ParadoxZone wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 3:25 am I don't think it's right that PoF starts from idealism. It may be that Steiner knew where he was going before writing it, but you'd expect that of someone writing a book.
And phenomenology is my only "way in". Others might have a different entry point. Just as Bernardo's work and persistence with analytic idealism was the only way I was going to "get" to idealism. (Without getting sucked back in to materialistic accounts, as has happened so often.) That's why I'm so grateful to Bernardo.
Having "got there", I now want to be a good and consistent idealist! There are other threads going in here with lots of videos being posted, and others are getting good value from that. More power to them. I'm kind of done with that for now. All of these things that the videos are about are not foreign to me. These thoughts have been rattling around here too, often chaotically.
Exactly right, PZ. It's heartening to know others are reading PoF and actually understanding it deeply. There is no assumption of idealism involved. It seems to me Eugene is mistaking the conclusions of this phenomenology, which are what we most often post about here, with the actual process of reasoning through our immanent perception-cognition as it manifests directly in our experience to reach those conclusions. A lot of people in the modern age simply don't get the difference, or why there is much greater value in this approach than simply starting with metaphysical conclusions, which is pretty much how every other philosophy in the world had proceeded prior to Steiner (except for a select few I have often mentioned). I really like Bergson's thoughts on this topic expressed in his last work, The Creative Mind.
Bergson wrote:These conclusions on the subject of duration were, as it seemed to me, decisive. Step by step they led me to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method. “Intuition,” however, is a word whose use caused me some degree of hesitation. Of all the terms which designate a mode of knowing, it is still the most appropriate; and yet it leads to a certain confusion. Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration. Numerous are the philosophers who have felt how powerless conceptual thought is to reach the core of the mind. Numerous, consequently, are those who have spoken of a supra-intellectual faculty of intuition.
But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will.
Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?
Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)