American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner by Robert McDermott

Author:Robert McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lindisfarne Books

In Metaphysics

Evolution and process became dominant dimensions in Steiner. He spoke of the “mobile, flowing character of the [spiritual] world” (p. xiv). His writings conveyed, almost overwhelmingly, the sense of cosmic memory and future hope. His mind grasped the evolutionary flow from Lemurian, through Atlantean, into post-Atlantean epochs and even into future epochs.117 When Steiner's memory and sense of destiny grasped this evolutionary flow, he had that basis for a “community of memory” and a “community of hope” that Royce made explicit.118

For the mature Royce, the cosmos recorded its process both in legible bodily traces—as in the Grand Canyon—and in the spiritual signs or truths open to all minded beings.119 Steiner had his Akashic Record.120 Because of both thinkers’ deep sense of timefulness, then, it is hard to say that Royce surpassed Steiner in his stress on the “irrevocability of past deeds,” or that, because of his teachings about karma and reincarnation, Steiner surpassed Royce in the latter's sense of destiny and hope. And both thinkers, however permeated with evolution and process, also insisted on the eternal: that constant all-embracing knowledge of and in whatever is real. Moving from process to spirit, we have already seen how central the idea of spirit was to both Steiner and Royce, particularly the Logos–Spirit.121 They both converged on how central this idea is. And however differently they viewed individuality,122 they grounded their notions of it on the idea of spirit.

In both thinkers' metaphysical universes, then, spirits or free-minded beings exercise influences even more centrally than do the forces of physical nature. Nevertheless, both Steiner and Royce refused to create an ontological realm lying beyond what humans experience. Instead, Steiner, countering Kant, held that

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