Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[AshvinP]

So you think I'm wrong and Steiner is wrong to say that he intentionally wrote PoF so that any careful reader could grasp his starting point without having yet transformed their consciousness. Okay, we disagree with you.

As much as I don't want to divert back to Steiner after we made such progress in figuring out what your view is, I feel compelled to rebut the above. There is just way too much misrepresentation of his arguments and/or Cleric's in your comments. Cleric clearly said Steiner felt the abstract intellect is sufficient to start moving in the direction of the living and dynamic Thinking which is the true bearer of the world's Unity and which he is trying to bring to life in his readers. Here is relevant quote from Chapter 1 (of original edition):

Steiner: "This is not to assert by any means that all our action flows only out of the sober deliberations of our intellect. To set forth only those actions as in the highest sense human which issue from abstract judgment, is very far from my intention. But the moment our action lifts itself up out of the area of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, what moves us to act is always intermixed with thoughts. Love, compassion, patriotism are mainsprings of action which do not let themselves be reduced into cold concepts of the intellect. One says: The heart, the Gemüt* come here into their own. Without a doubt. But the heart and the Gemüt do not create what it is that moves us to act. They presuppose it and take it into their domain. Within my heart compassion appears when, in my consciousness, the mental picture arises of a person who arouses compassion. The way to the heart is through the head."

In our normal and abnormal experiences there is always a "suchness" that defines the experiencing, even if that suchness involves mystery, confusion, or deep questioning.

The experience of perception is different than that of thought, feeling, movement, emotion, but they are all always an intricate suchness. That can always change and certainly does. When we begin a meditative practice the suchness of looking at a stone or leaf changes in major ways. The suchness of thinking the idea "hammock" changes.

Yes, we don't disagree on the above. And, your latest comments have been so clear and straightforward that I really wish we didn't waste so much time getting there. Perhaps you felt that was all necessary... but anyway, I am glad we finally made it solid debatable ground.

No. I'm saying there is not even an illusion of attaching concepts onto an experiencing like "rumble".
...
No the experience of "that is an odd sound" could be as intricate as any idea that participates it through my intentionality. In fact, even realizing it a drill could flatten the cognitive intricacy. Not necessarily.

What you say above goes against all experience (and solid cognitive science and psychology, but we can leave those aside). First, you have already said there is a movement of perceptual experience from one or two basic concepts to more and more concepts which 'fill out' the meaning of the experience. So are you now denying that happens and saying even the illusion of that occurring does not occur? In other words, we are always consciously aware of all possible meaningful concepts which could be properly associated with any given percept, so it does not even seem like we are adding concepts?

Second, if we partake in an activity which makes us learn and become more proficient, then we should know directly that the "cognitive intricacy" is never "flattened" by supplementing original concepts with higher-order concepts. The only question is whether a person is abandoning original proper concepts or is mistaking improper concepts for those higher-order concepts when evaluating the percepts and how they relate. Aesthetic activity is also a good example - one does not lose the beauty of a sunset if qualitative concepts which illuminate its relation to us are added to its expression when viewing it, describing it, painting it, etc. If you disagree, then I would like to know an example of where that happens.

Finally, we should take stock of how this relates to the original point of contention - it seems your position is that "Thinking vs. Willing" as spiritual activity which unites us with essential relations is irrelevant, because they are both practically the same activity. And perhaps, as we recently discussed in another thread, you say there is knowing by thought and knowing by will (and perhaps by other activities) and they both get us to a true ever-expanding knowledge of the underlying relations. Is that a fair summary?

[findingblanks]

No, as long as you acknowledge that we have no need to imagine or conceptualize a so-called pure percept-- something we actually encounter that has not yetbhad thining attach its concept to it-- we are just fine to actually begin.

However so far you've not made a single objection to that abstraction.

[findingblanks]

"First, you have already said there is a movement of perceptual experience from one or two basic concepts to more and more concepts which 'fill out' the meaning of the experience."

