Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[SanteriSatama]

Does bodily awareness have boundary?

although the dynamics of that still remain at very low resolutiion for me.

It's very simple empirical inquiry. Focusing attention to bodily awareness - to feeling one's body - can boundaries be observed?

[AshvinP]

This is becoming overwhelming to try to respond to everything, but I'll try to hit the highlights and refocus the conversation.

Our limited ego-self we currently identify with is a more recent development, but there is also eternal Ego-Self. The distinctions are not at all fundamental and are only a result of the Ego-Self 'forgetting' its true nature and becoming experientially-cognitively limited.

So I don't accept the idea of an eternal Ego-Self, at least on the face of it, but fundamentally the idea seems incoherent to me and I'm not sure how to parse the meaning of those words together. Can you elaborate?

I think our definitions are "knowledge" are simply different - I don't see how any true knowledge can exist without ability to reflect on experience. If we are dealing with mere non-reflective experience of desire and instinctual response, then I say there is no knowledge and also no purpose-intent.

This may be one of those things where each of our theses seems obvious to us and obviously nonsensical to the other. Later I'll try to offer my understanding of what knowledge is and how it can operate prior to self-reflection.

True, but I think we are honing in on the key differences which, as usual, relate to the essence of knowing-knowledge and its role in our experience. It is not surprising because that particular topic has been the biggest contention in philosophy in the modern era, for both materialist-dualist and idealist philosophies. For the latter, we could compare Schopenhauer to Hegel, for instance. If you are familiar with their positions, then you will get the sort of contention that I am pointing towards. If not, then I can elaborate, but I would rather not add to the already "overwhelming" sprawl of this discussion unless necessary. For now, I will say I identify much more with Hegel's position than Schopenhauer.

However, to the extent they determine any of our behaviors without our knowledge of them doing so, I say we are not acting freely or, likewise, with purpose-intent.

Ah, see, this is somewhere that we differ. "Freedom" in my perspective is nothing but the capacity to act upon a self-motivated intention, and an intention can be instinctively supplied. Freedom increases with self-reflection in two ways: we now have the capacity to engage with our intentions themselves from a critical or ethical perspective (that is, to develop abstract values and allow them to inform our intentions and to recognize the impact of our actions on the world at large), and we also have the capacity to develop better strategies for acting upon them. And ethically, self-reflection enables the recognition of metaphysical freedom, both ours and others, and thus enables us to will the practical freedom of metaphysically free beings (that is, to oppose oppression both of humans and animals). But freedom, in my view, is one of the aspects of a self that's reflected upon in self-reflection, and that's probably the single most fundamental disagreement between us: whether self-reflection generates selfhood, or whether selfhood is already present prior to being reflected upon. And that disagreement seems to function at a level that's deeply intuitive to both of us, so we'll have to tease out those underlying intuitions if we hope to be understood (and I suspect we do, or we wouldn't bother with all these words ).

Well, as I commented to SS, I do hold the Self as eternal and fundamental. Can there exist a Self in the Cosmos without any Self-reflection also taking place? I don't know (because that knowledge requires "3rd person perspective" I discuss below), but I doubt it and clearly we can only ever know a Cosmos where such self-reflection exists. That is because "knowing" presupposes reflective thinking in my view, but apparently not in yours. Also, I would add that "reflective thinking" is not limited to mere abstract thinking, but also includes intuitive thinking (which actually may have some overlap with what you are calling "instinctive" thinking). I can see where this claim gives rise to confusion - because I say there is a time when "purpose" does not exist due to lack of self-reflection, but now I say Self is eternal and likely never existed without some reflection.

My metaphysical position should always be taken as relational - in fact, my position is a critique of metaphysics, in the tradition of Descartes and Kant, which is derived from hypothetical 3rd-person perspective standing apart from the world and assessing how 'things' interact with other 'things' when I am not around. Rather, I say we can only philosophize from first-person experiential perspective and therefore everything is relational, including the existence of reflective thinking and "purpose". I act with a lot more "purpose" in relative to a human infant, but I perhaps barely act with purpose relative to a spiritual being who is always fully aware of its motivations and exactly how to bring about effects from causes.

