Subject: Re: The human kingdom
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 11:21:21 -0800
From: Sune Nordwall <Sune.Nordwall@home.se>
[someone] wrote:
Me (Sune):
The relation of the human kingdom to the natural kingdoms
of animals, plants and minerals is similar to that of warmth to 'air'/gases,
'water'/fluids and 'earth'/solids. For long it was a problem in chemistry
trying to understand warmth and the 'mass' of warmth in relation to the
investigated mass of different gases, fluids and solids.
[someone else]:
I took a lot of chemistry on the undergraduate and
graduate level and never heard of this "problem."
[someone]:
Of course not. You were studying real science, as
opposed to that which is considered "science" in anthroposophy.
It seems clear that you (someone) not know very much about
the history of chemistry and think it started all of a sudden in the 19th
century and that everything happening in chemistry before that was a sort
of uninteresting playing around with sugar and salt and strange superstitious
things done by mumbling alchemists.
http://www.iversonsoftware.com/.../history...
gives a very short introduction to the subject.
http://www.treasure-troves.com/.../CaloricTheory.html
http://www.treasure-troves.com/bios/Rumford.html
http://www.treasure-troves.com/bios/Joule.html
http://www.treasure-troves.com/bios/MayerJulius.html and
http://www.treasure-troves.com/bios/Clausius.html
give more info on the problem of understanding the nature of heat in some
detail, not as a substance, but in other terms.
But the 'real science' you studied seemingly never mentioned
the details of all the hard and detailed work leading up to today's situation
in chemistry, or let you see beyond the the 19th century. Is that the general
situation in American education, thinking the world started with the American
revolution and everything before that was only mumbo-jumbo somehow engaged
in by strange and uneducated not yet Americans?
...
(Me /Sune)
The problem of understanding the human kingdom is
similar to the problem of understanding warmth in its different forms and
differentiations. The human kingdom is not a kingdom of nature in the same
sense that the other kingdoms are, in a very similar way that warmth not
is a material element in the same sense as the other 'elements' are.
[someone]
This is a way for Sune to avoid stating the obvious
answer to the question posed, i.e., that in Anthroposophy humans are not
considered to be animals. That's it. We are not animals. Saying that humans
are not a"kingdom" in the sense of other "kingdoms" is a way of acknowledging
that this concept, that we are not animals, cannot be justified under any
scientifically based classification system, any more than you can justify
the existence of the four elements in modern scientific chemistry.
I see you have degraded to Dan's level of polemics, not even
being able to differentiate between structuralist and functionalist ontologies
and the 'atomist' conception as an outgrowth of the former and the 'element'
conception growing out of the latter. [snip]
[someone else]
Did Steiner believe that humans are somehow special
as compared with other living beings? If so, why?
[someone]
Yes, special indeed. We are the ones who were there
at the beginning; who lived our early existence on other planets.
Wrong again.
[someone]
... if you really dig into it, I'm sure you'll find
that deep down, it really is a load of crap.
Sad to see what seems to have happened to you. What happened
to your good spirits?
Sune Nordwall
Stockholm, Sweden
http://hem.passagen.se/thebee/indexeng.htm
- a site on science, homeopathy, cosmological cell biology
and
EU as a mechanical esoteric temple and threefolding of
society
|