The basics again 2

[Federica]

Regarding the phenomenological question - it’s been discussed hundred times. One can understand why the typical friend doesn’t get it, because we’ve all been there.

Whenever such a thought as the above occurs, I would recommend trying to summon these two quotes from Steiner for helpful orientation:

(1) Genuine spiritual perceptions act differently—they are living entities and must continually be created anew. One must go through the process repeatedly for already the following day uncertainty arises, especially about the loftiest experiences, and one must win certainty all over again. One must relate to spiritual knowledge as one relates in the physical world to what is reality and not image. A real process in the physical world is the need to eat: not many of you would refrain from eating today because you had a good meal a week ago. You would not say that the meal of a week ago is still in you nourishing you, so that there is no need to eat today. By contrast a soul content arrived at via the body remains and can be recalled unchanged in many respects. That is not the case with a spiritual soul content; this does not just fade; its very certainty is repeatedly shaken and must be regained ever again.
...
(2) One can never look at the truths about the higher worlds from too many aspects. One should realize that from any one aspect it is possible to give only the poorest sketch. And when one looks at the same thing from the most diverse aspects, the impressions one receives in this way only gradually complement each other to form an ever more animated picture. Only such pictures, not dry, schematic concepts, can help the man who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds. The more animated and colorful the pictures, the more can one hope to approach the higher reality.

Understanding, at the second-order (esoteric) level, doesn't come from 'being there' once or twice or from having all the concepts in place to explain away the perceptual content at issue (such as our friend 'not getting it'). It is a living cognitive process, just like digestion. These aren't mere metaphors but realities and we should (should, if we desire to explore the second-order movements) learn to gradually move our thinking like we move our bodily will when trying to get a sense of the form of a large structure, for ex., i.e. actively and repetitively from all different sides. Unlike the bodily will, we can also imbue that movement of thinking with imagination and explore perspectives and angles that are unavailable to the senses. We can try to intuitively feel the soul gestures and patterns of thinking at work, akin to floating up in the air and getting a bird's eye view on the landscape below. As I remarked to Guney, this is not simply for the benefit of others we are 'explaining' these things to but also, and primarily, for our own benefit of inner sensitivity to superconscious movements.

Of course. What you quote and say is not in contrast with my thought. You are hugely overinterpreting it, because you are letting some mannerism playing in there. You have to let go of your mannerism.

[AshvinP]

Of course. What you quote and say is not in contrast with my thought. You are hugely overinterpreting it, because you are letting some mannerism playing in there. You have to let go of your mannerism.

Sure, but you don't have to feel insulted if it doesn't apply to your particular thought (and I admit that I have no idea what the thought meant, if it doesn't apply). We can brush past that part (we, because I have been doing this a lot lately ) and interact with the rest as a way to deepen our orientation. There is still value in exploring the quotes again, contemplating them, seeing how they apply to various situations on the spiritual scientific path. In other words, you don't have to care so much about what I think about your thought, how I misinterpreted or overinterpreted it, and so forth. You can clarify its meaning, if you want, or just let it go and move on to new thoughts.

[Federica]

Of course. What you quote and say is not in contrast with my thought. You are hugely overinterpreting it, because you are letting some mannerism playing in there. You have to let go of your mannerism.

Sure, but you don't have to feel insulted if it doesn't apply to your particular thought (and I admit that I have no idea what the thought meant, if it doesn't apply). We can brush past that part (we, because I have been doing this a lot lately ) and interact with the rest as a way to deepen our orientation. There is still value in exploring the quotes again, contemplating them, seeing how they apply to various situations on the spiritual scientific path. In other words, you don't have to care so much about what I think about your thought, how I misinterpreted or overinterpreted it, and so forth. You can clarify its meaning, if you want, or just let it go and move on to new thoughts.

Why are you making it so difficult for yourself (and pedantic to read for everyone else)? Get over your mannerism Ashvin. Presumptuousness kills love, wisdom, and clairvoyance too.

[AshvinP]

Of course. What you quote and say is not in contrast with my thought. You are hugely overinterpreting it, because you are letting some mannerism playing in there. You have to let go of your mannerism.

