Looking up Einfühlung (empathy) online--because I don't quite agree with Sawicki's characterization of the translation issue and want to explore it further--I stumbled into a biography of Rudolf Steiner, of whom I had been completely ignorant. (NB: The wikipedia entry on Steiner is top notch.)
Yet another item on my to do list. So it goes. I'm especially looking forward to reading Die Philosophie der Freiheit or The Philosophy of Freedom. Both the German and an English translation are available from the Rudolf Steiner Archive.
4 Comments:
A good friend has many of Steiner's bks. The phil. of freedom is rather 'dry'. I seem to remember S. spending a lot of time trying to show the inadequacy of Kant's 'epistemology'.
Basically with S. there is a threshhold beyond which followers accept that he was a visionary in touch with the 'akashic records'...
I preferred Gurdjieff's more outrageous and interesting 'teaching'. I haven't looked at his Wikipedia entry!
Steiner walked off with most of the German theosophists when the society proclamed Krishnamurti as the Messiah returned. To K's great credit he walked away from it all with the famous line 'truth is a pathless land'.
Still grounded in Brighton. And now the airports are in a hopeless state. C'est la vie!
Dry's okay by me, esp. since I don't see myself following Steiner's spiritual path.
I was going to ask whether you were really grounded--as a philosophical point, not a conversation item. We talk this way all the time, as if we found ourselves in circumstances not of our choosing. I do at least. But lately I've been feeling a need to own up to many things I've called circumstances, to see this life of mine as it really is, blue guitar and all. Hm.
Just picked up Krishnamurti's Freedom from the Known at the local library. He argues that the observer of thought is an image, and that "[t]his awareness that the observer is the observed is not a process of identification." And so on until "the extraordinarily sensitive and highly intelligent" mind emerges. I think it would be dangerous to live like that, with an extraordinarily sensitive and highly intelligent mind. I myself am a product of the Montessori method, yet I could choose to be numb and stupid, couldn't I? Some entity inside rebels. Who could it be?
Hope you finally make it to Sicily, Paul, and that all is well.
did reply but it disappeared..
As for grounded, maybe sometimes - but often I'm blown away. I think I know what direction home is (in terms of groundedness).
Met Krishnamurti once in Madras circa 1978. He seemed pretty grounded and sensitive/intelligent but I don't think that made life a bed of roses. He suffered from v. bad headaches which his followers called the 'process'. I think it was migraine.
I don't see how you can choose to be stupid but hey, you could try.
as for the entity that stops you - who knows - maybe your maker.
Lots of folk who go to the gym are grounded but it doesn't make them sensitive. that requires something else. You could be a v. grounded car dealer!
There have always been techniques -mostly with a physical basis, that act as grounder: Sufi dances, Gurdjieff movements, certain 'martial' arts (aikido).
Gurdjieff in 'In search of the miraculous', mentions the bandit who could wait behind a rock all day to waylay a passing traveller. The bandit had great focus and strength but to what avail?
I often remember R.D. Laing's phrase about the challenge of 'just getting thru a day'..
P.
Ah, the "process"-- I would work that into my own speech, but am afraid of how it would be interpreted, as ideolect, or some other kind of artefact, symptoms I think they're called. Not interpreted by "them," by the way, but by me. I'm surely my own worst analyst.
Am imagining actually writing a science fiction trilogy--something I neglected to mention when you asked. I've only ever finished a few chapters. The "process" will definitely feature in the latter part of the first book. It's basically about a cyborg mind assassin who has second thoughts about exterminating a consciousness unattached to any lifeform.
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