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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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46. Posthumous Essays and Fragments 1879-1924: Development of Contemplative Consciousness

The nature of the world of will requires that man cannot understand himself, that he cannot form ideas out of the dark depths of his being; but ideas that cannot free themselves create instability and weakness of the inner being.
— The point of view of another person becomes important to you – your own recedes. – The manifold points of view. – You learn to see that thinking from the outside must be met with something like speaking – and from the inside: understanding what has been said. – Common sense: the will not just to dream life instinctively, but to understand it.
46. Posthumous Essays and Fragments 1879-1924: The Only Possible Critique of Atomistic Concepts
Translated by Daniel Hafner

Rudolf Steiner
The misunderstanding lies in the character attributed by the inductive method, and by the materialism and atomism issuing from it, to general concepts. For the person of understanding, there can be no doubt that the current state of natural science in its theoretical part is essentially influenced by concepts as they have become dominant through Kant.
From this, one sees at the same time how unfruitful the undertaking would be to want to make out anything about the outer world without the help of perception. How can one gain possession of the concept in the form of viewing, without accomplishing the viewing itself?
Against this, one could perhaps object that after all it is all the same what is understood by Atom, that one should let the scholar of natural history go ahead and operate with it—for in many tasks of mathematical physics, atomistic models are indeed advantageous—; that after all, the philosopher knows that one is not dealing with a spatial reality, but with an abstraction, like other mathematical notions.
46. Posthumous Essays and Fragments 1879-1924: Atomism and its Refutation

Rudolf Steiner
If I tell you that I owe much of my philosophic education to the study of your writings, you will understand how desirable it is for me to find your approval of my own thinking. Commending myself to your benevolence, I am, most sincerely, Rudolf Steiner First, we will call to mind the current doctrine of sense impressions, then point to contradictions contained in it, and to a view of the world more compatible with the idealistic understanding.
(See Rudolf Steiner and Marie delle Grazie, Nature and Our Ideals, published by Mercury Press.) The error underlying the theories of this science is so simple that one cannot understand how the scientific world of today could have succumbed to it.
Physiognomies

Rudolf Steiner
Nevertheless these joking caricatures are evidence of the drawer’s sharp powers of observation and for his intuitive understanding of inner nature, even in its distortion. What the soul comprehends becomes subtle intuition and playfully converts it to form.
1. Goethean Science: Introduction
Translated by William Lindemann

Rudolf Steiner
But we will recognize this only after we have first understood the organism, since the particulars in themselves, considered separately, do not bear within themselves the principle that explains them.
Whoever declares from the very beginning that such a goal is unattainable will never arrive at an understanding of the Goethean views of nature; on the other hand, whoever undertakes to study them without preconceptions, and leaves this question open, will certainly answer it affirmatively at the end.
We do not mean in any way to say that Goethe has never been understood at all in this regard. On the contrary, we repeatedly take occasion in this very edition to point to a number of men who seem to us to carry on and elaborate Goethean ideas.
1. Goethean Science: How Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis Arose
Translated by William Lindemann

Rudolf Steiner
But if one approached the things themselves with these generalities, in order to understand their life and working, one stood there completely at a loss; one could find no application of those concepts to the world in which we live and which we want to understand.
As we consider this fact, we should not attribute it, as many do, to Goethe's underestimation of the significance of less. [ 19 ] From then on Goethe never leaves the plant realm.
He writes about this: “Seeing no way to preserve this marvelous shape, I undertook to draw it exactly, and in doing so attained ever more insight into the basic concept of metamorphosis.”
1. Goethean Science: How Goethe's Thoughts on the Development of the Animals Arose
Translated by William Lindemann

Rudolf Steiner
We find the first indications of this in the year 1781. In his diary, published by Keil, under the date October 15, 1781, Goethe notes that he went to Jena with old Einsiedel and studied anatomy there.
Camper's letters show clearly that he could go into the matter with the best possible will, but was not able to understand Goethe at all. [ 19 ] Loder at once saw Goethe's discovery in the right light.
On February 13, 1785, Goethe sends him a split-open upper jawbone of a human being and one of a manatee, and gives him points of reference for understanding the matter. From Goethe's letter of April 8, it appears that Merck was won over to a certain extent.
1. Goethean Science: The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development
Translated by William Lindemann

Rudolf Steiner
[ 4 ] This is how matters stood when Goethe undertook to devote himself to the organic sciences. But he entered into these studies after preparing himself for them in a most appropriate way, through repeated readings of the philosopher Spinoza.
In 1796 attempts were made to grow plants in darkness and under coloured glass. Later on, the metamorphosis of insects was also investigated. [ 34 ] A further stimulus came from the philologist F.A.
Also, Goethe's Metamorphosis had already been translated into French by F. de Gingins-Lassaraz. Under such conditions, Goethe could definitely hope that a translation of his botanical writings into French, carried out with his collaboration, would not fall on barren ground.
1. Goethean Science: Concluding Remarks on Goethe's Morphological Views
Translated by William Lindemann

Rudolf Steiner
[ 14 ] Since one has made a fortunate and successful beginning at explaining Goethe's literary works in that way, there already lies in that the challenge to bring all the works of his spirit under this kind of study. This cannot remain unaccomplished forever, and I will not be the last among those who will heartily rejoice if my successor succeeds better than I.
1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Way of Knowledge
Translated by William Lindemann

Rudolf Steiner
Every right-minded person would in fact have to refuse a happiness that some external power might offer him, because he cannot after all experience something as happiness that is just handed him as an unearned gift. If some creator or other had undertaken the creation of man with the thought in mind of bestowing happiness upon his likeness at the same time, as an inheritance, then he would have done better to leave him uncreated.
[ 11 ] This kind of empiricism also underlies the philosophy of Eduard v. Hartmann. Eduard v. Hartmann seeks the ideal unity in nature, as this does positively yield itself to a thinking that has real content.
My epistemology 46 shows the way by which a kind of thinking that understands itself and is not self-contradictory arrives at this world view. I then found that this objective idealism, in its basic features, permeates the Goethean world view.

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