Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[AshvinP]

"I think Steiner is definitely speaking objectively in that quote. The "will" in that sense is truly intoxicating when it penetrates mere intellectual concepts."

Okay, I know when I need to bow out. I won't press this issue anymore with you. All I can tell you is this: just as 'the will is truly intoxicating when...' so is Steiner's concept of 'the nature of pure thinking.' I am NOT claiming that what either thinker REALLY MEANS is 'truly intoxicating.' I'm saying that you don't have to search very hard to find students of either thinker who are truly intoxicated on their every single word and thought. I am not able to penetrate this kind of thing.

That said, other aspects of this conversation feel very open and filled with great questions and insights. Thank you for contributing to those and to this one as well.

To be clear; my claim is not that I am a master of either Steiner or Schopenhauer. I have spent much more time with Steiner and find him to be a brilliant thinker who, like all thinkers ever, had a given perspective that both amplified his findings and revealed blind-spots. That's natural. My little study of Schopenhauer shows me that my initial impressions of him (largley based on my first interpretations of Steiner) were reductive and based on applying what I mean by certain words to Schopenhauer's words themselves.

Again thanks! We can move on, .I know that I can't make my points on this specific matter any clearer. My anthroposophical friends who agree with me say that I'm speaking clearly. My friends who do not, think I'm missing the true brilliance of Steiner's take on Schopenhauer. Life goes on!

Well, I wish you stick with it... because this is probably the deepest and most potentially productive intra-idealist discussion we have had on this new BK forum. There is a lot of interesting ground that could be covered. Of course, as Cleric pointed out before, the question regarding Steiner's interpretation Schopenhauer is not nearly as important to as the question of which living ideal worldview they advocated for is most accurate-useful. But it could still prompt much deeper exploration of both thinkers.

And, Steiner does, in fact, mean "truly intoxicating" as truly intoxicating. For an idealist, how the soul activity of will interacts with the mere intellectual thinking-thoughts is a very important dynamic to consider. We could think about it in terms of our favorite college professor - that professor who took concepts of math, science, psychology, or whatever, and imbued those dry concepts with their own passionate will, which made the concepts very attractive and charming to us. This is really simple stuff Steiner is talking about in PoF... we don't need to overcomplicate and make it something we can only grasp after the text has been "decoded" by a professional philosopher.

The fact that you keep saying you need 'evidence' for my claim and that you are just being objective (rather than reference anything I've said in relation to my criticism of Steiner reducing Schopenhauer's entire edifice to Steiner's own summary of Schopy's premises) speaks to my point that there is no way I can even begin to convince you that Steiner might be wrong. Or, maybe: it would help if you gave me three examples where you think Steiner mispresented another thinker. That way, I could at least see some pattern in what 'counts' as evidence for you. Obviously, nobody here is a Schopenhauer expert and I don't think anybody is pretending to be. Except for Steiner. In a few sentences he 'proved' with conclusive 'evidence' that Schopenhauer was speaking nonsense. I used to take that portion of PoF exactly as most serious students do and I remember it clearly.

I don't get why our disagreement with your arguments must be some sort of ideological commitment to Steiner. Cleric did a very detailed post responding to your initial points on this question. I do not have any examples of Steiner misrepresenting another thinker... and obviously, based on all his writings about Schopenhauer I have come across (I haven't read Riddles of Philosophy yet), I think his assessment of Schopenhauer is correct enough to warrant his presence in the original post.

In the section in The Philosophy of Freedom where Steiner says that he has shown the utterly baselessness of one of Schopenhauer's core points, do you agree 100% with Steiner? in other words, do you have any qualms whatsoever about how Steiner rewords Schopenhauer's argument or any qualms at all about Steiner's claim that this summary proves Schopenhauer is contradicting himself from the beginning? And also, do you realize what I mean when I point out the silliness when people think they have proven Steiner wrong by showing that he dissociated the will and thinking in his first editions of PoF? I have a strong feeling you think I am correct about the latter and, regarding the former, you believe that, yes, Steiner proved that Schopenhauer's core claim was shallow and grounded in a simple contradiction of logic. But I also have a hunch you might surprise me.

Let me ask you this question as clarification for what you mean by your question above (because it is not clear to me) - did Cleric correctly understand your claim in this post?

In our day, one will hardly come across a published book of PoF presenting edition prior to 1918, so it's safe to say that the misunderstanding of will vs. thinking should not arise at all.

