Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Breaking Bad Habits

[Apanthropinist]

First, I was not arguing a philosophical position, only pointing out what I genuinely find "fascinating". Second, I cannot try to "falsify" my "opponent's" argument if I have no idea what it is. No argument has even been made by my "opponent" yet.

No Ashvin, you were arguing a philosophical position, here:

quintessential examples of what I was trying to highlight as the "bad habit" which needs desperately to be broken right now.

Basically you are suggesting people are doing it wrong, ie, bad habit, which is a Psychogenic Fallacy.

Second, I cannot try to "falsify" my "opponent's" argument if I have no idea what it is. No argument has even been made by my "opponent" yet.

Both of these statements are true and valid.

I was, however, talking about your argument.

Claiming that people are employing a 'bad habit' where your claim is 'It is precisely the habit of thinking the realm of mind i.e. psyche i.e. "Spirit" is some free-for-all purely "subjective" realm where any opinion goes and any claim to "objective" truth should be met with contempt.'

That is nothing else other than a philosophical position you are arguing.

See bolded phrase. I am arguing that the comments reflect what I was trying to highlight. Only I know what I was trying to highlight.

No Ashvin, it is known what you were trying to highlight......because you made a point of highlighting.

I did not claim what I was trying to highlight is actually true.

Yes you did claim what you were trying to highlight is actually true. 'It is precisely the habit....' This is what you are claiming is 'true' and which you follow up with by confirming, '...which is what I am calling "bad habits of mind" and what I am claiming many people unconsciously hold to.'

I will be happy to read your rational, metaphysics, philosophical argument for this claim and how it relates to analytical idealism. As you will be aware, in analytic idealism there is no necessity for Deities and other Theological entities.

In other words I do not feel inclined to be drawn into your new 'meta game' as I believed you termed it in a earlier post. Just give me the rational philosophy of analytical idealism please, then we are good to go.

[AshvinP]

In other words I do not feel inclined to be drawn into your new 'meta game' as I believed you termed it in a earlier post. Just give me the rational philosophy of analytical idealism please, then we are good to go.

Either you know what the Cartesian and Kantian divides are or you don't. If you don't, then read my essay Res Ipsa Loquitur: Kant vs. the World. If you do, then please just respond with whether you agree or disagree with those philosophical positions and feel free to add any reasoning why or why not. Thanks in advance.

[Eugene I]

I hold to "objective idealism" only in so far as I do not believe my limited ego, as I am currently experiencing it, encompasses the entirety of Reality (a view I would call "unhealthy solipsism").

Oh, no question about that, that is also shared by the subjective idealism. The difference is that the objective one claims that the reality can be exhausted by the "truth" and entirely reduced to it, with "truth" being a universal idea entirely comprehendible by cognition (albeit the "higher" cognition), and there is noting else to reality other than just objective and universal ideas converging to the universal truth. The subjective one claims that there are other aspects of reality irreducible to ideas only, and the reality itself is not an idea. That does not introduce any Kantian divide, since such aspects are still accessible to direct experience of reality by reality itself. In other words, the "thing in itself" experientially knows itself as itself directly apart from any ideas. But in addition to that, it can reflect this experience with ideas as well, but can never do it exhaustively, because such aspects and such experience by itself are not ideas, but direct conscious experiences. No divide between ideas and other aspects is introduced either, because the reality is single in essence and a variety in aspects and expressions, and ideas are simply only specific aspects/forms of reality which are never separate from it in essence, but differ in heir aspect and vary in forms.

Unfamiliar with such experience, Kant thought that if the "thing in itself" is incomprehensible by cognition, then it must be unknowable in any possible way whatsoever and therefore remain eternally unreachable by consciousness. Not only Kant, but entirely missing the aspect of reality experiencing and knowing itself is a hallmark of all Western philosophy and spirituality. Absent such experiential knowledge, the only way the West could close the Kantian gap was to assume that the cognition can actually know all there is to reality, which means that the reality is entirely reducible to ideas comprehendible by cognition.

[Apanthropinist]

In other words I do not feel inclined to be drawn into your new 'meta game' as I believed you termed it in a earlier post. Just give me the rational philosophy of analytical idealism please, then we are good to go.

Either you know what the Cartesian and Kantian divides are or you don't. If you don't, then read my essay Res Ipsa Loquitur: Kant vs. the World. If you do, then please just respond with whether you agree or disagree with those philosophical positions and feel free to add any reasoning why or why not. Thanks in advance.

Should I consult my Spirit Guide to aid me with this?

I forgot to mention - our entrance into the genius mind of Kant and, if all goes according to plan, our break out through to the other side will be aided by a Spirit Guide who shall remain nameless for now.

