12. Philosophy and Theosophy
GA 246/1908-08-17/p018
·1908-08-17
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Now, however, something else is happening. In the course of development, after the heyday of the scholastics, a complete break occurs in the entire logical philosophical development of human thought. The natural thing would have been (but this is not meant to be a criticism, it is not even meant to say that it could only have happened at all; the actual course was just necessary - only hypothetically the following should be put forward), the natural thing would have been that one would have extended the technique of thinking more and more, that one would have grasped ever higher and higher parts of the supersensible world through thinking. However, this was not how things initially developed.
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