Watching this video re Antrhroposophy

[lorenzop]

I only have watched first few minutes, but it looks to be 17 minutes of dense aphorisms each of which could take countless time units to unpack. Also his delivery is Germanesque in its delivery, he does not bother to blink.
He says:
'The sense world itself is not a reality. It becomes reality when completed by our thinking. The concept is the essense of what appears as perception. The idea of a thing, its effective principle. It generates the being in its lawfulness.'
My questions:
1. is this solopsism-lite?
2. what is the 'sense world' if not a reality, is this a case of if a tree falls in the forest . . . ?
3. what/how does thinking make a sense world real or more real?


Here is link:

[AshvinP]

I only have watched first few minutes, but it looks to be 17 minutes of dense aphorisms each of which could take countless time units to unpack. Also his delivery is Germanesque in its delivery, he does not bother to blink.
He says:
'The sense world itself is not a reality. It becomes reality when completed by our thinking. The concept is the essense of what appears as perception. The idea of a thing, its effective principle. It generates the being in its lawfulness.'
My questions:
1. is this solopsism-lite?

Lorenzo,

I guess that depends on how you are defining "solipsism" and "solipsism-lite". What is really interesting is that, the reasons why people feel they need to avoid "solipsism" at all costs, are actually manifested in the philosophies which conceive the Cosmos as 'made of' distinct subjects with their personal bubbles of consciousness. At the very core, the latter is an egoic desire to hoard all experiences to ourselves, with no one to 'invade our privacy', as if our experience of Cosmic existence is something we can take personal possession of and own.

2. what is the 'sense world' if not a reality, is this a case of if a tree falls in the forest . . . ?

He is pointing to our own co-creative role in reality. The 'view from nowhere' imagines that if all thinking be-ings (as processes) vanish, the tree still falls in the forest as it does when we observe it. The participatory idealist view says the very meaning of "tree", "falling", "forest", etc. is integral to the 'objective reality' and that meaning is provided through the thinking activity of be-ings.

3. what/how does thinking make a sense world real or more real?

See #2. It's not that thinking makes a pre-existing world "more real", but that there can be no conceivable world without thinking be-ings. Even if you have the thought now, "a world without any thinking beings", the meaningful content of that thought only comes through your own thinking.

[lorenzop]

A Materialist would say the property of 'being real' or 'exist' does not need nor can be added to a thing.

[Cardenio]

To build on what Ashvin wrote: I think another way to think of it is to say that the creative principle, sometimes called The Logos, that is responsible for the existence of the world is also present in us, as us in the deepest sense. Insofar as we are not conscious of this presence (i.e. perhaps it is the parousia or so-called "Second Coming" of Christ the Logos) in us, we will not be equipped to find it in the rest of the world. And this present manifests initially and most immediately to us in the spiritual activity behind thinking. I hope I got this right and it is not misleading.

[AshvinP]

To build on what Ashvin wrote: I think another way to think of it is to say that the creative principle, sometimes called The Logos, that is responsible for the existence of the world is also present in us, as us in the deepest sense. Insofar as we are not conscious of this presence (i.e. perhaps it is the parousia or so-called "Second Coming" of Christ the Logos) in us, we will not be equipped to find it in the rest of the world. And this present manifests initially and most immediately to us in the spiritual activity behind thinking. I hope I got this right and it is not misleading.

Cardenio,

That is a great point. It is difficult to speak of these Christ-related aspects in our time. Many will simply assume there is evangelical preaching going on, even if there is nothing written to suggest that. But what you say is exactly right. Cleric has spoken of this previously as 'soul volume'. I tried to write a few short essays in that connection, re: high ideals and gratitude. We can simply observe the vast Cosmos and say, "some creative and ordered principle must be responsible for all this - one that manifests truth, beauty, and goodness - and that same principle lives in me as a being who thinks, feels, and wills". Then we can try to sense the concrete responsibility this bestows upon us, to be an image of that principle in the world around us through our thinking, feeling, and willing. We can try to sense how we actively mediate between its rich Divine meanings, which funnel into a 'point' of our Thinking activity, and then flows out expansively into all the worldly perceptions.

"Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?"

[lorenzop]

To build on what Ashvin wrote: I think another way to think of it is to say that the creative principle, sometimes called The Logos, that is responsible for the existence of the world is also present in us, as us in the deepest sense. Insofar as we are not conscious of this presence (i.e. perhaps it is the parousia or so-called "Second Coming" of Christ the Logos) in us, we will not be equipped to find it in the rest of the world. And this present manifests initially and most immediately to us in the spiritual activity behind thinking. I hope I got this right and it is not misleading.

Not sure how this addresses my question - How can the sense world not be a reality (until completed by our thinking)
Is saying the sense world is not a reality, the same as saying it's not real?
I would be OK with saying the sense world is neither real nor unreal.
BTW, I am not expressing skeptisicm as much as befuddlement.

[AshvinP]

To build on what Ashvin wrote: I think another way to think of it is to say that the creative principle, sometimes called The Logos, that is responsible for the existence of the world is also present in us, as us in the deepest sense. Insofar as we are not conscious of this presence (i.e. perhaps it is the parousia or so-called "Second Coming" of Christ the Logos) in us, we will not be equipped to find it in the rest of the world. And this present manifests initially and most immediately to us in the spiritual activity behind thinking. I hope I got this right and it is not misleading.

