Intuitive Idealism vs. Analytic Idealism (Part II): An alternative formulation of idealism

[Eugene I]

Why are we hung up on "refuting materialism"? That has been done a million different ways already. Someone who still clings on to it doesn't need to be refuted, just given space to (hopefully) realize all of these challenges exist. In fact, I think engaging them in debate only fuels their desire to defend their ego by way of materialism. That has been my consistent experience debating with any educated materialist - it leads nowhere fast. I say, if we want to promote meaningful discussion, we should look within the idealist framework and see what these natural scientific results are actually revealing to us about the structure of Reality.

The point is not about arguing with materialists, but about having sufficient argumentation base to talk to and convince general public. And that argumentation needs to have two bags: one is the arguments showing the flaws of materialism, the other one is showing the benefits of idealism. Materialists are still in majority among scientists, and general public has a lot of trust in science (based on the technological progress resulted from it). So in the mind of an average person a typical impression is that materialism is backed by science and idealism is at worst anti-scientific or at best quasi-scientific quasi-spiritual quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo. On the other hand, Steve is absolutely right, people do see and experience the meaning crisis resulted from the dominance of the materialistic culture and worldview. So, people are lost, they can not just switch to the idealistic mumbo-jumbo from the materialistic allegedly scientifically backed worldview just because it gives them some meaning and hope in life. Idealism needs to demonstrate that it can provide consistent and coherent worldview not only delivering universal meanings and values, but also can be coherent with scientific facts and proven math models of natural sciences. It also needs to address and provide clear no-nonsense answers to basic metaphysical questions obvious to most general public, such as the origin of consciousness, the origin of the perceived universe and its consistent structured laws, the origin of evil and suffering and so on. If you try to talk about idealism to an average person, one of the the first questions they ask is usually "ok, consciousness is fundamental, but how does the apparent universe with its consistent and precise laws emerge from consciousness and how is it maintained by consciousness?". Idealists need to have simple and clear no-mumbo-jumbo FAQ answers to such questions if they want to have any influence on the further progress of humanity.

The situation is simple and obvious to any metaphysically curious person. The two most basic observations about the reality are:
1. There is an apparent universe exhibiting patterns that follow precise math rules
2. There is consciousness experiencing, thinking and perceiving the universe.
A coherent metaphysical explanation for these basic observations needs to start from an assumption of a certain fundamental and then demonstrate how everything else emerges and derives from the fundamental. In materialistic paradigm #1 is declared fundamental but it stumbles upon the explanation of how #2 emerges from #1. Similarly, in the idealistic paradigm, where #2 is declared fundamental, the explanation of the emergence of #1 needs to be provided to have an explanatory closure. Panpsychism/dual-aspect monism gets around these emergence questions by declaring both #1 and #2 as fundamentals, but it has a bunch of other inconsistencies and problems of its own.

So far I was not satisfied with the BK's answer to this problem: a savage-genus non-metacognitive MAL instinctively trying different universes in his ideation activity until it runs into something that "works" and "feels good" to its instincts - that does not make much sense to me, and I see many other of his readers pondering about it with doubts. The explanation offered by the Intuitive Idealism presented in this thread does not seem to give a coherent explanation either. The theistic explanation (per Steve's theology) seems to make more sense (to me at least). There may also be other explanations in other versions of idealism. Now, you seem to have your own version of it:

It is no grand mystery why our truly shared (transpersonal) patterned Thinking activity leads to very precise and consistent measurements, once we make that slight shift in perspective. The general "scientific and public community" will never be satisfied with any explanation until they learn to consider their own Thinking activity and its role in the phenomenal world, and we are in no position to advise them on how to do that until we start doing it ourselves.

If you could present such explanation I would be very interested to know.

