Bruce Charlton's Notions

Continued from: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/modernity-is-do-not-try-to-join-dots-in.html

Final Participation is simple to summarise in its essence - it is Freedom in Thinking.

This is why Rudolf Steiner's most important book was entitled The Philosophy of Freedom - but of course Freedom here is of an ultimate and existential nature: it is, indeed, the Freedom in Thinking with agency, from the Self.

Freedom, by this account, was in general not possible to Men at any time in the past - such freedom is the destiny of the future; but as yet Man has not embraced but rather denied and rejected this freedom (from wickedness, ignorance and wrong ideas).

Freedom of thinking is possible because Man is a child of God, hence has the divine creative capacity to originate - to be an uncaused cause.

In early Men, and in childhood; the self was not autonomous - and thinking was a consequence of immersion in other causes.

With the evolution of consciousness, Man's thinking became incrementally cut-off from the environment (for example, in very different ways; the abstract philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, the detachment from immersion in God and nature and forbidding of representations of God and nature of the Ancient Hebrews).

Man became in a sense more free - less influenced by externals; but at the cost of this freedom being cut-off from participation in reality. The end point was modern alienation, meaninglessness, purposelessness. The self cut-off even from its own thinking...

The future is for Man to be free in thinking: thinking that is primary and uncaused, thinking from the real self (not any social construct), thinking of unbounded scope - thinking which encompasses and integrates all. This is Final Participation - in Owen Barfield's term - 'final' because it is the divine mode of thinking.

Naturally, Man's divine thinking would be partial and distorted compared with God's thinking (which is whole and true); nonetheless it is the next and necessary step.

So, when confronted with a modern world of isolated, meaningless, purposeless, incoherent 'dots'; and experiencing the need to 'join' these dots and attain wholeness and understanding - this is Not a matter of actually taking these dots as they currently-are and joining them. These existing dots are partial, distorted, dishonest... the task is near infinite in scope - overwhelming in complexity...

Rather, the task is much simpler. It is first to attain real, true, thinking and then confront all of reality (sensations, perceptions, feelings, memories, intuitions... everything) - on the basis that everything is significant - and to think them.

Suppose yourself to be looking at the night sky. With Final Participation what we do Not do is to think about the stars as a scientist might; we do not and cannot be un-self-consciously immersed in the experience as our ancestors might; neither do we think concepts of the meaning of stars as a philosopher or theologian might...

With Final Participation we think the stars, we think with the stars. The stars are real, objective and universally-accessible things that are included-in the stream of thinking along with... whatever might be other foci of attention such as the garden, the trees, our memories, our intuitions and imaginations... All are part of thinking, and this thinking is free because it originates in the self, and the self is agent and uncaused.

Such thinking is primary, all-encompassing; and we are not detached from anything that may be thought-about, because we think with it; but we rather participate-in anything, in this thinking.

This is what we need to do, we need to practise doing it until it is voluntary and habitual. This is metaphysics - first philosophy - and we should not be distracted from it, at least not initially, by second-order and 'epistemological' questions about the validity of the various bits and pieces of thinking.

(Naturally, even if our thinking is pure and uncontaminated by external causes, or by wrong motivations - and much thinking will, sooner or later, be so contaminated; our personal thinking will be partial and incomplete as compared with God's thinking. But to demand to know exactly how our own thinking matches up to God's - exactly where it is true and where it is not - is in fact to demand to know as much as God! Epistemology is therefore a fool's errand, a snare and a pitfall. Leave it alone!)

Insofar as we attain to this concept of Freedom in Thinking we are doing what is most important for us to do - that is for us to do, here and now. It is the essential next step in the primary purpose of the saved Christian - which is theosis, to become more divine, to become more like to Jesus Christ.

There is, perhaps, no more-important book that The Philosophy of Freedom (PoF) by Rudolf Steiner; yet it is, of course, limited in its scope - and potentially misleading.

Steiner himself apparently took several years to see its limitations (after-which he became a, very-unorthodox, Christian), and never properly acknowledged the fact that PoF was written from something like an anarchist/ Nietzschian/ anti-Chrstian stance. He pretended that the later Christian and spiritual metaphysics was latent in, and implied by, the PoF - which untruth makes the book extremely bizarre, and deeply puzzling to the spiritual-Christian reader...


It is possible to read PoF as a free-standing and self-justifying work; and indeed I think it likely that that is the best, perhaps the only, way to understand it. Contextualising the work can only come after it has been understood. So I would recommend accepting the book's implicit premises while reading it - until the overall thesis has been grasped. There is a useful website called The Philosophy of Freedom which does exactly this.

This way of reading PoF accepts Steiner's assertion that he has proved his thesis with 'evidence' (evidence from logic and introspection) - and it therefore accepts the book's self-designation as epistemology - and its function in terms of a libertarian-anarchist rationale for absolute individuality. 

But further reflection reveals that PoF is metaphysics, Not epistemology; it is asserting a thesis about the structure of reality, not merely about knowledge of reality. But only if PoF were true epistemology (and only if epistemology could deliver on its promise of assumption-free knowledge - which in fact it cannot ever do!) could PoF legitimately use evidence to prove its thesis - since if the thesis is true, it changes the nature of what-counts-as evidence. And this is to assume what is being proved - and so the argument undercuts its own legitimacy.

At the level of epistemology (as is usual/ universal with epistemology), PoF is therefore circular reasoning - and the reader can only choose either to enter the circle and believe its truth; or else reject it. And on what possible legitimate grounds (other than prior metaphysical assumptions) should he make such a decision?   

PoF leaves-open such questions as why reality really-is the way that it is described by PoF; and if it was - how could we ever know the fact?


Most importantly, the book simply asserts that freedom is the ultimate value - which many or most people would dispute. PoF asserts that a real morality must be independently arrived at and embraced wholly by the individual from his own resources - yet this is the opposite to traditional ideas; and there is no way (other than a kind of mockery) rationally to argue that the one morality is better than the other; except by asserting the (assumed, never proved) primacy of freedom, autonomy, agency...

Furthermore, in order to explain clearly; PoF presents a very simple model of how cognition is inserted into the world, which it splits between sensory phenomena and the concepts requires to make sense of them. This is very helpful, but must be transcended since, again, it is a circular model and gives no idea of how we could know its truth, or its limitations.

(Did Steiner personally observe his consciousness being instered into the world, and the effect it had? Does he personally know what life without/ before consciousness is like? Can he compare individual morality with universal morality to confirm that they are one? Clearly not - so where does this knowledge come-from?)


None of these limitations to PoF are a significant problem if we read it from the Christian metaphysical perspective that there is a loving creator God, we are his children; and creation was set-up and continues mainly to make possible the development of human consciousness towards a divine situation in which freedom/ autonomy/ agency are indeed prime goals.

From such a perspective PoF is revealed as being about both individual agency and the cohesion of reality; because they are the same. The true concepts by-which we understand the perceived world are the same as those of God's creation; and the truly-agent individual is able to participate in God's on-going creation - which is the purpose of the evolutionary-development of consciousness towards freedom and autonomy.  

But we need to bring this metaphysical perspective to our reading of PoF - it is not to be found within the work itself.

My advice is to do just this - and then to read it!

My interest in Rudolf Steiner is focused mainly on his early three philosophical works culminating in The Philosophy of Freedom (1894).

However, I believe that post 1900-ish Steiner became (I have to say) corrupted by his later situations - and that he reverted to extensive use of what he termed Atavistic Clairvoyance (or, what Owen Barfield termed Original Participation) - in other words the post-1900 Steiner increasingly employed mediumship, or what we now term channelling.

