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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 101 through 110 of 145

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30. Collected Essays on Philosophy, Science, Aesthetics and Psychology 1884–1901: Goethe's View of Nature 01 Jan 1894, N/A

Rudolf Steiner
The attempt to attribute the phenomena of life to causes that lie within the world we can observe was not attempted before Goethe; indeed, as late as 1790, the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant called any such attempt "an adventure of reason". One simply imagined each of Linnaeus' species to have been created according to a certain preconceived plan and thought one had explained a phenomenon when one recognized the purpose it was supposed to serve.
The artificial partitions between the individual genera and species had to be torn down, it had to be shown that all plants are only modifications of an original plant, all animals of an original animal. Kant had declared it impossible that we could recognize the original form that underlies all organisms and that we are able to find the lawful causes within our world of appearance that cause this original form to appear once as a lily and another time as an oak.
[ 19 ] Rudolf Virchow emphasizes in the remarkable speech he gave on August 3 of this year to celebrate the birthday of the founder of Berlin University that the philosophical era of German science, in which Fichte, Schelling and Hegel set the tone, has been definitively over since Hegel's death and that we have been living in the age of the natural sciences ever since.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Probability and Chance, Fritz Mauthner's Studies of Improbability 23 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

Rudolf Steiner
1 This Critique of Language was intended to provide our period with something better suited to it than Kant provided for his time with his Critique of Pure Reason.2 For Mauthner no longer believes—if that expresses it—that people seek knowledge in the form of concepts.
The more you develop a feeling for this as a result of what has been discussed today, the better it will be. On Hegel's birthday, August 27, we will build on the foundation laid today in a spiritual scientific approach to the concepts chance, necessity, and providence.
2. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, German philosopher of the Enlightenment, Published Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.
68c. Goethe and the Present: “Faust” as a Problem in the Education of Scientists 10 Oct 1903, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
In the eighteenth century, university studies had not yet progressed that far. Kant's question: How is science possible? It also has a university pedagogical side. We recognize it in Kant's two writings, the first from 1796: “On a newly raised, noble tone in philosophy,” and the second from 1798: “The dispute between the faculties.”
With him, everything is in a state of becoming. According to Hegel, this corresponds to the dialectical development in things. What science is it then that gives a comprehensive picture and thus a concentrated effect on the personality?
51. Philosophy, History and Literature: Truth and Science 07 May 1902, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
In more recent times, people have fallen back on the idea of considering various psychological abilities of human nature individually and, fantastically magnified, of imposing them on nature as an entity. Thus Hegel makes reason the world principle, Schopenhauer blind will. Lotze assumes a comprehensive consciousness that mediates all interaction.
I consider it impossible to find a general, true and correct worldview, on the one hand because of the subjective nature of the human mind, which sees everything through subjective glasses and, according to Kant, can never recognize the thing in itself, and on the other hand for the objective reason that all our research covers only such a small part of the universe and it is generally impossible that such a large part of what is happening will ever enter into the circle of our experience that we can draw universally valid conclusions about the whole world from it.
This method has added something to the world by creating new organs. Through methodical and reasonable observation, Kant has added a completely new element to what we commonly call nature in the moral realm, the world of sensation and feelings of pleasure, which extends far beyond empirical nature: the categorical imperative.
34. Essays on Anthroposoph from Lucifer and Lucifer-Gnosis 1903-1908: Eduard von Hartmann

Rudolf Steiner
It was precisely the retreat of idealistic confidence and spiritualized hope for life that permeated the creations of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel that led to Schopenhauer, the “philosopher of pessimism”, achieving a late impact. Many people despaired of any kind of spiritual uplift being able to bring true elevation in life.
We must therefore imagine that the conscious ideas of the human mind correspond to an unconscious ideal in reality. Like Hegel, Hartmann also regards the idea as the real thing in things, which exists in them beyond what is merely perceptible, accessible to sensory observation.
The fact that he was originally influenced by Schopenhauer's school of thought has given the “philosophy of the unconscious” a pessimistic slant. However, it should not be overlooked that Hegel and Schelling, with their by no means pessimistic way of thinking, also had an equally strong influence on Hartmann as Schopenhauer.
293. The Study of Man: Lecture VII 28 Aug 1919, Stuttgart
Translated by Daphne Harwood, Helen Fox