I may be speaking here on Ashvin's behalf but I believe that although the name of the thread is Schopenhauer vs. Steiner, the goal is not to confront the historical (and frozen in time) figures of these philosophers. Instead we're surveying what is living in us as stimulation from them but must necessarily go further. I say that in order to make clear that I'm not trying to defend the historical figure of Steiner but the living reality he was pointing to.

The above quote makes it clear that there's no some primitive confrontation of thinking vs. willing. Steiner was human after all. Things that were intuitively transparent to him turned out to be stumbling stones for others only when they confronted PoF. This forced him to refine further the arguments in order to address the objections. As he himself says, this addendum doesn't at all change the meaning of anything said before, it only clarifies it further.

At the core of the vs. topic is the fact that for Schopenhauer the Will was in its essence blind (unconscious). Only at some stage does it attain to inner reflection. Steiner points out that the only will we know is that which is imbued with idea. The most intimate example of this is thinking. The point is that postulating the World Will (which is unconscious except within human bodies) as the foundation, is an act of thinking. It is not a given fact. Actually it can never be experienced as such (this Ashvin elaborated in his essay). We can never know that blind will exists as the foundation because in its very definition it is not consciously (knowingly) experienced. This defeats the whole purpose of trying to bridge the Kantian divide in this way. Yes, we recognize the part of the will that has become self-conscious within man so Schopenhauer was on to something when he sought the unity of reality within the will but he again brings the unknowable thing-in-itself into the picture when he says that the World Will outside the human being is unconscious. He certainly brings it closer to our experiential world but nevertheless remains forever inaccessible in the domain outside man.

[Starbuck]

"Being a limitation or fragmentation of reality or truth, the process of thinking is always tending to return to its source or origin, and it is because of this that the disciplines of philosophy and science exist in our culture. Every thought process or the line of reasoning that a philosopher or scientist embarks upon is a process whereby the finite mind is tending to return to its source. That is why all philosophers and scientists desire one thing alone which is understanding. Their thoughts tend towards understanding. The experience of understanding is the dissolution of the process of thinking, into its source of consciousness. It is for this reason, contrary to popular belief, that for some people ‘thinking’ is a spiritual path. It is as legitimate spiritual path as any other path."

Rupert Spira

Spira's position as expressed in above quote is in relative harmony with Steiner until it says, "experience of understanding is the dissolution of the process of thinking". If "thinking" means mere rational intellect, then yes definitely, and that's usually how most people mean it (I am not sure about Spira). Steiner has a much higher and more noble sense of "Thinking", which is fundamental to all experience and therefore never dissolves. One's Thinking can perceive ideas (more accurately ideal relations) just as one's eyes can perceive color relations in the world. The proper domain of Thinking is bringing the most varied phenomenal relations back into ideal harmony with each other.

PS - I am out of town for next two days so likely will not be commenting.

This has made me go back to BKs Decoding Schopenhauer. His writing on the partial representation of endogenous experience makes me think we might be creating a false dichotomy here. Even the endogenous will needs rerepresentation to be known.

"the will—manifesting itself as the endogenous feelings—can be known and talked about in an explicit sense, even though the endogenous feelings themselves remain always distinct from representations of any kind, as they are not grounded in stimuli. Indeed, I contend that this is what Schopenhauer means when he writes that the will “can be known by [the individual subject] only indirectly, through reflection as it were” (W2: 278). Such indirect but explicit knowledge does not exclude the earlier, direct but implicit knowledge attained with the immediate experience of the endogenous feelings."

Kastrup, Bernardo. Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics (p. 51). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

"Being a limitation or fragmentation of reality or truth, the process of thinking is always tending to return to its source or origin, and it is because of this that the disciplines of philosophy and science exist in our culture. Every thought process or the line of reasoning that a philosopher or scientist embarks upon is a process whereby the finite mind is tending to return to its source. That is why all philosophers and scientists desire one thing alone which is understanding. Their thoughts tend towards understanding. The experience of understanding is the dissolution of the process of thinking, into its source of consciousness. It is for this reason, contrary to popular belief, that for some people ‘thinking’ is a spiritual path. It is as legitimate spiritual path as any other path."

