John Dunn

The world for Steiner

Wednesday, 16 July 2025 at 20:32

Rudolf Steiner

The world for Steiner

Like Gentile, Steiner too dispensed with naive realism, i.e. the notion that our understanding of the world is simply a reflection in the mind of what we receive into it via sense perceptions. Such an existence, in which reality is delivered to us without our contribution, based on passive observation and contemplation, was dismissed by Steiner with contempt. So far as these things are concerned, Gentile would have nothing to argue with Steiner about. Gentile even described Steiner’s critique of Kantian critical idealism as one of the most beautiful parts of the book. Where Gentile parted company with Steiner was on the point of the presupposed. For Gentile, the act of thinking constitutes reality. Nothing can presuppose thinking. But the world for Steiner would not be thought of if it was not first perceived. There is a given element in Steiner’s philosophy that was unacceptable to Gentile. Steiner described this given element as consisting of percepts, i.e. the things that are perceived by the individual about the world that exists around him.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

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.

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.

Concrete Logos is found

Saturday, 28 June 2025 at 22:15

Concrete Logos is found

Logos is truth in the deepest sense of the word, the generative principle of everything. It is variously translated as word, speech, principle, or thought. In Greek philosophy, it also referred to as universal divine reason, the mind of God, or the deep underlying truth of the cosmos. If you make the truth the search not for what is (i.e. externally and in the abstract) but for what ought to be, then thinking = reality = truth =Logos. If the truth for which we strive is considered to be the Logos, then might Gentile’s doctrine be not so much egocentric as logocentric? I noted above that what horrified Gentile was the degradation of the will and the compulsion to conform to any presupposition. So, if not in presupposed thoughts, which are abstract, the certainty of truth must be found in active thinking, which is concrete. This is where the Concrete Logos is found, i.e. in active thinking.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Creator, not a contemplator

Thursday, 26 June 2025 at 22:18

The Contemplator, 1901. Creator: Eugene Carriere (French, 1849-1906)

Creator, not a contemplator

If matter is everything, then spirit is nothing. But in thinking this, the spirit cannot attend, so to speak, to its own funeral. Therefore spirit is everything. Spirit is an absolute creator, not a contemplator. Spirit does not find the intelligible structure of the universe independently of and prior to its coming upon the scene, but creates it in its eternal process of self-realisation. Spirit is pure activity and is not contaminated by anything passive or external. Spiritual life means the life of freedom. Man is not man naturally, but becomes man through self- knowledge and self-choice. Man is a spirit because he can choose to be a beast or an angel. Freedom implies growth from within, not from without. The growth of a plant illustrates the latter; the growth of a man illustrates the former.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

To do is to think

Tuesday, 24 June 2025 at 21:34

Giovanni Gentile

To do is to think

And this is the critical point, because Gentile attempted to revive the spirit life of man in the face of socio-economic and philosophical forces that would expunge it. In Gentile’s conception, spirit is man thinking. Man creates the world in the act of thinking - all is spirit. Thinking is the essence of humanity. The human thing to do is to think. To live is to think. Not to think, or to let others think for you, is to be sub-human. Gentile allowed for no compromises. Either spirit is everything, or matter is everything. He had no need of metaphorical bridges between the two.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

A tale told by a thinker signifying everything

Monday, 23 June 2025 at 22:18

Prometheus by Heinrich Fueger, 1917

A tale told by a thinker signifying everything

Gentile’s point is that knowledge is not about reality but is reality. The world about us becomes ours by knowing it, which means actively creating it. Nosce Te Ipsum (Know Thyself) and you will know the world. Nothing, in short, transcends thinking. Thinking is absolute immanence. The self of Gentile’s actual idealism is essentially a thinker who wills by transforming the nature of things, the realm of actuality, existence, according to his needs. This type of thinker is a Prometheus, not a Spinoza. The essence of the self is the will to think. The I is strictly speaking not I, but makes itself, or becomes I, constantly defending itself against the seemingly real, whereas ‘reality is a tale told by a thinker signifying everything’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.