Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[AshvinP]

Here is a mathematical perspective on the claims of spiritual science. Just like Steiner, and at about the same time, D. Hilbert pronounced the principle and telos of mathematics: "we must know, we will know", implying that the mathematical reason can and will know everything in the world of mathematics. Watch what happened next:

Fascinating.

On an intuitive level, can we imply that mathematics is self referential as it ultimately all comes from the same source. i.e differentials are illusory?

OK, fine... ROUND TWO it is. I didn't really have a strategy for anything past ROUND ONE anyway






But I will try to relate this back to the original Topic of Contention, which has nothing to do with the validity of spiritual science's claims, at least not directly. What we are trying to determine is whether the Unity of the world can be borne by the Will, by Thinking, by both, or by neither (or by some other aspect of experience than those two). In other words, what can possibly allow the differentiated phenomenal world to find true connection to the unified noumenon? Schopenhauer says the "blind" Will experienced most clearly in sensory deprivation chamber, Steiner says our Thinking activity which actively takes differentiated phenomenon and forms from them ever-expanding ideal constellations of Unity.

Godel's incompleteness theorem, from what I can tell, only has bearing on this topic in so far as it shows that Godel had to THINK in order to demonstrate that mathematical symbols cannot ever fully encompass the underlying Reality they symbolize. Steiner, however, is not arguing for symbols as the bearer of the world's Unity, rather he is arguing that Thinking is only means of going beyond mere fragmented symbols into the noumenal Unities (Schopenhauer's will is one such symbol for Steiner). And Godel's theorem, as any other theorem of math or science derived by rigorous Thinking, is a precise demonstration of what Steiner is claiming.

So, in the process of writing that response, I realized Godel's theorem is a great argument against Schopenhauer's "Will" as the bearer of the world's Unity.

[ScottRoberts]

Here is a mathematical perspective on the claims of spiritual science. Just like Steiner, and at about the same time, D. Hilbert pronounced the principle and telos of mathematics: "we must know, we will know", implying that the mathematical reason can and will know everything in the world of mathematics. Watch what happened next:
(video)

Both Hilbert and Gödel worked withing the constraint of the Law of Non-Contradiction. As this law does not always apply in matters spiritual, I fail to see how the Incompleteness Theorem provides any perspective on spiritual science. Or on ontology in general, other than to reject the possibility that all of reality is a formal mathematical system.

[AshvinP]

In the following two comments by Steiner -- "As far as the will is concerned, it can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality” and “Against these arguments it must be said that the activities of our body come to our consciousness only through percepts of the self, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts” we see that Steiner is applying false presuppositions to Schopenhauer's terms, thereby unintentionally creating a strawman of Schopenhauer that certainly can be easily burned to the ground.

I realized I cannot form a great response to this because I have little idea what you are claiming is the "false presupposition" in those statements made by Steiner and your reasoning for that. But I will give it a shot anyway...

From what I can tell, Schopenhauer definitely claimed the experience of "pure" Will within himself (think sensory deprivation chamber or deep meditation) was what allows him to say he has found a connection to the noumenal Unity which all beings share. Although he adopts a fundamentally flawed concept of "will" which somehow includes all endogenous feelings and thought-forms (not stimulated by any noticeable 'external' events), even that expansive concept of "will" does not actually make sense of the Unities 'beneath' the differentiated phenomenal appearances of the world. It provides him no epistemic warrant to claim any such Unities exist apart from our personal localized consciousness. So maybe that addresses the criticism of Steiner's representation you were making.

[Eugene I]

Both Hilbert and Gödel worked withing the constraint of the Law of Non-Contradiction. As this law does not always apply in matters spiritual, I fail to see how the Incompleteness Theorem provides any perspective on spiritual science. Or on ontology in general, other than to reject the possibility that all of reality is a formal mathematical system.

Well, it's an analogy of course. However, if the reality is irreducible to ideas only and there are aspects of reality that are not ideas, then any ideas can never fully reflect or describe those aspects of reality that are not ideas (such as formless). Which means that the ideas and their systems are always incomplete with respect to the reality (= spiritual incompleteness theorem). Ideas can only "model" the reality with a certain accuracy, but never fully embrace it and be equivalent to it. Which means that the Steiner agenda/hope of closing the Kantian gap by complete knowing the ontic reality by thinking with ideas is unachievable, just like Hilbert's program in mathematics turned out to be unachievable.

