Philosophical Speculations

Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2024 3:04 pm

Güney27 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 05, 2024 7:52 pm The last response to my comment:

„What you wrote is extremely interesting. By the way, if you find it easier to respond in German that would be fine. Most of the philosophy I’ve read has been in German and sometimes it helps to write in the language in which it was originally thought.

I’ll start with a few technical points and then move to the more important big picture. I find it problematic to split reality and experience of reality into subject and object. If we speak of “the objective world” and subjective consciousness we lose the all important aspect of entanglement. Our consciousness is not something separate from an objective world, but a special form of a non-objective reality - interconnected and inseparable. The splitting of non-material consciousness and objective nature is the Greek metaphysical error of the 5th century BCE that has undermined thinking in the West ever since. We are that part of physical existence that “Experiences”. That experience can run along different paths, but all paths are forms of that initial awareness of an experience. All experience is an event of entanglement with what we encounter along that path.

The path starts with reduction from the incomprehensible to what is possible to experience within our radically limited “world”. This path, once initiated, can further reduce through objectification, or transcend back toward the incomprehensible through esthetic thinking. That is, we can think of any initial revelation mathematically/logically as wave collapse to quantum Eigenstate, and from that construct an abstract model of the universe from which we produce Ideas. Or we can esthetically think an initial revelation poetically poetically/musically without abstraction. The former is an ossified and lifeless retreat from the incomprehensible; the latter is the dancing with the revelation. Both science and poetry resort to metaphor, but it always helps to keep in mind the difference between them. Scientific metaphor acts to reduce the incomprehensible to a simple image that can be understood for practical purposes, such as the “code” of DNA, or “information” stored in cosmic events. The danger in this is that it can lead to taking the metaphor literally and arise in Ideas. Poetic metaphor goes in the opposite direction. It takes a simple and familiar image of experience, and by inhering in the physical experience itself, carries us into a profound experience of the incomprehensible that can never be reduced to Idea.

That is why Idealism was a dead end. By the way, my interest in physics is not for its theories, which will always be wrong and tainted with metaphysics, but rather the mysteries it introduces where physics necessarily fails.„

What is also interesting is what he means by "transcend back toward the incomprehensible through esthetic thinking". Does this esthetic thinking actually make the incomprehensible comprehensible (probably on a higher level), or one simply ascends through it into the incomprehensible and flows there dreamily ever after?

I will have a zoom call with him today. I will ask your question and report back.

I had a wonderful 2 hour conversation with JW and his perspective is much more profound and deep than I thought. He is very knowledgeable and a deep thinker (and a really kind person).We talked about all sort of things, and I mentioned Steiner. He said he will give him a try. I will send him essays from the forum to as good intodructions.

For Cleric’s question, he describes prime existence in a negative way, I.e that what it is not. Being reveals itself trough us. We are part of it but reduce it to the sense-world. He emphasized Heidegger and said I should read his later books.

Ashvin, if you are interested we could have a conversation together. Maybe that would be better than the conversation you had a couple years ago here on the forum. There are really much similarities in your thoughts and his.

Güney27 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2024 11:52 pm I had a wonderful 2 hour conversation with JW and his perspective is much more profound and deep than I thought. He is very knowledgeable and a deep thinker (and a really kind person).We talked about all sort of things, and I mentioned Steiner. He said he will give him a try. I will send him essays from the forum to as good intodructions.

For Cleric’s question, he describes prime existence in a negative way, I.e that what it is not. Being reveals itself trough us. We are part of it but reduce it to the sense-world. He emphasized Heidegger and said I should read his later books.

Ashvin, if you are interested we could have a conversation together. Maybe that would be better than the conversation you had a couple years ago here on the forum. There are really much similarities in your thoughts and his.