Similarly for "freedom", we are dealing in relational qualities. I disagree with your bolded definition of "freedom". It is not so much the capacity to act out our self-motivated intention but the capacity for us to actually desire, in full knowing consciousness, those ideals we bring to action in the world. I may be severely limited in my capacity to act, but as long as every action I am capable of making is also consciously desired from within myself, I am still free. Therefore, Self-knowledge, taking "knowledge" in its highest sense, which includes imaginative and intuitive knowledge, is the most critical component for spiritual freedom in my view.

'Aperspectival' is term from Gebser and The Ever-Present Origin

I haven't read this, but the quote clarifies what you mean. Thank you! My only encounter with the term "aperspectival" has been to mean what Gebser calls "unperspectival," particularly in Miri Albahari's work on aperspectival consciousness as the ground of being.

Right, I think we actually discussed her paper some on the old forum. I remember writing something along the lines of, "her use of the term 'aperspectival' is completely wrong" I did seriously have major issues with her philosophy of "Self", but I don't remember her arguments well enough to recount them now.

Can you point me towards the evidence you are speaking of in bolded statement?

What sort of evidence would you like? I can certainly provide research on early childhood development, if that would help. Briefly, though, very young children (but old enough to have acquired language) tend to have memories from infancy that are later purged, and infants can be traumatized in ways that are only possible if they're capable of remembering. Implicit memory tends to emerge as emotional responses with no clear reason behind them, so trauma triggers are a good example, but also, say, a feeling of warmth over a particular scent because your mother used to wear it while she was holding you as an infant. There's a memory there, but it's implicit in the present experience and unable to be explicitly accessed and reported upon. Implicit memory is a re-experiencing of some past state, whereas explicit memory is the capacity to integrate that re-experiencing into a narrative or report upon it. Most animals are capable of implicit memory -- this is how they learn anything at all.

OK so this reminds me of another clarification I should have made awhile ago - I do hold to reincarnation and I would speculate some "triggered" memories of those sort could be related to experiences in past lives. In my view, every individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm, so in a real sense lives out the entire metamorphic progression of the Cosmos, but over the course of many lives and there is true novelty of experience. So anyway, this "implicit memory" issue may also be related to my relational perspective - infant acts without purpose in relation to its future adult-selves, but not with quite as little purpose as its past infant-selves. But what's most important to highlight in my view is the fact that a process is, in fact, taking place, which moves from relatively little or no purpose-intent to relatively more purpose-intent, and the culmination of that process is spiritual freedom.

On that note, I am wondering whether you think there is any behavior which is not purposeful-intentional (I think you may have already answered "no", but just to confirm)?

Yes, and I'd offer two sorts right off the top of my head: reflexive actions and what de Beauvoir calls "mystification," by which she means (and I mean) a state where a person's self-reflective capacity is twisted to make them believe that they have no freedom, as in the case of enslavement, brainwashing, severe abuse, cult indoctrination, etc. In that case, the will of the mystified is subsumed into the will of the oppressor and their actions are not, from their own perspective, intentional because the faculty that should make them aware of their freedom is roped into the service of denying it.

Right, so you are not saying "purpose" excludes "knowledge", but rather you are expanding "knowledge" to encompass all instinctual behavior, or basically all behavior of living beings in general.

Yes, in my view there is a cognitive component intrinsic to desire itself, such that feeling is always already a sort of knowledge even before it's reflected upon.
...
Right, whereas I see meaning as always already purpose-bound: an idea has meaning when it has meaning for a being, when it's relevant to their purposes.
...
In the interest of making the conversation more manageable, I think I want to make a move toward narrowing our focus to the core disagreement, which seems to me to be the order of things: does self-reflection emerge from selfhood, or does self-reflection produce selfhood?

I am pretty confused by the above. Even if the "mystified" person is not acting with intent from "their own perspective", shouldn't they still be acting with "purpose" under your view, since they are living beings acting out of some sense of instinct? Or you are saying the mystification basically eliminates their instinctual capacity as well?

