Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[findingblanks]

"The bolded text in your response is not something that Steiner claims in PoF."

The part you bolded that you say doesn't mesh with PoF is when I said that Steiner was talking about how we can recognize an object.

Yep, this is a typical move. Okay, so I'll come back with a plethera of evidence that even just in PoF Steiner wants his reader to understand that you would not have seen the pencil if you hadn't conceptualized it as a pencil. And then I already know what you'll say.

But: there is a 45% chance that you'll agree with me that Steiner absolutely makes clear that starting with the perception of any object you recognize is what he is pointing to in his first careful explorations of concept and percept. Sorry I can't respond to all of what you say in one swoop, but you typically start with the key points and those assumptions need to be examined before downstream conclusions can be really grasped.

[SanteriSatama]

1) You are not asking for phenomenology by any reasonable definition - you are asking for a mechanistic and reductionist explanation of how the human mind connects meaning to perception.

As I understood, the question was phenomenological backtracking in the same sense as Heidegger's destruktio, and Derrida's less absolute 'deconstruction'.

Also, it is only to espected that the subject-construction in it's dependence from object-construction, and in it's character of mechanistic recreation of of the mechanism it reacts also as mechanistic defence mechanism which reacts to possibility of self-deconstruction as it did.

Cleric explained clearly in last comment why it was not "phenomenological backtracking". That involves starting with the givens of our experience as they are now and then working back to how they came to be that way, as Steiner does so well in PoF. It does not involve starting with hypothetically how they could or should be or what we want them to be for sake of our argument against philosophy of Thinking. FB wants to start from an abstract hypothetical state of "confronting a pencil percept without any meaning and then attaching the first concept" - that is not phenomenology, but 3rd-person reductionist philosophy.

Hmm. Starting from the idea of external visual object is a practical choice, yes, but it is also a way of begging the question. Also "3rd person" is begging the question by a priori excluding the possiblity of indefinite person. When thinking Gedanken, a priori exclusion of possibilities is a should from is. I'm not suggesting a should, but thinking with as little begging the question as we can.

We can start from the concept of pen, no problem. But instead of keeping eyes open and looking at a picture, we could experiment keeping eyes closed and deeply attending in all (and not only visual) sensations, thoughts, memories etc. that arise when focusing on the concept of pen. Including attending how attention moves during the experiment. I don't know where the experiment leads, if anywhere.

[SanteriSatama]

OK, I just did the experiment, the result was unexpected and interesting. But no spoilers yet, let's stay scientific and try to avoid experimenter effects. I'll tell my experience later when fellow fenomenologists have done their experiment and can report.

[findingblanks]

"1) You are not asking for phenomenology by any reasonable definition - you are asking for a mechanistic and reductionist explanation..."

How precious. Some people would say that the mechanistic and reductionist way of describing how we recognize a pencil is to say that we must attach find and then attach a concept to a percept.

The fact that you can't even see that, means I have to work much much harder to find language that helps you in there. I'm failing!

The phenomenology I'm asking you for is fluid and recognizing in the fluidity itself. Just flatly claiming that it is obvious and straightforward that we must attach the concept 'pencil' to a pure percept before we recognize a pencil before us is mechanistic and reductionistic.

But it's also part of a sacred text and the taboos of pushing against it are intense. But worth it! Even Steiner chose vastly different and more phenomenological descriptions. In almost every instance of his 1918 updates, Steiner either chooses metaphors or actual descriptions that are much more phenomenological. OF course he did. He had already told us that he was deeply dissatisfied with his early language. That does not mean he thought he was wrong. No, of course not. It meant that he thought his inarticulateness was causing his students to not only miss the clear conception he was trying to lay out but he was influencing their practices as well. If there was not a systematic difference between his descriptions in 1918 and the original, then this wouldn't be nearly as important.

But, believe it or not, I can stand in your shoes and see exactly why what I'm saying *MUST* sound mechanistic. I shared your view for long enough to still stand within it. And because it isn't logical discourse that ultimately frustrates one outside of an *obvious* view, my work isn't to simply keep showing you logical reasons to question the phenomenology of 'attaching' and 'searching' and 'finding' and 'selecting'.

But I have to include those. In Anthroposophy- A Fragment, Steiner goes very deeply into why this 'update' is vital. But that discourse takes us way off topic for other reasons.