This is quite explicitly described in passages of his later works (although Steiner strenuously denied that it really was atavistic clairvoyance - nonetheless, he describes visualisation and hearing words; much like Jung's hallucinatory Active Imagination); it is described in eyewitness accounts of Steiner's behaviour (eyes closed, frequent trance-behaviours); and it accounts for the vast and indiscriminate productivity of his later years: a vast productivity of (let's be honest...) mostly-nonsense; albeit highly-systemised* nonsense.

(All this behaviour is in stark contrast to the purposive, alert, aware thinking so convincingly explained and advocated in Philosophy of Freedom.)

My position is therefore that Rudolf Steiner was a great man, a genius of historic stature, originator of among the most important and relevant truths vital for our situation - yet, taken in total, he was mostly wrong about most things.

And for all their good work - this wrongness has been accentuated by the Anthroposophical movement - who have in practice taught almost everything except his core and essential philosophical insight.

This failure of the Anthroposophy movement was indeed made almost inevitable by Steiner's own errors in trying to systemise spiritual development into a (wholly-conjectural, on his part) process of 'initiation' and formal cognitive exercises. He should instead have pointing at the goal (which he had already done, in Philosophy of Freedom) and recognised that each person must find their own path to reach that goal; by trial and error (and repentance); as Steiner himself had done. 

I believe we need (and I mean literally need) to take Steiner's insights from PofF and apply them in our lives and in our civilisation - and we should (pretty much, but not entirely) ignore the truly vast structure of Spiritual Science he generated after writing Philosophy of Freedom^.

...With the exception of recognising that Steiner became a Christian in 1898 - and we too must have a Christian framework for our spiritual work on transforming consciousness.

We know this by experience of the multitudes who have tried to be spiritual but not religious (often implicitly anti-Christian), and observing the feebleness of the results. Our proper lineage includes William Blake, ST Coleridge, Owen Barfield and William Arkle - all of whom were serious Christians - as well as mystics or esotericists. 


Notes:
   *Steiner was a genius of quite astonishing intelligence and knowledge - and he was culturally German - so had capacities for systemisation far beyond normal, perhaps unique in history. My understanding is that he took information derived partly from channelling, and substantially information from reading, and incrementally elaborated these into his massive ideological system by addition and interpolation.
    ^Although there are indeed many nuggets of insight scattered throughout the post-1900 work which I would not wish to be without - for instance I am amazed and fascinated by the prophecy in lecture The Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body, of 1918. Half of the lecture is 'nonsense' (harsh, but I mean it is incorrect and inessential) - but the other half is the only absolutely compelling example of prophecy I have ever encountered. 

What is the relation between total reality and the ideas of the human mind? Steiner asserts (and I think proves, given his assumptions) that the ideas of the human mind are the same thing as total reality (albeit a tiny and biased sample from that total reality).

By 'same thing' - he means identical with.

The modern positivist/ relativist skeptic asks why (on earth!) this should be?

Steiner's answer is that the creator deity made things so.

(This I infer based on assumptions that are not given clearly and explicitly in PoF - and this makes it harder to understand this book, and Steiner's whole system, than it was 100 plus years ago).

*

Total relativity is sampled by thoughts as they occur in the process of thinking. This reality is generated, as it were, automatically: it is what thinking does.

Steiner regards thinking as not just automatic but necessarily valid. This arises from the fact that the units of 'thoughts' are identical with the units of total reality (insofar as any 'unit' detached from an inter-related-whole, can be valid).

More specifically, reality comes to us cloven in twain - split between percepts (coming through the senses - external and internal) and concepts which we derive from the totality of reality.

Thinking matches the percept to its complementary concept - that is what thinking does - and then weaves these thoughts into understanding.

And this understanding is a microcosm of total reality.

(All this is given us - by the basic set-up of creation.)  

*

But Men are variably conscious of this thinking - because consciousness has different strength and different focus.

Hunter-gatherers and youngish children unconsciously accept the validity of thinking.

Modern Man (older children and adolescents) became aware of the separate (and radically incomplete) realities of percepts and concepts; and becomes aware of the metaphysical assumptions of deity, creation, Man's make-up and thus doubts the validity of thought - notices that these assumptions are not compelled (and therefore denies them).

Future Man (mature adults, of whom there are apparently very few) will become conscious of thinking as valid - as reality itself.

*

So thinking actually is in itself a microcosm of reality. But what of the incompleteness and bias of thinking? How can each person discover these inaccuracies, and correct and improve their thinking - to make a more complete and representative sample of reality? And why should Man do this?

Further assumptions - that Man is made by God to-do-this, because Man's destiny is to become more divine. God has knowledge of the totality of reality: Man's destiny is to approach ever closer to this condition.

So Man is set-up with innate and spontaneous impulses to seek knowledge; to correct, make more consistent and complete knowledge. Furthermore, deity purposively assists this process, by many and various means.

*

The message of Philosophy of Freedom is therefore to restore confidence in the truth of thinking. Thoughts are real and true, they are indeed identical with ultimate reality. We should not waste time on doubting thoughts and thinking - but we should strive to be aware of them.

We should instead consciously seek to increase experience by exposure to the most helpful percepts. Don't waste time on doubting deity - accept that you dwell in a created universe, you were put into that creation and the whole fits together - communicated directly and reliably. Work towards the fullness of knowledge and increase of deity.

(If a Man was - after vast aeons of experience perhaps - to attain total knowledge: what then? Would he merge with deity? If so, then what would be the point of the whole protracted exercise? The answer is that Man would become a different deity - different on the basis of having a unique set-up, and different in the linearity of experience.)

The common distinctions between subjective and objective, spiritual and material, imagination and common sense are collapsed - all these are obliterated in thinking: if some-thing can be thought (really thought) then it is real and true.

*

But consciousness is what enables us to be aware of thinking, and consciousness may abstract from thinking, may create abstractions from thoughts, may create models from these abstractions.

Modern consciousness has fallen into many bad habits of abstraction; bad habits of abstracting artificial concepts from thoughts, and manufacturing abstract model systems from these abstractions.

These are not real - most of what is in modern consciousness is not real. Our automatic, unthinking consciousness, automatically misreads thinking.

To repeat: Modern Man automatically and habitually fails to observe thinking and instead focuses on abstracted, detached, modelled (hence unreal) phenomena. What consciousness is telling us are our thoughts and thinking, are not our thoughts and thinking but instead abstractions and models.

*

The test of un-reality is that we cannot think it!

Contrariwise - anything and everything we can and do think is real - including anything we can imagine and think.

So - The problem for modern Man is not Thinking but Consciousness.

What Modern Man needs to do (must do, if he is to fulfil his destiny) is to redirect consciousness away from percepts and concepts and onto thinking. To do this we need to be aware of what we are doing wrong with consciousness.

We think in truths: our task is to stop ignoring the fact. 

*
In 1894 Rudolf Steiner published a book Die Philosophie der Freiheit variously Englished as The Philosophy of Freedom (PoP), The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.
The book can be read online at:
http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004
Or listened to at:
http://www.rudolfsteineraudio.com/POSA/posa.html

Over the past years I must have written hundreds of blog posts that are focused on "thinking"... but thinking of a particular kind, and in a particular context. 

It really is extraordinarily difficult to get across the centrality of this! - and I have rather floundered around with various nomenclatures - primary thinking, heart-thinking, direct knowing... these are some of them. 

The basic idea came from Rudolf Steiner, and I found it very difficult to grasp. The best source is his Philosophy of Freedom - written when Steiner was in his thirties, and before he became a Theosophist and 'cult leader'. 

But for me the penny didn't drop, until I after I had read (or rather listened-to, as an audiobook by Dale Brunsvold) Steiner's PhD thesis published as Truth and Knowledge, and also Otto Palmer's book of excerpts of Steiner's own comments on Philosophy of Freedom. I hoped that I would be able to provide readers of this blog with an easier and more direct route to understanding what Steiner meant - and free of the obscuring accretions that Theosophy brought. 