Rupert Spira

Spira's position as expressed in above quote is in relative harmony with Steiner until it says, "experience of understanding is the dissolution of the process of thinking". If "thinking" means mere rational intellect, then yes definitely, and that's usually how most people mean it (I am not sure about Spira). Steiner has a much higher and more noble sense of "Thinking", which is fundamental to all experience and therefore never dissolves. One's Thinking can perceive ideas (more accurately ideal relations) just as one's eyes can perceive color relations in the world. The proper domain of Thinking is bringing the most varied phenomenal relations back into ideal harmony with each other.

PS - I am out of town for next two days so likely will not be commenting.

This has made me go back to BKs Decoding Schopenhauer. His writing on the partial representation of endogenous experience makes me think we might be creating a false dichotomy here. Even the endogenous will needs rerepresentation to be known.

"the will—manifesting itself as the endogenous feelings—can be known and talked about in an explicit sense, even though the endogenous feelings themselves remain always distinct from representations of any kind, as they are not grounded in stimuli. Indeed, I contend that this is what Schopenhauer means when he writes that the will “can be known by [the individual subject] only indirectly, through reflection as it were” (W2: 278). Such indirect but explicit knowledge does not exclude the earlier, direct but implicit knowledge attained with the immediate experience of the endogenous feelings."

Kastrup, Bernardo. Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics (p. 51). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I am not sure how that is any different from BK's answer to my question. It is still definitely in opposition to Steiner's view, which is that we can know the noumenon directly and in high resolution only via Thinking activity. The "Will", for Steiner, provides spiritual impulse to the individual being of a much different sort and does not allow our knowledge of the world to go beyond our unique personality. We can say, with after-the-fact representation of the Will experienced, that we have discovered an aspect of our own true essence (still with the help of Thinking activity), but not the true detailed essence of the Cosmos at large.

[AshvinP]

"Steiner holds willing, feeling, thinking as Triune aspect of all experience. He does not reduce any of those aspects to any other."

Here is one of the quotes in PoF that indicates Steiner was well aware that there is a kind of Willing that is purely ideal, aka, cognitive:

"Whatever there is in willing that is not a purely ideal factor..."

He realizes that nearly all of what we typically recognize as 'will' is mixed with non-ideal elements. And, therefore, he wants to make clear that this does not characterize the fundamental nature of the will. You will find other statements similar to his by Steiner in which he goes out of his way to make sure his reader does not deny the Will that is purely ideal.

And, then, most of Steiner's serious students interpret the following to be the only true interpretation of what Schopenhauer is indicating about the nature of the will:

"The will becomes the principle of the universe just as, in mysticism, feeling becomes the principle of knowledge. This kind of theory is called the philosophy of will (thelism). It makes something that can be experienced only individually into a constituent factor of the world."

"The philosophy of will can as little be called scientific as can the mysticism based on feeling. For both assert that the conceptual understanding of the world is inadequate."

Yes, Schopenhauer would have uttered sentences that basically said conceptual understandings of the world are inadequate. Can you guess another thinker who has said over and over and over and over that a conceptual understanding of the world is not enough? Yep,. Rudolf Steiner said it many times in other context. Guess what. That doesn't make Steiner a hypocrite. Guess what else. Schopenhauer made his claims in a different context than the books Steiner wrote. Most of Steiner's serious students will allow that it's fine that Steiner often said conceptual conceptual understandings of the world aren't enough but that if Schopenhauer said it necessarily means he obviously didn't respect the nature of cognition. This game never ends.

Steiner continues:

"In other words, the mysticism of feeling and the philosophy of will are both forms of naïve realism, because they subscribe to the doctrine
that what is directly perceived is real."

Considering that Schopenhauer is the epitome of a so-called 'philosopher of the will,' do we feel comfortable saying simply that Schopenhauer 'subscribed to the doctrine that what is directly perceived is real."? In Bernardo's book on Schopenhauer, Bernardo shows in detail the ways that Schopenhauer showed exactly why our representations are one step removed from that which the reality they represent.

I know there is no convincing you that Steiner's characterizations of Schop are misguided but you can even look at Steiner's comment:

"This penetration is brought about by a power flowing through the activity of thinking itself — the power of love in its spiritual form."

I'm sorry I can't do this for you at the time, but trust me that you can find many many times when Steiner talks about the essence of love in it's spiritual form as "The Will of God," or at other times, "Not I but The Christ in me Wills this" And yes, for Steiner to claim that The Will of God is love spiritualized required Steiner to 'think' which, in its essential form, is love and pure will and united with and as the Will of God.

