Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[findingblanks]

"Right now, I am left with the impression that you feel Steiner wanted us to figure out that what he was doing through philosophy and spiritual science was not very exceptional or trailblazing in any way."

Okay, I might need to stop speaking to you in this context. I clearly can't get across even non-technical statements about my own love for Steiner. I don't think you do this intentionally but you often repeat back the opposite of what I've said. I've now told you in many direct ways why I find Rudolf Steiner's work to be trailblazing and essential to culture. And I've said he makes mistakes that i think are very important, too. You echo back only this notion that I don't find value in his work. I can't possible make sense to you. I can't. You literally take much of what I say to be the opposite of what I've explicitly said.

Cleric and I struggle but we make progress in understanding little snips. It can be frustrating and head-scratching but that is a healthy sign.

Please know that I see your perspective and share much of it and not all of it. You believe that the 'exceptional state' is more than a necessary first step. You are surprised that I don't read the quotations you share to indicate that Steiner wanted to reader to undergo this fundamental shift in experience. One (of several) reasons it is surprising is that you can compare his characterization of the state in Chapter 3 to things he says about the nature of thinking later and they seem nearly identical. How can I honestly claim that "I am thinking of a table" isn't yet the fundamental transformation of thinking? I hear and feel your confusion about my take. But I can't even communicate simple non-philosophical ideas to you like my love and admiration for what Steiner has brought to culture. I've mentioned my love for the Waldorf schools I've worked with. I've mentioned that Steiner has given some of the most brilliant descriptions of learning process to date. Needless to say, he was the first person to work deeply with the new science that Goethe was trying to establish.

But I can tell quite easily that you are sweet and very intelligent person who cares deeply about the world. So I'm very happy to have entered into a chat about PoF with you. And I wish I had made a bit more sense.

[findingblanks]

"OK then I would choose to rephrase your observation as follows - "we are all actually bound to live by the 'rules' of Reality, even if we are not aware of them, and those who actively deny those rules will experience psychotic breaks". And then my objection shifts to, what is the relevance of that objection to anything being written in PoF? Do you assert Steiner is merely trying to tell us in Chapter 3 what is always happening when we engage in normal thinking activity throughout the day and nothing more?"

No, I would not accept that rephrasing because it presupposes a conclusion that Steiner doesn't want us to make yet. He says so clearly that in this part of the text he isn't assuming conclusions about the nature of things. So I would reject that as a paraphrase of what I'm saying.

"Do you assert Steiner is merely trying to tell us in Chapter 3 what is always happening when we engage in normal thinking activity throughout the day and nothing more?"

No, I assert that Steiner is saying that we need to isolate this special occurrence and not weave any other ideas or representations into it. Just like in Truth and Knoweldge when he characterizes the 'directly given world picture' and then quickly acknowledges that it seems he is making a knowledge-based claim about it but he really isn't. He acknowledges that via language and concepts he is forced to make it sound like he is bringing knowledge or conclusions into his 'artificial concept'.

So, no, he isn't merely wanting us to notice that we think we produce our own thought. He wants us to notice that that is the necessary starting point before anything can be known at all. He wants us to notice how easily we brush past this exception-to-the-rule every time we either ignore it (which is mostly) or reduce it to some other abstraction ("It's caused by matter!", "It's caused by spirit!").

We can delicately notice it for what it is. It stands outside the typical flow of experience. It reflects (his word) back on that experience and notices the thought itself: "I'm thinking of a table." This is the seed experience that needs to be delicately handled so that it can grow into the certainty that comes with the transformation.

Steiner was outstandingly aware of the way materialism-- along with his favorite non-materialist thinkers-- crushed this seed and, therefore, blocked the possibility of realizing the nature of thinking itself.

[SanteriSatama]

The first step is to realize that in knowing we share in the essential being of All. This is what we try to bring attention to, in practically every post in this forum (with questionable success). As long as we view knowing as a local soul-phenomenon, where growing in knowledge only inflates the ego and weighs it down with concepts that stand between it and reality, we can't make even the tiniest step forward.

