Understanding Steiner's Philosophy

[AshvinP]

I am currently watching anthroposophical introductory videos on YouTube, there is a lot of talk about spiritual evolution, e.g.
The Egyptians considered clairvoyance to be normal because in their time it was common to perceive things which are supernatural. however, I wonder how one can access the states of consciousness of previous humans it is a statement that can never really be verified by our own experience, because how are we supposed to know what humans perceived thousands of years ago, we can at most from literature try to trace back the state of consciousness of the people through language, but we will never be able to know with full conscience what people perceived at that time.
In addition, it is said that we get the theoretical basis for clairvoyant abilities, the initiate knows what the clairvoyant sees. however, we are not again in a realm of abstraction when it comes to a theoretical foundation. It is also said that people who deal with anthroposophy in this life will probably have clairvoyant abilities in the next life. We thus receive a science which is intended to provide us with knowledge about the life of the soul or spirituality. However, if the initiate relies on the perceptions of clairvoyance, then it is no more than a belief, only through direct and personal experience can knowledge of the spiritual come about. what is your opinion on Carl Gustav Jung and his idea of the collective subconscious and archetypes? To what extent are Rudolf Steiner's teachings compatible with Jung's teachers? What does Rudolf Steiner say about the active imagination as described and implemented by Jung or Goethe?
Kind regards

Guney,

This is a tricky subject, because the concept of linear time is so ingrained for the intellect. We habitually conceive time as stream of events which pass through our experience from the 'future' into the 'past' and then they only exist as our own mental pictures in remembrance of "what already happened", i.e. they practically disappear from existence. I am not in great position to provide clarity here, as it really requires higher consciousness to adequately get our hands around Time-experience as less or more integrated modes of cognitive being. The intellect is only familiar with linear time and therefore has nothing to compare it to. Cleric's essay on the Time-Consciousness Spectrum should be helpful to get a better understanding of Time-experience from first-person perspective on overarching ideas of experience. .

One could say that more integrated cognitive states perceive more of the 'past' and 'future' than less integrated ones. Consider a musical idea, such as we would engage in a VR game like Beat Saber. At its most integrated level, this musical idea encompasses all of the beats, notes/melodies, chords, verses. They are all superimposed or perfectly cohered within the Idea. Once we begin engaging the Idea in the game, it precipitates into a time-flow of beat cubes which approach us from the 'future', through our "I", and into the 'past'. These cubes repreesnt the underlying rhythm i.e. tempo of the melody and harmony. What was once a perfectly cohered Idea has become a linear time-flow of perceptual experience through our spiritual engagement with the Idea.





When we strike the beat cubes as they approach, they visually dissappear, i.e. they return to the more integrated state of super-sensible meaning. If we were to play this game with higher (more integrated) consciousness, it is practically as if the game 'slows down' for us because we perceive more of the overarching meaning which is precipitating into beat cubes. Actually it is a common phrase to say some activity has "slowed down" to mean we are more attuned to it and therefore it is more smooth and effortless - we are "in the zone" or "in the flow". We can more easily remember what has already flowed through our "I" and anticipate what is coming next, due to our expanded cognitive perception of the meaningful activity which gives rise to all the perceptual forms (reflections) embedded within the activity. So that can be a metaphor for what also happens with higher cognition in terms of accessing past states of being 'stored' in collective Memory.

As we integrate into higher archetypal domains of Ideas, we are moving from our own current localized perspective to encompass more of the holistic context which involves many more perspectives, and which our current perspective is only a dim shadow. That is why Cleric asks, in re: non-dual mystical state, why can't these people simply access another person's perspective in that state and experience all that they experience? Because they are not actually integrating to higher levels of thinking-consciousness, let alone the most integrated and encompassing state of All-Being. In this sense, what we know as 'time travel' is simply an expansion of thinking-consciousness, i.e. higher cognition, to encompass more perspectives and states of 'past' and 'future' being.

re: Jung and Steiner - I think I mentioned the book, "Jung and Steiner" by Wehr on Amazon. It's really a great resource to compare and align their respective outlooks and insights.

