St. Paul
|
Evolution
of Anthropocentricity |
A concept, central to
Anthroposophy, which refers to the development over time of mankind, of
the human mind, as the microcosmic
self-consciousness
of the Earth. "For the earnest expectation of the creature," as St.
Paul put it (quoted in SA
160) "waiteth for the manifestation
of the sons of God."
"The task of Homo
sapiens, when he first appeared as a physical form on earth," Barfield
explains in Speaker's Meaning, "was not to evolve
a faculty of thought somehow out of nothing, but to transform the unfree
wisdom, which he experienced through his organism as given meaning, into
the free subjectivity that is correlative only to active thought, to the
individual activity of thinking" (113-14).
Thus "We have to assume," according to "Science and Quality," "not that
man, after having been for a long time non-existent, eventually emerged
as one of the higher animals, but rather that anthropos was present from
the beginning, though without the 'centric' consciousness which we experience
today focused clearly and sharply into body and brain" (RM 181).
See in particular
"Science and Quality" (RM 176-186) and Speaker's Meaning,
Chap. 4. |
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