Bernardo's latest essay

[AshvinP]

In addition to what Cleric responded, I will add - all meaning, not only the "deeper" meaning, is in the ideal content (which all perspectives share). How could it be any other way?? When something appears meaningful to you, whether it's a feeling within you or an image from without, it is because you are Thinking about it. That is such a transparent and undeniable given of our experience that we really should not still be arguing about it... it is so transparent that the reasons for questioning it can only reside within one's personal prejudices.

You choose to limit the totality of reality effectively to what can be studied by psychology, then you argue that there can't be anything more than that which is accessible to psychology. We can indeed create meaning, but the deepest meaning is only ever discovered or revealed.

Also, the presupposition that people prior to "some point between Aquinas and Spinoza" held to a more dualistic view of God than we do now is the exact opposite of the actual metamorphic progression we can easily discern from the history of art, philosophy, science, etc. And your view is admittedly dualistic in an absolute sense.

You can argue that dualism between mind and matter is the same as dualism between god and mind, but that is based on your assumed conclusion. The dualism between mind and matter only really got started about 400 years ago. There have always been parallel streams of dualism / monism between mind and god. Perhaps the pantheist view was the majority, but the Judeo-Christian tradition changed that for the west. Interestingly, as the dualism between mind and matter grew, at the same time, among those who didn't see a duality between mind and matter, the duality between god and creation collapsed. So the whole thing turned upside down. This is why the church has generally just stuck with philosophy up to Aquinas. Even though the science from these earlier philosophers is obviously far out of date, the rest of philosophy since has gone down inevitably fissile paths by making one of these two fundamental errors.

You know (or should know) that is not true because I reference Steiner so often, who founded "spiritual science" of Anthroposophy. Clearly I think we have not yet reached the limits of our perception-cognition and, in fact, no such limits can truly exist independent of our own self-imposed limitations. That holds true for each individual and humanity at large. That is basically the core of nearly all contention on this forum - self-imposed limitations to knowledge (your position) vs. no such limitations.

re: dualism - you only assume that hard dualism existed in the early Church because, as you correctly point out, the mind-matter dualism got started around 400 years ago. You are a product of that recent Western tradition, as am I, as are most people on this forum, and so you project it back onto all earlier traditions. I am not sure what you mean by "the duality between god and creation collapsed". Clearly that duality is by far the mainstream modern position of the Western church and has been for centuries now.

[Simon Adams]

You know (or should know) that is not true because I reference Steiner so often, who founded "spiritual science" of Anthroposophy.

But surely Steiner falls exactly into one of these branches, it's essentially pantheism just as Spinoza, most of the German idealists, Jung etc...

Clearly I think we have not yet reached the limits of our perception-cognition and, in fact, no such limits can truly exist independent of our own self-imposed limitations. That holds true for each individual and humanity at large. That is basically the core of nearly all contention on this forum - self-imposed limitations to knowledge (your position) vs. no such limitations.

I didn't impose it You assume that everything we can potentially see is everything. Are you claiming that this is not an assumption?

re: dualism - you only assume that hard dualism existed in the early Church because, as you correctly point out, the mind-matter dualism got started around 400 years ago. You are a product of that recent Western tradition, as am I, as are most people on this forum, and so you project it back onto all earlier traditions. I am not sure what you mean by "the duality between god and creation collapsed". Clearly that duality is by far the mainstream modern position of the Western church and has been for centuries now.

Yes it is, although I can't speak for the protestant churches as they have all sorts of new ideologies. I was talking about mainstream philosophy.

[SanteriSatama]

In addition to what Cleric responded, I will add - all meaning, not only the "deeper" meaning, is in the ideal content (which all perspectives share). How could it be any other way??

Bernardo's argument is very simple and such has nothing to do with positions in metaphysics and theology.

He argues: Purely relational can't be meaningful. The argument is given as a universal, not subjectively. The argument is plain wrong as such, and so far he doesn't offer any alternative theory of meaning.

Content and holder is a relation. Part and whole is relation. Subject-object is a relation. Relational meaning is not any less meaningful than anything you can think, say, feel etc. as "not meaningful". Negation and affirmation are relations. We come from relational network of meaning, and continue in relational network of meaning, also and especially in our idealist aspect and ontology.

