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".