findingblanks wrote: ↑Sat Oct 16, 2021 5:57 pm Anthony,
"and still the ontological character of a percept remains elusive..."
That's such a good sign.
"From what I've read (which is limited), Steiner doesn't come out and say that percepts are ideal."
In 1916 when he began to try rearticulating some of the fundamental concepts in PoF, Steiner spoke a bit more clearly and descriptively about many elements. In fact, when you go to forums where people are celebrating PoF, you find that a disproportional amount of their favorite passages come from the very small amount of additions. I always take that as a small sign of health in the community.
I think you (not the other people in this context) will find an interesting contradiction in how Steiner speaks about the nature of a percept. You might read PoF and come away thinking that Steiner claims that thinking attatches a non-cognitive percept to its corresponding concept. I bet that within five minutes you can show me at least three passages from PoF that *could* lead someone to think that thinking attaches concepts to percepts (and that percepts are therefore have no cognitive function on their own).
It's a bit harder but you can actually find at least one spot (I think two) where Steiner says (in PoF) that a percept is inherently cognitive. He uses a wonderful metaphor in that spot. In fact, if you take him very seriously you can let that description redefine the earlier idea that percepts are in need of corresponding concepts. That's when it gets fun. If you find any of the above interesting, you'll probably have to DM me to talk about it. This context is a very passionate and well intended cult-like 'educational center.' We are about to see it kick into gear! Anyway, Anthony, I've really appreciated your questions, comments and insights in this thread (and I've only read about 1/8th of it!)
FB,
Let's also give Anthony the context from which you are claiming to understand these things. Let's refer him to the Philosophy Unbound thread, in which we had 13,500+ comments of you claiming no one, not myself, Cleric, or anyone else, understands Steiner, despite being very familiar with his entire corpus of books and many of his lectures as well. You projected various strawmen onto isolated passages from PoF and refused to seriously consider any of our comments in response, hence your repetitive posts which added up quickly. You also claimed no one understands Schopenhauer, including BK, and Steiner-Scop basically agree with each other. On another thread about Schop, you claimed a "Schop scholar" was coming to back up your erroneous interpretations of him, but this never happened and shortly later you disappeared from the forum.
In the course of that P-Unbound thread, Anthony should also be aware, after many pages of questioning and digging, we got down to the reason why you misinterpret Steiner. It is because you assume spiritual evolution (evolution of Thinking, perception-cognition) has stopped in the modern age with abstract intellectual reasoning, despite your claim to understand Barfield's arguments which you frequently invoke here (another thinker you mispresented on that same humongous thread). In fact, you completely ignored my comment recently about that on the "evolution of consciousness" thread by pulling Eugene's famous tactic of, "yeah, I agree!", when you do not, in fact, agree at all with Barfield or myself. You deny the very core of Steiner's spiritual science (which Barfield accepted), i.e. the existence of higher cognition available to all today - Imaginative, Inspirative, and Intuitive thinking.
Like many others, you cannot admit any higher cognition into your wordlview, i.e. any possibility of a systematic inquiry beyond the threshold of deep sleep and death, because you have an antipathy for any worldviews which assert "superiority" over others. That is also evident from your criticisms of BK for criticizing Harris and materialism... you actually argue that materialism is "compatible with protecting the Earth" and "deeply spiritual lives". Why? For no other reason than you don't like the assertion that some worldviews and some ways of conceiving the world are worse than others and actually have practical effects in the real world. You say, "we dont' learn much about a person's creative and moral living from the content of their beliefs." That's a nice way to put it, but really your position is that the ideal content of someone's worldview has no effect whatsoever on how they perceive-conceive the world which, in turn, has no effect whatsoever on how they relate to that same world and other human beings.
So Anthony should be clear, there is absolutely no logic to your arguments here, only thinly veiled antipathies which get translated into posts such as the one above, under the guise of having deep knowledge of Steiner, Schop, Barfield, etc. In reality, you are using the little you have learned from each of these philosophies to bolster your own feeling-based approach to life, an approach which actually flies in the face of Steiner-Barfield phenomenology of Thinking (spiritual activity). Sorry to start out so bold and sternly here, but I really have no interest in pretending to go through the motions with you yet again for another 50+ pages of meaningless and counter-productive comments. Anthony is making a genuine effort to logically reason his way through the arguments made by Steiner in PoF, and your arguments here, as elsewhere, if they can be called that, are diametrically opposed to logic and reason.