Phenomenological idealism: definitions of common terms

[Eugene I]

Eugene,

Point of clarification - you are quoting Brady the author there, not Steiner. I already explained what Brady is trying to say in that quote - he is talking about things that appear "other than thinking" to us at first blush, since the phenomenological method first starts from how phenomena manifest in our immanent experience. Clearly there are things which we naively perceive to be outside our own thinking, and it is only through Thinking that we can later conclude with epistemic confidence that they are not, in fact, other than Thinking in essence. But maybe if you hear it from Scott, you will take it more seriously...

In the meantime, I am reposting my very first essay, on Kant's epistemology, which I had occasion to update for other reasons, but it happens to be very timely with what is being discussed here. I really hope you take a look, because it can serve as a basic primer on what is going on in Kant's epistemic framework which is the same as yours, as Scott has also pointed out. It is a really short essay as far as essays go.

Nope, that's exactly Steiner, page 65

through Thinking that we can later conclude with epistemic confidence that they are not, in fact, other than Thinking in essence.

I don't like vague statements like "conclude with epistemic confidence". What does it mean - a proof or only argument-supported inference? We need to be clear about that and not attempt to "smuggle" and unwarranted assumptions.

Here is the key point I'm trying to emphasize here in this thread: we can only assume/infer such views, and perhaps support them with good arguments. Accepting such assumption above would be a major ontological leap, it's not a pure phenomenology-epistemology anymore. Other than that, yes, you can take this inference, I don't see any major problem with that.

[Eugene I]

Let's just say that sense perception comes to be understood as a kind of thinking.

I actually agree with it. Still a few things to note about it:
- It is still an inference
- There is a long way to go from this simple and reasonable assumption to the more far-reaching Cleric's "Absolute Idea"

Actually, I think any reasonable version of idealism would need to adopt this inference in order to be self-consistent. Even in the most "naturalistic" BK's version our sense perceptions are the "imprints" of ideations of of MAL instinctive thinking.

In my vocabulary, an 'idea' is a mumorphic act, of which 'formlessness' is one pole, with 'form' the other pole. So, being a pole of a polarity, there would be no "Absolute (formless) Awareness". One could say there is "Absolute Idea", though to distinguish this from Hegel's Absolute Concept, one would, I think, need to bring in the dynamic aspect of 'idea', which would then suggest 'thinking' or 'ideating' as a better word, as long as one doesn't restrict it to the feeble sort we engage in.

I agree, calling this "Absolute Awareness" is sort of misleading because it is never just Awareness, there is also always Ideation activity with its ideal content (forms) never separate from the Awareness (formless). On the on the hand, calling it just "Absolute Idea" ignores the formless aspect. We need a better term here. So as I said, it is perhaps the mumorphic approach that can resolve this dichotomy and restore the lost unity.

To clarify, the "Absolute Awareness" refers to the specific version of idealism pertinent to Buddhist, Advaitic traditions and some modern non-dual teachings (e.g. R Spira). Personally I spend a number of years immersed in these practices, but I do not adhere to it (anymore), IMO it is too limited in its scope.

[AshvinP]

Eugene,

Point of clarification - you are quoting Brady the author there, not Steiner. I already explained what Brady is trying to say in that quote - he is talking about things that appear "other than thinking" to us at first blush, since the phenomenological method first starts from how phenomena manifest in our immanent experience. Clearly there are things which we naively perceive to be outside our own thinking, and it is only through Thinking that we can later conclude with epistemic confidence that they are not, in fact, other than Thinking in essence. But maybe if you hear it from Scott, you will take it more seriously...

In the meantime, I am reposting my very first essay, on Kant's epistemology, which I had occasion to update for other reasons, but it happens to be very timely with what is being discussed here. I really hope you take a look, because it can serve as a basic primer on what is going on in Kant's epistemic framework which is the same as yours, as Scott has also pointed out. It is a really short essay as far as essays go.

Nope, that's exactly Steiner, page 65

through Thinking that we can later conclude with epistemic confidence that they are not, in fact, other than Thinking in essence.

I don't like vague statements like "conclude with epistemic confidence". What does it mean - a proof or only argument-supported inference? We need to be clear about that and not attempt to "smuggle" and unwarranted assumptions.

Here is the key point I'm trying to emphasize here in this thread: we can only assume/infer such views, and perhaps support them with good arguments. Accepting such assumption above would be a major ontological leap, it's not a pure phenomenology-epistemology anymore. Other than that, yes, you can take this inference, I don't see any major problem with that.