In the meantime, I'll keep pointing out that there is a structure to how you started by saying {paraphrase} "Oh, what Steiner says about the necessity of
attaching a concept to it's corresponding percept is straightforward" and at each point of my asking for a straightforward description, you've had to pop away into other kinds of discourse. I know, I know. To you, the description of the concentration exercise couldn't have been a more clear example. I tried to explain why Steiner (and myself here) don't want to presuppose the existence of pencil in phenomenologically observing how it can even be recognized in the first place.

[findingblanks]

"Steiner's ontic prime is Thinking (and Willing and Feeling), so of course he does not deny that meaning is inherent to all experience. Therefore, one cannot possibly step outside of experience and observe how meaning arrives to experience in the first instance."

Okay, so setting aside whether or not I agree with what you wrote above, Steiner clearly didn't agree with you. I'm sure you probably have memorized the few passages in PoF, TaK, and AToK, where he says that it is obvious to everyone (who considers it) that there is a period during the ontology of recognition during which the work is to 'search', 'select' and, 'find' a pure concept that must be 'brought to' and 'attached to' the encountered (encounters tend to be somewhat viceral) percept.

Many people have objected to Steiner's early work saying that he was often speaking of non-experiential aspects as if they were experiences. You may share that view.

[AshvinP]

As I understood, the question was phenomenological backtracking in the same sense as Heidegger's destruktio, and Derrida's less absolute 'deconstruction'.

Also, it is only to espected that the subject-construction in it's dependence from object-construction, and in it's character of mechanistic recreation of of the mechanism it reacts also as mechanistic defence mechanism which reacts to possibility of self-deconstruction as it did.

Cleric explained clearly in last comment why it was not "phenomenological backtracking". That involves starting with the givens of our experience as they are now and then working back to how they came to be that way, as Steiner does so well in PoF. It does not involve starting with hypothetically how they could or should be or what we want them to be for sake of our argument against philosophy of Thinking. FB wants to start from an abstract hypothetical state of "confronting a pencil percept without any meaning and then attaching the first concept" - that is not phenomenology, but 3rd-person reductionist philosophy.

Hmm. Starting from the idea of external visual object is a practical choice, yes, but it is also a way of begging the question. Also "3rd person" is begging the question by a priori excluding the possiblity of indefinite person. When thinking Gedanken, a priori exclusion of possibilities is a should from is. I'm not suggesting a should, but thinking with as little begging the question as we can.

We can start from the concept of pen, no problem. But instead of keeping eyes open and looking at a picture, we could experiment keeping eyes closed and deeply attending in all (and not only visual) sensations, thoughts, memories etc. that arise when focusing on the concept of pen. Including attending how attention moves during the experiment. I don't know where the experiment leads, if anywhere.

I don't understand the first paragraph, but sure to the 2nd. If we realize that whatever results is by virtue of Thinking (which includes attending), then we are on solid ground. We have an urge to call this simple and trivial fact of experience "begging the question", but it only seems that way because it's so trivially true.

[findingblanks]

"You should understand that "it always goes like that" because you demand something impossible and not because others are stuck in their conceptions."

Again, I'd be curious if you consistently apply this kind of intellectual reasoning and apply it to Steiner, say, in his partridge example in PoF. He has many others but that one could receive the same objection you apply to me here. I already know you definitely won't apply it to Steiner Nobody does. When Steiner makes the exact same move I (and others, of course!) am making here, you immediately shift the goalpost and focus on some other aspect of the question. I get it.

But as you go through PoF and the other early books, just notice the five or six places where Steiner chooses very specific examples because he thinks that they express the point he is making (about the fundamental necessity of connecting a percept to a concept in everyday experience).

Notice that in those core books, not only does he make the same claim I am asking you to describe, but he gives concrete example and he never mentions that the reader must understand that this is 'impossible' to recognize because of early childhood learning.

Don't get me wrong! I know the point you are making and it is perfectly valid in other contexts. But I also know this dance (unintentional) that happens when somebody who isn't Steiner asks a very smart and serious student of Steiner to describe a certain kind of experience that PoF says is fundamental.

The notion that you would be perplexed how I could suggest that you give the very kind of example that Steiner repeatedly gives and claims is clear...that CAN BE a starting point for seeing my point here. But, as I keep saying, it is my job to find a way to jostle this meaning 'into' you And I'm failing. Believe me, if you wanted me to prove that I can make your arguments at least as well as you (because I shared them for so long), I would enjoy it. Not really. I'd rather that a tiny jot of my point pinches you in the next three years or so. It has happened. It happened to me.