A mighty language problem and challenge. How much they try, Don Quijote and Sancho Pancha don't seem to able to wrestle back the standard English, conceptually colonized, purely epistemic meaning of knowing back to the root meaning of Greek gnosis - even though knowing and gnosis share the same PIE (Proto-Indo-European) root.

Feeling participation in being, and asubjective feel of participating in being, together with asubjective multperspectivism - a-privative denoting relative absence of subject-object division - does this sound sensible to you, relatable to the meaning you are trying to express? A perhaps better interpretation of 'gnothi seauton' as 'Feel thyself!', than the looping Windmill of epistemic "know thyself" as production and maintenance of conceptual ego-images and identities and definitions based on transitive (objectifying) and back-reflecting meaning of "is"?

These fuzzy and perhaps weird sounding translations from my native to English are offered with the prayer that they could help making a tiny step forward. Offered, not forced.

Speaking of windmills, Language of the World just brought this to attention:

Every expression of egoism can be ultimately traced to impairment of this Divine Triad. Egoism issues when we seek Wisdom for its own sake, without using it to guide with its Light, our deeds of Love. Love becomes egoistic if we don't seek to elucidate it with the Light of Wisdom. In that case Love can never be distinguished from a purely personal desire, seeking our own gratification on Cosmic pretext. If we seek only our own Truth, without the ever expanding horizon of Wisdom, or the sacrifice of personal desires, that true Love demands, we become self-seeking. The Divine Triad shows us how growing knowingly into the Cosmos doesn't turn us into super(cosmic)-egoists, but into servants of Truth through Love.

Also, we need to be careful with the dance with the ego. Full frontal attack to suppress and deny ego often leads to chaining of meta-ego attacking ego, etc. etc. etc. Ego is also a naturally arising and situational social construct in our intersubjective speech acts. But instead of rigid identities, which easily become robotic defense mechanisms, this inter-subjective ego-aspect can become playful dance in of changing and enjoying costumes of our continuous variance.

[findingblanks]

Cleric, seems we come to the end of this particular line of thought.

"When you say that young Steiner was struggling for certainty, it is exactly the stubborn viscous habit that seeds the uncertainty. This was Steiner's great insight. The certainty is given, the uncertainty is grafted from our cultural and philosophical environment."

Have you read any of this letters? Have you read his description of life before he had grasped the nature of thinking and after?

You say that Steiner already had the insight, it was given. And then he had to extricate it from our culture-philo environment. That's beautiful and non-dual and I love it. But Steiner never said it. In fact, find me one quote that suggests that his frustration was that he had already experienced the fundamental transformation of thinking before he began detaching all the cultural junk. Look, you will put the transformation at the beginning in most contexts. I get it. In fact, I bet I could have predicted that when I brought up young Steiner who was still struggling for certainity, you'd tell me, "Oh, he actually had it but just needed to figure out how to get rid of the other stuff." That's your pattern and you are going to stick to it!

Fortunately, nearly none of the good work we are trying to accomplish in the midst of our great limitations will suffer from this difference

[findingblanks]

"If we read without prejudice we'll see that it is all there implicit in the important observation."

I said at the beginning of all this that I've been told by the most serious students that you can read the first ten sentences of PoF and realize that Steiner is revealing the transformation in each sentence.

