Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Wed Dec 22, 2021 7:30 am
Starbuck wrote:Yes that is my understanding. As you state, he is a naturalist. I would say he confers intelligence unto his ontic base to no more or less a degree than a quantum physicist confers intelligence upon the forms emerging out of the quantum vacuum.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Dec 22, 2021 2:47 am
I agree and that's a perfect analogy. There is a void of some sort or another and all that we call "intelligence", "self-awareness", "aesthetics", "ethical values", emerge out of that void as secondary epiphenomenon. There is no sense trying to make his argument into something it isn't and which no one really understands it to be. That only serves to confuse and halt all productive discussion, because no one is clear on anyone else's position anymore.
My argument is that BK's definition of "natural" practically excludes half of all reality, if we want a simple way of imaging it. The depth structure behind our inner experience is excluded from "natural". The realm of currently imperceptible spiritual activity and noumenal meaning. Why? That's what we are trying to explain by way of PoF and also posts completely independent of PoF. There are very sound philosophical and scientific arguments for why.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that this isn't the first time this has been pointed out, or at least implied in some of the exchanges dating back to the early days of the old MS forum, when there was quite a bit of posting/discussion regarding Aurobindo, mostly initiated by and involving Don Salmon. He would regularly offer long involved posts, quoting huge tracts from
The Life Divine, explaining the inter-being evolution/involution dynamic. And while BK never really outright dismissed it, per se, one could tell that he was not into it, and not about to encourage it by indicating that he subscribed to it in any way. Here is just one thread from the old MS forum in which Don was clearly finding BK's take on idealism somewhat lacking—which BK did not respond to—although Don also points out that if BK's primary focus was on winning over some wavering academics still tentative about altogether abandoning materialism, it was understandable that BK had to keep it 'digestible' to their mindset, by taking the path of least resistance, while a vision like Aurobindo's, for example, would be a hard sell ...
Don writes from Aug 3, 2014
Thanks, Dana. It's good to know Cleric and myself didn't cook up this spiritually-rooted critique of BK idealism in the last year after we were indoctrinated into a cult
That is a great example of "completely independent of PoF". In addition to Aurobindo, I have also tried to show various facets of the same argument from Goethe, Schiller, Coleridge, Hegel, early Fichte and Schelling, Nietzsche, William James, Heidegger, Bergson, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and more recently I have seen it also in Herder. The only person I mention who was not independent of Steiner/PoF was Barfield. One would expect nothing less if ideation, specifically imaginative ideation, is essentially shared transpersonal activity, not divided and apportioned to "personal" alter-minds.
I have also noticed that many thinkers who have remained in pure intellectual analysis have their own involution of thinking, and their ability to adopt a more 'poetic' i.e. imaginative Thinking correlates to whether there will be an evolutionary phase. It correlates to whether their respective "turns" will be a turn for the worse, i.e. more abstract and fragmented, or for the better, more concrete and holistic. Let's remember, BK wrote a book called "More than Allegory", which was already short-changing spiritual mythology but was at least acknowledging it in some detail. Now he speaks of spiritual myth as almost less than fuzzy metaphor. All of these dynamics can become instructive tools for our own journeys. Nature offers up an endless supply for those paying close attention to her.