Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[AshvinP]

"Barfield describes the "immemorial and inextricable interpenetration" of perceiving-thinking."

Yes, but not everybody recognizes that the above statement can be interpreted in two fundamentally different ways. One way presupposes that there really is a core distinction between perception and thinking, whereas the other realizes that while we must make distinctions in our exploration of this reality, we must not lose sight that we are speaking of a unified event/process. The latter can still speak of how this event will express itself polarically, but it won't even slightly imagine there is perception interwoven with cognition or visa versa. To imagine either one as something that exists even slightly outside the other is to miss the reality they express as polarities. .

"There is no perception without some element of conceptual meaning, even if that meaning is "blooming buzzing confusion".

And I think we must agree that there is no historical or ontological 'blooming buzzing confusion' that precedes the act of cognition, regardless of what we find Steiner saying, yeah?

And everyone here has only taken it in the latter sense of polar distinction from the beginning. It needs to be distinguished in Barfield's philosophy because he is trying to show the variable relationship which evolves over human history and what that implies for ascending back to our spiritual heights. That is the same reason it needs to be distinguished in Steiner's philosophy.

There technically could be ontological "blooming buzzing confusion" because that still carries a conceptual meaning, but we all agree there is no ontological state without any conceptual meaning.

"looking backward down a perspective which reveals more and more of perception and less and less of thought". He then asks, "if we allow our fancy to approach the kind of consciousness that would be all perception and no thought, what do we come to?".

Yes, but we must remember that when he says 'more and more perception' he is describing a cognitive perception. He is not describing a 'more and more perception' that should be understood to be 'more and more' of our current experience of perception. This is a perception alive with meaning, not because meaning is threaded into it but because the perception is the meaning.

So this 'more and more perception' is only a 'less and less thought' in the sense that it has nothing to do with our modern experience of having an outer world of perception set against an inner world of thought. Hopefully we agree on the 'more and more perception' aspect.

No at this stage he has already distinguished between perception and cognition for purposes of his argument. He is precisely trying to show how one pole was much more prevalent than the other in ancient times and also today. So it makes no sense to conflate them back together as "cognitive perception" in the context of Barfield's argument.

"and it has now metamorphosed into nearly all "conceptual element" and no perceptual element."

Again, we can say it this way as long as we realize that by 'all conceptual, no perceptual' we don't really mean that we have suddenly stepped outside of the polarity that his always metamorphosing. I'm okay using clunky language as long as we agree that 'no perception' simply means that we don't have the kind of meaning-inherent perception of original participation. I'll assume that is what you mean unless you state otherwise.

Agreed, we are never "stepping outside" of the polarity into a state with ontically no conceptual or perceptual element, and Barfield's statement is reflecting the relative lack of perceiving meaning today.

"That is the situation we are at now, and that is the place from which Steiner begins his phenomenology of Thinking in PoF."

I don't fully agree because I think Steiner started from a very early and forceful expression of final-participation. However, I don't think he had clearly differentiated his intuitions and insights regarding experiential starting point from those aspects of his experience that still were embedded in the idols. This is why when he was a young man he stressed over and over to the reader that it was an utter necessity to start by understanding the supposed nature of 'pure experience.' He doesn't just say this is a thought experiment that can be helpful. He goes out of his way to explain why he insists it is the only way to truly grasp his starting point. He varies this slightly in each of the core books. And this is why it is easy to find many of his students today who echo him and talk about a relationship between a realm of experience supposedly devoid of any thinking and a realm of experience that is pure thinking devoid of perception. Of course, Steiner utterly abandoned this exhortation later in life because he had much more accurate ways of indicating his starting point. Those ways however haven't been clearly taken up by his students or, almost worse, they are blended with the idea of 'pure experience.'

It has been interesting over the years when I've presented PoF students with Volkelt's 'excellent characterization' of pure experience but out of context. Just conversationally stating that the only way I notice the milkman is heading to my door is by first encountering a set of pure percepts and then attaching the correct concepts to them. Almost always, PoF students, in THAT context, quickly correct me and point out that it isn't the case that this two-step occurs in order for me to make that kind of observation. But when we are explicitly talking about Steiner's texts, that's when it goes in the kind of circles we've seen above.

