John Dunn

Gentile and Steiner

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 at 23:30

Rudolf Steiner

Gentile and Steiner

Where Gentile and Steiner did unite is by finding the fulness of reality in the act of thinking. Where they united still further is on the location of the Logos in thinking. Remember we concluded that in Gentile’s philosophy, the very self, along with all other presuppositions, was lost to thinking. By a different route, the Steinerian self too was lost to thinking. The key difference is that Steiner never made man the thinker in the first place.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The individual subjects himself to himself

Friday, 18 July 2025 at 22:52

Rudolf Steiner

The individual subjects himself to himself

The critical point for Steiner is that the reality of the percepts is not exhausted in the perceiving of them. The act of perceiving a percept can only ever result in a partial view. The fullness of reality about anything perceived can only come from thinking about it. Whereas the perceiving is only ever partial, the thinking is always universal. (For example, separate individuals will perceive an actual triangle in different ways, from different viewpoints, but in thinking will always agree on the characteristics of a triangle, i.e. it is the thinking thatis universal, not the individual perception.)

For Gentile, who had pushed idealist philosophy to the extreme by equating reality with thinking, a world of percepts could only ever be understood as the Kantian residue of unacceptable presuppositions. It was on this basis that he critiqued Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom as not really leaving the individual free at all. According to Steiner however, that which was once considered to be unknowable i.e. the Kantian noumena, is made known, and it is the universality of thinking that makes this possible. This was exactly the point that Gentile rejected in his review of Steiner’s book. He was uneasy about the individual being subject to the universal. How can this be freedom? He missed Steiner’s point that if the unthinking and habitual ego is subjected by the thinking or spiritual ego, then the individual subjects himself to himself. ‘That man alone is free’, wrote Steiner, ‘who in every moment of his life is able to obey only himself’.

From Child of Encounter

© 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.