JustinG wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 12:23 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 1:47 pm
JustinG wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 5:46 am
I know you have provided lots of quotes, and I appreciate that. But I'm talking about quotes specifically in relation to what was in the post, which amounts to the issue of whether it is in accordance with PoF
not to seek to attain higher levels of spiritual development until earlier levels have been attained (for which the converse issue is whether it is detrimental to do otherwise). Also, without page number references it is difficult to place the quotes you provide in context.
In terms of my argument, part of my purpose has been to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the 'Jordan Peterson fan' interpretation of PoF is not the only valid interpretation. Thank you for your assistance in demonstrating that.
So the bold has been your argument this entire time? Then yes we all agree, seek practical reason first before Imaginative cognition. Of course, this has not actually been your argument, but is only now being mentioned for some reason.
The quotes I provided were multiple paragraphs and had chapter numbers from PoF. How does that compare to the ones you provided from Steiner? It's quite amazing to me that, in order to establish Steiner's position, you think it is better to reference the table of contents from some random person's book who Steiner
might have read, than to reference his own "pre-Theosophical" writings.
I have no idea what Jordan Peterson has to do with this. He isn't even aware of Steiner or PoF.
Whilst you may consider yourself to be functioning at a level beyond practical reason, your description of Tucker as 'some random person' nevertheless indicates you have a limited knowledge of Steiner's early work. Tucker and Mackay's views are basically adaptations of Stirner's philosophy, which was a big influence on Steiner.
Cleric or Scott - do you have any opinions on the relevance of the work of Tucker, Mackay and Stirner for understanding PoF?
As for Jordan Peterson, had it not been for your frequent extolling of him,
I probably would have picked up a copy of PoF long ago
Justin,
I don't know why you keep making these comments in bold. It reads to me like, "if you had not made the case for individual sovereignty, I wouldn't have locked myself in a cage and eaten the key". It's a sad image, but it doesn't make me feel like I screwed up by mentioning the names of people who trigger you. I am not letting the words of other people do that to me.
Steiner was the most prolific reader and writer in human history, as far as I can tell. He has commented on absolutely every major thinker and philosophy in Western history. Of course those ideas had an influence on him. Plato, Aristotle, Eckhart, Aquinas, Goethe Hegel, Stirner, Nietzche, and many ideas in between. Even Kant's! Not the individual personalities, mind you, but the
Idea-beings for whom they were vehicles of manifestation into the world, as we all are.
Once we abandon the atomic ego view of human souls and correspondence theory of truth, we will stop trying to match up concepts from one thinker to another and search for the deeper layers of archetypal spiritual activity which harmonizes them all at ever more conscious levels of integration. That is a genuine vertical movements towards spiritual freedom. Otherwise we remain endlessly on the horizontal plane entangled in circles of abstractions and flattened concepts which cannot harmonize of their own accord.
viewtopic.php?t=750
An obstacle we will quickly encounter when mining the meaningful lessons of virtual reality interfaces is the habitual movement of our thinking. Our intellectual reasoning is habituated to moving only horizontally along a plane of perceptions, connecting isolated quantities together and formulating a dim 'idea' of what they might mean. This mode of horizontal thinking will never really deepen our understanding of aesthetic phenomena. There are many reasons why, but we can also take a pragmatic approach here and ask ourselves, have we ever really deepened our understanding of aesthetic phenomena in this manner? Have we ever listened to a piece of music or read a work of poetry and mined its deeper layers of meaning by horizontally configuring and reconfiguring the notes or the words together in various ways? We will quickly realize that this approach is simply not fruitful for the Imagination. Our intellectual reason can discern meaning deeply and quite precisely, but only if we ourselves give it the impetus to do so; only if our spiritual core lends it the vertical thrust by which it can discover the depth structure of our flattened perceptions. Moving our thinking activity in a direction that we are not used to is the concrete image of a 'paradigm shift'.
"In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved matrix of space...
Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world...
But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."
-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)