Philosophical Speculations

"So sorry, hammock is also already ruined."

Santeri, I love your sense of humor. A lot.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 5:38 pm "Right, so the "next step" in your ontology is that "percept" and "concept" do not need to be "put back together" because they never exist separately? Do you mean that in essence they do not exist separately, or even in our normal experience of the world they never exist separately?"

I mean that there is no such think as a 'pure percept'.

I don't mean this from the point of view of 'there is no such thing as gold coin shaped as a duck; I know because I've searched the universe with every possible instrument of finely tuned perception.'

I mean this in the sense that there is no such think as a 'married bachelor', and we know this because we can carefully intuited the reason why as it is contained in the reality of the claim itself.

The only reason a thinker would ever claim that we must 'imagine' either:

1) being who has never encountered a specific environment
or
2) what we would 'experience' if our everyday consciousness was stripped of all so-called 'concepts'

Is if they presuppose that there is a 'moment' during which a percept is encountered that is in need of a concept.

That presupposition would need to be a part of wider structure of concepts about the nature of reality.

It isn't enough to say that reality is a whole that our organization 'splits' apart.

That is start and it can be shown to be true in all sorts of various ways. But to merely claim it and then use that claim to say that obviously we are faced with percepts on the one side and concepts on the other that thinking needs to 'weave back together' is not empirical or has it been justified.

But, believe me, if you talk to enough of us Steiner students for long enough, you will realize that the vast majority believe that literally there is a 'pure percept' that has yet to be touched by thinking and attached 'back' to its concept.

If you see directly that the notion of this 'encounter' is the result of prior assumptions, then you can see why Steiner's 1918 language goes much further to not merely giving us a better phenomenology (the percept hides thinking thinking within itself) but a cleaner starting point that is free from the assumptions that lead people to believing in pure percepts.

My original question can be restated as asking to see the specific ways PoF (in the non-1918 edition) make clear that thinking is already within any given experience.

And after that we can find ways to speak about the prior union of what differentiate as the bodily intellect and the bodily will.

Intuitively grasping thinking both reveals the essential nature of reality and creates it's next creative step in evolution. This might be taken as a paradox by the intellect. The intellect could say that it is a contradiction to claim that it 'reveals what is always already the case' AND 'creates something utterly new', but Barfield, Coleridge, Steiner and others have their own ways of showing why even the highest functions of the intellect have no choice but to see contradictions in polaric truths.

One place you see people lost in this is when they debate that "God" must either be non-self-conscious or self-conscious. This somewhat relates to why Schopenhauer's characterization must strike other groups as obviously leaving out cognition as understood by them.

So when Schopenhaer says things like:


"But what kind of knowledge is concerned with that which is outside and independent of all relations, that which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and therefore is known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas, which are the direct and adequate objectivity of the thing in-itself, the will?"

You can immediately know which groups of thinkers will declare he is not recognizing the will as essentially cognitive. These thinkers are basically forced (by how they hold their terms/ideas) to believe that what Schop calls 'ideas' here stand fundamentally outside of the will rather than being its intrinsic nature, and, therefore, graspable by the human's most essential nature.

A debate will never end that beings with even tacitly assuming there is a 'correct' way to speak about the essence.

I gave a passage from Ch 1 of PoF where Steiner makes pretty clear thinking is involved in every experience. Look one or two pages back.

I will need more context for the Schop quote to evaluate mote fully.

"downgrading of Thinking and/or upgrading of "blind Will""

I recognize what you might call the 'downgrading of thinking' as any tradition that would grasp the true essence of what is human (which is grasping the nature of God) and then say that this essence (this active principle) is a mere contingent fact that just happens to have come about because of a sequence of prior events.

I recognize what you might call an 'upgrading of the blind Will' as any tradition that would recognize the actual contingencies of human daily will and then say, this is identical to the foundation of reality.

