Donate books to help fund our work. Learn more→

The Rudolf Steiner Archive

a project of Steiner Online Library, a public charity

Search results 2971 through 2980 of 6549

˂ 1 ... 296 297 298 299 300 ... 655 ˃
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): The World as Percept
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

But these concepts, cause and effect, can never be gained through mere observation, however many instances we bring under review. Observation evokes thinking, and it is this which shows me how to link separate experiences together.
This dependence of our percept-picture on our places of observation is most easy to understand. The matter becomes more difficult when we realize further that our perceptual world is dependent on our bodily and spiritual organization.
The fact that I perceive a change in my Self, that my Self undergoes a modification, has been thrust into the foreground, whilst the object which causes these modifications is altogether lost sight of.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): The Act of Knowing (Cognizing) the World
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

I know the parabola to be a line which is produced by a point moving according to certain well-defined law. If I analyse the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola.
Our eye can seize only single colours one after another out of a manifold colour-whole, our understanding only single concepts out of a connected conceptual system. This separating off is a subjective act, which is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world-process, but are a single being among other beings.
The thought formation is such that the purely theoretical refutation of it does not exhaust our task. We have to live through it, in order to understand the aberration into which it leads us, and to find the way out. It must figure in any discussion of the relation of man to the world, not for the sake of refuting others whom one believes to be holding mistaken views about this relation, but because it is necessary to understand the confusion to which every first effort at reflection about such a relation is apt to lead.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): Are There Limits to Knowledge?
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

From this similarity of world-pictures he then infers the likeness to one another of the “Individual Spirits” underlying the single human perceiving subjects, or the “I-in-itself” underlying the subjects. [ 35 ] We have here an inference from a sum of effects to the character of the underlying causes.
Instead it is thought that from a sufficiently large number of perceptual facts one can infer the character of the thing-in-itself which underlies these facts. Formerly it was from concepts, now it is from percepts, that people seek to evolve the metaphysical.
He who does not lose himself in abstractions will understand how for a knowledge of human nature the fact is relevant, that physics must infer the existence, in the field of percepts, of elements for which no sense is tuned as for colour or sound.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): The Factors of Life
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

From the principle of Naive Realism, that everything is real which can be perceived, it follows that feeling is the guarantee of the reality of one's own personality. Monism, however, as here understood, must bestow on feeling the same supplementation which it considers necessary for percepts, if these are to stand before us as complete reality.
But if we once succeed in really finding the true life in thinking, we learn to understand that the self-abandonment to feelings, or the intuiting of the will, cannot even be compared with the inward wealth of this life of thinking, which we experience as within itself, ever self-supporting, yet at the same time ever in movement.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): The Idea of Freedom
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

Such a concept contains, at first, no reference to any definite percepts. When an act of will comes about under the influence of a concept which refers to a percept, i.e., under the influence of a representation, then it is this percept which determines our action indirectly by way of the conceptual thinking.
This shows that the Moralist does not understand the identity of the world of Ideas. He does not grasp that the world of Ideas which inspires me is no other than that which inspires my fellow-man.
Upon the recognition of this fact depends a clear understanding of the essential difference between man, who can develop the power to create freely out of the spirit, and the animal.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): Monism and the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

[ 11 ] Monism perceives clearly that a being acting under physical or moral compulsion cannot be truly moral. It regards the stages of automatic action (in accordance with natural urges and instincts), and of obedient action (in accordance with moral norms), as necessary preparatory stages for morality, but it understands that it is possible for the free spirit to transcend both these transitory stages.
Those who think of concepts as nothing more than abstractions from the world of percepts, and who do not acknowledge the part which intuition plays, cannot but regard as a “pure contradiction” the thought for which we have here claimed reality. But if we understand how Ideas are experienced intuitively in their self-sustaining essence, we see clearly that, in knowledge, man lives and enters into the world of Ideas as into something which is identical for all men.
Both will fall back on all sorts of suppositions for the explanation of the one or of the other, because both either do not understand at all how thinking can be intuitively experienced, or else misunderstand it as an activity which merely abstracts.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): Moral Imagination (Darwinism and Morality)
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

From this it follows for Ethics that, whilst we can understand the connection of later moral concepts with earlier ones, it is not possible to deduce a single new moral Idea from earlier ones.
4 [ 17 ] Ethical Individualism, then, has nothing to fear from a Natural Science which understands itself. Observation yields spiritual activity (freedom) as the characteristic quality of the perfect form of human action.
[ 19 ] Under certain conditions a man may be induced to abandon the execution of his will; but to allow others to prescribe to him what he ought to do—in other words, to will what another and not what he himself regards as right—to this a man will submit only when he does not feel free.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): The Value of Life (Optimism and Pessimism)
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

The striving for knowledge arises when a man is not content with the world which he sees, hears, etc., so long as he has not understood it. The fulfilment of the striving causes pleasure in the individual who strives, failure causes pain.
On the debit side we shall have to enter the displeasure of boredom, the displeasure of unfulfilled striving, and, lastly, the displeasure which comes to us without any striving on our part. Under .this last heading we shall have to put also the displeasure caused by work that has been forced upon us, not chosen by ourselves.
My intention was to demonstrate the possibility of freedom, and freedom is manifested, not in actions performed under sensual or soul constraint, but in actions sustained by Spiritual intuitions. [ 52 ] The mature man is the maker of his own value.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): Individuality and Genus
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

[ 5 ] It is impossible to understand a human being completely if one makes the concept of the genus the basis of one's judgment. The tendency to judge according to the genus is most persistent where differences of sex are involved.
Wherever we feel that here we are dealing with that element in a man which is free from the typical kind of thinking and from willing according to type, there we must cease to call in any concepts of our own making if we would understand his nature. Knowledge consists in the combination by thinking of a concept and a percept. With all other objects the observer has to gain his concepts through his intuition; but if the problem is to understand a free individuality, we need to take over into our own spirit those concepts by which the individual determines himself, in their pure form (without mixing with them our own conceptual contents). Those who always mix their own concepts into their judgment on another person can never attain to the understanding of an individuality. Just as the free individuality emancipates himself from the characteristics of the genus, so our knowledge of the individual must emancipate itself from the methods by which we understand what is generic.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1949): The Consequences of Monism
Translated by Hermann Poppelbaum

It is experience, but not the kind of experience which comes from perception. Those who cannot understand that the concept is something real, have in mind only the abstract form, in which we grasp it in our spirit.
A Beyond that is merely inferred and cannot be experienced owes its origin to the misconception of those who believe that this world cannot have the ground of its existence in itself. They do not understand that, by thinking, they discover just what they demand for the explanation of the perceptual world.
True, logical deduction—by syllogisms—will not extract out of the contents of this book the contents of the author's later books. But a living understanding of what is meant in this book by “intuitive thinking” will naturally prepare the way for living entry into the world of spiritual perception.

Results 2971 through 2980 of 6549

˂ 1 ... 296 297 298 299 300 ... 655 ˃