(As I have often said, my greatest strength as a 'philosopher' is that I know when I have not 'got' something; and therefore when I want to 'get' something, I know to keep on returning, and keep "banging away" at the problem - until either I do get it, or know that I can't. This was the case with Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom.)

Anyway; I have described what this thinking is like, as an experience; so that it can be recognized when/if it happens - how it can be distinguished from 'mundane' thinking (i.e. from the ordinary, everyday activity that most people think is all of thinking).

 Yet actually doing 'primary thinking' is only half of what is needed; and somebody might experience this frequently and yet get none of the positively transformative benefits it potentially contains. 

This is because we need to know the significance of primary thinking, know its importance in Man's destiny (especially "Western Man", and even more even-more especially those whose racial and cultural backgrounds are from the British Isles, Western and Central Europe, Scandinavia...).

And, for this, we need to know what is happening in primary thinking, where it comes-from (it's provenance) in terms of our-self (our real, divine, primary self - as-contrasted-with the externally-constructed, mortal, surface personality or persona).  

We need to know why primary thinking is valid (i.e. valid within the constraints of our mortal incarnation into this 'entropic' world). 

In other words, half of primary thinking is our explicit, conscious, and chosen knowledge of what it is; and the other half is actually doing it! 

Unless we are conscious of the situation; unless both understanding and practice are in-place, unless we are doing all this by choice and taking responsibility for the business... Then primary thinking is of not much help, or no help at all, to our situation in the world. 

It sounds hopelessly complicated! But the complications seem to arise from the problem of getting past established (mostly unconscious) assumptions and recognizing something very simple and clear which was "there all the time" but needed to become explicitly-known and chosen - at least that was my case. 

It's one of those things that is hard to "get", but when it is "got" then that is that. It is clear and obvious; and everything is changed by it. 

Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom (PoF; 1894) played a very important role in my personal development - indeed, it was perhaps vital. Nonetheless it is ultimately wrong and can cause serious problems if not (after understanding it) one fails to discard or transcend it. .

This is because PoF explains itself in terms of an abstract, simplified, and grossly incomplete model of human thinking. It is A Model (Percept + Concept = united by Thinking).

And any model is false - because simplified compared with complex reality; and false because abstract when reality is 'animistic' (about Beings and their Relationships).

The PoF is, in fact, Ahrimanic in structure: it divides the world into categories of percepts and concepts, and suggests that these are united in thinking. Yet the world is not really divided into percepts; not is thinking objectively divisible into concepts.

Therefore if we begin in Ahrimanic materialist alienation; if we then understand PoF which tells us how it works, and how to escape it...

But if we stop at that point; assume the validity of PoF and try to live by the model of PoF - then we will be stuck in just another kind of abstract materialism: we will loop back into the demonic traps of Ahriman.

We will just create yet-another bureaucratic religion - as happened with Rudolf Steiner's Anothroposophy: which consists merely in learning stuff (studying the scriptures of The Doctor) and doing Anthroposophic stuff (education, medicine, agriculture etc) according to the usual Ahrimanic vocabulary/ lexicon, blueprints, flow charts, recipes, rules and regulations...); as defined by the usual Ahrimanic hierarchy or authority and temple structure with sacred places and rituals...

The Philosophy of Freedom does not, therefore, in itself give us freedom, not even a little bit - unless it is seen as a first step; as a ladder that is ascended then discarded. We need an alternative to Ahriman, not merely a different kind of Ahriman; nor a reaction back to seek an impossible to Luciferic unconscious instinct - or Original Participation...

We need, in other words, to move forward to what Steiner called the Intuitive Soul and Barfield called Final Participation - and this entails something qualitatively different-from the analysis, theories and methods of Steiner's Anthroposophy, and different too from the philosophical abstractions of Barfield.

They are perhaps essential - at least for some people such as myself, but they are a starting-point merely.  

Who really wants freedom? Well I do, and I long have wanted it - and that is what makes me recognise that I am a rare outlier.

Of course, there are endless and (by design) inconclusive debates about what freedom 'really' is; but these are only relevant if you want it. And extremely few people do - judging by their lives and decisions; by the choices they make, how they spend their time, how much time they free-up to spend.

Yet freedom is at the heart of why we are in this mortal life; because freedom is an attribute of deity and our destiny (if we choose it) is to become more divine, including more free.

Rudolf Steiner's magnum opus is called The Philosophy of Freedom, and it gives an idea of what this freedom means and why it is an attribute of deity. And we already are deities - in embryo; we are children of God, we have God in each of us. The long term project is to become more godlike, and for this deity to increase in scope.

Deity is essentially a creative thing, and creativity is based upon love (love is the cohesion of reality) - and creativity is an aspect of freedom - that's how freedom fits into the scheme. For your creativity or mine to be of value to God's creation; our creativity must be free - that is, our creativity must come from that within each of us that is both divine and unique.

So, that is the importance of freedom, and what it is 'for'. And if you are not concerned by freedom, then you ought to be - because not to be concerned about freedom, is not to be concerned about your reason for being.
 

"There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds."

Thus wrote Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Philosophy of Freedom he demonstrated that thinking was the power that allowed modern human beings direct access to the spiritual worlds, an access that had once been the privilege of only a handful of mystics. 

No longer was it necessary for average human beings to depend on scripture and other forms of religious authority, for they could discover spiritual truth directly through strengthened thinking. This direct knowledge, he argued, was the only foundation for true moral freedom. He went on to develop and teach practical methods by which it could be achieved.

A century later, the Society he founded seems dedicated mainly to preserving and disseminating his nearly 60,000 transcribed lectures [Note: this number seems considerably too large an estimate, since Steiner only lectured actively for about 25 years, which is about 9,000 days - and he did not deliver six lectures every day]. 

The result of his own spiritual research, these lectures cover everything from gnomes to seraphim, from the history of Atlantis to recipes for compost. "Steiner says" is the constant refrain of anthroposophists, who seem to prefer citations from these lectures to direct knowledge of anything. While Steiner's initiatives in education, biodynamic agriculture, homeopathic medicine and care of the mentally retarded have been lovingly preserved, anthroposophy has, since his death, produced little in the way of social innovation. 

Anthroposophists, when they can be understood at all, express superstitions and prejudices that would embarrass a redneck. Fearing injury by everything from rock music to microchips to Jesuits, they have become a society of esoteric hypochondriacs, in neo-Amish withdrawal from modern political and economic life.

How is it that a movement dedicated to strengthened thinking produces so many goofy and morally useless ideas?

How did the author of The Philosophy of Freedom become this ghost to whom his readers so idolatrously surrender their independence of judgement?

That sound and stirring concepts give rise to corrupt and neurotic human organizations is pretty much a summary of the history of all spiritual movements...


I have been again engaging with Rudolf Steiner - because I regard him as one of the most significant thinkers of all time, and because he is a vital contributor to my deepest understanding of reality. Steiner is essential, but...

Yet again I find myself up against the phenomenon of which MacCoun speaks above. When I read or listen to Steiner's own lectures, or to the best of his followers expounding, I am overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation under such a mass of wrongness that I find it hard to continue.

But I disagree with MacCoun in her specific diagnosis that this is due to the Anthroposophical Society (AS), and the way it dealt with Steiner's legacy. I also disagree with her belief that the AS could - in principle - be reformed... I regard the AS as a symptom of Steiner's deep mistakes, and therefore it is unreformable

The problems lay with Steiner himself, and with his decision to become a spiritual leader of an organised movement.  But I repeat myself...


The problems are deep, because Steiner made the serious error of developing a meditative technique that he regarded as intrinsically scientifically valid; and spent two and a half decades, day after day, putting himself into this trance-state and spouting forth in lectures whatever came to him in this state.