[Federica]

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[MIchaelic]

hi Güney,

I'm new to this forum but very knowledgeable about Rudolf Steiner and his books, and can summarize some main ideas.

First and foremost, Anthroposophy is a spiritual BUT monistic worldview that claims that there is only one reality but this reality has layers: e.g. our physical world, the etheric world, the astral world and the pure spiritual world (Devachan). We humans can only see the physical world with our physical eyes directly and clearly, but as our cosmos is fundamentally one all humans and other creatures live in this world that is both physical and metaphysical (e.g. etheric, astral, spiritual etc.). And as all humans have higher senses that they can DEVELOP and thus also see higher realities, the higher worlds are not closed to them, but they can gradually learn to perceive them. (I know this is true because I have a little clairvoyant abilities myself.) Our physical world is a direct expression of higher worlds. Plants have both a physical body and etheric body, animals have a physical + etheric + astral body, and we humans additionally to the mentioned bodies also have an "I" which makes us unique and immortal. Through reincarnation, humans live repeated lives on earth, between which they travel through the higher worlds to process the results of previous lives, and prepare for next lives.

These is just for starters - if you want to know more or have questions, just let me know about which aspect of anthroposphy you'd like to hear more. Also, this site has some good introductory articles on Rudolf Steiner and his ideas:
http://www.anthrofriends.com

[Güney27]

hi Güney,

I'm new to this forum but very knowledgeable about Rudolf Steiner and his books, and can summarize some main ideas.

First and foremost, Anthroposophy is a spiritual BUT monistic worldview that claims that there is only one reality but this reality has layers: e.g. our physical world, the etheric world, the astral world and the pure spiritual world (Devachan). We humans can only see the physical world with our physical eyes directly and clearly, but as our cosmos is fundamentally one all humans and other creatures live in this world that is both physical and metaphysical (e.g. etheric, astral, spiritual etc.). And as all humans have higher senses that they can DEVELOP and thus also see higher realities, the higher worlds are not closed to them, but they can gradually learn to perceive them. (I know this is true because I have a little clairvoyant abilities myself.) Our physical world is a direct expression of higher worlds. Plants have both a physical body and etheric body, animals have a physical + etheric + astral body, and we humans additionally to the mentioned bodies also have an "I" which makes us unique and immortal. Through reincarnation, humans live repeated lives on earth, between which they travel through the higher worlds to process the results of previous lives, and prepare for next lives.

These is just for starters - if you want to know more or have questions, just let me know about which aspect of anthroposphy you'd like to hear more. Also, this site has some good introductory articles on Rudolf Steiner and his ideas:
http://www.anthrofriends.com

Hey Michaelic,

Thank you very much for your message and for your brief explanation of key anthroposophical concepts. This thread is almost four years old now, and in the meantime I have been able to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the anthroposophical literature and with Steiner’s philosophy—where the contributions of Ashvins and Clerics played a significant role.

Anthroposophy is a very interesting and important spiritual movement of the 20th century, and Steiner’s complete body of work is truly impressive. However, my interests have shifted somewhat compared to the time of this correspondence. Today I am much more deeply engaged with philosophy than I was back then, and I can feel that this effort is beginning to bear fruit. That does not mean that I have lost interest in anthroposophy. Rather, I see it as my (personal) responsibility to understand the great thinkers on the world stage—on whose shoulders Steiner himself also stands—and to follow the historical and conceptual development in depth. I am now much better able to appreciate the depth and significance of philosophy than I was before.

In addition, Tomberg has had a major influence on my thinking—an influence that is still quite fresh, yet already effective. Through him, I also began reading the works of Christian theologians and philosophers (such as Hans Urs von Balthasar). I think that is enough about me (:

What exactly do you mean when you speak of clairvoyant abilities? How does clairvoyant perception manifest itself, and how do you understand it in terms of interpretation? And what is your relationship to Steiner’s philosophical writings, especially The Philosophy of Freedom?

