Belief Not Required



Interesting: In his essay "Speech, Reason and Imagination" in his book Romanticism Comes of Age, Barfield says "I cannot think it is unduly paradoxical to say that it is really a kind of betrayal of [Rudolf Steiner,] the founder of anthroposophy to believe what he said. He poured out his assertions because he trusted his hearers not to believe. Belief is something which can only be applied to systems of abstract ideas."

This is yet another point at which we can understand Steiner's anthroposophy as grounded in phenomenology. Edmund Husserl made the starting point of his phenomenology to be what he called the epoche. He said that, in order to get anywhere in the attempt to confront reality as it was, one has to let go of one's natural inclination to distinguish in one's mind what is real and what is unreal, what is objective from what is subjective, what is inside from what is outside. For the sake of understanding what the world is, one has to stop judging what one experiences while one is experiencing it. Only in this way will one be able to actually encounter reality.

Another way of saying this is that in order to see just what it is that makes up my experience, I have to stop inserting my beliefs about that reality. I have to stop believing, so that I can see.

Steiner often referred his readers and lecture audiences to his book The Philosophy of Freedom, saying that that book was an excellent place to begin to understand his spiritual science. But I say, first read the book of which The Philosophy of Freedom was an expansion. That book is Truth and Knowledge, and it is the most detailed account of how one can untangle that knottiest of knots that is the epoche - how to un-believe.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting point; one-sided, though.

There is no such thing as unbelief, as there is no ... unmeaning, so to call it. Meaning and belief are human basic internal functions, not to be confused with external conventions or constructions, although the latter are untangledly knotted to the former, as being their only way of manifestation, communication and communion.

It is also true that these conventions and constructions should quite often be tested, a process that is the right understanding of un-believing.

The healthiest way is to alternate these two, believing and "unbelieving" (testing the belief), like the alternation between formulating a hypothesis and verifying it, in science.

VI
I disagree, Anonymous. Their is an ages-old tradition of un-believing, in the very sense I stated: namely, refraining from judgment. As you say, external conventions or constructions are inextricably tied to beliefs, but they are not the same thing. As Barfield puts it in the passage quoted, "Belief is something which can only be applied to systems of abstract ideas." The burden of his essay is that there is a way of thinking that is not based on belief, because it is not based on any system of abstract ideas. As such, it is wordless.

I mentioned Truth and Knowledge because Steiner therein describes how - or 'where' - to begin that kind of thinking.
Anonymous said…
I haven't known that Steiner and Barfield were postmodern relativists...

I relate misinterpreting mostly to Derrida & Co., than to phenomenology. Maybe you're on the wrong track, using the wrong map...

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