That could be an interesting idea after he has a chance to work with Steiner (or Cleric's essays) for a bit. Let's see if he dismisses it outright or rather some intuitive sparks fly and pique his interest more. I think if he at least sees there are unexplored options for thinking through the 'ineffable', and therefore wants to learn more about the direction in which those options can be sought, that would be a great starting point for a discussion.

Here are the thoughts from JW to the essays from cleric I sensed him ( the time consciousness spectrum and the fundamental of human condition) and some of my writings (which is heavily inspired by cleric and Steiner).

1. You began on solid common ground for us: our nature as thinking beings. We are not separate from Being, but individual instances of Being whose purpose is knowing through experience: we are Being in self-regard and experience. Being in self-consciousness.

But this brings us to the nature of thinking, which is yet to be understood. This should be a central theme for us over the duration of our conversations.

2. Perspective becomes a confused concept once we overcome subject/object metaphysics. The problem becomes apparent when we claim that all we can know is our subjective intuitions. Perspective implies consciousness which itself implies being conscious of something. That points to a relationship between intuition and the world. As you rightly said, we are perspectival consciousness within a world, but that makes the world an equal player in our thinking. The problem in the West to-date has been to imagine our consciousness as separate from an objective world. The present task isn’t to focus on ourselves as subject, but as individuated Being entangled, not separate.

If we are to think of ourselves as thinking in the world, we already acknowledge more than just our inner intuitions - an acknowledgement of a world. But a world is something in the universe, and we are yet to rethink what a universe and a world are. Again, this should be part of the future discussion. It is also the central focus my own thinking.
3. The universe is the “All” of our physical existence. It is not, however, all that exists, but a gross reduction. Our universe as such, though it appears to us as 14 billion years old, is only as old as life on earth from which we evolved. Consciousness started with single-celled life that probed its environment. We still observe this in the stimulus/response behavior of such organisms. At this stage it is a crude awareness of a universe and an interest in its impact on the organism. It has evolved greatly over the past 4 billion years and created worlds along the way. Life has evolved from a simple mode of Being experiencing itself to gradually moving toward a contemplation of its own essence. But in the original single-celled organism it wasn’t only an awareness of itself, but an awareness of its relation to the universe. If there is a purpose here, it is to shift the focus to awareness of the word rather than the inner organism.

The universe is what is left when through consciousness we reduce superposition to Eigenstate. The simplest explanation of this is as the first step in our reduction of information. Superposition remains, but we are aware of only one of the possible states. In our essence we carry the bestowal of spatial/temporal sensibility through which we entangle and interact with the universe. This is our given mode of existence and the foundation for the creation of worlds. How this happens remains one of the beckoning mysteries.

If humanity were to disappear, so would the universe, which exists as our conscious reduction from what physics would term quantum coherence. We can just think of it as the full manifold of Being.

4. Worlds exist within our universe as organic relationships and organizations of events we encounter. We are thrown into a world which imposes certain assumptions upon which the world was built. Consider the implication for any attempt to perceive and know without preconceptions. I would suggest the best we can do is fully grasp the assumptions and preconditions of the world and its historicity in which we are thrown, and question them critically. Today, that means rethinking the assumptions of metaphysics and scientific reductionism - two sides of the same coin of subject/object metaphysics.

5. Being reveals itself within this world and the world colors how we perceive. Today, the dominant mode is further reduction. In physics, revelation takes place as wave collapse. In what passes for philosophy, Being is reduced to systematic inventions and logic, mainly out of a felt inferiority to scientific knowledge. Both contemporary philosophy and Physics block us from the truth.

We will also need to rethink what truth and reality are.


Our world is the product of 2500 years of metaphysics. Metaphysics creates systems as worldviews. Systems are rigid and dead. As anti-life they are dogmatic, which leads to authoritarian. As we are thrown into a world, it is natural to unconsciously accept the dogma as “just how the world is”. It is the work of the poet and thinker to decalcify the world by revealing its underlying strangeness, and by doing so set a world back into motion. Only then can we as thinking and experience beings regain our natural rhythm.