[MIchaelic]

hi Güney,

In 1900, Rudolf Steiner began to speak openly about his clairvoyant views and launched anthroposophy (first within the framework of the Theosophical Society). Before that, he wrote 3 main philosophical books (including "Truth and Science" and "The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity") of which I am a huge fan. Very shortly summarized, Steiner argues that pure observation delivers just HALF of reality and the other half consists of thoughts that we fist create and then "perceive" as thought-images and that reveal the inner nature and laws of the observed objects. Truth or reality consists of the correct connection and penetration of observed objects by their corresponding thoughts and ideas. Thus we humans CREATE reality, or perhaps better, we RECREATE the world in the process of knowledge. Steiner argued that the spiritual world first reveals ourselves as a 'world of ideas' and the spiritual realm is not closed to humans but is principally open. Steiner argued that there were virtually no limits to human knowledge and that logic is equally valid in all worlds (physical, etheric, astral and spiritual). In his "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" (also called "Philosophy of Freedom" sometimes in English) Steiner worked out his epistemology in a general philosophy which advocated en ethical individualism: humans are the more developed and free when they no longer rely on authorities to provide him with ethics, but they create their own ethical system by receiving moral intuitions directly from the spiritual world of ideas. Thus, they can develop themselves by knowing themselves every more (we have to learn to know ourselves just like we have to know the outside world because, according to Steiner, feelings and impulses of the will arise in each one of us just like observations come to us more or less by themselves). So by knowing ourselves and our place in the world, we are ever more able to decide consciously on our attitudes, our ideals and our course of action in this life. Then we are determined only by ourselves and not by external factors (including, as i said, our urges) and that is the definition of freedom as applied to the inner life of people). Steiner maintained that the "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" was his most important book of his for the future.

Regarding clairvoyance, according to Steiner we all have higher senses slumbering in us which. In the past, all humans were clairvoyant but in a dream-like state and dependent on higher entities - not in a free and conscious way). As history progressed, humans ever became more earthly and the spiritual world closed itself and people lost their clairvoyant state. This has made us inhabitants of the earth first and foremost, and independent and autonomous. But in the future, everyone of us will develop forms of clairvoyance as a normal thing. Anthroposophy is a way to speed up this process. The new clairvoyance will come about as a result of an INCREASE in our conscioussness and our clear thinking, not as a result of a LOWERING of consciousness as happens in trance-like states or hypnosis.

Steiner stressed, however, that being clairvoyant is not enough to find truth, as clairvoyant observations have to be penetrated by human thought just like observations of the physical world have to be first penetrated by human thought if we want to find (or rather create/recreate) reality. And interpreting clairvoyant observations is much harder than interpreting physical observations.

Does that answer your questions? Let me know!

[AshvinP]

Steiner argued that there were virtually no limits to human knowledge and that logic is equally valid in all worlds (physical, etheric, astral and spiritual). In his "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" (also called "Philosophy of Freedom" sometimes in English) Steiner worked out his epistemology in a general philosophy which advocated en ethical individualism: humans are the more developed and free when they no longer rely on authorities to provide him with ethics, but they create their own ethical system by receiving moral intuitions directly from the spiritual world of ideas.

Hi Michaelic,

Thanks for joining and sharing your thoughts on PoF with us. I just want to briefly mention, if you have not already seen them, there are quite a few essays on this forum that are like a refinement and elaboration of the PoF epistemology. They could be called "PoF in motion", so to speak, as they help us delve deeper into the process by which our inner activity co-creates the phenomenal flow (while also remaining keenly aware of all the common philosophical traps that Steiner laid out in PoF). As I'm sure you already know, Steiner intended PoF not only to argue that we can be freer, in theory, but to help us become freer in the process of introspecting the intuitive dynamics of our soul life through the promptings of PoF and other works.