I am not seeing a page 65 or that quote from Steiner, but I will take your word for it now. Either way, it was explained how that quote was meant, and Cleric's quote of Goethean Science make very clear Steiner's philosophy of "Absolute Idea".

There really isn't any point trying to understand these things until you have understood the Kantian dualism implicit in your thought. Until then, you will view what we reach through Reason as mere "assumptions" or "inferences" about the "actual world" existing apart from our ideational activity, and no amount of explanations to the contrary will convince you otherwise, because the basis of those explanations (consistent monism) has been subconsciously ruled out from the beginning. The only reason you feel justified in separating out "Awareness" from "Thinking" is because of this implicit dualism. You will say it is simply a distinction and they always exist together, but that is not how it's functioning in your reasoning. It is functioning as an actual divide, where Thinking is always considered thinking about what we first become aware of.

[Eugene I]

The only reason you feel justified in separating out "Awareness" from "Thinking" is because of this implicit dualism. You will say it is simply a distinction and they always exist together, but that is not how it's functioning in your reasoning. It is functioning as an actual divide, where Thinking is always considered thinking about what we first become aware of.

Funny that I'm always talking about the unity of Awareness and Thinking. I don't say that the Awareness comes "first", any act of Thinking is always simultaneous and inseparable from Awareness. You attempts to label it as Kantian dualism are futile, it is NOT. In Kantian split the noumenon is unknowable and un-experienceable for Awareness-Thinking. In my approach it is directly 1-st person experienceable by Awareness-Thinking. Whether it is fully cognizable by Thinking is an open question, I make no assertions (or negations) about that. And that is because the formless (Awareness) aspect of it is not just an idea (not a concept, ideation, form). A just-concept can not experience anything. In other words, an idea can not embrace the fullness of the Reality of formless-form mumorphism, but it can still reflect on it.

I am not seeing a page 65 or that quote from Steiner, but I will take your word for it now. Either way, it was explained how that quote was meant, and Cleric's quote of Goethean Science make very clear Steiner's philosophy of "Absolute Idea".

On page 19 of the Brady's paper there is a quote from p.65 of the PoF

[AshvinP]

The only reason you feel justified in separating out "Awareness" from "Thinking" is because of this implicit dualism. You will say it is simply a distinction and they always exist together, but that is not how it's functioning in your reasoning. It is functioning as an actual divide, where Thinking is always considered thinking about what we first become aware of.

Funny that I'm always talking about the unity of Awareness and Thinking. I don't say that the Awareness comes "first", any act of Thinking is always simultaneous and inseparable from Awareness. You attempts to label it as Kantian dualism are futile, it is NOT. In Kantian split the noumenon is unknowable and un-experienceable for Awareness-Thinking. In my approach it is directly 1-st person experienceable by Awareness-Thinking. Whether it is fully cognizable by Thinking is an open question, I make no assertions (or negations) about that. And that is because the formless (Awareness) aspect of it is not just an idea (not a concept, ideation, form). A just-concept can not experience anything. In other words, an idea can not embrace the fullness of the Reality of formless-form mumorphism, but it can still reflect on it.

I am not seeing a page 65 or that quote from Steiner, but I will take your word for it now. Either way, it was explained how that quote was meant, and Cleric's quote of Goethean Science make very clear Steiner's philosophy of "Absolute Idea".

On page 19 of the Brady's paper there is a quote from p.65 of the PoF

Eugene,

You have literally been trying to prove to us that Steiner thought "the given" is something "other than thinking". That is dualism! That is the assumption you employ, so you are hoping you will also find it in Steiner and that we will be forced to accept that we have been wrong about Steiner's monist philosophy of Thinking all along. You need to be honest with yourself here... you are completely underestimating the influence of Kantian dualism and that mindset is reflected in all of your comments on this thread, every time you try to conceive of the relationship between Thinking and the underlying Reality. I am not even exaggerating - it is literally in all of your comments, so there is no possible way Cleric, Scott, and myself are still misunderstanding you, not to mention all of our previous encounters on other threads over many months. The noumenon/phenomenon dualism is only an artifact of the deeper subject/object dualism, and you once again assert that in bold above.

