Early/late Steiner

[Anthony66]

Are you able to suggest which essays are most pertinent?

Of the most recent works, I think The Game Loop: Part 6 Concentration (and subsequent parts) pinpoints what we are talking about.

In a nutshell, what you objected to previously still maintains the strictly compartmentalized sense of being - we experience a dissociated sphere of existence; the greater World process impresses at the boundary as various phenomena, while our intellectual process arranges storyboard-like mental images (of the impressions) strictly within the sphere. Seen in this way, it's not surprising that even when we investigate our own spiritual activity, we can only conceive through analogy that something similar may be happening for other dissociated spheres. And additionally, we're always haunted by the solipsistic uncertainty: what if I'm the only dissociated sphere in existence?

To overcome this dead-end situation, we need to realize that even our thinking process, which is experienced as sequencing mental images about dissociative boundaries, our and others' personal bubbles, etc., is still part of the unitary World process. We can only move forward if we clearly recognize this dual aspect: on one hand, we have the meaning implied in the fragmentary storyboard sequences (models of existence). On the other, if we are attentive, we should realize that these storyboard flashes are modulated on top of the primary flow of the World process (they are not some 'other' special process, independent of the total World flow). The question is: is there a way to know this World process in a more direct way, and not by indirect sequencing ripples on its surface? The answer comes through the method of meditative concentration, which fundamentally shifts our scientific perspective. It is enough to attempt to concentrate our attention even for a few seconds in order to get a hint of this. In a sense, it is 'inverse' knowing (although as we progress we realize that this is the natural way of knowing, while it is precisely our present intellectual knowing that is more like an 'unnatural' inverse mode). We no longer instinctively build storyboard sequences and wonder whether they faithfully mirror true reality beyond the dissociative boundary, but we come to know something of the World process through the fact that it pushes our attentive stream into various directions. IOW, initially we come to know something of the World process not by picturing what it is, but by observing how our intended concentrated flow is pressured (thus the 'inverse' nature of knowing). There's a special quality of realness to this experience. We simply cannot deny it. If it were an illusion we could simply 'walk through it'. And this is an especially tricky part. We may say, "I can sustain my concentration if I wanted to. But I just don't feel like it right now; I have other things to do." It is precisely this 'wanting to attend to the other things' that is already an inverse intuition for how the World process pressures us. As long as we believe that this tendency (to attend to the other things) is our pure and free will, independent of the World process, we have no chance of knowing reality.

We can doubt our abstract metaphysical mental images about what these pressures are, but not that the pressures are real. So in a very general sense, this path of knowledge begins by resisting through concentration the usual pushes and pulls of our inner life, which are aspects of the World process (including our tendency to attend to other 'more important' things). This is not yet the experience of other agencies. We get to know about the latter when the meditative path goes even further and we gradually realize that the pushes and pulls of our inner life proceed from meaningful activity.

So in a nutshell: it is easy to conceive that the World process impresses at the dissociative boundary as sense impressions. Meditative concentration can be thought of as moving this boundary closer to our core intuitive process, such that even our thinking flows feel shaped and constrained by the impress of the World process. Now even our opinions, preferences, sympathies and antipathies feel like pressures that compete to rule our inner movie flow. And the critical thing to realize is that we no longer have the inner leeway of the personal sphere to philosophize about these impressions because now the very philosophical thoughts feel shaped and constrained by the impress. IOW, now even our personal intellectual flow is grasped as an interplay between deep intuitive steering and the friction with the World process (for example, what we consider to pertain to the nervous system).

I re-read your essays and very much enjoyed them. They present a disciplined phenomenology explicitly refusing mechanistic explanations. The closing re-conception of intelligence as following the gradient of "makes sense" - steering toward musical coherence rather than executing complex calculation - is, as a phenomenology of what thinking feels like from inside, is very good.

But if I'm understanding you, "makes sense" becomes a truth-tracking faculty: following the gradient of meaningfulness is a way of knowing reality, an alternative to prediction-and-test that puts us in contact with "the momentary curvature of the flow" as it actually is. This is no longer a claim about how thinking feels. It's a claim that the felt-coherence gradient tracks something real in the world. But the Everest-in-fog image shows, and I think you acknowledge this, that gaining altitude (feeling-good, feeling-coherent) doesn't guarantee approaching the true peak, that you may be climbing a local hill. From the inside, the local hill and the true summit feel identical - both are "up," both "make sense," and in the fog you cannot tell which you're on. You seem to see this as a relative difficulty ("This rarely happens through a monotonic increase. It is an iterative process.") rather than a structural impossibility of using felt-coherence to certify truth. What would tell the summit from the hill is precisely an external altimeter - some check outside the felt gradient. In the fog, without instruments, "keep going up" cannot distinguish them. But you refuse the altimeter - that would be "picture-in-picture modeling", the enemy.

