Criticism

[AshvinP]

Right. I almost asked that as well. words words words. Our oh so limiting mode of communication...

I think what all this shows is that we need a glossary of Spiritual Science. If it doesn't exist, would somebody write one? I'd appreciate it.

What is probably most helpful for you guys is a glossary of philosophical terms - https://global.oup.com/us/companion.web ... ossary.pdf

[Ben Iscatus]

A major part of the problem with Reason, is it's unclear when it's being applied ingenuously. People on opposite sides of a debate claim to use reason. But feelings tend to come first, and that results in rationalisation. Confirmation bias is something we tend not to recognise in themselves - only in others. That's a huge problem.

[AshvinP]

A major part of the problem with Reason, is it's unclear when it's being applied ingenuously. People on opposite sides of a debate claim to use reason. But feelings tend to come first, and that results in rationalisation. Confirmation bias is something we tend not to recognise in themselves - only in others. That's a huge problem.

Let's say we are using intellect and Reason in the following way (which is the way Cleric and myself are using it, and is the way in which many German idealist philosophers have used them). The burden then shifts to those who want to challenge this understanding of the terms.

Every individual entity of reality represents a definite content within our thought-system. Every such entity is founded in the wholeness of the world of ideas and can be comprehended only in connection with it. Thus each thing must necessarily call upon a twofold thought activity. First the thought corresponding to the thing has to be determined in clear contours, and after this all the threads must be determined that lead from this thought to the whole thought-world. Clarity in the details and depth in the whole are the two most significant demands of reality. The former is the intellect's concern, the latter is reason's. The intellect (Verstand) creates thought-configurations for the individual things of reality. It fulfills its task best the more exactly it delimits these configurations, the sharper the contours are that it draws. Reason (Vernunft) then has to incorporate these configurations into the harmony of the whole world of ideas. This of course presupposes the following: Within the content of the thought-configurations that the intellect creates, that unity already exists, living one and the same life; only, the intellect keeps everything artificially separated. Reason then, without blurring the clarity, merely eliminates the separation again. The intellect distances us from reality; reason brings us back to it again.

Graphically this can be represented in the following way:





In this diagram everything is connected; the same principle lives in all the parts. The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations — because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements [ 52 ] — and reason recognizes the unity. If we have the following two perceptions: 1. the sun shining down and 2. a warm stone, the intellect keeps both things apart, because they confront us as two; it holds onto one as the cause and onto the other as the effect; then reason supervenes, tears down the wall between them, and recognizes the unity in the duality. All the concepts that the intellect creates — cause and effect, substance and attribute, body and soul, idea and reality, God and world, etc. — are there only in order to keep unified reality separated artificially into parts; and reason, without blurring the content thus created, without mystically obscuring the clarity of the intellect, has then to seek out the inner unity in the multiplicity. Reason thereby comes back to that from which the intellect had distanced itself: to the unified reality. If one wants an exact nomenclature, one can call the formations of the intellect “concepts” and the creations of reason “ideas.”

[Cleric K]

Not necessarily, it may be intuitive. But before we go into this discussion, can you give us your description or definition of Reason? What is this term referring to in our conscious/thinking experience?

I also like you posts that are less than 3-pages long

Believe me, I dream for the day when it won't be necessary to write n-pages long posts

In my consciousness it refers to the experience of thinking elements of reality which are felt to conform to higher lawfulness. Let me put it this way. When you're having a musical idea, what faculty of your being are you using? What are you doing in order to produce the melody? Would you agree if we call this a kind of Thinking? Instead of speaking forth philosophical words, you speak forth music. It's very interesting to observe how we can speak forth our own singing (inner) voice but we can also sing with the voice of a guitar, viola, drums, etc. We can even sing a whole symphony. These are all degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity.

Now what if I tell you that reasoned thoughts are only aliased sounds of higher order music, yet music that is very richly meaningful? What if all those aesthetic arts and music in particular are only the shadow of this higher order language? In fact we feel joy in music because it secretly speaks to us about a higher world where this music is actual meaningful speech.

So please pay attention that you know music and any aesthetic and mystical art only because you can follow its curvature with your spiritual activity. When you listen to music it entrains your activity along with it (in the same sense that written text entrains your thinking). You can experience the opposite effect when you create the music with your own activity. Then your musical idea entrains the sound-thoughts. To say that these modes of spiritual activity are unreasonable/a-reasonable tells me that you seek to replace them with conceptual thinking. This of course makes the music disappear and you say "There! Music is unreasonable!" Here we should simply not mistake reasoning with reducing. We can think about melody, harmony, rhythm, precisely because our thinking lives in the music. We simply recognize the spiritual gestures that we perform when we think music. Similarly, when we move our body our thinking lives in the will. We can speak of our different body parts and their gestures because we live in them cognitively. When I can't draw my hand through a wall I experience that in the cognitive element. Concepts are only thinking precipitations from all these forms of thinking. We can think in color, sound, touch, smell, feeling, will. After all, we think primarily in sound - it's our inner voice - it is sound.

