Jan Höglund's Blog

Category: Notes

  • Rudolf Steiner on Consciousness

    This is one of several posts which are based on my reading of The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. For other posts, see below. What happens in consciousness when we face another person? Rudolf Steiner writes: What, then, do I have before me when I face another person? I look at what is immediately apparent. …it…

  • Rudolf Steiner on Freedom

    This is one of several posts which are based on my reading of The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. For other posts, see below. I take the following to mean that in order to understand human freedom we need to free ourselves from the kind of thinking that is appropriate to understanding what is…

  • Rudolf Steiner on Gender

    This is one of several posts which are based on my reading of The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. For other posts, see below. The following is strikingly contemporary. Please, remember that the book was published 1894. Rudolf Steiner writes: It is impossible to understand a human being fully if one bases one’s judgment…

  • Rudolf Steiner on Natural Objects

    This is one of several posts which are based on my reading of The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. For other posts, see below. Ruldolf Steiner seems not only to overvalue thinking, but seems to be stuck in mechanistic thinking? Steiner writes: I construct a machine purposefully when I bring its parts into a…

  • Rudolf Steiner on Thinking, Feeling, and Willing

    This is one of several posts which are based on my reading of The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. For other posts, see below. Rudolf Steiner writes about the three factors of life—thinking, feeling, and willing—in the addendum to the 1918 edition of The Philosophy of Freedom. I find it difficult to step into…

  • Retrospective 2024-42

    This is a retrospective of week 42, 2024 (2024-10-14–2024-10-20). I’ve seen The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner (part 1 & part 2) this week. Rudolf Steinder said we shouldn’t “accumulate learning” as our own “treasure of knowledge”, but “place this learning in the service of the world”.1 He called Goethe the “Copernicus and the Kepler of…

  • From Coincidence of Opposities to Transcendence of Opposities

    This is a placeholder for an idea which can be expanded much further. The coincidentia oppositorum is a latin term for the coincidence of opposites. It’s also the name of chapter 20 in The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist. This is the first chapter in Part III of the book. The coincidence of opposites…

  • Iain McGilchrist on Concepts

    I’ve taken issue with Iain McGilchrist in a series of posts lately. This is yet another one. I will soon put an end to this. Iain McGilchrist writes: That the concepts may have become vulgarised is not a weakness in the concepts but, rather, in the cast of mind that does not measure up to…

  • A Critique of Iain McGilchrist

    McGilchrist says that attention is a moral act, but what if he doesn’t see what he doesn’t see? He has replaced one formula (it’s not either/or but both/and) with another more complicated, and, notably, more subtle, one (it’s not either/or or both/and, but either/or and both/and). He loves it! He’s very good at this kind…

  • Retrospective 2024-22

    This is a retrospective of week 22, 2024 (2024-05-27–2024-06-02). I’ve continued reading The Living Classroom by Christopher Bache this week. I’ve mentioned the book here and here in previous retrospectives. The book is about collective consciousness and teaching, but it is as applicable to any circumstance where people gather with a common intent. I’ll review…