Ashvin wrote:(1) How can the meaningful content of phenomena we perceive in the world considered less “real” than any other property it discloses, such as shape, size, color, taste, etc., without adding in metaphysical assumptions (such as dualism or naive realims) from the outset?
2) Do you agree that we cannot ever perceive our present Thinking but we are, nevertheless, always engaging it when evaluating the world content?
3) If you agree that perception-cognition has evolved over the epochs, then what is the principle limit to potential modes of cognition in the future? Why can’t there be a mode of thinking which transcends subject/object dualism, i.e. abstract spatiotemporal perception, and functions more like our audial or even touch-sense, like an octopus which mimics its environment through its tentacles?
JMG: “Ashvin, by all means. 1) It seems to me that you’re presupposing what you want to prove by this question. Shapes, sizes, colors, and tastes are what Bucke called “percepts,” that is to say, sensory stimuli that are assembled into objects by the process of figuration. Thoughts — for example, the thought that I’m trying to communicate here — are sequences of abstractions; they’re not part of the objects they attempt to describe, any more than the word “rock” is actually a rock! As we see from the history of philosophy, the process by which reflection differentiates abstractions from their component figurations, and then differentiates figurations from the percepts that are their raw material, is a slow one, and it happens in each tradition of philosophy as that works through its life cycle — Lao Tsu points out that the description of a process is not the process itself in the opening line of the Tao Te Ching, a realization it took another 2000 years for Western philosophy to reach. Each starts from a different set of cultural presuppositions; each arrives at a broadly common realization — which Western philosophy, in the usual way of things, is still struggling not to grasp.”
We must differentiate between “thoughts” and meaning. The former, like perceptions (thoughts can become perceptions), is a reflection of that meaning. The abstract thoughts are far removed from the world content, although still continuous with it, but not the meaning. The intuitive meaning of a thought is given to our thinking-sense just as immediately as any quantiative or qualitative property is given to an object of our perception. My question was about the meaning. Take Schopenhauer’s assertion, “the World is *only* universal Will, reflected in my direct experience of bodily movements and endogenous experience”. The truth of that assertion can only be valid if the meaning of it, i.e. its semantic content, discerned by Thinking, is downgraded to some illusory sphere of experience, while the bodily movements and endgoneous experiences are considered more “real”. If that does not occur, then the assertion must at least be modified to “the World is both universal Will and Thinking”. (not representational thinking)
JMG: “2) I agree that thinking is always part of our evaluation of the world we experience — the paired processes of figuration and abstraction are always at work, assembling the paired “buzzing, blooming confusion” of sensation and mentation into a coherent subjective world. I don’t agree that we can never perceive our thinking — au contraire, that’s the whole point of reflection, and in a more focused way, of meditative practice.”
The question here was about our *present* Thinking activity. Here is a reference from Steiner’s PoF, and I am asking if you agree with his assertion.
“The reason why we do not observe the thinking that goes on in our ordinary life is none other than this, that it is due to our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce, appears in my field of observation as an object; I find myself confronted by it as something that has come about independently of me. It comes to meet me. I must accept it as something that precedes my thinking process, as a premise. While I am reflecting upon the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is focussed upon it. To be thus occupied is precisely to contemplate by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to the object of this activity. In other words, while I am thinking I pay no heed to my thinking, which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking, which is not of my making.
I am, moreover, in the same position when I enter into the exceptional state and reflect on my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking; I can only subsequently take my experiences of my thinking process as the object of fresh thinking. If I wanted to watch my present thinking, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this I cannot do. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The thinking to be observed is never that in which I am actually engaged, but another one. Whether, for this purpose, I make observations of my own former thinking, or follow the thinking process of another person, or finally, as in the example of the motions of the billiard balls, assume an imaginary thinking process, is immaterial.” (Steiner, PoF Ch 3)
JMG: “3) There are at least two serious problems with this claim of yours — and of course it’s not yours alone; it’s essential not only to Steiner but to the entire movement of European philosophy of which he was so creative and interesting an example. On the one hand, it’s based on a fundamentally mistaken notion of the nature of evolution. Evolution is not teleological in any sense. It’s simply adaptation to changing circumstances, and its results are not progressive but radiating in all directions, finding available niches. As Spengler shows, using classic Goethean morphological methods, this is as true of cultures as it is of species. On the other, the claim you’re making is rather reminiscent of the famous stock prospectus during the South Sea Bubble: “An enterprise of great advantage, but no one to know what it is.” Proving a negative is exceedingly hard, and so you can demand that others prove in advance that there won’t be some mode of thinking someday that might somehow winkle itself out of the limits binding human cognition, rather than offering any reason to think that (a) it will happen, and (b) Steiner, rather than Hegel or Fourier or any of the other people who made that argument, is right about its nature. As Schopenhauer pointed out acerbically about Hegel’s parallel claims about “intellectual intuition,” no doubt it seems very convincing to those who claim to have this capacity, but to the rest of us, it bears a remarkable resemblance to utter hogwash.
Steiner’s work is a lot less problematic in that regard than Hegel’s — can you think of any social or political movement based on Hegel’s ideas that didn’t turn into a total flop in practice? I can’t — but he scored his share of misses; try mapping his account of the development of the Earth onto what’s known about the development of the solar system, for example, and it’s painfully clear that Steiner was far more dependent on the scientific notions of his own day, and far less connected to some objective source of truth, than he realized. That doesn’t mean that his work is worthless; it means that his insights need to be tested against other sources of information, and taken in their proper context, rather than turned into some sort of holy writ against which all other experiences are to be tested.”
Yes, I agree that my mere question is not positive evidence of higher direct cognition which moves beyond Kantian limits. That requires much more discussion. But, in my experience, mostly we never get to that discussion, because people are opposed to the very possibility of higher cognition. Once it is admitted as a possibility, which the “utter hogwash” reference makes me think we still have not reached that stage, then we can start to examine how it has already manifested, again assuming we have not foreclosed on the possibility of our Reason being equal to the task of assessing the likelihood of such things, given all the facts we have surrounding it. I would say the evidence for fully conscious Imagation is overwhelming, but also there is a good deal for conscious Inspiration and Intuition. Jean Gebser, in the The Ever-Present Origin, documents extensively how the reductive view of evolution simply does not hold given the facts we have, and the integral view of cognitive evolution holds quite well over the last 5,000 or so years.
re: Steiner’s cosmology – well, if we reject spiritual science and higher cognition outright, then yes none of his scientific claims will make any sense. Although, secular scientific models of the solar system and its evolution are entirely inadequate and incomplete, given the lack of accounting for our qualitative experience, regardless of our position on higher cognition and spiritual sight.