I think I missed this entire comment before. Sorry and thank you for the detailed response - this is exactly what I am looking for in starting these discussions. We must reason these issues through very carefully if we are to make any progress in shared understanding. I am not sure why you feel the need to add the bolded statement, though, as I don't think our mere disagreement with you amounts to ideological commitment which blocks all access to critical reasoned thinking.

I will admit that I am a bit confused by Steiner saying, "The philosophy of will can as little be called scientific as can the mysticism based on feeling. For both assert that the conceptual understanding of the world is inadequate.", if he is saying that to distinguish between his own position and means "conceptual understanding" as understanding by mere intellect. So it would help to have more of the context around that quote. Now if we take "conceptual understanding" to mean understanding by Thinking in its highest sense, then it is perfectly consistent with everything else he writes. Or if he is saying spiritual science cannot be rooted in philosophy of will and mysticism based on feeling, because they reject conceptual understanding as 100% illusory, then it is also consistent.

"Philosophy of Will" being a form of naïve realism still makes a lot of sense to me. As we see from BK's quote provided by Starbucks, they are claiming that the Will directly perceived is the noumenon. According to them, it is directly perceived prior to any representations of the Will. Therefore they posit that the mere percept of Will in absence of Thinking activity discloses the Will's true essence. That is a form of naïve realism. It leaves out that ideal element which, ironically, allows anyone to say the their individual will is connected to Will at large.

re: Love - as stated before, it makes great sense to put Love in the domain of Will and Memory in the domain of Thinking. The Love impulse pushes us forward into new integral experience while the Memory gathers back the past into the present so that we can make sense of those new experiences. Of course that is the most crude summary of an immense topic, but I am simply pointing out that Steiner's characterization of Love as "the Will of God" is very consistent with my understanding of his ontology in general.

Finally when Steiner says:

"If we turn towards thinking in its essence, we find in it both feeling and will, and these in the depths of
their reality."

Yes, certainly one way of interpreting this is to think of each of those words as pointing to substances that exist outside of each other as separate entities. That's one way of understand the above sentence.

My experience and understand (and some other's of Steiner's students) is that when Steiner says 'in the depths of their realities' he is trying to show the reader that there is a sphere in which normal thinking, normal feeling, and normal willing (which are highly differentiated in our daily experience) are united AS one substance. Yes, you can 'think' of these as three different things right next to each other. But I think a closer reading of PoF along with paying attention to one's own experiences of 'pure' thinking, feeling, and willing, are better understood as realizing that before we separate these three via our daily consciousness, they are (and actually remain) united as one.

I'll be interested to see if anybody who really has studied Schopenhauer can argue that the thought that his cognitive understanding of the true nature of "Will" was a 'shadowy, chilly picture of the world,' as Steiner claims. Steiner ends that section with:

"they {those who place Will as the ultimate} conclude all too readily that they themselves are rooted in reality, but that the intuitive thinker, devoid of feeling and a stranger to reality, forms out of 'abstract thoughts' a shadowy, chilly picture of the world."

I doubt that Schopenhauer would claim his core understanding wasn't grounded in his activity of thinking. And I doubt that he would claim his core understanding (when being activated, obviously) was shadowy and chilly. I know for a fact that Schopenhauer and Steiner would happily agree that when they merely utter their ideas robotically, they are not actually grasping them as truths.

LIke I said, nothing really matters in these debates. But sometimes seeds get planted. I spent at least 12 years clearly knowing that Steiner had proven Schopenhauer was speaking nonesense. He and Steiner were brilliant and reaching deeply into the nature of reality from different perspectives and using very different terms, often different words to mean the same thing and the same words to mean very different things. Yes, we can shallowly prove they made logical contradictions. I think that says more about us than them. I certainly include myself in that.

I don't see how your bolded statement is different from Steiner's quote re: "in the depths of their realities". A Triunity of willing, feeling and thinking necessarily implies that they are always United in their essence, before, after, always.

I think you misunderstood his quote re: "shadowy, chilly picture of the world". He was saying that is how the philosopher of Will views the philosopher of Thinking (the "intuitive thinker"). And that is exactly right. We see that happen on this forum many times. It is assumed that the philosopher of Thinking is dealing only in deadened intellectual concepts, no matter how many times it is explained that is not what Thinking in its highest sense deals with. The Will element, when compared to such mere intellectual concepts, is much more "attractive and charming" and that charming nature is mistaken for its "rooting themselves in Reality".

[findingblanks]

Hi Ashvin,

"I am not sure why you feel the need to add the bolded statement, though, as I don't think our mere disagreement with you amounts to ideological commitment which blocks all access to critical reasoned thinking."

