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Metaphysics as Christology. An Odyssey of the Self from Kant and Hegel to Steiner

[1] This is a small book by a great mind with a tragic fate. It is the dissertation of Jonael Schickler, a former student of Queen’s College, Cambridge, who died in the Potters Bar rail accident in 2002 at the age of 25. The original and bold main thesis of his dissertation can be presented in three interlinked perspectives. First, in an intellectual-historical vein, the author claims that Kant leaves us with some problems which Hegel tries to overcome, but only Rudolph Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, is able to solve. According to Schickler, Kant’s transcendentalism is fraught with the problem of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (Ding an sich), which leads to ontological scepticism. Hegel’s dialectic, with its mediation between being and thought, is the way to overcome it. But Hegel’s dialectic is under-determined because he does not give due weight to one crucial problem: how can we know the ground of our sensory impressions? It is Steiner’s four-fold conception of the human organization and of reality, culminating in his Christology, which fills this gap. Only by sublating Hegel into an even more absolute mediation, a general ontology is reached which prepares the ground for an anti-sceptical epistemology. Or, and this is the third perspective: in a contemporary philosophical and theological scene hostile to metaphysics, Schickler aims at a general ontology which sublates transcendentalism and dialectics in order to escape scepticism. This general ontology, according to his philosophical thesis, implies a theological telos, resurrection. In effect, Schickler presents an onto-theo-logy, or, as his title has it: Metaphysics as Christology. ‘This book defends the thesis, on purely philosophical grounds, that the possibility of the resurrection of a physical body is a necessary condition of ordinary thought and experience.’ (xix) [2] First, I would like to present the content of the book in somewhat greater detail—high appraisal and some criticism will follow later. The book begins with a foreword by Fraser Watts and a very helpful preface by George Pattison, Schickler’s former supervisor. The main part of the book consists of seven chapters, a conclusion and a summary. The first chapter sketches Schickler’s core question with reference to important strands of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Chapters