Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:58 pm
We've hit the halfway mark!
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 4:28 pm
5. The role of imaginative cognition, i.e. "image-consciousness" which is reflected in all mythology and aesthetics, as applied to our current perception-cognition of the world.
I've read the last few of your essays and I think I have a reasonable handle on this one. I guess the main concern, and what I see reflected from various posters here, is what are the safeguards on these imaginings? The world of the mythical exists without bounds it seems. I know you see this as a matter of rightly developing the imaginative faculties, but there are numerous examples of mental/spiritual developmental schemes which don't arrive on the same shore. I'm not an expert in Buddhist philosophy but from what I do know, the imaginative vistas that you describe are quite foreign to their schema.
Anthony,
Yes and I think we have made some real progress! Thanks for reading the essays. What is most important to grasp throughout all of these points is the role of
our own Thinking (Spiritual) activity in the task of knowing anything about the world we experience. Our logical and reasoning faculties are
always the safeguards in any field of inquiry. This is the most difficult thing for us to accept in the modern age (we don't need to get into the reasons why right now, but those are discussed at length by Steiner). We are somehow blind to our own Thinking and its role in creating the meaningful unities from the experience of manifold and seemingly disparate phenomena. We imagine instead that the totality of perceptual content for those meaningful unities are "out there" and our thinking amounts to figuring out by thoughts "in here" what is already out there. The real situation is as follows - only one half of the perceptual content necessary for the meaningful unities approaches us from without, and the other half (the meaningful content which unites the fragmented phenomena) approaches us from
within as concepts. Most of that happens unconsciously as we go about our day, but if we engage in any sort of systematic inquiry at work, on this forum, or wherever, and if we pay attention to what is happening in our thoughts as we produce them, we will notice how that spiritual activity unfolds. That is especially true if we pay attention to perceptual content which comes from our own Thinking like the mathematical object of "triangle" - then we have perceptual content which we have willed into existence and can be immediately united with its meaning without referring to any other perceptions. Here is a helpful illustration from Steiner in his book,
Goetheaen Science:
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/En ... 1_c10.html
"All the concepts that the intellect creates — cause and effect, substance and attribute, body and soul, idea and reality, God and world, etc. — are there only in order to keep unified reality separated artificially into parts; and reason, without blurring the content thus created, without mystically obscuring the clarity of the intellect, has then to seek out the inner unity in the multiplicity. Reason thereby comes back to that from which the intellect had distanced itself: to the unified reality. If one wants an exact nomenclature, one can call the formations of the intellect “concepts” and the creations of reason “ideas.” And one sees that the path of science is to lift oneself through the concept to the idea. And here is the place where the subjective and the objective element of our knowing differentiates itself for us in the clearest way. It is plain to see that the separation has only a subjective existence, that it is only created by our intellect. It cannot hinder me from dividing one and the same objective unity into thought-configurations that are different from those of a fellow human being; this does not hinder my reason, in its connecting activity, from attaining the same objective unity again from which we both, in fact, have taken our start. Let us represent symbolically a unified configuration of reality (figure 1). I divide it intellectually thus (figure 2); another person divides it differently (figure 3). We bring it together in accordance with reason and obtain the same configuration.
This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point
that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea.
And all human beings must ultimately meet each other in this channel if energetic thinking leads them out of and beyond their own particular standpoints. It can indeed be possible that a limited experience or an unproductive spirit leads us to a one-sided, incomplete view; but even the smallest amount of what we experience must ultimately lead us to the idea; for we do not lift ourselves to the idea through a lesser or greater experience, but rather through our abilities as a human personality alone. A limited experience can only result in the fact that we express the idea in a one-sided way, that we have limited means at our command for bringing to expression the light that shines in us; a limited experience, however, cannot hinder us altogether from allowing that light to shine within us."