Or let's do as I suggested:

"I will be happy to read your rational, metaphysics, philosophical argument for this claim and how it relates to analytical idealism. As you will be aware, in analytic idealism there is no necessity for Deities and other Theological entities."

Then we'll find out who is blowing philosophical smoke and who isn't. Thanks in advance.

[AshvinP]

In other words I do not feel inclined to be drawn into your new 'meta game' as I believed you termed it in a earlier post. Just give me the rational philosophy of analytical idealism please, then we are good to go.

Either you know what the Cartesian and Kantian divides are or you don't. If you don't, then read my essay Res Ipsa Loquitur: Kant vs. the World. If you do, then please just respond with whether you agree or disagree with those philosophical positions and feel free to add any reasoning why or why not. Thanks in advance.

Should I consult my Spirit Guide to aid me with this?

I forgot to mention - our entrance into the genius mind of Kant and, if all goes according to plan, our break out through to the other side will be aided by a Spirit Guide who shall remain nameless for now.

Or let's do as I suggested:

"I will be happy to read your rational, metaphysics, philosophical argument for this claim and how it relates to analytical idealism. As you will be aware, in analytic idealism there is no necessity for Deities and other Theological entities."

Then we'll find out who is blowing philosophical smoke and who isn't. Thanks in advance.

My argument for the "bad mental habit" claim is in that Kant essay. See below:

In Descartes' philosophy, we find a clear division of the world into 'spirit-mind' and 'matter'. The former became the private realm of inner experience and the latter became the public realm of knowledge. We can systematically study the realm of matter and share the results with others, but, according to Cartesian dualism, we cannot do the same for the realm of mind. It is no overstatement to say that Descartes' mind-matter divide helped make all of modern science possible. It provided a framework in which individuals could distance their subjectivity from the world of 'things out there', if not in practice then at least in theory.

Even in Descartes, though, we can imagine a thread which connects the two realms; a reality in which the private overlaps with the public; the 'inner' with the 'outer'. It would take the brilliance of a mind like Kant's to make our imaginations an exercise in futility. Kant's most well-known and influential insight now rests at the base of that branch of philosophy we call "epistemology". Rather than asking about the true essence of the world we live in, as was common for all Western metaphysics since Plato, Kant desired to shift the discussion towards the question of how the world can even appear to us in a way that makes it an object of our knowledge.

Kant answered his own question as follows - by the time we become conscious of our experiences of the world 'out there', our internal organization has already structured those experiences with categories. Further, those categories cannot be said to correspond with any aspect of the underlying reality; categories which cannot be said to directly link up with the "things-in-themselves". Let's imagine we have a sense perception X and another sense perception Y. Before we become aware of those perceptions, our unconscious intellect has already structured the perceptions into the category of cause (X) and effect (Y) so that Y always follows from X.

The a priori cause-effect judgment our mind unconsciously imposes on the perceptions reflects no knowledge whatsoever of the essence which underlies X, Y or the X-Y relationship. If X and Y actually exist and they happen to be in an actual cause-effect relationship, then it would be nothing more than dumb luck that we stumbled upon it. There is nothing within our conceptual judgments and the experiences structured by them which directs us towards such a conclusion about the underlying reality. It was a brilliant maneuver by Kant to reverse Hume's relationship between perceptions and judgments - judgments come before perceptions.

The same reversal holds true for any of the usual qualities and relations which we seem to experience, according to Kant. Substance and attribute, necessary and contingent, unity and multiplicity - these are all added to experience through our own unconscious intellect before we are even aware of the experiences. What is undeniable for Kant is that the appearances of the world as our intellect finds them (phenomenon) can never be traced back to the things-in-themselves (noumenon). The latter remain forever beyond our sensory and cognitive capacities; imprisoned behind an impenetrable wall of a priori judgments.
...
Schopenhauer began to bridge the Kantian divide with his assertion that the essence of Reality is the volitional Will shared by all creatures. Since the noumenon is Will, we can experience it by introspective practice; an meditative emptying of our consciousness of all "illusory" representations until we are only left with experience of pure Will. Another way of attaining such experience is through [good] art and music. The problem with Schopenhauer's thought was, ironically, that all ideas about the Will must also be disclaimed as illusory and epistemically unhelpful. A conceit such as that restores the ontic-epistemic divide for all intents and purposes.
...
Friedrich Nietzsche further specified Schopenhauer's Will to be a "will-to-power"- a Will in service of at least one tangible aim. For Nietzsche, reacting to the increasingly abstract and detached philosophy of his era, all important metaphysical concepts must be found within the sphere of daily experience rather than 'out there' in abstract intellectual space or within the still depths of ascetic practice. "Power", in that sense, is a radical interest in one's own ambitions and creations within life. It can either be willed consciously, which leads to 'healthy' states of being, or it can operate unconsciously within the guise of "obedience-duty", "virtue", "selflessness", etc., which then yields to pathologies of every sort. If we are able to harness our own will-to-power, to be truly free, then we must necessarily experience the noumenon in that process.
...
Here in the United States, we have the pragmatists such as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce who sought to re-conceptualize our idea of "Truth". Rather than "Truth" as a series of abstract concepts about nature which directly mirror the real state of 'things' existing beyond our conscious experience, the pragmatists recognized Truth as a practical knowledge which cannot come from anywhere but our direct experience. It was a deft maneuver because, even if the Kantian divide holds firm, the meaning we find from pursuing concrete aims is proclaimed more True than the state of 'things' we can never experience or know.

