AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Dec 02, 2021 4:25 am
JeffreyW wrote: ↑Thu Dec 02, 2021 3:46 am
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.
JW wrote: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.
Steiner wrote: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.
JW wrote: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.