/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18767820]

Where to start with this dude?

[Anonymous No.18768618]

>>18767820
I've yet to read anything by him entirely but pretty universally people recommend Philosophy of Freedom, since he was still writing in mainstream philosophy at the time. This channel is great and has a lot of readings of his books and essays if you're doing housework or running errands https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTuPXQlrmPfDB7YLJWywnAg

[Anonymous No.18768627]

Also a couple of images I saved from a thread where someone knowledgeable about anthroposophy was talking about him.

[Anonymous No.18768634]

>>18768627

[Anonymous No.18769973]

>>18767820
into the trash

[Anonymous No.18769997]

>>18768618
>https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTuPXQlrmPfDB7YLJWywnAg
This guy has a website with even more on it I believe, he's done most of Steiner's books and lectures

How To Know Higher Worlds is a good start, I also liked his book Theosophy as an introduction although I didn't finish it, and Occult Science after that

It's also worth looking around in the lectures, especially on themes you are interested in. Some of his best philosophical ideas are in random lectures, like how the pure ideas in Hegel's logic are the bridge between the concrete sensuous understanding's particular concepts and the higher realm's supersensible concepts, so doing a phenomenology of pure Hegelian logic is a propaedeutic to mystical insight, a very platonic way of thinking.

[Anonymous No.18770118]

>>18769997
This is very helpful, especially since I'm reading Hegel's POS with a friend this summer. Do you remember roughly in which lectures/books Steiner goes into this?

[Anonymous No.18770257]

>>18768634
Steiner didn't change much. Goethean science is still considered crackpot pseudoscience. But Goethe was not aiming at science as we understand it, he sought to make science an art form. The "problem" for lack of a better word with Goethe's philosophy is that it was not laid bare in philosophical treatises for just anyone to read but was hidden between the lines of his poems and essays. For inquisitive minds like the idealists of the day this was no problem at all, Goethe was hugely influential on them. In fact I'd say that a lot of Hegel's philosophy is Goethean objective idealism e.g. Goethe was writing essays about phenomenology and dialectics a decade before Hegel even started working on POS.

But with Goethe you cannot point to a single one of his works and say "this is his main philosophical treatise" like you can with Kant or any other philosopher. That's what makes Goethe so attractive to me personally. But herein lies the issue in the history of philosophy. Owing to the specialist and fragmentary nature of modern academia Goethe's role as a philosopher is completely passed over.

[Anonymous No.18770287]

>>18770257
>But Goethe was not aiming at science as we understand it, he sought to make science an art form.

This is misleading. He sought to fuse the artistic and scientific (metaphysical) aspects of the human being by revealing that they are actually the same thing all along, because the nature of insight is creativity and the nature of creativity is insight. Goethe's treatises were definitely scientific in a conventional sense, he believed his findings were literally true and that his instinct and insight-driven techniques would lead to scientific acquisitions. That's why a generation of followers of him and Schelling like Fechner and Oken continued to use his visionary methods.

They are considered crackpot science today by Lawrence Krauss and hordes of skittering STEM bugs, but who cares about that. Steiner was a hundred years ahead of his time in studying Goethe's scientific writings. Your familiarity with them now testifies to contemporary acceptance that they're integral to Goethe's thought, but before Steiner they were unknown and ignored.

He did write some short explicit works (collected in Goethe's Scientific Writings) and he engaged in overt polemics with Newtonians over his interpretation of light for example, but you're right he had no one theory of science, it was a general method of quasi-mystical intuition.

[Anonymous No.18770345]

>>18770118
I wouldn't read Steiner for help with Hegel really, especially the PoS. I will say that his insights on Hegel have changed the way I view Hegel, but I wouldn't go into such a complicated thinker with an esoteric crank's idiosyncratic insights into him as your main guide. Still a hell of a lot better than what most people write on Hegel, like Pinkard etc.

Ill try to find the lecture for sure, I think Barfield mentioned it in some dispute. Sidenote though, if you want a quick introduction to Hegel's thought as preparation for the PoS, the first 70 pages of Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (volume 1) are actually a good whirlwind tour of what you need to understand Hegel, plus a pretty damn good assessment of Hegel himself that isn't afraid to criticise fundamental ambiguities/possible contradictions in his thought, which is something a lot of recent scholars are afraid to do, so they simply avoid apparent contradictions or problems, and leave you feeling like a retard for perceiving them yourself.

You could also read Charles Taylor's Hegel but it's like 400-500 pages. Or Beiser's Hegel, which is shorter, and more negative in its evaluation of Hegel (Beiser thinks he's a sort of philosophical bricoleur, which doesn't do justice to him IMO).

The PoS is really fucking hard, most people just force themselves through it while giving up trying to understand it after like 50 pages. It's not absolutely brutal, but finding a consistent through narrative or solid handholds and reference points in it is hard. That's why I value Kolakowski's brief assessment of it as a bare minimum introduction, because he is well-aware of and honest about this, and he's also well-aware of the post-Hegelian traditions of Hegel admiration, like the Young Hegelians, the decline of Hegel study in Europe, and then the revival of interest in Hegel in the 20th century in its various branches (especially French), AND how the latter are often evasive and vague when it comes to Hegel's ambiguities. Kolakowski instinctively knows, from the inside of various traditions, both how influential the PoS has been on those traditions AND how cagey and even self-deluded they can be about admitting that it is, quite simply, an ambiguous text in certain ways. There is no one satisfying answer to difficult questions like, is it about the stages of history/cultures in history or the psyche?, is it a necessary dialectic or one possible progression?, is it depicting bygone stages actually undergone by a subject (whatever that subject is) or is it depicting stages still present in the subject and able to be experienced directly/phenomenologically?

It takes a lot of the "am i a retard" load off your back and lets you just read the text normally once you realise everybody has these same difficulties, even the greatest and most famous minds.

[Anonymous No.18770359]

>>18770257
Also sorry if this post >>18770287 seemed condescending, I was trying to build on what you were saying not rebuke it but looking back over it my tone is weird.

[Anonymous No.18770455]

>>18770118
>Hegel's POS
I can't help but read this as Hegel's Piece of Shit, and I can't blame myself for doing so.