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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 161 through 170 of 458

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5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom: The Character
Translated by Margaret Ingram de Ris

The power of development of their specialized philosophy is paralyzed through the influence which the thinking of Kant has made upon them. Through this influence it has lost all originality, all courage. From the academic philosophy of his time Kant has taken over the concept of truth which originates from “pure reason,” He has tried to show that through such truth we cannot learn to know things which lie beyond our experience of “things in themselves.” During the last century, infinite, immeasurable cleverness was expended to penetrate into these thoughts of Kant's from all directions, The results of this sharp thinking are unfortunately rather meager and trivial, Should one translate the banalities of many a current philosophical book from academic formulae into healthy speech, such content would compare rather poorly with many a short aphorism of Nietzsche's, In view of present-day philosophy, the latter could speak the proud sentence with a certain justice, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in one book—what every other person does not say in one book ...”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom: Introduction

As Nietzsche had discovered Schopenhauer's book in Leipzig, Steiner now saw Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason, in a bookstore window, and eventually came into possession of the volume. From the eager study of this book, to which he devoted every spare moment he could find, often reading single pages “more than twenty times in succession,” he hoped to find that which would enable him to understand his own thinking. Yet what he read in Kant was sharply opposed to his own inner conclusion, which he was to describe with the words, “Thinking can be developed to a faculty which really grasps the objects and events of the world.”
He spent the summer entirely in the study of philosophy, working his way with utmost care and diligence through the writings of Kant and the principal works of Fichte. He was enrolled for the study of mathematics, natural history, and chemistry.
235. Karma: Karma Impulses through Recurring Earth Lives 24 Feb 1924, Dornach
Translated by Henry B. Monges

I have often been compelled to indicate the great contrast, in this regard, between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” [Kante in German means a hard edge or angle. (Note by translator)] everything. Through Kant, everything in knowledge became sharp and angular; and thus, also human conduct. “Duty, thou great and exalted name, thou who containest nothing of pleasure, nothing that curries favors ...” this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended vexation—not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical vexation—of many opponents, and I opposed to it what I must acknowledge to be my view: “Love, thou impulse that speaketh warmly to the soul. ...”
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science IV 03 Oct 1915, Dornach

Thus, to cite another example, an astronomer who considers the Kant-Laplace hypothesis about the origin of the solar system to be probable cannot tell the secret researcher, who communicates a completely different cosmogony, as in the first case, that his assertion is erroneous, because the rotation of the Earth is considered proven by every healthy person, whereas the formation of the solar system from a nebula, according to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, can be considered probable, but not proven.
I have always pointed out the inadequacy of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis that the world formed out of a primeval nebula, which is demonstrated to children in school by the well-known experiment.
205. Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit I: Tenth Lecture 10 Jul 1921, Dornach

One need only turn against this theory of knowledge with a few lines here or there today, and someone will come along and say, “But Kant said...” People have become so wrapped up in Kantianism that they consider it a kind of Bible; at least many do.
I can't say he was listening, because he was usually asleep, and I don't know how many people can listen while sleeping, but I could tell at the time that he only woke up when he could somehow apply Kant. And once it happened that I repeated an argument – it wasn't even mine – in which it was said: If one really speaks of the thing in itself as being completely unknown, as Kant did, then it could consist of pins, so that behind the sensory phenomena there could only be pins.
175. Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha: Lecture VII 19 Apr 1917, Berlin
Translated by A. H. Parker

His whole cast of mind was opposed to abstract theorizing. And one of those who succumbed to it most was Kant. Take, for example, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason—I know that what I am about to say is heretical—and let us look at the main propositions.
You can gather from this why some people have a professional interest in misrepresenting Goethe (the great opponent of Kant) as I showed in the case of Haller, who wrote: “no created spirit can penetrate into the inner recesses of nature”—a complete distortion of Goethe's conception of nature.
30. Collected Essays on Philosophy, Science, Aesthetics and Psychology 1884–1901: Modern Criticism 10 Jun 1897,

And basically the entire chorus of aestheticians of the century that has just ended speaks of such rules. They all, from Kant to Carriere, Vischer and Lotze, teach how a tragedy, a comedy, a ballad must be composed. Not like the botanist who studies the life of the plant, they observe the real life of art; but they behave like a legislator who lets the laws emerge from pure reason according to which reality is to be governed.
266III. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes III: 1913–1914: Esoteric Lesson 04 Sep 1913, Munich
Translator Unknown

Swedenborg's visions, dreams and world view are permeated with Ahriman and so is what Kant took from Swedenborg's writings. People keep on asking: Should I think that what I see, hear or feel there is of importance?
68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: The Creation of the World and the Descent of Man 01 Dec 1905, Cologne

In religions, therefore, the divine spirit is placed at the beginning of events, through it matter is animated, the inanimate is made alive. In our days, since Kant-Laplace, one imagines the creation of the earth from a primeval nebula that was in a rotating motion.
217a. The Task of Today's Youth: A Path to Independent Scientific Work 01 Oct 1920, Dornach

And, I would like to say, a certain inner impulse, which comes from reflecting on things, should lead one to realize that, as was emphasized again and again at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th century of the Age of Enlightenment, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the servant of the theological and ecclesiastical establishment. How often has it been repeated, what Kant – you know that I am no Kantian – said with the words: the time is over when all the sciences followed in the train of theology.
For it was not nice, either, that, so to speak, a century after Kant spoke, science no longer wanted to follow theology, the rector of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, said that the gentlemen members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences felt very honored to be allowed to call themselves: the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns.

Results 161 through 170 of 458

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