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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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73a. Health Care as a Social Issue 07 Apr 1920, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
Think what a social effect it would have were there to be a real understanding of what is healthy in one person, what is unhealthy in another; think what it would mean if health care were taken in hand with understanding by the whole of humanity. Certainly this does not mean that we should encourage scientific or medical dilettantism—most emphatically not—but imagine that a sympathetic understanding of the health and illness of our fellow man were to awaken not merely feeling but understanding, an understanding that grows from a view of the human being—think of the effect it would have in social life.
We need teachers who are able to educate children on the basis of a world view that understands the true being of man. This was the thought underlying the course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded.
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture I 22 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Alan P. Shepherd, Mildred Robertson Nicoll

Rudolf Steiner
So that one may say, Manichaeism is only a post-Christian elaboration of that what was in Hellenism. One also does not understand the great philosopher Aristotle who concludes the Greek philosophy if one does not know that—if he still speaks of concepts—he already stands, indeed, hard at the border of abstract understanding that he speaks, however, still in the sense of tradition seeing the concepts close to sense-perception.
However, actually, he was never completely hostile to an inner understanding of Plotinism, even if he could not behold. He only suspected that in this world something must be which he could not reach.
Augustine was now eager to use Plotinism, as far as he could penetrate into it to the understanding of that which had become accessible to his feeling by Christianity. He really applied that which he had received from Plotinism to understand Christianity and its contents.
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture II 23 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Alan P. Shepherd, Mildred Robertson Nicoll

Rudolf Steiner
He will feel that one can understand that Augustine wanted still to adhere to the ideas that not yet cared about the single person that just cared about the general-human influenced by such ideas as those of Plotinism.
If you can project your thoughts, however, in that which one experienced and felt at that time, then you understand what a person like the Areopagite only wanted to express, actually, at which countless human beings aimed.
The intellect can understand only so far that it can say, the world may have originated in time, but it may also exist from eternity.
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture III 24 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Alan P. Shepherd, Mildred Robertson Nicoll

Rudolf Steiner
I believe that someone who studies Kant really can understand him in such a way, as I tried to understand him in my booklet Truth and Science. Kant faces no question of the contents of the worldview with might and main in the end of the sixties and in the beginning of the seventies years of the eighteenth century, not anything that would have appeared in certain figures, pictures, concepts, ideas of the things with him, but he faces the formal question of knowledge: how do we get certainty of something in the outside world, of any existence in the outside world?
One has already to say, the things, considered according to truth, appear absolutely different than they present themselves to the history of philosophy under the influence of an unconscious nominalistic worldview which goes back largely to Kant and the modern physiology.
Snakes slough their skins. As well as the opponents understand skinning today, it is indeed a lie. Since I have shown today how you can find the philosophically conscientious groundwork of spiritual science in my first writings.
74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomas and Augustine 22 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Harry Collison

Rudolf Steiner
The whole personality and the whole struggle of Augustine can be understood only when one understands how much of the neoplatonic philosophy had entered into his soul; and if we study objectively the development of Augustine, we find that the break which occurred in going over from Manichaeism to Platonism was hardly as violent in the transition from Neoplatonism to Christianity.
Neither do we understand that wonderful genius who closes the circle of Greek philosophy, Aristotle, unless we know that whenever he speaks of concepts, he still keeps within the meaning of an experienced tradition which regarded concepts as belonging to the outer world of the senses as well as perceptions, though he is already getting close to the border of understanding abstract thought free from all evidence of the senses.
I might say, if I may express myself clearly: we understand the world through sense-observations which through abstraction we bring to concepts, and end there.
74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: The Essence of Thomism 23 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Harry Collison

Rudolf Steiner
These spirits of High Scholasticism did a great deal half unconsciously and we can really only understand it, if we consider, looking beyond what I already described yesterday, such a figure as that which entered half mysteriously from the sixth century into European spiritual life and which became known under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite.
The expressions are no longer as descriptive as the Greek; but one can say that Aristotle differentiates between the active understanding, the active spirit of man, and the passive. What does he mean? We do not understand what he means unless we revert to the origin of these concepts. Just like the other forces of the soul the two points of understanding are active in another metamorphosis in building up the human soul:—the understanding, in so far as it is actively engaged in building up the man, but still the understanding, not like the memory which comes to an end at a certain point and then liberates itself as memory—but working throughout life as understanding.
74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomism in the Present Day 24 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Harry Collison

Rudolf Steiner
But it fills what he had thus discovered from the evolution of humanity with a kind of tune, a kind of undercurrent of sound, it completes his Ethics. And once more it is taken up by a sensitive human being.
We see this philosophic effort coming completely to nothing and we see then how the attempt came about, from every possibility which one could find in Kantianism and similar philosophies, to understand something of what is actually real in the world. Goethe's general view of life which would have been so important, had it been understood, was completely lost for the nineteenth century, except among those whose leanings were toward Schelling, Hegel and Fichte.
This is, that a study of the visible world, if undertaken quite objectively and thoroughly leads to the knowledge that this world is not a whole. This world emerges as something which is real only through us.
The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Comment I. Thomas and Platonism

Roman Boos
Commentary on the Book of Dionysius “Concerning the divine names” Prologue …It must be pointed out that Dionysius employs an obscure style in all his writings; not because he knows no better, but on purpose, in order to protect the holy and divine doctrines from the mockery of unbelievers. The difficulty of understanding these writings arises from several causes. First, because Dionysius uses the style and expressions of the Platonists, to which the moderns are not accustomed.
The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Comment II. Man and the Intelligible World

Roman Boos
In the second address [p. 65] Rudolf Steiner shows how the most supreme problem, the “relationship of the universals to individual things,” can only be understood if we realize its connexion with the tradition, founded by the Areopagite, Plotinus, Augustine and Erigena, of the reality of an intellectual world” permeated by “immaterial intellectual beings.”
This has an important historical significance, because in it purely earthly-logical concepts of the understanding are built up to contain the knowledge of a world the contents of which were formerly revealed to supernatural vision.
For when each of the holy Spirits looks upon God according to his own essence, one sees him more perfectly than another,—as can be understood from what has been said. And by how much more perfect a cause is seen to be by so much richer are seen to be its effects.
The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Comment IV. Man as a Learning Being

Roman Boos
And a third condition of achieving knowledge in reality, is that the “Eye of inward reading”—the “intellectus” is not too weak to grasp the fullness of the splendour which emanates from a spiritual substance. A thing is capable of being understood, in so far as it is in a condition of actuality. Therefore, God, who is pure actuality with no admixture of potentiality, is above all things capable of being understood.
Thus if God had so arranged human souls that they understood in the same manner as the separate substances can, they would not be capable of a complete knowledge, but in general a confused one.
Rudolf Steiner overthrows the materialistic remains of the Arab treasure-hunt that lie underneath the weak-minded modern empiricism. (One digs for the treasures of knowledge to-day in “Handbooks.”)

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