Steiner did not live up to his own best understanding - indeed as a matter of daily routine he fell below the standards he himself had understood and explained. Steiner distinguished the Luciferic and Ahrimanic types of spiritual evil - and he fell into both in his late work of lecturing and organising the Theosophical then Anthroposophical societies.

Steiner's focus on meditative technique - and training in this method - was Ahrimanic, materialistic. But (contrary to his own assertion that meditation should be in clear, alert consciousness) the actual meditative method he used was Luciferic - it was (according to multiple descriptions) a dissociated trance state of lowered consciousness, including lucid dreaming. He then took this unconsciously-generated, 'altered state', 'atavistic' material and systematised and taught it as fact - Ahrimanic again.

For many years, Steiner had this working like a machine. Ask him a question, he would go into a trance, and from his unconscious would generate vast masses of material on the subject - and by Steiner's unique intellectual brilliance (he was a genius) this dream-material would be systemised and rationalised even as it emerged in his speech. 

The vast bulk of Steiner's work from about 1900 was, then, an exemplification of exactly those errors and evils that he himself first diagnosed as spiritual problems of our time: the backward looking Luciferic trances, and the modern bureaucratic organisation he founded, led and left-behind: the Ahrimanic Anthroposophical Society.

*

The answer is: pretty much like the Old Testament.

I am not excluding the New Testament here - so the proper answer is 'The Bible' - but a focus on the OT emphasizes that the ancient Jews has a non-philosophical way of living, of thinking; which is the main... well it could be called 'rival' or 'complement' to the Greek style of thinking we call 'philosophy' and which tends to be the basis of what we call 'theology'.

*

For modern intellectuals it is difficult not to be philosophical.

Which is not to say we do philosophy well; of course we don't!

But, our first 'move' is usually to make a metaphysical assumption and proceed from there.

The basic metaphysical assumption used by the Greeks was (I think) to distinguish time/ change from eternity/ stasis.

*

But what does an intelligent, complex mode of thought without any such assumption look like? The answer is given by the OT.

 But if not metaphysical, not abstractly philosophical; then what is it?

Well it could be called historical, if history is seen as a very 'thick' and rich term, including what we might term myth, and purpose, and meaning.

So another word might be narrative: that life is conceptualized in terms of a story, and a story is a matter of persons, agents, individuals (such that some persons may be nations, or lands, or animals - the point that all significant actors in the drama of history are person-like - or as we dismissively put it 'anthropomorphized').

*

So for the ancient Hebrews there was a beginning and an end, and a lot of stuff happening in between.

So, life was framed by revelations and prophecies of what we (as individuals, families, races, peoples) came from and where we are going, and why, and how we personally fit into this.

And revelations (often in the form of promises, covenants and the like) told that God (and angels; and Satan and fallen angels) were engaged with the lives of each person and peoples, moment by moment, in fulfillment of prophetic destiny.

*

Destiny would happen, but by free will individuals could resist this, and delay the coming to pass (for good or ill; by repentance or sinning) - for a while.

What will happen is fixed (and known) by the nature of things which is the will of God; when it happens (and what that happening is actually like when experienced) is subject to choice.

Order is certain, timescale is contingent.

*

That would, in itself, perhaps be abstract; except that there was no space between the story and the self.

This is hard for us moderns to grasp: we set the individual against the rest of the world; but for an Old Testament character like David, there was both an intense individualism and a sense of being inextricably part of his people's destiny, and expression of his people in history.

Well, David was a King, it might be said; but what of ordinary people?

There is a circularity to the question, since there are no ordinary people recorded in this kind of mythic history (being recorded makes you a part of the myth). And that is the point. David began ordinary, became a king - but we get the sense of what it was to be ordinary from the earlier part - and it wasn't qualitatively different from being a King.

The book of Ruth shows another slice of ordinary life, and how is could be taken up into 'history'.

We can at least glimpse from such stories what it is to live in awareness that one is inside history, destiny, prophecy. 

*

Let's briefly consider an example of the difference between philosophical and historical modes: the problem of free will in the context of an omniscient God. i.e. if God knows the future how can we be free; but if we are free how can God know the future?

Philosophically, this is a version of the problem of how to understand the relationship between time and eternity, change and stasis. This history of philosophy up to Aquinas provides a variety of solutions (after which the problem was progressively swept aside and ignored).

It all seems impossible - or rather, any apparently satisfying answer (such as provided by Boethius in Consolation of Philosophy) is so abstract as to be un-understandable - less understandable that the problem was in the first place; and impossible to live-by.

And yet, the Old Testament demonstrates what it is like to live in a (non-philosophical) world where God is omniscient, where prophecies and promises always come to pass, and yet where the agents have free will and make real choices.

In the Old Testament world as we share in its lived quality, there is no 'as yet', there is no paradox (either real or perceived), there is no incoherence between God's foreknowledge and the freedom of the human actors.

*

Thus (by identifying with the OT, by living vicariously in its narrative) we seen that although Philosophically the problem seems insoluble; in practice - when there is a people living in an historical mode - it is not a problem, but in fact the answer is a matter of everyday experience.

And yet, precisely because the historical mode of thinking and living is essentially different from the philosophical mode; there is no philosophical explanation for how it works: we perceive how it works, we cannot philosophically explain its coherence - indeed, philosophically it seems incoherent.

We cannot capture mythic history in philosophy - we can only live it (whether in reality or imagination, whether permanently or temporarily), or not live it - maintain distance, regard history through the lens of philosophy.

*

But all religions (or at least, all strong and living and enduring religions) are and always have been philosophically incoherent; thus it is trivially easy to look at someone else's religion and demonstrate that it is nonsense, paradoxical, and (philosophically speaking)'makes no sense'. And yet the actual lived existence of that religion refutes all the philosophy!

(Or, at least, it may do - some religions really do not work, they do not make any significant difference to life. An 'Old Testament' of modern 'Liberal Christianity' or secular Leftism is unimaginable - except as a satire or warning, embedded in a genuine religious narrative.)

Yet of the same philosophical and analytic tools were turned back on the religion (or ideology) from which this destructive critique has emerged, then they would be revealed as self-dismantling.

*

Ordinary people cannot do philosophy - they have no need or interest to think in that kind of way.

But ordinary people can live historically; indeed it is the norm - and we are the weird ones.

Indeed, this has changed during my life. England certainly had an element of the mythic-historic when I was a child; and so did social roles such as being a doctor, an academic, a scientist (from my experience) and apparently also being a joiner/ carpenter, or coal miner - or a mother.

*

So we get two styles of Hebrew/ historical and Greek/ philosophical; and both present in Christianity from the beginning.

But we find it hard, nowadays, to stop being philosophical even though we are so inept at it; perhaps because we are so inept.

*

I find, recurrently, that the philosophical style tends to get out of hand; and that it inserts a gap between myself and my religion.

Indeed, 'gap' is hardly the word for what it does!

Whether I am reading Aristotelian scholasticism, mystical Platonism, or the tight legalism of the Reformation-influenced thinkers; again and again I will suddenly awaken from my intellectual fascination to find that Christianity is something ever there and I am standing over here, alone, looking at it.

*

Attempts to recover the historical way of thinking and living are attacked - and often demolished - by the power and status of philosophical questioning - since philosophy is able to make distinctions, and create problems, even or especially when it is unable to answer the questions raised by its own analysis.

That is, indeed, the history of philosophy, its driving dynamic - continual questioning, subversion.

Or, at least. the proportion of philosophers who have found a way of living from philosophy is very small in comparison with those who were absorbed (distracted) by the intellectual activity of demolishing ways of living (including previous philosophies).