I disagree that feeling itself is a sort of knowing, rather it always co-exists with a knowing aspect which serves a distinct role from feeling. There is a Tri-Unity of Willing, Feeling, and Thinking in all possible experiences, but they serve distinct essential roles. The former two essentially serve as differentiating faculties while the latter serves as an integrating faculty. I also disagree that meaning only arises when it becomes "relevant to their purposes", rather I think "purposes" only arise when a being seeks to bring about one inherent meaning of experience from another.

I typed most of the above before seeing your final question... so hopefully it helps clarify my position on selfhood and self-reflection and also helps us narrow down the issues for further discussion. Here is a portion of an essay I wrote which also speaks to the distinct roles of W-F-T (sorry I know this makes it more overwhelming but I think it will be more helpful than harmful):

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=381

Before proceeding further, we should remain clear - Heidegger does not exclude the "imagination", "inspiration", or "intuition" from Thinking. Spiritual contemplative personalities often partition abstract intellect from all these other modes of contemplation and consider only the former "thinking". That is a fundamental mistake and one that Heidegger, even with his mature exploration of Eastern mysticism, did not make. He recognized that all of these contemplative activities belong to and only belong to the domain of Thinking. We belong to that place where we must find our essential role. My heart belongs to my circulatory system and my lungs belong to my respiratory system, while both are essential to and therefore inseparable from my 'physical' existence.

My heart cannot claim for itself my in-breathing and out-breathing and my lungs cannot claim for themselves the circulation of my blood. So it is that my willing, feeling, and thinking activities belong to distinct and asymmetrical domains of my spiritual existence. The same applies for the Willing, Feeling, and Thinking of humanity writ large, because my personal activities are microcosms of the macrocosm. The soul-activities of Willing and Feeling fulfill their essential roles in the differentiated perspectives of human beings. They are what imbue us with unique personalities as our lives unfold in the integral flow of Time. Without these living beings constantly impelling our conscious experience into new thought-states, we would never experience any flow of Time.
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Human spirits, for example, present to us as a book - we read their gestures, expressions, eye movements, speech, etc. and are thereby drawn closer into their inner experience. If we were to ignore that reality of shared experience, then we would perceive human spirits as lifeless corpses moving around mechanically. In fact, there is a real danger of that occurring in the modern world with modern technology. We may soon be unable to tell any difference between interacting with a human spirit or an AI algorithm pretending to be such a spirit. Yet that same technology, when treated as nothing more than a symbol of an underlying spiritual reality, also reminds us that 'invisible' spiritual forces form all of our social interactions in a highly specified manner.

In what way besides Thinking could we approach such an invisible yet highly specified Reality? Thinking fulfills its essential role, then, through the integration of varied human souls - "I have not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them." It takes what presents to us as differentiated appearances of willing and feeling and weaves back together the ideal constellations which make sense of those appearances as a living whole. We often refer to this process when speaking of the "spirit" of a text, especially in common law traditions. The highly differentiated rules of court decisions and statutes can only be effective when they are born of the principle (spirit) underlying them. Old rules must continuously be reborn in that spirit to remain relevant and useful.

[AshvinP]

Does bodily awareness have boundary?

although the dynamics of that still remain at very low resolutiion for me.

It's very simple empirical inquiry. Focusing attention to bodily awareness - to feeling one's body - can boundaries be observed?

It's not very simple for me because I still have no idea what you are asking... do I sense bodily "boundaries" right this moment? If that's the question, then yes obviously I do.

[SanteriSatama]

It's not very simple for me because I still have no idea what you are asking... do I sense bodily "boundaries" right this moment? If that's the question, then yes obviously I do.

Ah. Yes of course, we can sense touch as a "boundary". The question was about bodily awareness.
, and whether bodily awareness feels distinct boundaries?

[AshvinP]

It's not very simple for me because I still have no idea what you are asking... do I sense bodily "boundaries" right this moment? If that's the question, then yes obviously I do.

Ah. Yes of course, we can sense touch as a "boundary". The question was about bodily awareness.
, and whether bodily awareness feels distinct boundaries?