I understand this tendency and I used to do it myself. It was grounded in the very misunderstanding we are looking at. So please know that I really do see the way in which you see it all taking place there in chapter 3. It's exciting! And I'm not sure it is an intellectual explication that would ever make you think that maybe the exceptional state isn't yet the intuitive grasping of thinking itself. More than anything else, please know that you have made clear your point-of-view. It fits my hand like an old favorite glove. If you want me to prove it, I'll send you an email from a fake account and strike up a PoF conversation. You'll be blown away by how united our understanding of it is

[findingblanks]

Cleric describes the 'exceptional state':

"The breakthrough comes when we find that the very desire to explain thinking with more thinking is what is misplaced. I know that this sounds too elementary to be true but it's actually not an intellectual judgment. It's the first lucid intuition we can have. I can't stress this enough. We don't grasp this if we think to ourselves "OK, then I'll just stop doubting and settle on what seems to be naively real". No, this simply sweeps the uncertainty under the rug. We really grasp it at the moment we lift ourselves in our thinking to a point that is not yet affected by the uncertainty. In other words we're stricken by a real spiritual experience, much like our hand has been paralyzed all our life and we suddenly realize we can move it."

And no doubt Cleric would say that a good example of this spiritual experience, if you are really trying to convey it, would be something like:

"In saying, “I am thinking of a table,” I already enter the exceptional state characterized above, in which something that is always contained — though not as an observed object — within our spiritual activity, is itself made into an object of observation."

If you are trying to convery to somebody in the clearest way possible what you mean by 'exceptional state', you would want to get across the utter shock of the realization. If it is like suddenly having movement in a hand that has been paralyzed all of your life, you would want the reader to realize that this exceptional state - which almost no humans have experienced as such - is like that. Now, if you were merely trying to show the reader that there is something very important about the moment of noticing a thought, you might use an everyday example of noticing a thought. But if you want to convey this 'breakthrough' that when we 'lift ourselves in our thinking to the point that is not yet affected by uncertainty', you'd do better to tell the reader:

"In saying, “I am thinking of a table,” I already enter the exceptional state."

That exceptional state is much more of a breakthrough than the relatively obvious importance of starting with a clean recognition of the experience of grasping a thought. The exceptional state.is a breakthrough not a mere reflection.

How could anybody possibly think it is radical to merely grasp one's own thought without yet grasping the true nature of thinking?

If I am noticing that I am thinking about a table, I've done it. I've had the breakthrough that PoF is all about.

The insincerity isn't mocking if read correctly. It is simply my play with embodying your claim as I contrast your description with Steiner's.

[SanteriSatama]

Cleric describes the 'exceptional state':

"The breakthrough comes when we find that the very desire to explain thinking with more thinking is what is misplaced. I know that this sounds too elementary to be true but it's actually not an intellectual judgment. It's the first lucid intuition we can have. I can't stress this enough. We don't grasp this if we think to ourselves "OK, then I'll just stop doubting and settle on what seems to be naively real". No, this simply sweeps the uncertainty under the rug. We really grasp it at the moment we lift ourselves in our thinking to a point that is not yet affected by the uncertainty. In other words we're stricken by a real spiritual experience, much like our hand has been paralyzed all our life and we suddenly realize we can move it."

And no doubt Cleric would say that a good example of this spiritual experience, if you are really trying to convey it, would be something like:

"In saying, “I am thinking of a table,” I already enter the exceptional state characterized above, in which something that is always contained — though not as an observed object — within our spiritual activity, is itself made into an object of observation."

If you are trying to convery to somebody in the clearest way possible what you mean by 'exceptional state', you would want to get across the utter shock of the realization. If it is like suddenly having movement in a hand that has been paralyzed all of your life, you would want the reader to realize that this exceptional state - which almost no humans have experienced as such - is like that. Now, if you were merely trying to show the reader that there is something very important about the moment of noticing a thought, you might use an everyday example of noticing a thought. But if you want to convey this 'breakthrough' that when we 'lift ourselves in our thinking to the point that is not yet affected by uncertainty', you'd do better to tell the reader:

"In saying, “I am thinking of a table,” I already enter the exceptional state."

That exceptional state is much more of a breakthrough than the relatively obvious importance of starting with a clean recognition of the experience of grasping a thought. The exceptional state.is a breakthrough not a mere reflection.

How could anybody possibly think it is radical to merely grasp one's own thought without yet grasping the true nature of thinking?

If I am noticing that I am thinking about a table, I've done it. I've had the breakthrough that PoF is all about.