When something appears meaningful to you, whether it's a feeling within you or an image from without, it is because you are Thinking about it. That is such a transparent and undeniable given of our experience that we really should not still be arguing about it... it is so transparent that the reasons for questioning it can only reside within one's personal prejudices. The only way that is not true is if we exclude any sort of intuitive knowing from Thinking, and there is no good reason to do so. The naïve person can do such things, but we are on a metaphysical forum and get to think these things through carefully in every comment.

Something as object of aboutness-relation is a relation in subject-object relation. Intuitive knowing is not an aboutness relation, it's holographic relation in part-whole relation.

Those "primitive musings" are due to people experiencing ideal forms from without. Their thought-forms appeared external like ours appear internal today. That is not to say the appearances more accurately reflect what is occurring today - in fact it is the opposite - because if thought-forms appeared to us today from without we would immediately recognize that living personalities were responsible for them. Therefore, there is continuity between "revelation" for ancient people and "true understanding" for modern people, whereas in standard theology there is no continuity whatsoever.

You keep on butchering Barfield. My primitive musings are here and now, not there in the "ancient" relating with your eurocentric denial-relation of my presence from without and within you, participating both in your costume and in spirit wearing a costume. Only way you can develop such denial-relation is by prejudice-relation of bivalent logic of either-orism.

Yes, in my language phenomena happen and are experienced mostly asubjectively, without grammatical subject. Asubjective lack of subject-object relation does not make our primitive meaning-relating any less meaningful.

The whole issue is that you Europeans continue to deny that we are also meaning, that we are meaningful, to maintain your denial relation of us, your superficial separation from us. That is a hurtful relation.

[AshvinP]

You know (or should know) that is not true because I reference Steiner so often, who founded "spiritual science" of Anthroposophy.

But surely Steiner falls exactly into one of these branches, it's essentially pantheism just as Spinoza, most of the German idealists, Jung etc...

I don't get what the desire is to always categorize these things with labels, other than to write them off without considering them in more detail. Steiner's phenomenological philosophy would be closest to Hegel, but his "spiritual science" is something completely new and only became possible in the last 150 years or so. Jung considered these spiritual issues deeply to, and recounted his own visionary experiences in the Red Book, but did not systematically discuss them in any higher resolution. The only "pantheism" involved is not arbitrarily separating off the natural world from the spiritual world by a hard boundary, which is nothing other than the result of Cartesian-Kantian dualisms.

Clearly I think we have not yet reached the limits of our perception-cognition and, in fact, no such limits can truly exist independent of our own self-imposed limitations. That holds true for each individual and humanity at large. That is basically the core of nearly all contention on this forum - self-imposed limitations to knowledge (your position) vs. no such limitations.

I didn't impose it You assume that everything we can potentially see is everything. Are you claiming that this is not an assumption?

I am not sure exactly what you mean, but my position is that 1) perception-cognition is inseparable (there is no possible state in Reality where we only perceive without ideal content) and 2) there is no fundamental limit to how much of the noumenal Reality we can perceive-cognize. That #2 claim is evidenced by everything from the history of spiritual metamorphic progression (and corresponding developments in art, mythology, philosophy, science, etc.) to the phenomenology of our own thinking activity. The latter is what Steiner discusses in detail in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In fact, almost everything slightly related to these core metaphysical-ethical-spiritual questions are dealt with in that book slightly over 200 pages. No "spiritual science" is referenced there. Yet people avoid reading and contending with it with such fervor... I have my suspicions why, but it's very unfortunate because it is extremely clear and relevant to all of these discussions.

[AshvinP]

In addition to what Cleric responded, I will add - all meaning, not only the "deeper" meaning, is in the ideal content (which all perspectives share). How could it be any other way??

Bernardo's argument is very simple and such has nothing to do with positions in metaphysics and theology.

He argues: Purely relational can't be meaningful. The argument is given as a universal, not subjectively. The argument is plain wrong as such, and so far he doesn't offer any alternative theory of meaning.

