What we Learned from JW's Monism

[Mark Tetzner]

I must also ask what is the actual relevance of all of those germans JW was going on about without getting into much depth upon? Did heidegger and kriekgard and husserl and the like (however their long names are spelt) really somehow make metaphysics utterly irrelevant? he kept stating this yet never gave an in depth answer as to why, does anyone here know why he would think that?

First of all I think JW is also looking to impress, which is only human, for example with his German-skills. He sprinkels in German all the time, the question is just what that adds to the debate. I am not saying he in truth does not understand German, he most certainly does to at least a high degree. But being an American and reading those people and understanding them is surely extremely, extremely hard. Just that I could not even understand some of the German he sprinkled into his videos. I understood a little, google did the rest. And I am German, as you know. Which is no crime, after all he is not German and sure the Americanos will find it cool. And I learned from him that Heidegger suposedly used words that do not exist. Sure it is possible that he made them up, but I am not going to read all of Heidegger so see if he really used certain terms like Mitstimmung on page 399 - or not. Nor do I understand why its all so important to him. It would have been nice if JW would have sent sources and quotes along but he never did. It makes you wonder. But I am not sure if it matters, there are many who think that we can not grasp the nature of reality because all our analysing happens in our head and is useless in their opinion. Because we are imagining it and can not touch things as they are.

I am guessing that the old Germans are a passion of his, good on him and his right. Hey, maybe he understands "the old Germans" better than myself, it can not be ruled out! For example there are people who study Latin etc. So its not impossible. He said he read them in German.

His take is that "these thinkers" demanded silence in front of the mystery and that we should shut up. Nothing wrong with that either, it is one of the major questions we all must ask ourselves, it is naive to skip it.

Heidegger also wrote a book "Was ist Metaphysik"? and I only just read the blurb on amazon and am completely anable to imagine what he may be talking about, it sounds like gibberish. That they even said what they supposedly said is nothing I can verify because I did not hunt for it. And it is possible that they came from a different angle than JW thinks. Were they thinking or talking about consciousness even? I will shut up, I dont know.

As for Wittgenstein, I a not sure if he even cared about any of this, I think he was a language-guy to a high degree. Not sure...He did not really trust his own thinking and second-guessed it, that is what I read somewhere. Well, maybe they were crazy

[AshvinP]

I must also ask what is the actual relevance of all of those germans JW was going on about without getting into much depth upon? Did heidegger and kriekgard and husserl and the like (however their long names are spelt) really somehow make metaphysics utterly irrelevant? he kept stating this yet never gave an in depth answer as to why, does anyone here know why he would think that?

It's not about any specific thinker making metaphysics irrelevant, but the evolution of cognition itself. We can look at the situation for ourselves and see why abstract metaphysical thought practically becomes the same over time, regardless of ontology (physicalism, dualism, idealism). They all converge towards the same epistemic nihilism because they ignore the role of immanent Thinking activity in the World Content. JW's also kept Thinking in the blind spot and therefore failed to see how his own 'post-structural' position functions the same as abstract metaphysics.

[JustinG]

AshvinP wrote:
So if we must look to immanent experience for this "prior to", the only conceivable place to look, quite literally, is our own Thinking.

Berdyaev wrote:
The problem is in this, that the way of Steiner and the way of the Steinerians have little in common between them. The way of Steiner is a way of gnosis, the way however of the Steinerians is a way of faith.

AshvinP wrote:
Ok, what you bolded may be true... so what is the point? Do you really think people like Cleric writing amazingly detailed imaginative posts, without ever referencing Steiner, God, scripture, or anything similar, is doing so out of his "authoritarian faith"? Such an argument is so absurd that it hardly warrants any further consideration.

You've answered your own question. Steinerians do not look to their own Thinking, but to the pre-conceived map provided by Steiner.

In addition to what Cleric said, the reason I included the underlined is to make clear how it's obvious Cleric is working with his own concrete Thinking experience to provide all of these posts to us and not simply reiterating a map provided by Steiner, as you are doing with your googled then copied-and-pasted quotes of other thinkers you are not even familiar with. It is failure to perceive our own Thinking in this manner which keeps the unexamined dualism firmly in place and makes us project what we ourselves are doing onto everyone else around us who we dislike or disagree with.

The following is a list of 12 clear signs that we are still thinking dualistically and therefore failing to move towards a cease-fire treaty in our inner civil war. Each sign is accompanied by an illustrative quote, which can aid us in understanding the deeper significance of these signs. The quotes are aids to the ceaseless evolution of our Thinking organism and should by no means be confused for a final destination. They come from about nine different philosophical thinkers, but I am intentionally choosing not to attribute the quotes (but will provide references to any specific requests), because that is a critical aspect of overcoming dualistic thinking. The primary way in which this dualism reasserts itself is through our own unexamined sympathies or antipathies for this or that philosopher, scientist, economic system, political party, spiritual tradition, etc. Our subconscious antipathies especially take possession of our intellect, and then we can hardly understand what has been written in any objective, dispassionate manner. Instead, we begin projecting everything we deeply dislike, without knowing it, into whatever sentences we are reading. Then, before we know it (quite literally), our desires, feelings, and thoughts are right back at war with each other. Our subconscious has once again been fortified and militarized.

Ashvin,

To show where I am coming from, here is a bit of my story and what I have learned from my experiences:

Everything is emotion. When happy, the world is bright. When depressed it is grey. When drunk, one sees double. When doing meditation or spiritual exercises, there are certain experiences. When doing other activities, there are other experiences. In encountering the world, it is not subject meeting objects, but subject meeting subjects. Every perspective is valid from where it stands, and there is no one perspective that is the only truth.