I am not assuming you are an example of the kind of commitment I have referred to, but I know there is a chance and to the extent that I see claims I am not offering any examples to make my point it reminds me of such interactions. I bring it up as a sort of meta-frame that is possibly tacitly informing the conversation. Possibly not.

You wrote:

"I will admit that I am a bit confused by Steiner saying, "The philosophy of will can as little be called scientific as can the mysticism based on feeling. For both assert that the conceptual understanding of the world is inadequate.", if he is saying that to distinguish between his own position and means "conceptual understanding" as understanding by mere intellect. So it would help to have more of the context around that quote. Now if we take "conceptual understanding" to mean understanding by Thinking in its highest sense, then it is perfectly consistent with everything else he writes. Or if he is saying spiritual science cannot be rooted in philosophy of will and mysticism based on feeling, because they reject conceptual understanding as 100% illusory, then it is also consistent."

More than anything I want to point out the wonderful thing you are doing above. You aren't simply selecting some of Steiner's ambiguous words (all words are so I'm not blaming Steiner) and then showing how you can find a spot of bad logic or inconsistency. You are naturally showing what some people call "The Chicago Method of Philosophy" in that your premise is that Steiner has thought enough about the issue that it most likly means you are missing something if it seems Steiner is making simple missteps in logic. This is a very wise approach. What I notice is that there are context when people naturally take the approach you are so skillfully demonstrating and, then, the very same person, will simply not take it in other contexts. The difference tends to often simply boil down to one's prior (conscious or unconscious or mixed) commitments. This is why when many people read The Philosophy of Freedom and see when Steiner claims to have demolished Schopenhauer's conclusions, they simply read the logic of the words and go, Yep, he did." And the same for people who think Schopenhauer demolished Hegel with his summary of Hegel's obvious errors.

"According to them, it is directly perceived prior to any representations of the Will. Therefore they posit that the mere percept of Will in absence of Thinking activity discloses the Will's true essence. That is a form of naïve realism. It leaves out that ideal element which, ironically, allows anyone to say the their individual will is connected to Will at large."

First I feel it is important to say that thus far I don't think any of us should claim that we have studied Schopenhauer enough to rephrase his points in short sentences that claim to stand in for his points. I do not think that is what you are doing, but I just want to make clear that we are not really presenting his points in contrast to Steiner. We are taking some very flimsy and scattershot notices (all very interesting and probably related to aspects of his edifice) and then wondering how THAT relates to our interpretation of Steiner.

That said, from what you wrote above, I fear we will unavoidably fall into the unintentional equiviation trap. That is, we will use words like 'thinking' and 'will' and 'ideal element' in different ways and we will impose one way of using those words on a thinker (either of our guys) who would be using that word other ways. And, to make it even harder, we need to remember that these guys might NOT use a word but expect their reader to see that the entire concept is implied by how they are setting up their other ideas. This is why Steiner often, years later, needed to clairfy that his 'intuitive thinking' is not something separated from a very specific activity of a fundamental form of and nature of Willing.

There are so many different versions of naive realism. Steiner points out the only form of naive realism that he thinks is legit in PoF he sets up a version of it that he points to as false, which all other philosophers agree with him upon. But most phenomenologically inclined philosophers, like Steiner, will point to where in their system there is a form of naive realism that is essential.

Now, again, not speaking for Schopy, there is nothing incoherent in claiming a fundamental Will that is NOT the result of human cognitive activity but that is by it's fundamental nature ideal. There is nothing incoherent about characterizing that Will as being directly participated by all forms of life and that this participation can be both conceptually grasped and lived. Just because we may not use Steiner's terms in how we come to understand this fundamental ideal activity that we participate in the deepest depths of our being (and even if we need to distinguish it from ways we understand various definitions of 'thinking' or 'knowing') that doesn't mean that there isn't a kind of thinking/knowing that can be identified with our direct intuitively living participation. Just as we can't clobber Steiner as 'being wrong' or not using the right terms because we find gaps or seeming missteps in his sentences, we can't simply say that it is a naive realism (in the critical sense) to claim that we have a non-conceptual unity with an experience of fundamental 'will'.

