Phenomenological idealism: definitions of common terms

[AshvinP]

No because I reject the assumption of two separate "spaces" of meaning which just happen to "overlap" in certain instances. A phenomenological approach makes no such assumption and therefore we are dealing with a unified 'space' of experience in which there exists varying peripheral spatiotemporal perspectives perceving the same ideal content, loosely illustrated by the image below.

Wow, wait!
Before arriving at this, you need first to answer my previous question: how do you know that we are experiencing exactly the same ideas? How did you arrive to this statement based on your 1-st person phenomenal experience?

I wrote above:

- Now, whether or not we actually experience exactly the same meaning is a whole different question. Here is a problem: how do we know (prove) that when we look at the same chair, the meanings that we phenomenally experience are exactly the same? Your experience of the meaning is experienced from your 1-rst person perspective, mine is experienced from my perspective. How do we compare them if I can only experience such thought forms our own perspectives? What I'm getting to is that the statement that we can experience exactly the same meanings is already an assumption. We can adopt such assumption, but we need to agree that it is an assumption first.

You said that we can only resolve it by taking a single 1-st person perspective. Fine, let's try, but I think it makes the problem even more difficult. Because if we are both looking at the allegedly the "same wall", how can we prove that we are experience the same meaning if we are not even allowed to compare our experiences?

I didn't arrive to anything, but only said we can't assume they are different ideal content from the outset. The problem is that none of what you are trying to do here is really phenomenology - I was just indulging your approach for a bit, but there's a much better way to do it. What we should do is carefully reason through our observation and thinking of the world content as it arrives in our experience. The first few chapters of PoF do precisely that, so if we are going to do a phenomenologial inquiry, we should proceed from there. You can still object to his reasoning or any unwarranted assumptions you think are being employed. We could start with what is below:

WHEN I observe how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another, I remain entirely without influence on the course of this observed process. The direction of motion and the velocity of the second ball are determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I remain a mere spectator, I can only say anything about the movement of the second ball when it has taken place. It is quite different when I begin to reflect on the content of my observation. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the occurrence. I connect the concept of an elastic ball with certain other concepts of mechanics, and take into consideration the special circumstances which obtain in the instance in question. I try, in other words, to add to the occurrence which takes place without my assistance a second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere. This latter one is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I can rest content with the observation, and renounce all search for concepts if I have no need of them. If however, this need is present, then I am not satisfied until I have brought the concepts Ball, Elasticity, Motion, Impact, Velocity, etc., into a certain connection, to which the observed process is related in a definite way. As surely as the occurrence goes on independently of me, so surely is the conceptual process unable to take place without my assistance.

We shall have to consider later whether this activity of mine really proceeds from my own independent being, or whether those modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think just as those thoughts and thought-connections determine that happen to be present in our consciousness. (see fn 1) For the present we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel obliged to seek for concepts and connections of concepts, which stand in a certain relation to the objects and events which are given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours or whether we perform it according to an unalterable necessity, is a question we need not decide at present. That it appears in the first instance to be ours is beyond question. We know for certain that we are not given the concepts together with the objects. That I am myself the agent in the conceptual process may be an illusion, but to immediate observation it certainly appears to be so. The question is, therefore: What do we gain by supplementing an event with a conceptual counterpart?

[Eugene I]

No because I reject the assumption of two separate "spaces" of meaning which just happen to "overlap" in certain instances. A phenomenological approach makes no such assumption and therefore we are dealing with a unified 'space' of experience in which there exists varying peripheral spatiotemporal perspectives perceving the same ideal content, loosely illustrated by the image below.

PS: Here are the facts of our 1-st person phenomenal experience:
- We experience sense perception phenomena, and each phenomenon bears some qualitative content. E.g visual perception bears the content of "color". We call such content "qualia". Important is that the qualia, as they are phenomenally experienced, are never apart from the phenomenon and its conscious experience, it's always an indivisible whole package phenomenon-quale-experience. We can only separate the quale of "color" from the experience of it by abstraction. And even if we do that, we have no ground to claim that the quale of "red color" somehow somewhere exists apart from the phenomenon and its experience with which this color is associated.
- Now, the same applies to thoughts and ideas. We only 1-st person experience ideas/meanings as a content of thoughts. In a way we can say that the meanings and ideas are the qualia of thoughts. They appear to us as a package thought-phenomenon/meaning/conscious-experience. We can not separate them as we actually experience them. We can only separate a meaning from the thought and experience of it by abstraction. And we have no ground to assume that these meanings somehow somewhere exist apart from the thought-phenomena and their experience with which this meaning is associated. Such statement would be a significant assumption.