Sure, but you don't have to feel insulted if it doesn't apply to your particular thought (and I admit that I have no idea what the thought meant, if it doesn't apply). We can brush past that part (we, because I have been doing this a lot lately ) and interact with the rest as a way to deepen our orientation. There is still value in exploring the quotes again, contemplating them, seeing how they apply to various situations on the spiritual scientific path. In other words, you don't have to care so much about what I think about your thought, how I misinterpreted or overinterpreted it, and so forth. You can clarify its meaning, if you want, or just let it go and move on to new thoughts.

Why are you making it so difficult for yourself (and pedantic to read for everyone else)? Get over your mannerism Ashvin. Presumptuousness kills love, wisdom, and clairvoyance too.

"Whoever does not see it needs to work harder on themselves"
"Your posts keep dripping with a soul quality opposite to humility"
"Get over your mannerism"

Yes, these are the thrifty comments of someone who doesn't stake spiritual science abstractly and tries to quietly live into virtues (instead of virtue signal)

Sorry, Federica, but I think I will stop conversing with you for a while, similar to others here. I don't know if you will continue to get any responses to your comments, or your threads containing just a title, if I bow out, but it's simply impossible to communicate in any productive way with you anymore. I can empathize with your situation. Lower impulses are ripping through your "I" without any resistance and I am sure that my way of interacting with you is only making the situation worse, making you feel more like a victim of some perpetual persecution by me. It's doing neither of us any good to continue this cycle and I know it will continue in the future no matter what my responses are or how they are constructed. You will scour each and every word, dissecting every sentence, to find "mannerisms" that irritate, insult, or offend you and use that as a reason to vent lower impulses.

Please know that I am not 'abandonding' you - you are still in my thoughts and prayers. And I hope others decide to continue dialoguing with you. Best wishes.

[Federica]

Sure, but you don't have to feel insulted if it doesn't apply to your particular thought (and I admit that I have no idea what the thought meant, if it doesn't apply). We can brush past that part (we, because I have been doing this a lot lately ) and interact with the rest as a way to deepen our orientation. There is still value in exploring the quotes again, contemplating them, seeing how they apply to various situations on the spiritual scientific path. In other words, you don't have to care so much about what I think about your thought, how I misinterpreted or overinterpreted it, and so forth. You can clarify its meaning, if you want, or just let it go and move on to new thoughts.

Why are you making it so difficult for yourself (and pedantic to read for everyone else)? Get over your mannerism Ashvin. Presumptuousness kills love, wisdom, and clairvoyance too.

"Whoever does not see it needs to work harder on themselves"
"Your posts keep dripping with a soul quality opposite to humility"
"Get over your mannerism"

Yes, these are the thrifty comments of someone who doesn't stake spiritual science abstractly and tries to quietly live into virtues (instead of virtue signal)

Sorry, Federica, but I think I will stop conversing with you for a while, similar to others here. I don't know if you will continue to get any responses to your comments, or your threads containing just a title, if I bow out, but it's simply impossible to communicate in any productive way with you anymore. I can empathize with your situation. Lower impulses are ripping through your "I" without any resistance and I am sure that my way of interacting with you is only making the situation worse, making you feel more like a victim of some perpetual persecution by me. It's doing neither of us any good to continue this cycle and I know it will continue in the future no matter what my responses are or how they are constructed. You will scour each and every word, dissecting every sentence, to find "mannerisms" that irritate, insult, or offend you and use that as a reason to vent lower impulses.

Please know that I am not 'abandonding' you - you are still in my thoughts and prayers. And I hope others decide to continue dialoguing with you. Best wishes.

Just quietly stop quoting me, Ashvin. You don't have to make a confused statement about virtues and display of troubled TWF like this. Thank you for the prayers, anyway.

[AshvinP]

Maybe it would be better if one don’t discuss such details.
But a nice example is the alien dwelling from Clerics essay.

It’s not hard to see that there is something given, and something which we need to do in order to grasp the given.
Cleric didn’t go deep into these details in he’s phonograph essays.
I think there is no need for it.

Guney,

I would ask that you vividly imagine a friend, with whom you shared your essay, comes back and says he/she simply can't understand what is meant by the 'given', it isn't found anywhere in their experience. We should try to intuitively sense in what state our friend is coming to us with such a question/objection, what underlying soul movements could bring them to this thought of 'there is no pure given, everything already has meaning when we encounter it' that seems so opposite of what we ourselves have concluded, 'there is something we need to do in order to grasp the given'. We can even live in this tension for a while and sense how there is no easy answer that we can spit out to resolve the discrepancy.

