JustinG wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:19 am
I'm not sure of how all the words in your literal version should be construed, so I'll differentiate with the following versions:
Claim: The mystic saw an angel
Metaphorical version: Whilst the mystic may have had visual apparitions of an angel and experienced a peak emotional state, we also know that's not actually what is happening and we shouldn't confuse the 'metaphor' for a literal claim.
Literal version: The angel is an objectively existing observer-independent entity and that is what the mystic saw.
Contextual version: The way of seeing structures what is seen, in the way captured by your quote from Kuhn:
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..
The mystic does see the angel but others do not, even though both are looking at the world.
My conclusion is that (following Hudson) many Steinerians follow the literal version and that the early Steiner follows the contextual version. I could be wrong on this issue, as I haven't investigated it much. I don't know about the later Steiner, but my reading of Hudson is that he thinks that the later Steiner also follows the contextual version.
Justin,
I was trying to make it less abstract. "Mystic" and "angel" are still vague as to meaning, removed from our personal sense-experience. My claim was about our actual breathing process, inhaling and exhaling. I was writing about this recently in the context of VR essay, so I will post an excerpt here:
This inhalation of meaning and exhalation of perception is what we are literally doing to communicate an idea. Whether the meaning is exhaled as a word-form in sound (voice), a musical down-beat (which is also sound), or a visual beat-cube in the virtual environment, does not change the essence of what is occurring. The metaphors we come up with in language are used to point to this literal meaning, not the other way around. For example, we say that we are "gathering our thoughts" prior to communicating an idea. That is a metaphor for inhaling meaning prior to exhaling perception. The issue here is not the literality, but the idolizing of "inhaling" and "exhaling" into purely physical processes which lack a qualitative (meaningful) dimension. As discussed in the previous essay, the physical processes are only partial reflections of the meaningful ideational activity
The same thing is going on with the mystic seeing an angel. The problem is our own conflation of "seeing" things with a purely physical act of perception. That is how
our intellect sees the world, so we assume Steiner or others are using "seeing" in the same way when speaking of perceptions in the spiritual realms. In that sense, Hudson is correct. But the confusion has nothing to do with what objectively exists and what is only "subjective". The angel, assuming it is not complete hallucination, does actually exist as a spiritual being. This is perfectly clear in Steiner's later writings which refer to earlier ones, even in the autobiography Cleric shared. The fact that we are always perceiving from first-person relational perspective does
not negate the objective reality of meaningful constellations of qualities, best described by the intellect with the word "angel", which can be verified by others.
Re: Kuhn quote - it was pointing to the fact that the seemingly opposite paradigms of the two scientists can be harmonized at a higher paridigmatic level which is perceived, not by endless intellectual speculation, but vertical movment of Thinking to more integrated layers of meaning for the shared phenomena of experience. A paradigm shift always involves a movement of Thinking activity which we have no prior familiarity with. (which is not to say that activity didn't exist before, but we were not conscious of its existence).