"Idealism and Consciousness": My Comment/Challenge to BK

[findingblanks]

"I can see how you would reach some of these conclusions simply from reading PoF and also a respected scholar's interpretation of it. Fair enough. But once we broaden out to consider any of his other writings related to spiritual science, all of those interpretations fall apart. Then it becomes clear that PoF is only the most basic of basic starting points. This starting point is critical, because, as alluded before, once the higher light of the Spirit dawns on our thinking, then the rest of spiritual scientific approach naturally unfolds from there."

To be clear, most Anthroposophists (me included) think of Khulewind's academic scholarly traits as secondary to his direct research as a spiritual scientist focused on epistemology and educational matters. In that sense, I take the comments of his I shared not as mere intellectual speculation but as his attempt to share his experiences. That might be a minor point to some and no need to argue it further. I just wanted to be clear that I share the opinion that Khulewind had made the basic transformations in regard to grasping what Steiner called 'thinking's essence.'

In terms of claims that PoF is the most basic of starting points, I'd rather shelve that for another day. I might refer you to some other Anthroposophists on that topic, but we can do that down the road. Thanks for sharing.

[findingblanks]

"I am really not trying to make this into a hostile claim or anything - it is just a plain fact."

No worries. I don't think Khulewind or Kloceck or any of those who share this view of PoF would find you being hostile. It is very natural for there to be different points of view regarding core texts. Thanks for responding above and clarifying your view.

[ScottRoberts]

Sorry for the nitpick, but it's 'Kuhlewind', not 'Khulewind' (or, to get nitpickier, 'Kühlewind, but I realize this is a challenge for diacritic-challenged US keyboards).

[AshvinP]

"We do not agree here. Steiner is speaking of living thinking, agreed, but it is not "present activity" (by this I am assuming you always mean normal intellectual reasoning cognition)."

No I consider it an exceptional state when a person is not simply thinking about an issue but living willingly in the present activity itself. I don't think this manifest in a uniform or mechanical way for all people, but I think there are tell tale signs of when a person has shifted from intellectually thinking about an issue to enacting a present experience that stays within the thought activity. It is an exception to the daily norm. And Steiner expected his readers to understand what he meant because he knew that despite this being not what we typically do, it is an experience people have reference to. Again, I find it very important and helpful that Steiner made clear he did not write about states and experiences that his reader's needed to take his word for and, more importantly, he expected careful readers at the time to grasp the distinction he was making between dead abstractions and living thinking.

I agree it is an "exceptional state", and that Steiner meant something along the lines of "very uncommon" in Chapter 3 discussion of "exceptional state". But that is not to be conflated with all subsequent discussion of "living thinking", "direct discernment", etc. in the rest of the book. It seems you (and perhaps Kuhlewind) are hanging your hat on the assumption that "exceptional state" in Chapter 3 is equivalent to the meaning of all subsequent times that any sort of higher living thinking is mentioned. But he never actually uses the German word Ausnahmezustand (state of exception) again, and the rest of the context in later chapters has clearly advanced to more deeper understanding of Thinking.

[Cleric K]

I think some of the confusion comes from the fact that not-observing-thinking is somehow equated with being unconscious of (living) thinking. But this is incorrect and Steiner made it explicit:

The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.

So whether we realize it or not, we're always existing in Thinking Intuition, which is the immediately known meaning of our present state of being. Whether we experience that this meaning manifests as the result of active becoming, is another question. So the blind (instinctive) will is truly concealed behind the metamorphosis of meaning that our states of being hold.

The exceptional state is entered when the Thinking will discovers its own reflection in thought-images. For example, when we think about the table, we're metamorphosing through meaningful states. This meaning is the immediate knowing essence of our spiritual being which we call Intuition. Yet the thought-images of the table do not reflect anything about the actual spiritual metamorphosis which brings them about. At the moment the Thinking will realizes that it not only moves instinctively through meaningful metamorphosis but also recognizes in the world content the reflections of what it is doing, we speak of observation of thinking.

