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He swept aside the Kantian residue
Tuesday, 15 July 2025 at 22:14
He swept aside the Kantian residue
In September 1919, Benedetto Croce invited Gentile to review, for La Critica (the bi-monthly magazine edited by Croce), The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner.139 On the first of October, Gentile confirmed that he had received the book and undertook to send the review as soon as possible. This was published in the 20th November issue of the same year. The Philosophy of Freedom was the foundational work of Steiner’s voluminous output. Upon this work the rest of the edifice that came to be known as Anthroposophy stands or falls. Steiner’s argument is that there is nothing that cannot be known. At a stroke he swept aside the Kantian residue, i.e. the idealist theory that there is a world of unknowable entities, the things- in-themselves or noumena, that form the basis of everything we perceive and act upon in the mind.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Foreshadowed by Prometheus and Zarathustra
Thursday, 10 July 2025 at 23:15
Zarathustra by Nikolai Konstantinow Roerich (1874 - 1947)
Foreshadowed by Prometheus and Zarathustra
So where has Gentile led us? If truth is to be found in thinking only, and if this criterion of truth is the Logos, then we are left with pure Logos. Is this the answer to my ‘who am I?’ question? I am pure Logos? But surely truth would never ask of itself - what is truth? Gentile’s Actualism was unable to account for the universally recognised fact that thinking is attached to the human individual, in fact, uniquely attached. Remember back to Ilyenkov’s conception of man as ‘substance that thinks’?
Does this mean that thinking adopts the individual in order to think? And if thinking is pure Logos, that must make me as an individual Logos incarnated. Could this really be the answer to the ‘who am I?’ question?Are we not relating to some core truth in the life of Jesus of Nazareth here, foreshadowed by Prometheus and Zarathustra and echoed in Dante and Coleridge?
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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