AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 10:03 pm
In the Steiner example, the concept of "parabola" is what joins with the perceptions of stone positions upon throwing to allow re-creation of the phenomenal unity of experience. That unity is itself a percept belonging to other concepts which can form a higher order unity, such as stone being thrown and hitting surface of a lake to cause ripples. Science, when done properly, is about tracing back the phenomenal unities to their necessary relations of ideal percepts-concepts. Those relations are generally called "laws of nature". Here is another excerpt which should clarify more:
Steiner wrote:Empirical science will have to ascertain how the properties of the eye and those of the colors are related to one another, by what means the organ of sight transmits the perception of colors, and so forth. I can trace how one percept succeeds another in time and is related to others in space, and I can formulate these relations in conceptual terms, but I can never perceive how a percept originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations between percepts other than thought relations must of necessity fail.
What, then is a percept? The question, asked in this general way, is absurd. A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thinking? The question concerning the “what” of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept.
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What causes us to enquire into our relationship to the world is not the fanciful pictures of how different the world would appear to other than human senses, but the realization that every percept gives us only a part of the reality concealed within it, in other words, that it directs us away from its inherent reality. Added to this is the further realization that thinking leads us into that part of the reality which the percept conceals within itself.
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The main point is that all the results of physical research, apart from unjustifiable hypotheses which ought to be excluded, have been obtained through percept and concept. Elements which are seemingly non-perceptible are placed by the physicist's sound instinct for knowledge into the field where percepts lie, and they are thought of in terms of concepts commonly used in this field. The strengths of electric or magnetic fields and such like are arrived at, in the very nature of things, by no other process of knowledge than the one which occurs between percept and concept.
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LET us recapitulate what we have achieved in the previous chapters. The world faces man as a multiplicity, as a mass of separate details. One of these separate things, one entity among others, is man himself. This aspect of the world we simply call the given, and inasmuch as we do not evolve it by conscious activity, but just find it, we call it percept. Within this world of percepts we perceive ourselves. This percept of self would remain merely one among many other percepts, if something did not arise from the midst of this percept of self which proves capable of connecting all percepts with one another and, therefore, the sum of all other percepts with the percept of our own self. This something which emerges is no longer merely percept; neither is it, like percepts, simply given. It is produced by our activity. To begin with, it appears to be bound up with what we perceive as our own self. In its inner significance, however, it transcends the self. To the separate percepts it adds ideally determined elements, which, however, are related to one another, and are rooted in a totality. What is obtained by perception of self is ideally determined by this something in the same way as are all other percepts, and is placed as subject, or “I”, over against the objects. This something is thinking, and the ideally determined elements are the concepts and ideas.
Okay I think I understand where you are coming from better now, and this seems like a fair understanding of things at one level. What I'm trying to distinguish is between the fuzzy partial versions of perception and conception, and that which lies beneath, the reality behind both. With perception, let's assume a Buddhist perspective, where there is a sense in which even the raw perception is clouded by automatically being distinguished from the perceiver.
More significantly, on the conceptual side, isn't there a distinction between the concepts we use, and some more absolute foundation? There is obviously a sense in which these concepts have a reality beyond the individual using them. In the example of the stone that is thrown, and forms ripples in the water, this "higher order unity" you talk of is clearly something we share, or we would not be able to talk about it. It doesn't matter whether two people read about this, two people saw this, or one person saw it and told another, there is a common immaterial reality to the concepts that goes beyond, and is independent from, the perception and the language (the method by which the concept was received). Now from an idealism perspective, these concepts (or ideas) exist in the minds of individuals, and this is extended into Mind at Large / subconscious in some way. I can even accept that in this realm you can have dynamic higher order 'concepts', call them 'upward' archetypes. But when you step back from more elemental concepts, such as shapes, or the way something like maths seems to be embedded in nature, from the way mathematicians often feel like they are discovering rather than creating .... even the very intelligibility of things such that we can conceptualise them, there must be some more absolute, "ideal" source. Like a fixed 'downward' archetype, be it a sphere, a mother, the number 5 etc.
Anyway I can't really express what I'm saying other than talking mostly gibberish. I even just tried to draw a diagram to explain, which hasn't worked out as I'd hoped. It seemed clearer in my head, but I want to put the form of weightless particles into the "natural laws" box, and it went downhill from there! But basically I was trying to show that you are creating a "unity" of the bottom two layers, whereas I see the actual unity as the top two layers (and the bottom layer just how it appears). If you ignore the fact that the diagram is not at all right, does it at least explain what I'm trying to get across?