The insincerity isn't mocking if read correctly. It is simply my play with embodying your claim as I contrast your description with Steiner's.

'The ceasing of doubt' is not a bad description of the phenomenal experience of 'doing-by-being'.

[findingblanks]

"So far, there is not the slightest reason why I should regard my own thinking from any point of view other than my own. After all, I contemplate the rest of the world by means of thinking. Why should I make my thinking an exception?"

What does he mean by 'so far?'

I'm sure you can imagine what I think he means.

"We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object."

Do you believe that in this chapter Steiner has ever once actually presupposed that you are real as a subject. He certainly says that you know you are the one who had this thought. But do think that, therefore, he believes that the reader at this point has intuited the reality of the "I"?

"There are people who say it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether our thinking is right or wrong, and thus our starting point is in any case a doubtful one. It would be just as sensible to doubt whether a tree is in itself right or wrong. Thinking is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of the truth or falsity of a fact."

Steiner hopes we realize how silly it would be to ask whether this starting point is right or wrong.

"To show how far the application of thinking to the world is right or wrong, is precisely the task of this book."

As we know, PoF does not go on to tell us facts about trees or planets or spiritual beings. It goes on to reveal the intuitive nature of thinking itself. At this point, he claims he hasn't yet gotten to that part of the book. I know, I know...he secretly hopes that we see he is presenting the later parts of the book about intuitive thinking here.

'So far', I think he's been clear in what this section of the book is needing to accomplish.

What happens when we apply thinking to itself? Not when we think about thinking and notice the nature of the exceptional state. What happens when thinking is experienced in the present? That's what the rest of the book gets into.

But, hey, there are students who think that if the book is read carefully enough, we'll see that Steiner is also teaching about the hierarchies. The insights never end.

[AshvinP]

"Right now, I am left with the impression that you feel Steiner wanted us to figure out that what he was doing through philosophy and spiritual science was not very exceptional or trailblazing in any way."

Okay, I might need to stop speaking to you in this context. I clearly can't get across even non-technical statements about my own love for Steiner. I don't think you do this intentionally but you often repeat back the opposite of what I've said. I've now told you in many direct ways why I find Rudolf Steiner's work to be trailblazing and essential to culture. And I've said he makes mistakes that i think are very important, too. You echo back only this notion that I don't find value in his work. I can't possible make sense to you. I can't. You literally take much of what I say to be the opposite of what I've explicitly said.

Cleric and I struggle but we make progress in understanding little snips. It can be frustrating and head-scratching but that is a healthy sign.

Please know that I see your perspective and share much of it and not all of it. You believe that the 'exceptional state' is more than a necessary first step. You are surprised that I don't read the quotations you share to indicate that Steiner wanted to reader to undergo this fundamental shift in experience. One (of several) reasons it is surprising is that you can compare his characterization of the state in Chapter 3 to things he says about the nature of thinking later and they seem nearly identical. How can I honestly claim that "I am thinking of a table" isn't yet the fundamental transformation of thinking? I hear and feel your confusion about my take. But I can't even communicate simple non-philosophical ideas to you like my love and admiration for what Steiner has brought to culture. I've mentioned my love for the Waldorf schools I've worked with. I've mentioned that Steiner has given some of the most brilliant descriptions of learning process to date. Needless to say, he was the first person to work deeply with the new science that Goethe was trying to establish.

But I can tell quite easily that you are sweet and very intelligent person who cares deeply about the world. So I'm very happy to have entered into a chat about PoF with you. And I wish I had made a bit more sense.

Right, and I genuinely suggest that you might want to dwell with those bolded statements some more. There are various reasons why people do not make "more sense", many of which can be attributed to either their poor writing skills or the poor understanding of the reader. Once you get to a full blown 35+ pages of that with people who clearly have the ability to follow rational arguments, though, the possibility that you are simply making incorrect and/or incoherent argument becomes pretty high. Part of that is to blame on your odd refusal to plainly state things, for sure, but part is also on the fact your argument is fundamentally incorrect, and I suspect they go hand in hand. I think Cleric hit the nail on the head in his last post where he said you are taking the given and adding modern era cultural baggage onto it so as it make it impossible for you to acknowledge what is actually being referenced in Chapter 3.

