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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 81 through 90 of 458

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53. The Theological Faculty and Theosophy 11 May 1905, Berlin

The picture of the world origin, of cosmology which is the most usual even today even if it is disputed, is found in the so-called Kant-Laplace world view. In order to orient ourselves, we want to say a few words about it to see then what signifies such a Kant-Laplace world view to us.
However, what is developed that way must find an end in such a way, as it develops. Kant and others admit that again new worlds form et etcetera. What is now such a world view that the modern researcher tries to compose from the scientific experiences of physics, chemistry etcetera?
Just as it is true that life, feelings, thoughts, impulses are in your body which one cannot see if one looks at your body with sensuous eyes, it is true that the spirit is also in the world. However, it is also true that the Kant-Laplace theory shows the body only. As little as the anatomist who shows the structure of the human body is able to say how a thought can arise from the blood and the nerves if he thinks only materially, just as little anybody who thinks the world system according to Kant-Laplace can get to the spirit one day.
334. From the Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism: Moral and Religious Forces in the Sense of Spiritual Science 07 Jan 1920, Basel

But for this modern man, there is basically little mediation between the two, so little mediation that, for example, Kant could say: There are two things that are most precious to him in the world: the starry heavens above him, the moral law within him.
We cannot get the true form of the moral impulses into our sensual body, into our sensual perception; but we get what stands there so isolated that Kant presented it quite isolated as the categorical imperative, we get that into our self that has separated from the body.
What one does out of moral duty, one does because one must. Kant therefore says: Duty, you exalted, great name, you carry nothing with you that means ingratiation or the like, but only the strictest submission.
153. The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth II: The Task and Goal of Spiritual Science and Spiritual Searching in the Present Day 06 Apr 1914, Vienna

And now along comes a spiritual science that wants to refute Kant, wants to show that what modern physiology so clearly demonstrates is not correct! Yes, spiritual science does not even want to show that what Kant says from his point of view and what modern physiology says from its point of view is incorrect; but time, the still secret search of time, will learn that there is another point of view regarding right and wrong than the one we have become accustomed to.
Such a line of argument could be quite correct, as correct as Kant's proof that man, with the abilities that Cart knows, cannot penetrate into the essence of things.
A man who deserves a certain amount of esteem as a philosopher has written a curious essay in a widely read journal. In it he writes, for example, that Spinoza and Kant are quite difficult for some people to read. You read yourself into them; but the concepts just wander around and swirl around – well, it is certainly not to be denied that it is so for many people when they want to read themselves into Kant or Spinoza, that the concepts swirl around in confusion.
65. From Central European Intellectual Life: Why is Spiritual Research Misunderstood? 26 Feb 1916, Berlin

Not everyone can say, as Goethe did from the depths of his inner experience: If, in the moral world, we can rise to impulses that work independently of the body, then why should this soul not be able, with regard to other spiritual things, as Goethe says in contrast to Kant, to “bravely endure the adventure of reason” — as Kant called all going beyond sensory perceptions?
The point is to be made aware of how one has to think, not just that what one thinks can be logically proved. Of course, Kant's fabric of ideas is so firmly supported that only with the utmost acumen can logical errors be detected in it.
Most people then start, when they want to prove something, with the words, “Kant already said,” because they always assume that the person to whom they say, “Kant already said,” does not understand anything about Kant.
68a. The Essence of Christianity: World Law and Human Destiny: A Christmas Reflection 11 Dec 1903, Weimar

This view is not only arrived at by the intellect but also by the feelings, which rise up to the lofty starry heavens and to the ideals of the human spirit with equal reverence and enthusiasm. Two things, says Kant, fill the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe: “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”
In the great nature, this dispute has apparently been resolved. The Kant-Laplace theory of the formation of this planetary system out of the primeval nebula is correct, but this world was preceded by an astral world and a spiritual world.
326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture V 28 Dec 1922, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth

45 Finally, in the Eighteenth Century, this led Kant46 to say that even the space and time qualities of things cannot somehow be outside and beyond man.
46. Immanuel Kant: 1724–1804. Lived in Koenigsberg, which he seldom left. Philosopher, scientist, mathematician. Professor in Koenigsberg 1770–1794.
It was taken up and changed by Laplace (1796) and known as the Kant-LaPlace Theory. Rudolf Steiner's exposition on Kant's theory is found in Truth and Knowledge, The Philosophy of Freedom, and An Autobiography, ed.
308. The Essentials of Education: Lecture Five 11 Apr 1924, Stuttgart
Translated by Jesse Darrell

It was certainly a great moment in the development of spiritual life in Germany when—specifically in reference to moral experience—Schiller opposed Kant’s concept of morality. When Kant said, “Duty, you sublime and powerful name—you who bear no enticements but demand stern submission,” Schiller stood against it. He opposed this concept of duty, which does not allow morality to arise from goodwill but only from subjection. Schiller replied to Kant’s idea of duty with the remarkable words containing a true moral motto: “I willingly serve my friend, but unfortunately I serve him from inclination; alas, I therefore lack virtue!”
It was a great moment when morality was purged of Kant’s influence and made human again through Schiller and Goethe. What came at that time from German spiritual life nevertheless became immersed in nineteenth-century materialism, as it still is today.
62. Results of Spiritual Research: Natural Science and Spiritual Research 12 Dec 1912, Berlin

We see it most clearly when we look at how Goethe once defended himself against Kant. It was Kant who first sought to determine how the knowledge that has emerged in modern times is bound to the instrument of the brain, how it must be limited to external experience and cannot penetrate into the depths of the world with which our spiritual and soul life is connected. Hence Kant's strict boundary between “science” and what he calls “belief”; and for Kant, higher realms are only accessible through belief.
For Kant called it a “daring adventure of reason” when man wants to penetrate into regions in which, according to Kant, knowledge cannot exist.
31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: A Society for Ethical Culture 29 Oct 1892,

Official philosophers, who today still regurgitate the old Kant concept—cripple, Nietzsche calls him—stand firmly on the standpoint of believing that there is such a thing as a morality “common to all good men”; modern thinking, which grasps its time and looks a little into the future, is beyond that. “Act in such a way that the principles of your actions can apply to all people”; that is the core sentence of Kant's moral doctrine. And this little saying rings in our ears in every key from the confessions of those who call themselves freethinkers, liberals, apostles of humanity etc.
65. The Spirit of Fichte Present in our Midst 16 Dec 1915, Berlin
Translated by Beresford Kemmis

As at an earlier date his thoughts were filled with the Bible and other works, so now the writings of this man, Immanuel Kant, confronted him as a new creation. So he made his way to Königsberg and sat at the feet of the great teacher.
This was in 1792, when Fichte was thirty years of age. Then a remarkable thing happened. Kant immediately recommended a publisher for the book, which aroused his enthusiasm. It went out into the world without the author's name, and nobody supposed it to be anything but a work by Immanuel Kant himself.
Goethe once also, by the way, expressed very aptly his relationship towards the philosophy of Kant. What he said was—not word for word, but in substance—as follows: Kant had argued that, by turning his attention outward upon the world, man can only arrive at sense-knowledge.

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