To get back closer to the nature of this entire thread:

I personally do not believe that Steiner demolished Schopenhauer by pointing to the logical contradiciton he finds in the way he, Steiner, summarized Schopenhauer's work. I used to definitely think he did. So in this sense I'm team Schopenhauer. But I definitely don't think BK grasps Steiner's core ideas and I know BK does not claim to know much about Steiner's epistemology. So in that sense I'm on team Steiner.

Like I said I'm on the sidelines and curious to see why some of you feel one of the teams is winning. Thanks.

[Eugene I]

findingblanks, I tend to agree with you, IMO Thinking and Will are both fundamental aspects of reality, but they function in different ways and can not be reduced to each other, so the dispute about which one is "more fundamental" is futile and pointless. So, both Steiner and Schop were right in claiming that Thinking and Will are fundamental, but (would be) wrong in claiming that Thinking or Will are "the only" or "the most" fundamental. And in addition to those there are also other fundamental aspects, such as Awareness/Experiencing and Being, and ignoring those ones is another mistake.

[findingblanks]

To add to what you said, Eugene:

And while I'm certainly not equating their world-views, I'm simply pointing out that the same kind of shallow reading of that people often applly to Steiner is being applied to Schopenhauer when anybody reduces his entire work to a few rephrased premises.

I think they each are working from and towards different aspects of what is fundamental. When you add that they had different temperaments, wrote at different times, were writing to vastly different audiences, and individuated their core experiences uniquely, it makes sense that their approaches could appear to some readers as being mutually exclusive.

findingblanks, I tend to agree with you, IMO Thinking and Will are both fundamental aspects of reality, but they function in different ways and can not be reduced to each other, so the dispute about which one is "more fundamental" is futile and pointless. So, both Steiner and Schop were right in claiming that Thinking and Will are fundamental, but (would be) wrong in claiming that Thinking or Will are "the only" or "the most" fundamental. And in addition to those there are also other fundamental aspects, such as Awareness/Experiencing and Being, and ignoring those ones is another mistake.

[findingblanks]

A side point that may shed some light on the kind of difficultly that is coming up in different forms.

If Steiner is not just abstractly speculating or making reasonable inferences about the universal true essence of thinking, then we'll need to say something like that either in directly encountering his own thinking he experiences that aspect of it which is universal OR we an say that he 'aims' his own highly experienced thinking at universal thinking and 'finds' the concept for it that completes it. I think the latter is somewhat rediculous but I know that some of Steiner's serious students do think in terms of actually attaching concepts to percepts.

But either way, if we are prepared to say that just as there is only one concept of triangle that all thinkers participate when grasping the nature of a triangle, there is only one essence of thinking that is being grasped as the very essence of one's own thinking.

This universal essence need not be assumed to be self-conscious. It need not be assumed to be inactive or a blog. It can be understood and experienced to be the living 'field' from which any and all living ideas will spring and grow and fade (those that are dynamic) or be 'found' (if you believe there are core ideas that never change).

Either way, discovering the fundamental essence that is revealed one's thinking does not necessitate thinking being the only pathway to make this disocvery. Indeed, Steiner gives other lectures where he talks about other legitimate pathways towards recognizing the ground of existence, pathways that do not start with a careful cultivation of thinking. He prefers and advocates the cognitive path. He points to dangers upon other paths. But he also specifies some paths that can safely get people there via forms of devotion. If we let ourselves consider the possibility that Steiner perhaps didn't know or mention every conceivable way that the fundamental nature of reality could be 'grasped', we can imagine pathways that blend aspects of philosophy with that of devotion and contemplation. We need not assume a cookie-cutter set of options in how a given human can freely grasp the nature of fundamental reality. And, then, once grasped, why would we expect them to explicate this in a way that is clear to most people or, even more unlikely, that matches up to how other people are trying to explicate this unitive knowledge.

So there is a very intricate aspect of 'apples and oranges' going on when we try to judge one person's pathway by how they interrupet another's, especially if they are assuming they are walking the same kind of path.

Just because Steiner called his early work philosophy, doesn't mean we should expect it to fully conform to common expectations of philosophy. The same for Schopenhauer.

[Eugene I]

But either way, if we are prepared to say that just as there is only one concept of triangle that all thinkers participate when grasping the nature of a triangle, there is only one essence of thinking that is being grasped as the very essence of one's own thinking.

