Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Thu Jan 27, 2022 5:06 pm
An interesting discussion.
In a way, it's odd that you and JMG disagree. He thinks he has a handle on aspects of higher cognition (for instance his regular astrological forecasts), yet, by saying that there is no teleology, speaks as if he doesn't really believe in it. Perhaps he believes that "the stars incline, but do not compel" and that we're not yet advanced enough to avoid the inclination. (Mind you, he totally missed the COVID epidemic.)
Yeah, I am glad you notice that, Ben. When it gets to the core issue of our own Thinking, and its role in everything we claim to desire, feel, know, or do, people are bound to start making contradictory claims when they continue keeping it in the blind spot. I think that is even more evident in my latest exchange with him:
JMG: "Ash, (1) you’ve completely misunderstood Schopenhauer here; I’d recommend another reading of Book 1 of The World as Will and Representation. As Schopenhauer says explicitly, “the world is my representation” — the experience of will in the form of body is simply our closest approach to the thing-in-itself, which of course cannot be known directly. All our experience is representation; we experience our bodies as representations, but the experience of willed action is the point at which, for us as embodied beings, we can **think most clearly** about our experience and come to an understanding of the inner nature of things. As for distinguishing thought and meaning, meaning is the relationship between an abstraction and one or more figurations, or between two or more abstractions. We know meanings immediately because we create them through thinking — we think, “A means B,” and that relation is transparent to us because it is a creation of our minds. That’s why meanings differ so often, and so significantly, between one language and another, one culture and another, and indeed one individual and another."
JMG,
I must be phrasing my points poorly, because what you wrote above is also how I understand Schopenhauer. He makes explicit that, in our experience of willed action (and music), we come into contact with the universal 'blind' Will which is the thing-in-itself. This is not a controversial reading of Schopenhauer at all. So I hope we cleared that up. What I am pointing to is what I used asterisks to highlight in your response above.
Kant, Schopenhauer, and yourself (and practically most other modern philosophers), are forgetting that Thinking is the faculty making the claims about what can and can't be known about the thing-in-itself, which is blind Will for Schopenhauer. All such claims presuppose the capacity of Thinking i.e. logical reason to reach fundamental truths about the nature of the Cosmos and our relation to it. What we can or cannot possibly know is a fundamental truth. That simple fact is conveniently ignored by all those who subscribe to the Kantian limits.
When you add, "we create meanings through thinking", you have imported Cartesian subject/object dualism into the argument, since meaning is epiphenomenal and added onto the world content by thinking beings. That is an abstract metaphysical assumption which finds no basis in our concrete experience of the world content. We feel as if we are subjects beholding objects, using concepts "in our mind" to impose meanings on the objects "out there", but to reify that into an inherent property of the Cosmos is naive realism. It is precisely our Reason which brings us back from the subject/object dualism to a more unified and participatory understanding of our relation with the Cosmos.
No one denies that - it is implicit in Kant and Schopenhauer, otherwise the latter's Reason could not confidently assert any conclusions about the universal Will we all share. He could not assert there is "one Eye who looks out from every creature" without that Reason which gives the assertion any semantic content. This has been the core blind spot for all modern philosophy, from rationalism, dualism, and idealism, to post-modern and post-structural linguistic philosophy. Our present thinking, our most intuitive yet formless and unobservable activity, is left in the blind spot. "Out of sight, out of mind". It is analogous to declaring the physical eye does not exist because it cannot perceive itself directly.
JMG: "2) No, I don’t agree with Steiner’s claim at all. Of course it’s possible to observe one’s present thinking — again, that’s the point of reflection, or in a more focused way, of meditation. Steiner here is reminiscent of those 19th century psychologists who insisted that it’s impossible for the mind to be free of thoughts; a few months of meditative practice would have cured them of that fallacy. I don’t claim to be familiar with the whole range of Anthroposophical spiritual practice, but those of Steiner’s practices I’ve examined — for example, the Foundation Stone meditation or the exercises in How to Know Higher Worlds — don’t develop that sort of reflective awareness the way, for example, discursive meditation or zazen do, so he may simply have been misled by his own personal experiences."
