Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and ThoughtLehrs, Ernst
Religion
Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought
Lehrs, Ernst
Anthroposophy; Cosmology; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832
We remember that, to form this faculty, two existing functions of the
soul, as such polarically opposite, had to be welded together - memory
based on exact sense-perception and the freely working fantasy; one
connected with the nervous system of the body, the other with the
blood. We also know from earlier considerations (Chapter II) that in
the little child there is not yet any such polarization, in body or
soul, as there is in man's later life. Thus we see that training on
Goethe's lines aims at nothing less than restoring within oneself a
condition which is natural in early childhood.
In saying this we touch on the very foundations of the new pathway to
science discovered by Goethe. We shall hear more of it in the following
chapter.
1 Critique of Judgment, II, 11, 27. Goethe chose the title of his essay
so as to refute Kant by its very wording. Kant, through his inquiry
into man's Urteilskraft, arrived at the conclusion that man is denied
the power of Anschauung (intuition). Against this, Goethe puts his
Anschauende Urteilskraft.
2 'Der Alte vom Königsberge' - a play upon words with the name of Kant's
native town, Königsberg.
3 It is naturally to be expected that new light will also be thrown on
the various realms of knowledge as such dealt with in these pages.
4 Delphinium, in particular, has the peculiarity (which it shares with
a number of other species) that its calyx appears in the guise of a
flower, whilst the actual flower is quite inconspicuous.
5 Goethe also describes a proliferated pink.
6 The terms 'primeval' or 'primordial' sometimes suggested for
rendering the prefix 'ur' are unsuitable in a case like this. 'Primeval
plant', for instance, used by some translators of Goethe, raises the
misunderstanding - to which Goethe's concept has anyhow been subject
from the side of scientific botany - that by his ur-plant he had in
mind some primitive, prehistoric plant, the hypothetical ancestor in
the Darwinian sense of the present-day plant kingdom.
7 The following observation is not one made by Goethe himself. It is
presented here by the author as an example of the heuristic value of
Goethe's method of pictorial-dynamic contemplation of the sense-world.
8 'Exakte sinnliche Phantasie.'
9 Entdeckung eines trefflichen Vorarbeiters.
CHAPTER VI
Except We Become ...
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