Right, and this is exactly Platonism, which is a legitimate and elegant, but yet unverifiable and unnecessary assumption. And as such, it is non-parsimonious, which is why Bernardo would exclude it from his metaphysics based on his strong view on the parsimony principle. Personally I'm still open to it as a legitimate possibility, yet I can see some issues with it. One issue is: what kind of "existence" we could attribute to these ideas? In the consistent Platonism all infinity of possible ideas eternally exist, but there is a "weak version" where the ideas do exist but they exist "potentially" (whatever it means), and a "strong version" claiming that they exist "actually" as the whole infinity of them. The strong version implies the actual existence of infinity, which is another mathematically problematic assumption (if you listen to mathematicians from the intuitionist camp). But more important issue is that, under idealism, all that exists is always consciously experienced, which for Platonic idealism means that all the infinity of ideas is actually experienced by the Global Consciousness. Which is the same as to say that the Global Consciousness is omniscient. This is essentially what the traditional theology claimed. But to make this compatible with the Whiteheadian evolving God, another assumption needs to be introduced that God exists as omniscient in no-time, yet simultaneously exist in time as evolving and non-omniscient (if it makes sense). So you can see how many more non-parsimonious, unprovable and unnecessary assumptions we need to bring to make Platinic idealism more-or-less consistent.

[AshvinP]

More than anything I want to point out the wonderful thing you are doing above. You aren't simply selecting some of Steiner's ambiguous words (all words are so I'm not blaming Steiner) and then showing how you can find a spot of bad logic or inconsistency. You are naturally showing what some people call "The Chicago Method of Philosophy" in that your premise is that Steiner has thought enough about the issue that it most likly means you are missing something if it seems Steiner is making simple missteps in logic. This is a very wise approach. What I notice is that there are context when people naturally take the approach you are so skillfully demonstrating and, then, the very same person, will simply not take it in other contexts. The difference tends to often simply boil down to one's prior (conscious or unconscious or mixed) commitments. This is why when many people read The Philosophy of Freedom and see when Steiner claims to have demolished Schopenhauer's conclusions, they simply read the logic of the words and go, Yep, he did." And the same for people who think Schopenhauer demolished Hegel with his summary of Hegel's obvious errors.

"According to them, it is directly perceived prior to any representations of the Will. Therefore they posit that the mere percept of Will in absence of Thinking activity discloses the Will's true essence. That is a form of naïve realism. It leaves out that ideal element which, ironically, allows anyone to say the their individual will is connected to Will at large."

First I feel it is important to say that thus far I don't think any of us should claim that we have studied Schopenhauer enough to rephrase his points in short sentences that claim to stand in for his points. I do not think that is what you are doing, but I just want to make clear that we are not really presenting his points in contrast to Steiner. We are taking some very flimsy and scattershot notices (all very interesting and probably related to aspects of his edifice) and then wondering how THAT relates to our interpretation of Steiner.

That said, from what you wrote above, I fear we will unavoidably fall into the unintentional equiviation trap. That is, we will use words like 'thinking' and 'will' and 'ideal element' in different ways and we will impose one way of using those words on a thinker (either of our guys) who would be using that word other ways. And, to make it even harder, we need to remember that these guys might NOT use a word but expect their reader to see that the entire concept is implied by how they are setting up their other ideas. This is why Steiner often, years later, needed to clairfy that his 'intuitive thinking' is not something separated from a very specific activity of a fundamental form of and nature of Willing.

There are so many different versions of naive realism. Steiner points out the only form of naive realism that he thinks is legit in PoF he sets up a version of it that he points to as false, which all other philosophers agree with him upon. But most phenomenologically inclined philosophers, like Steiner, will point to where in their system there is a form of naive realism that is essential.

Thanks for the complement, I appreciate it! And I also agree we should not think we have exhausted someone's major philosophy with a couple of short sentences or even paragraphs. Of course, we also cannot appeal to some sort of "read all of his writings and quote them in full context here before you are critical of his philosophy" argument. I would say the best approach is for us to do exactly what we are doing - try our best to summarize the various arguments in play, and then go back and forth with clarifications and adjustments as necessary. In that process, we must always be careful to make sure we have not simply given new meanings to previous words used, completely misrepresent what the other person said before, etc., as you correctly point out.

In this case, I think it is now your burden to state a counter-formulation of Schopenhauer to mine bolded above if you don't agree with it, and/or why my formulation does not fall within the sphere of "naïve realism". You say Steiner is himself relying on or implicating naïve realism at some point in his PoF argument - where specifically does this occur?

