Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[AshvinP]

To summarize my understanding of your position now:

All experience contains the whole of percepts-concepts and therefore the individual's progressive knowledge via active "attaching" concepts to percepts is not an accurate ontology - rather we we are passively observing them arise with their corresponding percepts from the primal Ground of experience (or something to that effect?). That is what Steiner calls "Thinking". What Schopenhauer and others call "universal Will" is another way of describing this same activity of passive observation which brings true knowledge to us, and he never limited it to "blind" Will which has no ideational quality or knowing element.

Is that in the ballpark of your view or not at all?

[findingblanks]

"I think you can write just fine when you are intending to communicate clearly."

Oh, I'm dealing with a mind reader. Too hard to try to communicate with somebody who thinks you are being insincere and can't even say that directly. Ugh.

[findingblanks]

"All experience contains the whole of percepts-concepts and therefore the individual's progressive knowledge via active "attaching" concepts to percepts is not an accurate ontology - rather we we are passively observing them arise with their corresponding percepts from the primal Ground of experience (or something to that effect?)..."

That's two steps closer, for sure.

The next step is to see if there may be a problem with even imagining a necessary encounter with a percept that needs its concept.

And passivity would definitely not capture my experience of attending to experience. But you are correct in noticing that I don't take any personal credit for what arises, even when a sudden intentional state ("focus now") arises. I certainly distinguish intentional states from involuntary ones, but I think it is very easy to slide assumptions into these states. At first I simply want to see if others agree that those qualities freely arise.

[AshvinP]

Beautifully put!

I find there is a kind of failure-drama that hums underneath even the most clear line of thinking or observation. This hum can become something like what Steiner refers to as the 'knowledge-drama, if it is attended to... Young Steiner was so deeply hopeful that his book The Philosophy of Freedom would be understood by even some of his harshest critics. His youth and zeal and naivety (and brilliance, of course, yes) are on full display in many of those early letters, especially his joy at his friend Rosa reading his entire book

But the 'failure-shame' has a lot of 'ugly' stuff in it and requires we drop our most treasured notions.

Yet, what's more beautiful than seeing that even when flung into the deepest terrains of shame, we merely expand our sense of God's wide domain?

Said epistemologically, what I know gets in the way of my knowing.

In the context of this thread, it points to the deep shadow dancing that I provoked in myself and in others and tried to give some rhythm to. I did not do well. In fact, I doubt the dance partners here even think their shadows are guiding their thoughts at all. But it doesn't matter. Because I was never insincere in my desire to show how deeply connected Schopenhauer and Steiner are. And I knew that I couldn't possibly show it by saying read this sentence and you'll see that Steiner was actually..... or that Schopenhauer actually had grasped...

One of my partners opened the door by asking me to show exactly where we can see that Schopenhauer recognized that universal will was necessarily intuited. That was a tiny doorway into the knowledge-drama.

So, because I knew there was no hope of showing the right set of words, I mirrored it and asked to show me where {rephrased} Steiner claimed that the percept hides thinking within it. I knew that if my partners did not refer to the 1918 edition of PoF, they could still possibly show how Steiner's word's do in fact claim/show that thinking is within the percept already.

And if they could see that, despite using the opposite words, Rudolf Steiner still had clearly communicated that thinking and percept are never apart, they could then go and see that without using the words, Schopenhauer communicated the fundamental nature of cognition in his notion of the will.

It was a long shot! And the failure hurts. But seeds within myself and within my partners were planted. And nobody was really unkind to each other. Simply flummoxed and maybe a bit annoyed.

Sometimes when I notice the frustration in Krishnamurti's face, I understand both his joy and sadness a little bit better.

"Oh, I'm dealing with a mind reader. Too hard to try to communicate with somebody who thinks you are being insincere and can't even say that directly. Ugh."

Hey man, I am just going on what you are admitting in the open like the bolded statements above. I didn't say you were being "insincere", I said communicating clearly was not the focus of your intention. Rather it was to "provoke deep shadow dancing". You said you a priori gave up hope on using the "right set of words" and then tried some other mirroring strategy, and I think it's obvious that clear communication was not a high priority in that strategy. I am not faulting you for trying those strategies, but now, since they didn't work so well, let's get back to the "normal" way of arguing these things. There is actually a lot going on in your post above which I sort of missed before. Like the colored statements:

In those statements, you are basically restating what I stated was your position a long time ago and asked you to confirm, which you never did. That, according to you, all perception has inherent meaning i.e. Thinking activity, and all Willing (in Schopenhauer sense) contains cognition i.e. Thinking activity. We are with you on that! There is no experience without Thinking activity. But then you take it further to say, because all experience has Thinking activity, Thinking and Willing are not really distinguishable in any important way which makes one serve an essentially different role in our experience than the other. Is that your position or do you want to revise it again?

[AshvinP]

"All experience contains the whole of percepts-concepts and therefore the individual's progressive knowledge via active "attaching" concepts to percepts is not an accurate ontology - rather we we are passively observing them arise with their corresponding percepts from the primal Ground of experience (or something to that effect?)..."

