Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[AshvinP]

For those of you who agree with Steiner that the reason we experience percepts divorced from concepts is because our thinking divides them, describe this observation. Try not to beg-the-question. Thanks!

I am sitting at my computer right now, typing a response to your comment, and it dawns on me that I don't know the meaning of everything I can perceive or possibly perceive in the Cosmos. Did my perceiving-thinking divide me from the totality of the Cosmic meaning? Or was it some cruel god who decreed it to be this way totally independent of me? Or is the world actually divided into separate parts with separate meanings and I am perceiving-cognizing the true reality right now at my computer desk? Reasonable people can think through these options for themselves, but I know which one makes the most sense to me.

[findingblanks]

"Reasonable people can think through these options for themselves, but I know which one makes the most sense to me."

Yeah, so it sounds like you are making an inference based on reasoning and that you are open to many possibilities. I'm assuming you don't believe that the options you threw out there are the only ways a person could wonder about the nature of reality. That's very fair.

Sometimes you sound as if you are not making inferences and that gets a little weird.

But I'd appreciate you taking me deeper into your experience. Steiner says that it is your thinking that causes the severance. So with reference specifically to your experience of thinking can you help me see why you believe it is your thinking that caused you to experience percepts? Is it fairly obvious to you that without thinking you would not observe percepts? Do you think that a mouse inspecting a piece of cheese has caused the cheese to become a percept via its thinking? Thanks.

[findingblanks]

I absent-mindedly flick a small chunk of cheese (later I'll realize it was a toy) to my rat Gracie. She noses it forward to me and sometimes pushes it with her little hands. We do this for about five minutes.

If we claim to know that thinking is what divides the world from its inherent meaningful unity, then we can ask

1) How did we come to realize this? Is it an inferences based on reasoning from other points of knowledge/experience?
2) Is it reasonable to suppose that Gracie is not intuiting the meaningful unity of what the toy-cheese is and is, instead, noticing an object in her environment and interacting with it?

If thinking causes the division, we might be willing to say that we know for a fact that Gracie's thinking caused her to notice the object and engage with it...?

[AshvinP]

"Reasonable people can think through these options for themselves, but I know which one makes the most sense to me."

Yeah, so it sounds like you are making an inference based on reasoning and that you are open to many possibilities. I'm assuming you don't believe that the options you threw out there are the only ways a person could wonder about the nature of reality. That's very fair.

Sometimes you sound as if you are not making inferences and that gets a little weird.

But I'd appreciate you taking me deeper into your experience. Steiner says that it is your thinking that causes the severance. So with reference specifically to your experience of thinking can you help me see why you believe it is your thinking that caused you to experience percepts? Is it fairly obvious to you that without thinking you would not observe percepts? Do you think that a mouse inspecting a piece of cheese has caused the cheese to become a percept via its thinking? Thanks.

Yes, it is based on reasoned inferences. If it sounds like we have a lot of confidence in those inferences, then it is because we do, since we consider reasoned thinking to be a mode of perceiving the world. That is the biggest stumbling block for modern people - recognizing that Thinking is a mode of sensing-perceiving. Why? Because they don't consider "ideas" and "meaning" to be real objective processes in the world. They consider them, at best, Fata Morgana like Schopenhauer. So it sounds crazy to modern man that we can "perceive ideas [ideal constellations of meaning]" like we perceive the Sun or the Moon or constellations of stars in the night sky. That modern bias is exactly what we need to overcome. I quoted Barfield before in his discussion of how thinking-perceiving is inseparable and how that conclusion is reached by all philosophers, scientists, etc. who reflect on it for a bit. Unfortunately, most of them forget that conclusion soon after they reach it. Barfield remarked that, personally, he did not allow himself to forget it. Remember, though, that Barfield is follower of Steiner and arrived at many of his conclusions through the latter's writings - the inseparability of perceiving-thinking does not undermine Steiner's phenomenology in PoF, rather the latter necessitates that inseparability when we take it seriously.

FB, your bolded request is like asking, "can you take me deeper into how you perceived the world as an infant or small child, and illustrate step by step how your perceiving-thinking as a small child evolved into your perceiving-thinking as a grown adult?" When we speak of perceiving-thinking of ideal content and processes, we are speaking of a living organism and its transformations. Those qualitative dynamics simply cannot be reduced to abstract mechanistic concepts of A leads to B leads to C, etc. That being said, we can all experience those transformations within our own thinking today, and Cleric has already illustrated that very well. There is nothing I can write here which would be more clear illustration of the living process than his pencil example. I still have no idea why that was insufficient for you or why you feel the need to divert into discussion of cats, mice, etc., because PoF is only speaking of human perception-cognition.