Perhaps in relation to what is discussed with DS and also on Schopenhauer-Steiner thread, my thought perceives distinct boundaries. The concept of "feeling a boundary" only becomes perceivable when thought imbues it with meaning. If you want to call that thinking activity "bodily awareness", then my answer is yes.

[SanteriSatama]

my thought perceives distinct boundaries. The concept of "feeling a boundary" only becomes perceivable when thought imbues it with meaning. If you want to call that thinking activity "bodily awareness", then my answer is yes.

[AshvinP]

my thought perceives distinct boundaries. The concept of "feeling a boundary" only becomes perceivable when thought imbues it with meaning. If you want to call that thinking activity "bodily awareness", then my answer is yes.

Exactly. Bodily awareness via meditation is a great example of one way the Thinking Spirit we share does its exquisite crafting of our soul. It clears our mind of merely intellectual abstractions so that Intuitive thoughts (think Bergson) can permeate our awareness. Thanks!

[DandelionSoul]

I'd like to take a minute before diving in and express gratitude that this conversation has, so far, been very pleasant, even with us being at odds in such a fundamental way. Sometimes philosophical disputes get... prickly, and I'm happy about the state of this one.

For the latter, we could compare Schopenhauer to Hegel, for instance. If you are familiar with their positions, then you will get the sort of contention that I am pointing towards. If not, then I can elaborate, but I would rather not add to the already "overwhelming" sprawl of this discussion unless necessary. For now, I will say I identify much more with Hegel's position than Schopenhauer.

I am, and that's the impression I've gotten from you. To be honest, sometimes when I read your snippets from Steiner I can't help thinking, "This is just warmed-over Hegel." I'm not sure if Steiner identified as Hegelian but given the time and place I think the Hegelian influence is pretty well inevitable.

Also, I would add that "reflective thinking" is not limited to mere abstract thinking, but also includes intuitive thinking (which actually may have some overlap with what you are calling "instinctive" thinking).

It very well may! Can you say more about intuitive thinking and what makes it reflective? When I think on the concept of intuition, I think of it as a kind of "knowing without knowing," what we usually call a gut feeling. I know that what I see on the couch is a cat, and even if I didn't know the word for that creature, I would know that she isn't part of the couch. She doesn't blend into the background. That ability to pick out an apparent object and note its relationships to other objects seems to me an aspect of intuition, and one that, though it varies in richness, complexity, and so on, must be shared to some degree with every living creature, since just to be a living creature requires some capacity to discern one thing from another (otherwise everything would die pretty quickly). If that's what you mean, and if that, in your view, requires self-reflection, then there is nothing alive that is not self-reflective, but here your objection over my use of "purpose" seems salient: it seems like "self-reflection" has become too broad to say anything useful.

Rather, I say we can only philosophize from first-person experiential perspective and therefore everything is relational, including the existence of reflective thinking and "purpose". I act with a lot more "purpose" in relative to a human infant, but I perhaps barely act with purpose relative to a spiritual being who is always fully aware of its motivations and exactly how to bring about effects from causes.

You're very confident that you act with more purpose than an infant. What grounds that confidence? What makes you so sure you know what degree of purpose an infant may or may not possess, since they can't use language yet and you can't remember ever being one, so there's no first-person experience at all to tell you what their first-person perspective is like? Likewise, how do you know there's an eternal Self if you have only ever experienced being a temporal self? Likewise, again:

I do hold to reincarnation and I would speculate some "triggered" memories of those sort could be related to experiences in past lives.

You've said in another thread that you have no experience of having lived a different incarnation. Why do you hold to reincarnation, with no first-person experience to ground it?

But what's most important to highlight in my view is the fact that a process is, in fact, taking place, which moves from relatively little or no purpose-intent to relatively more purpose-intent, and the culmination of that process is spiritual freedom.

What makes you think so? Do you have any first-person experience of the culmination of that process?