*

This is what troubles me about all specific attempts to formulate Christianity in terms of beliefs. It seems wrong to express Christianity as a list of beliefs; and also it seems wrong (and indeed even more wrong) to debate, modify or demolish lists of beliefs.

There is, it seems, no substitute for the historical sense of life; and if this is absent, then there can be no effective replacement; and this applies to Christianity as well as other religions.

Strong religion seems, indeed, to be characterized by precisely this historical sense; the sense of destiny - of living inside myth.

With this, all falls into place; without it, nothing else really matters.

*

  

 

I have been reading the avant-garde 'artist' Joseph Beuys recently (who some authorities regard as the most important 'artist' of the late 20th century) - from my recognition that his work was an explicit continuation of the philosophical insights of Rudolf Steiner; as expressed most clearly in The Philosophy of Freedom. 

In other words; if one engages with Beuys from a basis in The Philosophy of Freedom; we can see his work - especially its quantitatively-major element, the teaching - as directly derived from the same insights as Steiner described. Indeed, these insights were described, advocated and put into practice by Beuys across a wide range of activities.  

I said 'artist' in scare quotes - because Beuys was not really an artist in the traditional sense; or, at best, a rather mediocre one. Having surveyed the span of Beuys's work, it seems obvious that as a sculptor or in terms of his drawings, he was no better than most decent art school graduates. 

Indeed, his surviving artistic productions are mostly unpleasant in effect - being mostly dull, drab, depressing - and, in many instances (and sometimes deliberately) decaying. 

Yet Beuys was a genius - and this was based on (at least...) three major attributes:

1. Beuys was extremely intelligent - far more intelligent than 99% of the people around him in the art world - including the artists, students, gallery owners, critics and scholars (partly because art does not attract the best intellectuals and does reward confident frauds).

2. Beuys was extremely creative in his thinking. This is obvious in his speaking - the records of interviews and accounts of lectures. He (rather like Steiner) did a truly colossal amount of teaching and discussing - at times apparently up to 10 hours a day in public discussions, day after day, week after week. 

From the combination of intelligence and creativity; Beuys always seems to have something to say about anything (again, like Steiner); was very quick on the uptake and in response, and had considerable general knowledge at his command. 

3. Beuys had an extremely dominant, charismatic and magnetic personality - such that people who were in his presence were often overwhelmed, but could never ignore him - and those who spent much time with him seems to have been affected for the rest of their lives. 

Beuys was very influential, and launched several projects and 'organizations' - although it seems clear that from his point of view these were not intended to be moral, 'functional' institutions; but mostly venues for conversation, stimulation, and endlessly developing ideas and thoughts. 

His most famous slogan was "Everyone is an artist" which was apparently intended to mean that traditional art - the production of beautiful artifacts that could 'stand-alone' - was to be superseded by Steiner-esque Thinking from a condition of Freedom (which I regard as the same as my understanding of Primary Thinking). 

In other words, while an artist (i.e. everybody) continues to do and make things; the focus ought to be on the creative thinking which was primary, rather than the products which derived from thinking. 

This creative thinking was revealed more by discussions and conversations about 'art objects' and the thinking behind them - than it was by the objects themselves; this activity being embedded in a context of the evolutionary development of human consciousness under divine providence. 

In other words - I would regard Beuys as aiming to move from the 'medieval' (Intellectual Soul) world view, to the other-side of modernist meaninglessness and isolation - to arrive at the condition of Barfieldian Final Participation - when Men consciously choose to participate with divine creation in the creation of their own world-view. 

For Beuys to assert and operate on the basis that 'everyone' was an artist, was self-destructive from the point of view of a Professor in an art school - and indeed Beuys was sacked from his position. 

He regarded teaching as by far his most important activity; and went on to found (or develop the concept) of a Free University as providing a forum. But this is oxymoronic, and could not exist without refuting its own premises. 

Beuys's other projects had a similarly paradoxical and self-contradicting nature. He was a founder of the German Green party, but left it when the party began to operate as a party - winning elections, getting power etc.  

He also often asserted Rudolf Steiner's Threefold organization of society; which nowadays operates in a realm of quixotic idealism - and functions mainly as the basis for that kind of radical and open-ended discussion which Beuys so much enjoyed and advocated.

It seems that Beuys was a comprehensive failure at his articulated goals (whether in art, education, environmentalism. politics) - but that this was inevitable and indeed 'part of the plan' - since he was in reality a spiritual philosopher aiming qualitatively beyond current societal possibilities.

In the artistic productions, 'actions', teaching etc; Beuys was trying to 'cast a spell' (which worked only partially, and intermittently - and was heavily dependent on his presence) through which to imagine a personhood and society beyond our totalitarian bureaucratic materialism; and thereby inspire individuals to understand and adopt a Steiner-like understanding of Freedom rooted in primary and creative thinking, and an unorthodox Christianity.  

My impression is that hardly anybody understood what Beuys was doing, despite his repeated explanations - just as hardly anybody understood Steiner, Barfield or Arkle. People had very different metaphysical assumptions and interests, and were mostly trying to get along in society as-it-was; and their bottom line was ideological and pragmatic, rather than spiritual and idealistic. 

Like everybody must; Beuys operated in this mainstream world of ideology and practicality; and of course - like everybody - was prone to lapses, selfishness, vanity etc. - since this mortal life is about learning, not achieving perfection. Among his writings (as with Steiner's) there is a good deal of pretentious nonsense, showing-off, and pandering to the audience. 

There was definite dishonesty - especially in Beuys's claimed life-story relating to his self-propagated legend of having been a Stuka pilot rescued from a crashed plane by Tartar tribesmen, smeared in fat and wrapped in felt for warmth - which so many critics took as the basis for biographical and critical understanding. And the surviving 'works' mostly come across as enervating and miserable. 

Yet there is an underlying, implicit, but directly-knowable energy, seriousness and Goodness about Joseph Beuys; which stands in stark opposition to the evil inversions of the art-world that has perpetuated his memory and legacy. 

Indeed; Beuys's motivational Goodness and Romantic Christianity has become indirectly more evident recently, by high-level critical attacks on the man and his legacy - that derive from the heart of darkness constituted by the propagandists for the mainstream modern establishment. 

These attacks take the usual form of slurs alleging Fascism, racism, colonialist appropriation etc. - typical 'deplatforming' stuff deployed against any person or institution from The Past by evil powers when they detect potential danger from true values.  

My point is that - with the correct assumptions, and a willingness to sift and discern - there is potential value in the work of Joseph Beuys - despite his having been, while he lived, the darling of some of the most ridiculous and pernicious folk on the planet - i.e. the trendy, lefty, commissars of the 'modern art' Establishment.  

I came across a recent book - Ludwig Wittgenstein, by Miles Hollingworth Oxford University Press, 2018), via a podcast interview entitled "Wittgenstein as mystic" - which I found intriguing in several ways; including the Holligworth seemed rather more interesting and personally committed than the usual run of academic philosophers. 

Consequently, I got hold of and read the book with pretty intense concentration; and, at first, was stimulated and excited by the sense of some Big Thing emerging throughout. 

But, in the end, I felt very let-down. The book seemed to promise much, some kind of break-out into something free and creative and beyond the constraints of the usual... But it delivered me back to the same-old/ same-old world of mainstream academia and its solid linkage to The System - as evidenced by the insidious and soul-sapping inversional values that underlie this book, and lurk behind everything mainstream. 

It set me to reflecting, yet again, about that unusual quality in Wittgenstein; the way that he seems to hold-out the possibility of a genuinely alternative answer and 'escape' - and yet does not. And to wondering why this is.

My conclusion is that - for all his rigorous skepticism about The System (about the dominant and superficially-compelling discourse of logic, mathematics, science etc.), and for all the mysticism of that world of the unspeakable, the religiousness of that which lies beyond or behind what can be said (etc) - the whole of Wittgenstein takes-place within the core assumptions of "Western Philosophy", and so of course it cannot escape the implications of Western Philosophy. 