Here is an example from the most recent essay, which is still being posted periodically, and utilizes a video gaming metaphor for how the intuition-perception (or input-output) polarity can be explored and understood. Feel free to comment if you have any additional thoughts to share!

https://metakastrup.org/viewtopic.php?t=1086
"The elegance of this input–update–output loop has long been recognized as a potential metaphor for our human existence. Through our inner activity – thinking, feeling, willing – we continuously provide inputs that augment the World state in some ways, and aspects of this modified state are fed back to us (output) in the form of conscious phenomena – color, sound, tactile sensations, emotions, memory and mental images, etc3. Just like in a video game, only some portion of the rendered output seems to have anything to do with our inputs. There are many aspects of the output that feel completely uncorrelated with our activity, such as the terrain in the game map, the movements of another game character, etc. Thus, we conclude that the game state is something much vaster – our inputs sink into the game loop, and we usually recognize only some limited aspects of the output as having something to do with our input activity. This leads us to philosophize about the game-state-in-itself as something greater and mostly independent of our inputs.

At first glance, such a metaphor seems very fitting. It is readily understandable by any modern human because it seems to artistically depict very aptly what our existence feels like. Things, however, become more complicated when philosophers and scientists go further and try to understand more about the nature of the game loop – what variables it consists of and what logic updates it."

[Güney27]

hi Güney,

In 1900, Rudolf Steiner began to speak openly about his clairvoyant views and launched anthroposophy (first within the framework of the Theosophical Society). Before that, he wrote 3 main philosophical books (including "Truth and Science" and "The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity") of which I am a huge fan. Very shortly summarized, Steiner argues that pure observation delivers just HALF of reality and the other half consists of thoughts that we fist create and then "perceive" as thought-images and that reveal the inner nature and laws of the observed objects. Truth or reality consists of the correct connection and penetration of observed objects by their corresponding thoughts and ideas. Thus we humans CREATE reality, or perhaps better, we RECREATE the world in the process of knowledge. Steiner argued that the spiritual world first reveals ourselves as a 'world of ideas' and the spiritual realm is not closed to humans but is principally open. Steiner argued that there were virtually no limits to human knowledge and that logic is equally valid in all worlds (physical, etheric, astral and spiritual). In his "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" (also called "Philosophy of Freedom" sometimes in English) Steiner worked out his epistemology in a general philosophy which advocated en ethical individualism: humans are the more developed and free when they no longer rely on authorities to provide him with ethics, but they create their own ethical system by receiving moral intuitions directly from the spiritual world of ideas. Thus, they can develop themselves by knowing themselves every more (we have to learn to know ourselves just like we have to know the outside world because, according to Steiner, feelings and impulses of the will arise in each one of us just like observations come to us more or less by themselves). So by knowing ourselves and our place in the world, we are ever more able to decide consciously on our attitudes, our ideals and our course of action in this life. Then we are determined only by ourselves and not by external factors (including, as i said, our urges) and that is the definition of freedom as applied to the inner life of people). Steiner maintained that the "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" was his most important book of his for the future.

Regarding clairvoyance, according to Steiner we all have higher senses slumbering in us which. In the past, all humans were clairvoyant but in a dream-like state and dependent on higher entities - not in a free and conscious way). As history progressed, humans ever became more earthly and the spiritual world closed itself and people lost their clairvoyant state. This has made us inhabitants of the earth first and foremost, and independent and autonomous. But in the future, everyone of us will develop forms of clairvoyance as a normal thing. Anthroposophy is a way to speed up this process. The new clairvoyance will come about as a result of an INCREASE in our conscioussness and our clear thinking, not as a result of a LOWERING of consciousness as happens in trance-like states or hypnosis.

Steiner stressed, however, that being clairvoyant is not enough to find truth, as clairvoyant observations have to be penetrated by human thought just like observations of the physical world have to be first penetrated by human thought if we want to find (or rather create/recreate) reality. And interpreting clairvoyant observations is much harder than interpreting physical observations.

Does that answer your questions? Let me know!

Thank you for the opportunity to address the core theme of this forum here. I would like to share some thoughts related to this topic and hope that they may stimulate further reflection.