My point here is not actually to challenge your statements there as such, but to interrogate what seems to me a tension between a metaphilosophy that only allows you to philosophize from the first-person perspective and a metaphysics that says all sorts of third-person things for which you have no experience. The only way I can currently imagine that you mean what you say about only philosophizing from the first-person perspective is something like the Kantian notion of an implicit "I think" at the beginning of every judgment, but if that's the case, then I don't think we are restricted from doing third-person metaphysics, and just in the act of doing metaphysics, we find ourselves talking in third-person.

It is not so much the capacity to act out our self-motivated intention but the capacity for us to actually desire, in full knowing consciousness, those ideals we bring to action in the world. I may be severely limited in my capacity to act, but as long as every action I am capable of making is also consciously desired from within myself, I am still free. Therefore, Self-knowledge, taking "knowledge" in its highest sense, which includes imaginative and intuitive knowledge, is the most critical component for spiritual freedom in my view.

Rereading the statement you bolded, it was badly phrased. I expect you'll disagree with the underlying notion no matter how clearly I phrase it, but rather than "nothing but," it would have been a more faithful expression of my view to say "most basically." Freedom, knowledge, thought, purpose, meaning, to me these are concepts that are what they are in and through being interwoven with the life of the living. They are aspects of the process of living, and, consequently, there is no life that lacks them. But they are no more static than life is. Life is most basically self-organized, self-motivated conatus, but it is not just that. Even the simplest human life is vastly more complex than that of, say, a bacterium. Likewise, while purpose is most basically the intention to fulfill a desire, it is not just that: it complexifies and deepens and becomes richer. And maybe this is mostly a difference in how we use words, because I see the words we're using as referring to the whole movement from acorn to tree, whereas you appear to reserve them strictly for the tree.

I did seriously have major issues with her philosophy of "Self", but I don't remember her arguments well enough to recount them now.

We should discuss that at some point, though not here and now. I liked her overall thesis, and have even used "aperspectival" in her sense twice in this thread, but found it weak in trying to draw out how her ownerless consciousness came to be full of owned consciousnesses. At some point I'll read her book pushing back against No-Atman forms of Buddhism and see if I can make some headway over how her thought works.

I do hold to reincarnation and I would speculate some "triggered" memories of those sort could be related to experiences in past lives.

My own view on reincarnation is that there was only ever one "soul" to be incarnated, and it's incarnated as every living thing all at once across all of time. I suppose instead of believing in reincarnation, it might be more accurate to call my view panincarnation.

In my view, every individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm, so in a real sense lives out the entire metamorphic progression of the Cosmos, but over the course of many lives and there is true novelty of experience.

I agree with the microcosm/macrocosm idea... sort of. I think we each contain the Cosmos that contains each of us, sort of the way each part of a fractal or hologram contains the whole fractal or hologram, or the way every facet of a gem is visible in each facet of a gem, or Indra's Net, or something along those lines. I'm not sure how to put the intuition into words, because it also contains a notion of the continuous generation of novelty which seems missing in all the above images.

(Santeri probably knows more about fractal math than I do; I just know that if you zoom into any part of a Mandelbrot long enough, you'll eventually come back around to that one shape that I've affectionately termed the Mandelbrot Guy.)

In any case, as I noted above, I don't quite share your view of reincarnation, but I don't know if our views here are incompatible enough to quibble over here.

the culmination of that process is spiritual freedom.

I can agree with that, though I think we may have somewhat different understandings of precisely what spiritual freedom is or entails.

I am pretty confused by the above. Even if the "mystified" person is not acting with intent from "their own perspective", shouldn't they still be acting with "purpose" under your view, since they are living beings acting out of some sense of instinct? Or you are saying the mystification basically eliminates their instinctual capacity as well?

Basically yes. Self-reflection is the capacity to make thought the object of thought, including instinctive thoughts, which allows us much more self-determination in terms of how we value our instinctive thought at any particular moment and how we will act on it. It also enables us to make ourselves, holistically, the object of thought, such as when we wonder how we came across to someone else in an interaction or think about what we're doing with our life. We're able to "step outside of ourselves," in a sense, and see ourselves through the gaze of another (the world at large, or some particular person, or the God of our religion, or whatever).