This is why it becomes necessary to enter into and discuss such details. It's not only for our friend's benefit but also for ours. The main aim of esoteric epistemology is always to become more sensitive to the inner movements by which we have reached our conclusions about cognition, perception, the given, etc. We should try to feel concretely what potential paths of thinking experience are available when confronting the epistemological content and why some paths may be chosen over others, why intuitive activity funnels from the potential in a certain direction, depending on constellations of inner factors (most proximately our thinking habits). It's not guaranteed that everyone who approaches Cleric's phonograph essays will understand them as we do. We saw that with Marco Masi, for ex.

This is how we deepen our intuitive orientation and stimulate our imaginative and creative thinking capacity. As you point out, the alien dwelling is a great example and something we won't find in Steiner's early work. This provides another angle to approach the 'given' that is helpful for ourselves and others and we can surely come up with more angles. We should always take a deep interest in how fellow souls experience or fail to experience their own real-time intuitive activity. We will never find one 'perfect' phenomenology or epistemology that settles the issue, because the issue is us, with all our etched soul pathways and conditioned thinking movements. Yet we also don't need to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Instead, we can work with what is already there and gradually modulate the content as well, adding our own contributions that help triangulate the underlying intuitive experience. You have already started doing that and there is only more room to grow! We just don't want to become too satisfied with any particular angle or characterization of the inner realities.

Yes, you’re right.

But I think that one can loose oneself, if we try to intellectually think about phenomenology. So it’s best done in the way cleric explain this topic, i.e with metaphors. But you are right, we should try to understand the perspectives of others. Steiner wrote about it in HtkHW too.

Returning to the topic of this thread and productive dialogue...

That makes sense. I think SM characterized it well as telling a joke and then trying to explain why it's a joke, which kills the inner movements that made the joke-telling humorous. It's true that we should first use phenomenology, such as Cleric's essays, to deepen and refine our orientation and not get too concerned with why the phenomenology works. The latter will come as a natural consequence of the deepening orientation and that will aid us greatly when we are developing our own phenomenological angles for the benefit of, not only ourselves, but also others.

I am also reminded of something Steiner lectured on. We are all familiar with alchemical stories or fairy tales and the enigmatic imagery. The first-order content of the images and descriptions seems to be quite removed from inner realities and movements, like 'turning lead into gold' and all the complex alchemical formulas. In modern times, we have lost all feeling for the deeper symbolism but it's clear on the spiritual path that we can restore this feeling at a lucid, cognitive level and then the second-order inner processes begin to shine through the first-order symbolic content, or the latter becomes more transparent to the former.

But what is the point of even analyzing it in this way? Steiner characterizes it as follows:

A number of things make it seem precarious to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual investigation. One of them is the difficulty of the subject itself, since the sources of a genuine and true fairy tale mood have in fact to be sought at deep levels of the human soul. The methods of spiritual research often described by me must follow convoluted paths before these sources can be discovered. Genuine fairy tales originate from sources lying at greater depths of the human soul than is generally supposed, speaking to us magically out of every epoch of humanity's development.

A second difficulty is that, in regard to what is magical in fairy tales, one has to a considerable extent the feeling that the original, elementary impression, indeed the essential nature of the fairy tale itself is destroyed through intellectual observations and a conceptual penetration of the fairy tale. If one has the justified conviction in regard to explanations and commentaries that they destroy the immediate living impression the fairy tale ought to make in simply letting it work on one, then one would far rather not accept explanations in place of their subtle and enchanting qualities. These well up from seemingly unfathomable sources of the folk-spirit or of the individual human soul-disposition. It is really as though one were to destroy the blossom of a plant, if one intrudes with one's power of judgment in what wells up so pristinely from the human soul as do these fairy tale compositions.

Even so, with the methods of spiritual science it proves possible nonetheless to illumine at least to some extent those regions of the soul-life from which fairy tale moods arise. Actual experience would seem to gainsay the second reservation as well. Just because the origin of fairy tales has to be sought at such profound depths of the human soul, one arrives as a matter of course at the conviction that what may be offered as a kind of spiritual scientific explanation remains something that touches the source so slightly after all as not to harm it by such investigation. Far from being impoverished, one has the feeling that everything of profound significance in those regions of the human soul remains so new, unique and original that one would like best of all to bring it to expression oneself in the form of a fairy tale of some kind. One senses how impossible any other approach is in speaking out of these hidden sources.