[Eugene I]

I didn't arrive to anything, but only said we can't assume they are different ideal content from the outset. The problem is that none of what you are trying to do here is really phenomenology - I was just indulging your approach for a bit, but there's a much better way to do it. What we should do is carefully reason through our observation and thinking of the world content as it arrives in our experience. The first few chapters of PoF do precisely that, so if we are going to do a phenomenologial inquiry, we should proceed from there. You can still object to his reasoning or any unwarranted assumptions you think are being employed. We could start with what is below:

True, we cannot assume that the content is different. But that does not automatically mean that the content is the same. The fact is: we can not assume anything just based on the bare facts of our phenomenal experience. We just don't know.

Steiner's above quote does not address this either. The question remains: how do we arrive directly from bare facts of our 1-st person phenomenal experience (without taking any assumptions) that we are experiencing the same ideal content?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Steiner's and your view that we experience a shared ideal content is wrong. I'm only saying that it does not immediately follow from bare facts of our 1-st person phenomenal experience, unless we make some additional assumptions about it.

[AshvinP]

I didn't arrive to anything, but only said we can't assume they are different ideal content from the outset. The problem is that none of what you are trying to do here is really phenomenology - I was just indulging your approach for a bit, but there's a much better way to do it. What we should do is carefully reason through our observation and thinking of the world content as it arrives in our experience. The first few chapters of PoF do precisely that, so if we are going to do a phenomenologial inquiry, we should proceed from there. You can still object to his reasoning or any unwarranted assumptions you think are being employed. We could start with what is below:

True, we cannot assume that the content is different. But that does not automatically mean that the content is the same. The fact is: we can not assume anything just based on the bare facts of our phenomenal experience. We just don't know.

Steiner's above quote does not address this either. The question remains: how do we arrive directly from bare facts of our 1-st person phenomenal experience (without taking any assumptions) that we are experiencing the same ideal content?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Steiner's and your view that we experience a shared ideal content is wrong. I'm only saying that it does not immediately follow from bare facts of our 1-st person phenomenal experience, unless we make some additional assumptions about it.

You are trying to jump from the beginning of the phenomenological inquiry to a conclusion of it without going through any of the careful reasoning in between. That is against the entire spirit of phenomenology. We need to patiently and carefully reason from step to step. I can't help but notice this parallels the spiritualist desire to go directly from Earthly perspective to eternal all-encompassing Cosmic perspective. Almost all of the value here comes in the journey, and must avoid the temptation to simply abstract from the givens directly into the eternal "truths" of the Cosmos.

So, going back to Steiner, do you disagree with anything quoted there?

[Eugene I]

So, going back to Steiner, do you disagree with anything quoted there?

Steiner is too vague, that's why I'm not s big fan of him, even though I don't see anything grossly wrong there. I have a background in math and I'm used to a more disciplined thinking.

I'm going back to the same questions that I posted above, specifically:
How exactly, form the bare facts of your 1-st person phenomenal experience and without making any assumptions, you arrived at the statement that we all experience a shared ideal content?

My claim is that you can not arrive at such statement without any assumptions. In fact, as Hume showed long ago, if we only consider the base phenomenal single-person 1-st person experience and do not make any assumptions at all, we will get stuck at the extreme agnosticism/skepticism and single-person solipsism. We necessarily need to make certain unprovable assumptions to move from that dead end point. But the point is - we need to clearly and explicitly state which assumptions exactly we make. If you want to make an assumption of the shared ideal content - that's fine, I may even agree with you, but you need to explicitly admit that you are making such assumption.

[findingblanks]

Eugene, I really liked how you started breaking the phenomenological looking at the white wall down.

I was with you all the way until you said:

"Look at a chair in your room and reflect on the actual sensory phenomena in your 1-st person experience related to it. You will first notice the soup of colors and shapes of the whole visual experience of the room. Then you will notice a thought-image phenomenon that selects certain shapes and colors adjacent to each other spatially and interprets this collection of colors and shapes as a certain distinctive "object"."

I think this smuggles in a bunch of assumptions and doesn't track the experience of walking in a room and noticing a chair. Saying that we walk in the room and first see 'a soup of colors and shapes of the whole visual experience of the room...' seems to not only ignore the actual experience but builds up a picture based on other notions about bits and pieces of percepts needing to precede some other experience.

[Eugene I]

Eugene, I really liked how you started breaking the phenomenological looking at the white wall down.

I was with you all the way until you said:

"Look at a chair in your room and reflect on the actual sensory phenomena in your 1-st person experience related to it. You will first notice the soup of colors and shapes of the whole visual experience of the room. Then you will notice a thought-image phenomenon that selects certain shapes and colors adjacent to each other spatially and interprets this collection of colors and shapes as a certain distinctive "object"."

