lorenzop wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:29 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 2:03 pm
So, anyway, what do you think about your own first-person thinking agency and its role in the World Content? Have you had any insights in that regard? We should be clear, there is no "thesis" involved in Cleric's TCT essays. There is no postulating of a world-outlook called "structured idealism". That is completely missing the point. It is about
experiencing our own first-person thinking agency from within, differentiating it from the dim and homogenous activity we normally call "thinking", i.e. the verbal chatter in our heads.
Speaking of patience . . . this is a question I keep asking and I can't understand your (and Cleric's) answers (perhaps because I'm a fool); What is 'World Content'? I suspect you are using this term instead of the standard nuts-and-bolts phrase 'Reality' for a reason . . . What is 'World Content', and why use this term instead of Reality?
Re 'first-person thinking agency ' what is this? Is this a pre-logic pre-myth mental process whereby we create objects such a trees and automobiles from this stuff called 'World Content'? Is this similiar to Dr. Hoffman and how we create a dashboard from an unintelligible world of chaos?
As you can likely tell I have little clue what you are speaking of.
Can you construct\describe your POV\philosophy using the simple example of the experience of biting into an apple, or does your POV require cryptic phrases because it's so far from normal daily life?
<< I'm hoping to not get yet another wall of cryptic text as an answer.>>
Lorenzo,
The reason why it's cryptic is because you are trying to understand what we are saying from the traditional abstract metaphysical perspective. This perspective wants to behold everything as external objects, like images on a movie screen. The phenomenological perspective is quite opposite of this - it seeks to understand the concepts from within as living experience. If it is given concepts about 'hero', 'protagonist', 'villain', 'love story', etc. in the movie, it seeks to understand what those things mean in relation to
its own soul-narrative of continuously transforming and evolving willing, feeling, and thinking activity; desires, feelings, thoughts. This cannot be presented in a comprehensible way using sound bites, lists of definitions, or anything similar in a few brief sentences, which is the M.O. for the standard metaphysical approach. People must exercise patience and active effort to follow the illustrations, metaphors, etc. with their own thinking, to imitate the thinking-gestures which went into forming the illustrations, like Federica has shown is quite possible.
"World Content" is simply a way of saying, the appearances of the world as they present to our living activity. It highlights the fact that, when we perceive and conceive the world, we are engaging our own meaningful inner activity to make that possible and we thereby observe the content in various ways which transform in relation to that inner activity. "Reality", on the other hand, means whatever the person using it wants it to mean, and usually that goes right back to abstract metaphysics, speculating about the "essences" of the world independent of our own inner activity. More importantly, the very obsession with the isolated word-forms we are using is an expression of that abstract metaphysical approach which is disconnected from inner activity. Instead of seeking a list of definitions for these word-forms, just try to sense the spirit of the message we are intending to convey with them.
The first-person thinking agency is what you were
just using to gather meaning together which you intended to communicate, formulate that meaning into verbal thoughts, precipitate those verbal thoughts into written word-forms. We wouldn't be able to conceptualize anything, or coherently experience the world around us, if this thinking agency was absent. The metaphysical models you are seeking are a
manifestation of that activity. We simply need to contemplate that activity deeply rather than get lost in the abstract content (the models) which results from that activity. Instead of debating the metaphysical models, we can livingly confront the inner thinking-gestures we perform to make the models. To put it frankly, how people approach "ontology" or "metaphysics" in academic circles has become practically mindless and worthless. Why?
Because they seek to center their Being in concepts
about "reality", rather than
experience the center of their Being in their concept-forming activity. The materialist wants to discover their Being in abstract perceptions of neurons, chromosomes, etc. which they treat as external to them.
Similarly, metaphysicians of all sort want to discover their Being in externalized concepts of 'consciousness', 'mind', 'God', etc. Why are there hard problems in philosophy? Because people have no sense that they
fantasize that they are combining concepts and producing other concepts. The materialist thinks the concepts of neurons, puts the 'plus' sign between them, and places on the other side of the 'equal' sign the concept 'consciousness' - "neurons + more neurons = consciousness". This is the very same problem that the idealist faces when he tries to produce the alter's consciousness from the concept of MAL. The concept of our consciousness is taken from reality, from actual living experience, but the concept of MAL is abstract, we only have the thoughts about it.
Then if we put the instinctive MAL, which is only an abstract concept disconnected from living experience, on one side of the equation and we place the concept of our consciousness on the other side, imagining that somehow we produce the latter it in this way, deriving a viable explanation for it, we make the same fallacy as the materialist. To redeem these externalized concepts from their lifeless existence in the phantom layer of abstract cognition, we need to investigate the inner activity which is responsible for forming the concepts and weaving them together. That is the first-person thinking agency. It is That which weaves together the percepts-concepts of 'lightning' and 'thunder', for ex. Instead of abstractly speculating what 'essential' thing is behind the lightning and thunder, we can investigate That activity which connects the concepts together, irrespective of whether we know the 'essence' the concepts are pointing to.
Steiner wrote:The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.
This transparent clearness concerning our thinking process is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. Here I am speaking of thinking in so far as we know it from the observation of our own spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I am carrying out a thinking operation, is quite irrelevant. What I observe about thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder but what causes me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation shows me that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts.
Contemporary science and philosophy (even mainstream spirituality) don't at all want to approach this point where thinking encounters itself. It is somewhat understandable - it's much more difficult to investigate something incessantly twisting and morphing. This is the great dilemma of the intellect. If it has to investigate itself in the way it feels comfortable with, it must deaden itself - it must freeze itself into immobile mineral forms which are convenient to look at. But this means that all living thinking must cease! The other alternative, where thinking livingly experiences itself in mobility and constant metamorphosis is quite impossible to grasp in static concepts and so it's considered unworthy for scientific exploration. Yet it is precisely in our thinking that we must look to get back into the living World Process - the only WP we can ever know.
We are indeed capable of beholding the mobile and living nature of thinking but we need concepts of another kind, which are fluid and living. Just as we can't learn to ride a bicycle or swim in the water by just holding on to abstract rules but must turn them into living, flowing experience, so the Imaginative experience of thinking is a skill that must be developed. We must learn to swim through the contours of meaning with our thinking. All of this can and has been done. If it hadn't been already done for centuries before us, we wouldn't be able to write any of this (FYI, much of this was adopted from one of Cleric's old posts). This should be a huge source of inspiration and optimism about our ability to not simply 'do ontology', but to
live ontology.