[AshvinP]

I absent-mindedly flick a small chunk of cheese (later I'll realize it was a toy) to my rat Gracie. She noses it forward to me and sometimes pushes it with her little hands. We do this for about five minutes.

If we claim to know that thinking is what divides the world from its inherent meaningful unity, then we can ask

1) How did we come to realize this? Is it an inferences based on reasoning from other points of knowledge/experience?
2) Is it reasonable to suppose that Gracie is not intuiting the meaningful unity of what the toy-cheese is and is, instead, noticing an object in her environment and interacting with it?

If thinking causes the division, we might be willing to say that we know for a fact that Gracie's thinking caused her to notice the object and engage with it...?

Again this whole exercise is a mistaking of living organism for reductive and reducible machine. We and the rat are the former, not the latter.

I am wondering what you think all spiritual traditions are speaking of when they refer to the Fall, Maya, etc., i.e. the descent of Spirit into the world of forms. Do you suppose these mythologies in every culture have nothing to do with self-reflective thinking and its fragmentation of the world content from its intrinsic inter-connected meaning? It would be nice to hear you answer one of our roundabout questions for a change!

[findingblanks]

No, we aren't machines. Machines aren't even machines in the sense modern science wants us to think about them.

But some people do claim that Steiner is correct when he says that it is your thinking that divides the inherently united meaning of the Cosmos into percepts and concepts. You have acknowledged, thankfully, that you can see reasons for saying that. So I asked more into that. You then continued to pop away into abstracts.

If you believe that it is your thinking that causes percepts to appear to you, you can maybe describe that directly. And if I ask about how a rat might experience a toy block of cheese, you might say that is an example of thinking dividing the true reality of that percept from itself.

"Do you suppose these mythologies in every culture have nothing to do with self-reflective thinking and its fragmentation of the world content from its intrinsic inter-connected meaning?"

No, I don't suppose that. Nor do suppose that the organisms that preceded the first reflective humans intuitively grasped the meaning of the universe.

If it was the reflective process that split the word into two, then it is fair to assume that before the reflective process took root, the experience was unified. And, hence, my series of questions to those who claim they know that their thinking is what divides them from this inherent unity of meaning.

[findingblanks]

Some people believe that the human being just, poof, came into being, standing there staring out at world that required names and ideas.

Others believe that there was a slow and beautiful coming-into-being of a form of consciousness that could reflect upon the world.

If The Fall points to a form of consciousness that detached from the unity of the cosmos, this does not necessarily imply that prior to reflection all beings/organisms experienced the unity of percept and concept. Not at all.

That's why if you meet somebody who says with bold confidence that they know their thinking is what cleaves apart the concept and the percept, you can joyfully ask them to describe how they know this.

They may pop away, but that's also a way of connecting with them.

[AshvinP]

No, we aren't machines. Machines aren't even machines in the sense modern science wants us to think about them.

But some people do claim that Steiner is correct when he says that it is your thinking that divides the inherently united meaning of the Cosmos into percepts and concepts. You have acknowledged, thankfully, that you can see reasons for saying that. So I asked more into that. You then continued to pop away into abstracts.

If you believe that it is your thinking that causes percepts to appear to you, you can maybe describe that directly. And if I ask about how a rat might experience a toy block of cheese, you might say that is an example of thinking dividing the true reality of that percept from itself.

Yes, but it is not my thinking, as in "me" conceived of as an isolated bubble of consciousness (Kant-Schopenhauer view), rather it is our fundamentally shared spiritual activity that differentiated meaning into percepts and concepts. We exist in the same shared space of conscious activity. The key here is to understand that perception-cognition (perceiving-thinking if you prefer that), are two polar forces of the same underlying spiritual activity. They present the world content to us in different ways - perceiving from the 'outside' and thinking from the 'inside'. Perceiving provides the bare forms of experience and thinking provides the meaning of those forms. Again, they are fundamentally the same activity. Until we take these polar relations seriously, everything else will seem very arbitrary.

"Do you suppose these mythologies in every culture have nothing to do with self-reflective thinking and its fragmentation of the world content from its intrinsic inter-connected meaning?"

No, I don't suppose that. Nor do suppose that the organisms that preceded the first reflective humans intuitively grasped the meaning of the universe.

If it was the reflective process that split the word into two, then it is fair to assume that before the reflective process took root, the experience was unified. And, hence, my series of questions to those who claim they know that their thinking is what divides them from this inherent unity of meaning.

