John Dunn

The Logos coterminous with the I

Saturday, 2 August 2025 at 20:59

The Logos coterminous with the I

The question is not whether God (as the Logos) exists or not; but rather how (in what manner or mode) He exists. I know there is a god. What I do not know is what form that god takes. God is first and foremost a mystery, the ultimate mystery. It is in this sense of mystery that I can say that God is Love and the Beginning. I wrestle with the idea that God, being coterminous with the Logos, is also coterminous with the I. This is not the animal I, the sub-human I, it is rather the fully human I, one that has had an encounter with Love. Is such an I the Logos incarnate, or is it the I incarnate as the Logos? And is this theism or atheism?

The cosmic creation story is the metaphor for the individual’s story; the common denominator between the two being Love. The Creation is our purpose, which is to recover the content of ‘living thinking’ at its inception, before it is instantly degraded into ‘fallen thought’, which is thought reflected back to us as though it represented an external reality with an external existence inherent to it. To live through the eyes of reflected thought is to live before the Beginning, to live before the Creation, to be beholden to Ananke and to worship a demiurgic Díkaios, it is to exist before Love.

Love, the Creation, the Beginning, are representations of ‘living thinking’, which is the transformative and shaping force of the Logos. In ‘living thinking’, the self is asserted over the thought of ‘the they’, which is nullified. The corollary of this is that in normal everyday accepted modes of thought the I is absent, which means that our thoughts are not our own. To live in thoughts that are not one’s own is to live in the realm of Ananke, before the Beginning, before Love.

‘Living thinking’, however, is the action of an I very much in possession of its own thinking. The I and the Logos conjoin as the Creation, the Beginning, as Love. This conjunction matters, because a separation between the I and the Logos opens the way to idol worship, i.e. subjection to abstractions.

Living thinking is the violation of Ananke.

© John Dunn.

Steiner’s point

Thursday, 31 July 2025 at 21:37

Rudolf Steiner

Steiner’s point

Nevertheless, Steiner’s point, expressed in The Philosophy of Freedom, is that everything is knowable. He did, of course, dismiss the passive looker-on of Lockean naive realism. But much more importantly, Steiner offered as his major breakthrough a means of getting beyond the Spinozist residue in Kant’s philosophy, without resorting to a simple upending of Spinoza,substituting one unquestioned presupposition for another, the absolute Substance for the absolute I. Steiner went beyond Kant, in that he went beyond the unknowable external agent, the thing-in-itself, but also beyond Fichte and the Romantics; not creating reality, but rather intuiting the emergence of reality.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Steiner and Jung

Sunday, 27 July 2025 at 22:13

Carl Jung

Steiner and Jung

Contrary to the Coleridgean third level state of existence, where the creative imagination creates something out of nothing, Steiner tapped into a cosmic thought pool that already exists. Steiner’s point was that the cosmic pool of thoughts needs the free individual I as its means of expression. Free in Steiner's sense does not mean that I can think what I like, or create what I like. To him such a view would be no more than a libertarian fantasy. To be free in Steiner’s sense means that my actions are not guided by necessity, i.e. by the limitations of the perceptible world, culture, the state, matter, instincts, nature etc. Instead, I call directly upon the spirit world, or the cosmic fulness of reality. The intuitive ability to draw upon the cosmic pool of thoughts is a capability of the free individual I, which means that a process of individuation must have occurred first, which brings his work fruitfully into a relationship with Jung’s.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Cosmic mediator

Friday, 25 July 2025 at 22:05

Rudolf Steiner

Cosmic mediator

In Steiner’s cosmology, human consciousness is the place where observation(of the percept) and thinking meet. Human consciousness is the mediator, the only mediator in the cosmos, between observation and thinking, between percept and concept. Human consciousness is thus the location of truth, or the Logos. This is the eureka moment in Steiner’s philosophy, because it gives a direct answer to the Grail question with which I opened this pilgrimage - ‘who am I?’ Rather than being the creator of the Universe, à la Gentile, I am the mediator through which the fulness of reality is realised. Only in human consciousness is the cosmic fulness of reality realised.

Being the cosmic mediator means that our mental capacity is not to produce thoughts from nothing, creatively so to speak, but rather to channel the thought content of the cosmos. Being universal, the cosmic thought pool drawn upon by the mediating ‘I’ is single and eternal. Having established this critical point, the awe-inspiring step that Steiner takes, and invites us to follow, is to draw intuitively upon the cosmic pool of thoughts without first referring to an externally given percept.It is in this pure intuition, pure conceptual thinking, that freedom isto be found.

From Child of Encounter

© 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.