Worldviews, Outlooks and Tones: 1

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My Anthroposophical friends have said that the ideas I am developing are somewhat one-sided. I must acknowledge that I struggle with spiritual, mystical concepts. Most Anthroposophists seem to be outside of their comfort zone when considering the consequences of Rudolf Steiner’s scientific and mathematical teachings, especially in the fields of chemistry and physics. In turn, I find his more ‘theosophical’ and ‘occult’ spiritual scientific teachings very much outside of my comfort zone. However I wish to write a balanced book.

Goethe only discovered relatively late in his scientific and philosophical studies that a complete understanding of a subject is only achieved when the subject is considered from many different perspectives.

Luckily Rudolf Steiner comes to my aid in his conception of:

• Twelve worldviews
• Seven worldview moods
• Three soul tones
• Special worldview – Anthropomorphism

These were introduced and described in his lectures titled; Human and Cosmic Thought (Der menschliche und der kosmische Gedanke) GA 151. They are summarised on the excellent AnthroWiki page: Worldview.

Tom Last, in his superb Philosophy of Freedom website has demonstrated how Steiner structured what he considered to be his most important foundational work using these very same 23 worldviews.

Fortunately, I have (almost) always had a desire for my book to have a threefold structure. My fledgling outlined chapters numbered approximately 7 per section. I could, hypothetically, write each of these 21 chapters in a narrative which passes in order through the same 12 material, spiritual, realist, idealist and all 8 other intermediate perspectives.

This book has become my magnum opus, as a friend some time ago has called it. An epic work which is the result of perhaps 30 years of study of science, philosophy, mathematics and most recently, theology. It therefore needs structure to prevent it from becoming a one-sided monster. Hopefully, applying such a formal structure will enable a creative tension to develop during its writing.

Fortunately for me, Rudolf Steiner appears to have used these viewpoints as guiding principles in his writing of Philosophie der freiheit. The flow from one of the 12 worldviews to the next does not entirely match the paragraph structure of his text. Of interest is that he has explained how a materialistic outlook can be seen in a positive light from a spiritual perspective and vice versa.

In my next post I intend to present an outline of my book to show how the chapter structure may be created, as inspired by the structure of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom (based on the interpretation of Tom Last).

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