New topic split from 'concise criticism of analytic idealism' thread.

[Federica]

The brief question I posed on the server:

Q/Criticism: A key point where modern thinking went astray into materialism was when the thinking subject was abstracted out from the design and observations of experiments - it was felt the results were divined directly from outer perceptions and the observer's thinking agency had no role. Schopenhauer claimed he could observe the noumenal Will directly from inner perceptions, i.e. his own thinking agency was abstracted out from the process of concluding this ontology. How is this any different than the aforementioned materialist?

Great framing of the question, Frederica! I hope this one is asked.

Thank you AshvinP! Knowing nothing about Schopenhauer's philosophy, I am unable to comment on your question. However if you, or anyone else, is willing to share thoughts around mine on body-boundary as epistemic convenience vs. empirical fact, I would be so very interested in reading them!

[Soul_of_Shu]

Beyond one of these hurried-along Q&A sessions, allowing mostly quick pat answers with no deep dive into any thorough explication, someone really needs to have a long talk, i.e. dialogos, with BK about the question of redemption in the here and now, according to his Schop-inspired version of idealism—which seems to offer none, or at least nothing more promising than what materialism offers. Apparently for him, the best that one can haplessly hope for is to surrender to the Will of Nature, that it will do with us what it will, however many eons of evolution that may take, and that any notion of having some individual metacognitive say in our redemption is frankly illusory—which raises the question, what 'Good' (of the kind wedded to 'Beauty' and 'Truth') does it do that Nature has developed the capacity for metacogniton via its human expression? Supposedly little, this being why Christianity, as just one example, certainly on any collective scale, has failed miserably in delivering on its claim of redemption being available in the here and now, while the horrors of war and mass shootings go on and on, idealism too being likewise damned.

[Jim Cross]

Beyond one of these hurried-along Q&A sessions, allowing mostly quick pat answers with no deep dive into any thorough explication, someone really needs to have a long talk, i.e. dialogos, with BK about the question of redemption in the here and now, according to his Schop-inspired version of idealism—which seems to offer none, or at least nothing more promising than what materialism offers. Apparently for him, the best that one can haplessly hope for is to surrender to the Will of Nature, that it will do with us what it will, however many eons of evolution that may take, and that any notion of having some individual metacognitive say in our redemption is frankly illusory—which raises the question, what 'Good' (of the kind wedded to 'Beauty' and 'Truth') does it do that Nature has developed the capacity for metacogniton via its human expression? Supposedly little, this being why Christianity, as just one example, certainly on any collective scale, has failed miserably in delivering on its claim of redemption being available in the here and now, while the horrors of war and mass shootings go on and on, idealism too being likewise damned.

I think redemption is more the realm of religion. Philosophy is more about living and accepting what is rather than salvation from it.

[AshvinP]

The brief question I posed on the server:

Q/Criticism: A key point where modern thinking went astray into materialism was when the thinking subject was abstracted out from the design and observations of experiments - it was felt the results were divined directly from outer perceptions and the observer's thinking agency had no role. Schopenhauer claimed he could observe the noumenal Will directly from inner perceptions, i.e. his own thinking agency was abstracted out from the process of concluding this ontology. How is this any different than the aforementioned materialist?

Great framing of the question, Frederica! I hope this one is asked.

Thank you AshvinP! Knowing nothing about Schopenhauer's philosophy, I am unable to comment on your question. However if you, or anyone else, is willing to share thoughts around mine on body-boundary as epistemic convenience vs. empirical fact, I would be so very interested in reading them!

Frederica,

You are absolutely correct about the body-boundary as an epistemic convenience which has been reified into empirical fact for purposes of ontological/metaphysical speculation. This is very much tied in with Kant and Schopenhauer's epistemology (the latter has been adopted by Kastrup). Somewhere along the way, these thinkers adopt a naive realism - they take a merely perceptual experience and assume it is a 'thing-itself'. This contradicts their own philosophy, which is normally very critical of naive realism, but they do it because it is the only way to continue the ontological speculation. Consider the various "fundamental questions" asked by people pursuing metaphysical theories:

- What is the essence of everything we perceive?
- What is the essence of the human individual who perceives?
- What is the purpose of our existence?
- How did we come into being in the distant past and where are we going in the distant future?
- Does God exist and, if so, who or what is he? How is he involved in where we have been and where we are going?

It makes great sense, at this point, to ask, "what is the nature of the faculty we would use to even approach these questions, i.e. what are we capable of knowing?" That is the beginning of epistemology in modern philosophy, and Kant was the first and the last to tackle it among the academic philosophers. Nearly everyone after him, including Schopenhauer, simply adopted his position that we can't know anything of essence through our reasoning. But then how to continue pursuing our trade of academic philosophy? The only way is to become inconsistent and selectively choose what will be treated as mere appearance and what will be given more ontological status (ignoring the fact that one's own epistemology ruled out the possibility of doing the latter).

