idea (3)


GOD RESTS
The loftiest idea of God is the one which assumes that God, after His creation of the human being, withdrew and gave man completely over to himself. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science VI Goethe's Way of Knowledge

God led His creation only to a certain point. From there He let the human being arise, and the human being, by knowing himself and looking about him, sets himself the task of working on and completing what the primal power began. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science IX Goethe's Epistemology

HUMAN FREEDOM
So it is not the human beings business to realize God's will in the world, but his own. He carries out his own decisions and intentions, not those of another being.
Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 10.8 (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom

The moral world order is through and through the free work of human beings. The moral laws which the Metaphysician regards as flowing from a higher power, are the thoughts of human beings. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 10.8 (Lindeman) Philosophy Of Freedom

We reject any metaphysical influence beyond the reach of the intellect that cannot be experienced conceptually. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 12.8 (1988 stebbing) Philosophy Of Freedom

LAWS OF NATURE
The divinity has merged with the world. In order to know God, human knowing must penetrate into the world. The laws that our mind recognizes in nature are therefore God in His very being. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science XI Relationship of the Goethean Way of Thinking to Other Views

Everyone, in so far as he thinks, lays hold of the universal Reality. To fill one's life with such thought-content is to live in Reality, and at the same time to live in God. The world is God. The thought of a Beyond owes its origin to the misconception of those who believe that this world does not have the ground of its existence in itself. Rudolf Steiner, The Consequences Of Monism (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom

THE IDEA
When we speak of the essential being of a thing or of the world altogether, we cannot mean anything else than the grasping of reality as thought, as idea. In the idea we recognize that from which we must derive everything else: the principle of things. What philosophers call the absolute, the eternal being, the ground of the world, what the religions call God, this we call: the idea.

Everything in the world that does not appear directly as idea will still ultimately be recognized as going forth from the idea. What seems, on superficial examination, to have no part at all in the idea is found by a deeper thinking to stem from it. No other form of existence can satisfy us except one stemming from the idea. Nothing may remain away from it; everything must become a part of the great whole that the idea encompasses. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science IX Goethe's Epistemology

By taking possession of the idea, thinking fuses with the primal ground of world existence; what is at work outside enters into the mind of man: he becomes one with objective reality in its highest potency. Becoming aware of the idea within reality is the true communion of man. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science VI Goethe's Way of Knowledge

WORLD UNITY
It is futile to seek any common element in the separate things of the world other than the conceptual content gained by thinking. All attempts to find world unity, other than the coherent conceptual content gained by the conceptual analysis of our perceptions, must fail. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 5.9 (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom

No personal God can unify the world, because we experience our limited personality only in ourselves. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 5.9 (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom

A personal God is nothing but a human being transplanted into a Beyond.
Rudolf Steiner, The Consequences Of Monism (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom

THE END OF RELIGION
Only this is worthy of man: that he seek truth himself, without being led by revelation. When that has been thoroughly recognized once and for all, then the religions based on revelation will be finished. The human being will then no longer want God to reveal Himself or bestow blessings upon him. He will want to know through his own thinking and to establish his happiness through his own strength. Whether some higher power or other guides our fate to the good or to the bad, this does not concern us at all; we ourselves must determine the path we have to travel. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science VI Goethe's Way of Knowledge

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How an action is born?

(Chapter Nine - The Idea of Freedom)

I'm preoccupied by the 3 concepts used by Rudolf Steiner to explain action:

1.Mobile (or driving force - permanent determining factor of the individual)

2.Motive (or the temporary determinant of will)

3.Characterological disposition

1. Those can be the driving force of an action: lusts or desires /feelings / representations/ concepts/ pure concepts.

One question about the driving force is why are they the permanent determining factor of the individual? Is it because one lives for a long period of time (sometimes maybe a lifetime) with the same desires/lusts, he has the same feelings in certain situations and he always reacts in the same way to them, and the measure of one's experience is limited so one can have just a limited amount of representations of "what to do" in different situations - so he does just those actions about which he has a representations?

2. Motives, says Rudolf Steiner, can be either representations or thoughts. A representation or a thought is a motive, only if it made a human being make an action, otherwise is just a candidate for a motive.

The example in the book is: the representation of going for a walk in the next half an hour. This is the candidate for being the motive of an action.

Now, the characterological disposition (c.d.) enters the scene. From what I read, I understood that the c.d. is a group of mental objects of different types: representations, concepts, mental pictures and feelings. (Representation being a individualized notion or a mental picture).

Ok.

So when the candidate for being a motive enters one's consciousness,  objects from one's c.d. come to validate or invalidate the candidate. 

In the example from the book those objects that come to validate the candidate are: one's idea about the utility of walking, the value of one's health and in the end the feeling generated in me by the representation of taking a walk in the next half of hour.

*One thing that I forgot to say about c.d. is that is more or less permanent.

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