Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:15 am
JeffreyW wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:23 am
There are some fine points that need to be established here, which may take a few turns. This first is important: Being is not a quality, but the very truth of existence. Being, as the ground of existence, cannot be a quality of something else, and as such cannot be compared to experience. There is nothing else for Being to be a quality of.
I suspect we will be returning to this several times.
Yeah well, and there's good reason why we return to it again and again. For all intents and purposes, if there is nothing to be posited about the immanent nature of
Being other than, by definition, it exists, and to posit that the immanent nature of this
Being is in any way aware, so it is claimed, can only be an unfounded metaphysical premise, then ontology ends there. Yet we're still left with how to account for the origin of awareness, an accounting that remains entirely in the dark. And yet again, I'm not getting why
Being being immanently aware is so much more troublesome than awareness being utterly inexplicable. Why should endless speculation about the latter trump the metaphysical premise of the former? In this experience,
Being and awareness are inextricable, and any
Being existing apart from awareness can only be an abstraction within awareness.
Although I would not mind continuing a dialogue on metamorphoses of cognition with JW, I also want to summarize what I think is going on here.
Notice JW and Eugene both skipped over Thinking right into "existing" or "Being-ness" as the quality (or "very truth") which we can have absolute confidence and trust in. To nearly everyone, this will seem like a justifiable move, even a patently obvious one. But by skipping over the immanent reality of Thinking which is used to say anything about "existing" or "Being-ness" in the first instance, we are forced to insert thinking (with small 't') later as an abstract concept (unless we are hardcore materialists, then it is simply left out altogether). We have already entered into a dualism of "existing" and "thinking" at that point. Remember we are talking
ontology here - this cannot be avoided by switching back to a claim of epistemic distinctions. Once one skips over Thinking as concrete Reality of our immanent experience, there is never any reason to look for it later. Inevitably, due to sound philosophical and scientific considerations, one must then posit a complete void of knowledge which exists within the structure of Being, and there is literally nowhere else to possibly go from there, as you correctly point out (Shu).
The reason why the Reason-Imagination (representational-poetic/aesthetic) link is so important is because it reveals an inner logic which heralds a new stage of cognitive evolution. Not aeons from now, but already manifesting significantly in our present day. If we
a priori foreclose on the possibility of Reason having the capacity to even discern this inner logic, then obviously we will say it isn't possible and anyone writing about it, no matter how thorough and well-reasoned their arguments, must be mistaken. This is the real tragedy of the Cartesian-Kantian dualism - it's not about abstract metaphysical concepts, i.e. monism v. dualism, idealism v. materialism, etc., but rather it is about dead-ends of knowledge which manifest only because we convinced ourselves it is practically impossible to find what we are looking for - and what the human soul has always been looking for since the dawn of self-awareness is
a way out from the dead-ends back to its primordial Source.
That
a priori assumption comes in many forms in the modern age. Everyone seems to think the person with an opposing philosophy has done it but not themselves. BK says DID (dissociative identity disorder) is inherent structure of MAL. JW says representational thinking has practically veiled poetic thinking for aeons. The common element to both is implicit naive realism and dualism. It takes what is fundamentally a
mental habit, and reifies it into a fixed law of Reality itself. Barfield asked, "
why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy?" The unexamined naive realism and dualism is why. That is where Steiner's
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Thinking) is invaluable, because it shows us, by way of step by step analysis of perception and cognition as it manifests in our immanent experience, how we, as individuals, can come to
trust in our living Reason again, despite the nearly fatal thrashing it has taken in the modern age.
Behind Steiner, the thinker who documented this inner logic of cognitive evolution the most thoroughly is Jean Gebser in
The Ever-Present Origin. There are a few others like Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo who also investigate along the same lines - "
such a fundamental mutation as thinking—which gives the entire species its distinctive stamp—must transcend the point of origin and the beginning of evolutionary development." (Chardin).The evidence is undeniable, so the only question is whether we trust our Reason enough to evaluate it or, as is the norm in the modern and post-modern age, we will say our Reason is of no use and therefore this evidence is nothing more than idle speculation. If we held to that view of Reason in any other sphere of life, nothing would ever get done. But, in philosophy, we feel it is justified because we have divided the world of practical aims from Being itself. We say one can pursue practical aims endlessly without ever getting closer to Being. There is really nothing more escapist and life-denying than this mentality, which Nietzsche was correct to criticize so strongly.
Gebser wrote:Anyone today who considers the emergence of a new era of mankind as a certainty and expresses the conviction that our rescue from collapse and chaos could come about by virtue of a new attitude and a new formation of man’s consciousness, will surely elicit less credence than those who have heralded the decline of the West. Contemporaries of totalitarianism, World War II, and the atom bomb seem more likely to abandon even their very last stand than to realize the possibility of a transition, a new constellation or a transformation, or even to evince any readiness to take a leap into tomorrow, although the harbingers of tomorrow, the evidence of transformation, and other signs of the new and imminent cannot have gone entirely unnoticed. Such a reaction, the reaction of a mentality headed for a fall, is only too typical of man in transition.
...
By returning to the very sources of human development as we observe all of the structures of consciousness, and moving from there toward our present day and our contemporary situation and consciousness, we can not only discover the past and the present moment of our existence but also gain a view into the future which reveals the traits of a new reality amidst the decline of our age. It is our belief that the essential traits of a new age and a new reality are discernible in nearly all forms of contemporary expression, whether in the creations of modern art, or in the recent findings of the natural sciences, or in the results of the humanities and sciences of the mind. Moreover we are in a position to define this new reality in such a way as to emphasize one of its most significant elements. Our definition is a natural corollary of the recognition that man’s coming to awareness is inseparably bound to his consciousness of space and time.
Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin . Ohio University Press. Kindle Edition.