Schopenhauer basically does this for bodily and inner perceptions - in this way he concludes that what is "within him" as impulses of will (naively accepting physical body boundaries as real) must be the very essence of the Cosmos, since what is within him (matter) is also spread throughout the Cosmos. This isn't entirely inaccurate, but he has abstracted out the fact that he reasoned his way to this conclusion, and that all acts of knowing require such reasoning. That means human reason is not bound by the Kantian limit and is interwoven with all our conscious experience of the World Content (WC).

What is the nature of this relationship between human reason and the WC? Those who adhere to the naive realism of body-boundary will say all our inner experiences, including thoughts, are contained within this boundary and must model the WC which exists outside the boundary. They may not say this explicitly, but it is presupposed in all of their arguments. It is what gave rise to the Kantian limit in the first place. What does this accomplish? It severs human thinking from the WC so that the latter is considered something pre-existing our thinking, which only comes along later and tries to model it. Armed with this assumption, the modern philosophers can say their conclusions were generated from direct observation of 'facts' which don't include their concepts.

Even though they all reach much different conclusions - idealists, materialists, fundamentalists, etc. - they all claim to have divined these conclusions directly from perception. They forget how their intellectual thinking was involved in the weaving together of these experiences. If that was understood, then it would become clear why the "atomized human ego" view is a product of their own flawed thinking, not the structure of Reality itself. It does appear that we are each bound within our skin, but that's all it is - mere appearance. When we continue reasoning further, as modern science has done in certain cases, we find that such a boundary is only perceptual and not ontological. Once that is realized, we naturally come to the reasoned conclusion that we are not perceiving the entire spectrum of reality - that there are aspects of the human organism and the Cosmos at large which are supersensible to intellectual cognition yet still have a critical influence on the dynamics of our experience.

But consider the following thought experiment. Imagine an extraterrestrial humanoid life form whose mode of visual recognition was based on the enumeration of the material components that make up particular [manifestations] of general types, rather than on the identification of the general types that are instantiated by particular [manifestations]. Imagine, further, that this alien lands on Earth at a particular location and encounters two dogs: a living dog and a robotic dog. The alien scans the two dogs, catalogues their material constitution for future identification, and returns home. A few years later, the alien returns to Earth to the same location and faces the two dogs it encountered in its first trip. Despite being in the presence of the same two dogs, the alien’s cognitive apparatus is such that he is only able to identify the robotic dog and not the living one. From the alien’s perspective, the living dog of the first trip has faded out of existence, and an entirely different living dog has taken its place. What this admittedly fanciful thought experiment is meant to illustrate is that, if one focuses on matter rather than on form and allows for a sufficiently extended period of time, the stream-like nature of macroscopic organisms becomes perfectly evident. The fact that this does not happen to be easily perceptible to us does not make it any less true or important.

- Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Science (2018)

We could analogize it to the supersensible spectrum of Light. As humanity involuted into more complex and rigid sense-perception, which also allowed for more clear and precise intellectual consciousness, portions of the Light spectrum were veiled from normal waking cognition. We no longer perceive ultraviolet, infrared, etc. with unenhanced physical senses. The same thing goes for Sound frequencies. Where has the ultraviolet spectrum gone? Nowhere. It doesn't exist behind some veil as a 'noumenal Light-in-itself'. It still exists on 'our side' of experience and permeates all of that experience, but is veiled from our current cognitive perception. Nevertheless, it is always influencing our organism in detectable ways. The same can be said of supersensible forces of the soul (perceptions, impulses, feelings) and spirit (thoughts). These reside within us and therefore we must turn our living reasoning activity inwards for genuine Self-knowledge. It is that Self-knowledge - the fear of unknown 'dangers' lurking within the soul - that modern man wants to desperately avoid by conjuring up intellectual dualities and discontinuities, but ignoring these forces within simply gives rise to their outward manifestation in ever-more destructive ways. We should not ignore them but confront them honestly with the Light and Warmth of our spiritual activity.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

[Federica]

Frederica,

You are absolutely correct about the body-boundary as an epistemic convenience which has been reified into empirical fact for purposes of ontological/metaphysical speculation. This is very much tied in with Kant and Schopenhauer's epistemology (the latter has been adopted by Kastrup). Somewhere along the way, these thinkers adopt a naive realism - they take a merely perceptual experience and assume it is a 'thing-itself'. This contradicts their own philosophy, which is normally very critical of naive realism, but they do it because it is the only way to continue the ontological speculation. Consider the various "fundamental questions" asked by people pursuing metaphysical theories:

- What is the essence of everything we perceive?
- What is the essence of the human individual who perceives?
- What is the purpose of our existence?
- How did we come into being in the distant past and where are we going in the distant future?
- Does God exist and, if so, who or what is he? How is he involved in where we have been and where we are going?