Those are overly simplistic ways of me putting it, but just to show that I certainly see nearly all of modern science as your 'downgrading of thinking' and many wester so-called spiritual movements as basically equating their daily experiences of will as identical to the nature of reality itself. Much of that 'upgrading of the will' leads to the kinds of Luciferic work around manifesting whatever you desire. Just as people find aspects of Steiner to justify non-sense, I have no doubt that if Schopenhauer was a living philosopher, we'd have people trying to use bits and pieces of his works to say he supported the worst of new age ridiculousness.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 5:10 pm

findingblanks wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 4:42 pm Beyond the intellectual distinctions that necessarily fall out from these kinds of examinations, we can notice that when an act of thinking is intuited, we know that there is no difference between what some call God's will and the essence of our being. The intuition is the recognition.

Some people's prior schemas will cause them to accurately interpret this as meaning that God is aware of itself cognitively .

Other people's prior schemas will require different explications. For instance, they will be more inclined to give "The Father" more of a 'will' element, the 'son' a feeling element, and the 'spirit' a cognitive element.

I am not as drawn to the latter kind of distinguishing because I feel parsimony and phenomenology point towards a 'reduction base' that is names quite squarely the "Not I, but Christ in me lives" which is the true nature of intuitive thinking, so long as we don't get caught up its particular content in a given context of understanding.

OK but do you also recognize that philosophers such as Schopenhauer, and many others in both materialist-dualist and idealist camps of the modern age, would say nothing about Christ or the Trinity illuminates the nature of the fundamental Reality. We argue that this dismissal of such important foundations of Western culture is a direct consequence of downgrading Thinking and its unique role to mere "ripples on a lake", to the merely personal ideation about appearances which have no true connection to the noumenal realm. Steiner refers to these philosophers conceiving of Thinking as a Fata Morgana. You seem to conclude that this entire stream of philosophical thought related to downgrading of Thinking and/or upgrading of "blind Will" does not really exist and therefore is a straw man created by Steiner and ourselves, but I have no idea how you reach that conclusion.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 5:38 pm My original question can be restated as asking to see the specific ways PoF (in the non-1918 edition) make clear that thinking is already within any given experience.

And after that we can find ways to speak about the prior union of what differentiate as the bodily intellect and the bodily will.

Intuitively grasping thinking both reveals the essential nature of reality and creates it's next creative step in evolution. This might be taken as a paradox by the intellect. The intellect could say that it is a contradiction to claim that it 'reveals what is always already the case' AND 'creates something utterly new', but Barfield, Coleridge, Steiner and others have their own ways of showing why even the highest functions of the intellect have no choice but to see contradictions in polaric truths.

One place you see people lost in this is when they debate that "God" must either be non-self-conscious or self-conscious. This somewhat relates to why Schopenhauer's characterization must strike other groups as obviously leaving out cognition as understood by them.

So when Schopenhaer says things like:


"But what kind of knowledge is concerned with that which is outside and independent of all relations, that which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and therefore is known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas, which are the direct and adequate objectivity of the thing in-itself, the will?"

You can immediately know which groups of thinkers will declare he is not recognizing the will as essentially cognitive. These thinkers are basically forced (by how they hold their terms/ideas) to believe that what Schop calls 'ideas' here stand fundamentally outside of the will rather than being its intrinsic nature, and, therefore, graspable by the human's most essential nature.

A debate will never end that beings with even tacitly assuming there is a 'correct' way to speak about the essence.

I gave a passage from Ch 1 of PoF where Steiner makes pretty clear thinking is involved in every experience. Look one or two pages back.

I will need more context for the Schop quote to evaluate mote fully.
[/quote]

Below is the passage referred to. I don't understand what the bolded statement means.

Steiner wrote:It is entirely obvious that an action which the doer performs, without knowing why he does it, cannot be free. But how does the matter stand with the kind of action whose reasons are known? This leads us to the question: What is the origin and the significance of thinking? For without knowledge about the thinking activity of the soul, a concept of knowing about anything, including an action, is not possible. When we know what thinking in general signifies, then it will also be easy to become clear about the role of thinking in human action. “Only with thinking does the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, first become spirit,” says Hegel rightly, and therefore thinking will also give to human action its characteristic stamp.

