Federica wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 10:00 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 7:07 pm
Probably we should first be clear what is meant by 'language'. We are not necessarily speaking of the visual and audial perception of isolated words (which also have spiritual significance), but the living idea that gives
logical structure to the language as a temporally extended organism. Basically,
the meaningful and holistic patterns of inspired ('word of the heart') and imagistic thinking that have encoded themselves in linguistic forms. In our time, a great 'phase-gap' has developed between these living ideal patterns and their outer expression through words in speech and writing, so the latter do not closely modulate the former as they did in ancient times.
But these are nothing else than the concepts, right? These are universal patterns of inspired thinking. In this sense, I would call genius of language a being who lives as a further differentiation, so that the inspired patterns become language between “the word of the heart” and “the internal word”.
We will lucidly awaken to the creative 'genius of language' that was experienced more dreamily by our ancestors. In a certain sense, we will simply be condensing the creative activity into a shorter duration through the etheric element, whereas now the perceptual landscape transforms by way of our communicated ideas over much larger durations when mediated by the mineral element.
I am not sure I get this correctly. Is it in essence another reference to the modern habit to encode thinking (creative activity) in verbal form? And are you saying that language will express more and more the etheric realm and less and less the mineral-physical reality?
I suppose it depends what we mean by 'concept'. If we mean that as synonymous with all forms of higher ideation, then yes. But usually we differentiate between intuition, inspiration, imagination, and intellect, and 'concepts' are the aliased forms of ideation familiar to the intellect. We experience these concepts as point-like entities that serve a balancing function for the higher ideal relations. These are critical because, without them, we would be flowing in ever-morphing currents of meaning that we simply can't stop to grasp and freely orient toward, i.e. we would become infantile or animalistic. But the concepts are like pieces of bone, mineral extracts, that belong to a living organism, which is the language as a whole, the genius of language. And our whole experience of atomized perceptions that have become spatially fixed is related to this conceptual life.
We could say that, in general, we are always trying to recover holistic intuition of the Cosmic evolutionary process. Quite literally everything we do, apart from blindly following lower impulses, is a means to that end (and even blindly following impulses was a means to that end when the impulses were managed for us by higher beings, such as during early childhood). We first awaken to our own being in our life of imaginations, but only in a very dreamy way, where we cannot be said to have an individual will - there is no "I" who thinks. Then we further awaken in more lucid consciousness through dim mental pictures and intellectual concepts, the encoded imaginations. Even at this stage, for the ancient Greeks for example, thinking was still flowing mostly in the etheric space. They experienced their thoughts as harmoniously ordered for them by the Logos. The "I" who thinks was nascent but not fully blossomed. It is only much later that thoughts became merged with the mineral-physical element of the brain, which allows for individual thinkers who feel
causally responsible for ordering thoughts.
Once we get to this stage, though, the holistic intuition is very 'chopped up',
temporally decohered. This whole process has a direct influence on how the perceptual landscape is experienced. The latter takes on clearer outlines, especially in vision and hearing, yet it is also more fragmented, atomistic, fixed in space. Speech and writing becomes prosaic, seemingly devoid of the imaginatively flowing spiritual element that reverberated in the ancient consciousness. This is the basis for all modern philosophy, science, etc. which clearly has influenced how we experience the Cosmos - much more as a blind mechanism than a living organism. Yet we know that the spiritual element has now withdrawn into human thinking and, over many iterations, that thinking gradually restores some of the holistic intuition for reality - the ideas of archetypes, principles, laws of nature, and so forth. But as long as thinking remains mediated by the mineral element, only the outer quantitative relations of the sensory spectrum can be clearly grasped while the inner qualitative relations remain nebulous and dim. At best, we end up with the ideas of GR, QM, 'morphogenetic fields', depth psychology, certain forms of astrology, and such.
Practically that means the potential of thinking-speech is capped at rearranging mineral forces, conceiving the higher forces abstractly, and the perceptual landscape transforms from this effort at a snail's pace. For example an innovative idea for new technology is developed in one place, communicated to another, worked over some more by other people, experimented with, tested out, patented, marketed, and so forth before it can have any significant influence on transforming the perceptual environment. This is all a result of the bureaucratic inner relations that emerge from thinking that is forced to flow through the brain-bound mineral element (which fundamentally relates to selfish inner tendencies that lead to disharmonious intents). If thinking were to be liberated from this element through moral development, many of these intermediary relations may become unnecessary. We could imagine that the perceptual landscape may transform much more organically and directly through this etheric thinking which is more 'in-phase' with the sensory spectrum than our current thinking.
Steiner gave the following example:
It has to be clearly understood that Western culture is in its initial stages. We can see that this is most immediately apparent at the point where economic processes sprout from technological processes, if I may put it like this. A very typical example is the ideal once conceived by an American, an ideal that is bound to come to realization in the West one day. It is a purely ahrimanic ideal but one of high ideality. It consists of using the vibrations generated in the human organism, studying them in great detail and applying them to machines to the effect that if someone stood by a machine even his smallest vibrations would be intensified in that machine. The vibrations of human nerves would be transferred to the machine. Think of the Keely engine. 67 It did not succeed at the first attempt because it had been largely developed from instinct, but it is something that will certainly be realized one day. Here something arises from the crude mechanistic material world that points to what is to come — material mechanics linking up with immaterial, spiritual elements.