In the immediate post here you summarize things - there are pushes and pulls on our inner life by the World process. But this is pretty obvious - we get distracted and it's difficult to stay focused. It all comes down to whether we can establish that the pushes and pulls are other agencies or utterly impersonal - the friction of a mechanism, the inertia of habit, or the statistics of a distractible brain. It sounds like your next essay(s) are going to answer this!

[Rodriel Gabrez]

I wonder whether the whole problem of verification is, in a sense, orthogonal to the purpose of Steiner's spiritual-scientific output. It may arise because we are interpreting the contents of spiritual science primarily as facts and thereby importing the epistemological requirements appropriate to one mode of cognition into another.

"Fact" may simply be the linguistic cloak that modern consciousness is compelled to use in order to communicate what is actually closer to an enzyme. Steiner has to say things in forms like "X happened," "Y existed," or "Z is the activity of such-and-such a Being," because our language is overwhelmingly adapted to representing objects, events, and causal relations. But it does not follow that the primary purpose of these statements is to populate an otherwise familiar world-picture with additional, supersensible objects and events.

I like to view the "facts" of spiritual science as icons of activity. They are conceptual-imaginative precipitations of impulses and streams which cannot appear within ordinary intellectual consciousness in their native form. Their primary value therefore lies not in our possessing the correct representation, but in what happens when the representation is actively taken up into thinking. In that sense they are, again, more like enzymes than pieces of information: they are meant to catalyze an activity.

If so, asking how such a content can be "verified" may sometimes involve an analogous category error to what we find in the "hard problem of consciousness." The problem is generated in part by the conceptual architecture we bring to it. We first imagine spiritual cognition as perception of a hidden world of quasi-objects, analogous to sensory objects, and then naturally ask why independently trained clairvoyants cannot inspect those objects and converge upon the same descriptions. But perhaps this already spatializes and objectifies precisely what spiritual cognition is attempting to approach differently.

This does not, however, mean that anything Steiner says can be protected from criticism by declaring it "spiritual" whenever difficulties arise. We have to distinguish epistemic registers, although even these registers cannot simply be treated as timelessly self-identical.

To whatever extent a spiritual-scientific statement enters the sensory-empirical register, it becomes accountable to what can actually be encountered there. If a treatment is claimed to produce a measurable physiological effect under present conditions, then present empirical methods are entirely appropriate for investigating that effect. Logical claims remain logically accountable, and claims concerning presently observable phenomena cannot be insulated from observation by appealing to their esoteric origin.

As has been pointed out here, the situation becomes considerably more complicated, however, when present empirical methods are used not merely to investigate present phenomena but to reconstruct remote phases of terrestrial or cosmic evolution. Here measurement and extrapolation have to be distinguished. A method may establish a relation with extraordinary reliability under presently given lawful conditions while its projection into another cosmic epoch presupposes that the relevant lawful conditions themselves have remained sufficiently invariant.

But, as has also been mentioned, this invariance is precisely one of the things spiritual science may call into question. If cosmic evolution includes transformations not merely of the contents appearing within nature but of the lawful conditions under which nature manifests at all, then present measurements cannot simply be projected backward indefinitely without remainder. The resulting reconstruction is not "mere observation"; it includes assumptions about the continuity of the very framework within which observation presently becomes intelligible.

This cannot become an escape hatch whereby every conflict with empirical evidence is explained away by saying that "the laws were different then." That would simply make spiritual science immune to correction. Rather, it means that the conflict itself has to be located carefully. We should ask whether an empirical finding directly contradicts something spiritual science claims should be observable under the same conditions, or whether the contradiction appears only after the empirical finding has been embedded within a reconstruction that presupposes continuity of conditions across qualitatively different epochs.

