Ashvin,
Scott already alluded to this. The most down-to-the-core consideration of the matter (to my knowledge) has been expressed in Rudolf Steiner's
Philisophy of Freedom (PoF). Because of the sensitive nature of the word
freedom, it has been translated with different titles like
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and
Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. In our age any mention of freedom immediately summons the picture of endless, fruitless quarrels, about whether freedom is real or predetermined illusion, but this is exactly what the work is
not about.
Clearly, this work is
not the most popular read but there are also quite understandable reasons for this.
One reason is that the philosophical habits through the centuries have become quite abstract. Many people can't really get anything out of PoF because they can't find what they expect to see in a typical work of philosophy. As a purely abstract discipline, most philosophical formulations begin with selection of the axioms/ontological primes/whatever (which may be motivated by the given but are used as completely abstract concepts) and then go on to show how by combining them in the most ingenious ways, one can build a tree of knowledge that can be
mapped back to the given. If we approach PoF with such expectation, we'll be bitterly disappointed.
PoF is not about using the mind to postulate abstract primes and investigate their relations but about
investigating the living activity that brings forth the primes in the first place. Everything that we read in PoF is not supposed to add some additional data within our mind but instead guides us in a way, that if we
livingly experience what we read, we hear the words not as something that Dr. Steiner claims but as something that we ourselves produce through our own thinking on the given. In other words, we understand PoF not if we are able to recite its contents but if we are able at any point to produce its contents as a description of
our own given experience. Probably some analogy can be made with mathematics, where it's not about duplicating someone's data within our mind but reaching a specific domain of cognitive experience. We can claim that we understand the Pythagorean theorem not if we are able to recite its contents but if we live through the mathematical thoughts that constitute its proof. These thoughts are objective experience quite unrelated to the fact who has been the first to discover a path to them. While we produce the proof from our own mathematical thinking, we are at the same time walking a path of a real cognitive experience. But this is only one part. PoF gives only some initial conditions, it can help us gain lucid perspective on the contents of the given. From there on we are on a path that no one has trodden before. As we'll see below, it's not about reaching and contemplating some static "truth" but it's a path, a process.
The second reason is that some people simply have antipathy for the direction where this path of experience leads. We must be quite clear about that. Even if something is true, this doesn't mean it's desirable. It's hardly necessary to give examples. We all know how we much prefer to turn a blind eye on a fault of character that we may posses, rather than confront it. Our cognizing activity is not immune to this either. Our thinking is being shaped by countless factors that have been accumulated through our life - most of them completely unconsciously. Just as an example, one such factor could be the assumption that there's a
by definition unknowable objective realm that is responsible for the contents of our subjective experience. Please note, that the trouble with this idea is
not that it says there are hidden causes behind our experiences but that it assumes that these causes can
in principle never be known in their reality, as facts of direct experience. Such an idea is not something that is being forced upon us by the given. When I experience color, I'm justified to say that this color stands as a mystery in front of me, I don't know where it comes from and why I perceive it. But when I assert that the unknown reasons for the color's experience are
in principle unknowable, then I add something to the given entirely out of myself.
For many thinkers, assumption as this, has made its way into their cognitive process quite unconsciously. It looks to them that such a thing is quite obvious, that everything points in that direction. But this unconscious assumption has great consequences for any further exploration of existence. It immediately leads us to the belief that we can consider as knowledge only the tree of knowledge that we build by linking concepts together and then showing how they
map to the given perceptions.