Fundamentally, self-awareness gives us an awareness of our freedom, but it can also be used to negate that freedom by convincing us that we don't actually have any. This kind of manipulation, I see as a nullification of purpose because the impetus for the subject's actions is no longer internally supplied; they have been made an object, made to see themself as an object, and cut off from avenues of thought and feeling that might give the lie to that self-conception. But it can only be done where self-conception is possible in the first place: that faculty is the tool of the oppressor.

To be clear, I do not think this outcome -- where self-determination self-nullifies -- is stable. It must be continually reinforced, and even at that, purpose (which is to say, freedom) never quite dies. I don't know that it's possible to view oneself as always and only an object consistently all the time, since internally supplied desires constantly push back against the twisting of self-reflection. But to the degree that the subject is acting out their mystification rather than acting from their own purposes, I would call their actions purposeless.

I disagree that feeling itself is a sort of knowing, rather it always co-exists with a knowing aspect which serves a distinct role from feeling.

In the interest of tightening up the line of argumentation here, I'd like to poke at what seem to me to be some tensions running throughout your argument across this thread.

On the one hand, you said that true knowledge can't happen apart from self-reflection. On the other, you've affirmed that there is always already knowing bound up with experience. And animals experience, because they are ensouled, and so do infants. But you've affirmed also that animals and infants are non-self-reflective. So knowledge is already self-reflective, and experience always entails knowledge, and animals experience, so animals know, but animals are non-self-reflective, so animals don't know. I kind of wonder if you're using knowledge-language in two different ways. You specified "true knowledge" when you said that knowledge can't happen apart from self-reflection, so does that make instinctive knowledge false knowledge? If so, then what is false knowledge? What is knowledge such that it can be false?

Likewise, you suggested that an infant's consciousness is so interwoven with the world as a whole that the consciousness is incapable of differentiating between the infant and an object. But you also acknowledge that non-self-reflective consciousnesses have the experience of lack, and experience always entails a knowing, and so what is lacked is, to some extent, known in its absence, and I don't see how we escape either the conclusion that self-reflection is always already present, but implicit prior to becoming explicit (what you might call "intuitive") OR the conclusion that, in fact, self-reflection isn't necessary to ground these distinctions but is ultimately grounded by them.

The first horn of the dilemma plays well with your notion of the eternal Ego-Self, but it does not seem to play well with your notion that animals and infants are devoid of purpose in their actions. The second horn is... well... the view I've been promoting this whole time. And that's the view that comports best with my first-person experience: whenever I engage in self-reflective thought, I find that its objects are thoughts, memories, intuitions, feelings, etc. that existed prior to my reflecting upon them, so I find in my experience no reason to believe that the self on which I'm reflecting came into being with the reflection.

I can see where this claim gives rise to confusion - because I say there is a time when "purpose" does not exist due to lack of self-reflection, but now I say Self is eternal and likely never existed without some reflection.

As I was rereading your post and mine before I hit submit, I realized that I am very confused about this tension, and your explanation about relational metaphysics doesn't do much to resolve my confusion. Can you elaborate?

[AshvinP]

I'd like to take a minute before diving in and express gratitude that this conversation has, so far, been very pleasant, even with us being at odds in such a fundamental way. Sometimes philosophical disputes get... prickly, and I'm happy about the state of this one.

For the latter, we could compare Schopenhauer to Hegel, for instance. If you are familiar with their positions, then you will get the sort of contention that I am pointing towards. If not, then I can elaborate, but I would rather not add to the already "overwhelming" sprawl of this discussion unless necessary. For now, I will say I identify much more with Hegel's position than Schopenhauer.

I am, and that's the impression I've gotten from you. To be honest, sometimes when I read your snippets from Steiner I can't help thinking, "This is just warmed-over Hegel." I'm not sure if Steiner identified as Hegelian but given the time and place I think the Hegelian influence is pretty well inevitable.

Also, I would add that "reflective thinking" is not limited to mere abstract thinking, but also includes intuitive thinking (which actually may have some overlap with what you are calling "instinctive" thinking).

