Phenomenological idealism: definitions of common terms

[Cleric K]

And once again as serendipity would have it, Cleric might just as well have offered his 'Jerobeam Fenderson - Nuclear Black Noise (oscilloscope / lissajous music)' post in the Patterns and Meaning in Music thread.

I'll leave it here as to show what music should not be like But joke aside, seen through the Imaginative, the state of humanity today resembles much more Nuclear Black Noise than anything else. Music in fact has much more important role to play than simply providing aesthetic pleasure. It will be instrumental in the restoration of the harmony of the hidden layers.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'll leave it here as to show what music should not be like But joke aside, seen through the Imaginative, the state of humanity today resembles much more Nuclear Black Noise than anything else.

As King Crimson foreshadowed in 21st Century Schizoid Man

[Eugene I]

Yes, and no one has denied the authenticity and experiential depth of the mystical experience. But I must bring again the blurry analogy. Understanding the totality as a meaningful whole doesn't by itself make our perspective equivalent to that of the One Spirit that speaks forth the Cosmos. As you say, it's very important realization and once we grasp it it will be with us till the end of time, so to speak. But what we grasp is really only a seed that must grow. We behold the Cosmos as differentiated. We have five fingers on each hand. Santeri would protest, he would say this is dishonest, that in reality discrete numbers don't exist. But still... we have five fingers on the hand. Blame the Universe for being dishonest and creating five distinct fingers instead of one continuous. So it's not a question to reduce the higher order into unnecessary fragments. The question is to recognize what is already differentiated. Smearing it out doesn't make it whole. We still bump in the differentiated furniture no matter if we believe it is all one. So yes, we are really developing concepts, we speak about astral, etheric body, soul organs, planetary spheres, hierarchy of beings and so on. The prejudice is that this is optional. But it's not. What is optional is breaking down matter in the LHC. This won't bring any further insight into reality. The basic facts of QM and GR already give us almost everything necessary to spiritualize science and understand everything from a higher perspective. But the situation is not the same according to higher knowledge.

I agree with all that, Cleric. I'm just saying that, notwithstanding that it's all true and important, it is an incomplete view missing a certain essential facet of the Idea - its existential aspects, and this facet is what mystics experienced. On the other hand, the mystics indeed don't pay much attention to the non-existential aspects of the world of meanings and see a rather "smeared" picture if it, and that is exactly the incompleteness and limitation of their path. I'm saying that what needs to be done is integration of both. It is basically like reducing 3D experience of the world to different 2D experiences by applying different "sections" to the complete 3D. Mystics apply a "vertical" section that smears all horizontal content into a soup, and spiritual scientists apply a horizontal section ignoring the existential dimension. What is needed is integration of these 2D sections into one to restore the wholeness of the 3D. I'm not saying it is absolutely necessary, there is no need to push it, we can still progress to Love and Harmony without resorting to existential dimensions, but at some point this integration will just be natural and inevitable. But, if someone endeavors to put some effort to undertake this integration, it will only help to enhance the apprehension of more dimensions of the Idea, adding more facets to the richness of the knowledge of Wisdom and Love. The experience of the mystics does reveal the (meaning of) the primordial beauty of forms when experienced from the existential dimensions perspective, which is an existential facet of Love and Wisdom.

This primordial sphere of pervasive essence is the Great Perfection of samsara and nirvana.
Within the womb of the expanse, spontaneously and always present,
Samsara is all good, and nirvana is good too.
Appearance is all good, and emptiness is all good too.
Birth and death are all good; pleasure and pain are all good.
Everything is all good—great spontaneous presence.

This above quote does not deny the reality of suffering and the need to progress from ignorance to Knowledge and Wisdom. It just reveals an experiential dimension from which perspective everything is already good, while form the perspective of another dimension there is a developmental momentum from ignorance and suffering towards Wisdom and Love, with these perspectives being not in the contradiction to each other, but complementing each other.