That's two steps closer, for sure.

The next step is to see if there may be a problem with even imagining a necessary encounter with a percept that needs its concept.

And passivity would definitely not capture my experience of attending to experience. But you are correct in noticing that I don't take any personal credit for what arises, even when a sudden intentional state ("focus now") arises. I certainly distinguish intentional states from involuntary ones, but I think it is very easy to slide assumptions into these states. At first I simply want to see if others agree that those qualities freely arise.

Right, so the "next step" in your ontology is that "percept" and "concept" do not need to be "put back together" because they never exist separately? Do you mean that in essence they do not exist separately, or even in our normal experience of the world they never exist separately?

[findingblanks]

No, I actually thought there was a real chance that when I said it was obvious I look at a pencil and start attatching all those concepts to it you very well might have experienced a problem with that description.

The focus of my attention is only to be understood. Shadow dancing happens regardless. I just try to notice it and draw some kind of creative attention to it. Most deny it's ever there.

Beautifully put!

I find there is a kind of failure-drama that hums underneath even the most clear line of thinking or observation. This hum can become something like what Steiner refers to as the 'knowledge-drama, if it is attended to... Young Steiner was so deeply hopeful that his book The Philosophy of Freedom would be understood by even some of his harshest critics. His youth and zeal and naivety (and brilliance, of course, yes) are on full display in many of those early letters, especially his joy at his friend Rosa reading his entire book

But the 'failure-shame' has a lot of 'ugly' stuff in it and requires we drop our most treasured notions.

Yet, what's more beautiful than seeing that even when flung into the deepest terrains of shame, we merely expand our sense of God's wide domain?

Said epistemologically, what I know gets in the way of my knowing.

In the context of this thread, it points to the deep shadow dancing that I provoked in myself and in others and tried to give some rhythm to. I did not do well. In fact, I doubt the dance partners here even think their shadows are guiding their thoughts at all. But it doesn't matter. Because I was never insincere in my desire to show how deeply connected Schopenhauer and Steiner are. And I knew that I couldn't possibly show it by saying read this sentence and you'll see that Steiner was actually..... or that Schopenhauer actually had grasped...

One of my partners opened the door by asking me to show exactly where we can see that Schopenhauer recognized that universal will was necessarily intuited. That was a tiny doorway into the knowledge-drama.

So, because I knew there was no hope of showing the right set of words, I mirrored it and asked to show me where {rephrased} Steiner claimed that the percept hides thinking within it. I knew that if my partners did not refer to the 1918 edition of PoF, they could still possibly show how Steiner's word's do in fact claim/show that thinking is within the percept already.

And if they could see that, despite using the opposite words, Rudolf Steiner still had clearly communicated that thinking and percept are never apart, they could then go and see that without using the words, Schopenhauer communicated the fundamental nature of cognition in his notion of the will.

It was a long shot! And the failure hurts. But seeds within myself and within my partners were planted. And nobody was really unkind to each other. Simply flummoxed and maybe a bit annoyed.

Sometimes when I notice the frustration in Krishnamurti's face, I understand both his joy and sadness a little bit better.

"Oh, I'm dealing with a mind reader. Too hard to try to communicate with somebody who thinks you are being insincere and can't even say that directly. Ugh."

Hey man, I am just going on what you are admitting in the open like the bolded statements above. I didn't say you were being "insincere", I said communicating clearly was not the focus of your intention. Rather it was to "provoke deep shadow dancing". You said you a priori gave up hope on using the "right set of words" and then tried some other mirroring strategy, and I think it's obvious that clear communication was not a high priority in that strategy. I am not faulting you for trying those strategies, but now, since they didn't work so well, let's get back to the "normal" way of arguing these things. There is actually a lot going on in your post above which I sort of missed before. Like the colored statements:

In those statements, you are basically restating what I stated was your position a long time ago and asked you to confirm, which you never did. That, according to you, all perception has inherent meaning i.e. Thinking activity, and all Willing (in Schopenhauer sense) contains cognition i.e. Thinking activity. We are with you on that! There is no experience without Thinking activity. But then you take it further to say, because all experience has Thinking activity, Thinking and Willing are not really distinguishable in any important way which makes one serve an essentially different role in our experience than the other. Is that your position or do you want to revise it again?

[Cleric K]

If you haven't yet popped away to the "this is something only spiritualized perception/thinking can notice directly", you can still see why Steiner claims this is 'obvious' to the readers of his book. I guess you might try to argue that when he says 'a closer anaylis reveals' he is secretly nodding to the fact that he is about to describe spiritually transformed experience, but that requires we think he is dishonest every time he says that there is nothing in PoF that can't be observed by a careful reader, which explains why he thought his book would be more well received by some of his mentors and was clearly disappointed.