"By engaging deeply with the "exceptional state" of observing our own Thinking process."

Just to be clear; you are not suggesting that the 'exceptional state' that Steiner defines early in PoF is the intuitive experience of thinking as activity, right?

Cleric responded to the last question. It is the observation of one's own thinking - this is obviously "exceptional" if we consider how someone can go an entire lifetime in the modern world without engaging in such observation.

As for the rest, I think we are making progress from the "did Steiner say this or that?" approach and getting to the essence of what everyone is trying to discuss, so let's avoid the former. I know I brought up Steiner's PoF phenomenology and you were simply responding, so that was my mistake.

[AshvinP]

What do we think Steiner means by a being with fully human intelligence?

FB,

Let's consider for a moment what occurs with this line of questioning you are engaged in. Instead of trying to figure out what actually happens in our experience, in present day and also how it has metamorphosed over human history, we first must confront another layer of questions related to what Steiner said happens, according to the interpretation of each different personality who approaches PoF and how each person has come to understand it. Only after we figure out exactly what Steiner meant, or was trying to mean but said poorly, or what meaning he implied in this sentence and that sentence, in this edition or that edition... only then we can start discussing what is actually happening in our experience of the world.

Obviously I prefaced the discussion this way in the original post - I still think it was a good way to approach the discussion, but we should have abandoned it a long time ago. And I think Cleric and I have made clear we would rather abandon it than rehash it again. So I hope you agree with that and we can simply leave Steiner and PoF out of it going forward, and maybe also leave Barfield out of it if the interpretation of his writings also becomes a stumbling block. I am very interested in what you think about the notion that, currently, the abstract (fragmented) conceptual element is dominant in the perception-cognition polarity of our experience (if you disagree with this phrasing, let us know an alternative one), and what that means for the best way to restore the meaning of our perceptual experience?

[TriloByte]

I suspect that there are people in the forum who now think that it's useless to read PoF because it's 'outdated', it is incorrect, misleading, etc.

Not at all. Right now I am reading PoF motivated by your posts and effort. Thank you Cleric and AshvinP, please don’t stop writing.

And thank you Eugene (and Scott, of course).

[SanteriSatama]

"Let us assume that a being with fully developed human intelligence originated out of nothing and confronted the world. All that it there perceived before its thought began to act would be the pure content of perception. The world so far would appear to this being as a mere chaotic aggregate of sense-data, colours, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste, of smell, and, lastly, feelings of pleasure and pain. This mass constitutes the world of pure unthinking perception. Over against it stands thought, ready to begin its activity as soon as it can find a point of attack. Experience shows that the opportunity is not long in coming. Thought is able to draw threads from one sense-datum to another. It brings definite concepts to bear on these data and thus establishes a relation between them. We have seen above how a noise which we hear is connected with another content by our identifying the first as the effect of the second."

What do we think Steiner means by a being with fully human intelligence?

Is this a being that has never been to Earth but that has had its own cognitive experiences elsewhere so that concepts such a 'cause' and 'effect' function within its perceptions? Would this be a being who has developed in such a way as to have the basic concepts that come from evolving with the context of care and love and community; so while it would never have experienced Earth customs, it's 'fully developed human intelligence' shares the basic archyptal ideas that were central to human evolution?

Also let's ponder what Steiner means by 'before' when he says:

"All that it there perceived before its thought began to act would be the pure content of perception."

It seems to me that Steiner is asking the reader to imagine being a being that has never experienced the particular environment you are facing right now but that you have a fully developed 'human' intelligence.

Wouldn't your thinking already have 'figured' your very first observation?

Or do we take him literally and suppose there is a 'before,' that there is a moment of experience that you have 'before' figuration?

"The world so far would appear to this being as a mere chaotic aggregate of sense-data, colours, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste, of smell, and, lastly, feelings of pleasure and pain."

Well, it seems to me he is not suggesting that your figuration would present some recognizable patterns to you. For instance, you wouldn't be standing there immediately going, "Wow, that looks like fish swimming through the air and they seem to be moving across an ocean that is above, but I have no idea what this strange furry black thing is doing running towards me with a pink aspect wagging out an opening in it face."

No, it seems Steiner is saying you would have a moment in which there is only chaos, no recognizable patterns.