In our knowing, however, we create a picture of the directly given that contains considerably more than what the senses — which are after all the mediators of all experience — can provide. In order to know nature in the Goethean sense, we must not hold onto it in its factuality; rather, nature, in the process of our knowing, must reveal itself as something essentially higher than what it appears to be when it first confronts us.
...
At first, the world presents itself to us as a manifoldness in space and time. We perceive particulars separated in space and time: this colour here, that shape there; this tone now, that sound then, etc... Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement.
...
Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible.There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.

- Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science (1883-97)

[Ben Iscatus]

While of course 'anthroposophy', by definition, is pertaining to the human domain of perceiving/thinking, yet what are we to make of a fly selecting out from the blooming, buzzing confusion the percept of a dog turd as a meaningful experience? Presumably that's a kind of primal thinking too.

Yes, this is why to call such perception "thinking" is so odd. If an Absolute Idealist were to write an essay on the spiritual significance of a dog turd, I'm sure we'd all read it.

[Eugene I]

Ashvin, bear with me, I'm going through Steiner's work step by step. Yes, thanks to the quote that Cleric provided, I see it now, Steiner does claim that the "other-than-thinking" is in essence the same Thinking, the percepts are ideas. I'm convinced. What Steiner never mentioned is how he arrived from the phenomenological start-point:

Only our immediately given world-image (Weltbild) can offer such a starting point, that is, that which lies before us prior to subjecting it to the process of cognition in any way, before we have asserted or decided anything about it by means of thinking.

And through the epistemological step:

But when we want to know something other than thinking, we can do so only with the help
of thinking — that is, thinking has to approach something given and transform its chaotic
relationship with the world picture into a systematic one. Thinking therefore approaches the
given content as an organizing principle. The process takes place as follows: Thinking first
lifts out certain entities from the totality of the world-whole. In the given there is actually
no singularity, for all is continuously blended. Then thinking relates these separate entities
to each other in accordance with the thought-forms it produces, and lastly determines the
outcome of this relationship. When thinking restores a relationship between two separate
sections of the world-content, it does not do so arbitrarily. Thinking waits for what comes
to light of its own accord as a result of restoring the relationship. It is this result alone
which is knowledge of that particular section of the world content. If the latter were unable
to express anything about itself through that relationship, then this attempt made by
thinking would fail, and one would have to try again. All knowledge depends on
establishing a correct relationship between two or more elements of reality, and
comprehending the result of this

to claiming that all “other-than-thinking” is essentially the outcome of the Thinking itself, including the very experiencing of any phenomenon. That requires an ontological leap (inference/assumption) that he has not explicitly stated, so it looks like he "smuggled" it implicitly (perhaps he did somewhere stated it, in which case I would be interested to see a relevant quote).

Also, so far I haven't seen any mention of the awareness, of the conscious experiencing of the phenomena by Steiner, it looks like he just ignores it as something unimportant, and that is a hole in his philosophy. As I said many times, any philosophy that ignores/misses the experiencing/awareness aspect of reality is necessarily incomplete.

Don't try so scare me with dualism, there are multiplicities and polarities in the world: waves and particles, formless and form, conceivable and inconceivable, etc, none of which creates any duality, only multiplicity. Just like in math there are unprovable ideas, in the Reality there are inconceivable aspects, but they are still knowable/experienceable, so there is no Kantian gap. Ineffability with respect to concepts/ideas does not exclude experiential knowability.

But as I said, you can make an inference that the Reality is fully and exhaustibly conceivable by ideas (which is the same as to say that it is fully reducible to ideas). In other words, this means that the formless is actually a form, which would dissolve the mumorphism and leave only one aspect - the form. But that would be just that - an inference, assumption. But my own spiritual experience and high-level intuition tells me that it is just not true, so personally I won't adopt such assumption. But if you want to adhere to it then it's your free choice, I have no problem with that.

So, to be clear, my personal take (if it matters anyway as if anyone cares ):
- I actually think that all phenomena (forms) are ideal in essence (including sense perceptions), and are the result of some intentional thinking activity (of some Divine entity), but I want to emphasize that this is based on an assumption.
- I can not accept the assumption that the formless aspect (Awareness) is "ideal"/conceptual in essence and reducible to form (idea, concept). It could be said that the formless-form mumorphism is the "Idea", as long as we understand that such "Idea" still bears a non-conceptual aspect (awareness). Or, we can say that "the Idea is self-experiencing by nature".

[AshvinP]

While of course 'anthroposophy', by definition, is pertaining to the human domain of perceiving/thinking, yet what are we to make of a fly selecting out from the blooming, buzzing confusion the percept of a dog turd as a meaningful experience? Presumably that's a kind of primal thinking too.

