By Rudolf Steiner - Anthroposophy (a Fragment) (Classics in Anthroposophy) (1996-06-16) [Paperback]

Classics in Anthroposophy

by Rudolf Steiner

This text, outlining a new methodology for the study of human nature, dates from 1910 and was found after Rudolf Steiner's death among his unpublished papers. Steiner had dealt with the same theme earlier in lectures. Asked for a written version, he tried to write down what he had said, but found himself unable to do so-the language would not completely relinquish the words. Nevertheless, what he was able to put down remains a major intellectual and spiritual accomplishment of the twentieth century. Steiner presents anthroposophy, which lies between anthropology and theosophy, as a way of studying the human being. Where anthropology studies the human being on the basis of the senses-i.e. by observation within the limits of the scientific method-theosophy recognizes the human as a spiritual being on the basis of inner experience and seeks to understand what it means to be human in a spiritual world. Between these two approaches-basically those of science and religion-lies anthroposophy, which seeks to study human beings as they present themselves to physical observation, while at the same time seeking to derive indications of the spiritual foundations of phenomena by a process of phenomenological intensification. The results of such phenomenological intensification, though fragmentary and incomplete, are of enormous importance. They constitute the first steps toward a truly cognitive psychology, one that demonstrates the richness of the phenomenological approach to the human being as a sensory organism. Starting from there, Steiner unfolds the seven life processes, the nature of I-experience, the meaning of the human form, and its complex relation to higher spiritual worlds. This is a key work, whose time has truly arrived.

Genres: Spirituality

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

Reviews

[Hannah Connors · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish, I like woo woo stuff but I have no idea what this was saying.