This looks to me like the source of confusion. You see a difference between phenomenology and epistemology because your notion of epistemology stems from Kant, which presupposes a divide between what is real and what we know about it. Steiner's philosophical work was all about correcting this Kantian error. Kant's epistemology was asking "how do we know what is real about the world outside of us (his answer being "we can't"). Steiner, instead, asked, "What do we know", his answer being: phenomena (including the phenomena of thinking). Spiritual Science is about expanding our phenomenal universe, and hence increasing our knowledge. In short, Steiner's phenomenology is his epistemology, which differs from yours and Kant's.Eugene I wrote: ↑Sat Nov 20, 2021 10:16 pm
Cleric, I understand what you are saying. Indeed, the ability of consciousness to cognate and experience meanings is amazing an mysterious and allows for the rich and interconnected universe of meanings to exist in consciousness. However, in philosophical terms phenomenology does not study the meanings and their inter-relations with themselves and with the rest of reality, that belongs to epistemology. Phenomenology studies the raw conscious phenomena themselves, as was quoted from philosophical encyclopedia at the start of this thread, including all sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts and imaginations, and their qualia, but not including the meanings and ideas that the thoughts and imaginations bear. The challenge with studying the meanings is related to their complicated relations with the rest of reality (consciousness itself and the raw phenomena).
For example, I can have a thought bearing an idea/meaning of a "material world" existing beyond consciousness. Using my imagination I can imagine it very vividly. But the question is: how does this meaning relates to the reality? Does such material world actually exist? How do I know if it is true or not? Or I can have an idea of some advanced mathematical construct, for example, an uncountable infinity (Kantor's aleph 1). Does it exists in any way in reality other than just as a meaning of my thought in my imagination? Phenomenology does not address these questions, but epistemology does.
But that problem also applies to what you wrote and to PoF. Yes, by using Imaginative and Intuitive higher cognition we can have very high-level subtle imaginations and ideas, and we can have it in a shared way between a group of people. For example, we can both have intuitions and imaginations about Zodiacs. I can imagine and intuit Zodiacs and their possible relations with the life on Earth. But how do we know and verify in a spiritually-scientific way that the Zodiacs in fact are parts of the structures that govern the phenomenal realities that we experience as sense perceptions (i.e. the realities of the apparent physical world), and that they are not just our shared imaginations? We can imagine together a shared idea of a Pink Unicorn. But how do we know that it corresponds to any actual reality? This is very important question and I think people asked you about it on this forum: how do you know that your higher-cognition imaginations have any relevance to actual reality of the spiritual and/or physical world? What is a way to verify them and not just take them as beliefs? These are, again, epistemological questions.
This distinction between Kant's epistemology and Steiner's is perhaps better made clear in Steiner's book Truth and Knowledge, for which a good overview (47 page PDF) was linked to earlier: [url=https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... teiner.pdf[/url]
The book itself is available at rsarchive.org.