Let's try to imagine the living experience of someone who has spent decades trying to map reality in such a way. One day, in a flash of insight, he realizes that all this pursuit of knowledge has been an exploration of a very specific branch of a much more diverse tree of cognitive experiences. This sudden widening of the horizon of possibilities might be experienced as joy and enthusiasm. But other experiences can also make their way. Such an insight might just as well evoke anger. This is not just a simple switch of understanding "Oh, OK, so it's been X and not Y". Such experience adds a whole new perspective on our life experience. Now when we look back, we can trace how within a whole life segment, our cognitive activity has been
shaped through that invisible force of the assumption. The insight doesn't simply rearrange data on our screen but throws light on elements of reality that have been hitherto hidden. We were not aware of them previously but now, as Ashvin expresses it, a fog has been lifted and suddenly we perceive clearly the relation between the assumption and the shape of the thoughts. To put that into a metaphorical picture, we can say that previously our cognitive activity was flowing in certain patterns and rhythms and we were exploring the shapes thus formed. At that time we could say "that's just the patterns of neural activity" or "that's just the particular way awareness dreams its existence". But after the insight, our cognitive spiritual activity has found additional degrees of freedom. Previously, the explanation of our former thought shapes was sought into statements that point away towards reasons "in themselves" - laws of physics, dreaming awareness. Now through the transformation of our spiritual activity we realize that we have been (to continue with our poetic expression) enchanted into a love affair with an idea-being. We were so intrinsically merged with that idea-being that we were not aware of the way it was shaping our thoughts at every step. We don't imply here that the idea-being exists as some separate entity that forces our thinking out from distance. In our normal thinking, the perceptions of thoughts (words, mathematical symbols, etc.) are like condensations, projections of the ideas we experience as meaning. In this way, if the idea of the assumption is present, even if we cannot recognize it in its entirety, its essential nature is still being projected into every thought we form. The insight consists in the fact that we were able to encompass the vague idea as something concrete. Now we experience the idea as a part of the given and we can explore its relations to other ideas and perceptions. We are no longer confined to project thoughts that are unconsciously expressing the idea.
In this we have hinted at the essence of freedom as it is conceived in PoF. As we can see, it has nothing to do with empty speculations whether our activity is, from some external God-like perspective, free or pre-determined. What we can find in a completely practical way, is that it is possible to recognize elements that were previously shaping our soul life quite unconsciously but have now been lifted out of the fog. These elements have always been spread out within the given but we had to find our correct relation to them in order to
see them. As long as we don't know the forces shaping our experiences, we postulate concepts like nature, God, dreaming awareness, etc. In the process of transformation of our vantage point, we gradually discover the shaping forces within the contents of experience.
Now the chilling question in front of us is: "So it means that even in this very moment my thoughts, feelings, actions are shaped by such idea-beings that I'm merged with? And I can only penetrate into the actual reasons of my current flow of experience if I attain to a vantage point where these idea-beings become differentiated, so I can capture them in thinking and choose freely to associate with them or not?" You see, this is not a direction that most people will take with enthusiasm. Our current science and philosophy puts us into a very comfortable seat that keeps reality at a "safe distance" from us. We are quite comfortable to speculate about the workings of the brain, to imagine God has created our immutable personalities, that there's no personality at all but only the dream of cosmic consciousness. The first will say "I'm interested in science and philosophy, my personal life is completely separate matter". The second says "Blasphemy! How dare you question what God has created?!". The third will say "What personality?"
To touch upon what Eugene said:
Eugene I wrote: ↑Thu Jan 21, 2021 1:33 am
I entirely agree, since both states are possible, the experience of both states makes the idea of the existence of self inconclusive as well as the idea of its non-existence.
That's correct. We may never be able to perceive the self as "something in itself", as some fundamental element within the given. But we can surely have a practical idea of a self. To be more neutral with the words, instead of a self, we can speak of the specific environment within which our spiritual activity unfolds. And this environment does not contain only the perceptions of the sensory world but also all our knowledge - consciously or unconsciously attained, opinions, prejudices, sympathies and antipathies, hopes and fears. All this most surely forms the piping system through which our spiritual activity is forced the flow. We have no reason to claim that a self exists as some fundamental element of reality, but the labyrinth of the above mentioned factors most surely is part of the given and shapes our activity at every step. As long as we feel that our spiritual activity is able to reorganize this labyrinth, such that we attain to clearer and clearer perspective of it, we may label it a "personality". In this way we are not inventing anything but attaching a concept to perceptions of the given. Deviations occur only when we imagine that our thinking is somehow free from the labyrinth and we are in position to know reality independently of this environment. Actually we
only know reality to the extent we are conscious of the constellation of ideas that restrict the forms which our spiritual activity can take. Everything else can be called dreaming about reality but avoiding to confront it.
