49. The Practical Training of Thinking

GA 68b/1909-02-13/p045 ·1909-02-13 · 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: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

If people had any idea of what practical thinking is, they would see from the impracticality of thinking that certain things must be wrong. The facts investigated by science can be admirable, but the conclusions drawn from them are often dreadful because of the impractical thinking of the person drawing them. How can it be proved to many today that there is actually no soul, that everything a person accomplishes is based on purely mechanical laws? Yes, you can still find a very strange conclusion in the first pages of a “Outline of Psychology” — written by a person who is highly respected. Anyone with even a spark of understanding and practical thinking will immediately be able to reduce this to its true value. It says: Earlier times said that there was an independent soul; but today man has also been drawn into this web of the preservation of strength. It was first investigated, they say, in animals that everything that is fed to them is only transformed, and that what they do is transformed food. What the animals receive as strength is only converted food. How could there be an independent soul when only what you have stuffed in comes out converted?

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Cite: GA 68b/1909-02-13/p045 · edition English