I'm trying not to mirror your "you-are-making-no-sense" game by constantly finding sense in what you say.

Show me where I talked about there being one or two basic concepts from which percept moves, and I will probably do a decent job of understanding why your view would take my words that way.

[findingblanks]

"So are you now denying that happens and saying even the illusion of that occurring does not occur?"

If a person in the desert thinks they are looking at a giant bucket of water that isn't really there, that is a mirage.

If a person says that they can tell when the Christ inside a person's eye, unless that is what they literally see, this can't be an illusion but could be a delusion or just a very poor interpret of their experience.

To say that we experience a pure percept which then sends us on a journey to find "the" "corresponding concept", go through what Steiner calls a "selection" process and then begin to "bring it back" to its very own percept to be "attached" to it does not fit any useful definitions of perceiving an illusion that I've encountered.

If the person is really having an illusion they would be eager to describe exactly what the process of attatchment, for instance, is like.

It's figurative.

[AshvinP]

"First, you have already said there is a movement of perceptual experience from one or two basic concepts to more and more concepts which 'fill out' the meaning of the experience."

I'm trying not to mirror your "you-are-making-no-sense" game by constantly finding sense in what you say.

Show me where I talked about there being one or two basic concepts from which percept moves, and I will probably do a decent job of understanding why your view would take my words that way.

You're right, I am being too dismissive of your comments, especially considering I have been requesting those types of comments this entire time and you have graciously complied with that request and with very clear responses, so I apologize for the dismissive attitude. Here is the type of process I was referring to:

My phenomenology of doing the exercise?

I pick up the pencil. I feel my intention to remain focused and I tell myself "Don't simply associate." When old, already used ideas spontaneously arisie, I notice myself intend them away and focus again on the pencil. A specific idea arises in unision with its observation, like, "the sharpness of this ridge", I then notice an intention arise to dwell on that observation as opposed to allowing more ideas to arise. After five seconds of attending solely to the sharpness of the ridge, I notice a slight relaxation in my attention, as I reassert my focus, the idea and perception of 'yellow' arise and I notice a desire to dwell and focus exclusively on this. I haven't selected any of these arisings that I mention. I notice them.
(process continues)

Your last comment sounded like you were denying even the experience of this sort of process in our daily perception-cognition ("there is not even illusion"), regardless of what is actually happening. I do realize that would be a very extreme position to take, so I probably misunderstood.

There is another thing I wanted to comment on - it's very interesting that this particular part of your argument comes now, as it appears very relevant to what I discussed in latest aesthetics essay. By way of Aquinas, Barfield, and Emerson, I referred to the idea of a word going out and remaining where it is at the same time, and the connection to the divine Word. I think most people who have looked into basic mythology and spiritual traditions, or even history and anthropology and Western philosophy, would grant that the divine Word, Logos, Wisdom, Reason, etc. are intimately connected with Thinking activity in its highest sense. Your argument that additional concepts may actually "flatten" the "cognitive intricacy" of the phenomenon reminds me of that. I think that is a natural way of looking at it unless we consider this quality of the Word (Idea).

In mythology, we find pretty universally that self-reflective Thinking is responsible for the Fall which begins the existence of the entire phenomenal world (in a literal sense). As a crude summary, it is because that sort of Thinking is necessary before there can be an "I" and "you", a "Thou" and "That", etc. distinguishing one's self from other aspects of the Whole. If we only recognize the aspect of the Word which "goes out" to create the world, and do not also consider the aspect which "remains" to renew the phenomenal world with its eternal meaning, then we may naturally conclude that human concepts are just as likely to take away from true knowledge when added back to percepts than they are to contribute more true knowledge. So I think that shift in perspective is critical to go from mere intellectual concepts to the living reality of the Word rebirthing those concepts in its higher light that Steiner wants us to begin considering in PoF. Here are relevant excerpts from the essay:

What we gain in meaning from tracing ordinary words to their origins, we gain by orders of magnitude more by tracing the Origin of every word, in every language, to the meaning of the divine Word spoken in Genesis - "then God said, let there be light" - and in the Gospel of Saint John - "in the beginning was the Word". This primal Word is the One who was with God and who God was with in the beginning; the Word through whom all things were made, including the living light of men; the Word who shines in the darkness and who the darkness does not comprehend. In the medieval era, the Scholastics still wondered how the ordinary word of human utterance is related to this divine Word of scripture. So much so, that Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote a short treatise about "The Difference between the Divine Word and the Human (De Differentia Divini Verbi et Humani)".


"Verbum supernum prodiens,
nec Patris linquens dexteram..."

- Saint Thomas Aquinas, O Salutaris


Translation: "The supernal Word proceeding, and yet not leaving the right hand of the Father...". That is the 'paradoxical' aesthetic quality of the Word discerned by Aquinas in his thoughtful contemplation, and he did not abstract it away from the particular words uttered by any given person in their co-creative participation. This Word goes out into the world while also remaining in the place from which it is spoken. Only speech has this unique quality of going out and remaining where it is at the same time. All manner of inner activities play out inside the soul of man, but only speech shares the soul-qualities of those activities through the Ontological Prime. This inseparable quality of the Word, every word, and all meaning of the world's forms we perceive, speaks from the power of the truly intuitive and imaginative thoughts we conceive.

"If we ask ourselves what are the most distinctive features about the little thing we call a “word” – and it’s not a question that we very often do ask ourselves – I think we shall find that the two most outstanding are these. First, a word, whether spoken or written, has a remarkable, even paradoxical, quality, – namely that it both goes out and remains where it was to start with. “Word” means, of course, not simply the ink marks on the paper or the sound in the air. There is also the meaning of the word... this exodus does not leave the speaker or writer any poorer...

The second feature is already implicit in the first. In addition to the element in it that is perceptible to the senses – ink or sound – it expresses or symbolizes... something that is not perceptible to the senses, the something that is called its meaning."

-Owen Barfield, Meaning, Revelation and Tradition (1982)

Barfield presents a mystery which plagues the experience of modern man - what is the essence of divine "Revelation" as expressed through words? Humanity has developed an obsession with mere "likeness" or "resemblance" when it comes to the symbolic qualities of words, which stems from his obsession with outer forms at the expense of interiority. He treats all symbolic speech as exhausted in similes and metaphors of various sort, which then reduces all the symbols to signs of little import. The signs merely compare A to C by way of B, or imply a connection between A and C by saying A is B - "my love is like a rose" (simile) or "my love is a rose" (metaphor). Because of that unhealthy obsession, man cleaves the "symbolic" poesy of a word from its "literal" prose. He is certain that the meaning must be one or the other but cannot, in any case, be both.

Yet what is "C", in this example? It is the meaningful quality of "rose" which illuminates the nature of "my love" - the beauty of it, the natural unfolding of it, the joyous pleasure of perceiving it from above. Or, if "my love is a thorny rose", then also the pain and suffering it inflicts on me when I handle it without care. The word that goes out yet also remains with its speaker is symbolic and literal, when we understand what is "literal" to be the meaningful activity and content that all beings share. The symbolic word is indeed based in "likeness", but a likeness which eternally bears fruit in its ripeness. It points to the meaning behind the likeness which flows forth from a noumenal emanation. When that symbolic meaning concerns the Divine, as it did in ancient myth produced when all speech was still poetic, we can then rightly call it "Revelation"

.

[SanteriSatama]

If the will so wants, it can choose to be consciouss of the spiritual. If the will so wants, it can just dance the spiritual. And any mix.

Could this pass for a summary of Schop and Stein?

[SanteriSatama]

The way to the heart is through the head."