The above is just a brief topology of the question at hand, and meant only as an introduction to a deeper discussion

Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:12 pm Here are the thoughts from JW to the essays from cleric I sensed him ( the time consciousness spectrum and the fundamental of human condition) and some of my writings (which is heavily inspired by cleric and Steiner).

Well, hopefully the "deeper discussion" doesn't simply ignore the phenomenological approach presented in the essays, as the intro suggests might happen. What often happens is that the essays are confused for a series of metaphysical claims about the "nature of thinking" and the "nature of consciousness", because that's the familiar mode of thinking, and written off as highly speculative and confused for that reason. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but we'll see.

I would suggest the best we can do is fully grasp the assumptions and preconditions of the world and its historicity in which we are thrown, and question them critically. Today, that means rethinking the assumptions of metaphysics and scientific reductionism - two sides of the same coin of subject/object metaphysics.

Exactly right, but what does it mean to "fully grasp" and "rethink"? Hopefully he eventually sees that we cannot fully grasp and rethink the 'assumptions and preconditions' that structure our metaphysical and reductionist thinking through more metaphysical thinking, which reduces the meaning of those preconditions to our mental pictures (thoughts) about their meaning.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Dec 18, 2024 12:22 am

Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:12 pm Here are the thoughts from JW to the essays from cleric I sensed him ( the time consciousness spectrum and the fundamental of human condition) and some of my writings (which is heavily inspired by cleric and Steiner).

Well, hopefully the "deeper discussion" doesn't simply ignore the phenomenological approach presented in the essays, as the intro suggests might happen. What often happens is that the essays are confused for a series of metaphysical claims about the "nature of thinking" and the "nature of consciousness", because that's the familiar mode of thinking, and written off as highly speculative and confused for that reason. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but we'll see.

I would suggest the best we can do is fully grasp the assumptions and preconditions of the world and its historicity in which we are thrown, and question them critically. Today, that means rethinking the assumptions of metaphysics and scientific reductionism - two sides of the same coin of subject/object metaphysics.

Exactly right, but what does it mean to "fully grasp" and "rethink"? Hopefully he eventually sees that we cannot fully grasp and rethink the 'assumptions and preconditions' that structure our metaphysical and reductionist thinking through more metaphysical thinking, which reduces the meaning of those preconditions to our mental pictures (thoughts) about their meaning.

You are right Ashvin.
He’s approach is a heideggerian approach. Even if he is a critic of metaphysics, he has made metaphysical statements in the above text. I’m currently reading Heidegger to better understand him and I must say he is very different then most of other thinkers in a good way. He asks the exact questions that are the most important. I know you have read Heidegger to so I would ask you what do you think of him.

Jw is a really deep thinker and an academic philosopher, so I can learn much from our conversations. I’m really thankful to him in many ways. It’s really trough him that i came in contact with Steiner and clerics work.

If you know good passages from Steiner that would respond to his propositions I would be more than happy. I quoted a part from philosophy of freedom chapter 2 in the response I’m working on.
I’m working out the response in German but I will share them in English here. Thankfully I got laptop back today, so I don’t have to write

Thankfully I got my laptop back today so I don’t have to use my mobile phone to write the responses (:

Güney27 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 18, 2024 4:04 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Dec 18, 2024 12:22 am

Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:12 pm Here are the thoughts from JW to the essays from cleric I sensed him ( the time consciousness spectrum and the fundamental of human condition) and some of my writings (which is heavily inspired by cleric and Steiner).

Well, hopefully the "deeper discussion" doesn't simply ignore the phenomenological approach presented in the essays, as the intro suggests might happen. What often happens is that the essays are confused for a series of metaphysical claims about the "nature of thinking" and the "nature of consciousness", because that's the familiar mode of thinking, and written off as highly speculative and confused for that reason. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but we'll see.

