Prospects for a Phenomenological Idealism

[Federica]

Would you say that I am saying mostly the same thing (about triangles) if I put it this way:

- There is ideational activity. Activity is ideational if there is awareness of it, and it involves forms.
- The word 'idea' is just short for 'ideational act'.
- A form is that which distinguishes one idea from other ideas.
- There are no forms (a form is an abstraction). There are only ideas.
- There are no isolatable ideas. Every idea only occurs in relation to (ultimately) all other ideas.
- The power to form ideas, and the ideas formed, are a tetralemmic polarity -- each is, yet is not, the other.
- A triangle is an idea, and as such, inseparable from all other ideas, and inseparable from the power to think.

I'm not sure. If something that involves forms is, how do you intend that forms are not there?

[ScottRoberts]

I view that task as similar to if our intuition led us to the brink of a committed and loving romantic or friendly relationship, but then we stop and wonder what assurances we can have that this relationship will work out and help us realize our potential and ideals. We ask to establish resonance with the person's soul-structure before we have put in the effort to cultivate that resonance. We are then asking for something that will surely elude us, because the resonant relationship only realizes its fruits when we enter into its experience with qualities of faith, trust, and hope, which are cognitive qualities imbued with deep longing and ideal striving. Why is it true that committed relationships with others help elevate our humanity? We can only say through the experience of the relationship itself. That doesn't mean we need to blindly enter the relationship without any idea of who the other person is or how they relate to us. We need a bridge that elucidates the broad relationship between us but simultaneously preserves its unique mystery and invites our cognitive-moral efforts to unveil it.

Well, yes, leaps of faith are required, but that is why one uses abductive logic: If one's hypothesis has clarifying consequences, it is easier to take the leap. Whether this is sufficient to invite our cognitive-moral efforts, I'm not sure.

But this raises an issue I've been noodling on of late. Do we need to invite? I haven't thought this through, but just wondering if an "anthroposophy lite" isn't something worth looking into. I'll leave it at that for now, since I'm not sure what I have in mind.

That being said, I guess my main question for you is how you envision that Part I will be distinguished from what you have already written in your essays. Are you aiming to elucidate any additional aspects of consciousness evolution and/or include any additional ways of reasoning to them?

Probably not much distinguished. I think it will be good for me to review some of Cleric's posts to see if they suggest useful ways to think about things. Well, of course they do that, but can they fit into the limited scope of Part I?

[ScottRoberts]

Scott, I think Ashvin’s metaphor above is the most relatable, fitting reply, but to add something specific to the Lessing quote: I understand the convenience of it, in this juncture, but I don’t agree with a literal interpretation. In fluid terms, I agree we can become more acquainted with our experience of revelation, in the wake of it. But here’s the thing: before one can reduce and flatten an inner revelation to its rationalized backdrop imprint, one needs to first allow not for the revelation to manifest (revelations don’t manifest) but for one’s own inquisitive will to sense, feel and realize the process of its own becoming it, a living element of the revealed truth. Otherwise there’s nothing to imprint on the backdrop tablets of the bureaucratic-metaphysical storyboard.

In other words, one cannot rationalize any revealed objects. One can only become revelatory to oneself.

By 'rationalization' I include what Coleridge terms 'reason' and not just 'understanding'. A difference is being able to accept as reasonable something like triunity, which understanding cannot do. I would say that this moves the thinker a bit up the vertical, and not just horizontally.

[ScottRoberts]

I'm not sure. If something that involves forms is, how do you intend that forms are not there?

I'm just saying that one will not ever encounter a form by itself. If one thinks of forms as concrete entities one can fall into the materialist error that Tegmark did -- imagining a world of just (mathematical) forms, ignoring the thinking (or feeling, willing, sensing) of them. Hence I call the notion of a self-existing form an abstraction from an idea(tional act). Indeed, one can also call the power to think an abstraction, since it doesn't exist except in polar relation with ideas. Making it concrete leads to the error of mysticism.

[AshvinP]

I view that task as similar to if our intuition led us to the brink of a committed and loving romantic or friendly relationship, but then we stop and wonder what assurances we can have that this relationship will work out and help us realize our potential and ideals. We ask to establish resonance with the person's soul-structure before we have put in the effort to cultivate that resonance. We are then asking for something that will surely elude us, because the resonant relationship only realizes its fruits when we enter into its experience with qualities of faith, trust, and hope, which are cognitive qualities imbued with deep longing and ideal striving. Why is it true that committed relationships with others help elevate our humanity? We can only say through the experience of the relationship itself. That doesn't mean we need to blindly enter the relationship without any idea of who the other person is or how they relate to us. We need a bridge that elucidates the broad relationship between us but simultaneously preserves its unique mystery and invites our cognitive-moral efforts to unveil it.