I think we can eventually approach the metaphorical phenomenologies, which of course, have become much more explicitly symbolic than fairy tales, in a similar way. They retain the symbolic quality that points to deeper soul movements (unlike standard modern philosophy), but the content explicitly tells us, in some form or another, that we are investigating those deeper soul movements as well. They leverage the fact that our consciousness has become the most 'in focus' within the movements of lucid philosophical-scientific concepts, rather than the more dreamy conceptual movements of the early Middle Ages for ex. Now we have already started going into a spiritual scientific explanation again

The risk, however, is that we take this spiritual scientific exploration of the phenomenological method as some discursive intellectual analysis that ruins all the enchantment of the pure metaphorical approach, i.e. we fail to understand the discussion of the phenomenology as itself a kind of 'fairy tale'. In other words, it is only another way of doing more phenomenology of spiritual activity. Our phenomenological movements have become the metaphor, in a certain sense, for the inner structure and flow of spiritual activity, serving the same function as the 'alien dwelling' (for ex.) in another context.

I realize how recursively convoluted this can all begin to sound, for the same reason as explaining the artform that went into telling a joke. Again, this is just meant as a 'preview' of how we may begin to think through these discussions when the time is right, and we will intuitively know when the time is right if we persist with our basic phenomenological efforts. Sometimes I find it to be fruitful to just live in these recursions for a while, to dwell in them without trying to grasp the significance of them too clearly. There is something kind of thrilling in that experience, which is essentially the exceptional state we aim for through concentration. I have also been experimenting with this as a method to go to sleep more easily

[AshvinP]

I made a brief Facebook post on this, since even if it doesn't help Jeff, it may help other Anthroposophers who are interested in these questions. (the pic is from my visit to Istanbul last year)

***

On the question of the 'given', I also came across this quite explicit remark from Steiner in GA 3:

If a being with a fully developed human intelligence were suddenly created out of nothing and then confronted the world, the first impression made on his senses and his thinking would be something like what I have just characterized as the directly given world-picture. In practice, man never encounters this world-picture in this form at any time in his life; he never experiences a division between a purely passive awareness of the “directly-given” and a thinking recognition of it. This fact could lead to doubt about my description of the starting point for a theory of knowledge. Hartmann says for example:

[Hartmann objection]

The objection to this, however, is that the world-picture with which we begin philosophical reflection already contains predicates mediated through cognition. These cannot be accepted uncritically, but must be carefully removed from the world-picture so that it can be considered free of anything introduced through the process of knowledge. This division between the “given” and the “known” will not in fact, coincide with any stage of human development; the boundary must be drawn artificially. But this can be done at every level of development so long as we draw the dividing line correctly between what confronts us free of all conceptual definitions, and what cognition subsequently makes of it.

It might be objected here that I have already made use of a number of conceptual definitions in order to extract from the world-picture as it appears when completed by man, that other world-picture which I described as the directly given. However, what we have extracted by means of thought does not characterize the directly given world-picture, nor define nor express anything about it; what it does is to guide our attention to the dividing line where the starting point for cognition is to be found.

It becomes evident why this is so important when we consider, for ex., how all modern philosophy was tainted by unconsciously importing the subject/object divide into their reasoning. Kant did this when evaluating the 'limits to cognition' and we all know what enormous impact his epistemology has to this day across all fields of inquiry. If we can't asymptotically guide our attention to the starting point for cognition, we can never get a proper phenomenology off the ground that resists importing assumptions about subject/object, inner/outer, spirit/matter, etc.

We are always tempted to take inner experiences of colors, sounds, smells, etc. and place them in the bucket of 'outer world' while taking inner experiences of desires, feelings, thoughts, etc. and place them in the bucket of 'inner world'. There is nothing in the given that directs us to do this but we habitually do it anyway. This is an extremely potent habit of thinking and merely conceptualizing its existence doesn't ensure we will refrain from unconsciously following its streamline during our thinking evaluations of the experiential flow. We need to imaginatively approach a state in which even these most rudimentary conceptual distinctions are not made, so as to guide our attention and sensitize our spiritual activity to a new habit of experiential thinking that replaces the old abstracting habit.

