Jonael Schickler, Christology, and Rudolf Steiner

So the book arrived today: Schickler’s dissertation, “Metaphysics as Christology: An Odyssey of the Self from Kant and Hegel to Steiner.” The author’s argument is as optimistic and uplifting as his own fate is tragic. Just days after finishing the manuscript, Schickler was killed in the Potters Bar rail accident in 2002 near Hertfordshire in the UK. I first heard about his dissertation a few months ago from a friend who has been studying Rudolf Steiner for some years now, and its content, as well as the author’s untimely death, struck me as deeply significant to my own course of study. I remain humble in regards to my own philosophical abilities, but I nonetheless feel compelled to carry forward the work that Schickler left unfinished. I, like him, find in Steiner’s esotericism a re-ignited passion for Wisdom, for God, and for the Cosmos that has otherwise been all but extinguished by contemporary forms of materialist positivism. My own philosophical goals are to breathe life back into Western philosophy by overcoming the limitations of Kantian skepticism. This will require not just new ideas, but the cultivation of a trans-empirical organ of perception: the imagination. The beginnings of this work can be read in my essay “The Role of Imagination in Speculative Philosophy,” posted a few days ago. I plan on posting regularly over the coming days and weeks as I make my way through Schickler’s text, offering my own reflections, but mainly trying to internalize his perspective so as to see the world as he did. Stay tuned!