This I can't confirm. Loads of empathy, compassion and compassionate transforming can go on in heart - and/or whole body - without trying to attach mental images of personifications etc. to bodily awareness. Does it matter whose pain the heart is soothing, healing? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

[SanteriSatama]

Translation: "The supernal Word proceeding, and yet not leaving the right hand of the Father...". That is the 'paradoxical' aesthetic quality of the Word discerned by Aquinas in his thoughtful contemplation, and he did not abstract it away from the particular words uttered by any given person in their co-creative participation. This Word goes out into the world while also remaining in the place from which it is spoken. Only speech has this unique quality of going out and remaining where it is at the same time. All manner of inner activities play out inside the soul of man, but only speech shares the soul-qualities of those activities through the Ontological Prime. This inseparable quality of the Word, every word, and all meaning of the world's forms we perceive, speaks from the power of the truly intuitive and imaginative thoughts we conceive.

"If we ask ourselves what are the most distinctive features about the little thing we call a “word” – and it’s not a question that we very often do ask ourselves – I think we shall find that the two most outstanding are these. First, a word, whether spoken or written, has a remarkable, even paradoxical, quality, – namely that it both goes out and remains where it was to start with. “Word” means, of course, not simply the ink marks on the paper or the sound in the air. There is also the meaning of the word... this exodus does not leave the speaker or writer any poorer...

The second feature is already implicit in the first. In addition to the element in it that is perceptible to the senses – ink or sound – it expresses or symbolizes... something that is not perceptible to the senses, the something that is called its meaning."

-Owen Barfield, Meaning, Revelation and Tradition (1982)

Barfield presents a mystery which plagues the experience of modern man - what is the essence of divine "Revelation" as expressed through words? Humanity has developed an obsession with mere "likeness" or "resemblance" when it comes to the symbolic qualities of words, which stems from his obsession with outer forms at the expense of interiority. He treats all symbolic speech as exhausted in similes and metaphors of various sort, which then reduces all the symbols to signs of little import. The signs merely compare A to C by way of B, or imply a connection between A and C by saying A is B - "my love is like a rose" (simile) or "my love is a rose" (metaphor). Because of that unhealthy obsession, man cleaves the "symbolic" poesy of a word from its "literal" prose. He is certain that the meaning must be one or the other but cannot, in any case, be both.

Yet what is "C", in this example? It is the meaningful quality of "rose" which illuminates the nature of "my love" - the beauty of it, the natural unfolding of it, the joyous pleasure of perceiving it from above. Or, if "my love is a thorny rose", then also the pain and suffering it inflicts on me when I handle it without care. The word that goes out yet also remains with its speaker is symbolic and literal, when we understand what is "literal" to be the meaningful activity and content that all beings share. The symbolic word is indeed based in "likeness", but a likeness which eternally bears fruit in its ripeness. It points to the meaning behind the likeness which flows forth from a noumenal emanation. When that symbolic meaning concerns the Divine, as it did in ancient myth produced when all speech was still poetic, we can then rightly call it "Revelation"

.
[/quote]

John begins: En arche een ho logos...
Logos =/= word. "Word" is translation from the crappy Latin translation 'verbum' of Vulgata.

Erasmus tried to translate 'logos' as discussion, discoursive speech. The Roman word, in the same transitive direction of domination, which Barfield illustrates, did not tolerate discussion but burned Erasmians at stake, as word is to be obeyed, not questioned. Poor Erasmians and their heretical dialectics, what is their suffering and sacrifice to the word compared to the Suffering of Christ, and translation of Him into Holy Sword of the Word?

Sword can also stay in wielders hand, and have no discussion while transitively dismembering the external.

Also Heart, a mere feel, can breath out and extend to all while also staying.

In these excerpts Barfield appears highly illiterate and thoroughly ignorant and misguided.

[Cleric K]

So you think I'm wrong and Steiner is wrong to say that he intentionally wrote PoF so that any careful reader could grasp his starting point without having yet transformed their consciousness. Okay, we disagree with you.