Across the Atlantic in England, we have brilliant philosophers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Owen Barfield who, unfortunately, rarely get recognition as such. To say they are underappreciated would be a gross understatement. Early in the 19th century, Coleridge was already busy at work attempting to restore the human individual to her rightful place as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Everything objectively meaningful in the Cosmos can be discerned from the inner workings of the individual, according to Coleridge, especially in the process of Thinking ("primary imagination").

Owen Barfield was the best commentator on Coleridge (see What Coleridge Thought), but also a brilliant philosopher in his own right. He conducted deep studies on the evolution of language meanings (philology), particularly in the English language but also in ancient Greek. From that study, he discerned the corresponding transformations in our conscious experience of the world. Words are the "fossils of consciousness", according to Barfield and under metaphysical idealism there is only consciousness. Therefore his view implicitly holds that our language-concepts and percepts can link back to the underlying conscious activity from which they spawned. And with stark contrast, Barfield knew that it was the task of 20th century man onwards to "save the appearances" (phenomenal world) from the clutches of the Kantian divide.
...
Another philologist and deep philosophical thinker was Martin Heidegger, who stood somewhat apart from traditional Western metaphysics. Heidegger, especially in his later works published after World War II, made a compelling case for rejecting the Kantian divide. He embraced a philosophy in which the phenomenon of daily life concealed yet also unconcealed Reality (Aletheia). What conceals Reality is the multitude of bare perceptions separating the world into isolated fragments, and what unconceals its essential relations is the human activity of Thinking (what Barfield referred to as "conscious figuration" above).

Rather than turning away from the perceptions of everyday life to speculate abstractly about concepts with our intellect, Heidegger wanted us to confront those perceptions with our Reason for the precise aim of reuniting them with their proper concepts. There was a magical way in which bare perceptions (including thought-perceptions) which draw away from us in daily life also call upon us to Think. It was the spiritual duty of every individual to heed that call (see Heidegger's lectures, What is Called Thinking?). He was certainly not alone in this perspective.
...
Heidegger spearheaded 20th century phenomenology and produced insights which will surely resound in Western philosophy for much more time to come. Yet he is still a relatively recent thinker and was heavily indebted to another thinker who came before him. That would be the German contemporary of Kant who directed his brilliance in the complete opposite direction of Kant's ontic-epistemic divide - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Most people know Goethe as the poet who wrote Faust and would be surprised to find out that his scientific and philosophical output was just as remarkable.
...
Goethe was not interested in Kant's definition of "knowledge". What Kant considered knowledge Goethe rejected as irrelevant speculation about concepts which had become untethered from the concrete world. Instead, "knowing" for Goethe was disciplined, attentive and generous observation of the phenomenon which confronted him so that he could explore his own ideal and objective relationships with them. He did not feign an "objectivity" in his scientific or philosophical pursuits which simply does not exist in the real world. Goethe's desired to add back to the perceptual appearances what rightfully belonged to them but had been taken away.

If Kant's maxim was that it is impossible to directly experience and know a thing-in-itself, Goethe's maxim was Res Ipsa Loquitur - "the thing-speaks-for-itself"... profound thinkers like Goethe, Steiner and Barfield have shown that the Kantian divide is nothing more than a mental habit we have grown accustomed to.

Your response?

[Apanthropinist]

Your response?

My response:

I will be happy to read your rational, metaphysics, philosophical argument for this claim and how it relates to analytical idealism. As you will be aware, in analytic idealism there is no necessity for Deities and other Theological entities.

I already told you what my game is.....

[AshvinP]

Your response?