Content and holder is a relation. Part and whole is relation. Subject-object is a relation. Relational meaning is not any less meaningful than anything you can think, say, feel etc. as "not meaningful". Negation and affirmation are relations. We come from relational network of meaning, and continue in relational network of meaning, also and especially in our idealist aspect and ontology.

When something appears meaningful to you, whether it's a feeling within you or an image from without, it is because you are Thinking about it. That is such a transparent and undeniable given of our experience that we really should not still be arguing about it... it is so transparent that the reasons for questioning it can only reside within one's personal prejudices. The only way that is not true is if we exclude any sort of intuitive knowing from Thinking, and there is no good reason to do so. The naïve person can do such things, but we are on a metaphysical forum and get to think these things through carefully in every comment.

Something as object of aboutness-relation is a relation in subject-object relation. Intuitive knowing is not an aboutness relation, it's holographic relation in part-whole relation.

That's true, intuitive Thinking is prior to all subject-object distinctions. When we get to subject-object, cause-effect, etc. we are already presupposing Thinking which imbues those relations with meaning. BK's conclusion that ultimate Ground is Unity of all possible relations is also correct. We must think in polar terms of eternal-temporal, unchanging-changing, etc. to intellectually understand. But BK is absolutely wrong to strip the Ground of ideal content i.e. meaning due to his philosophy of Will. And it is definitely his philosophy (metaphysics) which leads him to do that because the fact that the Ground can only be experienced with inherent meaning is otherwise plainly obvious.

Those "primitive musings" are due to people experiencing ideal forms from without. Their thought-forms appeared external like ours appear internal today. That is not to say the appearances more accurately reflect what is occurring today - in fact it is the opposite - because if thought-forms appeared to us today from without we would immediately recognize that living personalities were responsible for them. Therefore, there is continuity between "revelation" for ancient people and "true understanding" for modern people, whereas in standard theology there is no continuity whatsoever.

You keep on butchering Barfield. My primitive musings are here and now, not there in the "ancient" relating with your eurocentric denial-relation of my presence from without and within you, participating both in your costume and in spirit wearing a costume. Only way you can develop such denial-relation is by prejudice-relation of bivalent logic of either-orism.

Yes, in my language phenomena happen and are experienced mostly asubjectively, without grammatical subject. Asubjective lack of subject-object relation does not make our primitive meaning-relating any less meaningful.

The whole issue is that you Europeans continue to deny that we are also meaning, that we are meaningful, to maintain your denial relation of us, your superficial separation from us. That is a hurtful relation.

I feel like you are not reading carefully what I write and getting triggered by what you imagine I am writing. Where did I say "primitive meaning-relating" is "any less meaningful"? Where did I "deny that [you] are also meaning" and that "[you] are meaningful"? My philosophy of Thinking, as also elaborated in TMT Part 3 essay that you read, is 'aperspectival' and holds meaning as fundamental to everyone and everything, every experience, every moment of Time, past, present and future.

[SanteriSatama]

That's true, intuitive Thinking is prior to all subject-object distinctions. When we get to subject-object, cause-effect, etc. we are already presupposing Thinking which imbues those relations with meaning. BK's conclusion that ultimate Ground is Unity of all possible relations is also correct. We must think in polar terms of eternal-temporal, unchanging-changing, etc. to intellectually understand. But BK is absolutely wrong to strip the Ground of ideal content i.e. meaning due to his philosophy of Will. And it is definitely his philosophy (metaphysics) which leads him to do that because the fact that the Ground can only be experienced with inherent meaning is otherwise plainly obvious.

By "ground of ideal content" it sounds like you simply mean experiencing as such. Ideal content = meaning = experiencing; a rose is a rose is a rose. Identity relations.

That is not yet very significant in relation to the philosophical argument of the essay. Kastrup is denying even the possibility that meaning is in the relation itself, and relations create the nodes we name as subjects etc.