[AshvinP]

Yes, and no one has denied the authenticity and experiential depth of the mystical experience. But I must bring again the blurry analogy. Understanding the totality as a meaningful whole doesn't by itself make our perspective equivalent to that of the One Spirit that speaks forth the Cosmos. As you say, it's very important realization and once we grasp it it will be with us till the end of time, so to speak. But what we grasp is really only a seed that must grow. We behold the Cosmos as differentiated. We have five fingers on each hand. Santeri would protest, he would say this is dishonest, that in reality discrete numbers don't exist. But still... we have five fingers on the hand. Blame the Universe for being dishonest and creating five distinct fingers instead of one continuous. So it's not a question to reduce the higher order into unnecessary fragments. The question is to recognize what is already differentiated. Smearing it out doesn't make it whole. We still bump in the differentiated furniture no matter if we believe it is all one. So yes, we are really developing concepts, we speak about astral, etheric body, soul organs, planetary spheres, hierarchy of beings and so on. The prejudice is that this is optional. But it's not. What is optional is breaking down matter in the LHC. This won't bring any further insight into reality. The basic facts of QM and GR already give us almost everything necessary to spiritualize science and understand everything from a higher perspective. But the situation is not the same according to higher knowledge.

I agree with all that, Cleric. I'm just saying that, notwithstanding that it's all true and important, it is an incomplete view missing a certain essential facet of the Idea - its existential aspects, and this facet is what mystics experienced. On the other hand, the mystics indeed don't pay much attention to the non-existential aspects of the world of meanings and see a rather "smeared" picture if it, and that is exactly the incompleteness and limitation of their path. I'm saying that what needs to be done is integration of both.

I don't get it Eugene... you say I was correct about the implicit dualism in your view, but your responses to Cleric are making the exact same points you have been making since we started many months ago, which are all born of that implicit dualism. You feel Cleric is not adequately "integrating both" because you have created an artificial duality between "ideational" and "awareness/experiencing/existing/etc." to begin with. Since Reality is not, in fact, two, Cleric cannot integrate these two facets, one of which is a complete abstract artifice. As he has mentioned often, it is classic example of the person sitting on the Thinking tree who saws off the branch on which he is sitting and then blames the tree for not being able to support his weight.

[Eugene I]

I don't get it Eugene... you say I was correct about the implicit dualism in your view, but your responses to Cleric are making the exact same points you have been making since we started many months ago, which are all born of that implicit dualism. You feel Cleric is not adequately "integrating both" because you have created an artificial duality between "ideational" and "awareness/experiencing/existing/etc." to begin with. Since Reality is not, in fact, two, Cleric cannot integrate these two facets, one of which is a complete abstract artifice. As he has mentioned often, it is classic example of the person sitting on the Thinking tree who saws off the branch on which he is sitting and then blames the tree for not being able to support his weight.

Let me give you an analogy. Let's say I'm blind from birth but not deaf, I can experience sounds and cognate the meanings of audible forms. But I can not see and therefore can not cognate the meanings of visual forms and colors. My friend is the other way around - he is deaf but can see. In reality the meanings of the visual and audible forms are not apart, they are inseparable dimensions of the same manifold of meanings. But I can not cognate the visual dimension of meanings and my friend can not cognate the audible one. Then we both go to a hospital and I have my vision restored and my friend have his hearing restored. Now we can experience the dimensions we were unable before, and cognate the meanings related to those dimensions, which means we can now "integrate" from our perspectives those dimensions together. In fact nothing actually happened to those dimensions, they have always been united, it's just that we cold not perceive them both at the same time.

We can not deny the fact that we, as limited human beings, have a limited and fragmented knowledge of the World/Idea and can only cognate limited parts of its fulness. Most of us do not perceive the high-cognition meanings, structures and hierarchies that Cleric perceives. Similarly, most of us do not experience the non-dual mystic states. And there is perhaps a lot of other meanings and ideas in the universe that we are not aware of. But this fact of the incompleteness and fragmentation of our knowledge does nothing to the unbreakable unity of the Idea. The seeming fragmentation only applies to our limited perspective and incomplete knowledge of it. And when we are able to break with our experiential knowledge into some dimensions and levels previously unknown to us, we can say that we now "integrated" them into our body of knowledge.