"This mass constitutes the world of pure unthinking perception."

Is he still describing something that he doesn't want us to think has an ontological existence? Is this still a cognitive imagination by the reader? Or maybe is he wanting to reader to see that by imagining this it means it actually is a reality that the reader simply hasn't experienced for himself?

We have been talking about the fact that Barfield shows us that you only get an idolatrized environment of supposedly pure perception IF AND ONLY IF your perception is saturated by the believes that came with the rise of modern science. As Barfield so expertly shows us, it is an error to think of idolatrized perception as standing apart from your thinking. If you do think it is 'just there, free from my assumptions,' you are an excellent example of a person living within the idols of the study without realizing it. What does Steiner say about the perceptual mass of chaos?

"This mass constitutes the world of pure unthinking perception."

He also then says:

"Over against it stands thought..."

Remember, he is asking the reader to cognitively imagine a being that is encountering something 'before' thinking has had any effect on it. Barfield reminds us that humans did not confront a world of chaos and then slowly attach concepts to it. We no longer think of children as starting from chaos and attaching concepts.

But do we think there is any reason at all to suppose that adults first encounter a form of reality that is free from thinking? Above in this thread we quoted where Steiner emphatically says that we obviously encounter a 'first form' before we complete it (in each moment) and then experience it as meaningful.

" {Thought is} ready to begin its activity as soon as it can find a point of attack. Experience shows that the opportunity is not long in coming."

Steiner's use of 'experience' in the above sentence can not be referring to the thought experiment. He isn't saying that within our imagination of being this nearly-human being we 'experience' this state of pure chaos. He is saying that it is obvious that thinking must quickly fill the gap, so to speak. Maybe this is obvious to Steiner because if thinking didn't quickly fill the gap, we'd just be staring blankly into the chaos that he seems to be suggesting is ontologically prior to what thinking adds to it.

A careful reader can see the reason why careful reader's often shift from the imagination of the human-like, fully intelligent being to ontological notions of a chaos that actually confronts us before thinking begins weaving meaning into the chaos and presenting us with a non-chaotic world.

A careful reading can actually show the spots where it might not be obvious when Steiner shifts from the cognitive imagination to statements about what 'experience shows.' He certainly doesn't mean that only his experience shows this. Or that experience only shows this after some kind of initiation.

Steiner feels he has pointed to something that experience clearly shows.

I think he clearly pointed to what a certain kind of presumption about 'pure experience' clearly shows.

Or, we'd have to talk more about the pure chaos we encounter moment to moment.

Before and after the polar thought-form of "conceptualized order" vs "non-conceptualized chaos" is and moves Attention.

Can Attention know why how and where it is moving, attending? If Attention is stuck in attending and looping only a network of conceptualized ordering (a common meaning of thinking), does it know why? If attention does not know, can attention be free?

"Chaos" is polar projection of conceptualized order. And only a projection-imagination, as conceptual order can not actually know it's projected opposite. Only Attention can know, when attending detaches from looping the conceptualized ordering and grabbing more conceptualizing by external sensing. Only attention can know, by attending internal sensing of bodily awareness, sense of being.

'Morphogenetic field' can be thought of as a conceptualization of bodily awareness. Thinking so, can we say that morphogenetic field is lacking in creativity and intelligence; that bodily awareness is not creative intelligence?

When conceptualized looping projects and scare-mongers bodily awareness as "mechanistically instinctive" and "mechanistically reactive" and ", it is clearly projecting its ignorance, it's own mechanized character. Imagination of "chaotic mass" is simply an admission of ignorance of what is beyond the control of conceptualizing looping.

The maxim "gnothi seauton" translates correctly: Feel thyself!. The instruction is for Attention to attend internal sensing ("self"), to feel-know (gnosis) in bodily awareness. The translation error from apolar ground of gnosis to purely epistemic knowing by polar organizing of conceptual networks has been most unhelpful, causing Attention to get stuck in looping conceptualizing networks, from where even gnosis, the "morphogenetic field" is reflected and imagined as fragmented "percepts". as conceptualizing graspings.

Through attending bodily awareness, attention can opening paths from creative intelligence to thinking and make also thinking more aware, more intelligent and more creative. Attending bodily awareness is not difficult, the ground of gnosis, the sense of being is always present as it is presence.