I would suggest the best we can do is fully grasp the assumptions and preconditions of the world and its historicity in which we are thrown, and question them critically. Today, that means rethinking the assumptions of metaphysics and scientific reductionism - two sides of the same coin of subject/object metaphysics.

Exactly right, but what does it mean to "fully grasp" and "rethink"? Hopefully he eventually sees that we cannot fully grasp and rethink the 'assumptions and preconditions' that structure our metaphysical and reductionist thinking through more metaphysical thinking, which reduces the meaning of those preconditions to our mental pictures (thoughts) about their meaning.

You are right Ashvin.
He’s approach is a heideggerian approach. Even if he is a critic of metaphysics, he has made metaphysical statements in the above text. I’m currently reading Heidegger to better understand him and I must say he is very different then most of other thinkers in a good way. He asks the exact questions that are the most important. I know you have read Heidegger to so I would ask you what do you think of him.

Jw is a really deep thinker and an academic philosopher, so I can learn much from our conversations. I’m really thankful to him in many ways. It’s really trough him that i came in contact with Steiner and clerics work.

If you know good passages from Steiner that would respond to his propositions I would be more than happy. I quoted a part from philosophy of freedom chapter 2 in the response I’m working on.
I’m working out the response in German but I will share them in English here. Thankfully I got laptop back today, so I don’t have to write

Thankfully I got my laptop back today so I don’t have to use my mobile phone to write the responses (:

Yeah, his story of evolution is quite obviously a metaphysical one, extrapolating the results of modern reductionist thinking into the primordial past to support a bottom-up story of complexification. It may therefore help to draw some attention to the evolution of consciousness. Since he is probably somewhat familiar with the development of ancient philosophy and proto-science, it may be helpful to point briefly toward this quote (I say briefly so as not to distract too much from the core phenomenology):

GA 209 wrote:Considered from this point of view, what was the alphabet? It was what the heavens revealed through their fixed stars and through the planets moving across them. When the alphabet was spoken out of the original, instinctive, human wisdom it was astronomy that was expressed. What was spoken through the alphabet and what was taught in astronomy in those olden days was one and the same thing. The wisdom in the astronomy of those times was not presented in the same way as the learning contained in any branch of knowledge today, which is built up from single perceptions and concepts. It was conceived as a revelation that made itself felt on the surface of human experience, either in the form of an axiomatic truth or as part of an axiomatic truth. Thus a concrete experience was represented with a part of the primal wisdom. And there was something of quite a dim consciousness connected with the fact that, in the Middle Ages, those who were highly educated still had to learn grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. In this ascent through the various spheres of learning lies a half conscious recognition of something, which in earlier days, existed in instinctive clarity. Today grammar has become very abstract. Going back into times of which history tells us nothing, but which, nevertheless, are still historical times, we find that grammar was not the abstract subject it is today but that men were led through grammar into the mystery of the individual letters. They learned that the secrets of the cosmos found expression in the letters. The single vowel was brought into connection with its planet, the single consonant with the single sign of the Zodiac; thus, through the letters of the alphabet, Man gained knowledge of the stars.
...
These mysteries in the world of numbers give the merest intimation that here we are not concerned with what merely lives in the hollow of Man's head. ...In the relations of number we can come to perceive the relations of the objectivity of the world. If we always just add one to one naturally this is something that has nothing to do with the facts. I have a piece of chalk. If beside it I place a second piece of chalk this has nothing to do with the first. The one is not concerned with the other. If, however, I presuppose that everything is a unit and now pass to the numbers contained in this unit, I get a two in a way that is a matter of some consequence. I have to break up the piece. I then get right into reality.

