Starbuck wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 1:44 pm
Ashvin wrote:
To be fair, BK has debated Phillip Goff and John Verveake several times, though I agree his clashes with materialists probably get more hits.
Park of the problem is when you say 'we' like its a collective thing with all in agreement. I would imagine there are potentially an infinite number of idealisms. Not sure how BK can take that all on! Materialism is also nuanced but it is the prevailing paradigm, and in a sense monolithic - and Im sure you share his critiques if not his solutions.
By the way I would love nothing more than for you to get an hour with Bernardo to go into depth. My guess is you would end up sharing a lot more common ground than you might think. From what I see, his world view could include yours but not vice versa. Think you might be mixing up 'genuine knowledge' with gnosis/enlightenment.
I will give you the Goff one, Vervaeke didn't seem like a debate of anything really, but still it was a great discussion.
Yes, there are infinite amount of abstract intellectual formulations of "idealism". That is our critique - no movement is actually made from the abstract intellectual theory to a living undertanding of idealism and its practical applications in the world. The latter requires a narrowing down of the infinite formulations to those which harmonize the facts of experience in a practically useful way. For most people, there is absolutely no difference in their desiring, feeling, or thinking - experience of the world content in general - whether they are "materialist", "dualist", or "idealist". This is a clear sign that these things are only held at the most abstract, non-practical level. They are the fodder for endless intellectual debate, mostly within academic circles, and for book sales and website subscriptions, but nothing else. If that is what some people want and are satsified with, then that's fine. We are only speaking to the people who still feel that understanding these things at a deeper and more practical level are important for current humanity.
Steiner wrote:The fact that what we seek in things exceeds what is directly given us in them, splits our entire being in two parts; we become conscious of our polar opposition to the world. We confront the world as independent beings. The universe appears to us in the polarity: I and the world. We erect this wall of separation between us and the world as soon as consciousness lights up within us. But never do we lose the feeling that we belong even so to the world, that a bond endures that joins us to it, that we are not beings outside, but rather inside the universe.
This feeling creates the striving to bridge the polarity. And the entire spiritual striving of mankind ultimately consists in the bridging of this polarity. The history of our spiritual life is a continuous searching for the unity between us and the world. Religion, art, and science all pursue this goal. The religious believer seeks, within the revelation which God allots to him, the solution to the world riddle that his “I,” not content with the world of mere phenomena, poses him. The artist seeks to fashion into matter the ideas of his “I,” in order to reconcile what lives in his inner being with the outer world. He too feels himself unsatisfied by the world of mere phenomena and seeks to mold into it that something more which his “I,” transcending the world of phenomena, contains. The thinker searches for the laws of phenomena; he strives, thinking, to penetrate what he experiences observing. Only when we have made the world content into our thought content, only then do we find again the connection from which we ourselves have detached ourselves.
The notion that his worldview could "include" ours is also the result of abstraction. You feel the bare concepts of "MAL", or the basic metaphors of "dissociation", etc. are actually
explaining our experiences in the world. We disagree. We say this is explaining next to nothing about that experience. It is just labeling the experiences, putting them into the box of "mind", sealing up the box, and that's it. Now everything has been "explained" somehow. Shouldn't a creative and evolving worldview actually present novel forms of ideas, illustrations, arguments, etc? Again, regardless of what you think about our arguments, I don't think it can be reasonably denied we are doing this (assuming you actually follow the essays/posts), while BK endlessly debates materialists about the same "hard problem" over and over. You are right, though, that we don't consider BK's view "wrong" in any fundamental way, only
incomplete.
Ashvin wrote:It should be clear that the concepts in these infernal loops are not fundamentally "wrong", but rather they are incomplete because they remain within a flattened and circular plane of thinking. What is common to all such loops? They all lethally undermine the central role and efficacy of our own thinking activity . Moreover, they all force the person engaged in the loop to rely on increasingly more abstract concepts as they seek more understanding. The religious fundamentalist, for example, must perpetually generate doctrines and dogmas, with endless intellectual interpretations, to remain relevant in any spiritual conversation. That is because the other alternative - direct perceiving and knowing of what the doctrines are symbols for - has been excluded from the thought-loop. None of these infernal loops are logically necessary or warranted from our given experience. They are simply the consequence of an intellect which has subconsciously decided to stop reasoning through its experience whenever reaching its subconsciously desired conclusion. It is the software program repeating or terminating itself once it has cycled through its pre-programmed code.