I wrote an essay on the above in the 90's, which is here https://panexperientialism.blogspot.com ... ffect.html. From there, I developed an interest in the philosophy of Whitehead - not as absolute truth, but as one useful way of making sense of the world. I've recently completed a Master of Research on the topic of panpsychism and social theory. In fact, I got my mark for my thesis back yesterday and got 96%, so am very pleased! You'll have to forgive me if I am not in the mood for heavy philosophizing at the moment.

Here is a link to my thesis: https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/cn9aog95DT5QQ1V

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

To show where I am coming from, here is a bit of my story and what I have learned from my experiences:

Everything is emotion. When happy, the world is bright. When depressed it is grey. When drunk, one sees double. When doing meditation or spiritual exercises, there are certain experiences. When doing other activities, there are other experiences. In encountering the world, it is not subject meeting objects, but subject meeting subjects. Every perspective is valid from where it stands, and there is no one perspective that is the only truth.

I wrote an essay on the above in the 90's, which is here https://panexperientialism.blogspot.com ... ffect.html. From there, I developed an interest in the philosophy of Whitehead - not as absolute truth, but as one useful way of making sense of the world. I've recently completed a Master of Research on the topic of panpsychism and social theory. In fact, I got my mark for my thesis back yesterday and got 96%, so am very pleased! You'll have to forgive me if I am not in the mood for heavy philosophizing at the moment.

Here is a link to my thesis: https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/cn9aog95DT5QQ1V

Justin,

Here's the major issue underlying our back and forth here - you seem to feel that Cleric or myself don't already understand your position. When I read what you wrote above, I think, "yes all of this makes sense... it fits exactly with the assumptions I thought Justin was employing". I am sure Cleric will think the same. This is exactly what JW felt as well - he listed his academic credentials, his knowledge of German, etc. and then assumed someone like myself or Cleric could not possibily be familiar with or understand what he has already learned. That is why I suspect he ignored all of my requests to read Cleric's posts and respond to them specifically. It probably looked like a bunch of gibberish to him, like Steiner's chapter on individuality in PoF looked to Jim. It's not about this or that philosopher's thought-system - you may indeed know more about those than myself or Cleric.

But that is exactly what we are trying to move away from, especially myself. Abstract thinking feels like it must build a worldview by cobbling together mineralized concepts from this philosopher here, that philosopher there, comparing the concepts to each other, building a bigger concept out two smaller ones, etc. We say, this is not how the Ideal reality is or how it evolves. No idea is reducible to any other idea. Our abstract thought-systems are ideal phenomena, like any other phenomena we encounter in Nature, and can only be explained through the Ideal evolutionary process, not the other way around. One cannot study Whitehead, panpsychist philosophy, Marx, etc. and then derive the evolutionary processual essence of Reality, because the latter simply is not structured that way (the 'bottom-up' reductive way).

The bottom-up reductive approach manifests in all ontologies - physicalism, dualism, idealism, DA monism, panpsychism. It doesn't matter. And, at risk of losing Martin's appreciation again, this approach is necessitated by unexamined Cartesian-Kantian dualist assumptions which are deeply ingrained in the modern psyche. This can be discerned quite clearly in the "subject meeting subjects" bolded phrase. One only needs to visualize what this world looks like to immediately sense the implicit fragmentation which is built into the very structure of how ontic Reality is perceived. But if one has not also experienced how Reality could be perceived without this dualistic addiction - as Cleric put it, if one has never experienced being sober - then they will not sense that fragmentation and will flow along with it, none the wiser.

Nevertheless, this 2nd image below can at least point the way to experiencing a different sort of Reality, especially if it is immediately compared to the 1st image i.e. the "subject meeting subjects" imagery.

[Dave casarino]

these are interesting models but the spherical one as amazing as it is as an image has a sort of emanationist style ontic extension/distancing which to me is well maybe not dualism but a sort of actualisation at a point of difference from origin point over time and through excessive extending from one point to another point. Do category differences in progression a la neoplatonism corrupt true non duality?

[AshvinP]

these are interesting models but the spherical one as amazing as it is as an image has a sort of emanationist style ontic extension/distancing which to me is well maybe not dualism but a sort of actualisation at a point of difference from origin point over time and through excessive extending from one point to another point. Do category differences in progression a la neoplatonism corrupt true non duality?

Dave,

The most important thing to remember is these are visual symbols of an essentially non-physical, non-spatial Reality. The moment we start thinking the symbol has more explanatory power than the most basic point it is being used to convey, it becomes counter-productive to genuine understanding. That basic point it is being used to convey is that we all exist within a shared Macrocosmic living organism of ideations - I mean "organism" in a very literal sense, just as your limbs, organs, etc. and inner experiences belong to your living microcosmic organism. There is certainly a cognitive distancing which has occurred from the shared ever-present Origin, through the archetypal subconscious 'layers' of experience between the Origin and our localized cognition, which is practically an undeniable aspect of our immanent thinking experience. Yet the image also conveys how there is no fundamental thinking barrier between our peripheral perspective and the Origin, as we find in the flattened perspective of the 1st image. Consider the below quote:

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.

[Dave casarino]

True, but anyway, what exactly is so great about Heidegger anyway? Is he exactly philosopher supreme as JW espoused? Should I read him?

[Anthony66]

That basic point it is being used to convey is that we all exist within a shared Macrocosmic living organism of ideations - I mean "organism" in a very literal sense, just as your limbs, organs, etc. and inner experiences belong to your living microcosmic organism. There is certainly a cognitive distancing which has occurred from the shared ever-present Origin, through the archetypal subconscious 'layers' of experience between the Origin and our localized cognition, which is practically an undeniable aspect of our immanent thinking experience. Yet the image also conveys how there is no fundamental thinking barrier between our peripheral perspective and the Origin, as we find in the flattened perspective of the 1st image.

Magnificent Ashvin!