findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Dec 08, 2021 7:44 pm
Remember the guy who claimed that blue containers are what cause slugs to die? That's how I started this post
Now Imagine that guy's name is Vishna and I said:
"Some people say that Vishna looks like a black person.
Not true at all! Vishna is very attractive!"
I bet, just like the mistake about the slug and bull, we can spot the presupposition in this one, too.
Let's take a step back and see what has actually happened here. Dana also posted a critique of Steiner on this thread. It referenced a quote he posted from Steiner about "negro novels" and it read as follows:
Shu wrote:For the record, as you know, I've listened to an audio version of PoF, and explored parts of the online PDF copy, which for the most part I find resonates with the insights that I'd come to before ever reading it, and which both you and Cleric have helped to clarify in your own summaries. However, none of it changes the impression of Steiner that I've shared in the comment I made, in reply to Jim, previous to this one. So I'm curious what you make of those impressions, seeing Steiner as both brilliant and flawed, as brief as they may be?
Let's take a moment to appreciate the humility in this approach.
It ends in a question! That is an endangered animal on the Meta-Kastrup forum these days. Although, some others have taken that approach, like Dave on the other JW thread and Martin once in awhile. It implicitly admits, "
these are just my impressions from what I have read and I probably need a lot more context to make sense of them, but until that is provided, I will tentatively conclude that Steiner had this big racial blind spot in his time". That is a great approach! Assuming, of course, that one does actually consider any further context that is provided and seeks to understand that context
on its own terms. One cannot take Steiner literally with the racial comments but dismiss all the spiritual context as superstitious nonsense, like Ben did with the "elementals", if the question is "
what did Steiner mean when saying these things". That makes no logical sense whatsoever.
Cleric and myself are always trying to point to the core context for Steiner and for spiritual understanding in general, which is the concrete reality of our own Thinking activity which permeates all that we peceive, feel, and desire. Much of that activity is subconscious and can be revealed through our Self-knowledge, which of course comes by way of that higher Thinking activity. There is no dualism of intellectual reasoning and imaginative cognition here - they are continuous and unified in essence. But now I am already making it too abstract, so we need to constantly resist that urge and bring it back to a more concrete Center. It is the same "Divine Thinking" that Cleric wrote about recently, which is
world-creating, i.e. it creates all that we call the phenomenal world, including genders, races, nations, cultures, and epochs (temporal experience itself), and is also responsible for unfolding those complex divisions back into an organic and integrated Whole.
Whether we agree with any of that or not,
that is the underlying spiritual activity we are dealing with in Steiner, so
that is the context we need to seek understanding of when evaluating his lectures. If we have no desire to seek understanding of it, then we should just admit that to ourselves and say no more. Or say more, but don't be surprised when I don't take anything you are writing seriously. Why should I? You have already admitted, either explicitly like Jim, or implicitly like FB (by way of ignoring all of Cleric's elaborations), that you do not seek to understand anything Steiner or we are writing about. FB is in a tough spot, because he simply
assumes his decades of being around these ideas has given him superior insight into the inner workings of spiritual science, Steiner's brilliance and flaws, etc. So it's a tough spot that he is keeping himself in by way of his own assumptions. At the end of the day, we really need to contend with the concreteness of Thinking as spiritual activity and reality if we want any chance of understanding these things.
“The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I am’. The secondary. I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation." - Coleridge
Do we read the above quote and feel, "that's a beautiful way of putting it...", or do we think, "
what Coleridge is speaking of is what lives in me right now as I contemplate his words and what I can start making ever-more conscious right this moment!"?