This is not to assert by any means that all our action flows only out of the sober deliberations of our intellect. To set forth only those actions as in the highest sense human which issue from abstract judgment, is very far from my intention. But the moment our action lifts itself up out of the area of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, what moves us to act is always intermixed with thoughts. Love, compassion, patriotism are mainsprings of action which do not let themselves be reduced into cold concepts of the intellect. One says: The heart, the Gemüt* come here into their own. Without a doubt. But the heart and the Gemüt do not create what it is that moves us to act. They presuppose it and take it into their domain. Within my heart compassion appears when, in my consciousness, the mental picture arises of a person who arouses compassion. The way to the heart is through the head. Even love is no exception to this. When it is not the mere expression of the sex drive, it is then based upon the mental pictures which we make for ourselves of the loved one. And the more idealistic these mental pictures are, the more blissful is the love. Here also the thought is father to the feeling. One says: Love makes us blind to the weaknesses of the loved one. The matter can also be grasped the other way round and it can be maintained that love opens the eye in fact for precisely the good qualities of the loved one. Many pass these good qualities by without an inkling, without noticing them. One person sees them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What has he done other than make for himself a mental picture of something of which a hundred others have none. They do not have the love because they lack the mental picture.

Steiner wrote:It is entirely obvious that an action which the doer performs, without knowing why he does it, cannot be free.

Not at all obvious.

"but no one denies that even without the clear concept, we still experience a union of perception and ideal element..."

Okay, so then you believe that in the various places (like the one I showed), when Steiner says something like 'this is clear' or 'this is obvious,' he is merely saying that if we make up a concept like 'concept-free percepts', then we can imagine that they stand apart from pure concepts?

In other words, if you agree that he can't possibly mean we are to ontologically believe in pure percepts as a necessary element to understanding the nature of cognition, then he is not asking his readers to take seriously an ontological encounter with something free of cognition?

In other other words, you believe that when Steiner says that Volkelt give us a 'fine characterization of 'pure experience', Steiner is hoping his reader's do not take this characterization literally?

"In our estimation, Johannes Volkelt has succeeded admirably in sketching the clear outlines of what we are justified in calling pure experience. He already gave a fine characterization of it five years ago in his book on Kant's Epistemology, and has then carried the subject further in his most recent work, Experience and Thinking. Now he did this, to be sure, in support of a view that is utterly different from our own, and for an essentially different purpose than ours is at the moment. But this need not prevent us from introducing here his excellent characterization of pure experience."

Okay, so, speaking personally, I think that to claim something is excellently characterized but isn't real is intrinsically confusing. But let's look carefully at what Steiner himself defines as 'pure experience', keeping in mind that he later said that he obviously used different words to talk about the same concepts in his early texts.

Before Steiner shares Volkelt;s excellent characterization, he gives us more a clue as to what he thinks about it:

"He presents us, simply, with the pictures which, in a limited period of time, pass before our consciousness in a completely unconnected way."

Now, so that we don't waste time in an unnecessary side-debate, it would be great if we could agree in advance that Volkelt's characterization is obviously filled with cognitive materal. So what we want to ask ourselves here is if Steiner really believes that this characterization is of what meets us BEFORE we add 'more' concepts to it.