[Eugene I]

Here is Goethe's mathematical view, from Steiner's Goethean Science, which captures much of what I was trying to point out above:

Let us examine this nature more closely. Mathematics deals with magnitude, with that which allows of a more or less. Magnitude, however, is not something existing in itself. In the broad scope of human experience there is nothing that is only magnitude. Along with its other characteristics, each thing also has some that are determined by numbers. Since mathematics concerns itself with magnitudes, what it studies are not objects of experience complete in themselves, but rather only everything about them that can be measured or counted. It separates off from things everything that can be subjected to this latter operation. It thus acquires a whole world of abstractions within which it then works. It does not have to do with things, but only with things insofar as they are magnitudes. It must admit that here it is dealing only with one aspect of what is real, and that reality has yet many other aspects over which mathematics has no power. Mathematical judgments are not judgments that fully encompass real objects, but rather are valid only within the ideal world of abstractions that we ourselves have conceptually separated off from the objects as one aspect of reality. Mathematics abstracts magnitude and number from things, establishes the completely ideal relationships between magnitudes and numbers, and hovers in this way in a pure world of thoughts. The things of reality, insofar as they are magnitude and number, allow one then to apply mathematical truths. It is therefore definitely an error to believe that one could grasp the whole of nature with mathematical judgments. Nature, in fact, is not merely quantity; it is also quality, and mathematics has to do only with the first. The mathematical approach and the approach that deals purely with what is qualitative must work hand in hand; they will meet in the thing, of which they each grasp one aspect. Goethe characterizes this relationship with the words: “Mathematics, like dialectics, is an organ of the inner, higher sense; its practice is an art, like oratory. For both, nothing is of value except the form; the content is a matter of indifference to them. It is all the same to them whether mathematics is calculating in pennies or dollars or whether rhetoric is defending something true or false."

I agree with the above, it's all pretty obvious, but that does now answer at all why and how the natural phenomena follow and exhibit mathematically precise patterns.

[AshvinP]

Here is Goethe's mathematical view, from Steiner's Goethean Science, which captures much of what I was trying to point out above:

Let us examine this nature more closely. Mathematics deals with magnitude, with that which allows of a more or less. Magnitude, however, is not something existing in itself. In the broad scope of human experience there is nothing that is only magnitude. Along with its other characteristics, each thing also has some that are determined by numbers. Since mathematics concerns itself with magnitudes, what it studies are not objects of experience complete in themselves, but rather only everything about them that can be measured or counted. It separates off from things everything that can be subjected to this latter operation. It thus acquires a whole world of abstractions within which it then works. It does not have to do with things, but only with things insofar as they are magnitudes. It must admit that here it is dealing only with one aspect of what is real, and that reality has yet many other aspects over which mathematics has no power. Mathematical judgments are not judgments that fully encompass real objects, but rather are valid only within the ideal world of abstractions that we ourselves have conceptually separated off from the objects as one aspect of reality. Mathematics abstracts magnitude and number from things, establishes the completely ideal relationships between magnitudes and numbers, and hovers in this way in a pure world of thoughts. The things of reality, insofar as they are magnitude and number, allow one then to apply mathematical truths. It is therefore definitely an error to believe that one could grasp the whole of nature with mathematical judgments. Nature, in fact, is not merely quantity; it is also quality, and mathematics has to do only with the first. The mathematical approach and the approach that deals purely with what is qualitative must work hand in hand; they will meet in the thing, of which they each grasp one aspect. Goethe characterizes this relationship with the words: “Mathematics, like dialectics, is an organ of the inner, higher sense; its practice is an art, like oratory. For both, nothing is of value except the form; the content is a matter of indifference to them. It is all the same to them whether mathematics is calculating in pennies or dollars or whether rhetoric is defending something true or false."

I agree with the above, it's all pretty obvious, but that does now answer at all why and how the natural phenomena follow and exhibit mathematically precise patterns.

Clearly the above is just one quote from an entire book examining these questions. I could link you to the free book and wait for you to get back to me, but that has been done numerous times and I am guessing the links have not been clicked on once. Even in this short quote, though, the answer to your question is implicit - the "why" and "how" will be found in the qualitative world of experience, which is that aspect of the phenomenal world abstract mathematics purposefully leaves out because it simply has nothing useful to tell us about qualities of experience (by itself). If we try to derive the solution from within the ideal world of abstractions, because we think that is what the lay public wants to convince them to come over to "our side" (why should they, if "our side" is just another world of pure abstractions?), then we will get nowhere, because the solution is not to be found within that world. Cleric's new essay is precisely pointing us in the direction where we can discover, from within our own experience, how and why the natural phenomena exhibit the precise rhythmic patterns that they do. Have you read it or do you plan on reading it? These things should not be governed by what we think academics or lay people want to hear, only by a deep and thoughtful desire for the Truth.

