Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 10:24 pm
Cleric, so, what's your opinion on the self-causality hypothesis? Do you think it is plausible within the framework of the Steinerian idealism?
Yes, it is indeed plausible. Although, it should be noted what the nature of ‘Steinerian idealism’ really is. From what you have written so far I believe it won’t be difficult for you to grasp this.
Our abstract intellectual cognition resembles manipulation of puzzle pieces within our imagination. This is the direction that metaphysics and philosophy have taken in the last few centuries. If we observe ourselves
while doing this kind of philosophy, we’ll see that we have puzzle pieces for MAL, matter, energy or whatever and we try to build a thought edifice that is really a thought
model of reality. In all this, the living spiritual activity which imagines and manipulates the puzzle pieces remains in the
blind spot of consciousness, so to speak.
A new stage of the cognitive evolution of humanity begins when attention begins to shift away from the planar relations of thought puzzle pieces, towards the actual process of these pieces taking shape. You gave the example of the Ouroboros – the snake biting its tail. When this symbol is presented to a person still operating strictly at the intellectual level of cognition he would take that symbol as a puzzle piece. He will try to imagine some self-referential process of reality in the way he pictures a microphone and speaker in a feedback loop. Yet the actual spiritual activity that animates the imagined process remains in the blind spot.
From the way you describe things, it is clear that for you the Ouroboros is not simply an abstract model for the supposed reality-in-itself but a
symbol of living spiritual experience. There’s deep intuition within you that basically has the meaning “Whatever is in me that acts as thinking spiritual force, is of the
same essential nature as the forces that seem to move the world phenomena. They seem to me as an external world only as far as I haven’t found the union with the first-person spiritual forces that are active in them.” So this is a different kind of thinking. In planar thinking we manipulate abstract symbols on the surface of our imagination and
map them against perceptions. In the latter case, which we can call vertical or depth thinking, we deal with actual phenomenology, we investigate the thinking process as an actual process of reality. Clearly this presents an insurmountable challenge for the pure intellect which always feels as a top-tier observer of reality, thinking from its tower about the world down there. But if we are to observe the actual thinking process we feel as a dog (or snake) chasing its tail. The intellect wants to see itself in front of itself, and observe thinking as some signal produced from a mechanical device. But once again this picture doesn’t include the living activity that does the imagining. So the intellect can never observe as a finished perception its
current thinking activity. It observes only shed snake skins that were thought an instant ago, while its current activity which focuses on the past shed skin, is the present living snake, which is fully intuitively conscious of itself but has not yet externalized itself.
Nevertheless, with the appropriate training it is possible to stabilize this process and begin to livingly navigate through it. Then everything we produce through our spiritual activity becomes a panoramic image of the forces that are active in the production of the image itself. So unlike planar thinking, it’s not so much the shape and color of the puzzle pieces and their horizontal relations but the investigation of the invisible gradient of our being through which the spiritual force is transduced until it reaches the state of mineralization (which we correlate with the nervous system and the sense organs). So at this stage of cognition it is not that in the images we see the true nature of reality. They are only reflections, ripples on the imaginative surface etched by our deeper intuitive activity. Such is the case with the Ouroboros. It’s clear that clairvoyant vision won’t find some literal Cosmic Snake biting its tail out there in spiritual space. These are imaginative symbols which make sense only when they are seen in the light of deeper intuition of our soul and spiritual nature. The greater orientation we gain in these intuitively known worlds, the more the whole perceptual panorama of our soul and sensory life becomes a living reflection of them.
We need to consider things in such light if we are to understand the direction of ‘Steinerian idealism’. We’ll be completely on the wrong track if we imagine that Steiner developed some complicated framework of planar thoughts that the intellectual ego manipulates on the surface of imagination and models the supposed reality-in-itself. Actually, where planar philosophy and metaphysics end, is where spiritual science begins. We can’t have a notion of spiritual science without understanding something of the higher forms of cognition from whence the concepts and images precipitate. And the first step across this threshold is to find the transition between planar and depth thinking. That’s why the Philosophy of Freedom (alternatively translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) is such an important work.
Steiner is not some ‘rights-holder’ over this domain of spiritual inquiry, any more than Pythagoras, Newton, Leibniz, Euler are ‘right-holders’ over the world of mathematical ideas. These things are difficult to understand only as long as we imagine that every soul is a completely self-enclosed sphere and ideas are simply local phenomena that we have learned to copy-paste in between ourselves through the medium of language and symbols. If we instead recognize that what we call subconsciousness is really a whole not yet elucidated world of soul and spirit, where the archetypal being of all humanity is to be found, then we clearly understand that the whole evolutionary journey of man from the dawn of cognition, has been to gradually grow into the spiritual world, such that both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ phenomena can be seen as reflections of the deeds of the Spirit living in all beings.
There have been many bright individuals who have been bringing the spirit in the world - both the pre-Christian mystics and the later Christian initiates who developed the science of the Christ being reaching down into the sensory spectrum through the ego activity of the individual “I”. Steiner’s work is one of the pieces of this Cosmic mosaic, yet a very important one. It so happens that there’s always a certain individuality that has to anchor certain spiritual impulse within the sensory world. For one thing was Aristotle, for another was Newton. If it wasn’t Steiner hopefully it would have been some other name. The important thing is to recognize the part of the veil that has been lifted through each impulse. In Steiner’s case the most important contribution is to lead the intellect towards its spiritual foundations. We know very well the crisis of cognition in our days. We have either the complete submerging in planar thought and endless abstract modeling of the supposed reality-in-itself, as is the case for the contemporary lifeless science and philosophy. Or we have the half-understood Eastern mysticism that declares the intellectual ego to be an illusion and one shuts himself into mystic sleep, expecting anything else eventually only after death. It becomes critically important in our age that we can find our intellect as the decohered manifestation of a higher form of spiritual activity, which leads us into a higher soul and archetypal spiritual world, where the driving forces of all Earthly happenings are to be found.
The point of all this is that although speaking of self-caused reality is plausible, we should
not remain with only these thoughts. For some they will remain simply abstract planar puzzle pieces. Others will dimly feel that they symbolize something intuitively felt but will decide that this is the maximum achievable on Earth. So such theories only serve their purpose if they stimulate us to seek clear cognition along the depth axis of our being. Then we no longer speak of theories but we communicate in images the living reality of the shared spiritual world, in the same way we communicate in symbols mathematical ideas.