Thank you as well for the brief recapitulation of Steiner’s epistemology. Steiner’s philosophical approach shows strong parallels to Fichte’s philosophy and, more generally, to the thinkers of German Idealism, who occupied Steiner intensely during his youth. This opens up an interesting field of inquiry, for we can read Steiner as a philosopher who seeks to describe how the world of our experience comes into being through the activity of thinking, which, as a complement to the aggregate of perception, turns it into “something,” that is, into recognized objects. Steiner thus moves within the tradition of epistemology, since his questioning concerns the act of knowing, which is simultaneously an act of creation: the human being brings the concept to perception, through which the world becomes complete. This is a beautiful thought, one that does not regard the human being as something that distorts the world as it really is by filtering it through his constitution. A similar idea can be found in Schelling and Goethe. Thinking becomes intuition, and Steiner attempts to show that reality is not simply given, but made.

However, within this wonderful text there is also a deficiency that troubles me. By adopting a semi-phenomenological position and taking thinking as the starting point of his investigation—attempting to show how (objective) experience is synthesized through thinking—Steiner remains, in a certain respect, in a position similar to that of Kant and his epigones, for whom knowledge consists in the categorical ordering of material that appears as an aggregate. In doing so, he neglects to reflect on the fact that anything appears at all—that something, as being, enters the horizon within which the act of constitution, that is, the act of cognition, can take place in the first place. That something shows itself in openness, greets the human being, and addresses him. Steiner begins, so to speak, with thinking, but forgets being, which in its openness first allows something to appear that can then be known. Here a vast and mysterious dimension remains untouched, one that has, however, been addressed by other thinkers in their contemplations (the late Schelling and Heidegger, to name two prominent examples).

This dimension may, of course, be dismissed as a mysticism of feeling, but this would be mere polemic and would fail to do justice to the question of being. It is one of the most fundamental questions that has occupied thinkers and spiritual masters over the past 2,600 years. Here likely lies an impulse for what later becomes Steiner’s approach to spiritual science, and for why he attempts to unveil the invisible in the form of a science. This is not meant as criticism in the sense of disparagement, but rather as a reflection on Steiner’s path as a thinker and spiritual teacher. Just as Plato and Aristotle laid down two different paths of thought that had different effects in the world, so one might view Steiner as walking along one of these distinct paths of thinking.

At this point, Valentin Tomberg’s influence should also be mentioned. In addition to his Meditations on the Twenty-Two Major Arcana—which in itself is a remarkably deep and extensive work (my edition comprises nearly 800 pages, though this may vary depending on the version)—Tomberg wrote several other texts, among them Personal Certainty, which should be taken into account if one wishes to understand his earlier foundational philosophical ideas.

In this book, Tomberg shows an affinity with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant’s transcendental method asks after the conditions of the possibility of experience—that is, after what necessarily conditions experience. He reflects critically upon the immanent phenomena of (empirical) consciousness and attempts, on the basis of appearances, to identify the necessary conditions that allow an appearance to appear. In doing so, all assumptions of an external world existing independently of its appearance in consciousness are set aside, since such assumptions lead back to the dogmatism that Kant sought to overcome through his critical philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant thus asks about the possibility and justification of the natural-scientific form of knowledge (synthetic a priori judgments); in the Critique of Practical Reason, he applies the transcendental method to the domain of ethical and moral experience; and in the Critique of Judgment, to the experience of beauty. Tomberg sees in Kant an immense achievement, insofar as Kant includes the whole human being, with all of his faculties, in philosophy through the three Critiques, without conflating the different domains of experience, but rather distinguishing them and showing that each “form” of “knowledge” belongs to its own domain and requires its own methods of cognition. In the three Critiques, we thus encounter the three transcendentals: the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Tomberg seeks to show how thinking must become flexible by escaping system-thinking and moving toward symbolic, ordering thinking in order to attain inner certainty—one that arises from the inclusion of the whole human being in the act of knowing, rather than only one of his faculties. His point of criticism toward Steiner is that Steiner neglects the mystical and does not allow it to sufficiently flow into his work, thereby omitting an essential aspect of the human being as a whole. For Tomberg, this leads to the withering of a tradition. Unfortunately, it is not possible to present Tomberg’s thinking—or Kant’s—in a thorough and coherent way in a short text. Entire books were not written in vain.

