Criticism

[AshvinP]

He is spot on. One of the features of sectarianism is rigidity and intolerance to anything even slightly different from a rigid set of the views of the sect.

When "sectarianism" is not enforced by state violence, as it clearly is not in Anthroposophy or here on this forum, the cure is very simple - clear Thinking. An approach which grounds itself in Thinking cannot become a "psychological sect" for those who continually re-mind themselves of this Ground. This all comes back to the nearly infantile inability of modern man to trust in his own Thinking, if he even recognizes that he is Thinking at all. Modern man slumbers in his Thinking and projects blame onto all manner of external groups for his own inability to logically reason through what he fears the most, so as to render it less frightening. This is the egoistic root of nearly all political and sociocultural conflict in the world today. Which reminds me of a great post I came across today:


https://theoriapress.wordpress.com/2021 ... ciousness/

Waves of Thinking Lap the Shore of Consciousness

Thinking issues forth from the I and joins in identity with every object. On its return, it stamps the inverse, frozen, and summary image of this gesture into the nervous system. This impression shocks the sleeping I awake as it flashes up as representations in consciousness.

But could the I remain awake and go together with thinking on the way out?

That is, could thought become conscious as verb and not as noun? Could it achieve wakefulness in action and not merely in the terminus of thought? And could knowledge, hence, be achieved not through representation but through identity?

[Eugene I]

Steiner admits development of man's freedom, but essentially denies his freedom and creativity
Штейнер признает развитие человека и развитие его свободы, но в сущности отрицает творчество человека из свободы

Berdyaev is again spot on, in Steiner's view man's destiny is do be entirely driven by collective unconscious and travel/develop along the collectively defined curvatures of the "GR space of meanings" through a structure of levels and hierarchies built by higher beings. Any deviation from such path is possible but considered to be an expression of man's ego. The fundamental freedom and creativity of the Spirit imbedded at the core of each human soul is essentially denied. Granted, the price to be paid for such freedom is the development of human ego, but that does not necessarily mean that any expression of Spirit's creativity and freedom through individual spiritual activity is always and necessarily egoic, this is simply not true.

[JustinG]

Also, I think the writings of existentialists can be a useful antidote to tendencies to regard Steiner as almost omniscient or more than human. Berdyaev's crtique of Theosophy and Anthroposophy (http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_l ... _252b.html) is worth looking at, as is Kafka's brief but hilarious description of his meeting with Steiner (https://anthropopper.com/2014/11/26/fra ... f-steiner/) :

Thanks for the links, I used to read Berdyaev but didn't know about that critique. Interesting that in one of his responses to the Anthroposophist N. Turgenyeva during that dispute he wrote about exactly the same problem that I spotted (sorry for poor translation from Russian):

In the Anthroposophy movement I can see a danger of transforming it into a gnostic sect with all typical features of sectarian psychology and with a lack of "breathing with the world's air" [it's hard to translate this idiom literally].

He is spot on. One of the features of sectarianism is rigidity and intolerance to anything even slightly different from a rigid set of the views of the sect.

The way I look at it (which is probably very 'unSteinerian', but might align with Buddhist notions) is that percepts, concepts and thinking all condition each other. If one follows Steiner's instructions then one might experience what he describes of the supersensible. But to 'test' his claims it would be necessary to do it without creating the expectation of what will be experienced beforehand (which does not mean what is experienced is any less 'real').

[Eugene I]

The way I look at it (which is probably very 'unSteinerian', but might align with Buddhist notions) is that percepts, concepts and thinking all condition each other. If one follows Steiner's instructions then one might experience what he describes of the supersensible. But to 'test' his claims it would be necessary to do it without creating the expectation of what will be experienced beforehand (which does not mean what is experienced is any less 'real').

Well right, this is how we experience it from our human perspective. But the Steiner's key insight here is that percepts are the results of a meaningful conscious activity of the Spirit as a whole, in other words, percepts are always caused by and develop from their root meanings, and so the meanings can be known by "penetrating through" the percepts by higher cognition. In other words, the world of percepts is a result of manifestation of the world of meanings by the Consciousness at large. BK is saying similar thing - our sense percepts are what ideations of MAL "look like" through the "dissociative boundary", however, in BK's view the MAL's "ideations" are void of meanings (bacause MAL ideational activity is instinctive and meaningless).