Or, phrasing the same differently, claiming that the reality can be fully known by thinking and with ideas is the same as to say that all there is to the reality is the ideal content, and there is nothing to the reality other than the ideal content. Which is the same as to reduce all ontology only to the ideal content.

So, there are only two options: either to claim that all reality is only ideal content, or to accept that the reality cannot be fully known through thinking.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I must confess that I may be defecting to the red team, given that Steiner didn't make it into the All-star World Cup match

[AshvinP]

So I am still on the BLUE team, and will add this consideration for others to contemplate - it dawned on me while listening to BK that Steiner's remark, "Schopenhauer wants to avoid making 'abstract thinking' the bearer of Unity in the world", is exactly right, because it is essentially a means of attacking Kant's emphasis on spiritual faith - as long as the noumenon is kept behind an impenetrable veil, one must allow for spiritual faith as the bearer of life meaning. And, if knowledge of the noumenon only comes through Thinking, then it is inescapable that a Spirit (in Western theistic sense) exists which is shared by all, now reaffirming spiritual reality based on knowledge (as Hegel did). The only way around that is to find the noumenon in the "blind" Will, which then undermines spiritual faith and spiritual knowledge in one fell swoop - a rather ingenious move, even if an extremely destructive one for Western civilization.

There is no "impenetrable veil" because the "Will" (in Schopenhauer-BK terms, even though I don't like this term because it is misleading), or Existence-Awareness in Advaitic terms, by nature IS Awareness and it is therefore directly Aware of itself, it always directly consciously experiences itself. So it is not based on faith, but on a direct experience. Now, it is called a "mystical" experience simply because most people are not aware of it (including most Western thinkers and philosophers), but realizing such experience has always been the goal and the key aspect of the Eastern spiritual traditions. This experience experientially reveals the fundamental unity of Reality in its existential and experiential aspects. There is no way to describe such experience in words or ideas, it has to be experienced directly in order to be realized. And it is exactly this Awareness-Beingness which is the bearer of unity. However, the thinking and its ideal content is also a bearer of unity simultaneously with and in addition to the unity in Existence-Awareness. We are not opposing one unity to the other and not excluding one of them, but uniting them together.

This firmly puts you in RED team. We will have time for more argument in next round. Right now giving everyone a chance to catch up and comment of they like. Thanks.

The "impenetrable veil" in my comment refers to Kant's epistemology (not Schopenhauer). Kant literally says, "I had to get rid of knowledge to make room for faith". That is a brilliant move for a dedicated Christian, because it seems to eternally preserve the faith in God that was clearly eroding away quickly from reason and science. Once Kant rules out any path to the noumenon by philosophy, science or anything else, the skeptic can never claim God has been disproved or faith in God is not warranted. The meaning that presents itself to us, which no one could seriously deny exists in their daily life at that time, must emanate from some 'location' which "pure reason" can never access i.e. God.

Schopenhauer's counter-move, as the militant skeptic of God, was equally if not more brilliant. He said to Kant, "pure reason cannot access the noumenon, but pure experience of my will is the noumenon". Now the argument he uses to get there, as recounted by BK in that answer, is very sketchy IMO. It is along the lines of, "my body appears to me as 'matter', and everything 'outside' of my body appears to me as the same 'matter', so what I endogenously experience within my body must also be responsible for everything I perceive outside of my body". And what he claims to endogenously experience within is body is "pure Will". It is volitional Will but utterly "blind" Will, like the way an instinctive insect appears to function.

The flaws in his argument are numerous, and Steiner captures a fair number of them within his short two paragraphs quoted, and I hope to eventually get into those, but in response to your comment the above should suffice to clarify the point I was making. Schopenhauer attacks at the core of Kant's spirituality by reducing the noumenon to blind instinctive Will, and as you have pointed out before, that is not at all in keeping with traditional Christian theology. Eventually, another person should be added into this mix, who Steiner references often, and that is Hegel. Schopenhauer and Hegel were philosophizing at the same time and, although Hegel was more popular at that time, eventually Schopenhauer's idealism proved to be much more influential (but not because of the force of his arguments, rather the Spirit of the modern Age).