Everything is reasonable because concepts originally precipitate from meaningful reality. This means that when we contemplate the arrangement of the concepts they will be seen as logical. Logic is the higher musicality of thinking. Things become misunderstood because this arrangement of concepts can take on its own life. Then we can arrange concepts which are not necessarily taken from reality. They are local reality but not one extracted from the world content. Seen in this way everything is known by Thinking - not by words but by moving along the curvature of color, sound, will. Thinking is versatile. It's not something concrete but it's the spiritual activity which similar to the octopus can resonate with every phenomenon by mimicking it. So music has its logic, color has its logic, smell has its logic. All these logics are part of even higher order logic. In order to understand this we must overcome our desire to extricate everything into abstract thoughts into the phantom layer. Then if we are criticizing higher cognition, we're most certainly criticizing our own inability to think in color, sound, feeling. Everything collapses in the phantom layer and then we blame Steiner and others that they do the same. In other words we're saying "If I can't do it, no one else can, so anyone claiming higher order spiritual activity is a liar".

[Martin_]

Ok. i can work with that.
Just to check if we're all on the same page, (using the above definition of Reason), we DO agree, that when Einstein came up with E=mc², he exercised both Intellect and Reason, right?

[Ben Iscatus]

reason recognizes the unity. If we have the following two perceptions: 1. the sun shining down and 2. a warm stone, the intellect keeps both things apart, because they confront us as two; it holds onto one as the cause and onto the other as the effect; then reason supervenes, tears down the wall between them, and recognizes the unity in the duality.

I wondered why someone keeps moving those uranium-rich rocks and making a cairn out of them. Hope he's using gloves.

[Cleric K]

Ok. i can work with that.
Just to check if we're all on the same page, (using the above definition of Reason), we DO agree, that when Einstein came up with E=mc², he exercised both Intellect and Reason, right?

This is something much more convoluted. We can say that he used Reason when he tried to grasp the relativity of human perspectives - the fact that we can't speak of objective state of the world, which will be clearly defined even in absence of relative perspectives on it. This is intuited. Speaking of the constancy of speed of light is also intuited but from that point onwards we're dealing with intellectual convolutions. E=mc² results from mathematical relations when classical mechanics and electromagnetism is seen through the prism of relativity.

[Eugene I]

OK, so first let's to summarize what we learnt from definitions:

What is probably most helpful for you guys is a glossary of philosophical terms - https://global.oup.com/us/companion.web ... ossary.pdf

OK, so according to the glossary:

Reason is the ability or faculty to engage in theoretical and practical reasoning.
Theoretical reasoning is aimed at assessing evidence and drawing conclusions about what is true.
Practical reasoning is aimed at making decisions about what to do.

Now, the PoF definition of Reason seems to be different from the glossary:

The intellect (Verstand) creates thought-configurations for the individual things of reality. Reason (Vernunft) then has to incorporate these configurations into the harmony of the whole world of ideas. This of course presupposes the following: Within the content of the thought-configurations that the intellect creates, that unity already exists, living one and the same life; only, the intellect keeps everything artificially separated. Reason then, without blurring the clarity, merely eliminates the separation again.

First, here the definition of Vernunft already pre-supposes that "the unity and harmony of the whole world of ideas" exists, which is a metaphysical assumption. But this is just a disclaimer.

Everything is reasonable because concepts originally precipitate from meaningful reality. This means that when we contemplate the arrangement of the concepts they will be seen as logical. Logic is the higher musicality of thinking. Things become misunderstood because this arrangement of concepts can take on its own life. Then we can arrange concepts which are not necessarily taken from reality. They are local reality but not one extracted from the world content. Seen in this way everything is known by Thinking - not by words but by moving along the curvature of color, sound, will. Thinking is versatile. It's not something concrete but it's the spiritual activity which similar to the octopus can resonate with every phenomenon by mimicking it. So music has its logic, color has its logic, smell has its logic. All these logics are part of even higher order logic. In order to understand this we must overcome our desire to extricate everything into abstract thoughts into the phantom layer. Then if we are criticizing higher cognition, we're most certainly criticizing our own inability to think in color, sound, feeling. Everything collapses in the phantom layer and then we blame Steiner and others that they do the same. In other words we're saying "If I can't do it, no one else can, so anyone claiming higher order spiritual activity is a liar".