[Steve Petermann]

I don't actually think any metaphysical or theological formulation will be what sparks or maintains a move towards more integrated science, art, mythos, spirituality.

Doesn't the latest essay (which you seem to like) offered by Cleric outline a metaphysical system? Whether people realize it or not they orient their lives around a metaphysic. It may not be well-formed or thought out but it still informs their thinking and actions. If they change their metaphysical thinking it can have an enormous impact on them. We see this with people who have made some transition.

That is because I hold to the "evolution of consciousness" (metamorphoses of the Spirit) throughout human history. If you are familiar with Barfield, then it is the exact same view he held. I have written about this pretty extensively, so I will just give the conclusion - each individual must now give birth to the Spirit's entire metamorphic progression towards Self-knowledge from within themselves.

This issue of spiritual or religious evolution is a difficult one for me. I do believe we see progress for the good as history has proceeded but there is always a counter-insurgency as well. Here are my worries with talking about spiritual evolution. First, it seems to denigrate the spirituality of early humans. Did the early animists have an inferior spirituality? As history has unfolded through the millennia do the religious and spiritual traditions represent spirituality that is lacking? Here's what I think. Each epoch presents unique challenges for finite beings. However, in every age there is a divine depth to everything and that depth exerts its influence, trying to create love, beauty, and meaning. Early hominids may have had a rudimentary framework within which they lived but I also think their divine depth worked within it. This is also true throughout the history of spirituality.

This spiritual evolution idea can also morph into an elitist hierarchy where only the few move along this evolutionary path to great heights. I think the basis target for any metaphysical system should be something like the uneducated cleaning person who works two jobs to support her children. If they can't be a paragon of spirituality then something is wrong with the system.

I also worry that this evolutionary sentiment can lead to unhelpful eschatological thinking. It goes something like this. Since there is spiritual evolution, at some point there will be an endpoint. Here we could think of becoming a Buddha or reaching de Chardin's omega point. This tends to cast a negative connotation on life where there needs to be a fundamental fix. I don't think this is what life is about. I've written about the problem of perfection and rejecting world rejection. I think the world is fundamentally exactly as God wants where the many things we admire (and speculating also God) are possible. What might those admirable qualities be? The list is large. Here are only a few: Love, Courage, Grit, Honor, Self-sacrifice, Vitality, Compassion, Creativity, Humility, Faith in the face of doubt, Long-suffering, Kindness, and on and on. Finite life makes these possible to have. Should there be an ending resolution to all this or some pinnacle to be had? I don't think so.

[AshvinP]

I don't actually think any metaphysical or theological formulation will be what sparks or maintains a move towards more integrated science, art, mythos, spirituality.

Doesn't the latest essay (which you seem to like) offered by Cleric outline a metaphysical system? Whether people realize it or not they orient their lives around a metaphysic. It may not be well-formed or thought out but it still informs their thinking and actions. If they change their metaphysical thinking it can have an enormous impact on them. We see this with people who have made some transition.

No, it states up front the following:

The most we can say without going beyond the given facts is that we experience World Content entirely of conscious phenomena - colors, sounds, feelings, thoughts, etc. These are in continuous metamorphosis. So we are basically approaching the question in the same way as science but instead of imagining a real world 'out there' which our thoughts reflect, we take the immediate world of the metamorphosis of the World Content of consciousness. When we do this we are safe because we don't presuppose anything. Even if there are many deeper facts behind the appearances of conscious phenomena this doesn't change the given fact that we experience the continuous transformation of the conscious World Content.

One could say we are assuming that we experience conscious phenomena which is constantly changing, but we can't reasonably question that. Besides that, I do not see any other metaphysical assumptions. Perhaps you do, in which case I am curious which you are referring to.

That is because I hold to the "evolution of consciousness" (metamorphoses of the Spirit) throughout human history. If you are familiar with Barfield, then it is the exact same view he held. I have written about this pretty extensively, so I will just give the conclusion - each individual must now give birth to the Spirit's entire metamorphic progression towards Self-knowledge from within themselves.