We must make a distinction here. There's transformation and transformation.

This is the path that I sought to follow — if only, as I have said, in a modest way — in my Philosophy of Freedom. What I sought there was first to make thinking sense-free and then to present this thinking to consciousness in the same way that mathematics or the faculties and powers of analytical mechanics are present to consciousness when one pursues these sciences with the requisite discipline.

Perhaps at this juncture I might be allowed to add a personal remark. In positing this sense-free thinking as a simple fact, yet nevertheless a fact capable of rigorous demonstration in that it can be called forth in inner experience like the structure of mathematics, I flew in the face of every kind of philosophy current in the 1880s and 1890s. It was objected again and again: this “sense-free thinking” has no basis in any kind of reality. Already in my Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, however, in the early 1880s, I had pointed to the experience of pure thinking, in the presence of which one realizes: you are now living in an element that no longer contains any sense impressions and nevertheless reveals itself in its inner activity as a reality. Of this thinking I had to say that it is here we find the true spiritual communion of humanity and Union with reality. It is as though we have grabbed the coat-tails of universal being and can feel how we are related to it as souls. I had to protest vigorously against what was then the trend in philosophy, that to which Eduard von Hartmann paid homage in 1869 by giving his Philosophy of the Unconscious the motto: “Speculative Results Following the Method of Scientific Induction.” That was a philosophical bow to natural science. I wrote to protest against this insubstantial metaphysics, which arises only when we allow our thinking to roll on beyond the veil of sense as I have described. I thus gave my Philosophy of Freedom the motto: “Observations of the Soul According to the Scientific Method.” I wished to indicate thereby that the content of a philosophy is not contrived but rather in the strictest sense the result of inner observation, just as color and sound result from observation of the outer world. And in experiencing this element of pure thought — an element that, to be sure, has a certain chilling effect on human nature — one makes a discovery. One discovers that human beings certainly can speak instinctively of freedom, that within man there do exist impulses that definitely tend toward freedom but that these impulses remain unconscious and instinctive until one rediscovers freedom in one's own thinking. For out of sense-free thinking there can flow impulses to moral action which, because we have attained a mode of thinking that is devoid of sensation, are no longer determined by the senses but by pure spirit. One experiences pure spirit by observing, by actually observing how moral forces flow into sense-free thinking. What one gains in this way above all is that one is able to bid farewell to any sort of mystical superstition, for superstition results in something that is in a way hidden and is only assumed on the basis of dark intimations. One can bid it farewell because now one has experienced in one's consciousness something that is inwardly transparent, something that no longer receives its impulses from without but fills itself from within with spiritual content. One has grasped universal being at one point in making oneself exclusively a theater of cognition; one has grasped the activity of universal being in its true form and observed how it yields itself to us when we give ourselves over to this inner contemplation. We grasp the actuality of universal being at one point only. We grasp it not as abstract thought but as a reality when moral impulses weave themselves into the fabric of sense-free thinking. These impulses show themselves to be free in that they no longer live as instinct but in the garb of sense-free thinking. We experience freedom — to be sure a freedom that we realize immediately man can only approach in the way that a hyperbola approaches its asymptote, yet we know that this freedom lives within man to the extent that the spirit lives within him. We first conceive the spirit within the element of freedom.

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA322 ... 30p01.html

This is the first quote I came upon. You know that Steiner has spoken in many places about this. In the living experience of thinking we already live in the Spiritual World, we have point of contact, 'overlap' with Spiritual Reality. The goal of PoF is to lead us precisely to this inner experience. It is inconceivable to speak of this inner experience without the transformation of the way we experience thinking as a spiritual process. This is what we attain to if PoF is experienced in its depth.