JF is so far avoiding this quote.

[Güney27]

I made a brief Facebook post on this, since even if it doesn't help Jeff, it may help other Anthroposophers who are interested in these questions. (the pic is from my visit to Istanbul last year)

***

On the question of the 'given', I also came across this quite explicit remark from Steiner in GA 3:

If a being with a fully developed human intelligence were suddenly created out of nothing and then confronted the world, the first impression made on his senses and his thinking would be something like what I have just characterized as the directly given world-picture. In practice, man never encounters this world-picture in this form at any time in his life; he never experiences a division between a purely passive awareness of the “directly-given” and a thinking recognition of it. This fact could lead to doubt about my description of the starting point for a theory of knowledge. Hartmann says for example:

[Hartmann objection]

The objection to this, however, is that the world-picture with which we begin philosophical reflection already contains predicates mediated through cognition. These cannot be accepted uncritically, but must be carefully removed from the world-picture so that it can be considered free of anything introduced through the process of knowledge. This division between the “given” and the “known” will not in fact, coincide with any stage of human development; the boundary must be drawn artificially. But this can be done at every level of development so long as we draw the dividing line correctly between what confronts us free of all conceptual definitions, and what cognition subsequently makes of it.

It might be objected here that I have already made use of a number of conceptual definitions in order to extract from the world-picture as it appears when completed by man, that other world-picture which I described as the directly given. However, what we have extracted by means of thought does not characterize the directly given world-picture, nor define nor express anything about it; what it does is to guide our attention to the dividing line where the starting point for cognition is to be found.

It becomes evident why this is so important when we consider, for ex., how all modern philosophy was tainted by unconsciously importing the subject/object divide into their reasoning. Kant did this when evaluating the 'limits to cognition' and we all know what enormous impact his epistemology has to this day across all fields of inquiry. If we can't asymptotically guide our attention to the starting point for cognition, we can never get a proper phenomenology off the ground that resists importing assumptions about subject/object, inner/outer, spirit/matter, etc.

We are always tempted to take inner experiences of colors, sounds, smells, etc. and place them in the bucket of 'outer world' while taking inner experiences of desires, feelings, thoughts, etc. and place them in the bucket of 'inner world'. There is nothing in the given that directs us to do this but we habitually do it anyway. This is an extremely potent habit of thinking and merely conceptualizing its existence doesn't ensure we will refrain from unconsciously following its streamline during our thinking evaluations of the experiential flow. We need to imaginatively approach a state in which even these most rudimentary conceptual distinctions are not made, so as to guide our attention and sensitize our spiritual activity to a new habit of experiential thinking that replaces the old abstracting habit.

JF is so far avoiding this quote.

Yes for sure!
This subject object dualism is a really big lens for our “spiritual eye”.
I once had an experience, when I was in between sleeping and waking consciousness, that I heard a voice saying “there is only one world”.The days before that I thought about subject-object dualism.
This experience was imbued with meaning and I could understand the matter in a more direct way.

[AshvinP]

Yes for sure!
This subject object dualism is a really big lens for our “spiritual eye”.
I once had an experience, when I was in between sleeping and waking consciousness, that I heard a voice saying “there is only one world”.The days before that I thought about subject-object dualism.
This experience was imbued with meaning and I could understand the matter in a more direct way.

That's great because such an awakening can easily elude us for our entire lives in the modern world.

I want to share a further comment on this topic made by JF and my response, since it may be helpful to contemplate. It's becoming clearer to me what the underlying issue is for JF, which is exactly this habitual dualizing assumption that most idealist-minded people feel that they have 'overcome' by simply conceptualizing it. It is fascinating how this assumption can sneak in at the beginning and then generate an entirely misleading orientation to the whole of spiritual science which is nevertheless felt as reasonable and wise.

***

Thanks for this clear elaboration. It is very helpful for orienting me to the underlying discrepancies in our understanding.

I think you are more a Barfieldian and recognize that the further 'back' we go, the more experience is a united event of perception-cognition, before they are apparently (but not really) separated by the modern human soul.