I suspected that this would be the core issue, as it often is. Are you able to expand on what specifically you disagree with? He addresses specifically what you are calling "the point of reflection" of meditation in the quote below, which he calls "the exceptional state".
"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)
re: meditation which is "free of thoughts" - yes our Thinking is capable of getting rid of its reflections in thoughts, but it cannot get rid of itself. The fact that there is duration of experience and formation of memory during any meditative state means there is still ideal content, i.e. meaning, i.e. Thinking. Practiced mystical meditators generally forget that they use their Thinking to get to their desired thought-free destination. It is with them the whole time and remains with them when they feel Oneness with the Cosmos.
JMG: "3) To say that modern science is inadequate does not mean that it’s wrong. What makes modern science inadequate is that it only takes the material plane into account — but within its limits as a single-plane phenomenon, it does its job very well. When Steiner claims that the Earth used to be part of the Sun, and spun off it at a certain point in the development of the solar system, in strictly material terms he’s just plain wrong, and that has to be taken into account when reflecting on his claims to a source of knowledge free from the limitations on human cognition that Kant sketched out. (It’s far from the only place where Steiner’s spiritual work led him into claims that are factually inaccurate on the material plane; every beekeeper I know who’s read Steiner’s work on bees has said that he’s quite simply wrong about a lot of the details.) From a Goethean approach, furthermore, we need to take Steiner in context and compare his claims to those made by other Theosophists, and other practitioners of the same methods of visionary work — of whom there were quite a few, of course. No two of them agree with one another on all points, just as no one plant is the Urpflanze; by comparing them one to another, it becomes possible to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the process — which you don’t get by assuming as a matter of course that one such narrative is objectively true and every other narrative is not.
As for hogwash, once again, a Goethean approach is applicable here. In the wake of Kant, a flurry of European intellectuals tried to come up with gimmicks to do an end run around the limits to human cognition he traced out. Each of them had his own claim to special knowledge, and all of them defended that claim by some form of philosophical handwaving, usually involving misquoting Kant. (Your earlier outburst claiming that it doesn’t matter what Kant actually said is typical.) Take one of those gimmicks and assume that it’s true, and no doubt you can make some kind of sense of the world; look at all of them in a row, as Goethe looked at plants and skeletons, and the underlying Urphänomen becomes impossible to miss. In Spengler’s terms, Faustian culture finds limitation of any kind intolerable, and so the pressure on European intellectuals in the terminal phases of Faustian culture to find some way around the limits to human cognition was immense — but none of them work. Just as Europe’s global empire crashed to the ground after 1914, the empire of human cognition that Hegel, Steiner et al. tried to impose on an irreducibly incomprehensible cosmos is falling to the ground as well. The sooner we outgrow that, the sooner the legacy of Western philosophy can begin moving toward its mature form."
Modern philosophy and science is not wrong, only incomplete. Steiner himself points this out in Goethean Science (see quote below). Steiner's descriptions of the Cosmic evolution are *not physical*. He is a monist and idealist. He must use physical images to convey the ideal experiences-perceptions. It is only our own tendency to reify all physical descriptions which leads to that confusion, but Steiner tries to caution the reader against doing that at every opportunity he has. Ancient Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, etc. are all the *same* ideal 'planet' moving through its various incarnations. There is no physical process, in a metaphysical sense, occurring whatsoever. It is not even occurring in linear time, but rather as a 'decohering' of certain states of being from superimposed meaning. Again, if he wants to convey these things to those who are thinking with the intellect, he must use spatiotemporal language descriptions of that sort.
The multiple claims to "special knowledge" critique of higher cognition makes little sense to me, just as the "constant squabbles" critique. If Steiner is correct, and higher Imaginative cognition blossomed towards the end of the 19th century, that is exactly what we would expect to occur. So how do we differentiate between the claims to higher cognition which are false, which are being used poorly, or which are true and being used properly? By testing them against our Reason! "Test all things and hold fast to what is good". Of course, if we severely discount or eliminate the capacity of our own Reason to discern these things from the outset, even though we use it to discern that we "can't discern", then there is simply nowhere left to go in global philosophy, science, or culture in general. Who else is going to move the legacy of Western philosophy towards its mature form other than logically reasoning i.e. Thinking beings?
"This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea." (Steiner, Goethean Science)