Thus after being borne up in dialectics to grasping the thought of the astronomical, one reached still further into the cosmos with arithmetic and in a similar way with geometry. From geometry one got the feeling that the geometrical, thought concretely, was the music of the spheres. This is the difference between what holds good today and what once existed in the instinctive wisdom of primeval times. Take music today—the mathematical physicist reckons the pitch of a note, for example, reckons which pitch is at work in a melody. Then anyone who is musical is obliged to forget his music and enter the sphere of the abstract if, being a keen musician, he has not already run away from the mathematician. Man is led away from immediate experience into abstraction and this has very little to do with experience.

In itself it is really interesting—if one has a mathematical bent—to press on from the musical into the sphere of acoustics, but one does not gain much in the way of musical experience. That someone today learns geometry and as he proceeds begins to experience forms as musical notes, that is to say, if he rises from the 5th to the 6th grade, and makes geometry sound musically, all this, as far as I know, does not enter the curriculum. But that was once the meaning of rising to the sixth part of what was to be learned—from geometry to music. And only then did the archetypal, underlying reality become an experience. The astronomy in the subconscious then became something that one consciously mastered as astronomy, as the highest and 7th member of the so-called Trivium and Quadrivium.

The history of Man should be studied in accordance with the development of his consciousness for then we can gain a feeling that consciousness must return to these matters.

This helps illustrate that there is no absolute rule that the pathways of thinking via philosophical or mathematical-scientific language and symbols must be flattened and reductionistic. That indeed, if we study the ancient teachings, these all began in a non-reductionist form and served as imaginative portals into the higher octaves of the superimposed state, even lasting somewhat into the Middle Ages. They helped thinking consciousness resonate with the more experientially entangled states of Be-ing, where it discovers archetypal currents of meaning. It is only logical that modern thinking consciousness should be able to spiritualize its philosophical and mathematical-scientific thinking in the same sense, to restore its sensitivity to more integrated domains of meaningful experience where it can be active .

I am a little familiar with Heidegger and agree he was intuiting deeper spiritual realities like many other 20th century thinkers and asking the deeper questions. It is most helpful to focus on these patterns of thinking that emerged across thinkers and fields of inquiry over the last 150 years, as they help us intuit the underlying spiritual evolution unfolding. To flesh out that intuition, it also helps to delve into the details of specific instances.

GA 209 wrote:Today grammar has become very abstract. Going back into times of which history tells us nothing, but which, nevertheless, are still historical times, we find that grammar was not the abstract subject it is today but that men were led through grammar into the mystery of the individual letters. They learned that the secrets of the cosmos found expression in the letters. The single vowel was brought into connection with its planet, the single consonant with the single sign of the Zodiac; thus, through the letters of the alphabet, Man gained knowledge of the stars.

Someone just brought my attention to the following presentation, which is fantastic. It really illustrates for us the inner axis along which spiritual science can lead. Even our ordinary dry and prosaic speech used in philosophy, science, theology, etc. is of this same archetypal essence, resonating with much deeper experiential realities, except the underlying intuition anchored in the word-symbols has been 'chopped up' and decohered into fragments. We have lost inner sensitivity to the holistic, feeling-imbued qualities of our ordinary linguistic concepts. Through inner exercises, however, we can restore that sensitivity and begin to spiritualize our philosophical and scientific thinking. Science and Art can spiral together into unity as symbolic anchors of the Cosmic Spirit that animates our soul at the individual and collective scales.





Such a presentation also becomes much richer with the benefit of spiritual scientific revelations. It goes to show how so many souls in our time are instinctively finding their way to the threshold of deeper scales of inner activity.