[Cleric]

In my view Steiner is simply wrong, in terms of mathematics. E.g. Euclid's definitions and proofs are not universal*, they are generalizing demonstrations in the context of Elementa. Can triangles exist in spherical etc. curvy context? If a flat triangle is partitioned so that it can form curvature of Geodesic dome, does it cease to be triangle?

Instead of "single concept", which cannot be proven either logically or empirically, we can talk of family resemblance.

*Universal in the sense: "necessarily true in all possible worlds". Gödel's theorem's don't allow a logical and formal completion of the notion "all possible worlds"

Santeri, this is not the sense of universal that we speak of. Steiner's example of a 'triangle' is not at all aimed at speaking about mathematical proofs. In the same way he might have used the concept of 'mother', for example.

To grasp what we're talking about we must first realize that there's something more fundamental than mathematics as cognitive discipline and that something is Thinking itself. After all, [pure] mathematics is nothing else but Thinking conceptualizing its own dynamics and patterns when it lives within the ideal world of number and form.

In this sense, Thinking is concerned with the experience of concepts (meaning). The whole discussion in this thread revolves around the idea that it is in concepts/ideas that we experience the unity of reality. The only reason this may sound counter-intuitive is if we unconsciously insist that concepts and ideas have existence only local to the intellect. If we're healed from this prejudice we do find that we're truly one in the experience of the idea.

To claim that we're one because of unifying underlying principle of consciousness, is OK, if we're trying to give general form of our philosophy but in our time we need to enter deeper into the details and this is where things really fail. The idea that Will is the unifying medium is not the result of direct experience. Think about it - at what point do you experience your will and mine to be 'one'? What today is called oneness is really to 'dance fluidly together with the World Will'. But this World Will still remains external to us, it impresses into our being, we feel its activity, yet we don't experience things from the point of view of that World Will, we're not one with it in this particular sense. We're one as far as we allow ourselves to flow without any friction with it but ultimately we preserve our point of view, which doesn't include the point of view of the World Will.

All this is different when we come to concepts and ideas which are experienced through Thinking. When we Think about the same thing, we truly experience the same concepts and we experience them from the same side. If I experience you pushing me, I experience your will impressing into my soul life. I may be in complete harmony with this and feel totally fluid, dancing with your pushing, but the fact remains that I'm one only with the effects your will has on my inner state, not with your point of view. This changes when we consider ideas. When we speak about the concept of 'mother' we really live in the same ideal element. Your words about 'mother' impress in my soul life, just as your will does, but as long as we understand the same thing, we also live in the same ideal experience. We're truly one when we live together in the same ideas.

That's why we speak about Thinking being the universal element. Only through thinking we live in the element of meaning which is truly one and the same for all beings. Things become really rolling when we understand that this element is to be found not only in our heads but throughout the Cosmos and we can experience it from the same point of view. This is the domain of higher cognition and how it reveals the beings of the spiritual world. We only understand how the World comes into being by experiencing the same ideal element that lives in the higher beings.

As we can see in this forum, it's extraordinarily difficult for people to grasp what is being talked about here. When it's heard "we're one when we live in ideas", one automatically imagines independent minds that are simply synchronized in their concepts. In that sense the oneness is simply metaphorical, much like we can say that all PCs running Windows are 'one'. This is absolutely not what we're talking about. Unfortunately there's no way to explain this any clearer than this. It requires one to experience intimately the Thinking process and recognize that the world of ideas, which is the essential meaningful experiential element of Thinking, is truly the thing that is One. Every time we speak of one consciousness, one will, etc. we're speaking only abstractly. We're imagining the continuity of our inner world as it flows into the outer. By outer I don't mean the spatial material world but the part of inner life that we feel is an imprint of something which is not the product of our own activity. Yet we don't have first-person experience of that outer world impressing in us. We only assume that our inner world somehow flows without interruption within that which impresses in us. The ideal element is the only one that allows us to experience the inwardness of that which impresses outwardly within us. The reason is that this ideal element is the same for all Thinking beings.