[AshvinP]

There is no "impenetrable veil" because the "Will" (in Schopenhauer-BK terms, even though I don't like this term because it is misleading), or Existence-Awareness in Advaitic terms, by nature IS Awareness and it is therefore directly Aware of itself, it always directly consciously experiences itself. So it is not based on faith, but on a direct experience. Now, it is called a "mystical" experience simply because most people are not aware of it (including most Western thinkers and philosophers), but realizing such experience has always been the goal and the key aspect of the Eastern spiritual traditions. This experience experientially reveals the fundamental unity of Reality in its existential and experiential aspects. There is no way to describe such experience in words or ideas, it has to be experienced directly in order to be realized. And it is exactly this Awareness-Beingness which is the bearer of unity. However, the thinking and its ideal content is also a bearer of unity simultaneously with and in addition to the unity in Existence-Awareness. We are not opposing one unity to the other and not excluding one of them, but uniting them together.

This firmly puts you in RED team. We will have time for more argument in next round. Right now giving everyone a chance to catch up and comment of they like. Thanks.

The "impenetrable veil" in my comment refers to Kant's epistemology (not Schopenhauer). Kant literally says, "I had to get rid of knowledge to make room for faith". That is a brilliant move for a dedicated Christian, because it seems to eternally preserve the faith in God that was clearly eroding away quickly from reason and science. Once Kant rules out any path to the noumenon by philosophy, science or anything else, the skeptic can never claim God has been disproved or faith in God is not warranted. The meaning that presents itself to us, which no one could seriously deny exists in their daily life at that time, must emanate from some 'location' which "pure reason" can never access i.e. God.

Schopenhauer's counter-move, as the militant skeptic of God, was equally if not more brilliant. He said to Kant, "pure reason cannot access the noumenon, but pure experience of my will is the noumenon". Now the argument he uses to get there, as recounted by BK in that answer, is very sketchy IMO. It is along the lines of, "my body appears to me as 'matter', and everything 'outside' of my body appears to me as the same 'matter', so what I endogenously experience within my body must also be responsible for everything I perceive outside of my body". And what he claims to endogenously experience within is body is "pure Will". It is volitional Will but utterly "blind" Will, like the way an instinctive insect appears to function.

The flaws in his argument are numerous, and Steiner captures a fair number of them within his short two paragraphs quoted, and I hope to eventually get into those, but in response to your comment the above should suffice to clarify the point I was making. Schopenhauer attacks at the core of Kant's spirituality by reducing the noumenon to blind instinctive Will, and as you have pointed out before, that is not at all in keeping with traditional Christian theology. Eventually, another person should be added into this mix, who Steiner references often, and that is Hegel. Schopenhauer and Hegel were philosophizing at the same time and, although Hegel was more popular at that time, eventually Schopenhauer's idealism proved to be much more influential (but not because of the force of his arguments, rather the Spirit of the modern Age).

BTW, Dana, this is what Hegel said to Schleiermacher (as recounted by Steiner), who I thought you were referencing in your first post. It's a great quote.

Therefore when Schleiermacher wanted to explain Christianity from this thoughtless element and said: Christianity cannot be understood through the thought element when one includes worldwide thoughts, to some extent the divine thoughts, grasped differently than through feeling oneself dependent on God, through which one develops a feeling of dependency on the universe - to this Hegel replied: "Then the dog is the best Christian, because it has the best knowledge of the feeling of dependency!"

[AshvinP]

I must confess that I may be defecting to the red team, given that Steiner didn't make it into the All-star World Cup match

that's hilarious

yeah Steiner gets shorter shrift than any other philosopher I can think of... even his strictly philosophical works which don't mention spiritual things are mostly ignored.

[ScottRoberts]

Both Hilbert and Gödel worked withing the constraint of the Law of Non-Contradiction. As this law does not always apply in matters spiritual, I fail to see how the Incompleteness Theorem provides any perspective on spiritual science. Or on ontology in general, other than to reject the possibility that all of reality is a formal mathematical system.

Well, it's an analogy of course. However, if the reality is irreducible to ideas only and there are aspects of reality that are not ideas, then any ideas can never fully reflect or describe those aspects of reality that are not ideas (such as formless). Which means that the ideas and their systems are always incomplete with respect to the reality (= spiritual incompleteness theorem).