We make use of language to express what we want to say and to reveal what lives in our souls. It is in the way in which language is used as a means of expressing the inner life of soul that the several epochs in the evolution of humanity differ radically from one another. If we go back to the ancient Hebrew epoch and to the wonderful modes of expression used in the temple-language, we find that there was a quite different way of clothing the secrets of the soul in words—a way undreamed of nowadays. In the old Hebrew language only the consonants were written, the vowels being inserted afterwards; and when a word was uttered the echoes of a whole world reverberated in it—not, as is the case to-day, some more or less abstract concept. The reason why the vowels were not written was that they were an indication of the speaker's inmost being, whereas the consonants were intended to depict external objects or conditions. For example, whenever an ancient Hebrew wrote the letter B—or what corresponded to our present B—it always evoked in him a sense of warmth and a picture of some outer condition, in this case something in which one could be enclosed, as in a shelter or a house. The sound B could not be uttered without this feeling as an accompaniment. Again, the sound A (ah) could not be uttered without conveying the impression or image of something inwardly powerful, of a radiating force. The content of the soul thus projected into words streamed out into space and into other souls. Language was therefore much more alive, much more related to the secrets of existence than is the case nowadays. (GA 124)

Here is my response



Thank you for your thoughts.It is important to understand that the writings are targeted investigations of our consciousness, which do not throw any postulates or metaphysical thoughts into the space. Everything written is a symbolic description of our thinking, which remains unconscious to us in our everyday lives. Before anything can even be discussed, thinking is necessary; every proposition, every supposed insight is a product of that activity which we are exploring here. Every statement about the world, about existence, is a child of thought. It would make no sense to study thinking by formulating theories about what it is. For our thinking (the intentional process that brings forth thoughts) is unconscious to us; everything we recognize are the manifested thoughts. When we try to create a model of thinking through thought constructs, the activity remains in the background, so we are in the position of a dog chasing its own tail. There is no talk about thinking in the sense of axiomatic statements about it, but in symbolic form, which directs our consciousness towards the activity. This form of writing aims to point the reader towards something rather than explaining what thinking is in the form of statements. There is much more to mention, but I think this should suffice for the beginning of our conversation and foundation.


“1. You began on solid common ground for us: our nature as thinking beings. We are not separate from Being, but individual instances of Being whose purpose is knowing through experience: we are Being in self-regard and experience. Being in self-consciousness.But this brings us to the nature of thinking, which is yet to be understood. This should be a central theme for us over the duration of our conversations.”

We should start our investigation by indicating our course without such statements about the essence of our existence. It is thinking that is our own activity through which we become self-conscious and self-reflective beings, for whom their own existence poses a problem. Because our existence (also referring to the content of the phenomenal experience which we colloquially call "the world") presents a problem to us through our capacity to think, we perceive ourselves as separate beings (from what we designate as "the world"). We attempt to bridge this (artificial separation) by creating mental constructs through our intuitive activity (thinking, which "casts" intuitions into the form of words), shaping a mental construct of the metamorphosis of the "world." Thus, we try to immerse the world (and its dynamic unfolding) in our own activity. Any assumption about the world must be abandoned so that we can understand ourselves as beings (existence) that are always thinking (whose central core is the thinking activity) and try to understand and study themselves through this.