It very well may! Can you say more about intuitive thinking and what makes it reflective? When I think on the concept of intuition, I think of it as a kind of "knowing without knowing," what we usually call a gut feeling. I know that what I see on the couch is a cat, and even if I didn't know the word for that creature, I would know that she isn't part of the couch. She doesn't blend into the background. That ability to pick out an apparent object and note its relationships to other objects seems to me an aspect of intuition, and one that, though it varies in richness, complexity, and so on, must be shared to some degree with every living creature, since just to be a living creature requires some capacity to discern one thing from another (otherwise everything would die pretty quickly). If that's what you mean, and if that, in your view, requires self-reflection, then there is nothing alive that is not self-reflective, but here your objection over my use of "purpose" seems salient: it seems like "self-reflection" has become too broad to say anything useful.

I agree! This discussion is very civil and productive.

Steiner probably favored Hegel's philosophy the most out of any of the other German idealists. Yet he also states it remains at mere abstract level and must be taken well beyond that to get a good understanding of how metamorphosing Thinking reveals the true Spirit acting in the world. I would also point out that Hegel may have been more popular when he was alive, but his philosophy has not fared well at all compared to Kant or Schopenhauer since then.

Instead of referring to Steiner, since you are not yet familiar with his thinking, I will refer to Bergson. Perhaps you are not familiar with his thinking either, and I am definitely no expert, but he is known for proposing Intuition as the only means of gaining true knowledge (I don't agree it is the only way, but its the most important and comprehensive way). It takes us within the interior of the phenomenal world in a very literal sense - intuition gives us experience of the world from the inner perspective of other spiritual beings. If we try to think of it in terms of "reflective thinking" of mere abstract intellect, then we will make no progress. It is not "reflective" in that way. It is more like thinking which has no need for abstraction because it directly perceives and immediately understands the fullness of noumenal relations. This cannot be confused with "instinct", though, because it is not simply consciousness that is one with Nature in our infancy and therefore lacking any clear perspective on it. Rather it is like the 'aperspectival' consciousness Gebser wrote about, which integrates all previous modes of consciousness within itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(Bergson)

Henri Bergson defined intuition as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed.

Two images Henri Bergson gave in his essay An Introduction to Metaphysics may aid us in comprehending the ideas of intuition, analyses, the absolute and the relative. The first image is a city reconstructed with juxtaposed photographs taken from every viewpoint and angle. The reconstruction can never give us the dimensional value of walking through the actual city. This can only ever be grasped through a simple intuition. The same goes for the experience of reading a single line of Homer. If you wish to explain this experience to someone who cannot speak ancient Greek, you may translate the line and lay commentary upon commentary, but this commentary shall never grasp the dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its original language.

Rather, I say we can only philosophize from first-person experiential perspective and therefore everything is relational, including the existence of reflective thinking and "purpose". I act with a lot more "purpose" in relative to a human infant, but I perhaps barely act with purpose relative to a spiritual being who is always fully aware of its motivations and exactly how to bring about effects from causes.

You're very confident that you act with more purpose than an infant. What grounds that confidence? What makes you so sure you know what degree of purpose an infant may or may not possess, since they can't use language yet and you can't remember ever being one, so there's no first-person experience at all to tell you what their first-person perspective is like? Likewise, how do you know there's an eternal Self if you have only ever experienced being a temporal self? Likewise, again:

I do hold to reincarnation and I would speculate some "triggered" memories of those sort could be related to experiences in past lives.

You've said in another thread that you have no experience of having lived a different incarnation. Why do you hold to reincarnation, with no first-person experience to ground it?

I am not speaking of what I have personally experienced, but rather what can possibly be experienced from first-person perspective. The third-person perspective simply does not exist, and therefore nothing derived from that non-existent perspective could possibly be experienced. If what is derived happens to be true, then it is sheer luck. If I could only have confidence in those things which I have personally experienced and remember, then I would would have confidence in next to nothing right now That being said, I do think we must eventually derive our true knowledge from inner experience - and since I do not think there are fundamental limits to that experience-knowledge, this is very possible for each person.

You would agree that all cognitive science so far holds that an infant does not act with the same sort of intent that a full-grown adult acts with, right? You may claim that a human being always acts with some intent, regardless of age, but I don't see how you can claim infants act with equal degree and quality of intent as full-grown adult without contradicting many empirical studies of these things.