[AshvinP]

I don't get it Eugene... you say I was correct about the implicit dualism in your view, but your responses to Cleric are making the exact same points you have been making since we started many months ago, which are all born of that implicit dualism. You feel Cleric is not adequately "integrating both" because you have created an artificial duality between "ideational" and "awareness/experiencing/existing/etc." to begin with. Since Reality is not, in fact, two, Cleric cannot integrate these two facets, one of which is a complete abstract artifice. As he has mentioned often, it is classic example of the person sitting on the Thinking tree who saws off the branch on which he is sitting and then blames the tree for not being able to support his weight.

Let me give you an analogy. Let's say I'm blind from birth but not deaf, I can experience sounds and cognate the meanings of audible forms. But I can not see and therefore can not cognate the meanings of visual forms and colors. My friend is the other way around - he is deaf but can see. In reality the meanings of the visual and audible forms are not apart, they are inseparable dimensions of the same manifold of meanings. But I can not cognate the visual dimension of meanings and my friend can not cognate the audible one. Then we both go to a hospital and I have my vision restored and my friend have his hearing restored. Now we can experience the dimensions we were unable before, and cognate the meanings related to those dimensions, which means we can now "integrate" from our perspectives those dimensions together. In fact nothing actually happened to those dimensions, they have always been united, it's just that we cold not perceive them both at the same time.

We can not deny the fact that we, as limited human beings, have a limited and fragmented knowledge of the World/Idea and can only cognate limited parts of its fulness. Most of us do not perceive the high-cognition meanings, structures and hierarchies that Cleric perceives. Similarly, most of us do not experience the non-dual mystic states. And there is perhaps a lot of other meanings and ideas in the universe that we are not aware of. But this fact of the incompleteness and fragmentation of our knowledge does nothing to the unbreakable unity of the Idea. The seeming fragmentation only applies to our limited perspective and incomplete knowledge of it. And when we are able to break with our experiential knowledge into some dimensions and levels previously unknown to us, we can say that we now "integrated" them into our body of knowledge.

Eugene,

I wasn't saying I don't get the meaning of your criticism, but rather I don't get why you are still making it.

Let's just observe what an "analogy" is, for starters. It is what the intellect uses by way of abstraction to point to an underlying Reality which cannot be captured directly by its cognitions. Cleric has made many analogies on this forum - in fact, almost every post he writes uses at least one. For ex., the GR analogy to show the way in which Perception and Idea exist in a polar relation (form-formlessness, respectively). So what is the difference between his and yours above? I think it's clear his are operating within deeper layers of meaning. They are still employing intellectual concepts of GR, because, after all, he is trying to explain higher cognitions to people who can only perceive with intellectual cognition. If he didn't employ the intellectual concepts, then it would be completely meaningless to us (due to our own cognitive limitation).

But the GR analogy has now moved deeper into the realm of relativistic Time-experience. Your analogy is still operating from fixed spatially-oriented concepts of particular sense-perceptions and the meaning we cognize when observing them. His analogy is speaking to the very structure of what our cognition is universally doing when we engage any sense-perceptions of temporal phenomena and their relations. So who is more likely to be misunderstanding whom here? Could it possibly be the person who has explained, by way of analogy, the very structure of how you construct your analogies in order to criticize of his lack of "integration"? I don't think so. I realize this is a really roundabout way of making a simple point, but I am running out of ways to provide helpful explanations without just copying and pasting what I have written before.

Also, you are using an analogy to explain your criticism of our philosophical approach (which we already understand). And, on top of that, it is simply false to assert that Cleric has not experienced the "non-dual mystic states" of meaning, i.e. that he is either 'deaf' or 'blind' to Eastern mystical experiences. Cleric, on the other hand, used an analogy to illuminate the problematic polar relation of Perception and Idea which gives rise to the dualistic thinking you are employing when the polar relation is not understood concretely.