Let's approach this through an analogy. Let's suppose we know ourselves only as inner metamorphosis of bodily will which is instinctive. It is meaningfully experienced but is not self-conscious. Then one day we stand before a mirror. Initially there's no connection whatsoever between the image and the will. We can imagine this similarly to the delay we see in live TV programs where the signal goes through satellite link. By the time the image is reflected, the will has already 'forgotten' what it was doing an instant ago and thus the image is not recognized to have any correlation with it. If we imagine the delay growing smaller and smaller, self-consciousness begins to take shape because the will now recognizes in the image, the effects of its bodily gestures. This is true even if we take the mirror example literally - our reflection in the mirror is already a past image. It is something that our will imprinted into the physical world, which was reflected by light, bounced in the mirror and arrived in our eyes. What we contemplate is the image of our bodily configuration as it was absurdly small but yet measurable time ago (it's measurable as it can be seen from any modern laser rangefinder which measures precisely the time of flight of light before it reflects back to the meter). So in this sense, the observation of thinking is really the perception of how our intuitive spiritual activity has modified the world content. We experience the act in real time, in pure intuition, but the effect of this act is perceived as if retrospectively, as it is already embedded in the world. It is tremendously important to grasp this correctly, otherwise things will always remain confusing. We do not become conscious of the content of thinking only at the time when we perceive it. We're conscious of this content in pure intuition in the very act of thinking. When we perceive how this thinking act has modified the world content (with the thought-image) our new intuition is already something different - it consists of the meaning "I perceive how my intuitive act of thinking from an instant ago has impressed as a thought-image in the world content."

The real trouble is that the modern intellect lives continuously in this thinking intuition but wants to build picture of reality only as arrangement of thought-images. In other words, it must be ensured that thought-images stand on their own, as if having nothing to do with the activity that imprints them in the world content. This is also the reason why any intellectual attempt to approach thinking, fails miserably. Thinking is confronted with great contradiction. It is very easy to trace this in our modern age when concepts as Turing machine are common understanding. Thinking which wants to understand itself as arrangement of thought-images of concepts related through abstract laws, tries to grasp itself as some mechanism which ultimately can be presented as a universal state machine. It doesn't matter if it's imagined that the 'substance' of this machine is physical, spiritual, energetic or whatever. It's the mode of cognition that is the same in all cases. As thinking juggles with the concepts reflected in thought-images, it says "So this neuron activates this neuron" or "this is the soul, it excites these thoughts" or "This is MAL, it ripples through these alters" and so on. What is common in all these cases is that the above thoughts don't really say anything about the thinking spiritual activity which thinks these thoughts in real time. These thoughts look away from their origin. They represent an imagined thinking organism and its laws of operation which however can exist in this way only as long as the comfortable distance between real thinking and the thought-images is maintained.

If we imagine that we have found the perfect Turing machine which explains our thinking, even if we try to test it against ourselves, we'll quickly see that we can't do it. If we try to simulate the thought "I think" in this machine, we immediately find out that the real machine that we are, is already doing something else - it is thinking the mental simulation of another thinking machine which thinks the "I think" thought. This is well known but it presents a limitation only when we don't recognize that the dual intellect (strict separation between thinking subject and object) is not the only form of cognition available to man. When we realize that the thought-images are not supposed to build external (to thinking) mental model of reality but are the living feedback such that we can come to know ourselves as active spiritual beings in much greater depth, then the whole quest for knowledge assumes a different character. It is no longer building of toy models of the universe but continual unveiling of the spiritual essence of the Cosmos through the pinhole of our "I"-being, similarly to the way sand slowly sips through an hourglass. When we contemplate the "I think" thought, it is no longer the goal to simply cover this thought with even more intellectual thoughts that are supposed to 'explain' the first, but instead, the thought becomes the mirror image through which we begin to gain self-consciousness of the spiritual thinking gestures that we perform in order to bring thoughts like these into existence.

What we must realize is that in the course of evolution we can't gain self-consciousness directly within the initially instinctive spiritual activity. This first comes about when spiritual activity begins to approach its reflection in thought-images. This is the exceptional state where spiritual activity encounters its own contribution to the world content. Once we begin to investigate these thought-images, we begin to become more and more conscious of the instinctive thinking gestures that we have always performed but were not yet self-conscious. As we understand that in our "I"-being we're constantly performing spiritual gestures and as we learn to contemplate their reflection in thought-images (in the etheric body), we gradually attain to Imaginative consciousness. When through the help of these panoramic reflection of our spiritual activity we come to know ourselves better as a spiritual being, we learn to be self-conscious within the spiritual gestures themselves (which are really the degrees of freedom our spirit). This is the ascent to Inspirative consciousness. Here we no longer strictly need the support of Imaginative reflections in the ether but instead we live in the meaning-interference of living idea processes (beings). Now the world ether doesn't serve to give us self-consciousness - we already have self-consciousness in the spiritual gestures themselves. Instead, we contemplate how the activity of the beings in the spiritual world shape the World Process. Even further than this, we no longer live in the reverberation of spiritual activity of beings, which is like Cosmic speech resounding through the spiritual world, but we can live self-consciously directly in pure meaning. That is, we no longer spiritually perceive the meaning of Cosmic Thoughts of spiritual beings but we directly resonate with the pure meaning of their perspectives.

