Donate books to help fund our work. Learn more→

The Rudolf Steiner Archive

a project of Steiner Online Library, a public charity

Search results 1 through 10 of 22

1 2 3
225. Cultural Phenomena — Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy: Cultural Phenomena 01 Jul 1923, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
But Albert Schweitzer says quite correctly at a later point in his writing: “Kant and Hegel ruled millions who never read a line of theirs and did not even know that they obeyed them.”
And there is hardly a single one of you whose thinking does not involve Kant and Hegel, because the paths are, I would say, mysterious. And if people in the most remote mountain villages have come to read newspapers, it also applies to them, to these people in the mountain villages, that they are dominated by Kant and Hegel, not only to this illustrious and enlightened society sitting here in the hall.
A newspaper article begins by saying how ineffective Bergson seems in comparison to Kant. But then it goes on to say: Steiner's wild speculations and great spiritual tirades stand even less up to an epistemological test based on Kant.
165. The Conceptual World and Its Relationship to Reality: Lecture One 15 Jan 1916, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
The central dogma of the Trinity, of the three divine persons, thus depended on realism or nominalism, on one or the other conception of the essence of universals. You will therefore understand that when Kant's philosophy increasingly became the philosophy of Protestant circles in Europe, a reaction took hold in Catholic circles.
The whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at the world, is different in the progressive current of philosophy, which follows Kant, Fichte, Hegel, or earlier Cartesius, Malebranche, Hume, up to Mill and Spencer. It is a completely different kind of intellectual research, a completely different way of thinking about the world, than that which emerged, for example, in Gratry and the numerous neoscholastics who wrote everywhere, in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, England, and Germany; for there is a wealth of neoscholastic literature in all countries.
273. The Problem of Faust: Goethe's Feeling for the Concrete. Shadowy concepts and Ideas filled with Reality 27 Jan 1917, Dornach
Tr. George Adams

Rudolf Steiner
Thus, Fichte tried to penetrate beyond the ordinary, everyday ego to the absolute ego, anchored in the Godhead, and weaving its web in eternity. Thus Schelling and Hegel sought to press through to absolute Being. All this was naturally taken at the time in various ways.
It looks as if he were right outside the picture I have just given you; however, he represents a caricature of it. He has been infused with all that the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy was able to give, and by Schlegel's interpretation of it all; but he takes this in a very narrow, egoistic sense.
Yes, my dear friends, we may indeed get to know people who take the philosophy of Kant even more egoistically than this scholar. We once knew a man who was so infected with this philosophy of Kant and Fichte that he did actually believe he had created the whole world.
221. Earthly Knowledge and Heavenly Insight: The I-Being can be Shifted into Pure Thinking I 03 Feb 1923, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
Rosenkranz was a Hegelian, but his Hegelianism was, first of all, colored by a careful study of Kant – he saw Hegel, so to speak, through the glasses of Kantianism – but, in addition, his Hegelianism was strongly colored by his study of Protestant theology.
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture III 24 May 1920, Dornach
Tr. Alan P. Shepherd

Rudolf Steiner
We have to look into this period if we want to recognise what scholasticism entailed. There Kant's philosophy emerges, influenced by Hume, which influences the philosophers even today. After Kant's philosophy had taken a backseat, the German philosophers took the slogan in the sixties, back to Kant!
—The question of certainty of knowledge torments Kant more than any contents of knowledge. I mean, one should even feel this if one deals with Kant's Critique that these are not the contents of knowledge, but that Kant strives for a principle of the certainty of knowledge.
Hence, Fichte, Schelling, and then Hegel immediately reacted against Kant. Thus, Fichte wanted to get everything that Kant had determined as an illusory world or as a world of appearances from the real creative ego that he imagined, however, to be rooted in the being of the world.
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture I 17 Oct 1920, Dornach
Tr. Paul King

Rudolf Steiner
Kant, of course, rejects this. He wants nothing to do with the conclusions drawn by Fichte. We now see how there follows on from Fichte what then flowered as German idealistic philosophy in Schelling and Hegel, and which provoked all the battles of which I spoke, in part, in my lectures on the limits to a knowledge of nature.
Fichte constructs his philosophy, in a wealth of pure concepts, out of the 'I am'; but in him they are filled with life. So, too, are they in Schelling and in Hegel. So what then had happened with Kant who was the bridge? Now, one comes to the significant point when one traces how Kant developed.
This is what came to Kant in the form of the philosophy of David Hume. Then the Central region of the earth's culture still set itself against this with all force in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomism in the Present Day 24 May 1920, Dornach
Tr. Harry Collison

Rudolf Steiner
To-day we can, of course, give only a sketch of Kant; we need only point out what is important in him for us. I do not think that anyone who really studies Kant can find him other than as I have tried to depict him in my small paper Truth and Knowledge.
This accounts for the rapid reaction against Kant which for example, Fichte, and then Schelling, and then Hegel produced, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Thus we have a real world-content instead of something which remained for Kant merely a faith-content. For Kant the acquisition of knowledge is something formal, for the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it is something real.
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture II 28 Sep 1920, Dornach
Tr. Frederick Amrine

Rudolf Steiner
It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it.
In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life. One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions.
162. Artistic and Existential Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science: Second Lecture 24 May 1915, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Necessity and Chance in Historical Events 28 Aug 1915, Dornach
Tr. Marjorie Spock

Rudolf Steiner
Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution.
You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world.
Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him.

Results 1 through 10 of 22

1 2 3