The other kind of transformation, which undoubtedly requires much more than the living experience of thinking, is the continuation of the above. When we have attained to the point of overlap, in our thinking we are one with the very fabric of reality. When this path is pursued further, this point of overlap acts as the seed from which Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition grow. These latter three can only be developed by working upon the whole human being and only intimate experience of thinking is not enough. So yes, no one claims that reading PoF alone should lead to the development of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But it's also unthinkable that PoF can be experienced if one stays within the bounds of the formal intellect, juggling with metaphysical concepts, staying oblivious of the very spiritual process that performs the juggling. The inner transformation of our spiritual experience is what PoF is all about, and this grows out of the way we experience thinking.

"First, you have already said there is a movement of perceptual experience from one or two basic concepts to more and more concepts which 'fill out' the meaning of the experience."

I'm trying not to mirror your "you-are-making-no-sense" game by constantly finding sense in what you say.

Show me where I talked about there being one or two basic concepts from which percept moves, and I will probably do a decent job of understanding why your view would take my words that way.

To add to Ashvin's post, I can quote your words here:

I listen to the rumble and the thought of it being a drill come to mind, then the thought of it possibly being a car, then a truck, then a plane. I notice that I am still confused. I notice myself visualizing each of these options. I carefully think of each one and then listen to the rumble. As I do this, other options come to mind. I have six or seven concepts. I notice that three of them feel more likely and that the others feel less likey the more I examine them. I start slowly holding each of the three concepts and listening and trying to see if it could be what the rumble is. As I do this a new idea pops into my mind and I feel certain that it must be it. I turn and it was actually one of the three. Or I turn and it was correct! Doesn't matter. The phenomenology is there.

What Ashvin and I pointed out is that effectively there's a process of enrichment of the perceptions with concepts.
You said:

We would agree in saying that there are transformations of unitive states.

And I'm in complete harmony with this. There's always at the core of our state the experience of concept and percept belonging together. The easiest way to notice is this in the observation of our own thinking process (through the exceptional state). It makes no sense to speak for our thought-perceptions as if they are first being presented to us (which eventually may be accompanied with a brief moment of confusion) and only then we 'interpret' the thought-perceptions and arrive at the appropriate concepts. This is not at all how it works in our thinking. Actually it's quite the opposite. The thought-perceptions are only testimonies for the ideal meaning of the concept that we already experience in thinking. We don't need to perceive our thoughts in order to interpret and understand what we're thinking. We perceive our thoughts because we think. This Steiner explains in the beginning of PoF. So let's be clear. In our thinking we have unity of thought-perception and meaning. As far as we're thinking, there's always this unity at its core. In this sense I'm in full agreement that when we hear rumble with the vague meaning of confusion, there's still unity in our spiritual experience. Yet through our spiritual activity the meaning (considering the rumble sound stays the same) metamorphoses. This is objective transformation and you have described it above as a metamorphic process of the experience of meaning (by going through several concepts until settling at the final one).

So let's try to synchronize. I'm not saying that at the first moment there's only 'pure percept'. We can probably express ourselves in that way if we want to stress on the fact that we don't experience a clear cut concept together with the perception, but no one denies that even without the clear concept, we still experience a union of perception and ideal element - even if it is as vague as the meaning of 'confusion'. I really hope we're together so far. Assuming that at every elementary point of the metamorphic process we do experience some kind of unity of perceptions and meaning (we have suchness), how does this invalidate the fact that on a larger scale we have transformative experience which changes confusion to clear concepts?

[Cleric K]

If the will so wants, it can choose to be consciouss of the spiritual. If the will so wants, it can just dance the spiritual. And any mix.

Could this pass for a summary of Schop and Stein?

As long as we realize that when 'the will chooses to be conscious of the spiritual', we can no longer afford to express in this way. To be conscious of the spiritual in its essence means that we have the mentioned in my previous post, point of overlap. To dance with the spiritual one can simply recede and watch a movie by allowing himself to be carried by it. To be conscious of the spiritual means that in Thinking we are the very will of the movie. We can no longer speak that 'some will' decides to experience the spiritual within us, while we quietly observe this fact as a third person merged with the background.