Well, yes, leaps of faith are required, but that is why one uses abductive logic: If one's hypothesis has clarifying consequences, it is easier to take the leap. Whether this is sufficient to invite our cognitive-moral efforts, I'm not sure.

But this raises an issue I've been noodling on of late. Do we need to invite? I haven't thought this through, but just wondering if an "anthroposophy lite" isn't something worth looking into. I'll leave it at that for now, since I'm not sure what I have in mind.

Right, and that's why I say our thinking through the phenomenal world becomes spiritually concrete when it has practical consequences of insight that feed into various domains of living experience. Of course, the secular materialist could also say his insights feed into useful technological pursuits that can improve our material lives, so that's why the insights need to remain connected with our inner life of thinking agency. The secular materialist can't say his insights lead towards a strengthening, enlivening, and ennobling of his inner forces.

I think what we have here on this forum, especially in Cleric's posts, are basically an 'Anthroposophy lite' since they provide non-esoteric metaphors that can help us orient towards some very deep esoteric realities. But Anthrosophy is, at its core, about freely discovering the means of inwardly perfecting one's soul-structure and reintegrating with one's higher self, so all roads should lead towards that invitation. If an individual is conceptually given a more or less complete framework of 'higher worlds' and 'inner perfection', then that defeats the purpose.

Today people love to attend lectures that present what they are to learn through slides or other perceptible means. People go to movies because they can see something there. They do not value the fact that there are also some words. People want to remain passive: they just want to be people who watch. You will gain nothing from a spiritual-scientific book or lecture if you allow these modern habits to predominate, as spiritual-scientific lectures or books contain nothing of that sort. Everything depends on your working inwardly with what such books or lectures offer as a thread. It is important that reasoning, which has become passive in our intellectual age, should now become active. Spiritual science is an inner activity to the extent that it concerns the world of ideas and is therefore radically different from what modern people are used to. This inner training of self is extremely important, since that is how we can overcome the abstract spirituality connected with modern reasoning. This self-training will renew the entire spiritual and soul constitution of a human being.

Steiner, Rudolf. A Road to Sacred Creation: Rudolf Steiner's Perspectives on Technology (p. 130). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

That being said, I guess my main question for you is how you envision that Part I will be distinguished from what you have already written in your essays. Are you aiming to elucidate any additional aspects of consciousness evolution and/or include any additional ways of reasoning to them?

Probably not much distinguished. I think it will be good for me to review some of Cleric's posts to see if they suggest useful ways to think about things. Well, of course they do that, but can they fit into the limited scope of Part I?

My answer to that is clearly, yes! Not only that, but I don't see how the aim of Part I can be realized without fitting in something akin to those posts. For ex. the TC spectrum essay - we can't get a concrete feel for the evolution of consciousness unless we also include its temporally expanding aspect, i.e. how the aperture of consciousness radiates out to encompass more of the stream of the 'past' and the 'future' within its creative domain. Otherwise, we may envision that things are progressing from outer thoughts to inner thoughts but we are remaining an atomic ego-unit the entire time. It seems to me a very useful Part I would be one that anticipates many common misconceptions of the evidence and arguments presented, due to our material-mystical reductionist habits of thinking, and addresses them briefly.

[Federica]

I'm just saying that one will not ever encounter a form by itself. If one thinks of forms as concrete entities one can fall into the materialist error that Tegmark did -- imagining a world of just (mathematical) forms, ignoring the thinking (or feeling, willing, sensing) of them. Hence I call the notion of a self-existing form an abstraction from an idea(tional act). Indeed, one can also call the power to think an abstraction, since it doesn't exist except in polar relation with ideas. Making it concrete leads to the error of mysticism.

Yes, now I follow, thanks! In essence, it's the same as to say that thinking and thought stand in polar relation with each other, what Cleric called hysteresis, where the axes - pure thinking and pure thought - are abstractions, respectively the mystical one, and the materialistic one, as you say.

I'm also reminded of this characterization of the polarity power to think --- ideational act (thinking --- thought):

I would say Thinking without Thought is loveless. But the absolute Divine is Love. It bears the eternal tendency of sacrificing itself into negative images, i.e. thoughts-perceptions. Thereby new evolving relationships are created. And when Thought becomes so isolated that it loses sight of Thinking, i.e. the thread which weave all be-ings into unity, then it freely develops the capacity to Love anew from within itself. Thought gives birth to loving Thinking.