I think there is a lot of valuable insights in Steiner's anthroposophy, but it's a mixed bag and a critical approach is needed. The worst thing to do is to accept his whole teachings as the "ultimate truth", a sure sectarian path.

[AshvinP]

The way I look at it (which is probably very 'unSteinerian', but might align with Buddhist notions) is that percepts, concepts and thinking all condition each other. If one follows Steiner's instructions then one might experience what he describes of the supersensible. But to 'test' his claims it would be necessary to do it without creating the expectation of what will be experienced beforehand (which does not mean what is experienced is any less 'real').

Why is that? Do you suppose our current thinking is powerful enough to weave together a realm of imaginative cognitions which only conform to our intellectual expectations? Clearly we should approach all of these endeavors as objectively as possible, but we shouldn't overestimate our current fragmented state either. Everyone will have expectations of one sort of another - the key, as always, is to be awake to them rather than assume one is the only person on Earth who has rid himself of all sympathies and antipathies.


"Better to be of a humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud."


A useful way to think of percepts is as the "lure" which draws our Thinking (Reason and higher cognition) into our thinking which withdraws the unified world content from us (intellect). That is more or less Heidegger's framework in his lectures on Thinking.

[JeffreyW]

1.”Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist. Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik. Man suche nur nichts hinter den Phänomenen; sie selbst sind die “
Maximen und Reflexionen 488

What you are quoting points directly to the fact that Goethe considers our conceptual reasoning as belonging to the phenomenon. We find this very strange because we have abstracted so far from "idea" that we feel it must be a completely "inner" activity which has nothing to do with the phenomenon being observed.

"Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.

Truth is a torch, but a huge one, and so it is only with blinking eyes that we all of us try to get past it, in actual terror of being burnt.

Of the Absolute in the theoretical sense, I do not venture to speak; but this I maintain: that if a man recognises it in its manifestation, and always keeps his gaze fixed upon it, he will experience very great reward."

We could go on endlessly quoting similar maxims from Goethe. The Idea is what 'stands behind' the mere appearances for Goethe but is also manifested through them, for anyone with living Reason to perceive.

2. Kant most definitely defended Reason, and in the Transcendental Deduction equated it with Will. In The Critique of Practical Reason, he goes on to equate Reason/Will with god. That was the part of Rationalism he retained.
Critique doesn’t mean criticism as in refutation; more a detailed analysis.

I should have specified more. Do you think he defends Reason as a means of genuinely understanding, in any rigorous or precise manner, what stands behind the appearances (noumenon)? That is the epistemology I am trying to differentiate my position from.

Of far more importance than all that has been above said, is the consideration that certain of our cognitions rise completely above the sphere of all possible experience, and by means of conceptions, to which there exists in the whole extent of experience no corresponding object, seem to extend the range of our judgments beyond its bounds. And just in this transcendental or supersensible sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance, lie the investigations Reason, which, on account of their importance, we consider far preferable to, and as having a far more elevated aim than, all that the understanding can achieve within the sphere of sensuous phenomena. So high a value do we set upon these investigations, that even at the risk of error, we persist in following them out, and permit neither doubt nor disregard nor indifference to restrain us from the pursuit. These unavoidable problems of mere pure reason are God, Freedom (of will) and Immortality. The science which, with all its preliminaries, has for its especial object the solution of these problems is named metaphysics—a science which is at the very outset dogmatical, that is, it confidently takes upon itself the execution of this task without any previous investigation of the ability or inability of reason for such an understanding.

3. But the question I asked includes includes why you would think it is a rational world. Afterwords I will give my reasons why it isn’t.

