Güney27 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 03, 2022 9:30 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Mar 03, 2022 2:46 pm
The Philosophy of Freedom is separated into fourteen chapters, but the most fundamental division comes between the first and second halves. In respect to their ideal content, they are reciprocal images, or inversions, of one another. If the first half concerns knowledge, the second action. If the first concerns the logic of science, the second concerns the logic of art. The first addresses how to know facts, the second how to create them. The first concerns how the human being comes to know the world and to understand its place in that world, the second how he lives in that world, and by living in it, shapes it. The first is centripetal, the second centrifugal. The first concerns the structure of reality and perception while the second concerns the manner in which the human will flows out and through that structure. Thus, the first may be likened to a consonant while the second may be likened to a vowel because, just as in the act of vocalization, the first provides the shape and the second the content.
At the outset of The Philosophy of Freedom Steiner surveys various schools of contemporary philosophy and notes that, despite their substantial differences, they all share a fundamental similarity in their approach to the question of knowledge. Steiner notes the way in which each of the various schools establishes itself on the foundation of premises that it never subjects to thorough scrutiny. Steiner argues that such tacit postulates, axiomatically affirmed and yet never examined, have tended to lead philosophers astray and encouraged them to attempt answers to questions that are not being posed. One such example is the question “how does the world get into my brain for me to perceive it?” Another is “how does my perception and representation of the world relate to the world itself?” Steiner acknowledges the vast amount of philosophical literature devoted to answering these questions, but contends that they assume departure points that are by no means self-evident, and arguably absurd to someone who had not already accepted them. Nothing about my perception of a tulip reveals that it is “in my head” or that I am perceiving a representation of the tulip but not the tulip itself. Thus, the proposition that “perception involves electromagnetic oscillations being translated into nervous impulses and entering my brain at which point the image of a tulip is conjured forth in my mind” ought to be the eventual conclusion to be demonstrated by a chain of reasoning and not a postulate that can be assumed at the outset. And directly it is evaluated in this light, it reveals to depend on premises that appear improbable to say the least, and certainly unexamined. For instance, we know that all of the relevant physical and physiological processes can transpire without resulting in a perception if attention is lacking. How many times have I stared at a paragraph only to realize that my eyes had been skirting over the words and my brain had been imitating them, and yet I remain entirely unaware of what I had read? Feigned attentiveness is as useless to perception as faux flowers are to real bees.
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To recapitulate Steiner’s argument from above: in the standard theories of cognition of his day, the fact that perceptions are objects of experience is never accounted for unless it is by relegating everything to mere representations, at which point the term loses its basis both from lack of evidential and conceptual ground. Nothing in direct perception suggests that it is a representation and so it is hard to understand where evidence for this notion could hail from except for the foregone affirmation of the very conclusion that is in question. If it be nonetheless affirmed, in the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, that “the world is my representation,” the term loses its meaning because a representation implies something of which it is a representation. Just like a simulation cannot but be of something that is not a simulation, so if the reality that cause such representations is totally unknown, on what basis do we believe in the theory that says everything we do know is a representation? After all, it was ostensibly formed in response to the very evidence which it now calls into question. On the other hand, if reality is in fact known, then the world is not just my representation so the theory is also moot.
Here, Steiner introduces what he believes to be the answer to these riddles and which he claims to be a discovery that anyone can make. Steiner argues that the true theoretical categories by which to understand cognition are observation and thinking. To draw the distinction between mind and matter like Descartes or phenomenon and noumenon like Kant, results in theories that lead to impertinent questions that have no true answers any more than a trumpet blast can wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. Steiner defends the thesis that he has found the proper departure point for true philosophy by beginning with the categories of observation and thinking. The matter of observation are percepts and the achievements of thinking are concepts, which are not objects but “relations” or “organizing ideas” that lend intelligibility to observation. I said “matter” in respect to observation to draw attention to the manner in which our perception is confronted with something given, in whose genesis we played no active part. I described concepts as the “achievements” of thinking to emphasize the manner in which concepts depend on our active initiative to grasp them or call them forth. Further, in the process of perception, we are also tasked to achieve something when we seek to discover specific instances (within the configurations of matter that is the object of observation) of the concepts that we first grasped in their generality. In other words, concepts are not immediately given to observation in the way that percepts are. Instead they must be invoked, or called forth. In this consists our freedom...