One needs to go deeper than W. went in order to see where we are, and thereby become inwardly free from it. 

In other words, we need to go as deep as our primary assumptions concerning the nature of reality - that is, metaphysics; and Wittgenstein shared the deep aversion to doing this which characterized his era - indeed the refusal to do this. Something which has, to very varying degrees and in different domains, characterized Western philosophy since at least Ancient Greek times when several core assumptions became habitual.  

And Hollingworth needs to go deeper than he does. He mistakes a degree of detachment from the career structures of academia for intellectual and spiritual independence. Yet it is again and again clear that he is himself a (partly explicit, more fully implicit) supporter and sustainer of several aspects of the core and mainstream 'liberalizing' agenda of the globalist-leftist-materialist System.

The explanatory 'climax' of the book purports to be a distinction between physical and mental philosophy, thinking and doing (which is itself a vast metaphysical assumptions!) and a series of reflections of sex/sexuality in relation to Wittgenstein. 

This whole section rings false, is full of strong but wrong assertions, inconsistencies, and - this is the problem - it is bounded by the very recent and local sex-conceptualizations of political correctness... Thus the foundation of the thesis is just A Mess. And since the key explanation is an incoherent mash-up, the whole of the rest of the books structure retrospectively collapses into less than the sum of its parts.

Wittgenstein's mysticism is ultimately a oneness mysticism, because his assumption is that God must be one, and one who created everything from nothing (ex nihilo) - so that everything is of God and one. 

The failure is that W. does not recognize the asserted oneness and this nature of creation as assumptions - therefore he fails to acknowledge metaphysics.

W. also shares the assumption that the world is made of Things as well as Beings; Things that include all manner of physical abstractions (relating to such as matter, forces, fields, and their mathematical descriptions). 

For instance, one major discussed philosophical example of 'freedom' is making moves on a chessboard: i.e. an abstract mathematical game of un-alive pieces within the bounds of a fixed and unified 'world'. Such a model begs all the vital questions concerning freedom. 

The failure is that to assume un-aliveness as ultimate to reality has such downstream consequences of that Beings, such as ourselves, are ultimately constrained by the un-alive. We are regarded as dwelling among un-aliveness. Un-aliveness even permeates the understanding of God (since Wittgenstein's assumed God, as with many mainstream Christians, must be the ultimate source of un-aliveness). 

By my understanding; a fundamental (albeit common!) misunderstanding of Christianity is almost inevitable given such assumptions. Indeed Wittgenstein's reflections of Christ and Christianity are ethically focused, and to do with conduct in this life - as evidenced by W.'s focus on Tolstoy's version of Christianity. Such entails a Great Deal of moral agonizing about the human condition, and its paradoxical impossibilities. 

That Christianity - on different metaphysical assumptions - might instead be about everlasting life versus death, resurrection versus spirit; and love as creation... such cosmic transformations are out-with the scheme created by Wittgenstein's ultimate assumptions.

In all this Wittgenstein is not distinctive nor unusual, but absolutely mainstream within Western philosophy. He brought a new quality to the conversation, as I say a kind of agonized and confessional quality; and the feeling (partly from his own subjectivity, partly asserted) that he was cutting deeper and making a fresh start on thinking - but this is ultimately an illusion.  

(The fact of Wittgenstein's immediate and sustained success among high status and upper-class British intellectuals of a modernists, anti-Christian (pro-evil) type (e.g. the Bloomsbury group and the Cambridge Apostles) - all this ought to be a red flag waving against the idea of Wittgenstein as a genuinely effective mystical or Christian thinker.   

Therefore, once again (and this has happened to me three or more times before), I leave this latest encounter with Wittgenstein once again regarding him as a rather fascinating character, indeed a somewhat addictive character! -- but one whose actual work is ultimately deeply-conventional and therefore useless to our fundamental needs here-and-now: not just useless but (due to its implicit promises) actually misleading.

Wittgenstein famously stated that the philosopher's job ought to be show a trapped fly the way out of a fly-bottle. The bottle was a container into which the fly had strayed (e.g. in search of aromatic food, being used as bait) but once inside the fly could not escape. Instead, he just buzzed about in a panic. To me, this seems like projection - in that Wittgenstein and his philosophy has served as a fly-trap for many people - both at the time, and since. His personality and work is baited with the promise of autonomy of thinking and escape from system; and the philosophy offers certain, limited, satisfactions. Yet once inside the Wittgensteinian bottle - all genuine escape routes are self-blocked by unexamined assumptions. 

So Wittgenstein will be discovered, eventually, to be as useless and misleading as is the work of the entirety of Western Philosophy - being - as it is - rooted in metaphysical assumptions that are unnoticed, denied; or regarded not as assumptions but as necessary truths of existence. 

Such is our situation. 

The reason for the intractability of our civilizational decline, and why the causes of decline are defended, sustained and abetted (at various levels) by Almost Everybody; is exactly that our ideological/ philosophical roots lie so deep... 

As deep as roots can be, which is as deep as our primary assumptions concerning the nature of reality.  

Note: I should give credit to the fact that - for about two-thirds its length - I was pretty gripped by Hollingworth's account of Wittgenstein's life and work. As academic books go, it is a superior product.

Yet the whole basis of the book is that it is more than just another academic book on Wittgenstein: thus it engages in various 'breaking the fourth wall' and Tristram Shandy-esque strategies of authorial insertion. These are seemingly expressive of sincerity and a perspective from 'life' rather than 'career'. 

But, by the end and overall, I felt instead the gravitational pull of the ordinary academic values, and the modern-Western socio-political assumptions into which academia is now locked by bureaucratic structures - as well as the pervasive leftism of the intellectual class. This constrains all official instances of 'rebellion' by the need to ingratiate oneself to the ethical arbiters of The System - of which the Oxford University Press is an integral element! 

So the initial promise - and the scattered and stimulating insights - only made worse my frustration at the eventual let-down: as if I had been 'taken for a ride', fallen for a line of speil... 

In Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom (1894) he has a model of thinking that describes thoughts as being formed from the combination of a sensory percept (or a memory of a perception) with a concept - or idea. Percept and concept, combined equals a though; the process of this combination through time is think-ing. 

 

But many or most of our concepts are false - being derived (perhaps especially nowadays) from external sources that are untruthful. And, naturally, when our sensory perceptions are understood using untrue concepts - then the resulting thinking will itself be false. 

However, for Steiner, the true and correct concept to join-with a percept is actually universally available - from what might be termed a realm of truth. We might, in this model, think of the realm of truth as a kind of divine omnipresent, all permeating ether of true ideas. In principle, it is possible to know the truth - really to Know something - if we combine our perceptual inputs with those real-and-true concepts, drawn from the divine ether. 

 

How might this happen? In the first place, we must be correctly motivated - and this motivation could be described in terms of love; and also in terms of a seeking motivated by the transcendental values of truth, beauty and virtue. 

A properly motivated person can therefore - in principle - know the truth; because he is always able to access the true concept with which to interpret his sensory/ memory perceptions. 

 

Yet we all know that what happens in our modern lives is that we are confused and distracted by a vast deluge of false concepts. It is usually very difficult to pick out the true concept from among some many, such frequently arriving, wrong, untrue, misleading ideas that are swirling in our thoughts. 

We need, therefore, to be able to recognise when we really-know something, from the more frequent occasions when we are wrong about it, because we are using wrong ideas to interpret it. 

The answer lies in that type of introspection which could be termed intuition; and my purpose here is to explain a model of intuition based on the Steiner model of thinking. 