We can read the following and ask ourselves if Steiner does or does not think this captures a reality that precedes a cognitive process of attaching more concepts to it. Volkelt said:

“Now, for example, my consciousness has as its content the mental picture of having worked hard today; immediately joining itself to this is the content of a mental picture of being able, with good conscience, to take a walk; but suddenly there appears the perceptual picture of the door opening and of the mailman entering; the mailman appears, now sticking out his hand, now opening his mouth, now doing the reverse; at the same time, there join in with this content of perception of the mouth opening, all kinds of auditory impressions, among which comes the impression that it is starting to rain outside. The mailman disappears from my consciousness, and the mental pictures that now arise have as their content the sequence: picking up scissors, opening the letter, criticism of illegible writing, visible images of the most diverse written figures, diverse imaginings and thoughts connected with them; scarcely is this sequence at an end than again there appears the mental picture of having worked hard and the perception, accompanied by ill humor, of the rain continuing; but both disappear from my consciousness, and there arises a mental picture with the content that a difficulty believed to have been resolved in the course of today's work was not resolved; entering at the same time are the mental pictures: freedom of will, empirical necessity, responsibility, value of virtue, absolute chance, incomprehensibility, etc.; these all join together with each other in the most varied and complicated way; and so it continues.”

You already say you agree with me that we obviously never encounter a kind of 'pure percept' that is free from any cognition. You then say that Steiner himself never suggests that reality. Okay, setting that aside. When you read the above, do you believe that Steiner thinks that experience is what really happens BEFORE it has other concepts attached to it? Before going on below, think of your answer to that.

And Steiner obviously says:

"Here we have depicted, within a certain limited period of time, what we really experience, the form of reality in which thinking plays no part at all."

Is this straightforward?

I'm assuming you agree with Steiner. So I'm assuming your answer above was that, yes, there is a form of reality we encounter which is free from any thinking at all. I don't think that I'm being a nit-pick to pause and really ask about what you mean when you say that nobody thinks there are percepts that are really free from thinking and that is an experience that we "really experience" and can be characterized well as "the form of reality in which thinking plays no part at all."

I imagine you might slightly grant me that I'm pointing to a valid spot of experience and thought. And I imagine you'll say that this is merely a confusion of words, that Steiner wasn't speaking sharply when he used the word 'thinking' in that sentence. He didn't want his reader to think of 'thinking' in a way that implied the human activity he had been talking about up till then in the book. So, as I've been saying the whole time, I know that we can make sure that no phrase ever uttered by these great thinkers contradicts however we hold their core claims. That's fine.

"Now one definitely should not believe that one would have arrived at a different result if, instead of this everyday experience, one had depicted, say, the experience we have of a scientific experiment or of a particular phenomenon of nature. Here, as there, it is individual unconnected pictures that pass before our consciousness. Thinking first establishes the connections."

I disagree with you in many ways on this topic. For instance, I think Steiner means it when he says that until thinking attaches other concepts to 'pure experience' it is 'pure experience', or, in other words, until we attach concepts to it, we are experiencing unconnected visual images. But I think he is tying himself into a few knots because of how he has set up his entire starting-point.

I've shown at least 3 portions of PoF in which Steiner seems to indicate that he agrees with what he said in ToK and his other core epistemology books. And he himself says that there is no contradiction in meaning between those core texts despite some language differences.

So we can keep looking carefully at if Steiner really thought there was an actual experience we have that must precede the world 'figuration' gives us when we look out the the window and sweet our eyes across the gorgeous landscape. Steiner goes on:

"We must also recognize the service rendered by Dr. Richard Wahle's little book, Brain and Consciousness (Vienna, 1884), in showing us in clear contours what is actually given by experience divested of everything of a thought-nature..."

After making clear that Steiner does NOT agree with Wahle's conclusion that we can't reach objectivity with regard to nature, Steiner says:

"{Wahle's} assertion is completely valid, however, with respect to the first form in which we become aware of reality."

What is this first form that we experience:

"According to Wahle we know only a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time."

This is when Steiner students tend to either remind me that he's talking about childhood experiences. I've already addressed why that can't be the case and Steiner himself makes clear he isn't pointing to childhood experiences. Or Steiner's students begin to talk about an 'unconscious process' that can't be see to be true until a transformation and that Steiner obviously thought many of his readers in 1888 would have that experience and see that he was correct. I've already indicated why this doesn't square with the texts themselves or what Steiner himself said about his expectations.