So, on the one hand, we can say that Steiner acknowledges that the directly given world picture is only imagined conceptually, never experienced; that Steiner is NOT suggesting we have such an experience, only suggesting that we conceptualize it and use that concept as our starting point.

On the other hand, he says that the directly given world picture flits by us in experience. And he says that he knows that if an intelligent being sprung forth from nothing into our world, BEFORE it had any coherence and experientialy intricate implying, it would experience a nearly endless filed of perceptually separated entities.

That is an assumption. You were getting...interested in assumptions earlier. Obviously you think that that assumption is for some reason necessarily correct. Can you explain that?

These are all points that are very useful to explore further and as carefully as possible. If what follows doesn't apply to what you meant by the above comments, then I apologize and would ask you to clarify their meaning for me.

If we are remaining faithful to the first-person flow of experience, as the only possible perspective there is, then there is no need to compare that experience to some other "reality". There is no other "reality" for it to correspond to.

In other words, if we can strip ordinary sensory experience of all its conceptual determinations, including subject/object, inner/outer, etc., and experience the result as its meaning permeates our imaginative state of being, then it exists "in reality" and we are experiencing it. If we start wondering whether this experience 'corresponds to reality', we have strayed from first-person phenomenology into abstract metaphysics. There is no justification to begin with the ASSUMPTION that there is another reality 'beyond' or on the 'other side of' what we can reach through our reasoned imaginative experience. Our first-person spiritual activity is an integral part of whatever reality is, including the real-time activity we are using to unwind previous conceptual determinations.

These imaginative movements we make aren't "adding more assumptions", but retracing what we MUST have added through past conceptual activity, so that we become sensitive to the more undetermined state of the experiential flow. The real assumption is that there is some 'other reality' that might not correspond with what we experience in the first-person flow when engaging in our imaginative activity and reaching certain imaginative states.

By the way, none of this is to suggest 'illusions' or errors are impossible when we engage in imaginative activity, but the reason why such illusions or errors arise isn't some lack of correspondence with another 'objective reality', but other reasons entirely (which I am happy to discuss more if we need to). This is why I keep speaking of how ordinary habits of thinking lead us astray in this epistemic domain and Steiner expected us to interact with his thinking movements in a way that deconditions us from those habits, so we can remain faithful to the first-person flow of experience.

In fact, higher cognitive development is nothing but a PURIFICATION of the experience of the imaginative state free of habitual conceptual delineations. There is no other reality that it takes us to, some exotic realm of bodies and beings and processes. It simply clears away the habitual mechanisms, the instinctive reactions, the buzzing thoughts, emotions, etc., so we can dwell more purely in the imaginative state we reach through the aesthetic epistemological method.

To be clear, I am not appealing to any higher experiences to make this point about the reality of the imaginative state we reach through Steiner's epistemological experiment. It is entirely independent of that. At the same time, it doesn't hurt to contemplate this continuity as a working hypothesis, to see if it helps shed new light on the higher cognitive states and their relation to the entry-level phenomenology.
...
It is also worth mentioning that, if we were to either experience the superposition of all possible inner phenomena as pure holistic knowing, or as chaotic relationless aggregate, we would be identical with the Absolute. From the highest perspective, these two poles - Heaven and Hell, Cosmos and Chaos, Divine Father and Divine Mother, etc. - are One, perfectly united in Divine matrimony.

We humans should imagine we can only asymptotically approach this state, always getting nearer but never quite reaching. Whether we ascend through higher cognition, or descend through some kind of disease (for ex. antereograde amnesia), major trauma, or we are Hitler across the threshold experiencing the results of our deeds as if they are happening to us, we never unite with pure Heaven or pure Hell. But we can get damn close! And for all practical purposes, the way to reconcile the poles in our flow of experience is to imaginatively live into their realities. The poles are absolutely real even if we never experience them in their Absolute purity.

[lorenzop]

I don't think people can actually experience a subject\object dualism, but rather, our speech and philosophies take the subject\object model too seriously, so we might become inclined to think (on a surfacy level) the subject\object model is true.
However, no one experiences a division between subject and object, no one experiences 2 things . . . there isn't a line of separation between me and seeing . . . there is only seeing, touching, tasting, etc.
All we need to do is point this out. It doesn't require a proof or a change in philosophy.