*Mario Betti* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## 2 - Twelve Worldviews > More than almost any other of his contemporaries, Rudolf Steiner sought strenuously for a multiplicity of outlooks. Born in Kraljevec (modern Croatia) in 1861, he studied sciences in Vienna and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in Rostock. After he had embarked on editing Goethe’s scientific writings as part of Kürschner’s ‘German Literature’ editions, he was employed at the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar. In both Vienna and Weimar, and later, around the turn of the century in Berlin, he moved in the most varied circles. His research increasingly enabled him to comprehend both the material and the spiritual aspect of the world in a *single* process of cognition, and this was to form the basis of the anthroposophy that he later founded. > The world is full of enigmas. Cognition seeks to understand it. But mostly it tries to offer a thought content as solution to any riddle. But riddles – as I said to myself – are not solved by thoughts. These direct the soul towards solutions but do not themselves contain them. An enigma arises in the actual world, and exists there as a phenomenon; and so its solution must also arise in reality. Some essence or occurrence appears which embodies the solution to another. And so I said to myself: the whole world, apart from the human being, is an enigma, the world riddle if you like; and the human being is its solution. … Human beings do not create the content of knowledge for themselves, but, with their soul, they offer the stage or setting where the world first comes to a partial experience of its existence and development. Without human knowledge, the world would remain incomplete. – Steiner, *Mein Lebensgang* # Quotes # References