Rudolf Steiner
A favourite objection of materialism to those who speak of the soul and the spirit is that people get feeble-minded in old age, and, with true consistency, the materialists argue that even such a great man as Kant became feeble-minded in his old age. The statement of the materialists and the fact are quite right. Only they do not prove what they set out to prove. For even Kant, when he stood before the gate of death, was wiser than in his childhood; only in childhood his body was capable of receiving all that came out of his wisdom, and thereby it could become conscious in his physical life.
In Berlin there were once two professors. One was Michelet the disciple of Hegel, who was over ninety years old. And as he was considerably gifted he only got as far as being Honorary Professor, but although he was so old he still gave lectures Then there was another called Zeller, the historian of Greek philosophy.
32. Collected Essays on Literature 1884-1902: From The Modern Soul 27 Jan 1900,

Rudolf Steiner
Hegel sought to clearly elaborate the ideas of freedom, justice, duty, beauty, truth, etc., so that each of them stands before us in a vivid, meaningful way.
He cannot therefore understand Stirner, just as he cannot understand Hegel, because he dreams of a grey, contentless unity, whereas Hegel strives for a manifoldness full of content.
He smiled at the weak-minded who need darkness in order to be able to feel with the universal soul of the world. Before me stands the bust of Hegel. No, thinkers are not colder, more sober natures than mystical dreamers. They are only braver, stronger.
70b. Ways to a Knowledge of the Eternal Forces of the Human Soul: The Forgotten Pursuit of Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought 13 Mar 1916, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
And as if the German spirit wanted to reveal itself in all directions, we see in Hegel - who, like Schelling, is a native of Württemberg; he is even from Stuttgart - we see in Hegel how he is endeavoring to experience in what the soul can experience in itself, at the same time, what, as divine-spiritual, flows through the world and can live into one's own soul, only in a third way. As if the German spirit wanted to reveal itself on all sides: Hegel tries to do this in the third way. For him, what permeates and illuminates the world is divine-spiritual thought.
The way in which Hegel strives, one could say, is the nature of mystical striving grown together within oneself with what fundamentally fills the world as divine-spiritual.
70b. Ways to a Knowledge of the Eternal Forces of the Human Soul: A Forgotten Pursuit of Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought 17 Mar 1916, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
The third person, who is very much honored by being present, and to whom attention must be drawn, because the third side of the German character speaks through him – and of the soul's character in general – is Hegel. Of course, when people speak of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel today, the first thing that comes to mind is: Yes, but you really can't expect people to deal with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel!
Within a more or less forgotten current of German intellectual life, which has been forgotten throughout the entire nineteenth century and into our own days – only this forgotten tone has been little studied so far – there are spirits who, in terms of their intellectual makeup, in terms of the extent of what they know and can do, in terms of the their genius, are far below the tone-setters Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but who, curiously enough, when one looks at what must be striven for today through spiritual science, have created more of spiritual science or have created more that corresponds to it than the great inspirers: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.
This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body.
65. Why is Spiritual Investigation Misunderstood? 26 Feb 1916, Berlin
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
Not everyone can say, like Goethe, from the depth of his own experience: If even in the world of sense man can rise to impulses which act independently of the corporeal, why should not this soul of his be able, in relation to other spiritual activities, to embark boldly upon the "adventure of reason."9 (This was the name given by Kant to anything that went beyond the moral standpoint.) This is where Goethe speaks in opposition to Kant.
And most of them, when they wish to adduce these proofs, begin by saying, "Kant said," on the assumption, of course, that the person whom they are addressing understands nothing about Kant.
Fritz Mauthner25 is to-day a highly esteemed philosopher, regarded by many as a great authority because he has out-Kantianised Kant. Whereas Kant still regards concepts as something with which we grasp reality, Mauthner sees in language alone that wherein our conception of the world actually resides.

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