It makes great sense, at this point, to ask, "what is the nature of the faculty we would use to even approach these questions, i.e. what are we capable of knowing?" That is the beginning of epistemology in modern philosophy, and Kant was the first and the last to tackle it among the academic philosophers. Nearly everyone after him, including Schopenhauer, simply adopted his position that we can't know anything of essence through our reasoning. But then how to continue pursuing our trade of academic philosophy? The only way is to become inconsistent and selectively choose what will be treated as mere appearance and what will be given more ontological status (ignoring the fact that one's own epistemology ruled out the possibility of doing the latter).

Thank you, AshvinP for the thorough reply! This seems to be a major opposition to idealism.
So you are saying: they can’t postulate mentation as ontological primitive, because they do this through reasoning after saying that nothing of essence can be known through reasoning. And you want to tackle the nature of reasoning before the nature of reality on the grounds that we can’t begin to tackle the latter without the former, Correct?

Now, I have no idea about IK or AS, however when it comes to BK’s model, I don't find any implicit or explicit postulate that nothing of essence can be known through reasoning. Have you found it? I am not even sure this comes as a deduction in his idealism. Why would he hold such a position? I don't think he does.

My body-boundary critique btw only disputes the particular way BK chooses to explain how the universal mind articulates itself in the multitude of individualized subjects of experience, namely dissociation and the body as its representation. It doesn’t dispute the idealist hypothesis itself. I just would like to see a better way to explain the de-combination of mind-at-large.

Schopenhauer basically does this for bodily and inner perceptions - in this way he concludes that what is "within him" as impulses of will (naively accepting physical body boundaries as real) must be the very essence of the Cosmos, since what is within him (matter) is also spread throughout the Cosmos. This isn't entirely inaccurate, but he has abstracted out the fact that he reasoned his way to this conclusion, and that all acts of knowing require such reasoning. That means human reason is not bound by the Kantian limit and is interwoven with all our conscious experience of the World Content (WC).

Again, I can't comment on AS, however I would not agree that human reason is interwoven with all conscious experience (whatever conscious means in your use, and even if it means meta-conscious). To me, thought or reasoning, is just one modality of knowing-experiencing. Reasoning, among other phenomena, might be required for practicing academic philosophy but not necessarily for all acts of knowing.
Reasoning (or thought) happens as one phenomenon among other knowing-phenomena (i.e. perceptions & bodily sensations, thoughts, memories & mental images, emotions) that all contribute to spread light onto the ‘big questions of existence’.

What is the nature of this relationship between human reason and the WC? Those who adhere to the naive realism of body-boundary will say all our inner experiences, including thoughts, are contained within this boundary and must model the WC which exists outside the boundary. They may not say this explicitly, but it is presupposed in all of their arguments. It is what gave rise to the Kantian limit in the first place. What does this accomplish? It severs human thinking from the WC so that the latter is considered something pre-existing our thinking, which only comes along later and tries to model it. Armed with this assumption, the modern philosophers can say their conclusions were generated from direct observation of 'facts' which don't include their concepts.

BK does not say or imply that. The body-boundary comes in his model only as a secondary hypothesis that he posits as an explanation of the privacy and relative separation of our individual subjectivity.
Moreover, BK could not be farther away from saying that his conclusions are generated by direct observation of facts. First, reality is experiential or mental, not 'factual', second there is no such a thing as direct observation of reality in his model. Observation happens in the cockpit, as per the well-known metaphor. What we are capable of perceiving is not reality and its qualities, but merely a survival-convenient re-rendering of reality on the screen of perception.
No severance between human thinking and world content in BK's model either. On the contrary, it is a continuous and reciprocal impingement of mental contents on both sides!

Even though they all reach much different conclusions - idealists, materialists, fundamentalists, etc. - they all claim to have divined these conclusions directly from perception.

Well, no... BK for example claims to have come to his conclusions from experience (which includes thought) and an ontological primitive or postulate: mentation. Mentation being an extension to the whole of reality of our own experiential first person knowing.

They forget how their intellectual thinking was involved in the weaving together of these experiences. If that was understood, then it would become clear why the "atomized human ego" view is a product of their own flawed thinking, not the structure of Reality itself. It does appear that we are each bound within our skin, but that's all it is - mere appearance. When we continue reasoning further, as modern science has done in certain cases, we find that such a boundary is only perceptual and not ontological.