I still don't understand - do you agree that self-reflective thinking divided world content, as the mythologies describe, or disagree?

[findingblanks]

"Yes, but it is not my thinking, as in "me" conceived of as an isolated bubble of consciousness..."

Okay, so if I can show you that in PoF Steiner actually believed and was stating that it is your thinking (you as an individuated entity) that divides the percept from the concept, you will be willing to say he was misunderstanding reality? This is a good start, then.

"do you agree that self-reflective thinking divided world content, as the mythologies describe, or disagree?"

No, I believe that prior to the earliest human alpha thinking, the living beings of the Earth encountered trees and bushes and streams without understanding them. Hence, I do not believe that the first thinking (in its rich and vibrant particiapted forms of early humans) is what created the experiences of bushes and streams and fragrances. Yet, I do believe that it caused a new and sudden shock of fear, shame, beauty and the possibility of divine union. So, no, I do not believe that self reflective thinking caused the first environmental objects to appear.

[findingblanks]

"We seem born to be dissatisfied. And our thirst for knowledge is but a special instance of this dissatisfaction. We look twice at a tree. The first time we see its branches at rest, the second time in motion. We are not satisfied with this observation. Why, we ask, does the tree appear to us now at rest, now in motion? Every glance at Nature evokes in us a multitude of questions. Every phenomenon we meet sets us a new problem. Every experience is a riddle."

To read this as if he isn't speaking of individual human experience seems preposterous to me.

"Everywhere we seek what we call the explanation of the facts."

Again, it strikes me as a very poor reading of Steiner to make this a deeply esoteric claim. Remember, Steiner said over and over that he wasn't speaking in esoterics in PoF or any of his early epistemological texts. A baby does not seek an explanation. But as the baby grows into a child who begins to develop the earliest intellectual/cognitive faculties, they do begin to seek understandings.

To claim that this basic experience of what it is like to seek an explaination is not what Steiner is pointing to, that he is speaking from the Akashic record about The Fall Of Humanity and needs the reader to grasp this to understand The Philosophy of Freedom...is a deeply delusional way of handling the text. I'm not saying you are completely making that claim, but you are working hard to pop away, per usual, from my boring close reading and phenomenology of the text.

"The something more {the understanding of the phenomena} which we seek in things, over and above what is immediately given to us in them, splits our whole being into two parts. We become conscious of our antithesis to the world."

I know what it is like to experience myself looking a tree and wondering about its branches, it's growth, its color, its smell.

In other words, I know what it is like to experience a branch and then develop a question about it. Before the question comes, I have a distinct sense of myself from the branch. A branch is an unbelievably complex spiritual event that is connected with the entirity of Cosmic evolution. To 'attach' its concept to this percept before me, is not what I'm doing. It's much simpler. I'm aware of myself looking at the branch and forming a question.

Steiner says that the process of questioning (the something more, the striving for explanation...) splits me apart from the world.

To claim that he is pointing back to a period of Earth evolution when reflection was born rather than asking the reader to notice their own experience, again, seems like a very poor reading.

And if it is my thinking that splits apart myself from the world, then when I'm not thinking or when it is a non-human being encountering the world, the implication is that the fundamental unity is in place.

So, again, for those who agree with Steiner that it is thinking which divides the real world into percept and concept, it is fair and very joyful to ask them how they came to that conclusion. And it is fair to become curious and ask them about the rat that plays friskily with the toy.

They will probably pop away and talk to you about deeply esoteric matters, maybe even asking you to imagine the Fall of Lucifer. But at least Steiner said that he was speaking very plainly and clearly in The Philosophy of Freedom.

"We confront the world as independent beings. The universe appears to us in two opposite parts: I and World."

"We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness first dawns in us."

"Against all these theories we must urge the fact that we meet with the basic and primary opposition first in our own consciousness. It is we ourselves who break away from the bosom of Nature and contrast ourselves as “I” with the “World”."

We can also enjoy the reason that Steiner finished this chapter by saying:

"I have so far been concerned not with scientific results of any kind, but with the simple description of what every one of us experiences in his own consciousness...The ordinary consciousness is unaware of the sharp distinctions made by the sciences, and my purpose so far has been solely to record the facts of everyday experience. I am concerned, not with the way in which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with the way in which we experience it in every moment of our lives."

I often note that a common reaction to any attempt to stay 'boring' and close to the text results in people popping away and talking about esoterics and deep transformations of consciousness.

But, fortunately, Steiner claimed that thinking causes the division of percept from concept. Some people say he is right. And we can ask them the boring kinds of questions I ask and listen carefully to their experiences, or, more likely, their instructions and theories.