I believe that we can, by introspection, recognise the provenance of a true concept. That is, we can we can look within our own thinking, and recognise when a concept comes from the 'realm of reality'. And I believe that this is an inbuilt (indeed God-given) ability. 

 

In other words, those who are capable of love have the ability to know when they Know. 

This is to know that our ideas come from a divine realm. With the proviso that this provenance-detection of reality is only available to those whose motivations (at that particular moment of introspection) are good (loving, truthful, virtuous, in pursuit of transcendental beauty). 

And, those whose real motivations are selfish, self-seeking, unloving, dishonest, manipulative, un-virtuous etc - are Not able to know when they Know. 

 

Such people (and I think there are many of them; and nearly all of us, for much of the time) live is a state of un-fixable, chronic confusion. They are unsure about everything - all of the time, because all of their ideas are wrong. 

And even if they - by chance - stumble-upon a truth, they will not be able to recognise that truth intuitively - it will be indistinguishable from the distracting mass of errors; because their motivations are to use that truth in some way that sustains the side of evil; against God and divine creation. 

 

So those with Good motivation can recognise when they really-know something. However, this inner, wordless knowing is different-from explaining to our-selves what exactly it is that we know - typically using language or symbols. This is a further and fallible, error prone, matter. 

Self-explaining is, indeed, a matter of 'modelling' - inevitably by selection and simplification, the totality of what we know, into something manageable with our cognitive ability and in the available time.

And - having explained our inner knowing to ourselves; there is a further step of 'translation' involved in communicating (or rather, trying to communicate) that inner-explanation to other people. And it is only this which is available 'objectively' (as we call it) in public discourse - to be subjected to analysis etc.  

It is in these at-least-two stages of modelling - of summarising and communicating - our recognised real-knowledge; that the varieties of differences in intuitions arise. But, all intuitions of knowing are - in and of themselves, true - hence the same; whoever is accessing them at any particular time and place.

  

Note added: This is just to emphasise that the above is a model, Steiner's is a model - therefore it is certainly wrong. It is an attempt to overcome our Ahrimanic consciousness with something else Ahrimanic. All true - therefore it is something that may, or may not, help understanding; but itself needs to be overcome. And in our era we need to overcome System with The Personal - with relationships between persons; and bringing that personal understanding (which is spontaneous in young chidlren) to consciousness, and consciously choosing it. Just a reminder... 

Ever since this crisis broke, I have been awaiting with anticipation Terry Boardman's analysis: here it is - I excerpt a few of the more striking (and accessible) insights (lightly edited - italics are mine):

Again and again in his lectures on The Karma of Untruthfulness, Steiner emphasised the importance of the search for truth. He began with the question that was in everyone’s minds at that time of the First World War: “what can I do in this crisis?” – and answered simply and directly: “Endeavour to understand! See through things!”

Thoughts, he said, are forces and have effects. What people think is far more important than what they do, because thoughts become deeds in the course of time. 

We live today on the thoughts of past times; these thoughts are fulfilled in the deeds of today. Clear and proper understanding of what is going on is the only way – “Nothing else is of any use”. 

We need wide-awake vigilance and discrimination in all things. All forms of atavistic mediumism and spiritual practice that avoid the conscious mind are anti-modern and harmful. At the very beginning of his public life, in his book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894; a.k.a. The Philosophy of Freedom), Steiner showed how it is vital to combine the correct thought with the object, to find the concept that truly corresponds to the percept. 

Nothing is better for a person, he said, than real insight into how things work in the world. The truth can never be as damaging as an untruth and to adhere to the truth is a solemn and holy act of worship. Have courage for truth, he urged; stand on the foundation of truth, even if it is harmful or embarrassing. 

It is essential “to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. ….

This Consciousness Soul epoch (1413-3573), which according to Steiner lasts 2160 years, will continue until the middle of the 4th millennium. A crucial aspect of this epoch is for individuals to become conscious of themselves as spiritual beings and of their relationship to the worlds of spirit, nature and other human beings. This is something that only individuals can do in freedom; it cannot be done en masse, as a group... 

In this epoch the main challenge is for individuals to penetrate their mental life so that they can become the conscious masters of their thinking. The Consciousness Soul Age will be followed by the Age of the Spirit-Self, the first period in which the spirit of man will be developed, as distinct from the soul. The focus in that epoch will not be so much on individuals and thinking but on the development of new communities and a higher, more refined life of feeling...

The current coronavirus crisis in this 21st century since the time of Christ is taking place within this struggle for the corona (crown) of world power between China and America... 

From the early 1970s until today we have seen countless examples of this animalisation. In their paranoid overreaction to the coronavirus, governments have sought to reduce whole nations to sheep, locked up in domestic ‘pens’, unable to move freely until their ‘shepherds’ allow, and whole nations have meekly complied. 

Public social and cultural life has all but been sheared off and we wait dumbly for we know not what. Perhaps a vaccine that, like sheep, we shall all be required to take for purposes of “health and safety”, our vaccination records accessible on an implanted ID chip in our bodies, just as farm animals already have...

Meanwhile, as we are not in fact sheep but human beings, we can at least use this current imposed detention in our ‘pens’ to study, research, think and meditate, and try to understand what is going on, even though much of that research and study may have to be in the ahrimanic realm of the Internet (the inspiration for which, like almost all modern technology, came from that realm). 

We can take courage from the knowledge, a result of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual research, that in this Age of the Consciousness Soul, in this 21st century of the Christian Era, and in this Michaelic Age, since the 1930s17 the Christ Being, the Divine Logos, has been visible to those who can perceive Him in the etheric mantle of the Earth, which is the realm of the angels. 

There He is borne by an angel, as in Palestine He was borne for just three years by a human being. Since the Ascension he has united Himself with the Earth. This can become a great source of strength and comfort to people in times such as ours.

Owen Barfield regarded himself as a disciple of Rudolf Steiner - in a not-altogether healthy way; because it exerted a constraining effect on his potential and caused Barfield to leave out - unexplained - considerable aspects of his world view. 

Instead Barfield, at a certain point, would merely recommend his audience to 'read Steiner'; which is, for most people, way too much to ask; since locating and extracting the undoubtedly gold insights from Steiner's voluminous dross of error and nonsense is the work of several years hard labour...

I speak as one of not-many of Barfield's great admirers who actually have put-in these years of work. Having done so; I was rather surprised to find that Barfield makes a very noticeable change to Steiner's terminology from The Philosophy of Freedom (insights from-which form an essential basis to Barfield's schema as expressed in (for example) Saving the Appearances, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning and History, Guilt and Habit.

How do we attain knowledge of reality, and is such knowledge indeed possible? This question forms the basis of that branch of 'modern' (post-medieval) philosophy called epistemology. 

However, the modern attempt to make epistemology fundamental (as does so much 19th and 20th century philosophy) is actually an error, and has gone nowhere. 

Nowhere; because epistemology takes-for-granted the primary level of philosophy, which is metaphysics: that discourse which tries to describe our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. 

Thus, both Steiner and Barfield fail to describe their primary assumptions about reality before they embark describing their model of knowledge - which has the effect of giving these models a rather arbitrary, take-it-or-leave it quality. 

(For instance, both Steiner and Barfield ought to describe what they assume about God before they describe what they believe about knowledge; since for them both the possibility of knowledge depends on a personal creator God who has certain attitudes towards Men.) 

Nonetheless, since I share broadly the same metaphysical assumptions as Steiner and Barfield, I regard their models of knowledge as very useful - which is all that can reasonably be asked of any simple model of reality; especially one that aims at a time-less hence 'static', cross-sectional description of reality. 

The following is a comparison of the terminological equivalents of the epistemological models of Steiner and Barfield: 

Rudolf Steiner

Percept + Concept = Thinking

Owen Barfield

Perception + Thinking = Consciousness

The potential confusion when reading these authors is that they use thinking to mean different things: Steiner's thinking is the end result of our perceptions of the world being understood and interpreted by concepts. 