It's not that I didn't notice your repeated statements about the respect, admiration, love, etc. you have for Steiner and what he has contributed, rather I ignored those because I felt they were not relevant to what we were trying to establish here and, in some cases, I felt like you were explicitly including those statements to then proceed with completely misrepresenting Steiner and the themes, content, style, etc. that runs through every single writing of his I have come across. Perhaps none of it was being done consciously, but nevertheless the misrepresentations are real. In the post where you spoke of "living by" the intuition, for ex., I don't accept your ex-post explanation of what you meant with "living by", because all the examples given in the post were clearly trying to show that people, even young children, are always observing their own thinking in the way that Steiner meant it.

There is an easy to way to clear all of these things up - invest a few minutes into writing a bullet point list or something of what you believe is actually going on with thinking activity - is it truly our own activity? what can it reveal to us from either the ES or the "breakthrough" state? what, if any, is its role in the unfolding of our experience and our spiritual destiny? Cleric has written no less than 5-10 posts responding to your criticisms and outlining what his position is on those issues at the same time. I am only asking you to write one post and write it clearly, and I know you are perfectly capable of doing so because you are very intelligent and your writing is not as poor as you make it out to be. Maybe you already have such a post in your archive somewhere, in which case you could just copy and paste.

[Cleric K]

Cleric describes the 'exceptional state':

"The breakthrough comes when we find that the very desire to explain thinking with more thinking is what is misplaced. I know that this sounds too elementary to be true but it's actually not an intellectual judgment. It's the first lucid intuition we can have. I can't stress this enough. We don't grasp this if we think to ourselves "OK, then I'll just stop doubting and settle on what seems to be naively real". No, this simply sweeps the uncertainty under the rug. We really grasp it at the moment we lift ourselves in our thinking to a point that is not yet affected by the uncertainty. In other words we're stricken by a real spiritual experience, much like our hand has been paralyzed all our life and we suddenly realize we can move it."

And no doubt Cleric would say that a good example of this spiritual experience, if you are really trying to convey it, would be something like:

"In saying, “I am thinking of a table,” I already enter the exceptional state characterized above, in which something that is always contained — though not as an observed object — within our spiritual activity, is itself made into an object of observation."

No, I'm not describing the exceptional state. I'm describing 'the most important observation one can make' within that state. It is what Steiner asks us to observe, the 'bringing forth' of thoughts. I show you that quote, you say "Well, that's just an overstatement on Steiner's part". I also asked you if he also overstates things in the 1918 addendum, where he made it as explicit as possible?

I think we really reached the crux of the matter in the previous post. As I said, the question is no more in which chapter he shows how we arrive at the certainty of bringing forth thoughts. The thing is that you altogether deny that we ever arrive at that certainty through thinking that turns into itself. In your view this thinking can only 'think that it creates the thoughts' but not experience it as certain intuition (direct knowing). You demand an additional element, which we must find in an inexplicable way, which tells us from outside thinking, something about the nature of thinking. And this is something that Steiner explicitly overrules.

Let me ask an additional question, which I hope will clear up the way in which you expect this certainty to be arrived at. Consider the simpler version "Thinking exists", without any reference to the origin. I guess you can agree that this is a certain truth. The question is how do you arrive at that certainty? Is it that "thinking simply thinks (assumes) that it exists" or it is direct intuition that is expressed in "Thinking exists" - in other words, the essential being of thinking contemplates/testifies its own self-affirmation. Take a moment to experience this thought and its associated certainty, and tell me if it has anything in common with the certainty of "I bring forth the thoughts"? Or the latter is arrived at some completely different way (outside the essential being of thinking)?