Hallo Ashvin,
first i want to say that i don't know much about steiner's philosophy and my questions are not to criticize but to try to understand what steiner has to say.
i'll start by giving my understanding of the key points. Steiner says that we add thoughts to our perceptions (the impressions given by sense organs, colors, sounds, shapes...). When we see a tree, all we see is a shape with specific colors.
Only through our thinking do we add a term to it, in this case tree. The thinker and the one who perceives the thoughts are the same. Steiner interprets decrates in that he interprets that I exist in the sense that I bring forth the thoughts myself.
Also, thinking is neither subjective nor objective.
It generates these concepts and transcends them. Thinking and perception together are cognition, for thinking bestows perception with an ideal content. So knowledge is our own activity which makes sense of our perceptions. Questions that arise for me: what is a thought? A term that points to a certain consciousness content? Why are the thinker and the perceiver the same? In many Eastern teachings, thinking and perceiving are separate, why does Steiner claim the opposite? How does the thinker create concepts? where do the thoughts come from What are the objects of our perception? If our perceptions are not representations, then what are they? The thing in itself ? Why does our thinking change when we change the physical brain state? That and some other things I didn't read out of the scriptures.
Best wishes
Guney,
I understand. Criticism, clarification, both, or neither is all fine by me. I am going to take this opportunity to address a few different themes which will address your questions, but also the questions behind the questions. We have come across these questions so often that I can discern some patterns underlying them and I think addressing these patterns will ultimately be the most fruitful way forward.
1) Many times our questions are
presupposing a conception of reality that has not been established. As the earlier quote indicated, for ex., the materialist-dualist will ask, "how does the world get into my brain for me to perceive it?" He doesn't realize a flawed dualist conception of reality is presupposed in the question. Many questions on this forum surrounding the PoF approach are of this same nature, except the dualism has been moved within the sphere of the mind, so we need to pay attention for that. Often times it manifests as an assumed dualism between "thinking" and "awareness", "thinking" and "experience", "world as I represent it" and "world as it really is", or something similar. Fundamentally, it is still a dualism of subject/object, world "in here" vs. world "out there".
"In many Eastern teachings, thinking and perceiving are separate, why does Steiner claim the opposite?"
2) Exactly. That is the dualism I am speaking of. I highly recommend you read Cleric's latest post (of many) on this topic
here. There is no warrant for treating them as fundamentally separate activities, which is inevitably how they are treated when only understood as isolated intellectual concepts. I find it really helps to understand the spiritual evolution of humanity over the last few epochs (3,500 years or so). "Spiritual" here means our inseperable Willing-Feeling-Thinking activity, which for our purposes here can be called, our Perceiving-Thinking (Matter-Spirit) activity. I am going to post an excerpt from an upcoming essay on this topic.
Humanity's inner thought-life was not always the way it is today. There was a time when ideas and meaning were more concretely perceived 'behind' the natural forms and processes of the world. Man himself felt his identity to be much more bound up with Nature and the collective he belonged to. The outer world and inner world were much more interwoven to the extent that there was practically little "inner" life to speak of. As the meaningful activity permeating the Cosmos became more and more inwardized within the individual human soul, there was a cultural 'big bang' across all cultures from ancient China and India to Persia and Greece. Mythology, religion, art, and philosophy were born as the cultural reflections of this changing relationship of Spirit-Matter within the human soul. We see this imaged in the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris, who was chopped into little pieces. That was the decoherence of ancient participatory consciousness into rational thought-fragments. Then we have the birth of Horus with his All-Seeing Eye, who reflects the birth of the thinking individual himself. It is the image of the individual's synthetic gaze by virtue of its thinking.
We then have the deeply meaningful mythological and philosophical developments in ancient Palestine and Greece, all tied to the growth of the individual's inner thought-life and, consequently, the civic sovereignty accorded to the individual.
3) Many questions on this topic try to isolate claims here and there and understand them in isolation. That simply isn't possible. The nature of Reality and our participatory role in it can only be evaluated in the holistic context. When I first read PoF, I found that often I could mentally note things I didn't understand and keep reading, and later I would intuit the resolution to my confusion after perceiving more of the holistic context. For ex., all your questions related to "what is a thought" or "where do they come from" can only be understood in the holistic context of how we build up knowledge from observation and thinking. These questions also tend to presuppose dualistic view which asks from a 3rd-person non-existent perspective, and perhaps regards spatial dimension as fundamental as well (which it cannot be under idealism).