I won't go through all your points but I must say that PoF is all about the spiritually transformed experience. It is about experiencing our thinking as the actual spiritual process that it is. And he's not being dishonest at all. From the very beginning he speaks about the exceptional state and that we need the goodwill to step beyond our usual habits of mind if we're to ever make a step forward. If we try to understand PoF on the purely intellectual level (that is, as formal associations of concepts) we simply miss the point entirely. And still, there's no hard boundary between the intellectual thinking and the spiritualized thinking. We engage in the latter when thinking (even if abstract in itself) becomes livingly experienced.

So when you say "he is secretly nodding to the fact that he is about to describe spiritually transformed experience" I would say that he's not at all nodding secretly. He's nodding openly and in full disclosure. At no point is he pretending that he's building abstract models that are meant to keep the intellect entirely in its comfortable formal domain, while spiritualized thinking is saved only for those who engage in Anthroposophy. The whole goal of PoF is to guide us to experience thinking as self-evident spiritual reality. And this we achieve not by being stuffed with ideas and then asked to believe them but precisely through the backtracking mentioned. Once we recognize that the Thinking spiritual process precedes concepts like subject, object, matter, external world, etc., we already live in the spiritual world - the only world we ever know. Other worlds appear in the picture only after they are being introduced by thinking.

So this is one thing. We must be perfectly clear that PoF invites precisely into the transformation of thinking. It's simply wrong to imagine that Steiner wrote PoF in such a way that it had to be understood as abstract formal system and only those acquainted with Anthroposophy are capable of experiencing the transformed thinking. To understand PoF in the true sense means precisely to allow ourselves to attain to the transformed Thinking experience.

...

Thank you for finally making your position a little bit clearer in the last few post (although it still needs deciphering).

What I understand is that you practically agree with the fact that thinking enriches perception through concepts. For example, you say that the indeterminate rumble is being tested against concepts until the right one is selected. Yet you argue that this is only a coarser phenomenological view. In other words, something like one of those pictures that are made of smaller pictures. Basically your point is that the coarser (big) picture gives the illusion of concepts being attached to perceptions, while when observed in finer resolution we discover that every elementary act of cognition contains elementary perception and elementary concept that are inseparably united and there's no point of speaking of one coming after the other. Let's consider a simplified rumble scenario. Just the sound and no selection. Let's imagine that we have two phases. First we have a brief moment where we experience the rumble but associated only with the meaning of confusion. In the second phase we have the same sound but now related with the concept of, say, drill. You agree that at the coarser resolution it is indeed the case that first we have the sound with the general meaning of confusion in consciousness, then through our thinking activity we experience the enrichment of consciousness, which elucidates the sound experience with the concept of drill. If I understand your position correctly, you claim that the above is only an 'optical illusion' because at each point we have union of perception and some meaning - in the first phase we have union of the sound and confusion, in the second phase we have the same sound but instead of meaning of confusion we have the more precise concept of drill.

Ultimately, there's no moment where we have perception without meaning or vice versa but only metamorphosis of the unified state such that the union of sound and confusion transforms into union of sound and the clear concept of drill.

Would you express yourself this way?

[findingblanks]

In our normal and abnormal experiences there is always a "suchness" that defines the experiencing, even if that suchness involes 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.

"All experience contains the whole of percepts-concepts and therefore the individual's progressive knowledge via active "attaching" concepts to percepts is not an accurate ontology - rather we we are passively observing them arise with their corresponding percepts from the primal Ground of experience (or something to that effect?)..."

That's two steps closer, for sure.

The next step is to see if there may be a problem with even imagining a necessary encounter with a percept that needs its concept.

And passivity would definitely not capture my experience of attending to experience. But you are correct in noticing that I don't take any personal credit for what arises, even when a sudden intentional state ("focus now") arises. I certainly distinguish intentional states from involuntary ones, but I think it is very easy to slide assumptions into these states. At first I simply want to see if others agree that those qualities freely arise.

Right, so the "next step" in your ontology is that "percept" and "concept" do not need to be "put back together" because they never exist separately? Do you mean that in essence they do not exist separately, or even in our normal experience of the world they never exist separately?

[findingblanks]

"I won't go through all your points but I must say that PoF is all about the spiritually transformed experience."

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.

I'm with Steiner on that particular point. I also think it helps me see specifically why you would have a tendency to naturally assume he is describing those portions of the text from a transformed state of understanding.

I have a strong hunch how you would define his concept in chaptet 3 of the "exceptional state." Maybe you'll talk about that someday.

[findingblanks]

"For example, you say that the indeterminate rumble is being tested against concepts until the right one is selected."

No, I wouldn't want to make that division.

I would say that my focus on the rumble (already cognitive) allows for relevant other experience to emerge. This may be a rumble caused by something I've never experienced, but I could still experience all kinds of cognitive emergence.

"Basically your point is that the coarser (big) picture gives the illusion of concepts being attached to perceptions, while when..."

No. I'm saying there is not even an illusion of attatching concepts onto an experiencing like "rumble".

"You agree that at the coarser resolution it is indeed the case that first we have the sound with the general meaning of confusion in consciousness, then through our thinking activity we experience."

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.

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