"Meaning must come from the Absolute Source of All Meaning, otherwise nothing means anything anymore..." and that's contrary to his own purported scientific and empirical approach, it's like Kastrup just found Existentialism, it's true meaning, and is screaming from that pain in his argument against the philosophical iceberg behind Rovelli and relationalism. Pain is the meaning we try to avoid and hide and deny, and Living Philosophy becomes by confronting and healing pain. I exaggerate yes, on purpose.

Empirically, it's very obvious that an linguistic expression-distinction gains meaning from it's relation to the whole of a language, without clear separation and border where language ends and some other relating starts. Bivalent polarities are relations in a language, not external and universal conditions of meaning. A whole is not definable by setting borders to contain it, a whole is defined by part-whole relation. Post-structuralism means simply of inclusion of many other meaning-relations, distinctions and qualities beyond simple dual polarity.

Semantic webs of distributed relational networks can express and conway linguistic meaning, because by their relational structure and ontology their are analogous to non-linguistic webs of emotional and sentient meaning.

[Simon Adams]

I don't get what the desire is to always categorize these things with labels, other than to write them off without considering them in more detail. Steiner's phenomenological philosophy would be closest to Hegel, but his "spiritual science" is something completely new and only became possible in the last 150 years or so. Jung considered these spiritual issues deeply to, and recounted his own visionary experiences in the Red Book, but did not systematically discuss them in any higher resolution. The only "pantheism" involved is not arbitrarily separating off the natural world from the spiritual world by a hard boundary, which is nothing other than the result of Cartesian-Kantian dualisms.

I don't have a desire to use labels, it just happens to be the closest one to one of the main areas where I don't agree with you. That doesn't matter, we don't need to agree. We each have our own journey, and all we can do is to be true to ourselves.

I am not sure exactly what you mean, but my position is that 1) perception-cognition is inseparable (there is no possible state in Reality where we only perceive without ideal content) and 2) there is no fundamental limit to how much of the noumenal Reality we can perceive-cognize. That #2 claim is evidenced by everything from the history of spiritual metamorphic progression (and corresponding developments in art, mythology, philosophy, science, etc.) to the phenomenology of our own thinking activity. The latter is what Steiner discusses in detail in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In fact, almost everything slightly related to these core metaphysical-ethical-spiritual questions are dealt with in that book slightly over 200 pages. No "spiritual science" is referenced there. Yet people avoid reading and contending with it with such fervor... I have my suspicions why, but it's very unfortunate because it is extremely clear and relevant to all of these discussions.

... and to me, your "noumenal reality" doesn't contain it's source. You think it's the changeless source of itself, to me it's the very opposite, it's a movement between poles. Let's shake hands and agree to disagree, as we're wearing a circle in the carpet

[SanteriSatama]

I feel like you are not reading carefully what I write and getting triggered by what you imagine I am writing. Where did I say "primitive meaning-relating" is "any less meaningful"? Where did I "deny that [you] are also meaning" and that "[you] are meaningful"? My philosophy of Thinking, as also elaborated in TMT Part 3 essay that you read, is 'aperspectival' and holds meaning as fundamental to everyone and everything, every experience, every moment of Time, past, present and future.

The language and meaning comes from the hurtful relation as such, from the meaning in and of the relation and how it radiates in subjectifications etc. From the relation in all it's collective and unique aspects, from the whole of a hurtful relation which can never be fully spoken. Language-experience responding by subjectification is very much part of the relation, a constitutive denial part of an ineffable whole of meaning. Perspectival does not mean same as subjective. Subjective is a rigid indentity relation, perspectival relating is unique noding and networking in constant movement. Perspectival- relational is present on every and each level of wholes, only denial of perspectival movement allows to totalize and extract meaning into abstraction.

[AshvinP]

That's true, intuitive Thinking is prior to all subject-object distinctions. When we get to subject-object, cause-effect, etc. we are already presupposing Thinking which imbues those relations with meaning. BK's conclusion that ultimate Ground is Unity of all possible relations is also correct. We must think in polar terms of eternal-temporal, unchanging-changing, etc. to intellectually understand. But BK is absolutely wrong to strip the Ground of ideal content i.e. meaning due to his philosophy of Will. And it is definitely his philosophy (metaphysics) which leads him to do that because the fact that the Ground can only be experienced with inherent meaning is otherwise plainly obvious.

