AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 10:28 pm
Shaibei wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 6:38 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 5:16 pm
I have the same "proof" of it as I do for anything I know - my exeprience and reason. The fact is, everything in our experience is 'counterfactual' and 'untestable' in the modern sense. The claim that I exist and experience the world is as well. Absolute proof is impossible - one can always speculate my existence is an illusion. Does this make my claim a mere belief rather than genuine knowledge? There is no view that can stand apart from the Cosmos, looking at it unfolding from frame to frame, and say "the external order matches up with my internal order". When we ask for proof in that sense, we are asking for something which has no relation to first-person reality, only to our own abstract conceptualization of it. That holds for any propositional claim to "truth".
What we actually do is seek out new ideas which harmonize the facts of observation more than our previous ideas. This is how we pursue everything from our daily activities to systematic philosophy and science and say we have gained genuine "knowledge" in the process. At any given time, new facts of observation could upend previous ideas and force them to adapt. So my idea that the order within my Willing-Feeling-Thinking is intimately connected with the Cosmic order I perceive is one reasoned from first-person experience. It is reasoned from the first-person perception of
meaning which permeates all the outer and inner forms of that experience. New facts of experience will force my idea to adapt and evolve, IF I continue reasoning through them, but any reasoned ideas will not be completely dismantled if the Reality is, in fact, unified.
Otherwise, if I don't continue reasoning, my ideas will hit the "impenetrable" Kantian limit, which only exists and is impenetrable because my abstract intellect declared it to be. When you say "reason and meaning are not necessarily correlative", consider what is implied. It is implied that
your conception of "reason" as abstract intellectual thinking is the full essence of Reason (and Thinking) as such. It is failing to account for the limitations of our own thinking, as you say. We assume our small "t" thinking has exhaustively conceptualized our higher Thinking and use that as the basis for denying the otherwise intuitive connection between Reason which discerns meaning. We try to substitute "willing" or "feeling" in the West, or "pure awareness" in the East, as the faculty which discerns meaning. These things happen really often. It is a mental habit we are so accustomed to, that it is very hard to notice. It becomes an implicit claim to God-like knowledge about the limits of God-given thinking.
When discussing the limitations or non-limitations of thinking there is more than one aspect to consider.
For example, our thinking is limited by the fact that we forget things. If there is anyone who claims to remember everything, he has the burden of proof.
In the context of idealism, a significant difference between our thinking and that of M@L stands out, in that our thinking does not create objects.
In your discussion, you touch on the point of contention between Steiner and Kant, but ignore other aspects, like the ones I mentioned.
If my thinking were to create objects I would a priori know the laws of nature and not have to synthesize between my thinking and what my senses perceive. This synthesis begets scientific theories and other scientific theories that refute the first. How do we know we have reached the last point from which we can declare "there is nowhere else to progress"? we don't.
The problem is less in science, because even if we offer a model that works but does not give the full description of reality, wecan get along with it. The problem starts when someone claims to "see" the meaning behind the events of reality and argues that his statement has inter-subjective importance.
I know, for example, one who claimed to be a seer and declared that Theodor Herzl's vision of the State of Israel is delusional. And why is that? Because the establishment of such a state did not fit with his anthroposophical narrative. Well, it happens that this State saved the lives of many during WW2 and this "seer" was stuck in his own subjective imagination. Therefore one should always be careful.
What is being ignored here is the depth structure. Thinking is not all or nothing, omnipotence or abstract representations. Rather it is an entire gradient of meaningful discernment. Thinking allows for the formation of memories. Every previous state of being becomes potentially accessible memory for our thinking faculty to access. So your objection above is, "thinking gives us memory but not totally conscious memory right away, so it's fundamentally limited". This ignores the fact that every skill is acquired gradually over time via discipline and effort. It isn't all or nothing. It reminds me of this quote from Ayn Rand channeling Nietsche.
"Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them."
The same goes for creation of objects and knowing the laws of nature (or creating them). We do know that there is an intimate connection between our thinking and the structure of the phenomenal world. Science has practically confirmed what Barfield called "figuration" and Coleridge called "primary imagination" which mediates between meaning and perception. We are not fully conscious of that object-forming capacity right now. That is no reason to forsake the possibility of ever becoming conscious of it.
Again, you are implicitly adopting the "view from nowhere" when saying we synthesize what we think with what we perceive. Thinking is a sense-organ which perceives meaning. We are not matching up thoughts to sense data which is already complete, but bringing that sense data to completion by perceiving the meaningful element. Same for asking how we know if we have reached the final knowledge. If we still experience time and perception, that means there is still more to know, because there is still deeper meaning to mine.
The fact that the entire subconscious has not been made conscious yet also isn't a logical objection to the nature or potential of thinking. Thinking is what gives us the very possibility of making the subconscious more conscious. And the anecdote about the "seer" has no relevance either. I know people who have claimed to use their eyes when making up stories about what they saw. Does that fact reflect on the very essence and limits of vision? This objection also
presupposes Reason is not equal to the task of evaluating various claims to knowledge, spiritual, scientific, or otherwise, even though that is what our reason is always doing and how any field of knowledge advances. The conclusion you desire to reach about Reason is embedded in your assumption and you have traveled in a circle back to your own assumption.
At the root of this dynamic appears to be our persistent and near universal desire to be at the very apex of evolution, thinking, and knowledge. We posit one abstract Being to be above us, to maintain a religious sentiment, but besides that we are the creme de la creme. Either we already know everything or we have reached the very limits of knowing for
all ideational beings in the known Cosmos. A fascinating case study here is the evolutionary idealist philosopher, Hegel. He intellectually perceived the entire Cosmos as the unfolding of Logic through the Spirit. All human history, religion, philosophy, art, science, and culture in general, was the manifestation of higher order Logic rhythmically involving and evolving, i.e. dialectical process, by which the Spirit awakened within the human individual. His vision, then, was entirely aligned with Steiner's phenomenological idealism. Hegel elegantly expressed this process in the following image.
“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.”
Yet, even Hegel ended up assuming Logic had exhausted itself in the modern age. That is, in
his own age. He felt that all further progress towards spiritual freedom would unfold through the cultural institutions already in place when he was writing. What can be the explanation for this except the intellectual tendency to fortify its own supremacy? There is no other logical option. Hegel idolized his temporal perception of the spiritual evolution from the physical perspective, because it meant
his own philosophical and spiritual knowledge would never be surpassed to any significant extent. He failed to see how the modern age in which he lived is analogous to yet another imperceptible stage in the plant's life. It is the stage when the plant surrenders its life in a particular form so that its seeds can fall within the soil and give birth to an entirely new wave of organic forms. The death of the plant becomes the basis for rebirth at a higher stage of integration. That is the stage in which our own thinking-organism finds itself. We must discover the sacrificial plant nature within us to continue evolving.
