{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 177/1917-10-13/p008","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"The most significant characteristic of many of the concepts held today is their poverty. People like to take things easy today—as I have said so many times—and they want their concepts to be as straightforward as possible. This, however, makes them rather limited. Now, limited concepts do prove adequate when one is dealing with the superficial aspects of the physical world, the mere surface of that world, which is the only thing modern people want to consider, in spite of all the advances. Magnificent discoveries have been made in recent times about physical phenomena, but the concepts used to explore them are relatively limited. The desire for limited concepts, or concepts of limited content, has also crept into all philosophical and ideological thinking. We see philosophers today who are literally craving such limited concepts. The most limited concepts, with practically no content, are tossed about over and over again. They are often quite pretentious, but they do not contain anything which has real weight. Widely used ideas today are ‘the eternal’, ‘infinity’, ‘unity’, the ‘significant’ compared to the ‘insignificant’, ‘general’, ‘particular’, and so on. People like bandying these about—the more abstract the better.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"8. Abstraction and Reality","site_heading":null,"date":"1917-10-13","location":null,"word_count":193,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/177/1917-10-13/p008","alignment_confidence":"high","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Anna R. Meuss","identified_edition":"RSP1993","book_title":"The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness","publisher":"Rudolf Steiner Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA177/English/RSP1993/19171013p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/177/1917-10-13/p008"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/177/1917-10-13/p008","paragraph_aligned":true}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1917-10-13","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 177/1917-10-13/p007","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/177/1917-10-13/p007"}],"bead_confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":194,"en_words":193,"ratio":0.99,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"paired_german":{"status":"paired","german":[{"locus":"GA 177/1917-10-13/p007","passage_number":7,"text":"Das bedeutsamste Charakteristikon vieler Begriffe der Gegenwart ist die Armut dieser Begriffe. Die Menschen sind heute - ich habe das ja oft hervorgehoben - bequem, sie wollen möglichst überschauliche Begriffe. Dadurch aber werden diese Begriffe auch furchtbar arm. Ja, mit solchen armen Begriffen kommt man aus gegenüber jener oberflächlichen Natur oder jener Naturoberfläche, welche die Gegenwart, trotz aller Fortschritte, allein ins Auge faßt. Trotzdem so Großartiges in bezug auf die Naturerscheinungen in den letzten Zeiten zutagegetreten ist — die Begriffe, mit denen man diese Naturerscheinungen zu verstehen sucht, sind verhältnismäßig arm. Aber diese Sehnsucht nach armen Begriffen, nach Begriffen von geringem Inhalt, hat sich auch übertragen auf alle Weltanschauungen. So sehen wir heute Philosophen auftauchen, welche eine förmliche Sehnsucht haben nach armen Begriffen. Da werden immer wiederum die ärmsten Begriffe, das heißt die inhaltsärmsten Begriffe herumgekollert. Diese Begriffe sind manchmal recht anspruchsvoll, aber sie werden nicht ausgefüllt mit einem schwergewichtigen Inhalt. Besonders reich ist ja unsere Gegenwartsphilosophie immer an solchen Begriffen wie das «Ewige», das «Unendliche», die «Einheit», das «Bedeutungsvolle» gegenüber dem Unbedeutenden, das «Allgemeine», das «Individuelle» und so weiter. Mit solchen Begriffen wirtschaftet man ganz besonders gern, mit Begriffen, die möglichst abstrakt sind.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":194,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/177/1917-10-13/p007"}],"english":["GA 177/1917-10-13/p008"],"method":"length","confidence":"high","correspondence":"established","length_check":{"de_words":194,"en_words":193,"ratio":0.99,"partial":false},"pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.04,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":6747,"original_word_count":6463,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Anna R. Meuss","identified_edition":"RSP1993","book_title":"The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness","publisher":"Rudolf Steiner Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA177/English/RSP1993/19171013p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 177/1917-10-13/p007"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}