By "ground of ideal content" it sounds like you simply mean experiencing as such. Ideal content = meaning = experiencing; a rose is a rose is a rose. Identity relations.

That is not yet very significant in relation to the philosophical argument of the essay. Kastrup is denying even the possibility that meaning is in the relation itself, and relations create the nodes we name as subjects etc.

"Meaning must come from the Absolute Source of All Meaning, otherwise nothing means anything anymore..." and that's contrary to his own purported scientific and empirical approach, it's like Kastrup just found Existentialism, it's true meaning, and is screaming from that pain in his argument against the philosophical iceberg behind Rovelli and relationalism. Pain is the meaning we try to avoid and hide and deny, and Living Philosophy becomes by confronting and healing pain. I exaggerate yes, on purpose.

Empirically, it's very obvious that an linguistic expression-distinction gains meaning from it's relation to the whole of a language, without clear separation and border where language ends and some other relating starts. Bivalent polarities are relations in a language, not external and universal conditions of meaning. A whole is not definable by setting borders to contain it, a whole is defined by part-whole relation. Post-structuralism means simply of inclusion of many other meaning-relations, distinctions and qualities beyond simple dual polarity.

Semantic webs of distributed relational networks can express and conway linguistic meaning, because by their relational structure and ontology their are analogous to non-linguistic webs of emotional and sentient meaning.

Not ground of ideal content, the Ground is ideal content along with will and feelings in Tri-Unity (more accurately the activity of willing-feeling-thinking). No experience exists without that Tri-Unity.

BK's reliance on an "absolute source of all meaning" for meaning in all its particular manifestations is precisely due to the fact that he does not see the Tri-Unity which includes Thinking in all experience. He holds there can be experience of "pure Will" without ideal content, for example. So he then assumes that we, as representations of Will, are inventing the meaning from our secondary ideational activity. Although his position is more nuanced than that, and as noted before he seems to be leaning slightly away from that philosophy of Will in recent discussions, that is it in a nutshell.

Simon's transcendental idealist philosophy is actually the religious form of BK's philosophy of Will. It pushes back all meaning onto transcendent God instead of instinctive MAL and therefore views all thinking activity in the natural (phenomenal) world as secondary and illusory in a sense which has very negative practical implications. Most importantly, as Cleric explained earlier in this thread, the person who has a strong feeling of connection to the Ground, religious or secular, self-aware or instinctive Ground, etc., will rest comfortable in ceasing all pursuit of higher knowledge of the Ground - knowledge in much higher resolution.

[AshvinP]

I feel like you are not reading carefully what I write and getting triggered by what you imagine I am writing. Where did I say "primitive meaning-relating" is "any less meaningful"? Where did I "deny that [you] are also meaning" and that "[you] are meaningful"? My philosophy of Thinking, as also elaborated in TMT Part 3 essay that you read, is 'aperspectival' and holds meaning as fundamental to everyone and everything, every experience, every moment of Time, past, present and future.

The language and meaning comes from the hurtful relation as such, from the meaning in and of the relation and how it radiates in subjectifications etc. From the relation in all it's collective and unique aspects, from the whole of a hurtful relation which can never be fully spoken. Language-experience responding by subjectification is very much part of the relation, a constitutive denial part of an ineffable whole of meaning. Perspectival does not mean same as subjective. Subjective is a rigid indentity relation, perspectival relating is unique noding and networking in constant movement. Perspectival- relational is present on every and each level of wholes, only denial of perspectival movement allows to totalize and extract meaning into abstraction.

If it can "never be fully spoken", i.e. spoken in a way that makes it coherent and representative of my actual position on meaning, then why are you speaking of it? Like I said to Simon before, my metamorphic view leads to inevitable conclusion that ancient people and modern indigenous cultures have a better implicit understanding of spiritual Reality than we do, because they experience the meaning of that Reality in very concrete form, like people in most modern cultures experience physical objects in concrete form. If that still sounds "hurtful" or whatever is triggering your sensitivity in this regard, then so be it, because I am not going to try and decode your criticism when I suspect it fails to even understand my position.