Federica wrote:We can notice how whenever we want to focus some meaning within our intuitive context, for ex. when forming some idea about the objects in our room, we form mental pictures and 'name' the objects of our thinking. This process has a lot of influence on the way we experience our perceptual environment. It has simply become difficult to identify this influence because the depth of linguistic space is now so merged together within our thinking-perceiving experience.
As I said before, I don't recognize such strong association in my experience. Naming the objects in the room is only optional for me, I'm sure it's also the experience of many many others. By the way, when it happens that we temporarily lack the word to designate a particular object, this becomes evident: we have the clear picture of the object in mind, only the word does not come in the desired language. This is a typical experience (and an annoying one): certain words, as I have noticed, always come first in a certain language, and I have to struggle to revive them in another one. Also (I know it sounds strange, but it's true) as a strong preference, I speak in a language mix, if I know that the recipient(s) of the communication will understand (and that it's not inappropriate). It's actually not uncommon in my social environment, even work environment.
So I definitely don't have this sense that there's a constant process of naming that "has a lot of influence on the way I experience the perceptual environment". This feels very optional to me, thus I don't feel the linguistic space merged together within the thinking-perceiving experience. Rather, I typically have quite differently working and sounding options if I want to name things, and what option would feel more natural is contextual, and very variable.
(i will now read the Barfield part)
I probably should have elaborated - the 'naming' comes in when we try to
understand the relations of objects (or processes) in our perceptual experience, beyond the nebulous intuition that there are objects and processes. We simply can't do this without the aid of the inner voice. Every individual basically recapitulates the development of humanity as a whole. Just as the birth of modern conceptual thinking drastically changed the way humanity experienced their environment, so it does for each individual. The problem is that the transition process remains shrouded in darkness for normal intellectual thinking-memory, individually and collectively. For example, if you could grasp in clear consciousness how you experienced the perceptual environment as a child before you learned the various languages, it would be much easier to trace their influences and discern how each one modulated your perceptual experience in various significant ways. That's what I mean when I say they are 'merged together' for modern thinkers - they are flattened out into a homogenous experience of 'consciousness' or 'thinking-perception' and we simply can't trace the detailed influences anymore. Yet the more we delaminate the inner thought-life, the more the depth of the manifold influences become intuitively apparent.
By the way, on Aquinas' distinction of the 'inner word', 'word of the heart' and the spoken word, here is a great discussion in one of Barfield's essays. The quote from Coleridge is great and really sums up the phenomenological approach - when thinking becomes the object of its own perception, the perceptual and thinking poles of unified Intuition come into contact with one another.
*** (Barfield)
What I do want to do. if I can manage it, is to present some of that unfamiliar psychology in summary form, so that you can reflect further on it if you are minded to do so. You find the substance of it in a good many places: St. Augustine's treatise on
The Trinity is one of them, and there is a good deal of it in Aquinas's
Summa, especially in the early
Questions. A particularly memorable moment for me was the moment when I discovered that Aquinas had also taken the trouble to produce a separate short treatise entitled The Difference between the Divine Word and the Human (De Differentia Divini Verbi et Humani).
The psychology in question differs from modern linguistics in the sense that it begins its investigation into the word at a much earlier stage in its life, or even just before its birth. The spoken or uttered word is seen as the conclusion of an interior process, during which it first took form as an "inner" word (verbum interius), an entity not yet belonging or clothed in any sound, real or imagined. The exponents of this psychology speak of a "memory word", of a verbum cordis or "heart word", and finally of the "intellect word" that finds vent in actual utterance vox, the voice or sounded word. The reasoning is close, elaborate, conscientious. In fact, one gets the impression that the will or the ability to think really strenuously is something that we have since rather lost hold of. I can only sketch inadequately the general picture that is left in the mind after studying it to the best of one's ability. It is a picture of the memory as a sort of womb in the human psyche. Impressions from the senses are received into that womb, and the mere fact that it retains them instead of letting them go as soon as they appear allows the first embryonic appearance of a word or name, the
memory-word. Received further into the light of the intellect, this memory-word becomes the
heart-word, but it is only when the intellect acts on it acts formatively on or in it- that it opens into the
intellect-word, and is ready to be born into physical existence as a voiced or uttered word.
Of course, to get the full force of it, you have to realize that all this is not conceived as a purely subjective process. Psychology in those days had not yet become the physiology in disguise that it mostly is today. The form or species of an object, which in the active intelligence makes possible its naming, was identical to the form or species of the object itself in what we should call the "outer" world. "
There is one principle which produces the object of perception and the same principle at the other pole produces the contemplation of that object." That was how Coleridge was to put it many years later; but earlier thinkers did not need a Coleridge to preach it to them, because they took it for granted.
The point I want to draw attention to is the circumstance that the context in which you find this psychology expounded so carefully and in such detail whether it is St. Augustine on the Trinity or Aquinas distinguishing between the divine Word and the human, or some other is usually a sustained endeavour to help the reader grasp by analogy the existential relation between the Father and the Son in Christian theology. St. Thomas Aquinas is not content simply to produce the first two lines of his wonderful Corpus Christi hymn:
Verbum supernum prodiens
Nec Patris linquens dexteram...
The supernal Word proceeding
And yet not leaving the right hand of the Father...
He must find some way, as a philosopher, of helping his readers grasp in their imaginations the appallingly difficult notion difficult because it flouts the fundamental law of contradiction on which all strictly logical thought is based - the notion of a thing or being proceeding or going out and yet remaining where it was. And this he does by saying in effect:
Look, you find this an impossible notion to accept about your Creator. But think carefully, look very carefully into yourselves, and you will see how it is something that happens every time an ordinary human word is engendered.