I would not use the word "rational", because that is generally equated with some form of rationalism, which is basically dualism, and is the exact opposite of my position. I would be comfortable saying the world is a fundamentally logical world, in the sense of the Logos of John 1. There is an intellgible principle underlying the Cosmos which can be discerned. The Logos has evolved and continues to evolve - we could call this "spiritual evolution", which I hold to be practically synonymous with the evolution of perception-cognition. So none of this is to be confused with 'transcendental' religious tradition. This is why I pointed to Steiner's Philosophy of Spiritual Activity before - it is a rigorous phenomenology which shows how we find a sphere of overlap between the eternal, ever-evolving intelligible principle of the Cosmos and our own finite be-ing in our immanent Thinking activity. By re-cognizing this as an immanent reality (as opposed to abstract theory), we gain confidence that there is a thread of Spirit (Thinking) which weaves through the entire Cosmos and right into our own Thinking activity, which includes, but is not limited to, Reason.

In thinking, we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel (and also perceive), we are single beings; in so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: We see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force which is universal but which we learn to know, not as it issues from the center of the world, but rather at a point in the periphery. Were we to know it at its source, we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious. But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us from the universal world existence.

1. The point of the Goethe quote, and there are many more like it, is that Kant’s noumenal does not exist - an implicit rejection of metaphysics. Goethe sees reason, spirit, etc as embedded in immanent reality. In this instance, there is nothing behind the blue sky, but everything is made apparent in the blue sky itself. Goethe’s view is very much like Spinoza’s pantheistic “god or nature”.

2. One of the most important elements of Kant’s epistemology is that Reason can tell us nothing at all about the noumenal realm. Kant’s attempt to rescue certain objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism rested on the model that Reason is the unifying principle under which the categories of the understanding organize sense data into a unified perception that is objectively true. The validity of Reason, however, did not extend beyond what originated in sense perception, and any attempt to extend reason beyond the phenomenal world was the metaphysical error of Transcendental Illusion. He traced out examples of this error in the four antinomies in Bk II of the Critique of Pure Reason.

3.What you wrote, and Steiner’s quote, has some similarity to Heidegger’s Being, but gives no justification for Reason as a means to deeper reality. You switched from Reason to a modified use of Logic. My question has to do with reality explicable through the logical unified explanation in the sense of Reason.

[AshvinP]

1. The point of the Goethe quote, and there are many more like it, is that Kant’s noumenal does not exist - an implicit rejection of metaphysics. Goethe sees reason, spirit, etc as embedded in immanent reality. In this instance, there is nothing behind the blue sky, but everything is made apparent in the blue sky itself. Goethe’s view is very much like Spinoza’s pantheistic “god or nature”.

The first part is true and I agree, Goethe does not hold to any 'transcendental' realm of abstract metaphysical concepts which explain Nature, but the bold part is something you have added without any warrant and contrary to all evidence in Goethe's writings. The person who wrote Faust did not think "everything is made apparent" in the mere perceptions of the world, especially the richness of the normally invisible spiritual reality. The very idea of his archetypal proto-plant, which he perceived but Schiller did not, refutes that assertion. I suspect the reason you are adding this onto his thought is intimately related to #2.

2. One of the most important elements of Kant’s epistemology is that Reason can tell us nothing at all about the noumenal realm. Kant’s attempt to rescue certain objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism rested on the model that Reason is the unifying principle under which the categories of the understanding organize sense data into a unified perception that is objectively true. The validity of Reason, however, did not extend beyond what originated in sense perception, and any attempt to extend reason beyond the phenomenal world was the metaphysical error of Transcendental Illusion. He traced out examples of this error in the four antinomies in Bk II of the Critique of Pure Reason.

It took us awhile to circle back to my original criticism in the first few pages of this thread, but the above indicates you are holding to Kant's epistemology in CoPR, which I flatly reject. What you write above is exactly what I am saying is the result of implicit dualism and naive realism, even though I am well aware Kant assumed he had overcome both. That is why he failed to notice the inconsistency in his own argument within a span of a few pages. It assumes "sense perception" is only what comes through our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and touch, but not any content which comes through our conceptual activity, which he calls concepts of "pure reason". That simple error embeds metaphysical dualism and naive realism within it, and all subsequent Reasoning, ironically, is thrown off by those flawed assumptions.