Such a boundary is not ontological in BK's idealism either: everything is mental. No ontological boundary between reality outside and reality inside us.
We are whirlpools in the lake of universal mentation he says. Such a boundary is only perceptual: BK agrees with that. He says that the human body is what our experiential inner life looks like to a second observer.

Once that is realized, we naturally come to the reasoned conclusion that we are not perceiving the entire spectrum of reality - that there are aspects of the human organism and the Cosmos at large which are supersensible to intellectual cognition yet still have a critical influence on the dynamics of our experience.

I don't see this vision as irreconcilable with idealism...

But consider the following thought experiment. Imagine an extraterrestrial humanoid life form whose mode of visual recognition was based on the enumeration of the material components that make up particular [manifestations] of general types, rather than on the identification of the general types that are instantiated by particular [manifestations]. Imagine, further, that this alien lands on Earth at a particular location and encounters two dogs: a living dog and a robotic dog. The alien scans the two dogs, catalogues their material constitution for future identification, and returns home. A few years later, the alien returns to Earth to the same location and faces the two dogs it encountered in its first trip. Despite being in the presence of the same two dogs, the alien’s cognitive apparatus is such that he is only able to identify the robotic dog and not the living one. From the alien’s perspective, the living dog of the first trip has faded out of existence, and an entirely different living dog has taken its place. What this admittedly fanciful thought experiment is meant to illustrate is that, if one focuses on matter rather than on form and allows for a sufficiently extended period of time, the stream-like nature of macroscopic organisms becomes perfectly evident. The fact that this does not happen to be easily perceptible to us does not make it any less true or important.

- Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Science (2018)

We could analogize it to the supersensible spectrum of Light. As humanity involuted into more complex and rigid sense-perception, which also allowed for more clear and precise intellectual consciousness, portions of the Light spectrum were veiled from normal waking cognition. We no longer perceive ultraviolet, infrared, etc. with unenhanced physical senses. The same thing goes for Sound frequencies. Where has the ultraviolet spectrum gone? Nowhere. It doesn't exist behind some veil as a 'noumenal Light-in-itself'. It still exists on 'our side' of experience and permeates all of that experience, but is veiled from our current cognitive perception. Nevertheless, it is always influencing our organism in detectable ways. The same can be said of supersensible forces of the soul (perceptions, impulses, feelings) and spirit (thoughts). These reside within us and therefore we must turn our living reasoning activity inwards for genuine Self-knowledge. It is that Self-knowledge - the fear of unknown 'dangers' lurking within the soul - that modern man wants to desperately avoid by conjuring up intellectual dualities and discontinuities, but ignoring these forces within simply gives rise to their outward manifestation in ever-more destructive ways. We should not ignore them but confront them honestly with the Light and Warmth of our spiritual activity.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

[/quote]

[AshvinP]

Frederica,

You are absolutely correct about the body-boundary as an epistemic convenience which has been reified into empirical fact for purposes of ontological/metaphysical speculation. This is very much tied in with Kant and Schopenhauer's epistemology (the latter has been adopted by Kastrup). Somewhere along the way, these thinkers adopt a naive realism - they take a merely perceptual experience and assume it is a 'thing-itself'. This contradicts their own philosophy, which is normally very critical of naive realism, but they do it because it is the only way to continue the ontological speculation. Consider the various "fundamental questions" asked by people pursuing metaphysical theories:

- What is the essence of everything we perceive?
- What is the essence of the human individual who perceives?
- What is the purpose of our existence?
- How did we come into being in the distant past and where are we going in the distant future?
- Does God exist and, if so, who or what is he? How is he involved in where we have been and where we are going?

It makes great sense, at this point, to ask, "what is the nature of the faculty we would use to even approach these questions, i.e. what are we capable of knowing?" That is the beginning of epistemology in modern philosophy, and Kant was the first and the last to tackle it among the academic philosophers. Nearly everyone after him, including Schopenhauer, simply adopted his position that we can't know anything of essence through our reasoning. But then how to continue pursuing our trade of academic philosophy? The only way is to become inconsistent and selectively choose what will be treated as mere appearance and what will be given more ontological status (ignoring the fact that one's own epistemology ruled out the possibility of doing the latter).

Thank you, AshvinP for the thorough reply! This seems to be a major opposition to idealism.
So you are saying: they can’t postulate mentation as ontological primitive, because they do this through reasoning after saying that nothing of essence can be known through reasoning. And you want to tackle the nature of reasoning before the nature of reality on the grounds that we can’t begin to tackle the latter without the former, Correct?