But what's most important to highlight in my view is the fact that a process is, in fact, taking place, which moves from relatively little or no purpose-intent to relatively more purpose-intent, and the culmination of that process is spiritual freedom.

What makes you think so? Do you have any first-person experience of the culmination of that process?

My point here is not actually to challenge your statements there as such, but to interrogate what seems to me a tension between a metaphilosophy that only allows you to philosophize from the first-person perspective and a metaphysics that says all sorts of third-person things for which you have no experience. The only way I can currently imagine that you mean what you say about only philosophizing from the first-person perspective is something like the Kantian notion of an implicit "I think" at the beginning of every judgment, but if that's the case, then I don't think we are restricted from doing third-person metaphysics, and just in the act of doing metaphysics, we find ourselves talking in third-person.

My response above should have clarified this point as well. I do agree with Kant who basically ruled out the 3rd-person perspective in his metaphysics, but then he turned around and used the perspective he just ruled out to derive his epistemology, and the latter is what I disagree with most strongly. We should remember what he failed to remember and make sure we are not utilizing that non-existent perspective to make metaphysical arguments. It is definitely the natural way for modern man to think through these things, so we must constantly guard against it in our own thinking.

It is not so much the capacity to act out our self-motivated intention but the capacity for us to actually desire, in full knowing consciousness, those ideals we bring to action in the world. I may be severely limited in my capacity to act, but as long as every action I am capable of making is also consciously desired from within myself, I am still free. Therefore, Self-knowledge, taking "knowledge" in its highest sense, which includes imaginative and intuitive knowledge, is the most critical component for spiritual freedom in my view.

Rereading the statement you bolded, it was badly phrased. I expect you'll disagree with the underlying notion no matter how clearly I phrase it, but rather than "nothing but," it would have been a more faithful expression of my view to say "most basically." Freedom, knowledge, thought, purpose, meaning, to me these are concepts that are what they are in and through being interwoven with the life of the living. They are aspects of the process of living, and, consequently, there is no life that lacks them. But they are no more static than life is. Life is most basically self-organized, self-motivated conatus, but it is not just that. Even the simplest human life is vastly more complex than that of, say, a bacterium. Likewise, while purpose is most basically the intention to fulfill a desire, it is not just that: it complexifies and deepens and becomes richer. And maybe this is mostly a difference in how we use words, because I see the words we're using as referring to the whole movement from acorn to tree, whereas you appear to reserve them strictly for the tree.

Well I should make clear that I do not view these things as "either/or", like either we are completely free or not free at all. Rather it is a gradient as you say. Yet the implication of that gradient, for me, is that there is actually a possible state in which there is no intent, no purpose, and no freedom, or so little of those that there may as well be none for all intents and purposes (I know, this pun has probably worn out its welcome by now). I will respond to rest of your post later tomorrow.

[SanteriSatama]

Instead of referring to Steiner, since you are not yet familiar with his thinking, I will refer to Bergson. Perhaps you are not familiar with his thinking either, and I am definitely no expert, but he is known for proposing Intuition as the only means of gaining true knowledge (I don't agree it is the only way, but its the most important and comprehensive way). It takes us within the interior of the phenomenal world in a very literal sense - intuition gives us experience of the world from the inner perspective of other spiritual beings. If we try to think of it in terms of "reflective thinking" of mere abstract intellect, then we will make no progress. It is not "reflective" in that way. It is more like thinking which has no need for abstraction because it directly perceives and immediately understands the fullness of noumenal relations. This cannot be confused with "instinct", though, because it is not simply consciousness that is one with Nature in our infancy and therefore lacking any clear perspective on it. Rather it is like the 'aperspectival' consciousness Gebser wrote about, which integrates all previous modes of consciousness within itself.

Bergson offers an excellent combo of Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, which I mentioned in the other thread. Very good to bring him up.

Because I'm a petulant and bothersome language cop, I would say "multiperspectival" sharing and presence, instead of "aperspectival". But the intuitive idea is similar enough.