[Cleric]

"Let us assume that a being with fully developed human intelligence originated out of nothing and confronted the world. All that it there perceived before its thought began to act would be the pure content of perception. The world so far would appear to this being as a mere chaotic aggregate of sense-data, colours, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste, of smell, and, lastly, feelings of pleasure and pain. This mass constitutes the world of pure unthinking perception. Over against it stands thought, ready to begin its activity as soon as it can find a point of attack. Experience shows that the opportunity is not long in coming. Thought is able to draw threads from one sense-datum to another. It brings definite concepts to bear on these data and thus establishes a relation between them. We have seen above how a noise which we hear is connected with another content by our identifying the first as the effect of the second."

Blanks, as I said, I completely agree that if one takes 'pure perception' in the sense of perception without meaning/concept/idea, we wander into abstract territory.

Nevertheless, for me personally, the idea behind the above quote, ever since I stumbled upon it in Truth and Knowledge, was one of the most profound and eye-opening thought experiments. As I said, everything can be understood completely right as long as we're looking for the holistic message, and not focus on the various ways things can be misunderstood when the holistic context is absent.

So what is the pure content of perception? It is what we can attain to as far as we recognize and separate every concept that lies on top of the elementary perception. For example, experience of red is an elementary perception together with its elementary meaning of 'redness'. If that red happens to belong to the sensory perception of a rose, then the above thought experiment allows to see how the implicit concepts that I experience together with the red of the rose, make it different from pure red. One of the implicit concepts is that I'm seeing an external plant in the physical world. How do we recognize pure red filling my consciousness from red belonging to a rose, or red belonging to a rose that I see in a dream? In its essence the quality of red is everywhere the same. It's the ideal context which makes the experience different.

This is my understanding of 'pure perception' and I must say that I don't have any problem with it. Let me put it this way: I can call a perception pure when I have removed so much of the ideal content that I arrive at the perception+elementary concept which I can no longer separate. For example, I can disregard whether I'm dreaming or awake, whether I'm seeing a rose or not, but when I reach the elementary experience of 'red' I can no longer doubt the ideal content I experience. Whether it's a hallucination, dream, visual input, the fact remains that I experience 'redness'. This is as far as I can go. If I go on and imagine, like the materialist, that the experience of redness is nothing but the firing of neurons, I'm not in the least going any deeper in direct experience. On the contrary - I begin again to put layers of concepts that only cover the perception with imagined explanations.

We don't commit epistemological crime when we recognize pure perceptions (and their elementary concepts) in this way. As said, for me this was one of the most important mental exercises ever, and continues to be to this day. Every time I'm in doubt about something I simply step back and ask "What is the raw contents of experience and what is it that I add through thinking?" (by adding I mean primarily mental habits, which can be largely unconscious). This is especially useful when reading scientific articles. The media, especially, presents scientific experimental results in horrible way, only looking to make sensations. When we're presented, for example, with results from the LHC experiments, what is it really that belongs to the pure perception and what is layered on top with thinking? When it's spoken about Higgs bosons and so on, do we really see them? Not really. The pure perception is the indications of the instruments after particles collide. This is the raw data. It's invaluable to be able to make that distinction and recognize what really lives on top of the instruments' readings as concepts added by scientific thinking.

I'm not saying that the pure perceptions are the only certain thing and everything else is just abstract addition. The problem is not that we find concepts that are in harmony with the perceptual element but when we try to explain away the perceptual through combinations of concepts. This is where we enter the domain of the abstract thinking with which both modern science and philosophy are so much in love. And this is also why Thinking has a central role - because in perception of Thinking (the exceptional state) we have pure perception which is completely explained by the ideal activity we experience.

In my experience, this inner exercise of recognizing the concepts living together with the perceptions not only isn't misleading but points us at something critically important. If we disregard this exercise on the pretext that perceptions and concepts always belong together and it's meaningless to try and purify the perception, we simply have no means to recognize how divides like mind/matter or my conscious bubble/others' conscious bubbles appear. It is absolutely crucial that we recognize the pure contents of inner experiences. Only from that position we can also distinguish an idea as mind/matter. It is from here that we can recognize how it has been unconsciously patched into our psychic organization and how it has affected our thinking ever after.

[Cleric]

I suspect that there are people in the forum who now think that it's useless to read PoF because it's 'outdated', it is incorrect, misleading, etc.

