John Michael Greer, synchronistically, has come out with a post about philosophy in which he supports Kant over Hegel and Steiner. Further posts on Steiner will follow. Some may wish to comment on this at Greer's site.
Some quotes from his article:
Kant lived long before quantum theory, of course, but he got to many of the same conclusions well in advance by sheer ruthless logic. He even showed that space and time as we experience them are products of human consciousness, not “out there” in the world. There are doubtless things analogous to space and time in what he called the Ding an sich, the “thing in itself,” but we don’t know anything about them, and as the quantum physicists showed later on, they routinely behave in ways that make hash of our notions of the way space and time work. Thus we cannot know the world directly. All we can know is a model of that world assembled by our minds and nervous systems. That model is good enough for the purposes of everyday life and it can be leveraged in clever ways by scientists, but it can never tell us the truth about the world. That was the discovery that rattled the foundations of eighteenth-century Europe.
The quest for an answer to Kant fell broadly into two broad overlapping phases. The first, which had its peak in the 19th century, took its keynote from Hegel, who simply insisted that the mind had something called “intellectual intuition” which enabled it to do an end run around Kant’s challenge. That didn’t work very well, not least because no two philosophers seemed to be able to get the same results with their “intellectual intuition.” That difficulty led most later thinkers to interpret Hegel’s phrase as meaning something much closer to “brain fart.”
Despite the joke, this wasn’t a light matter. European thought inherited from its Christian roots the idea that knowing the truth about the world was a matter far more serious than mere life and death. That was why Friedrich Nietzsche—another thinker who took Kant’s insight seriously—wrote mordantly about the chaos set in motion by the collapse of the idea that the world known by the mind is the real world. That was also why Rudolf Steiner, whose ideas we’ll be discussing in future posts, launched his career with a volume, The Philosophy of Freedom, in which he tried to prove that thinking really could grasp the objective truth about the world. It was a gallant attempt, and he carried it out about as well as anyone could have done, but it didn’t work. He had the good sense to turn in other directions thereafter.
Instead of saying PoF is brilliant and SS is flawed, he says PoF is flawed but Theosophical understanding was brilliant. So that is an interesting twist in the plot, at least.