It is true that Steiner didn't talk about the higher forms of cognition in PoF but from every sentence in the book it's clear that all effort is to bring consciousness to this state where we recognize ourselves as a spiritual being that contemplates its thought-reflection. It is from this tiny island of self-reflection that the no longer instinctive but now more and more conscious evolution of the spirit proceeds.

[findingblanks]

Later, I hope to respond. But for now, just wanted to celebrate that today is The Philosophy of Freedoms 128th birthday

[findingblanks]

Thanks, Scott. You're feedback was taken like a cool wind on a hot day. Much appreciated.

[findingblanks]

From Steiner:

"The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course..."

I'm curious if anybody reading this who has also studied PoF believes that when Steiner says that 'because [thinking] is our own creation' if they believe this point has been demonstrated at this point in the book or if they think it need not be demonstrated? Also, keeping in mind, Steiner himself says that at this point he is not yet making any claims about the reality of an "I" being despite using the terms (hard to avoid!).

Also, what do people think constitute the 'characteristic features of [thinking's] course' that Steiner mentions above?

[findingblanks]

"The exceptional state is entered when the Thinking will discovers its own reflection in thought-images."

Yes, as long as we don't add necessarily to Steiner's example of "I am thinking about a table", we come closer to recognizing why this is an exception to what we are almost continuously doing every second of our waking life. And Steiner was wise to remind the readers at various points that he hasn't yet established certain realities early in the book but that language forces him to use certain terms and phrases that seem to imply he is asking the reader to take these realities for granted. This helps when early on he distinguishes the difference between thinking and observing versus turning our attention to thought-forms. The strong tendency to then interpret this activity of observing thought-forms as 'actually being' X, Y or Z must be avoided. Steiner knew that he needed to bring the reader right up to making this distinction that each of them do already and stop them from then making habitual interpretations but, rather, just...keep....reading....

Remembering that 'just...keep...reading' when talking about this kind of text means 'just...keep...paying...attention...'

Thinking and observing is not the same thing as observing our thoughts. And, as Steiner says, noticing a thought will never happen at the same time as the thinking it into being. Later he'll explain why thinking can be grasped directly in its presentness.

[AshvinP]

"I can see how you would reach some of these conclusions simply from reading PoF and also a respected scholar's interpretation of it. Fair enough. But once we broaden out to consider any of his other writings related to spiritual science, all of those interpretations fall apart. Then it becomes clear that PoF is only the most basic of basic starting points. This starting point is critical, because, as alluded before, once the higher light of the Spirit dawns on our thinking, then the rest of spiritual scientific approach naturally unfolds from there."

To be clear, most Anthroposophists (me included) think of Khulewind's academic scholarly traits as secondary to his direct research as a spiritual scientist focused on epistemology and educational matters. In that sense, I take the comments of his I shared not as mere intellectual speculation but as his attempt to share his experiences. That might be a minor point to some and no need to argue it further. I just wanted to be clear that I share the opinion that Khulewind had made the basic transformations in regard to grasping what Steiner called 'thinking's essence.'

In terms of claims that PoF is the most basic of starting points, I'd rather shelve that for another day. I might refer you to some other Anthroposophists on that topic, but we can do that down the road. Thanks for sharing.

FB,

I wanted to follow up on this, because, at the end of the day, this is what we are all really interested in. Is there a structured spiritual reality mostly veiled by abstract intellectual cognition and, if so, can we reveal its structure in any significant way during our lifetimes? It hardly matters what Steiner meant in PoF if we can't answer that question affirmatively. You seem to indicate above that Kuhlewind was ambivalent about all that, and I am curious to hear more about him and these "other Anthroposophists", but I am also curious about what you think? What do you make of Cleric's last paragraph describing Inspirative and Intuitive cognition? If this sort of spiritual reality does, in fact, exist, revealed through these sorts of cognitive capacities of humanity, waiting to be developed just as soon as we decide to make the effort, then there is hardly any more question more important to be clear and precise about than that one.