John O'meara

The Thinking Spirit: Rudolf Steiner and Romantic Theory John O'meara

This collection of texts, in presenting Rudolf Steiner's highly evolved understanding of the nature of thinking, points the direction to take today to carry on with the work of Goethe, of Coleridge and of Emerson as the three principal spokesmen for Romantic Imagination in 19th century Europe and America. Their Romantic epoch came to an end, because the creative thought that served that epoch could not fully satisfy the requirements of thinking or the further necessity of theory that properly characterize our own age. But Romantic tradition continues, with the full theory and culture of thinking that Rudolf Steiner elaborated, who should satisfy our sense of what we need to support a recovery of the Imagination in our own time. As Steiner put it-we need today to: "provide knowing with a firm basis through the fact that the world of ideas, in its essential being, is seen connected with nature, in order then, within the world of ideas thus consolidated, to advance to an experience beyond the sense world."