This issue of spiritual or religious evolution is a difficult one for me. I do believe we see progress for the good as history has proceeded but there is always a counter-insurgency as well. Here are my worries with talking about spiritual evolution. First, it seems to denigrate the spirituality of early humans. Did the early animists have an inferior spirituality? As history has unfolded through the millennia do the religious and spiritual traditions represent spirituality that is lacking? Here's what I think. Each epoch presents unique challenges for finite beings. However, in every age there is a divine depth to everything and that depth exerts its influence, trying to create love, beauty, and meaning. Early hominids may have had a rudimentary framework within which they lived but I also think their divine depth worked within it. This is also true throughout the history of spirituality.

This spiritual evolution idea can also morph into an elitist hierarchy where only the few move alone this evolutionary path to great heights. I think the basis target for any metaphysical system should be something like the uneducated cleaning person who works two jobs to support her children. If they can't be a paragon of spirituality then something is wrong with the system.

I also worry that this evolutionary sentiment can lead to unhelpful eschatological thinking. It goes something like this. Since there is spiritual evolution, at some point there will be an endpoint. Here we could think of becoming a Buddha or reaching de Chardin's omega point. This tends to cast a negative connotation on life where there needs to be a fundamental fix. I don't think this is what life is about. I've written about the problem of perfection and rejecting world rejection. I think the world is fundamentally exactly as God wants where the many things we admire (and speculating also God) are possible. What might those admirable qualities be? The list is large. Here are only a few: Love, Courage, Grit, Honor, Self-sacrifice, Vitality, Compassion, Creativity, Humility, Faith in the face of doubt, Long-suffering, Kindness, and on and on. Finite life makes these possible to have. Should there be an ending resolution to all this or some pinnacle to be had? I don't think so.

I agree, we cannot simply accept a worldview because it mentions "spiritual evolution", but by the same token we cannot reject it for only that reason either. Many people have glommed onto Goethe, Hegel, Steiner, Barfield, Gebser, etc. to take the "spiritual evolution" without any of the hard work of actually making a coherent set of arguments for it. I would not put Teilhard de Chardin in that camp, but even if we did, my view is not really based on his, but the aforementioned thinkers. I can tell you for certain Steiner-Barfield do not posit any sort of final eschatology of the sort you are referencing - in fact, Steiner really went of his way to combat that conception. When we look deeply into his body of work (of which there is seemingly no end), you will see he actually dispels a lot of "new age" misconceptions which were cropping up through Theosophy and other similar movements at that time. He even goes after every misconception cropping up within his own spiritual science, Anthroposophy.

Anyway, the point is that these things need to be judged on their own merits without any presuppositions or prejudices, one way or the other. Since more people are generally familiar with Barfield here, I will just speak about his approach for now. He coined the term "original participation", which was another way of saying our spiritual ancestors were much more directly connected to the noumenal spiritual realm than we are now (that is quite obvious for anyone who takes a serious look at ancient mythological traditions). Yet, in the same way that an infant cannot reflect deeply on those numinous experiences because they do not sense themselves as individual personalities, that was also true of earliest humans. I think that fact also becomes obvious to anyone who looks seriously at the progression of mythology (and all human culture more generally) from ancient India to ancient Persia, Egypt, and Greece-Rome.

The reason Steiner started Anthroposophy and Barfield became one is precisely because they did not like the trend of treating this world like a virtual reality simulation and nothing more - so Steiner went from Theosophy ("the Wisdom of God") to "the Wisdom of humans", just to bring it much closer to human culture and our daily lives on Earth. They had the utmost curiosity in the World Content around them as they experienced it. No stone should be left unturned. I hope that is enough info to dispel some of your doubts for now, which are generally well-founded, but not in this case. And it would be nice to hear your thoughts on the substantive arguments made in favor of the "spiritual evolution" view as Anthroposophy holds to it. You may want to start with Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Or if you want to start with pure phenomenology of Thinking, then you should go with Steiner's The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

The latter goes through every modern philosophical worldview and dispels them with very precise reasoning, while also building up an idealist philosophy of Thinking and spiritual evolutionary ethics which naturally unfolds from that philosophy. Don't get too caught up on the terms and labels I am using, because I think you will find quickly that none of those terms do the work of Steiner or Barfield justice.