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

3.What you wrote, and Steiner’s quote, has some similarity to Heidegger’s Being, but gives no justification for Reason as a means to deeper reality. You switched from Reason to a modified use of Logic. My question has to do with reality explicable through the logical unified explanation in the sense of Reason.

Steiner's illustration above should clarify this. Reason is not only a means to a deeper reality, but the only way in which we can make sense of terribly fragmented sense-perceptions which do not resemble the living reality undergirding them whatsoever (in this example, the living and growing rosebud) . The "continual process of development" does not occur without our Reason. The latter is a temporal manifestation of Logic which continues to evolve. Reason is the last mode of cognition evolved through humanity and will be the first to be transfigured into a new mode, but what applies to the rosebud also applies to our own cognition - if we treat the recent stage of Reason as a black hole of genuine knowledge, we have practically stopped observing our cognitive development and will thereby have an incomplete picture of Logos as such.

[JeffreyW]

1. The point of the Goethe quote, and there are many more like it, is that Kant’s noumenal does not exist - an implicit rejection of metaphysics. Goethe sees reason, spirit, etc as embedded in immanent reality. In this instance, there is nothing behind the blue sky, but everything is made apparent in the blue sky itself. Goethe’s view is very much like Spinoza’s pantheistic “god or nature”.

The first part is true and I agree, Goethe does not hold to any 'transcendental' realm of abstract metaphysical concepts which explain Nature, but the bold part is something you have added without any warrant and contrary to all evidence in Goethe's writings. The person who wrote Faust did not think "everything is made apparent" in the mere perceptions of the world, especially the richness of the normally invisible spiritual reality. The very idea of his archetypal proto-plant, which he perceived but Schiller did not, refutes that assertion. I suspect the reason you are adding this onto his thought is intimately related to #2.

2. One of the most important elements of Kant’s epistemology is that Reason can tell us nothing at all about the noumenal realm. Kant’s attempt to rescue certain objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism rested on the model that Reason is the unifying principle under which the categories of the understanding organize sense data into a unified perception that is objectively true. The validity of Reason, however, did not extend beyond what originated in sense perception, and any attempt to extend reason beyond the phenomenal world was the metaphysical error of Transcendental Illusion. He traced out examples of this error in the four antinomies in Bk II of the Critique of Pure Reason.

It took us awhile to circle back to my original criticism in the first few pages of this thread, but the above indicates you are holding to Kant's epistemology in CoPR, which I flatly reject. What you write above is exactly what I am saying is the result of implicit dualism and naive realism, even though I am well aware Kant assumed he had overcome both. That is why he failed to notice the inconsistency in his own argument within a span of a few pages. It assumes "sense perception" is only what comes through our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and touch, but not any content which comes through our conceptual activity, which he calls concepts of "pure reason". That simple error embeds metaphysical dualism and naive realism within it, and all subsequent Reasoning, ironically, is thrown off by those flawed assumptions.

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

3.What you wrote, and Steiner’s quote, has some similarity to Heidegger’s Being, but gives no justification for Reason as a means to deeper reality. You switched from Reason to a modified use of Logic. My question has to do with reality explicable through the logical unified explanation in the sense of Reason.

Steiner's illustration above should clarify this. Reason is not only a means to a deeper reality, but the only way in which we can make sense of terribly fragmented sense-perceptions which do not resemble the living reality undergirding them whatsoever (in this example, the living and growing rosebud) . The "continual process of development" does not occur without our Reason. The latter is a temporal manifestation of Logic which continues to evolve. Reason is the last mode of cognition evolved through humanity and will be the first to be transfigured into a new mode, but what applies to the rosebud also applies to our own cognition - if we treat the recent stage of Reason as a black hole of genuine knowledge, we have practically stopped observing our cognitive development and will thereby have an incomplete picture of Logos as such.

1. This flatly contradicts your assertion:

Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik.

2. Why are you attributing Kant’s epistemology, which I only summarized, to me?

3. My response to this will take some time.

[AshvinP]

1. The point of the Goethe quote, and there are many more like it, is that Kant’s noumenal does not exist - an implicit rejection of metaphysics. Goethe sees reason, spirit, etc as embedded in immanent reality. In this instance, there is nothing behind the blue sky, but everything is made apparent in the blue sky itself. Goethe’s view is very much like Spinoza’s pantheistic “god or nature”.

