findingblanks wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 12:11 am
If I am speaking to an Anthroposophist, I'll be more likely to point to the way in which they can notice that there is always an aspect of knowing in every experience they have. Once this can be directly noticed, then I'd try to show how this knowing can't be distinguished (except linguistically) from the willing that it is. I'd try to have them play around with taking a dozen different instances of this ever-present knowing and try their best to find any aspect of it that is not fully will.
Then I'd show them that with time this experience can be condensed and intensified, but that it remains fundamentally the same. Most importantly, I'd try to show how we will need to differentiate this experience 'downstream' into polarities and that we will most likely sort them into downstream examples of 'thinking' and 'willing.'
If I was talking to somebody attached to a fixated view of Schopenhauer. I'd need to start in a similar way but before they noticed that the connection they are making between the universal will and their own requires a 'knowing' experience that is never absent from this will. They have to make the opposite move that the Steiner student makes. From there, it becomes all about intensifying and stabilizing the experience through practice. And then we'd look at why it is helpful to make downstream distinctions between the polarity, probably in terms of concepts and instinct or 'thinking' and 'willing.'
I'm not sure what we're arguing here. I don't know what anthroposophists you've been talking to but what you say in the first part above is what anyone should naturally know even if they've read only one book, like
Outline of Esoteric Science. I tried to portray all this
here. All this is
implicitly contained in PoF. Of course it couldn't be made explicit there because we can't speak of the Ruling Will of the Spirit without some resort to the knowledge of Cosmic evolution. The task of PoF is through nothing but
clear and perceptive thinking, to lead the human being to its spiritual core. Once we know ourselves as a Spirit weaving integratively between the World of Phenomena and the World of Meaning, we're in secure position to also
understand everything else that can be found further down this path of integration, even if we ourselves are not there yet.
What you say in the second part is precisely the topic of this whole thread. Again, I'm not expert on Schopenhauer but from what I've seen so far I don't see how anyone can imagine that Sch. wrote everything that he had, while secretly implying that the Ruling Will is actually the
fully conscious World Spirit. Everything around Schopenhauer is permeated with this
soul mood of the mysterious and blind World Will, which ultimately reflects in his pessimistic outlook. How could he had expressed all this if he was secretly implying that man has a long evolutionary road in front of him, on which more and more of this blind World Will will become fully conscious Spiritual Activity within him, allowing him to transform himself and participate in the
meaningful transformation of the World?
As stated numerous times, we're not here to mock personalities but to recognize and understand the evolutionary process that humanity is going through. We need inner mobility to recognize whole inner stances and not simply try to comprehend intellectual fragments. One such inner stance is the spiritual perspective which only looks
downwards. This is best exemplified in materialistic Darwinism. Man feels as if he rises from the darkness of mechanical nature and awakens in his ego, looking upon everything below him - the kingdoms of nature and the mechanical forces. In Schopenhauer we have something quite similar in terms of spiritual stance, except that what the ego has been rising from is considered to be of spiritual nature - the blind World Will. Nevertheless, the thinking ego again feels utterly alien, as a mere side-effect, of this surging ocean of will, just as the materialist's ego feels as side-effect of the world of mechanical forces. This pessimistic picture that Schopenhauer draws, of a thinking being realizing itself as an accident of World existence, and floating helplessly on the surging waves, can only be momentarily alleviated through aesthetic experience, where the ego can belong to its own element, as if imagining "How beautiful life would be if I could exist in this element of mine, without being subject to the surging waves of the World Will from which I proceed, to which I'm nothing but a floating leaf on a stream!" Alas, the ego can experience only glimpses of this imaginary freedom, before it returns to the reality of the surging waves.
Compare this with the perspective that the Spiritual element of the ego is not at all a freak accident of the World Will 'somehow' becoming self-reflective, but that the knowing element, as you call it, is truly inherent in the Ocean. In that case our thinking core is nothing but the seed point from which this knowing expands and illuminates everything. Everything that has been pressing as World Will, seemingly from the outside, now gradually becomes inner Will illuminated and propelled by fully conscious meaning (Idea), in other words - Spirit.