[Steve Petermann]

One could say we are assuming that we experience conscious phenomena which is constantly changing, but we can't reasonably question that. Besides that, I do not see any other metaphysical assumptions. Perhaps you do, in which case I am curious which you are referring to.

He has a whole section on The Time-Consciousness Spectrum and things like inversion horizon, holistic integration, subconscious elemental world rhythms, resonant attunement, waves, etc. If those aren't metaphysical speculations, I don't know what would be.

[Eugene I]

Clearly the above is just one quote from an entire book examining these questions. I could link you to the free book and wait for you to get back to me, but that has been done numerous times and I am guessing the links have not been clicked on once. Even in this short quote, though, the answer to your question is implicit - the "why" and "how" will be found in the qualitative world of experience, which is that aspect of the phenomenal world abstract mathematics purposefully leaves out because it simply has nothing useful to tell us about qualities of experience (by itself). If we try to derive the solution from within the ideal world of abstractions, because we think that is what the lay public wants to convince them to come over to "our side" (why should they, if "our side" is just another world of pure abstractions?), then we will get nowhere, because the solution is not to be found within that world. Cleric's new essay is precisely pointing us in the direction where we can discover, from within our own experience, how and why the natural phenomena exhibit the precise rhythmic patterns that they do. Have you read it or do you plan on reading it? These things should not be governed by what we think academics or lay people want to hear, only by a deep and thoughtful desire for the Truth.

Obviously the flow of our conscious phenomena is qualitative by nature, it's a no-brainer for anyone studying consciousness. All quantitative is always an abstraction of qualitative. I read Cleric's essay. It's a nice writeup, to me it looks like a 2000-old Buddhist Vipassana meditation technique superimposed with Cleric's theory of Time-Consciousness wave cycles and higher order beings manifesting these cycles. This is one of the possible explanatory model of the global-to-local encompassing structure of the conscious activity. I still didn't find the answer to the question why and how the observed natural phenomena (when we extract the quantitative aspects from them by means of abstract thinking), always follow and exhibit mathematically precise patterns according to the Schrodinger equation. Schrodinger equation is not a solution, it is only a consistent observation which by itself does not give us any answers to "why" questions.

Overall, looking at your and Cleric's activity, I can see a version of idealism within the Hagel-Goethe-Steiner tradition. It's a work in progress and hopefully will end up in a coherent idealistic paradigm. I still can't help seeing a lot of explanatory gaps, unanswered questions and unaddressed problems. You are missing:
- The explanation of why and how the observed natural phenomena follow and exhibit mathematically precise patterns according to the Schrodinger equation. (how many times I asked it ?) That is a sub-question of a more general question: why and how and by whom and for what purpose the apparent observed world was created?
- The overall picture and meaning of the metamorphic process: why and how did we as individuated conscious beings started or existence as dissociated conscious activities, why are we dissociated from the global consciousness, and why are we metamorphing toward the global integration? What is the meaning and purpose of this process?
- The problem of suffering and evil: why suffering and evil is necessary in this world? How the creator(s) of this world justify the suffering and how it is mitigated? Have we ever gave our consent as free conscious beings to undergo this suffering? If not, what moral right the creator(s) have for making us suffer without our consent?
- The dimension of ineffability/transcendence of reality. The Hagel-Goethe-Steiner tradition is clearly "gnostic" in a sense that it envisions the world of inter-personal and trans-personal conscious activity as entirely a process of thinking-cognition (be it rational, intuitive or imaginative). It's a self-closed environment of cognizable/cognizing living ideas and there is nothing else other than cognizable ideas to the reality. But our spiritual sense and intuition tells us that this is not the case. From ordinary people to mystics of spiritual traditions, we have a sense of the ineffable transcendental dimension of reality. We can see it in almost every spiritual tradition - in Buddhism, neo-Platonism, mystical Christianity, Judaism etc. It is also a key aspect of the Steve Petermann's theology (the Transcendental God). This is not the same as collective or personal subconscious/unconscious. Subconscious (as per Jung psychology) is an ideating and cognitive activity, yet it is not directly reported to our field of awareness. The ineffable dimension is not forever alien and inaccessible to us in the Kantian divide sense. We as cognitive activities of consciousness do have a way of communion with the ineffable depths of consciousness because we are the activities of the same consciousness, however, the way of such communion is ineffable by itself, and as a result of such communion, the ineffable does not cease to remain as ineffable. Simon also rightly pointed you to this issue and this was the point of his disagreement with your philosophy.

