findingblanks wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 5:51 pm
If you haven't yet popped away to the
"this is something only spiritualized perception/thinking can notice directly", you can still see why Steiner claims this is 'obvious' to the readers of his book. I guess you might try to argue that when he says 'a closer anaylis reveals' he is secretly nodding to the fact that he is about to describe spiritually transformed experience, but that requires we think he is dishonest every time he says that there is nothing in PoF that can't be observed by a careful reader, which explains why he thought his book would be more well received by some of his mentors and was clearly disappointed.
I won't go through all your points but I must say that PoF is
all about the spiritually transformed experience. It is about experiencing our thinking as the actual spiritual process that it is. And he's not being dishonest at all. From the very beginning he speaks about the
exceptional state and that we need the
goodwill to step beyond our usual habits of mind if we're to ever make a step forward. If we try to understand PoF on the purely intellectual level (that is, as formal associations of concepts) we simply miss the point entirely. And still, there's no hard boundary between the intellectual thinking and the spiritualized thinking. We engage in the latter when thinking (even if abstract in itself) becomes livingly experienced.
So when you say
"he is secretly nodding to the fact that he is about to describe spiritually transformed experience" I would say that he's not at all nodding
secretly. He's nodding openly and in full disclosure. At no point is he pretending that he's building abstract models that are meant to keep the intellect entirely in its comfortable formal domain, while spiritualized thinking is saved only for those who engage in Anthroposophy. The whole goal of PoF is to guide us to experience thinking as self-evident spiritual reality. And this we achieve not by being stuffed with ideas and then asked to believe them but precisely through the backtracking mentioned. Once we recognize that the Thinking spiritual process precedes concepts like subject, object, matter, external world, etc., we already live in the spiritual world - the only world we ever know. Other worlds appear in the picture only after they are being introduced by thinking.
So this is one thing. We must be perfectly clear that PoF invites precisely into the transformation of thinking. It's simply wrong to imagine that Steiner wrote PoF in such a way that it had to be understood as abstract formal system and only those acquainted with Anthroposophy are capable of experiencing the transformed thinking. To understand PoF in the true sense means precisely to allow ourselves to attain to the transformed Thinking experience.
...
Thank you for finally making your position a little bit clearer in the last few post (although it still needs deciphering).
What I understand is that you practically agree with the fact that thinking enriches perception through concepts. For example, you say that the indeterminate rumble is being tested against concepts until the right one is selected. Yet you argue that this is only a
coarser phenomenological view. In other words, something like one of those
pictures that are made of smaller pictures. Basically your point is that the coarser (big) picture gives
the illusion of concepts being attached to perceptions, while when observed in finer resolution we discover that every elementary act of cognition contains elementary perception and elementary concept that are inseparably united and there's no point of speaking of one coming after the other. Let's consider a simplified rumble scenario. Just the sound and no selection. Let's imagine that we have two phases. First we have a brief moment where we experience the rumble but associated only with the meaning of confusion. In the second phase we have the same sound but now related with the concept of, say, drill. You agree that at the coarser resolution it is indeed the case that first we have the sound with the general meaning of confusion in consciousness, then through our thinking activity we experience the enrichment of consciousness, which elucidates the sound experience with the concept of drill. If I understand your position correctly, you claim that the above is only an 'optical illusion' because at each point we have union of perception and some meaning - in the first phase we have union of the sound and confusion, in the second phase we have the same sound but instead of meaning of confusion we have the more precise concept of drill.
Ultimately, there's no moment where we have perception without meaning or vice versa but only
metamorphosis of the unified state such that the union of sound and confusion transforms into union of sound and the clear concept of drill.
Would you express yourself this way?