Now, I have no idea about IK or AS, however when it comes to BK’s model, I don't find any implicit or explicit postulate that nothing of essence can be known through reasoning. Have you found it? I am not even sure this comes as a deduction in his idealism. Why would he hold such a position? I don't think he does.

My body-boundary critique btw only disputes the particular way BK chooses to explain how the universal mind articulates itself in the multitude of individualized subjects of experience, namely dissociation and the body as its representation. It doesn’t dispute the idealist hypothesis itself. I just would like to see a better way to explain the de-combination of mind-at-large.

Schopenhauer basically does this for bodily and inner perceptions - in this way he concludes that what is "within him" as impulses of will (naively accepting physical body boundaries as real) must be the very essence of the Cosmos, since what is within him (matter) is also spread throughout the Cosmos. This isn't entirely inaccurate, but he has abstracted out the fact that he reasoned his way to this conclusion, and that all acts of knowing require such reasoning. That means human reason is not bound by the Kantian limit and is interwoven with all our conscious experience of the World Content (WC).

Again, I can't comment on AS, however I would not agree that human reason is interwoven with all conscious experience (whatever conscious means in your use, and even if it means meta-conscious). To me, thought or reasoning, is just one modality of knowing-experiencing. Reasoning, among other phenomena, might be required for practicing academic philosophy but not necessarily for all acts of knowing.
Reasoning (or thought) happens as one phenomenon among other knowing-phenomena (i.e. perceptions & bodily sensations, thoughts, memories & mental images, emotions) that all contribute to spread light onto the ‘big questions of existence’.

What is the nature of this relationship between human reason and the WC? Those who adhere to the naive realism of body-boundary will say all our inner experiences, including thoughts, are contained within this boundary and must model the WC which exists outside the boundary. They may not say this explicitly, but it is presupposed in all of their arguments. It is what gave rise to the Kantian limit in the first place. What does this accomplish? It severs human thinking from the WC so that the latter is considered something pre-existing our thinking, which only comes along later and tries to model it. Armed with this assumption, the modern philosophers can say their conclusions were generated from direct observation of 'facts' which don't include their concepts.

BK does not say or imply that. The body-boundary comes in his model only as a secondary hypothesis that he posits as an explanation of the privacy and relative separation of our individual subjectivity.
Moreover, BK could not be farther away from saying that his conclusions are generated by direct observation of facts. First, reality is experiential or mental, not 'factual', second there is no such a thing as direct observation of reality in his model. Observation happens in the cockpit, as per the well-known metaphor. What we are capable of perceiving is not reality and its qualities, but merely a survival-convenient re-rendering of reality on the screen of perception.
No severance between human thinking and world content in BK's model either. On the contrary, it is a continuous and reciprocal impingement of mental contents on both sides!

Even though they all reach much different conclusions - idealists, materialists, fundamentalists, etc. - they all claim to have divined these conclusions directly from perception.

Well, no... BK for example claims to have come to his conclusions from experience (which includes thought) and an ontological primitive or postulate: mentation. Mentation being an extension to the whole of reality of our own experiential first person knowing.

They forget how their intellectual thinking was involved in the weaving together of these experiences. If that was understood, then it would become clear why the "atomized human ego" view is a product of their own flawed thinking, not the structure of Reality itself. It does appear that we are each bound within our skin, but that's all it is - mere appearance. When we continue reasoning further, as modern science has done in certain cases, we find that such a boundary is only perceptual and not ontological.

Such a boundary is not ontological in BK's idealism either: everything is mental. No ontological boundary between reality outside and reality inside us.
We are whirlpools in the lake of universal mentation he says. Such a boundary is only perceptual: BK agrees with that. He says that the human body is what our experiential inner life looks like to a second observer.

Once that is realized, we naturally come to the reasoned conclusion that we are not perceiving the entire spectrum of reality - that there are aspects of the human organism and the Cosmos at large which are supersensible to intellectual cognition yet still have a critical influence on the dynamics of our experience.

I don't see this vision as irreconcilable with idealism...

But consider the following thought experiment. Imagine an extraterrestrial humanoid life form whose mode of visual recognition was based on the enumeration of the material components that make up particular [manifestations] of general types, rather than on the identification of the general types that are instantiated by particular [manifestations]. Imagine, further, that this alien lands on Earth at a particular location and encounters two dogs: a living dog and a robotic dog. The alien scans the two dogs, catalogues their material constitution for future identification, and returns home. A few years later, the alien returns to Earth to the same location and faces the two dogs it encountered in its first trip. Despite being in the presence of the same two dogs, the alien’s cognitive apparatus is such that he is only able to identify the robotic dog and not the living one. From the alien’s perspective, the living dog of the first trip has faded out of existence, and an entirely different living dog has taken its place. What this admittedly fanciful thought experiment is meant to illustrate is that, if one focuses on matter rather than on form and allows for a sufficiently extended period of time, the stream-like nature of macroscopic organisms becomes perfectly evident. The fact that this does not happen to be easily perceptible to us does not make it any less true or important.

- Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Science (2018)

We could analogize it to the supersensible spectrum of Light. As humanity involuted into more complex and rigid sense-perception, which also allowed for more clear and precise intellectual consciousness, portions of the Light spectrum were veiled from normal waking cognition. We no longer perceive ultraviolet, infrared, etc. with unenhanced physical senses. The same thing goes for Sound frequencies. Where has the ultraviolet spectrum gone? Nowhere. It doesn't exist behind some veil as a 'noumenal Light-in-itself'. It still exists on 'our side' of experience and permeates all of that experience, but is veiled from our current cognitive perception. Nevertheless, it is always influencing our organism in detectable ways. The same can be said of supersensible forces of the soul (perceptions, impulses, feelings) and spirit (thoughts). These reside within us and therefore we must turn our living reasoning activity inwards for genuine Self-knowledge. It is that Self-knowledge - the fear of unknown 'dangers' lurking within the soul - that modern man wants to desperately avoid by conjuring up intellectual dualities and discontinuities, but ignoring these forces within simply gives rise to their outward manifestation in ever-more destructive ways. We should not ignore them but confront them honestly with the Light and Warmth of our spiritual activity.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

It looks like I lost my rather lengthy response... I will have to circle back on this later.

[AshvinP]

...

I am not countering idealism at all. Rather, I am emphasizing a return to the Idea aspect of it, which was traditionally emphasized until Kant. With the latter, idealism lapses into dualism of noumenon and phenomenon, reality and appearance, will (or perceiving) and thinking (or ideating). Schopenhauer is a continuation of this but with extra emphasis on the Will (which replaces transcendent God of Kant) and the inability of the human being to understand it. He therefore felt we are doomed to be forever oppressed by its ceaseless push into the future, through which everything that exists for thought decays and dies. These conceptions only give us half-truths because they have divided the Polar essence of Thinking-Willing into a duality. (Polar as in two poles of a unified magnetic field, for example)

BK is certainly in this tradition. Consider the following recent article and it is clear how much of Schopenhauer's pessimism is ringing forth from him these days.

https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2022/02 ... n.html?m=1

I am sure you will agree he is denying the ability of human reason to reach essential knowledge in this article. The unspoken issue underlying this pessimism it is human thinking in the form of intellect trying to grasp a Polar essence which is beyond its capacity to grasp. Polar relations cannot be understood through Aristotelean logic. If the intellect was identical to human Thinking as such, then Kant, Schop, and Kastrup would be justified in their pessimistic epistemology, although they would need to stop philosophizing on matters of ontology to remain consistent.

Yet there is no warrant to flatten out Thinking into some uniform and homogenous intellectual activity across all time. Once we discern how human consciousness and ideation has evolved over the course of even a few millennia, it becomes quite irrational to maintain this flattened understanding of Thinking. I recommend you check out Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield, The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin, or Riddles of Philosophy by Rudolf Steiner. Jung also speaks of this in various places, like Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Heidegger as well in his lectures, "What is Called Thinking?"

As soon as we start positing two or more types of experiencing and knowing which is intrinsic to Reality itself, we have lapsed into dualism. Again, this is done (subconsciously) mostly out of intellectual convenience - if something cannot be understood by it, what better way to continue speculating and opinionating then to declare its knowledge has been derived directly from perception or some non-thinking experience? Then it cannot even be argued with - we cannot point to an error in its thinking because it feels it was not thinking to form the conclusions, to begin with. The intellect declares it directly divined knowledge from experience in one way or another.

If BK was willing to admit that thinking is essential in the process of attaining knowledge, and therefore Schopenhauer and himself may have made an error in thinking when investigating the "blind Will" as the ontic prime, then he would be willing to dialogue with people apart from materialists who bring this argument to his attention. When he became aware such arguments were being made here, he chose to sever connection with the website over simply engaging the criticisms. I hope he does some day, but it's not looking likely at all. This blind Will philosophy is simply the mirror image of materialism, with terminology swapped. Matter is the outward representation of Will even according to his own philosophy!

It becomes erroneous when Will is divided from Thinking or Ideation and the latter is treated as illusory activity, exactly like the materialist who says its completely epiphenomenal activity which flashes up from matter somehow. Blind or instinctive Will is codeword for mindless matter/energy and there is no explanation for how reflective thinking can emerge from blind or mindless activity. The hard problem reasserts itself in the realm of Mind itself. And, because human reason has been written off as irrelevant to essential knowledge, there isn't even a way to bring the error to the intellect's attention.

