Federica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 8:44 pm
LukeJTM wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 8:17 pm
P.S. I know I've not posted for a while. I've just been busy for a while. I appreciate the replies given last time I posted, however I don't have much to reply with at the moment.
Thanks for the kind note, Luke
If I may, no worries about these things!
LukeJTM wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 8:17 pm
Oo, very cool to know that Bernardo read Barfield's book! Maybe he will read Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom at some point? He has read Barfield so he probably heard of Steiner's work. Or maybe he will read Jean Gebser's book? But who knows.
For my part I think it's unlikely. He probably knows Steiner, but Steiner would bring him to unstable terrain, in contradiction with his philosophy and with the purposes of Essentia foundation. He's now locked into a role...
I once asked BK a question relating to higher cognition and mentioned Steiner, and got the impression that he had only briefly heard of Steiner, probably only in connection with occult 'woo-woo' science, rather than idealist philosophy. In his one and only appearance on this forum, he also gave the following answer to my question:
1) Are you familiar with Owen Barfield's and/or Jean Gebser's ideas on the "evolution of consciousness" (as described in Saving the Appearances and The Ever-Present Origin respectively) and, if so, do you find their arguments convincing and what implications would such a process have for your idealist position, specifically regarding any telos it may imply for collective human development?
I am familiar with both. My position on telos, motivated not only by my own pondering, but also those of Jung, Barfield, Gebser and others, is that nature seems to be driving, at tremendous cost in suffering and time, towards the development of meta-consciousness (a.k.a. self reflection, conscious metacognition, re-representation, self awareness, etc.) in both breadth and depth. This seems to be our role, and that of our suffering: to take explicit notice of nature and its unfolding, in the mirror of our reflections.
Anyway, reading Barfield and Steiner will hardly make a difference if he is only selectively using parts to reinforce his own analytic idealist position, without investigating the first-person experience of willed thinking activity. He couldn't make the connection between what Barfield was discussing in StA and spiritual reality precisely for that reason. That is also why he doesn't make the connection that self-conscious ideation is not only the end or telos of evolution, but also its
Origin. Once we investigate the inner life of our thinking activity, we realize that outer nature is simply the 'other side' of self-conscious spirit, i.e. what the latter looks like when it has been decohered and frozen in time through our convoluted intellectual cognition.