Now I'm getting confused here. You/RS are saying that there is a "unity and harmony of the whole world of ideas". Great, but you are also saying that there is a "phantom layer of abstract thoughts". Aren't the abstract thoughts also ideas? Do they still belong to the "unity and harmony", or not anymore? If not, aren't we creating here another kind of dualism?

Let's take an example of different geometries from JW description of the famous Poincaret's conventionalism arguments:

Henri Poincare, a prominent mathematician and physicist, played an important role with his essay on The Four Geometries, in which he demonstrated that four geometries with contradicting premises could be equally internally consistent, suggesting that rational systems are artificial constructions.

Now, some of these geometries provide more accurate description of our visual sense perceptions, others are less accurate. For example, Euclidian geometry gives a reasonably accurate description, but it was found by Einstein that Riemann geometry provides more accurate description, and Lobachevsky geometry gives less accurate description. There is also a huge number of other axiomatic geometries that are less accurate in describing our visual sense perceptions, but they are still to some degree accurate. We have no proof that either of these geometries describe the observable world exactly with infinite accuracy, so neither of them is entirely accurate and neither is entirely inaccurate. Now, which ones of those geometries belong to the "unity and harmony of the whole world of ideas" and which ones belongs to the "phantom layer of abstract thoughts"?

[Martin_]

Ok. i can work with that.
Just to check if we're all on the same page, (using the above definition of Reason), we DO agree, that when Einstein came up with E=mc², he exercised both Intellect and Reason, right?

This is something much more convoluted. We can say that he used Reason when he tried to grasp the relativity of human perspectives - the fact that we can't speak of objective state of the world, which will be clearly defined even in absence of relative perspectives on it. This is intuited. Speaking of the constancy of speed of light is also intuited but from that point onwards we're dealing with intellectual convolutions. E=mc² results from mathematical relations when classical mechanics and electromagnetism is seen through the prism of relativity.

so no lightbulb above his head?

[Cleric K]

Now I'm getting confused here. You/RS are saying that there is a "unity and harmony of the whole world of ideas". Great, but you are also saying that there is a "phantom layer of abstract thoughts". Aren't the abstract thoughts also ideas? Do they still belong to the "unity and harmony", or not anymore? If not, aren't we creating here another kind of dualism?

Let's take an example of different geometries from JW description of the famous Poincaret's conventionalism arguments:

Henri Poincare, a prominent mathematician and physicist, played an important role with his essay on The Four Geometries, in which he demonstrated that four geometries with contradicting premises could be equally internally consistent, suggesting that rational systems are artificial constructions.

Now, some of these geometries provide more accurate description of our visual sense perceptions, others are less accurate. For example, Euclidian geometry gives a reasonably accurate description, but it was found by Einstein that Riemann geometry provides more accurate description, and Lobachevsky geometry gives less accurate description. There is also a huge number of other axiomatic geometries that are less accurate in describing our visual sense perceptions, but they are still to some degree accurate. We have no proof that either of these geometries describe the observable world exactly with infinite accuracy, so neither of them is entirely accurate and neither is entirely inaccurate. Now, which ones of those geometries belong to the "unity and harmony of the whole world of ideas" and which ones belongs to the "phantom layer of abstract thoughts"?

I speak about phantom layer in the following way. I'll use example that you have given before. From visual perception we can abstract the concepts of sky and blue. When we say "the sky is blue" it can be said that we're using reason because the concepts find their unity in the visual perceptions.

But we can also manipulate concepts on their own. For example we can mechanically rearrange concepts and build "the sky is green". This is what I call the phantom layer. Of course this doesn't mean that it is some dual aspect of reality. The thought "the sky is green" is still a meaningful arrangement of concepts but it simply doesn't correspond to perceptions in the wider context. It fits nicely in our local curvature of meaning but not with the curvature at large.

This doesn't mean that abstract thoughts are useless. For example if I extract the concept of "watering" from the fact that watering a tomato plant turned out to be beneficial, this concept can be connected in the intellect with other plants too. So the intellect operates with abstracted concepts and can recombine them in various ways. Sometimes this turns out to be useful, sometimes it turns out to be incompatible with the wider context. I speak of phantom layer because today's science and philosophy operate almost entirely with concepts that people practically don't remember how were originally abstracted from experience. It's customary today to operate with ideas like energy, MAL and so on without having any concrete perceptions for them. That's why modern thinkers have become largely locked within a web of concepts without any means to relate them to actual conscious phenomena.