FYI - we have had innumerable discussions on this same topic over the last few years here, so I apologize if anything above is presupposing background knowledge. It's hard for me to return to entirely 'blank slate' after all the arguments we have presented here. I am happy to clarify any of the points made above.

[AshvinP]

...

Let me expand some more on this topic of human thinking. The dualism I refer to above is only natural when we forget the role of our own thinking in the ever-evolving World Processes. In this sense, I am not claiming BK or anyone else is unaware that they must use logical thinking to reach a philosophical conclusion. If asked about this, they will say, "of course I had to think for my conclusion." The claim is that they have forgotten the simple fact that everything which is perceived in the world or in thought, would be a "blooming, buzzing confusion" in the absence of intuitive (mostly subconscious) thinking which weaves together perceptions and concepts into coherent wholes of experience. It is a fact we can discern from our immanent experience of the world around us as we confront its content, and has also been confirmed many times over by modern psychology and cognitive science, and theoretical physics as well (think the 'uncertainty principle' or double-split experiments in QM).

Interesting attempts have been made to arrive at the relation between thinking and perceiving by imagining them actually divided from each other. You may remember Williams James's supposition of a confrontation between, on the one hand, the environment... and, on the other, a man who possessed all the organs of perception, but who had never done any thinking. He demonstrated that such a man would perceive nothing, or nothing but what James called "a blooming buzzing confusion". Well, he was only expressing in his own blunt way the conclusion which always is arrived at by all who make the same attempt, whether philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, or physicists. Unfortunately it is also a conclusion which is commonly forgotten by those same [people] almost as soon it has been arrived at; or certainly as soon as they turn their minds to other matters - such as history or evolution - but which I personally decline to forget. I mean the conclusion, the irrefragable consensus, that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.
...
The distinction between [perceiving and thinking] is... rather easy to lose sight of, once we begin to reflect or philosophize, for this reason: that the single experience we call "consciousness" - our inwardness at any given moment - is not composed either of perceiving alone or of thinking alone, but of an immemorial and inextricable combination of the two. Indeed it is better to call it an interpenetration rather than a combination. We soon learn, once we begin to reflect, that what we have been accustomed to refer to in everyday speech as "perceiving" - as for instance when we speak of perceiving a chair... or for that matter a neuron or chromosome - is in fact perception heavily laced with thinking, with habitual thought, with mental habit.

Kant actually understood this aspect of experience - he knew concepts were always interwoven with perceptions of the world. But Schopenhauer had to forget this aspect of Kant, and his own thinking experience, to declare the "blind instinctive Will" is fundamental. He thought of humans as tiny thinking men riding the shoulders of a blind Willing Giant. Consider this comparison with materialist thinking. Newton formulated the now standard accepted color theory after setting up an experiment, in which a prism is introduced into an environment and light which passes through it is perceived as differentiating into colors of the rainbow. His conclusion was, "these colors all exist within the 'light-itself' and make themselves known to us when some dynamic of the prism draws them out."

What is not accounted for in this conception? The fact that the human thinking agency created the conditions for colors to manifest in this way. We should all ask ourselves whether we also think of light and similar phenomena like Newton did. Do we say, "of course there is a human involved, but it doesn't matter, because the light and its embedded colors exist whether I am there to arrange the experiment or not... these things all preexist human thinking experiments." If we think this way, then that means we are under duress of this modern forgetfulness and 'view from nowhere'. It doesn't matter what the "essence" of Light is right now - we can't reasonably speak of philosophical or scientific conclusions about Light and colors after abstracting out human thinking agency. We have then simply ignored at least half of the given facts which need to be accounted for.

That is what Schopenhauer and many others did and are still doing. The 'blind Will' can never be experienced or known, because it is always the self-aware, lucid, awakened thinking agency which is experiencing and knowing. Once this is understood, however, then our logical reasoning leads to an Idealism, not only in theory, but in its full reality and significance. It leads to what has traditionally been known as "spiritual reality" which is entirely interwoven with and responsible for our normal waking experience. That is quite the opposite of what Schopenhauer and BK want to conclude. Then the stories 'we tell ourselves' as MAL are not only hallucinations and fantasies bubbling up before we return to the instinctive Will, but the exact opposite - they are archetypal reflections of the structure of higher worlds - more Self-aware than we can currently imagine - to which we consciously return after death.

[Federica]

AshvinP,

I would like to adopt your nutshell explanations of idealism’s trajectory and start from there. Obviously I can’t, however they do give me insights into your line of thought. Thank you for going to that trouble, it helps, but from my near-blank state I am still struggling to grasp what you mean by ‘a return to the Idea aspect of idealism as emphasized until Kant’.