Man is not a uniformly organized being. He continually demands more than the world willingly gives him. Nature has given us needs; among these are those whose satisfaction she leaves to our own activity. There are ample gifts allotted to us, but even more abundant is our desire. We seem to be born into dissatisfaction. Only a special case of this dissatisfaction is our drive for knowledge. We look at a tree twice. We see its branches at rest once, and in motion the next time. We are not satisfied with this observation. Why does the tree appear to us once at rest, and the other time in motion? So we ask. Every glance at nature generates in us a sum of questions. With every appearance confronting us, we are given a task. Every experience becomes a riddle. We see a creature emerging from an egg resembling its mother; we ask about the reason for this similarity. We observe growth and development in a living being up to a certain degree of perfection: we seek the conditions of this experience. We are never satisfied with what nature spreads before our senses. We seek everywhere for what we call an explanation of the facts. The surplus of what we seek in things over what is directly given to us divides our whole being into two parts; we become aware of our contrast to the world. We position ourselves as an independent being facing the world. The universe appears to us in two contrasts: I and world. This dividing wall between us and the world is erected as soon as consciousness ignites within us. But we never lose the feeling that we belong to the world, that a bond exists connecting us with it, that we are not a being outside, but within the universe. This feeling generates the striving to bridge the contrast. The bridging of this contrast constitutes, in the end, the whole intellectual striving of humanity. The history of spiritual life is a continuous search for the unity between us and the world. Religion, art, and science equally pursue this goal. The religious believer seeks in the revelation granted to him by God the solution to the riddles of the world, which his dissatisfied self, unsatisfied with the mere appearance of the world, poses to him. The artist seeks to embody the ideas of his self into the material, to reconcile what lives within him with the external world. He too feels dissatisfied with the mere appearance of the world and seeks to shape that more which his self, transcending it, contains. The thinker seeks the laws of appearances; he strives to penetrate through thinking what he experiences through observation. Only when we have made the content of the world our thought content do we find the connection again from which we have detached ourselves. We will later see that this goal can only be achieved if the task of the scientific researcher is understood much deeper than is often the case. The whole relationship I have laid out here confronts us in a historical phenomenon: in the contrast of the unified worldview or monism and the two-world theory or dualism. Dualism focuses only on the separation made by human consciousness between I and world. Its whole striving is a powerless wrestling for the reconciliation of these contrasts, which it alternately calls spirit and matter, subject and object, or phenomenon and appearance.
Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom (Chapter 2)


“2. Perspective becomes a confused concept once we overcome subject/object metaphysics. The problem becomes apparent when we claim that all we can know is our subjective intuitions. Perspective implies consciousness which itself implies being conscious of something. That points to a relationship between intuition and the world. As you rightly said, we are perspectival consciousness within a world, but that makes the world an equal player in our thinking. The problem in the West to date has been to imagine our consciousness as separate from an objective world. The present task isn’t to focus on ourselves as subject, but as individuated Being entangled, not separate.If we are to think of ourselves as thinking in the world, we already acknowledge more than just our inner intuitions - an acknowledgment of a world. But a world is something in the universe, and we are yet to rethink what a universe and a world are. Again, this should be part of the future discussion. It is also the central focus of my own thinking.”

I agree with you that we are not separate beings attempting to study the world from "outside," even though we may perceive ourselves as such, as described in the above quote. The task of our investigation should first and foremost be to temporarily set aside all supposed knowledge in order to engage in our essential act of thinking, which enables us to make statements like the ones you are making. The "world" is given to us as perception; it exists without our conscious bringing it forth. However, the world is not understandable to us through our perception; it is only when these perceptions are conceptually processed and ordered through thinking that it becomes so. Whenever we are confronted with a perception that is unfamiliar to us, we begin to think in order to bring this perception into harmony with other perceptions, thus establishing a relation and understanding what it is. If we had no terms to order and relate the contents of perception, we would have mere impressions, resulting in a heap that is unintelligible, thus not comprehensible. We would not be able to speak of a world. A "world" is always an ordered one, in the sense of conceptual order. Through the given perception, a world is not provided to us; it is only through the activity of thought, which adds the relevant concepts to the world, that the "world" "arises" in the sense that we can never speak of a world before that without falling into transcendental illusionism. We should ask ourselves the most essential question, namely that of what knowledge is and how it arises. Once we answer this question, we will stand on solid ground; however, we must beware of metaphysical speculation that might creep into our answers. Knowledge can only be studied in the act of knowing. It is important not to perceive the written as metaphysical postulates, even though it is difficult through our current thinking. I hope that we will be able to elaborate on the whole in our further conversation.“

