|
|
|
|
Steiner designed all his books to discourage passive collecting of information and to encourage instead conscious pondering and questioning, particularly of hitherto unexamined notions. Like Steiner’s other writings, Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path offers a mode of inquiry rather than a set of creeds, pieties, or doctrines. His style makes us practice a more active thinking so that we can become aware of its power, vitality, and essentially spiritual nature. His work stimulates our soul’s own activity, stirring our latent powers and strengthening them so that we may eventually become able to think his insights ourselves. —Gertrude Reif Hughes Of all of his works, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path is the one that Steiner himself believed would have the longest life and the greatest spiritual and cultural consequences. It was written as a phenomenological account of the “results of observing the human soul according to the methods of natural science.
This seminal work asserts that free spiritual activity - understood as the human ability to think and act independently of physical nature - is the suitable path for human beings today to gain true knowledge of themselves and of the universe. This is not merely a philosophical volume, but rather a warm, heart-oriented guide to the practice and experience of living thinking.
Readers will not find abstract philosophy here, but a step-by-step account of how a person may come to experience living, intuitive thinking - “the conscious experience of a purely spiritual content.”
During the past hundred years since it was written, many have tried to discover this “new thinking” that could help us understand the various spiritual, ecological, social, political, and philosophical issues facing us. But only Rudolf Steiner laid out a path that leads from ordinary thinking to the level of pure spiritual activity - intuitive thinking - in which we become co-creators and co-redeemers of the world.
“When, with the help of Steiner’s book, we recognize that thinking is an essentially spiritual activity, we discover that it can school us. In that sense - Steiner’s sense - thinking is a spiritual path” (Gertrude Reif Hughes).
Contents:
- Translator’s Introduction
- Introduction by Gertrude Reif Hughes
- Preface to the Revised Edition, 1918
- Part 1: Theory: The Knowledge of Freedom
- Conscious Human Action
- The Fundamental Urge for Knowledge
- Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World
- The World as Percept
- Knowing the World
- Human Individuality
- Are There Limits to Cognition?
- Part 2: Practice: The Reality of Freedom
- The Factors of Life
- The Idea of Freedom
- Freedom—Philosophy and Monism
- World Purpose and Life Purpose (Human Destiny)
- Moral Imagination (Darwinism and Ethics)
- The Value of Life (Pessimism and Optimism)
- Individuality and Genus
- Final Questions: The Consequences of Monism
- Appendixes
- Bibliography
- Index
This volume is arguably the most essential of Rudolf Steiner’s works. The thoughts in this book establish the foundation for all of Anthroposophy.
Previous translations: The Philosophy of Freedom and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. German edition: Die Philosophie der Freiheit
 Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was born in Kraljevic, Austria, where he grew up the son of a railroad station chief. As a young man, he lived in Weimar and Berlin, where he became a respected and well-published scientific, literary, and philosophical scholar, known especially for his work with Goethe’s scientific writings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he began to develop his earlier philosophical principles into an approach to systematic research into psychological and spiritual phenomena. Formally beginning his spiritual teaching career under the auspices of the Theosophical Society, Steiner came to use the term Anthroposophy (and spiritual science) for his philosophy, spiritual research, and its results. The influence of Steiner’s multifaceted genius has led to innovative and holistic approaches in medicine and therapies, philosophy, religious renewal, Waldorf education, education for special needs (including the Camphill Village movement), threefold economics, biodynamic agriculture, Goethean science, architecture, and the arts of drama, speech, and eurythmy. In 1924, Rudolf Steiner founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world. He died in Dornach, Switzerland.
See all titles by this author |
 Gertrude Reif Hughes, PhD, is Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at Wesleyan University, where she served as Chair of her Department and of the Women's Studies Program. The author of Emerson's Demanding Optimism (1984), she has published essays on American poets, including Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., and Adrienne Rich, as well as essays on Rudolf Steiner and feminist thought and on Steiner's Calendar of the Soul. A lifelong student of Anthroposophy, she is a former chair of the Board of Anthroposophic Press (SteinerBooks) and former President of the Rudolf Steiner (Summer) Institute, where she taught meditation for many years and served on its board. She is a member of the board of Sunbridge College and one of the core faculty of The Barfield School Masters Program at Sunbridge. Her degrees are from Yale University and Mount Holyoke College. As a child, she attended the New York City Rudolf Steiner School.
See all titles by this author |
|
<< See other titles in the "Anthroposophy" category
|
Michael Lipson, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist practicing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is the translator of Rudolf Steiner's