Now, again, not speaking for Schopy, there is nothing incoherent in claiming a fundamental Will that is NOT the result of human cognitive activity but that is by it's fundamental nature ideal. There is nothing incoherent about characterizing that Will as being directly participated by all forms of life and that this participation can be both conceptually grasped and lived. Just because we may not use Steiner's terms in how we come to understand this fundamental ideal activity that we participate in the deepest depths of our being (and even if we need to distinguish it from ways we understand various definitions of 'thinking' or 'knowing') that doesn't mean that there isn't a kind of thinking/knowing that can be identified with our direct intuitively living participation. Just as we can't clobber Steiner as 'being wrong' or not using the right terms because we find gaps or seeming missteps in his sentences, we can't simply say that it is a naive realism (in the critical sense) to claim that we have a non-conceptual unity with an experience of fundamental 'will'.

To get back closer to the nature of this entire thread:

I personally do not believe that Steiner demolished Schopenhauer by pointing to the logical contradiciton he finds in the way he, Steiner, summarized Schopenhauer's work. I used to definitely think he did. So in this sense I'm team Schopenhauer. But I definitely don't think BK grasps Steiner's core ideas and I know BK does not claim to know much about Steiner's epistemology. So in that sense I'm on team Steiner.

Like I said I'm on the sidelines and curious to see why some of you feel one of the teams is winning. Thanks.

So here we have a pretty big misunderstanding - neither Steiner nor we on "team Steiner" (perhaps including you now, and we are happy to have you!) are claiming there is something "incoherent" about claiming Will can exist apart from human cognitive activity. Rather, we are claiming that such a claim can only be coherently made by reliance on human cognitive activity (in its highest sense, which we must always remember). This highest sense of Thinking includes "direct intuitive living participation". Now if you say that intuitive participation is the same as Schopenhauer's Will, then it is your burden to provide the arguments for why. It seems pretty clear to me, and BK apparently agrees, that Schopenhauer does not believe any sort of ideal content is necessary to experience the universal Will. In fact, once ideal content is experienced in connection with the Will, we are no longer directly experiencing the Will but rather we are experiencing the Will plus ideal illusion ("representation") we have generated ourselves. So if you disagree with that claim re: Schopenhauer, we need arguments for why. You could argue "intuitive participation" does not involve ideal content, but I doubt you want to do that.

But either way, if we are prepared to say that just as there is only one concept of triangle that all thinkers participate when grasping the nature of a triangle, there is only one essence of thinking that is being grasped as the very essence of one's own thinking.

This universal essence need not be assumed to be self-conscious. It need not be assumed to be inactive or a blog. It can be understood and experienced to be the living 'field' from which any and all living ideas will spring and grow and fade (those that are dynamic) or be 'found' (if you believe there are core ideas that never change).

Either way, discovering the fundamental essence that is revealed one's thinking does not necessitate thinking being the only pathway to make this disocvery. Indeed, Steiner gives other lectures where he talks about other legitimate pathways towards recognizing the ground of existence, pathways that do not start with a careful cultivation of thinking. He prefers and advocates the cognitive path. He points to dangers upon other paths. But he also specifies some paths that can safely get people there via forms of devotion. If we let ourselves consider the possibility that Steiner perhaps didn't know or mention every conceivable way that the fundamental nature of reality could be 'grasped', we can imagine pathways that blend aspects of philosophy with that of devotion and contemplation. We need not assume a cookie-cutter set of options in how a given human can freely grasp the nature of fundamental reality. And, then, once grasped, why would we expect them to explicate this in a way that is clear to most people or, even more unlikely, that matches up to how other people are trying to explicate this unitive knowledge.

Here is where I think the argument re: always receding horizon of Thinking is instructive. As mentioned before, basically the argument is that whenever we start reflecting on our Thinking process which generated thought-forms, that 'layer' of the Thinking process becomes the new thought-form and another 'layer' of non-observed Thinking is 'formed'. This simple fact implies that there is always some Thinking in the Cosmos observing the layer of Thinking which we cannot observe and keep pushing back every time we try. That is an argument for self-awareness as fundamental to Thinking and it is one we can all verify for ourselves at any time. Perhaps I am getting that wrong and I am certainly open to that possibility, but I don't think so.

re: Thinking as only pathway to discovering fundamental essence - I am curious to see the "other lectures" you are referring to so I can look at the specific context. The very concept of "discovering" or "recognizing" the Ground implicates Thinking activity in such recognition. And, we should keep in mind, the fact that this argument for Thinking's exclusive role is so simple does not make it any less true.