Also, just my personal comment/complaint: there is a common feature to Hagel, Steiner, your and Cleric's writings: it is a real struggle to read and comprehend , the language and style reminds jungles with the meanings buried in thick and excessive linguistic constructs. May be I just do not have enough IQ to comprehend this philosophy, even though I can usually read philosophical and scientific text without much difficulty. May be I'm too spoiled by the discipline, brevity, precision and clarity of analytic philosophical and scientific texts. No offence, but if you intend to keep your philosophy as an ivory tower for distinguished idealists, there is no problem with that. However, if you want to make any impact on the society on a larger scale with your philosophy, you need to make it more accessible for ordinary people.

[Lou Gold]

This issue of spiritual or religious evolution is a difficult one for me. I do believe we see progress for the good as history has proceeded but there is always a counter-insurgency as well. Here are my worries with talking about spiritual evolution. First, it seems to denigrate the spirituality of early humans. Did the early animists have an inferior spirituality? As history has unfolded through the millennia do the religious and spiritual traditions represent spirituality that is lacking? Here's what I think. Each epoch presents unique challenges for finite beings. However, in every age there is a divine depth to everything and that depth exerts its influence, trying to create love, beauty, and meaning. Early hominids may have had a rudimentary framework within which they lived but I also think their divine depth worked within it. This is also true throughout the history of spirituality.

This spiritual evolution idea can also morph into an elitist hierarchy where only the few move along this evolutionary path to great heights. I think the basis target for any metaphysical system should be something like the uneducated cleaning person who works two jobs to support her children. If they can't be a paragon of spirituality then something is wrong with the system.

I share your ambivalence Steve and appreciate your thoughts.

[AshvinP]

Clearly the above is just one quote from an entire book examining these questions. I could link you to the free book and wait for you to get back to me, but that has been done numerous times and I am guessing the links have not been clicked on once. Even in this short quote, though, the answer to your question is implicit - the "why" and "how" will be found in the qualitative world of experience, which is that aspect of the phenomenal world abstract mathematics purposefully leaves out because it simply has nothing useful to tell us about qualities of experience (by itself). If we try to derive the solution from within the ideal world of abstractions, because we think that is what the lay public wants to convince them to come over to "our side" (why should they, if "our side" is just another world of pure abstractions?), then we will get nowhere, because the solution is not to be found within that world. Cleric's new essay is precisely pointing us in the direction where we can discover, from within our own experience, how and why the natural phenomena exhibit the precise rhythmic patterns that they do. Have you read it or do you plan on reading it? These things should not be governed by what we think academics or lay people want to hear, only by a deep and thoughtful desire for the Truth.

Obviously the flow of our conscious phenomena is qualitative by nature, it's a no-brainer for anyone studying consciousness. All quantitative is always an abstraction of qualitative. I read Cleric's essay. It's a nice writeup, to me it looks like a 2000-old Buddhist Vipassana meditation technique superimposed with Cleric's theory of Time-Consciousness wave cycles and higher order beings manifesting these cycles. This is one of the possible explanatory model of the global-to-local encompassing structure of the conscious activity. I still didn't find the answer to the question why and how the observed natural phenomena (when we extract the quantitative aspects from them by means of abstract thinking), always follow and exhibit mathematically precise patterns according to the Schrodinger equation. Schrodinger equation is not a solution, it is only a consistent observation which by itself does not give us any answers to "why" questions.

If quantitative is always an abstraction of qualitative, then why would you think the quantitative could ever provide an explanation for the qualitative? An abstraction cannot explain that which it is abstracted from. That has been the gist of your argument here - that we need to provide "convincing" natural scientific explanation for the entrenched academic and average person, and since natural sciences can only be "objectively" investigated and verified by mathematical abstractions (according to you), that is the type of explanation you are seeking. But now you admit such an explanation is always dealing with abstractions of the noumenal qualitative realm, so how do you propose to bridge that gap to find this convincing and objectively verifiable explanation?