The thinking process has a peculiar place within the given. When we have perceptions, we can ask "why I'm perceiving this color? Where this sound comes from?". The only thing that, so to speak, does not surprise us with its presence, is the perception of our own thoughts. Of all possible perceptions, of the whole spectrum of experiences within the given, only thought perceptions (as long as we are observing the thinking process) are present as something for which the
cause is also experienced. We can often hear "Nature operates by such and such laws", "The Creative Nothing forms existence" but these are statements that stand only as abstract ideas. They express that
causes for experiences exist but at the same time, when we formulate them in such an abstract manner, "Nature" and "Creative Nothing" remain as something completely foreign to us - we have the ideas but we can never find them within the given. We don't have direct experience how Nature or Creative Nothing create existence, we only experience the "output" of these processes, and any attempt to find something of this creative process within our own experience is considered a disillusioned act of an ego intoxicated in its thirst for self-importance.
Yet if we really want to ground our cognition in the given, we can only state the obvious fact - within active thinking, cause and effect are experienced as one.
This is the only place we can experience a perception that contains its own cause. We can express this in many ways "The living Idea projects itself as a thought and beholds it", "The Universe observes its creative process within the thought-perceptions" and so on. But it is exactly here that we must be most vigilant because when we formulate such statements, we admire the thoughts as something that has already become external to this creative process. We may think that we are being humble and sober when we dissociate from the process where cause and effect are experienced together but from another perspective we can picture this as "The Creative Universe refusing to recognize its own creative activity and insisting that it's only a movie produced by the 'Creative Universe'".
There are many more things to be said here but this post is long enough already. The main takeaway is that, as we find things in the given, thinking stands out as the only thing where the cause is known. It is for this reason that the thinking process is the only logical place from which our quest for unveiling the hidden layers of the given can begin. After all, if we ignore the only thing where we can experience a cause
as a fact of the given, and instead imagine our own causes, how can we expect that these abstract thoughts can ever be experienced as real causes? We are throwing away the only thing that gives us a
point of contact with the creatively causative process and prefer to contemplate and admire the dead skin shed from the very same process.
The final reason for the unpopularity of PoF that we'll mention (which is related to the previous), is that many people dislike even more strongly the far reaching consequences of this spiritual path. To be able to lift the veils of our own personality and become progressively aware of all our weaknesses, faults, fears - not very appealing but bearable. But to describe that when this process is continued even further, one enters even greater environment of idea-beings, that shape not only our personality but the whole Cosmic landscape - this is what gets many people outraged. It is well known that Steiner didn't stop with PoF. He showed at great lengths how the process of lifting the fog can be continued even further and the contents of the experiences thus attained can be communicated. That's what became known as Anthroposophy. It is this second part of Steiner's work that puts many people off. The thinking is "If I'm gonna become such a mad esoterist, speaking of spiritual beings, I'd better stay away from PoF as it will probably simply brainwash me and prepare me for his sect."
But if what we are here talking about is at least partially understood, it should be more than clear that PoF is precisely the opposite of brainwashing - it is exactly the ability undress all accumulated and preconceived ideas, prejudices, opinions. Only in this way we can truly distinguish the given from the layers accumulated over it.
When I speak of PoF, I don't actually imagine the book itself. Please don't assume that I'm throwing around this as a fervent priest the Bible. Not at all. In fact, even as I've been writing this post I'm not sure if what I say here can be found in the book. PoF is a living experience. It is the experience of finding the truly certain within the riddle of existence and being able to calmly and objective perceive the contents of experience. It's not a destination, it's a process. We are free not if we take someone's ideas and choose to believe them or not but when we attain to a process that progressively reveals, layer after layer, how our spiritual experience has been formed thus far and how we can reveal what is yet to be uncovered.