1.”Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist. Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik. Man suche nur nichts hinter den Phänomenen; sie selbst sind die “AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 5:02 am JW,
Thank you for the elaboration. To be clear, I also am only interested in our own views which we have reasoned through. I bring up Goethe as an example of an epistemology that directly challenges Kant's and all other implicitly dualistic epistemologies. That is really what I want to hone in on here.
JeffreyW wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 3:32 am I might not bring the specificity of detail you request, as I don’t now have the time to review a vast body of work I’ve left dormant for decades, but perhaps I’ve retained enough of the substance. I see Goethe as the opposite of Kant in many ways. In the Critiques, Kant wrote the closing argument for an era coming to an end simultaneously with his own life. Goethe announced a new era in his youth. As such, Goethe is a transitional figure, as seminal in his own way as Kant, but yet in the early steps into no-man’s land. It wouldn’t be until the end of the 19th Century that the closing argument for Romanticism would be given.
Goethe’s notions of Morphology and Polarity are themselves descriptions of the world of Goethe’s intellect. On the one side is his rejection of metaphysics and the promotion of esthetic knowledge. This is seen in his rejection of the noumenal and insistence that nature reveals all in appearance and experience with nothing hidden behind it; rejection of atomization in favor of nature as endless becoming ,and with that rejection of the static nature of systematic philosophy typified by Kant and Hegel; and most importantly - esthetic expression of nature to challenge purely scientific objectification as seen in his claim that he could describe the becoming of a plant dramatically as validly as a scientific explanation.
The bold does not seem correct to me. Goethe was a highly spiritual thinker, so it's likely that he at least thought there was a spiritual reality 'behind' the appearances of Nature. What you are describing actually sounds like naive realism to me, unless we are counting our careful reasoning activity as "experience" of Nature (which I would, because there is no good reason to exclude it).
At the other end of Polarity is his naive continued acceptance of Reason. The irrational underbelly of nature seems never to have appeared to him. That would come a bit later with the younger Schopenhauer, and with that he was led by rational understanding to his idea of Morphology, with nature guided by Bildungstrieb as an expression of “genetic” Urphänomenen. These Urphänomene revert back to metaphysics, however, in which Ideal forms find their manifestation through this Bildungstrieb.
And so in Goethe we find the competing forms of Werther and Farbenlehre - The poet who would be a scientist.
And with that ends my thoughts of Goethe. He came too early to bear fruit - that stage of development wouldn’t ripen for another 60 years or so, but he was a necessary transitional phase. My area of academic study was Western Intellectual History seen from the perspectives of philosophy and physics, and my attention was drawn to major stages, which in this period is best understood from Kant’s closing argument for The Enlightenment and Nietzsche’s closing argument for Romanticism - both in fully ripened bloom.
But our understandings of Goethe, Heidegger, or even Kastrup for that matter, shouldn’t be the prime concern here, but rather a presentation of our own views. I have tried to give an account of mine, which are not those of any other writer, and am prepared to discuss that further. As to your question of “not totally created in the mind”, I mean that our awareness is a an event of entanglement in which we experience relationship. To be conscious means an event in which we become conscious of something. Entanglement means there is no elemental subject/object relationship, but rather an entanglement of equal partnership. Music is the purest from of this, where in the entanglement there is sympathetic vibration equally occurring within the entangled partners.
Related to what I said above, Goethe's acceptance of Reason is exactly what allows him to avoid naive realism of Nature's appearances. You have mentioned this several times before and I have generally been confused about it. It sounds like you think Kant was also defending Reason, even though he is most famous for his critique of it. Do I have that wrong?
Apart from that, as I have mentioned before, I think it is your abstraction of "idea" which makes you feel the plant-Urphänomenen was a reversion back to metaphysics, when Goethe himself speaks of it as a living, breathing, dynamic and concrete reality which he could perceive. If one a priori denies the possibility of Thinking as a sense-organ, then of course we must say anyone perceiving anything beyond what Nature immediately presents in particular forms is metaphysically speculating or hallucinating. That is why I want to hone in on the epistemological method which considers Thinking as a sense-organ. Do you disagree with that and, if so, can you elaborate some counter-arguments (apart from the mere fact that most people don't think of it that way)?
JW wrote:In return, I would be interested in your justification for the applicability of Reason to a fundamentally irrational world.
I don't think it is a fundamentally irrational world. You see how that is a metaphysical conclusion when you add in "fundamentally", right? This is where I may actually agree with Rovelli - all of these terms are relational. From the perspective of our current intellectual cognition, yes there is A LOT about the phenomenal world, especially human experience, which can be called "irrational". But that is a function of our own limited cognition. We can't take this relational dynamic and reify it into a fixed law of Reality, so that what we call the "subconscious" is forever "irrational" and that's just the way it is. That sort of claim is a combination of abstract metaphysics and naive realism, exactly of the sort Kant and Schopenhauer employed in their epistemologies.
Reason will only take us so far before it must be transfigured into Imaginative cognition to make sense of the currently subconscious dynamics of experience, but there is no fundamental discontinuity between them. It is a qualitative leap in cognition, but not a leap into something of a fundamentally different essence than logical reasoning. They both serve the same underlying function - uniting Nature's fragmented appearances into ever-more coherent wholes of experience and thereby moving the human spirit-soul in the direction of its primordial Origin, in full clarity of consciousness. Cleric has posted extensively with illustrations of Imaginative cognition here, so you may want to browse some of those when you have a chance, to get a better idea of what I am referencing.
Maximen und Reflexionen 488
2. Kant most definitely defended Reason, and in the Transcendental Deduction equated it with Will. In The Critique of Practical Reason, he goes on to equate Reason/Will with god. That was the part of Rationalism he retained.
Critique doesn’t mean criticism as in refutation; more a detailed analysis.
3. But the question I asked includes includes why you would think it is a rational world. Afterwords I will give my reasons why it isn’t.