Maybe if you focused on your sense of why Steiner today could be reading PoF (not knowing his former incarnation yet) and be disgusted with it (in the loving sort of disgusted why Steiner himself was with the epistemology of his time), that intuition could help you see my point. I am in no way leaving the sphere of PoF in my point here.

[SanteriSatama]

I don't understand the first paragraph, but sure to the 2nd. If we realize that whatever results is by virtue of Thinking (which includes attending), then we are on solid ground. We have an urge to call this simple and trivial fact of experience "begging the question", but it only seems that way because it's so trivially true.

The 2nd paragraph: please just do the experiment, and report the results. Let's not predifine Thinking as this or that or nothing, a dogma to preach or defend, let's be scientific and do phenomenology empirically.

Is that too much to ask? Is simple experiment somehow threatening???

[AshvinP]

"Steiner's ontic prime is Thinking (and Willing and Feeling), so of course he does not deny that meaning is inherent to all experience. Therefore, one cannot possibly step outside of experience and observe how meaning arrives to experience in the first instance."

Okay, so setting aside whether or not I agree with what you wrote above, Steiner clearly didn't agree with you. I'm sure you probably have memorized the few passages in PoF, TaK, and AToK, where he says that it is obvious to everyone (who considers it) that there is a period during the ontology of recognition during which the work is to 'search', 'select' and, 'find' a pure concept that must be 'brought to' and 'attached to' the encountered (encounters tend to be somewhat viceral) percept.

Many people have objected to Steiner's early work saying that he was often speaking of non-experiential aspects as if they were experiences. You may share that view.

It is that "setting aside" which is so problematic, as it keeps us in the realm of discussing what we think other people thought and are thinking, instead of just getting to the heart of the matter, which is the question of what is actually happening in Reality. I am still holding out hope you will provide that to us in one of these comments...

re: the rest of your comment, what you are doing there is exactly what Steiner "particularly emphasizes" below. You are confusing the concept of "thinking" for the living reality of our Thinking activity. Or rather, you are attributing that confusion to Steiner, even though he tells you not to, and then criticizing him for it.

Through thinking, concepts and ideas arise. What a concept is cannot be said in words. Words can only make the human being aware of the fact that he has concepts. When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation; to the object there comes then an ideal counterpart, and he regards the object and ideal counterpart as belonging together. When the object disappears from his field of observation, there remains behind only its ideal counterpart. The latter is the concept of the object. The more our experience broadens, the greater the sum of our concepts becomes. The concepts however by no means stand there isolated. They join themselves together into a lawful whole. The concept “organism” joins itself, for example, to the others of “lawful development” and “growth.” Other concepts formed in connection with single things merge totally into one. All the concepts that I make for myself of lions merge together into the overall concept “lion.” In this way the individual concept join themselves into a united system of concepts within which every one has its particular place. Ideas are not qualitatively different from concepts. They are only concepts that are fuller in content, more saturated, and wider in scope. I must particularly emphasize that heed be taken at this point of the fact that I have indicated thinking as my starting point and not concepts and ideas, which are first gained through thinking. These already presuppose thinking. What I have said therefore about the self-sustaining and self-determined nature of thinking cannot simply be transferred to concepts. (I state this here expressly, because herein lies my difference with Hegel. He posits the concept as primary and original.)

[AshvinP]

I don't understand the first paragraph, but sure to the 2nd. If we realize that whatever results is by virtue of Thinking (which includes attending), then we are on solid ground. We have an urge to call this simple and trivial fact of experience "begging the question", but it only seems that way because it's so trivially true.

The 2nd paragraph: please just do the experiment, and report the results. Let's not predifine Thinking as this or that or nothing, a dogma to preach or defend, let's be scientific and do phenomenology empirically.

Is that too much to ask? Is simple experiment somehow threatening???

This is exactly the same thing I was criticizing before with FB... you are not trying to do phenomenology, which starts with givens of our experience, i.e. Thinking activity in relation to perceptions (visual or otherwise). You want to get rid of that given of our experience from consideration and then say we are "empirically" deriving results. That should remind you of what other philosophers do, namely the materialists and dualists, who think good science can be done by getting rid of the "subject" from consideration and only considering the "object". In our experience, we know this cannot ever be done, so the approach can only lead to flawed conclusions about the essence of what we experience.