Not sure how this addresses my question - How can the sense world not be a reality (until completed by our thinking)
Is saying the sense world is not a reality, the same as saying it's not real?
I would be OK with saying the sense world is neither real nor unreal.
BTW, I am not expressing skeptisicm as much as befuddlement.

Consider this illustration:

Let us return to our example of the thrown stone. We connect the sight perceptions that originate from the individual locations in which the stone finds itself. This connection gives us a curved line (the trajectory), and we obtain the laws of trajectory; when furthermore we take into account the material composition of the glass, and then understand the flying stone as cause, the shattering of the glass as effect, and so on, we then have permeated the given with concepts in such a way that it becomes comprehensible to us. This entire operation, which draws together the manifoldness of perception into a conceptual unity, occurs within our consciousness. The ideal interrelationship of the perceptual pictures is not given by the senses, but rather is grasped absolutely on its own by our spirit. For a being endowed only with the ability to perceive with the senses, this whole operation would simply not be there. For such a being the outer world would simply remain that disconnected chaos of perceptions we characterized as what first (directly) confronts us.

Now some may take that last part and say, "ok but there is still a reality of disconnected chaos of perceptions". But it is only being stated that way for purpose of highlighting the role of our own thinking activity. As far as we can ever know, there is no being in any reality which goes around consciously experiencing a world of disconnected chaos of perceptions. If we try to imagine that, we will quickly find it is impossible. There are thinking beings who perceive a more or less harmonious array of perceptual content (including inner perceptions of thoughts, feelings, desires) - when it's more, we say it is "logical" or "reasonable", when it's less, it becomes more "illogical" or "unreasonable". We are not passive observers in this process, because our logical thinking (Logos principle) is doing the harmonizing. We are, essentially, beings who harmonize via ensouled logical thinking.

[lorenzop]

How do we know or establish the sense world is a 'disconnected chaos'? This seems more like a Materialist position - the world is a-swirl of sub atomic particles or probability waves.

[Cardenio]

How do we know or establish the sense world is a 'disconnected chaos'? This seems more like a Materialist position - the world is a-swirl of sub atomic particles or probability waves.

I think the point is to draw our attention to the fact that stimulation of the sensory organs is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for perception. Instead, any such stimulation must be complemented or completed by our ability to "make sense of it," which is to say, to think it through and thereby grasp its concept. We can take vision as a representative example: our eyes detect color and motion but as to what it is that is so colored or which so moves, the eyes must remain silent. Instead we see through our eyes with our ideas/intelligence. I understand that W. James was pointing to a similar observation when he coined the phrase "a blooming, buzzing confusion."

You will probably say: "but you are talking about perception of the world and not the world itself when you say 'the sense world is a disconnected chaos.'" It's important to address this issue head on. The ideal for epistemology is to begin without presuppositions because to begin with presuppositions begs the question that is being posed. We would, in turn, have to justify those presuppositions and it does no good to simply appeal to more presuppositions in the justification. The premise that "the real world" is made of sub-atomic particles and probability waves is definitely a presupposition. A good test for this is to imagine an entirely different theoretical substratum to reality and consider whether it would make the slightest difference to our direct experience. The answer here is definitely "no." We know this because many people had/have never heard of these things and yet their immediate experience remains unchanged. Compare the idea of altering the theoretical substratum to altering an elementary feature of perception, like color, or emotions, or ideals, or desires. It makes no sense to say that colors, emotions, ideals, or desires, could be different and yet we might not notice. That is because these things are elementary features of experience by definition whereas something like sub-atomic particles are an inference, model, or extrapolation from those features. That is why an epistemology that begins without presuppositions cannot begin with the models of the physicists and must instead begin with what is immediately given to experience. As Steiner argues, it can be seen that two elements confront one another in direct experience, which he terms Begriff (often translated as "concept") and Wahrnehmung (often translated as "percept").

I know the answer was not thorough but at the same time, I hope you will find something in it to be clarifying.

[AshvinP]

How do we know or establish the sense world is a 'disconnected chaos'? This seems more like a Materialist position - the world is a-swirl of sub atomic particles or probability waves.

Lorenzo,

In additional to the great response Cardenio gave, we can also consider that there are times when we perceive, from 1st person perspective (the only perspective), a more chaotic array of content. It is not often, or perhaps not at all for more fortunate people, because the world is so structured for us already through human culture and institutions, which are collective embodiments of Ideas which constantly provide a backdrop of meaning for us, but we can imagine a situation where tragedy strikes all of a sudden.

Perhaps, if you from US, you remember watching or hearing the news when the planes struck the twin towers in NYC on 9/11. For Americans, that was quite a tragic event. I remember I was in high school spanish class at the time and the memory of everyone's reaction is vivid. That is when our understanding of the world is shaken at its core and we are plunged into a more chaotic state. Another stereotypical example is when a spouse catches their partner cheating on them. Everything you thought you knew about your life partner is called into question.

The law even has a legal concept for murderous acts committed in this heat of rage, "voluntary manslaughter", which carries less severe penalties than murder. It is implicit that the person was almost in a temporary state of unconsciousness, a bit like sleep walking but with a lot of rage, blind to what they were doing in the world, acting out of pure instinct. When these sorts of things happen, people are experiencing concrete examples of how a lack of Thinking which permeates the sense content with intelligible meaning literally leads to more chaotic perceptions and sometimes even impulsive actions.

We also have analogies to this when signals are scrambled and we hear or see a bunch of "static". What are "signals" other than meaningful ideations being transmitted with perceptions? The static in the analogy results from an inability to match the ideations with the content in a harmonized way.