My response:

I will be happy to read your rational, metaphysics, philosophical argument for this claim and how it relates to analytical idealism. As you will be aware, in analytic idealism there is no necessity for Deities and other Theological entities.

I already told you what my game is.....

I had no idea what you are talking about anymore. I did not make an argument for "Deities" or "Theological entities" in the Kant essay or this essay. Maybe I am just too dull to follow your logic, or maybe you are not, in fact, talking about anything of substance. Until you provide more clarity, I am happy to leave this as it is. Maybe you can try formulating a response to Cleric's question instead - viewtopic.php?p=5810#p5810

[Apanthropinist]

I had no idea what you are talking about anymore.

I suspect you might if you paid more attention to what it is that I might be doing. But in order to do that you would need to drop your assumptions and beliefs and just follow what I am actually doing. I also suspect that you are quite capable of doing so. I don't doubt your intelligence.

I did not make an argument for "Deities" or "Theological entities" in the Kant essay or this essay.

Quotes from your "Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Incarnating the Christ"

"Steiner is easily the most prolific and profound commentator on the metamorphoses of Spirit."

"Perhaps a series of events when the sovereign individual consciousness became the most important locus of the Spirit."

"Specifically, they highlight the individual ego becoming responsible for its own progressive reintegration within the Divine."

"Christ in Jesus also speaks of fulfilling the law and the prophets rather than abolishing them."

"As maddening as it may be for militant skeptics, what Christ revealed is not much different from what modern science has also revealed."

"The only difference between sound Christian theology and sound assessment of theoretical physics stems from the latter's refusal to acknowledge that what is standing 'behind' the appearances of the world is psychic in nature."

"What illuminates the shadows dancing in front of us on the cave wall is not more shadowy stuff, but the true Source of Light."

"...therefore, we are striving to become Christ-like in the most real and concrete sense we can possibly imagine for ourselves."

"Here is when the dualist Christian chimes in to say, "it is not only seemingly impossible, but actually impossible, and that is why we remain forever dependent on God's grace". Yet, if our broad overview through the metamorphoses of Spirit has revealed to us anything so far, it is that our cross is only ours to bear right now."

"The third and final part of this essay will explore the reason why our spiritual activity, as it has metamorphosed over the centuries, is connected to the Divine. We will see how anyone reading these words right now can begin exploring these connective relationships of the Spirit at any given time they choose. We all have a choice to make and let us remain honest with ourselves when doing so, because the stakes remain very high. Only then can we begin contemplating how it is that Saint Paul remarked so many centuries ago, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me."

Then can we also begin taking seriously what Jesus prayed to his disciples at the Last Supper:

"You, Father, are in me, and I am in you. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one as We are one - I in them and You in me - that they may be perfectly united..."
- John 17:21-23."

Maybe I am just too dull to follow your logic, or maybe you are not, in fact, talking about anything of substance. Until you provide more clarity, I am happy to leave this as it is.

I doubt anyone, dull or smart, could support the logic of your assertion that you are not making an argument for Theological entities/Divinity (as I quoted from your essay above)...or maybe you are not, in fact, talking about anything of analytical idealism. Until you cease being disingenuous, I am happy to continue.

[Cleric K]

Thank you for clarification. Now I understand you better. The only thing that still remains unclear is the distinction you make between "body" and "soul life". Are not body and soul life qualia in awareness ?

Yes, they are. In our inner life we have a whole spectrum of perceptual phenomena - color, tone, smell, but also feelings, thinking, willing, memories. We speak of body, soul and spirit by recognizing three major domains of this spectrum. Sensory perceptions are related to physical bodily life. When we speak of soul, attention goes to the part of the spectrum that is related with our life as a human being that lifts above the purely physical survival. Here we find our goals, likes, dislikes, relations with other beings, which are primarily of the nature of feeling and desire. When we speak of spirit we understand the innermost spiritual activity, which today is most clearly experienced in thinking (the spectrum of thought perceptions). In thinking we experience ourselves lifted above both the physical and the soul life. That's why we can think about them objectively. It's the spirit that is concerned with knowledge and understanding. Through thinking we discover the ideas which relate all perceptions (including thought perceptions themselves) into harmonious unity.