In the first case, spiritual science should simply bear the contradiction. In the second, however, the disagreement may concern something deeper than competing factual claims: it may concern whether the lawful structure disclosed by present cognition can legitimately be treated as the invariant measure of every phase of cosmic unfolding.

This is especially important because the epistemic registers themselves may be products of the differentiation being described. It's likely a mistake to imagine a timeless box called "empirical reality," another called "spiritual reality," another called "logic," and then simply sort Steiner's statements among them. The empirical register is real and binding within the conditions under which it operates. What is questionable is its elevation into an invariant ontological grammar for reality as such.

Indeed, some of Steiner's strangest cosmological pictures may have precisely the function of preventing this unconscious backward projection. A condition such as Old Saturn, for example, becomes almost nonsensical if imagined merely as a fantastically ancient physical environment governed by the categories through which present natural science organizes matter, force, organism, consciousness, space, and time. But perhaps the point of the picture is precisely to make thinking capable of approaching conditions in which these categories have not yet differentiated in their present form. Spiritual-scientific cosmology would then concern, among other things, the genesis of the very categories through which we presently construct an empirical account of cosmic history.

The spiritual content is therefore not necessarily exhausted by whatever proposition precipitates into one of our present epistemic registers. The same statement may carry an empirical implication while simultaneously functioning as an imaginative expression of an activity that cannot be reduced to that implication. A failure in one register genuinely matters within that register, but it does not automatically settle the nature or value of the originating spiritual content.

The spiritual-scientific content as spiritual-scientific content would consequently require another kind of evaluation. Not simply, "Does this sentence correspond to a hidden object in the way that an empirical proposition corresponds to a sensory state of affairs?" but something more like: What does this content do to cognition when it is actually metabolized? Does it disclose relationships that were previously unavailable? Does it make thinking increasingly capable of following processes rather than merely arranging representations? Does it illuminate otherwise disconnected phenomena without proliferating ad hoc explanations? Most importantly, does it eventually liberate the student from dependence upon the representation itself by awakening the activity of which the representation was only a carrier?

This is where morality and the person-as-instrument intersects the epistemological domain. The two, as Steiner often reminds us, are inseparable. I'd hesitate, though, to make moral purification itself a criterion of verification. Different spiritual traditions can cultivate profound moral development while articulating apparently incompatible accounts of reality. Moral development may be epistemologically indispensable insofar as the cognitive instrument is the person himself—it may reduce the distortions introduced by desire, vanity, fear, antipathy, attachment, etc.—but it cannot by itself establish the truth of a particular spiritual-scientific proposition.

Nor, from this perspective, do the differing spiritual traditions necessarily need to be conceived simply as competing inventories of claims about the same static supersensible geography. Their apparently incompatible pictures may themselves function within different streams, historical conditions, and transformations of consciousness. That possibility does not magically reconcile their contradictions, but it changes the nature of what would have to be compared. One would need to understand not merely what each picture says, but what cognitive activity it embodies, what it makes possible, and what relation that activity bears to the development of consciousness.

So perhaps the underlying misstep is to assume that spiritual science must eventually supply the modern soul (Consciousness Soul) with a new collection of sufficiently well-verified facts. It may instead be trying to transform the activity of knowing out of which our very notion of a fact arises, while leaving factual cognition completely legitimate within its proper conditions.

On this reading, the point is not ultimately to believe Steiner's pictures. Indeed, their successful use might involve their eventually becoming dispensable (a point I made a while ago, from another angle, in the Tomberg thread). There's something paradoxical about treating the contents of spiritual science as doctrines to be preserved intact in memory and defended propositionally if their intended function is to catalyze the development of a cognition capable of no longer needing them in that form. The picture has done its work when the activity it was carrying has become one's own.

This is why I'm not sure the verification problem, as presently formulated, ever quite reaches the heart of the matter. It asks whether the pictures Steiner gives us constitute reliable representations of supersensible reality. But I'd say the more fundamental question is whether they can cease being merely representations at all—whether, when properly worked with, they can become channels through which the activity they iconically express begins to participate in the inflowing and informing of our own thinking.

If that is the case, then the ultimate criterion appropriate to spiritual science would not simply be whether one has accumulated a set of correct propositions about an invisible world, but whether the supposedly spiritual "facts" have actually become active within cognition—whether the enzyme has catalyzed anything. And at that point the question is no longer simply what one knows about spiritual reality, but what one's knowing has become capable of doing.