Now coming back to the original point:

However, I can't say that I can agree with calling the triangle concept a "being", in the sense that we are beings. Does it think? will? Feel?

Would you still disagree with calling an idea a being - not in the sense of earthly, physiologically living being, but in the sense of intentional, active and interactive ideational entity?

[Federica]

By 'rationalization' I include what Coleridge terms 'reason' and not just 'understanding'. A difference is being able to accept as reasonable something like triunity, which understanding cannot do. I would say that this moves the thinker a bit up the vertical, and not just horizontally.

I think the crux of the question is not so much how we arrange the semantic extension of the words we use - revelation, reason, understanding, idea, form, etcetera. No semantic rearrangement can ever move the thinker up any vertical, so long as the thinker doesn't detach his self-perception from the role of "the thinker", by instead including the observer he implicitly assumes he is in the very fabric of the so-called "object" of analysis, going from rationalizing to experiencing. It goes without saying, I am myself struggling with this. I try to keep this absolute necessity engraved in my intentions.

If the individual agency doesn’t constantly strive to bring and maintain itself in the recognition of its real-time moving and cooperating - in thinking, feeling, and ultimately doing - within the same reality under scrutiny, then a third-person administrative model is produced, as if from without reality, but, in fact, from a veiled spot inside it. This necessity is different from the thought: "I am also part of this reality, as a cooperating being in connection with all other ideational activity, ok, I know that".

I am aware I am just repeating what Ashvin and Cleric have many times expressed. It's because your posts, as I understand them, seem to refute this necessity. Would you say that’s accurate, since you disagree with it being a necessity, or would you say that you are mindful of it, and it’s just me, misinterpreting your thoughts?

[ScottRoberts]

I am aware I am just repeating what Ashvin and Cleric have many times expressed. It's because your posts, as I understand them, seem to refute this necessity. Would you say that’s accurate, since you disagree with it being a necessity, or would you say that you are mindful of it, and it’s just me, misinterpreting your thoughts?

I don't deny the necessity of moving from rationalizing to experiencing if one wants to move vertically. But what if one's efforts to make that move constantly fail? For over 50 years I have known of the need to learn to concentrate, but for some reason my efforts dwindle away, and I am back to rationalizing. (Which might have been a good thing in the early years, since what I wanted back then was mystical escape.) But while one can't move vertically through reason, one can become aware that the vertical direction exists, and is necessary to pursue, even if it may not occur in this lifetime. To put it another way, through reason we can become aware that we are insane (and so stop living in denial), but also that there is a path to sanity, and that it is our responsibility to strive to become sane, even if we think ourselves unlikely to succeed in this lifetime. Which is more or less what I mean by 'anthroposopy lite'.

[Lou Gold]

I am aware I am just repeating what Ashvin and Cleric have many times expressed. It's because your posts, as I understand them, seem to refute this necessity. Would you say that’s accurate, since you disagree with it being a necessity, or would you say that you are mindful of it, and it’s just me, misinterpreting your thoughts?

I don't deny the necessity of moving from rationalizing to experiencing if one wants to move vertically. But what if one's efforts to make that move constantly fail? For over 50 years I have known of the need to learn to concentrate, but for some reason my efforts dwindle away, and I am back to rationalizing. (Which might have been a good thing in the early years, since what I wanted back then was mystical escape.) But while one can't move vertically through reason, one can become aware that the vertical direction exists, and is necessary to pursue, even if it may not occur in this lifetime. To put it another way, through reason we can become aware that we are insane (and so stop living in denial), but also that there is a path to sanity, and that it is our responsibility to strive to become sane, even if we think ourselves unlikely to succeed in this lifetime. Which is more or less what I mean by 'anthroposopy lite'.

I woke up in the middle of the night, responded to messages and then took an extremely rare look here.

Probably outside the conversational flow I offer my two cents that you've never been able to concentrate because you are attempting to concentrate on reason when you need to concentrate on faith. Without faith you will not recognize Grace. You'll pass it by without noticing or think that nothing is happening.

Over and out with gratitude for all the things I learned here.

[ScottRoberts]

Probably outside the conversational flow I offer my two cents that you've never been able to concentrate because you are attempting to concentrate on reason when you need to concentrate on faith. Without faith you will not recognize Grace. You'll pass it by without noticing or think that nothing is happening.

I don't think so. What I (try to) concentrate on is vowel sounds, or moving a point of light in a circle, or a pin.... Reasoning is a distraction (one of many).