With this, I would like to return to the main topic. Steiner’s work is without doubt unique and extraordinarily valuable. Yet the question of being is absent from his philosophy, and this conditions the trajectory of his work—just as the time and milieu in which he lived shaped his path. Steiner wrote and acted in a world that was radically different from our own. For this reason, I do not accept the claim to absolute authority that many anthroposophists attribute to Steiner, but instead regard him as a genius from whom much can be learned. Accordingly, his Philosophy of Freedom is problematic in that it thinks too exclusively from the direction of the subject. While this is necessary, it misses the dimension of the object, which is treated merely as material to be processed by the mental act. This one-sidedness can then lead to insights—or consequences—that manifest on other levels.

I apologize for the length of this text and hope that I was able to express myself clearly.

[Kaje977]

However, within this wonderful text there is also a deficiency that troubles me. By adopting a semi-phenomenological position and taking thinking as the starting point of his investigation—attempting to show how (objective) experience is synthesized through thinking—Steiner remains, in a certain respect, in a position similar to that of Kant and his epigones, for whom knowledge consists in the categorical ordering of material that appears as an aggregate. In doing so, he neglects to reflect on the fact that anything appears at all—that something, as being, enters the horizon within which the act of constitution, that is, the act of cognition, can take place in the first place. That something shows itself in openness, greets the human being, and addresses him. Steiner begins, so to speak, with thinking, but forgets being, which in its openness first allows something to appear that can then be known. Here a vast and mysterious dimension remains untouched, one that has, however, been addressed by other thinkers in their contemplations (the late Schelling and Heidegger, to name two prominent examples).

Could you elaborate on the bolded and underlined? I'm not entirely sure to what extent Steiner neglected this, and it seems like his work is being somewhat misrepresented here. This is not a philosophical assertion by Steiner, but rather that Steiner uses the aggregate (The Given World-Picture) as an introspective tool (an introspective methodology) and not as a valid logical reflection of an experience in which he asserts the underlined. Steiner's approach could be labeled just that: "(Instructional) Scaffolding". And Steiner examines the so-called "Zone of proximal development" (ZPD), as it would be called nowadays.



Basically (to make it short), one could say that this tool is a way of unwringling oneself from the strong physical and sensual attachment of the mind (e.g. as in the stretching exercise "Inner Space"). But it is just one of many "tricks" available, there are many other instructional ways to get there. It's probably not quite right to describe it this way (like some sort of party trick), but I think this bluntly expresses what it is about so that even the layman can at least understand to a certain degree the purpose of The Given World-Picture.

For me, the term "being" as it is used here seems very synonymous with terms like “thing-in-itself” (Kant) or ratio essendi, except that likewise it is being admitted that this Being-ness is accessible, but still treated as something that is separate. But Steiner's approach will (no logical reflexion or speculation necessary) bring you to experiential knowledge that we already experience that Being and that the phenomenological approach is what helps us to become more conscious of it's Being-ness and what it means for oneself, for others, for the entire world and humanity and further. The very thing you describe here: "That something shows itself in openness, greets the human being, and addresses him." is exactly what's being talked about here the whole time. So, I was really confused about this post, to be honest.

[AshvinP]

Accordingly, his Philosophy of Freedom is problematic in that it thinks too exclusively from the direction of the subject. While this is necessary, it misses the dimension of the object, which is treated merely as material to be processed by the mental act. This one-sidedness can then lead to insights—or consequences—that manifest on other levels.

Kaje already hit most of the essential points, so let me only add a few thoughts. We should be clear that, in PoF, the question of Being is not ignored, but it is concealed within the question of thinking. We can only recognize this, however, when we work with 'pure thinking', which PoF leads us into through its introspective method (it is very much like a Tombergian arcanic exercise, in that sense), that is, thinking turned away from sensory content and back towards its immanent imaginative flow of activity, and we discover the givenness of Being from the 'other direction' of the sensory aggregate. Because, in pure thinking, unlike sensory observation, both the imaginative content and the inner activity that generates (or focuses) the content are united. The subject discovers the content of the objectively given within its cognitive flow, where the poles of reality can be experienced as phase-locked. It's inputting stream is correlated perfectly with the output flow. Here, thinking creates the conditions for the possibility of appearance in its imaginative flow. This is where Being in its openness first presents itself in full intuitive clarity.