The first part is true and I agree, Goethe does not hold to any 'transcendental' realm of abstract metaphysical concepts which explain Nature, but the bold part is something you have added without any warrant and contrary to all evidence in Goethe's writings. The person who wrote Faust did not think "everything is made apparent" in the mere perceptions of the world, especially the richness of the normally invisible spiritual reality. The very idea of his archetypal proto-plant, which he perceived but Schiller did not, refutes that assertion. I suspect the reason you are adding this onto his thought is intimately related to #2.

2. One of the most important elements of Kant’s epistemology is that Reason can tell us nothing at all about the noumenal realm. Kant’s attempt to rescue certain objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism rested on the model that Reason is the unifying principle under which the categories of the understanding organize sense data into a unified perception that is objectively true. The validity of Reason, however, did not extend beyond what originated in sense perception, and any attempt to extend reason beyond the phenomenal world was the metaphysical error of Transcendental Illusion. He traced out examples of this error in the four antinomies in Bk II of the Critique of Pure Reason.

It took us awhile to circle back to my original criticism in the first few pages of this thread, but the above indicates you are holding to Kant's epistemology in CoPR, which I flatly reject. What you write above is exactly what I am saying is the result of implicit dualism and naive realism, even though I am well aware Kant assumed he had overcome both. That is why he failed to notice the inconsistency in his own argument within a span of a few pages. It assumes "sense perception" is only what comes through our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and touch, but not any content which comes through our conceptual activity, which he calls concepts of "pure reason". That simple error embeds metaphysical dualism and naive realism within it, and all subsequent Reasoning, ironically, is thrown off by those flawed assumptions.

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

3.What you wrote, and Steiner’s quote, has some similarity to Heidegger’s Being, but gives no justification for Reason as a means to deeper reality. You switched from Reason to a modified use of Logic. My question has to do with reality explicable through the logical unified explanation in the sense of Reason.

Steiner's illustration above should clarify this. Reason is not only a means to a deeper reality, but the only way in which we can make sense of terribly fragmented sense-perceptions which do not resemble the living reality undergirding them whatsoever (in this example, the living and growing rosebud) . The "continual process of development" does not occur without our Reason. The latter is a temporal manifestation of Logic which continues to evolve. Reason is the last mode of cognition evolved through humanity and will be the first to be transfigured into a new mode, but what applies to the rosebud also applies to our own cognition - if we treat the recent stage of Reason as a black hole of genuine knowledge, we have practically stopped observing our cognitive development and will thereby have an incomplete picture of Logos as such.

1. This flatly contradicts your assertion:

Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik.

How? It says nothing of "everything made apparent" in the blue sky.

2. Why are you attributing Kant’s epistemology, which I only summarized, to me?

I don't know. You really don't make it easy to figure out what your position is with these short and cryptic answers. Earlier you were adopting various positions for sake of argument without tellying anyone that was what you were doing I really didn't want to get into any other thinkers anyway, which is why I am trying to focus only on the phenomenology of perceiving-thinking.

[JeffreyW]

1. The point of the Goethe quote, and there are many more like it, is that Kant’s noumenal does not exist - an implicit rejection of metaphysics. Goethe sees reason, spirit, etc as embedded in immanent reality. In this instance, there is nothing behind the blue sky, but everything is made apparent in the blue sky itself. Goethe’s view is very much like Spinoza’s pantheistic “god or nature”.

The first part is true and I agree, Goethe does not hold to any 'transcendental' realm of abstract metaphysical concepts which explain Nature, but the bold part is something you have added without any warrant and contrary to all evidence in Goethe's writings. The person who wrote Faust did not think "everything is made apparent" in the mere perceptions of the world, especially the richness of the normally invisible spiritual reality. The very idea of his archetypal proto-plant, which he perceived but Schiller did not, refutes that assertion. I suspect the reason you are adding this onto his thought is intimately related to #2.