I can already hear another attempt to rescue Steiner, because I've heard it so many times. I'll characterize it below but please try to see why Steiner himself as already argued against this attempt to square the above what we are saying is obvious:

"Steiner is talking about an experience that is always there but that we don't notice because it unconscious. If you want proof that it is always happening first, just think of those times you catch yourself staring blanking across a room full of people. See? You are then noticing the first encounter that you then need to attach concepts too. Now, most of the time, you don't notice that every single pure experience (that person's pants, the picture on the all, the first syllable of the word being uttered to you, the handshake, the sound of an alarm...) happens before you use your thinking to attach the concept to it. So the hundreds of things you notice as you scan your eyes across a room are al preceded by this first stage. And Steiner is correct to emphasize that even this first stage is obviously the case."

Can whatever you just did ten seconds ago be immediately characterized in general by what Steiner says next:

"It is not only the things of the outer world and the processes of the inner world that stand there, at this stage of our knowing, without interconnection; our own personality is also an isolated entity with respect to the rest of the world. We find ourselves as one of innumerable perceptions without connection to the objects that surround us."

As you watch the football game, how many concepts did you have to attached just to realize that the man was running? Did you have to attach it once and it 'stuck' or do you repeatedly attach it each time you look back and that man running? And do you 'attach' field at the same time as you attach 'feet' and 'knees' and 'running' and 'going after ball' and 'must be tired...'?

"Here we have depicted, within a certain limited period of time, what we really experience, the form of reality in which thinking plays no part at all."

Believe me, I know that at least one person thinks I'm simply taking comments out of context and all the rest. I can't force that person to provide the shared context or to even merely agree that there is some relevance between what Steiner is saying in these parts core texts concerning 'pure experience' (pure percept, percepts free from concepts...) and our agreement that we don't attach a concept to a percept to know it is there

But Steiner goes into this from so many directions. I'll give him the last word:

"The basic error of many scientific endeavours, especially those of the present day, consists precisely of the fact that they believe they present pure experience, whereas in fact they only gather up the concepts again that they themselves have inserted into it. Someone could object that we have also assigned a whole number of attributes to pure experience. We called it an endless manifoldness, an aggregate of unconnected particulars, etc. Are those then not conceptual characterizations also? In the sense in which we use them, certainly not. We have only made use of these concepts in order to direct the reader's eye to reality free of thoughts. We do not wish to ascribe these concepts to experience; we make use of them only in order to direct attention to that form of reality which is devoid of any concept."

"but no one denies that even without the clear concept, we still experience a union of perception and ideal element..."

We just have basic disagreements about this stuff. I know that many people deny this and claim they experience 'things' that are utterly devoid of cognition and they point to Steiner's core texts as having shown them how to get to this so-called fundamental experience. They typically claim that Steiner believed his core texts were meant to inspire an initiation that would allow the student to then see that Steiner was justified to set up his staring point (the encounter with pure experience) as he did. Nothing can convince these people that Steiner himself would not go along with this claim, even showing them quote after quote where Steiner clearly says any careful reader can see that he is merely pointing to obvious facts and observations in creating his starting point.

Others deny an essential unity by saying that when we, say, hear a sound and don't know what it is we are aware of something (the sound) that is utterly free of cognition. Despite what Steiner, Barfield and many others have shown regarding such experiences, nothing can convince them otherwise. I'm not saying these are the only examples of counterexamples to your claim, but there are two obvious ones that I encounter all the time.

Now, maybe you merely meant that no serious students of Steiner would claim there is an experience free of an ideal element. All I can say is that then we go down a hole of saying a well regarded Anthroposophist isn't 'serious' if we find evidence that they believe in pure percepts or pure experience as an actual encounter that precedes what thinking brings to supposedly 'transform' it.

"It is entirely obvious that an action which the doer performs, without knowing why he does it, cannot be free."