[Eugene I]

Another analogy is a famous "not seeing the forest through the trees". There are two extreme ways to know the forest: to move very closely and only look at the trees and not see the forest as a whole, and move very far away and see the forest as a smeared whole but not see the individual trees. The first perspective makes impression of a forest as a collection of fragmented pieces (trees) and not realize the unity of the forest, the second one apprehends the unity of the forest but is completely blind to the structure and details of it. Both perspectives are limited. The most wholistic way to apprehend the forest is to be far enough to see the forest but close enough to see the trees, and in this way to know its both aspects - the unity as a forest and the structure and details of each individual tree.

[findingblanks]

Great, Scott. But my larger point is simply that when you say:

" Steiner's phenomenology is his epistemology, which differs from yours and Kant's."

This seems to suggest that you read PoF as a phenomenology. I'm glad you don't, but I can see why people might take it that you do. I certainly find bits and pieces in PoF that describe experience but I find that in most epistemologies. But I think we can say that Steiner's phenomenology is very distinct from many of the core claims he makes in PoF that are, on the whole, taken as phenomenology by his students. For example, you will find that a vast majority of his students great his phrases about the necessity of attaching a concept to a precept as phenomenology. Another example is that that vast majority of his serious readers will claim that Steiner's comments about an alien that has never formed a concept facing reality is a phenomenological description of something real rather than a thought experiment packed with presuppositions about an 'encounter' that humans must have before they can 'attach' the correct concept to the blooming buzzing confusion. I am aware that you might not treat PoF phenomenologically, but your statement made me think you were inclined to which is why I brought up my opinion that very much is not. And I think Steiner showed over the years - not just with the systematic change in language he brings to the 1916 additions - that he certainly didn't want it to be read in such a way. I think this was a process that we see him working out slowly over time.

[AshvinP]

Great, Scott. But my larger point is simply that when you say:

" Steiner's phenomenology is his epistemology, which differs from yours and Kant's."

This seems to suggest that you read PoF as a phenomenology. I'm glad you don't, but I can see why people might take it that you do. I certainly find bits and pieces in PoF that describe experience but I find that in most epistemologies. But I think we can say that Steiner's phenomenology is very distinct from many of the core claims he makes in PoF that are, on the whole, taken as phenomenology by his students. For example, you will find that a vast majority of his students great his phrases about the necessity of attaching a concept to a precept as phenomenology. Another example is that that vast majority of his serious readers will claim that Steiner's comments about an alien that has never formed a concept facing reality is a phenomenological description of something real rather than a thought experiment packed with presuppositions about an 'encounter' that humans must have before they can 'attach' the correct concept to the blooming buzzing confusion. I am aware that you might not treat PoF phenomenologically, but your statement made me think you were inclined to which is why I brought up my opinion that very much is not. And I think Steiner showed over the years - not just with the systematic change in language he brings to the 1916 additions - that he certainly didn't want it to be read in such a way. I think this was a process that we see him working out slowly over time.

I don't think Scott ever said PoF should not be read as phenomenology. Steiner quite clearly intended it to be, as I quoted to you on the other thread (or maybe this one, I am not sure). Here it is again below in case you missed it. There is nothing imcompatible with thought-experiments to illustrate a point and phenomenology. We could say he is 'circumambulating' the phenomenon of cognition, which is of course a tricky one to approach with intellect, from multiple different angles, one of them being thought-experiments (but these are rare).

I am well aware that many who have read thus far will not find my discussion “scientific”, as this term is used today. To this I can only reply that I have so far been concerned not with scientific results of any kind, but with the simple description of what every one of us experiences in his own consciousness. The inclusion of a few phrases about attempts to reconcile man's consciousness and the world serves solely to elucidate the actual facts. I have therefore made no attempt to use the various expressions “I”, “Spirit”, “World”, “Nature”, in the precise way that is usual in psychology and philosophy. The ordinary consciousness is unaware of the sharp distinctions made by the sciences, and my purpose so far has been solely to record the facts of everyday experience. I am concerned, not with the way in which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with the way in which we experience it in every moment of our lives.

[findingblanks]

"I don't think Scott ever said PoF should not be read as phenomenology."

Agreed. When Scott said that Steiner's epistemology IS his phenomenology, I took him to mean the same. Which is why I pointed out where I see it differently. Scott's a big brainer