Not at all. Right now I am reading PoF motivated by your posts and effort. Thank you Cleric and AshvinP, please don’t stop writing.

And thank you Eugene (and Scott, of course).

Thank you, TriloByte! This is really encouraging, and a little relieving to know that all these back and forths may not have been completely to waste.

[SanteriSatama]

The whole discussion in this thread revolves around the idea that it is in concepts/ideas that we experience the unity of reality.

In other words, "keeps on looping".

The only reason this may sound counter-intuitive is if we unconsciously insist that concepts and ideas have existence only local to the intellect. If we're healed from this prejudice we do find that we're truly one in the experience of the idea.

My counter argument is not "unconsciouss" nor "prejudice" - that's just rhetorics. Even if conceptualizations and ideas are the size of an universe, they remain localized intellect. My empirically founded argument is that Thinking at it's best (ie. Creative Intelligence) is not bound as conceptual looping. The Source of creative intelligence, and how the Source manifests in conceptualizing processes, is in preconceptual sentience.

To claim that we're one because of unifying underlying principle of consciousness, is OK, if we're trying to give general form of our philosophy but in our time we need to enter deeper into the details and this is where things really fail. The idea that Will is the unifying medium is not the result of direct experience. Think about it - at what point do you experience your will and mine to be 'one'? What today is called oneness is really to 'dance fluidly together with the World Will'. But this World Will still remains external to us, it impresses into our being, we feel its activity, yet we don't experience things from the point of view of that World Will, we're not one with it in this particular sense. We're one as far as we allow ourselves to flow without any friction with it but ultimately we preserve our point of view, which doesn't include the point of view of the World Will.

Why assume that this World Will is point-like, has The point of view as you say? Does World Will need to be anything else that uniquely experiencing, and all the wonderful complexity that arises from such will? Isn't Will to experience sufficient and self-explanatory cause?

Sure, I'm not denying the possiblity of spiritual beings and deities of mathematical kinds manifisting as participatory relations in such Will, highly evolved conceptual networks, which can have their subject alters as their incarnations as well as sub routines for mathematical and conceptual creativity, which continuously expand the horizons of experiencing.

Trying to present "one" or "triangle" as something else than mathematical concepts is not helpful, it reeks of dishonesty. In our age we do feel deep need for continuity, in the want created by our fragmentation and alienation. But "one" as basic concept-metaphor for continuity is ill chosen and creates more problems for clear and coherent thinking than it solves.

All this is different when we come to concepts and ideas which are experienced through Thinking. When we Think about the same thing, we truly experience the same concepts and we experience them from the same side. If I experience you pushing me, I experience your will impressing into my soul life. I may be in complete harmony with this and feel totally fluid, dancing with your pushing, but the fact remains that I'm one only with the effects your will has on my inner state, not with your point of view. This changes when we consider ideas. When we speak about the concept of 'mother' we really live in the same ideal element. Your words about 'mother' impress in my soul life, just as your will does, but as long as we understand the same thing, we also live in the same ideal experience. We're truly one when we live together in the same ideas.

Whether intended or not, the literal meaning of "one in same idea, same thing" reads as idea of Borg, fully mechanized and determined existence in the purely top-down causal idea of Borg-like deity. From the perspective uniquely experiencing and exploring Love in all forms of Love, in dynamic participation with Creative Intelligence, this is the genuine defence of genuine Thinking.

[AshvinP]

I suspect that there are people in the forum who now think that it's useless to read PoF because it's 'outdated', it is incorrect, misleading, etc.

Not at all. Right now I am reading PoF motivated by your posts and effort. Thank you Cleric and AshvinP, please don’t stop writing.

And thank you Eugene (and Scott, of course).

Thank you, TriloByte! This is really encouraging, and a little relieving to know that all these back and forths may not have been completely to waste.

Indeed it is, thanks! We hope to hear thoughts or questions after reading.

[findingblanks]

"There technically could be ontological "blooming buzzing confusion" because that still carries a conceptual meaning, but we all agree there is no ontological state without any conceptual meaning."

And just to add/ask: and you would agree that it is not that the first form of reality we meet is this low-level conceptualized perception that is in need to more concepts to be a very rich an cognitively active figurated experience, yeah>