Santeri said:

"Not at all obvious."

And in other contexts Steiner explains exactly why some of the most free people he ever met could not describe or even state the reasons they acted. I'll try to find the lecture but all of my Steiner books are in storage from the recent move. That said, I don't think it takes too much reflection to understand a kind of action taken that is not preceded or accompanied 'knowledge' of its motivation.

That said, if we expand 'knowing' to simply include intuitive experience, then I think everybody could agree with Steiner's statement above.

The interesting thing is that because of the context in which Steiner made that statement, it is typically used by his students to show that only an individual who has consciously grasped 'the reason' they acted can be said to be acting freely.

And the rest of the that portion of PoF is often interpreted in a way that would define 'intuitive knowing' as merely 'unconscious impulse', and, therefore, unfree.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 6:36 pm

Steiner wrote:It is entirely obvious that an action which the doer performs, without knowing why he does it, cannot be free.

Not at all obvious.

So here is a clue that helps dissolve all the issues. And, yes, I realize that most of you think there are no issues when Steiner says things like:

"Thus far we have arrived at the following truths. At the first stage of our contemplation of the world, the whole of reality confronts us as an unconnected aggregate..."

Because you claim that he doesn't really believe there is an experience we have each moment before thinking attaches a concept to it. But, as I've shown above, you have to argue against each and every time Steiner argues that it is obvious this is the case.

But here's the thing. I'll assume an integrated knowledge and practice of Owen Barfield here:

If somebody is even slightly infected with the idols of the study, they will think it is obvious that early human beings MUST HAVE looked out at world like ours but it simply had no ideas attached to it. It was a blooming buzzing fleeting chaos that they then slapped concepts like "cloud' and 'moon' and 'river' and 'wind' to and looked at it as we modern people look out at those 'things'.

Similarly, an infection of the idols of the study will do much the same thing to how we imagine human children. We will imagine they must have had a period where it was all meaningless and just a loud visual blur of chaos that they slowly shaped by attaching the right concepts to the loud blur.

And finally, the infection of the idols will also determine how we conceptualize the nature of experience itself, even the adult. How? Well, the structure is very similar, unsurprisingly:

We will be forced to say there must be a moment in which we experience pure chaos. that moment must be followed (like with primitive man or a human child) with attaching the right concept to it. Then and only then has thinking bridged what the bodily organization separated.

In original participation none of these ideas would have made sense for all sorts of reasons, but primarily because in original participation we 'knew' that every appearances was the expression of something that shared our essence.

And now we must initiate final participation. This means we have to grasp directly, in experience, the error that would cause us to posit a world of chaos or even just a world of bare objects that are free from concepts.

Before that first step is congruently taken, all epistemologies will in some way (all differently) presume a division that must be bridged to greater or lesser degrees of accuracy and 'correspondence'.

Santeri said:

"I'm not assuming fundamental discontinuity. On the contrary, I'm trying to save continuity from the fundamental discontinuity in the current standard paradigm, which Badiou calls 'set theoretical ontology', and which manifests as discontious fragmentation."

Yes, the forms of this discontinuity will always be different, context from context. But we can learn to track those moments in thinker's process in which they experience/think (hopefully we all realize why there are spots where we have to say 'experience/think' as opposed to merely one or the other; read Barfield on 'figuration') a division that must be bridged by two fundamentally different 'things'.

The notion that before we see that the milkman is calming maneuvering past the oak tree while he pats the dogs head and prepares to set down the milk we actually experienced thousands of disconnected perceptions that were in need of concepts....

This kind of claim - especially if the people say it is obviously the case that we 'really do experience this' - can only come from unrecognized assumption (Idols of the Study) that are functioning in not only the person's intellect but in how they think they see the world.

And, yes, 'think they see' is a phrase that highlights why modern 'figuration' is mainly materialistic regardless of one's world-view. Many students of The Philosophy of Freedom, for instance, think they see a world of chaos before they attach the correct concepts to it.