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That's not saying much (and it sounds like you are indeed not making an informed judgement). I'm judging it from a rationalist perspective too. ( http://en.wiki
by swombat 15y ago
That's not saying much (and it sounds like you are indeed not making an informed judgement). I'm judging it from a rationalist perspective too. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism : "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification")
In fact, if you bother to actually read the guy's books instead of dismissing him based on a wikipedia entry (hardly a rationalist behaviour), you'll see he's very much a rationalist too.
He arrives at conclusions with "spiritual" consequences by starting from the perspective that the only thing we can know directly is our thoughts, and building a model of the world from that, piece by piece, using reason and thinking. I'd argue that compared to Steiner, you and I are mostly irrational.
So, explaining your dismissal of anthroposophism (literally translated as "love of man") as being "from a rationalist point of view" is a completely empty statement.
- scott_s 15y agoinstead of dismissing him based on a wikipedia entry (hardly a rationalist behaviour) I see no problem with it if the Wikipedia entry is accurate. Is it?
- swombat 15y agoIt's hard for an intelligent expert in the domain to accurately summarise a philosophy, let alone for a wikipedia editor to do so. Complex arguments tend to require a fair amount of patience and understanding on the reader's side. Anyway, that being said, the entry is not terrible (at least if you know a bit about what it's talking about). Quoting: > Anthroposophy postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development. More specifically, it aims to develop faculties of perceptive imagination, inspiration and intuition through cultivating a form of thinking independent of sensory experience, and to present the results thus derived in a manner subject to rational verification. In its investigations of the spiritual world, anthroposophy aims to attain the precision and clarity attained by the natural sciences in their investigations of the physical world. Considering this description, I hardly think you can call it anti-rationalist. On the contrary, anthroposophy is an attempt to apply rationalism to spirituality. It is only dismissed as irrational gobbledygook by those who (irrationally) dismiss all of spirituality and anything connected to it as gobbledygook.
- scott_s 15y agoThen we need to agree on a definition of "spirituality", since by my definition, any assumption of spirituality is irrational. I consider "spirituality" to be the assumption of the super-natural, and an individual's personal connection to the super-natural. How do you define it?
- swombat 15y agoOn a fundamental level, I define it as the stuff in the world that's beyond the purely material, that transcends physicality. Things like Mathematics, Love, Beauty, etc. Things that I believe will continue to "exist" (in some sense) beyond the existence of the universe around us. As Steiner puts it, "science, religion and art" all try to bridge this dichotomy of the physical vs the spiritual. So, no, it's nothing to do with ghosts and stuff.