Name: Goethe's World View
Price: 415.00 ZAR
Availability: InStock
Author: Steiner, Rudolf ; Lindeman, William
ISBN: 9781957569246

Type

Physical Book

Author

Rudolf Steiner

Translated by

William Lindeman

Publisher

Mercury Press (Canada)

Language

English

Pages

168

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.6 x 14.0 x 1.0 cm

Weight

0.22 kg.

ISBN13

9781957569246

Synopsis "Goethe's World View"

The thoughts expressed in this book are meant by Rudolf Steiner to contain the fundamental elements that he observed in Goethe's worldview. There was a particular appeal for Steiner in observing what nature reveals of its being and laws as perceived by Goethe's refined organs of sense and spirit. He came to understand how Goethe experienced such revelations as good fortune and happiness so great that he sometimes valued them over his poetic gift.Rudolf Steiner "lived into" the feelings that passed through Goethe's soul when he said: "Nothing motivates us so much to think about ourselves as when, after a long interval, we finally see again objects of the highest significance, scenes of nature with particularly decisive characteristics, and compare the impression remaining from the past with the present effect. We will then notice by and large that the object emerges more and more, that, while we earlier experienced joy and suffering in our encounter with the objects and projected our happiness and perplexity onto them, we now, with egoism tamed, grant them their rightful due, which is that we recognize their particularities and learn to value their characteristics more highly by thus living into them. The artistic eye yields the first kind of contemplation; the second kind is suited to the researcher of nature; and I had to count myself, although at first not without pain, still in the end fortunate that, as the first kind of sense threatened to leave me by and by, the second kind developed all the more powerfully in eye and spirit." - Goethe

Rudolf Steiner

(Author)

View Author's Page

Rudolf Steiner (Donji Kraljevec, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Croatia, February 25 or 27, 1861-Dornach, Switzerland, March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, educator, artist, playwright, social thinker, and occultist. He was the founder of anthroposophy, Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophic medicine, and the new artistic form of eurythmy.

He described anthroposophy as follows: Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that would like to lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe. Those who feel certain questions about the essence of man and the world as a vital necessity as the one felt when we are hungry and thirsty can be anthroposophists.

Steiner proposed a form of ethical individualism, to which he later added a more explicitly spiritual component. He derived his epistemology from the worldview of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, according to which thought is an organ of perception just like the eye or the ear. Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thought perceives ideas.

See less