Language is already one layer of abstract symbols removed from intuitive element that Cleric is speaking of. True, he is speaking of it in language, but there is no "psychological history and trauma" in "calmly describing inner experiences... and the simple steps that anyone can take to test them against their own experience". At the very least, there is no reason to add another heap of abstract layers onto those calm descriptions of inner experiences. That's exactly how the phrase "psychological history and trauma" is functioning here - as a whole mess of abstract concepts heaped onto the discussion so as to obscure its living foundation. It requires us to first detour into all the various abstract concepts associated with psychology, history, and trauma, and tease them out one by one. As anyone who has spent a fair amount of time on a discussion forum knows, the participants will forget entirely what the original question was in that process of abstractly teasing out.SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:16 pmFirst, I'm of the opinion that sharing experiences is good, also in the hope that voices of experience might help the next guy to have it little easier, and avoid some mistakes that have been made. While also admitting that it's important for each to do their own mistakes as we stumble and fall in our unique ways.Cleric K wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 9:25 pm This is the whole spirit of PoF. And if people are not willing to take that leap, that's just a thought's distance wide, and verify things for themselves, it's OK! No one forces them. But to speak about those who do take that leap and simply report their inner experiences, as being deluded and monopolizing their interpretations, is just arrogance. This is what always baffles me the most in conversations like these. I would understand if I was claiming the existence of small green men on Mars and trying to force everybody to accept my interpretation. But when I simply and calmly describe inner experiences, and not only that, but describe also the simple steps that anyone can take to test them against their own experience, and this makes me a cultist, blinded arrogant colonist, etc. - this simply makes no sense to me.
You say that it is 1st person "I" describing inner experiences. I wish it was that it was that simple, as what is interpreting and describing experiencing is also very much a language. And as languages are also spiritual living beings, they can carry also their psychological histories and trauma. A deeply traumatized language does not necessarily always think very well. A language which speaks through a living body is not identical with the the living body it is using to speak. Both aspects can be true, living body using a language, and language using a living body, in various mixtures, and the relation is very delicate and the more fantastic the deeper the resolution of the inquiry gets. I'm not the first or last to suggest that generic European language is deeply traumatized and in need of healing - Brouwer, Heidegger, Korzybski, Bohm, Buckminster Fuller etc. etc. have in their various ways contributed to therapeutic philosophy of language trying to heal itself and learning to think better. Small steps, yes, but as you say, in their ways even small steps can be very significant.
Oh, and the wonder of learning different languages, learning to think in different languages and to compare how different languages think! To think on the level where we suddenly observe not only thoughts, but whole thinking processes of whole languages!
I could be even so bold, that after first sudden observation of a thought, trying to interprete and express a thought in language becames inevitably a process where a living body is participating in the self-healing process of a language. And that such therapeutic participation and friction truly deserves to be called Thinking with capital T.
So let's avoid that altogether. Music is actually closer to direct experience of soul qualities than speech, especially modern speech, at least when we are remaining in the realm of abstract intellect, as we clearly are most of the time on this forum. That is an aspect of music even our old pal Schopenhauer intuited in his aesthetic philosophy. I will discuss that more in next essay installment of Spiritual Aesthetics. But as long as we are remaining in the discussion of intuition, as we have been attempting to with regards to the highest cognition which Steiner begins laying the foundation for in PoF, we should not ignore what Henri Bergson had to say about it. And, if we pay attention and approach the quoted excerpt with good will, we then see how Steiner's understanding and approach in PoF, about 50 years before Bergson wrote what is below, is nearly identical.
These conclusions on the subject of duration were, as it seemed to me, decisive. Step by step they led me to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method. “Intuition,” however, is a word whose use caused me some degree of hesitation. Of all the terms which designate a mode of knowing, it is still the most appropriate; and yet it leads to a certain confusion. Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration. Numerous are the philosophers who have felt how powerless conceptual thought is to reach the core of the mind. Numerous, consequently, are those who have spoken of a supra-intellectual faculty of intuition.
But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will.
Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?
Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)
