12. Philosophy and Theosophy
GA 246/1908-08-17/p046
·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.
So you find that what is first the most subjective, what is established independently of experience, is precisely what leads most objectively into reality. What, then, was the reason why the subjective of the mental image could not come out into the world at first? The reason was that it came up against a “thing in itself”. When man constructs a circle, he does not come up against a thing in itself, he lives in the thing itself, even if initially only formally.
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