"So when you write, "I am suggesting that our very understanding is both a capturing of direct reality and a distorting of it", it appears to me you referring specifically to intellect as "understanding" while excluding higher cognition."
Well put! No, the important explicating role played by the intellect (which both 'clarifies' and 'distorts' necessarily) is also shared by other modes of explication, including those that rely on what some refer to as 'higher' modes.
Yes, the interesting problem I have is trying to find words that speak to you. That's my problem, so to speak
Not yours! Unless I find a creative way to help generate that bridge, you will be left feeling I don't understand what you are saying and you will be left being quite certain my comments miss the point. If I ever succeed in this quest with you, it is not that you'll suddenly realize we are in complete agreement and have no different point of view. But you will realize that the kinds of distinctions I am making aren't quite so point-missing as they seem.
Partially I think this is a challenge simply because of the nature of the content itself. But it also has a very connection to the living-dialectic you referred to above. Whatever point we cherish is always already instancing a thesis aspect, a antithesis aspect, and a synthesis aspect. Our problem is that we mostly unconsciously experience our understanding as synthesis only. Therefore, from that point of view, another perspective that seems to miss the point is often really a living and necessary 'antheses' or 'synthesis' that we, understandably, experience as lacking. One way I gaurd against this is that I try to at least grasp as clearly as possible (not intellectually but cognitively) the way in which any of my understandings are standing in all three positions and, therefore, even when I am in apparent disagreement with another's point, I must be able to see that it has something I'm missing to an extent. Otherwise, ego simply pushes to convince the other or to 'understand' them until they see my point.
I will say something right now about the 'prior' we are talking about, but for all the reasons I just stated, it is obvious to me it will fall into the creative and very necessary abyss of shared understanding we are cultivating. If I do figure out a new way in eventually, then I will be able to make the following points much more fruitfully to you.
Yes, I would say that the intellect inherently distorts.
But that isn't exactly the 'distortion' I'm speaking of.
And 'distortion' as an adjective does indeed distort my point a bit.
Yet, it also helps point to it a bit.
We can find in Steiner descriptions of Inspiration and Imagination
in which he describes the way in which both modes of higher knowledge
'distort' the Truth to a degree. He isn't speaking negatively of them when
he points out that they necessarily leave some 'distance' between the
Living Intuition and how it incarnates as an Inspiration or an Imagination.
But rather than referring to Steiner, I'll say that I appreciate that you and I
both seem to be on the same page regarding how utterly essential the
intellect is in explicating an Intuition and, yet, how we should be very
sensitive to the ways our creative and useful intellectual 'chopping' is
always both helping the understanding of ourselves and others and
creating unique challenges to it. And that is unavoidable.
I say that the same kind (not the same thing, just kind) of process
is taking place with the higher modes of cognition. Since we aren't
claiming that only Steiner's schema of 'higher' counts, I'll refrain from
using his schema. But even to say 'higher' is already making a consession
in that direction. Which is fine.
But this is all to say that in my view it isn't merely the intellect which
necessarily incarnates (explicates) The Word (or Intuition or...) but any
actual intuition is moving through 'higher' forms of knowing in order to
even reach the intellect, each of which (via its role in incarnating The Word)
creatively 'distorts' in order to speak in communion with an Other.
The use of 'distort' is only useful if we don't take it in the pejorative sense. Yes,
this incarnating process also could be described as 'clarifying.' That is true! But
the only reason I might avoid saying 'clarify' is that that tends to overlook the
metamorphosis that happens in incarnation intuition. But it is just as true to say
that these modes of knowledge ("higher" or however we label them) 'clarify' the
truth as to say they 'distort' or metamorphose or 'birth'. Birth isn't a bad
metaphor in that the child is a 'distortion' of the parent while carrying
the life forward. Father and Son metaphor.
............
One day my daughter was playing by herself outside. She was about five.
I was reading under a nearby tree. She ran up to a nearby big rock and placed
both hands on it. I saw a smile grow on her face. She then twisted herself
towards the sun behind her and said, "Thank you sun!" I asked her why she
thanked the sun and she said, "For making the rock so warm and cozy."
She was five. And certainly intellect was involved with her the joy and
gratitude she felt well up within her has she felt the warmth. If she was a dog
or a snail, I'm not sure she would have had that sacred experience of gratitude.
But even though her intellect was involved, I don't think it is accurate to say
that she first unconsciously separated each 'item' of her experience into 'parts.'
Somebody might claim her experience of gratitude in the sun warming the stone
was the function of Reason itself. Somebody might want to point out that
there is a difference between that kind of Reason and the Reason cultivated by
an adult in order to grasp directly the unity of the Cosmos.
I don't think my daughter could have had that experience without having basic
intuitions and concepts (not the same thing obviously) of 'sun' and 'stone' and 'hands'
and 'me' and 'warm' and one-thousands other 'things.' And I don't think the spiritual
scientist or Goethean or XYZ can speak of what is 'prior' to intellect until they have
acquired very core, basic, and special intuitions and concepts. It is those very intuitions
that will even make it possible to say, "I am now in mode of knowing that is prior to those
cognitions." But it will be a mere intellectual quibble about 'prior' until and unless I can
make myself more clear to you.
"All the concepts that the intellect creates — cause and effect, substance and attribute, body and soul, idea and reality, God and world, etc. — are there only in order to keep unified reality separated artificially into parts; and reason, without blurring the content thus created, without mystically obscuring the clarity of the intellect, has then to seek out the inner unity in the multiplicity. Reason thereby comes back to that from which the intellect had distanced itself: to the unified reality."
So despite my agreeing with that statement 100%, because of this living thesis/antithesis/synthesis of my understanding, I have to sound like I'm
pushing against it.
If it is true that we are wrong to look at the plant and think 'that' is the plant, ignoring that its actual reality is the Wholeness of all that came before and all that it is striving to become, this implies that we only step out of an intellectual illusion about 'this is a plant' if we are directly beholding the entirety of its reality, an entirety that is beyond a 'higher perception'. I mean to say, we don't want to make the error of thinking that when we truely see the plant in its wholeness we are seeing a (spiritual) perception that could be drawn. No, of course not. The non-intellectualized 'seeing' of the actual plant is not at all a 'seeing' but simply uniting intuiting with what it is. So even when we speak of its wholeness as being the process of its becoming, we are still in the intellectual illusion which includes the 'higher' modes of perception. Or, in other words, just as differentiating the 'parts' of the plant in space is false. So is differentiating the 'stages' of the plants life. When the Reason grasps the plant it isn't merely looking wider in space and time, it is disregarding the illusion of both. That does not mean it is 'seeing' the plant that is 'really there' beyond the spacial and temporal experiences of it that our bodies generate.
All this to say: I am going to see if a possible creative bridge might be possible.
Hopefully, you'll grasp with a 12% intuition that I'm not disagreeing with anything you are saying despite my 'anthetical' push for distinctions that seem point-missing
Typically people just stop talking when it seems they aren't seeing each other's points. But the 12% is where the action is in my opinion.