4) The quote before also indicated that the text of PoF itself has a polar relation between the first half and second half. I actually never thought of it like that until I came across the quote. It is accurate, though. For our purposes here, the first half is phenomenology and the second half is ontology. In other words, appearance and reality. The first half deals with how the world content confronts us in our first-person experience. It is
not speaking to the 'absolute reality' of perception and cognition. It is starting from
where we are now in spiritual evolution, i.e. we perceive a world of perceptual content external to ourselves which presents itself as a given, i.e. pre-existing our thinking, and then our thinking comes into motion to find the concepts which unite the perceptions into coherent wholes of experience.
We must come to really
inhabit this process as our own first-person thinking activity. For that, I am going to share an exercise Cleric posted awhile back.
Cleric wrote:As said, we need nothing but livingly experienced thinking in order to make the proper observations. Here's a very simple but tremendously effective exercise. Look around and take some object. The more familiar, the better. Try to find something new about it, something you've never noticed before.
I try to pay attention to my cognitive process, I try to be aware of what I'm doing in my consciousness. And I make many observations. I see that the paint is peeled. I actually become aware that this pencil is in fact a piece of wood that has paint on it. Yes, it's super elementary fact but I've never thought about it. Then I notice that these peelings have longitudal shape, they are like lines. They are not strictly parallel to the edge of the pencil's hexagonal shape but seem to go slightly diagonally. I can go on and on.
Now just consider this. Moments ago I only had some generic perception and the concept 'pencil'. Then through my consciously willed thinking activity I found a way to attach a ton of other concepts - wood, paint, peeled, longitudal, hexagon, worn out, etc. All of these concepts are meaningful ideal content. They tell me something about the perceptions that I behold, and allow me to relate it to many other concepts. For example I was thinking what could I have done with this pencil such that these longitudal and slightly twisting peeled streaks have formed. I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the way I repeatedly put the pencil in the pencil case. Maybe I have used it while I've been doing carpentry and it got damaged - I don't remember. Yet there's a whole world of ideas that I can link to by starting from these observations.
This is very simple and straightforward exercise. I invite everyone to try it. The experience may surprise you. I have perceptions and through my deliberate spiritual activity I've come to experience a ton of other concepts/meanings/ideas, which simply wouldn't be there unless I attempted this exercise. In the most phenomenological sense, through my thinking I have attached concepts to the perceptions belonging to the pencil. I'm not speculating what may be lying behind my thinking and behind this attaching process. I'm interested in the immediate spiritual experience - I have visual perceptions and through my thinking I came to experience the above mentioned concepts in relation to them.
So that is probably enough for now. To quickly give answers to the final questions - we don't need to try and categorize what perceptions
are, in their essence, as if studying some object in our backyard. In fact, that endeavor is guaranteed to lead us astray, because no such neutral observer perspective exists. We only need to understand how they function in our own first-person experience. We are perceiving an array of constantly changing content - colors, sounds, smells, shapes, etc. - and we unite them through meaningful concepts. I think maybe this additional excerpt from upcoming essay could help:
Imagine you are in an orchard among many different trees, with oranges, apples, peaches, and fruits of all kind. They are of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. When you pick them and take a bite, they are of all different tastes as well. Each fruit stimulates a slightly different tincture of tastes on your palette. You are enjoying the fruit, but every next bite gives a new meaningful experience; new knowledge for your soul to in-corporate. Every new fact of experience creates new desires, new feelings, new thoughts, and new perceptual associations between them. You must begin differentiating between 'good' fruit and 'bad' fruit. Eventually, you are involved in a staggering complex of fruit-experiences. To make sense of them, you must reason your way back to the meaningful qualities they all share in common. You must work back from the manifold experiences to the fruits which gave rise to them, from the fruits to the leaves, the leaves to the branches, and the branches to the roots. Unlike your instinctive grasp at the fruit above for personal pleasure, you voluntarily descend to the roots below in full consciousness for shared understanding. You arrive to the meaningful principles which unite the experiences, like the human cultivation of orchards, tree growth by water and sunlight, planting of trees, and tree development from seeds.