Also, when in your experience has a fundamental question of any importance been answered without a substantial investment of time and effort on your part? You can't find something until you start looking for it! And that was the purpose of Cleric's essay - not to answer all riddles of the Cosmos in a few pages - but to point people in the direction of where to start looking. You say the Time-Consciousness wave cycles manifested by higher order beings is "one of the possible explanatory models" of global-to-local manifestation of qualitative experience. So what is one other possible explanatory model which encompasses all the same data points, i.e. rhythms and qualities of our immanent experience? Surely you have at least one other model/approach in mind to be so confident that his is only one of many other possible ones.

Answers in bold to your other questions below:

Overall, looking at your and Cleric's activity, I can see a version of idealism within the Hagel-Goethe-Steiner tradition. It's a work in progress and hopefully will end up in a coherent idealistic paradigm. I still can't help seeing a lot of explanatory gaps, unanswered questions and unaddressed problems. You are missing:

- The explanation of why and how the observed natural phenomena follow and exhibit mathematically precise patterns according to the Schrodinger equation. (how many times I asked it ?) That is a sub-question of a more general question: why and how and by whom and for what purpose the apparent observed world was created?

Answered above. If you refuse to take the approach Cleric is describing to answer this question, that is not an "explanatory gap" of his approach, it's just your refusal to bridge the gap.

- The overall picture and meaning of the metamorphic process: why and how did we as individuated conscious beings started or existence as dissociated conscious activities, why are we dissociated from the global consciousness, and why are we metamorphing toward the global integration? What is the meaning and purpose of this process?


These questions reflect anthropomorphic bias projected onto Cosmos at large. All we know is that this is the Reality we are involved in, and whatever meaning and purpose it has arrives through our Thinking activity. It's purposes are not other than our purposes because we are One in essence. We should not imagine a non-existing 3rd person perspective where we observe Reality from a distance and say "this is why it did X,Y,Z" or "this was the purpose of X,Y,Z." In my view, these questions are born of our egoistic desire to impose our own finite localized consciousness onto the infinite-eternal Reality at large.


- The problem of suffering and evil: why suffering and evil is necessary in this world? How the creator(s) of this world justify the suffering and how it is mitigated? Have we ever gave our consent as free conscious beings to undergo this suffering? If not, what moral right the creator(s) have for making us suffer without our consent?

See last answer. Second, we all intuit the value of this integral process we participate in by continuing to participate in it despite the evil-suffering and not just passively, but actively pursuing various goals as social beings. Third, we have to consider value which comes from eternal existence (not just this lifetime) if we want to evaluate this critique fairly. Finally, the fact that evil-suffering cannot be explained, if indeed it cannot be, does not make the metamorphic Reality any less true. That being said, I always found this quote from Steiner helpful and uplifting, precisely because it rings so true:

"All optimism and pessimism are thereby refuted. Optimism assumes that the world is perfect, that it must be a source of the greatest satisfaction for man. But if this is to be the case, man would first have to develop within himself those needs through which to arrive at this satisfaction. He would have to gain from the objects what it is he demands. Pessimism believes that the world is constituted in such a way that it leaves man eternally dissatisfied, that he can never be happy. What a pitiful creature man would be if nature offered him satisfaction from outside! All lamentations about an existence that does not satisfy us, about this hard world, must disappear before the thought that no power in the world could satisfy us if we ourselves did not first lend it that magical power by which it uplifts and gladdens us. Satisfaction must come to us out of what we make of things, out of our own creations. Only that is worthy of free beings." - Steiner