I define "idea" (which, as an idealist, I treat as synonymous with "thing") as "that which has form" (or synonymously "has ideal content"). This implies that there is more to an idea than its ideal content. In addition to its ideal content there is the thinking of the ideal content. If one abstracts that power to think, one can only say of it that it is formless. But this formlessness does not exist by itself (I think you agree with that). But also it is not something in addition to ideas. It is in addition to ideal content, but then ideal content (form) also does not exist by itself. So I see no reason not to say that reality is reducible to ideas. Although, I would prefer to just say that reality consists of ideas, which are the mumorphic polarity of the power to think and ideal content. Nothing is left out.

Ideas can only "model" the reality with a certain accuracy, but never fully embrace it and be equivalent to it. Which means that the Steiner agenda/hope of closing the Kantian gap by complete knowing the ontic reality by thinking with ideas is unachievable, just like Hilbert's program in mathematics turned out to be unachievable.

Or, phrasing the same differently, claiming that the reality can be fully known by thinking and with ideas is the same as to say that all there is to the reality is the ideal content, and there is nothing to the reality other than the ideal content. Which is the same as to reduce all ontology only to the ideal content.

You have shifted from "idea" to "ideal content" as that to which reality is not reducible. Not the same claim. In any case, you are ignoring that with idealism, to be is to be known (to modify Berkeley). I recommend my short bit How Idealism Simplifies Metaphysics for more on why what you say here is contrary to the spirit of idealism.

So, there are only two options: either to claim that all reality is only ideal content, or to accept that the reality cannot be fully known through thinking.

There is a third option: reality is conscious activity, and every conscious act has ideal content, which ideal content is thereby known.

[Eugene I]

I define "idea" (which, as an idealist, I treat as synonymous with "thing") as "that which has form" (or synonymously "has ideal content"). This implies that there is more to an idea than its ideal content. In addition to its ideal content there is the thinking of the ideal content. If one abstracts that power to think, one can only say of it that it is formless. But this formlessness does not exist by itself (I think you agree with that). But also it is not something in addition to ideas. It is in addition to ideal content, but then ideal content (form) also does not exist by itself. So I see no reason not to say that reality is reducible to ideas. Although, I would prefer to just say that reality consists of ideas, which are the mumorphic polarity of the power to think and ideal content. Nothing is left out.

The question whether the formlessness can exist without ideal content is irrelevant here, we are discussing a different problem. And I agree that all the reality of the ideal content (forms) is reducible to ideas with nothing left out (taking the "ideas" in a broadest sense). However, the formless is not reducible to ideas and it is not an idea, that is what I'm talking about here. And because formless is also an aspect of reality, this means that the wholeness of reality (together with formless and forms) is irreducible to ideas.

You have shifted from "idea" to "ideal content" as that to which reality is not reducible. Not the same claim. In any case, you are ignoring that with idealism, to be is to be known (to modify Berkeley). I recommend my short bit How Idealism Simplifies Metaphysics for more on why what you say here is contrary to the spirit of idealism.

I enjoyed your your article, all good points. And I agree with Berkley's claim. But here is the thing: the Knowing/Experiencing of ideas and of all ideal content, as well as the conscious activity (thinking, willing) of producing the ideas, and also the Beingness of ideas, are not ideas by themselves, but "adverbial aspects" (in John Vervaeke terms), prerequisites and fundamental realities that make ideas possible to exist and to be known. Those aspects are what belongs to "formless" side/aspect of reality. And as such, these formless adverbial aspects are irreducible to ideas.

There is a third option: reality is conscious activity, and every conscious act has ideal content, which ideal content is thereby known.

Right, exactly, but since the Knowing of the ideal content is not an idea, then it can not be reduced to ideas and ideal content, which goes back to the second option:

the reality cannot be fully known through thinking

where "the reality" is taken in its the wholeness including both forms/ideas and formless.

However, the adverbial aspects of reality can still be known by directly consciously experiencing of them, known not by "thinking", but by experiential (gnosis) way, even though thinking can accompany such experience and reflect it with appropriate reflective ideas. And it is this direct Gnosis that closes the Kantian divide.