But for Barfield, thinking is (more or less) what Steiner means by concepts': the processes by which we understand and interpret perceptions  - or 'images' in the case of ancient Man, whose perceptions came packaged with meanings. 

Steiner thus talks a lot about 'thinking' of a particular kind (e.g. 'pure' thinking, or 'heart-thinking') as being the main aim of modern Man; the destined path ahead. This thinking (says Steiner) can be cultivated by meditative exercises which are intended to (but actually do not!) promote the desired kind of thinking. The desired kind of thinking is itself True Knowledge - and this is therefore Steiner's epistemology.

By contrast; Barfield talks about the destined and desirable future state of Consciousness; which is self-aware, active and chosen (rather than unconscious, passive and automatic): he calls this Final Participation; and for Barfield this is True Knowledge - as well as the proper aim of created Man (because Final Participation is to join with God in the work of creation).

After struggling to 'get' this for a few years; I think the above equivalence is broadly correct; and might be helpful to those who wish to read both Steiner and Barfield.   

One of the difficulties about understanding Owen Barfield, is that he did not really understand himself! 

In the third chapter of his Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner argues his core point that thinking ought to be the basis of understanding the world.

To read this chapter slowly and carefully, understanding at each step, may provide a breakthrough for some people.

**

I believe I have given sufficient reasons for making thinking the starting point for my study of the world. When Archimedes had discovered the lever, he thought he could lift the whole cosmos from its hinges, if only he could find a point of support for his instrument. He needed something that was supported by itself and by nothing else. 

In thinking we have a principle which subsists through itself. Let us try, therefore, to understand the world starting from this basis. We can grasp thinking by means of itself; the question is, whether we can also grasp anything else through it.

I have so far spoken of thinking without taking account of its vehicle, human consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object that before there can be thinking, there must be consciousness. Hence we ought to start, not from thinking, but from consciousness. There is no thinking, they say, without consciousness... 

To this I must reply that in order to clear up the relation between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it. Hence I presuppose thinking. 

Nevertheless one could still argue that although, when the philosopher tries to understand consciousness he makes use of thinking and to that extent presupposes it, yet in the ordinary course of life thinking does arise within consciousness, and therefore presupposes consciousness...

Now if this answer were given to the world creator when he was about to create thinking, it would doubtless be to the point. Naturally it is not possible to create thinking before consciousness. The philosopher, however, is not concerned with creating the world but with understanding it. 

Accordingly the philosopher (who is not the creator) has to seek the starting point, not for the creation of the world, but for the understanding of it. 

It seems to me very strange that the philosopher should be reproached for troubling himself first and foremost about the correctness of his principles instead of turning straight to the objects which he seeks to understand! The world creator had above all to know how to find a vehicle for thinking, but the philosopher has to seek a secure foundation for his attempts to understand what already exists. 

How, then, does it help us to start with consciousness and subject it to the scrutiny of thinking, if we do not first know whether thinking is in fact able to give us insight into things at all?

We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For both subject and object are concepts formed by thinking. 

There is no denying that before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood. Whoever denies this fails to realize that man is not the first link in the chain of creation but the last. Hence, in order to explain the world by means of concepts, we cannot start from the elements of existence which came first in time, but we must begin with that element which is given to us as the nearest and most intimate. 

We cannot at one bound transport ourselves back to the beginning of the world in order to begin our studies from there, but we must start from the present moment, and then see whether we can ascend from the later to the earlier... 

Only if the philosopher recognizes that which is last in time as his first point of attack, can he reach his goal. This last thing at which world evolution has arrived is, in fact, thinking.

*

There are people who say it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether our thinking is right or wrong, and thus our starting point is in any case a doubtful one. 

It would be just as sensible to doubt whether a tree is in itself right or wrong! Thinking is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of the truth or falsity of a fact. 

I can, at most, be in doubt as to whether thinking is correctly applied, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies wood adapted to the making of this or that useful object. I can understand anyone doubting whether, by means of thinking, we can gain knowledge of the world; but it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can doubt the rightness of thinking in-itself.

To show how far the application of thinking to the world is right or wrong, is precisely the task of this book.


Edited from Chapter 3 of The Philosophy of Freedom, by Rudolf Steiner (1896) translated by Michael Wilson.

Thinkers I respect such as Owen Barfield and Jeremy Naydler have stated that Rudolf Steiner is essential to our time. But given the truly vast volume of his work, its range, as the problematic nature of his legacy this leaves open the question of just what it is about Steiner that is essential? (In contrast with what is of perhaps important but lesser status: as well as what may better be neglected or ignored.)

Steiner himself gave a clue in the importance he attached to his earliest books, especially those about Goethe's science, his doctoral thesis published as Truth and Knowledge and (in particular) The Philosophy of Freedom. In other words, these were works of a metaphysical nature rather than being concerned with Steiner's specific or detailed 'findings'.

Steiner's modern legacy, by contrast (as far as I can determine) is focused around these specific findings - for example in relation to education, medicine and agriculture. There is also a considerable and commendable publishing and dissemination activity with respect to the vast number of works and the scholarship of summarising, systematising and analysing these works. Beyond this, there is the activity of teaching and supervising a specific technique of meditation.

My feeling is that none of this captures the essence and none is 'essential'.

(In one paragraph) What seems to me essential is what Steiner called monism and modern people might call holism - in particular, the bringing of imagination into the realm of one, single mode of thinking that can be called true 'science'; so that the perceptual ('objective', external) world of the natural sciences is united (again) with the conceptual ('subjective', inner) world of imagination; and this in a way that both heals our personal alienation and also creates a realm of public and shared discourse - a realm which is variously referred to by Steiner as Spiritual or Occult or Esoteric Science. 

This making of a science of the imagination, and the possibility that each of us participate in it; requires, first, a proper understanding of the nature of science. This comes from the Goethe books - but has, I think, been lost underneath a focus on the Steiner-described and recommended technique of meditation as if this was the science.

As I argue in my book Not Even Trying

http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk

real science cannot be defined by technique but only by aim and ideals - science is, descriptively, nothing more specific than a truthful sustained examination of some rather specific class of phenomena, done in such a way that it is a social activity - which entails group production of some kind of public, communicable, evaluable content.

Thus, spiritual science cannot be captured by any particular technique of meditation, but only by the aim of some (perhaps small) group of investigators studying the imagination (presumably mostly by introspection, but in principle by any helpful method); honestly and in a sustained manner, and inter-communicating and critically evaluating their findings.

If this description of Steiner's essence is correct, then we can see that his essence is a mid-level activity, as appropriate to any science - it is not an ultimate activity like a religion.

This is confirmed by Steiner's biography - he was himself a Christian (albeit of a very unusual type) but did not require of his followers that they be Christian. But, and this is important, Steiner's philosophy presupposes religion of a certain type - it only makes sense within the metaphysical context of a religion that enables his work to have meaning.

Steiner's work does not make sense in a secular, atheistic context - with the nihilistic metaphysics that entails - because in such a context it is no more than a large number of bare assertions.

In sum, a true follower of Steiner must be religious (within a restricted range of deistic religions) - if he is not to be engaged in a self-refuting and ultimately incoherent activity; but he need not necessarily be Christian as Steiner himself was.

What makes Steiner essential (or, at least, nearly so) is that he uniquely offers the possibility of a Science (which modern Man seems to require) of the Imagination (which Modern Man to desperately lacks); and as an active, fundamentally-engaged participant (not merely as a passive observer, consumer or obedient follower).

In this sense, therefore, the essence of Steiner is as necessary for modern Christians and other religious people as it is for the secular majority.