All these philosophers you mention recognize that Being as it presents itself through sensory content is mere shadow play, a projection of Being as it exists in its native intuitive essence. Or we could say the former is the latter when 'chopped up' into elements (or beings) that we experience as unfolding their existence spatially and temporally. This decoherence of Being strips its sensory appearances of intuitive clarity, such that thinking is given the practical task (not theoretical inquiry) of restoring coherence to the flow. Thus it only makes sense that the question of Being will be illuminated when we retrace the play of shadows into the intuitive essences which cast them. (This isn't to deny the reality of the shadows, but to expand orientation to their relation with the deeper intuitive beams that project them and provide their meaningful context). I also remind of Cleric's NP-SP imagination here. We should really feel how there is simply no other way to lucidly encounter Being, except within the same cognitive flow that we are always using to do philosophy, religion, and science, and build our models of reality.

So Steiner does not avoid the question of Being, even in the early epsitemic works, but shifts the inner direction along which the answer to this question is to be sought and found (continuously, in an ever-expanding way). He stands at the culmination of Western metaphysics and shows the path forward to the intuitive realities that previous thinkers could only model indirectly with their mental pictures (except perhaps the initiates at the very dawn of philosophy). To truly grasp this fact, however, requires a proper orientation to the higher cognitive spectrum from which all mysticism, of all ages, has drawn its content. All the misunderstandings in this area arise when this spectrum isn't sufficiently explored, but is either ignored or caricatured or imagined 'too remote' to even attempt understanding it. We must acquire a taste for how what lives in our intuitive life as cognitive weaving, also lives in the wider World phenomenal flow which seems disconnected from our inputs (intents).

"To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself." (Blake)

Only then it becomes clear exactly why Steiner sought the question of Being through the portal of pure thinking, in which the former finally awakens to itself on Earth in the flow of philosophical-scientific thoughts and can continue expanding its wakefulness into all other World content which feels objectively given.

"For everyone, however, who has the ability to observe thinking—and with good will every normal man has this ability—this observation is the most important one he can possibly make. For he observes something of which he himself is the creator; he finds himself confronted, not by an apparently foreign object, but by his own activity. He knows how the thing he is observing comes into being. He sees into its connections and relationships. A firm point has now been reached from which one can, with some hope of success, seek an explanation of all other phenomena of the world." (GA 4)

[Federica]

I want to remind of Güneys wise words from 2024:

Reading Owen Barfield StA and PoF again made me thinking about the standard theory of perception in the current perspective of mainstream materialism. If, like the materialist think, the world around us is only a dream, somehow generated trough our senses and the stimulis of the unrepresented, that would implicate that the brain and the senses are dream pictures too, and that would negate any knowledge. It would defeat its own axioms. Like Barfield pointed out, that would mean there was no evolution we could know about, and all neuroscience would be worthless. It’s a very simple fact that anybody without training in these fields could understand quite easily. Realizing this more deeply made me think that if it is so easy to acknowledge, why the mainstream world view hasn’t changed after this works been published.

Although these words were meant to save the materialist, these are equally if not more suitable to save the philosopher from falling into the sister trap to the theoretical materialist trap. For one can ‘forget’, or dissociate from, one's own conjecturing both as an inquirer of sensory reality (natural scientist) and as an inquirer of being (philosopher).

In a sense, the philosopher of today faces a higher risk than the scientist, when dissociating from their own thinking. While the scientist at least has some level of contextual justification for conjecturing in dissociation from their own thinking (the sense world is their contextual justification) - and Kant had historical, timely justification - the philosopher of today has no justification for inquiring being without first and foremost *being* the inquiry.