Yes, this is why to call such perception "thinking" is so odd. If an Absolute Idealist were to write an essay on the spiritual significance of a dog turd, I'm sure we'd all read it.

The notion that we simply know what a "fly" is, let alone how whatever it is perceives-cognizes the world conent, is born of Kantian dualism and the subconscious egoism underlying it. Since it views all reasoning through the phenomena as a useless endeavor, it simply assumes whatever is naively perceived is the full extent of the "fly". It neither admits that it has no idea what the fly is or how it experiences, or that we can reason our way to a better understanding with patience and effort, so it takes the convenient egoistic way out - whatever I immediately perceive-think the fly to be, that is what it is.

[Cleric K]

But as I said, you can make an inference that the Reality is fully and exhaustibly conceivable by ideas (which is the same as to say that it is fully reducible to ideas)

And THAT's the dualism that you deny You keep seeing ideas as packets of meaning within awareness. You see awareness as circular container and ideas as rectangles within that container that can be arranged as mosaic but can never completely fill in the circle. And that's completely true when speaking of intellectual thoughts. If this is how it was, I wouldn't subscribe either. As said earlier this is the event horizon to which Hegel reaches. Your remarks are justified for Hegel's philosophy because for him the concept is indeed the ground reality. It is difficult to see how the world can emerge from the concepts of thinking. But please try to understand that the Idea in the sense of Goethe, is not a concept in the mind. It is the meaningful essence of the Cosmos. Just take your One Awareness and try to conceive that the more you move towards the apex the more meaningful it is.

You ask about the leap that Steiner takes. He doesn't take a leap but simply asks that we don't place self-imposed ceiling on how much the meaning of our state can grow. Otherwise we inevitably arrive at some kind of monadism where the different monads can experience some kind of meaning but there's limit. For example, it is impossible to speak of a greater monad which encompasses the meaning of the separate ones into a greater whole (and not only to encompass the meaning in some informative way but that this meaning is the creative intent through which smaller monads take shape, similarly to the way our meaning creates thoughts). In other words, the Cosmos at large, even if we don't call it blind and dark will, is assumed to operate in ways that neither the Cosmos nor the monads can experience as meaningful. They are bound to forever remain inexplicable, irrational, instinctive. We can fantasize that they are not irrational, that they are governed by some completely different kind of Divine logic, call it meaning2. Yet our meaning1 can never grow into meaning2.

You see, we must not confuse presenting ideas with leaps. Otherwise you won't be able to learn even the numbers in mathematics. There's nothing in your pre-mathematical consciousness that can convince you that there's such thing as numbers. So yes, you need a leap but not a leap of blind belief that will forever remain just that but a leap to experience the thoughts. No one is asking for belief in the Absolute Idea. The thing is that if you take this journey in a living way, by living in the thoughts, and not simply seek a hole in their alibi from distance, you'll make a small step in a new direction. Then you'll make another step and another. Then you'll have to ask yourself "OK. If I'm moving in that direction, how much more I can go before I hit the ceiling?" Then the realization will come that the ceiling is there only if we place it ourselves. This allows us to speak meaningfully about the point at infinity where the road leads. If you say "That's an assumption" I'll say "OK, come with me. Let's go together. Show me where the ceiling is."

The thing to realize is that these ideas are not to be framed on the wall and believed (eventually verified after death). This knowledge is practical. We can speak of growing meaning because we experience it ourselves in small steps. If we don't take the first step we can speculate forever if even the first step is possible. But if we have experienced at least one step then we feel that the burden of proof is on us to think of an excuse why it should be impossible to take the second, the third and so on steps. Hedge in the other thread is at least honest that he is afraid of what he might find. And this is natural in our age. This fear is the same as the fear of death. It's the fear of spiritual reality. As any fear, it is overcome through knowledge and gradual strengthening through experience.

[Soul_of_Shu]

The notion that we simply know what a "fly" is, let alone how whatever it is perceives-cognizes the world conent, is born of Kantian dualism and the subconscious egoism underlying it. Since it views all reasoning through the phenomena as a useless endeavor, it simply assumes whatever is naively perceived is the full extent of the "fly". It neither admits that it has no idea what the fly is or how it experiences, or that we can reason our way to a better understanding with patience and effort, so it takes the convenient egoistic way out - whatever I immediately perceive-think the fly to be, that is what it is.

Cronenberg's take on it ...