I think this smuggles in a bunch of assumptions and doesn't track the experience of walking in a room and noticing a chair. Saying that we walk in the room and first see 'a soup of colors and shapes of the whole visual experience of the room...' seems to not only ignore the actual experience but builds up a picture based on other notions about bits and pieces of percepts needing to precede some other experience.

You are right, as I said to Ashvin, I did not say that you first experience the soup of bare sensory experiences. I just listed them in the order that starts from the sensory ones. We always experience the whole package of all phenomena (including thought-meanings) together and simultaneously. We cannot say which ones come "first". But notice that there is a actually a sort of a united soup of a unity of all sensory experiences, feelings and thoughts at every moment of our experience. But by focusing our field of attention we emphasize certain areas of this soup and disregard the rest of it.

[findingblanks]

Maybe, Eugene. But I think what you are calling the separated bits (colors, shapes, etc) are necessarily post-phenomena of experience except in unique cases when, say, you are inspecing rooms for any signs of the color red so that when you open the door your first experience is already filtering just for color. Even in that example, we'd see 'red' as the result of prior and present abstractions. So I don't agree that we can't say which comes first. The whole package is the situation and it comes first in any experience. It is not easy to articulate how we experience the 'situation' and our attempts will necessarily imply division where there is none, but I think we can safely say that our experience of the room or the train or whatever are not built up out of whatever we may then call it's 'parts' or 'elements'.

[Martin_]

Ashvin, do you also agree with the following hypothetical exchange:

The bold is already a major assumption which has strayed from the phenomenological approach. You are already assuming a monism in which there are a two subjects with overlapping "spaces" of conscious phenomena (I am including ideal content of appearances in "phenomena"). If any such monism is correct, then it can only result as a conclusion after we have carefully reasoned through our 1st-person experience of phenomena. So no, the "unity of the fields", in the sense you are using it, is a pure assumption at this point and is only appropriate for analytic philosophy.

No because I reject the assumption of two separate "spaces" of meaning which just happen to "overlap" in certain instances. A phenomenological approach makes no such assumption and therefore we are dealing with a unified 'space' of experience in which there exists varying peripheral spatiotemporal perspectives perceving the same ideal content, loosely illustrated by the image below.

Yeh, i know tha image. it's good. But i've always seen it as an ontological claim, not a phenomenal.

I don' tknow how you can go from the defenition of phenomenology that you and Eugene have agreed upon, and then conclude axiomatically, that that means that there is only one phenomenon. (no duality). How does this arise axiomatically, whthout "careful reasoning" out of the definiution of phenomenology. and, ok, say that it does, then you have to be VERY careful to constrain yourself and never claim that this unity is real. That would be an ontological statement. This, btw, i think is one of my main gripes with Steiner, i realize now. That - in my opinion - he mashes phenomenology and ontology into one with no rigor at all.

I think what the PoF is suffering from trying to be too many things at once; it's using both Analytical Thinking, and Imaginative Thinking at the same time. It doesn't really work for me. It makes me confused about "What does he (Steiner) actually mean?". I'm just not wired the right way.


By the way. I have NO problem with a worldview aka. Steiner. I just can't follow his (and yours sometimes as well) trail of thought.

[Eugene I]

Maybe, Eugene. But I think what you are calling the separated bits (colors, shapes, etc) are necessarily post-phenomena of experience except in unique cases when, say, you are inspecing rooms for any signs of the color read so that when you open the door your first experience is already filtering just for color. Even in that example, we'd see 'red' as the result of prior and present abstractions. So I don't agree that we can't say which comes first. The whole package is the situation and it comes first in any experience. It is not easy to articulate how we experience the 'situation' and our attempts will necessarily imply division where there is none, but I think we can safely say that our experience of the room or the train or whatever are not built up out of whatever we may then call it's 'parts' or 'elements'.

That's an excellent point, and I was trying to point to that tacitly and getting here when I said above that the qualia of the perceptions are indivisible from the perceptions and their experiences, and the meanings are indivisible from the thought-phenomena and their experiences. But this is of key importance. In fact what we directly experience is a wholeness of the phenomenal experience all at once. This wholeness is indivisible (as it is experienced) into colors, shapes, thoughts and ideas, and experiences of them. So, of course, my analysis was already thought-post-processing of that experience to emphasize certain aspects and components of that soup one by one to try to understand what's going on. But I never implied or made an assumption that I can divide this wholeness into separate pieces and consider them as some separate objects or entities. The fundamental experiential fact is: our 1-st person direct phenomenal experience is an indivisible wholeness.

But note that this observation makes the validity of the assumption of the shared ideal content more difficult, because the ideal content is inseparable from the wholeness of the phenomenal experience which includes all the rest other than pure ideal content. This points to the fact that the "pure shared ideal content" is an abstraction and the existence of such content is an assumption. (Which does not mean that it would not be a legitimate assumption to make)