- The dimension of ineffability/transcendence of reality. The Hagel-Goethe-Steiner tradition is clearly "gnostic" in a sense that it envisions the world of inter-personal and trans-personal conscious activity as entirely a process of thinking-cognition (be it rational, intuitive or imaginative). It's a self-closed environment of cognizable/cognizing living ideas and there is nothing else other than cognizable ideas to the reality. But our spiritual sense and intuition tells us that this is not the case. From ordinary people to mystics of spiritual traditions, we have a sense of the ineffable transcendental dimension of reality. We can see it in almost every spiritual tradition - in Buddhism, neo-Platonism, mystical Christianity, Judaism etc. It is also a key aspect of the Steve Petermann's theology (the Transcendental God). This is not the same as collective or personal subconscious/unconscious. Subconscious (as per Jung psychology) is an ideating and cognitive activity, yet it is not directly reported to our field of awareness. The ineffable dimension is not forever alien and inaccessible to us in the Kantian divide sense. We as cognitive activities of consciousness do have a way of communion with the ineffable depths of consciousness because we are the activities of the same consciousness, however, the way of such communion is ineffable by itself, and as a result of such communion, the ineffable does not cease to remain as ineffable. Simon also rightly pointed you to this issue and this was the point of his disagreement with your philosophy.


We have been over this far too many times to count and I am not going to do it again. Suffice to say, there is no "ineffable transcendental dimension of reality" where cognition i.e. Thinking (spiritual) activity is entirely absent. You have even admitted to this many times before, so I have no idea why you keep making this critique.


Also, just my personal comment/complaint: there is a common feature to Hagel, Steiner, your and Cleric's writings: it is a real struggle to read and comprehend , the language and style reminds jungles with the meanings buried in thick and excessive linguistic constructs. May be I just do not have enough IQ to comprehend this philosophy, even though I can usually read philosophical and scientific text without much difficulty. May be I'm too spoiled by the discipline, brevity, precision and clarity of analytic philosophical and scientific texts. No offence, but if you intend to keep your philosophy as an ivory tower for distinguished idealists, there is no problem with that. However, if you want to make any impact on the society on a larger scale with your philosophy, you need to make it more accessible for ordinary people.

That's a fair personal complaint, as long as you realize that's all it is - your personal opinion.

My experience has been the exact opposite of yours when reading Steiner, Barfield and Cleric - their writing is a pure breath of fresh air compared to the suffocating abstractions of modern philosophy which attempts to formulate everything of importance in terms of those dead abstractions, such as "mathematical ontologies". It takes some getting used to precisely because we are so accustomed to living in a circular web of meaningless abstractions that, when something which "threatens" to lift us up out of those dead concepts into living qualities of experience comes along, it seems very confusing and hard to follow at first. We have completely forgotten the living mythopoetic thinking and writing of our ancestors in the modern age. But we are, after all, still living souls in a world full of qualitative experience, so eventually, if we persist with good will, it becomes much easier to follow. Even a few months ago, I would have needed to read Cleric's latest essay 5-10x before following, but now I followed along very well the first time I read it. As far as my own writing, I cannot be a fair judge of that. Again, these things take good will, patience, and effort - no fundamental riddles of the Cosmos are solved with a neat little set of abstract concepts and mathematical equations. But the Good News is that we have Divine help!

"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen" (Ephesians 3:20-21)

[AshvinP]

One could say we are assuming that we experience conscious phenomena which is constantly changing, but we can't reasonably question that. Besides that, I do not see any other metaphysical assumptions. Perhaps you do, in which case I am curious which you are referring to.

He has a whole section on The Time-Consciousness Spectrum and things like inversion horizon, holistic integration, subconscious elemental world rhythms, resonant attunement, waves, etc. If those aren't metaphysical speculations, I don't know what would be.

He is trying to describe the living experience he has had with higher cognition, and so he must put that into some words which allow us to at least visualize the concepts, right? The only other alternative is not to write anything at all. Just because we are not used to the language does not mean it is "metaphysical speculation". I would say the latter is something like "living organisms as we perceive them in the world are the dissociated alters of MAL". That is not based on any direct experience, it is just an abstract hypothesis (and not a very detailed one). But that is not to pick on BK, because you find that in every other analytical philosopher today. And, my answer to Eugene's last comment may also be relevant here - those terms sound odd to us precisely because they employ more living conceptual language than the dead abstractions of the modern age we are all way too familiar with at this point.

There may be another confusion going on here - you may be speaking "metaphysical implications" rather than "metaphysical assumptions". The former will obviously follow from any well thought-out system of experience, but the latter are not necessary to make at the outset and were not made by Cleric (apart from the most basic "we are experiencing constantly changing phenomena"). The other confusion may be that you thought Cleric was hypothesizing the existence of "inversion horizon", etc., but he was actually describing what he has concretely experienced.