2. One of the most important elements of Kant’s epistemology is that Reason can tell us nothing at all about the noumenal realm. Kant’s attempt to rescue certain objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism rested on the model that Reason is the unifying principle under which the categories of the understanding organize sense data into a unified perception that is objectively true. The validity of Reason, however, did not extend beyond what originated in sense perception, and any attempt to extend reason beyond the phenomenal world was the metaphysical error of Transcendental Illusion. He traced out examples of this error in the four antinomies in Bk II of the Critique of Pure Reason.

It took us awhile to circle back to my original criticism in the first few pages of this thread, but the above indicates you are holding to Kant's epistemology in CoPR, which I flatly reject. What you write above is exactly what I am saying is the result of implicit dualism and naive realism, even though I am well aware Kant assumed he had overcome both. That is why he failed to notice the inconsistency in his own argument within a span of a few pages. It assumes "sense perception" is only what comes through our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and touch, but not any content which comes through our conceptual activity, which he calls concepts of "pure reason". That simple error embeds metaphysical dualism and naive realism within it, and all subsequent Reasoning, ironically, is thrown off by those flawed assumptions.

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

3.What you wrote, and Steiner’s quote, has some similarity to Heidegger’s Being, but gives no justification for Reason as a means to deeper reality. You switched from Reason to a modified use of Logic. My question has to do with reality explicable through the logical unified explanation in the sense of Reason.

Steiner's illustration above should clarify this. Reason is not only a means to a deeper reality, but the only way in which we can make sense of terribly fragmented sense-perceptions which do not resemble the living reality undergirding them whatsoever (in this example, the living and growing rosebud) . The "continual process of development" does not occur without our Reason. The latter is a temporal manifestation of Logic which continues to evolve. Reason is the last mode of cognition evolved through humanity and will be the first to be transfigured into a new mode, but what applies to the rosebud also applies to our own cognition - if we treat the recent stage of Reason as a black hole of genuine knowledge, we have practically stopped observing our cognitive development and will thereby have an incomplete picture of Logos as such.

The claim that reason is the means to a unified living reality is merely a metaphysical assertion, and one that current understanding of the universe flatly contradicts. It gives me no basis to believe that the fragments themselves aren’t indicative of reality and Reason is merely our practical construction.

I wrote all this at the beginning, but it was generally ignored so I’ll do it again. In the 19th century, reason had become a questionable basis for knowledge. Of course, Nietzsche was the most prominent philosopher to refute the validity of reason, but those from other fields played a role. Henri Poincare, a prominent mathematician and physicist, played an important role with his essay on The Four Geometries, in which he demonstrated that four geometries with contradicting premises could be equally internally consistent, suggesting that rational systems are artificial constructions.

Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, later expanded this idea in his often misunderstood but seminally important essay: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. His ironic use of “Unreasonable” is often missed. In the essay he demonstrates two important principles:
Given the same data, time, and space, multiple explanations can be given that are equally sound given their premises. For example, both heliocentric and geocentric theories accurately predicted the movements of the night sky.

All rational systems break down at some point. Newtonian physics accurately describes the thin slice or reality in which our reason evolved, but breaks down when we expand the scope either micro or macro. Relativity and quantum physics describe their own realm accurately, but flatly contradict each other and Newtonian physics. He goes on to propose his Epistemological Law of Empiricism, which says that any rational system is an imposition of order on a limited number of events, space, and time, and this apparent order will always tear apart as we expand the spatial and temporal scope, or the number of events. The persistent failure to achieve any unification theory only underscores this.

Quantum mechanics describes an irrational reality that violates both the identity principle through superposition, and the principle of sufficient reason through indeterminacy, again suggesting that Reason is a practical adaptation suited for reducing reality to icons that can be manipulated and predicted within a very narrow band of reality, but no applicability beyond that.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows the impossibility to justify any rational system. From this, Penrose determines that the most elemental reality is non-computational and arational.

Rovelli demonstrates that all order is an illusion made possible only through “ignorance”, by which he means blurring almost all of reality to a few related events in a subsystem, the appearance of which disappears back into the chaotic spin foam when we reduce the myopia.

In light of all this, I see no way to support the metaphysical assertion that Reason leads to deeper truth. Just the opposite.