12. Philosophy and Theosophy

GA 246/1908-08-17/p034 ·1908-08-17 · English High

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.

Even in our time, however, there are still people who have a real understanding of Aristotle. Vinzenz Knauer, who was a university lecturer in Vienna in the eighties of the nineteenth century, usually made the difference between matter and form and what is important clear to his listeners with an illustration that may be mocked. He said that one should think of a wolf that has eaten nothing but lambs for some time in its life, how it is then actually composed of the matter of the lambs - and yet the wolf never becomes a lamb! This is the difference between matter and form, if you follow it correctly. Is the wolf a wolf through matter? No. Its essence is implanted through form - we find it not only in this wolf, but in all wolves. Thus we find the form through a concept which, in contrast to what the senses grasp in detail, is something universal.

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Cite: GA 246/1908-08-17/p034 · edition English