When it's said that the body exists only as qualia in awareness we shouldn't imagine that the body is only a floating image in awareness. Actually the body is the most remote and shrouded in mystery part of reality for us. We know the body only as far as we experience the qualia of the senses. Here we should be very clear of something. Man of today is actually quite mistaken when he thinks that he knows the physical body, just because he has studied the corpse. The things that we really know are color, tone, smell, touch, warmth, etc. - the pure experiences of the senses. The gradations and combinations of the sensory experiences are already worked upon by our thinking. The visual picture of our body is only a specific shape within our color perceptions. It is only a one-sided idea when we look at the mirror and say "this is my body". This is how the body imprints into my visual system, but the reality of the body I don't know at all. Although we know from anatomy that we have liver, heart, kidneys and so on, normally we don't have inner perceptions of them (except when in pain). This changes when we develop the higher forms of cognition. Then just as we normally feel our thinking to be in the head, we can perceive how different aspects of our soul life are related with different organs. For example, if we have persistent negative relations with somebody, in our normal consciousness we feel, say, anger and related thoughts in the head. When higher cognition is developed we can perceive that these feelings actually exist as active forces in the liver. Many diseases can be traced to their spiritual origins in this way.

So the body is not mere picture in awareness - it's multilayered spiritual reality which shapes and restricts our activity. In our soul life we may be entangled in very complicated relationships with other souls. Through our bodily life we are entangled with different kinds of beings which constitute our physical life. So spiritual development doesn't extricate us from the physical life but in fact throws light on our physical body from within. We experience in our normal state the senses and the images in the brain. We already need to develop the soul organs in order experience how the soul/astral body (where the soul organs have their forms) relates to the major organs like heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, etc. At this point we don't yet experience their biological reality from the inside but primarily how they are related with our soul life (like the example with the liver). We need even higher forms of consciousness to reach the inner reality of the metabolic system, bones and muscles.

I'm saying all this just to point attention that it isn't at all enough to focus on "it's all qualia in awareness". Yes, this is a general truth but what we experience in our normal state is only the tip of the iceberg so to speak. The qualia of our senses, thoughts, feelings in our everyday consciousness are only shadowy experiences which can become part of the full picture when they are complemented with everything which is still hidden from view and will be revealed in the course of evolution.

[AshvinP]

I had no idea what you are talking about anymore.

I suspect you might if you paid more attention to what it is that I might be doing. But in order to do that you would need to drop your assumptions and beliefs and just follow what I am actually doing. I also suspect that you are quite capable of doing so. I don't doubt your intelligence.

I did not make an argument for "Deities" or "Theological entities" in the Kant essay or this essay.

Quotes from your "Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Incarnating the Christ"

"Steiner is easily the most prolific and profound commentator on the metamorphoses of Spirit."

"Perhaps a series of events when the sovereign individual consciousness became the most important locus of the Spirit."

"Specifically, they highlight the individual ego becoming responsible for its own progressive reintegration within the Divine."

"Christ in Jesus also speaks of fulfilling the law and the prophets rather than abolishing them."

"As maddening as it may be for militant skeptics, what Christ revealed is not much different from what modern science has also revealed."

"The only difference between sound Christian theology and sound assessment of theoretical physics stems from the latter's refusal to acknowledge that what is standing 'behind' the appearances of the world is psychic in nature."

"What illuminates the shadows dancing in front of us on the cave wall is not more shadowy stuff, but the true Source of Light."

"...therefore, we are striving to become Christ-like in the most real and concrete sense we can possibly imagine for ourselves."

"Here is when the dualist Christian chimes in to say, "it is not only seemingly impossible, but actually impossible, and that is why we remain forever dependent on God's grace". Yet, if our broad overview through the metamorphoses of Spirit has revealed to us anything so far, it is that our cross is only ours to bear right now."

"The third and final part of this essay will explore the reason why our spiritual activity, as it has metamorphosed over the centuries, is connected to the Divine. We will see how anyone reading these words right now can begin exploring these connective relationships of the Spirit at any given time they choose. We all have a choice to make and let us remain honest with ourselves when doing so, because the stakes remain very high. Only then can we begin contemplating how it is that Saint Paul remarked so many centuries ago, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me."

Then can we also begin taking seriously what Jesus prayed to his disciples at the Last Supper:

"You, Father, are in me, and I am in you. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one as We are one - I in them and You in me - that they may be perfectly united..."
- John 17:21-23."

Maybe I am just too dull to follow your logic, or maybe you are not, in fact, talking about anything of substance. Until you provide more clarity, I am happy to leave this as it is.

I doubt anyone, dull or smart, could support the logic of your assertion that you are not making an argument for Theological entities/Divinity (as I quoted from your essay above)...or maybe you are not, in fact, talking about anything of analytical idealism. Until you cease being disingenuous, I am happy to continue.

So you failed to notice I said "in the Kant essay or this essay", or you noticed and intentionally ignored it. Either way I have grown tired of holding your hand like an unruly child so I am done until you make a substantive contribution on this forum. (you started off well mentioning Julian Jaynes and went quickly downhill from there).