Now, commenting on what I do feel I can grasp - Bk’s post on human mind’s self-deceptive nature.
Pessimism in this post is only a thin veil, attached to vocabulary perhaps… we read ‘deception’ and we go: ‘Oh.. so sad’. That’s it. Beyond that first level semantics, there is no pessimism there, in my opinion.


It seems to me that one can only mourn a ‘solid waking reality’ - one that would not be conjured up by mind in the same way a drug hallucination is - from the standpoint of someone who is somehow, in a corner of their mind, nostalgic of materialism. Only from such a place the self-deceptive nature of mind is destabilizing, sad, and pessimistic. Only the idealist who bravely gave up on the solid ground offered by ‘reality’ but is gritting their teeth at the same time, will be left with a sour taste by the idea that 'this waking reality too is not outside mind'.
But for the fully-fledged idealist it's just... business as usual! Howelse? It seems you do not grant BK the capacity to take responsibility for his own philosophy? From my perspective, I have some criticisms, but at least this I would grant him...


You write: ‘I am sure you will agree he is denying the ability of human reason to reach essential knowledge in this article’. I don’t think he is.
First, what is ‘essential knowledge’? The knowledge human reason can reach is mental, and essentially-mental knowledge is all the knowledge there is to the human mind, so yes, absolutely, the human reason can reach essential knowledge. This is what I read in this article. The only way to be sad about that and to be pessimistic, is to be grieving an essential physicalist-style type of knowledge.


And second, for an idealist ( for BK, I gather?) human reason is so far apart from being everything. So far apart from being our true nature. Why should the idealist be so deeply concerned and depressed by what human reason can or cannot reach? Consciousness is one. Human reason is a localization, or a temporary pattern of excitation, of and within it. So what human reason, or the separate self, or the body-mind, or the ego-mind identity, or the dissociated alter, or whatever we wanna call it can or cannot reach is quite relative in BK’s system, isn’t it?
I don’t see why this observation about the works of human reason as the modality (universal) mind uses ‘to talk to, and make sense of, itself’ should ascribe BK into a tradition of pessimism.

(this was a partial reply, sorry, I need more time to assimilate the rest of your comments)

[Federica]

Beyond one of these hurried-along Q&A sessions, allowing mostly quick pat answers with no deep dive into any thorough explication, someone really needs to have a long talk, i.e. dialogos, with BK about the question of redemption in the here and now, according to his Schop-inspired version of idealism—which seems to offer none, or at least nothing more promising than what materialism offers. Apparently for him, the best that one can haplessly hope for is to surrender to the Will of Nature, that it will do with us what it will, however many eons of evolution that may take, and that any notion of having some individual metacognitive say in our redemption is frankly illusory—which raises the question, what 'Good' (of the kind wedded to 'Beauty' and 'Truth') does it do that Nature has developed the capacity for metacogniton via its human expression? Supposedly little, this being why Christianity, as just one example, certainly on any collective scale, has failed miserably in delivering on its claim of redemption being available in the here and now, while the horrors of war and mass shootings go on and on, idealism too being likewise damned.

Soul_of_Shu,

Premise: I did have a similar thought to Jim Cross' on the word 'redemption'. However I don't see ultimate value in compartmentalizing the fields of inquiry and their vocabularies too strictly, because experience does not do that, only academic abstraction does it.
So I am totally fine with the question of redemption.


Now, your statement that BK's system does not seem to offer more redemption than materialism, makes me cringe a little. Am I misunderstanding your meaning of redemption? I would argue that there is a fair amount of redemptory material to buy into in BK's system that is clearly lacking in materialism.


However this material only feels redemptory from beyond the viewpoint of the dissociated alter.
To me an additional hint that this might very well be the stumbling block here, comes from the connection you make between: we not having a say as individual metacognitive subjects (dissociated alters) and the Good that metacognition supposedly brings from the standpoint of Nature.


If we look from the perspective of our limited ego-mind identity - if the redemption we aspire to is the body-mind’s - well yes, the whirlpool will dissolve and disperse, more or less substantially (although I would agree with you that this is not well enough tackled in BK’s model).
However if we go all the way through, the idealistic way, we have to acknowledge that we are not that alter, just the same way that blind dissociated character was not the woman who was hosting it, in the DID syndrome study BK often refers to.

So whose redemption are we talking about?

I think that the main question in your question is ‘Who is the ‘I’ who seeks redemption?’ Are we protected enough from the materialist ‘I’ who got kicked out through the door, trying to sneak back in through the window, asking: ‘Hey, where is my redemption?’