3. The universe is the ‘All’ of our physical existence. It is not, however, all that exists, but a gross reduction. Our universe as such, though it appears to us as 14 billion years old, is only as old as life on earth from which we evolved. Consciousness started with single-celled life that probed its environment. We still observe this in the stimulus/response behavior of such organisms. At this stage it is a crude awareness of a universe and an interest in its impact on the organism. It has evolved greatly over the past 4 billion years and created worlds along the way. Life has evolved from a simple mode of Being experiencing itself to gradually moving toward a contemplation of its own essence. But in the original single-celled organism, it wasn’t only an awareness of itself, but an awareness of its relation to the universe. If there is a purpose here, it is to shift the focus to awareness of the word rather than the inner organism.The universe is what is left when through consciousness we reduce superposition to Eigenstate. The simplest explanation of this is as the first step in our reduction of information. Superposition remains, but we are aware of only one of the possible states. In our essence, we carry the bestowal of spatial/temporal sensibility through which we entangle and interact with the universe. This is our given mode of existence and the foundation for the creation of worlds. How this happens remains one of the beckoning mysteries.If humanity were to disappear, so would the universe, which exists as our conscious reduction from what physics would term quantum coherence. We can just think of it as the full manifold of Being.”

Here is a problematic point that I will address. It is important to mention that when we speak of a world that is outside the knowable, that is, outside of consciousness (at least of conscious perception, as this is always necessarily bound to knowledge), we are making metaphysical postulates about the world "behind" our phenomenal experience, of which we can fundamentally never know, since our perception is all that ever presents itself to us. I wanted to bring this up once and think that we will revisit this in the further course.In your above statement, there is a contradiction that I will address. You assume that the contents of perception, which we call the universe, are as old as human consciousness. This implies that humans have a phenomenal representation of a "world" (or also of certain energetic concepts that do not necessarily fall into a material conception) that acts as reality upon humans and is then perceived in consciousness as phenomenal. You would call this reduction, which would fundamentally mean the same thing since you separate the real and the perceived (phenomenal).You say: "If humanity were to disappear, so would the universe, which exists as our conscious reduction from what physics would term quantum coherence. We can just think of it as the full manifold of Being." Thus, the world is a representation, as mentioned above, and everything must also be understood as such, and not as the real. Even humans, in the sense of their physiology, namely the nervous system, the brain, the sensory organs, and everything else that is currently the object of scientific investigation, must, if you want to maintain coherence, also be understood as a reduction (representation), just like all other perceptions.Here you say: "Our universe as such, though it appears to us as 14 billion years old, is only as old as life on earth from which we evolved. Consciousness started with single-celled life that probed its environment. We still observe this in the stimulus/response behavior of such organisms. At this stage, it is a crude awareness of a universe and an interest in its impact on the organism. It has evolved greatly over the past 4 billion years and created worlds along the way. Life has evolved from a simple mode of Being experiencing itself to gradually moving toward a contemplation of its own essence. But in the original single-celled organism, it wasn’t only an awareness of itself, but an awareness of its relation to the universe. If there is a purpose here, it is to shift the focus to awareness of the word rather than the inner organism.”However, here you are treating the realm of biology, which, according to your statement, must always be understood as a reduction (representation), as something real. Just as the universe is as old as today's human consciousness, so nature and biological life, as well as the earth, must also be as old as today's human consciousness, and just like the representation of the human body as something evolutionarily developed, like other organisms, must fall away if humanity were to disappear. This implies that we must also reject the conception we have of evolution (in the standard sense of today's scientific investigation), through the artifacts and studies of our phenomenal world as an explanatory attempt regarding the genesis of humans and other so-called organisms, as they only exist in human representation. Physics is thus merely the study of phenomena that would dissolve if humanity no longer existed.It should also be mentioned that a postulate of a noumenon is always a metaphysical statement, as it posits something "behind" the being that exists in our perception. Accordingly, it is also a metaphysical postulate when you say that our "world" arises through a reduction and that all existing, as we know it, exists only in consciousness from humans (representation). For thus, you posit something that is prior to the reduction (representation) and then becomes perceivable (and thus knowable). You project an abstract thought that you have made "behind" perception and then explain how this occurs in the form of an intellectual model


.“4. Worlds exist within our universe as organic relationships and organizations of events we encounter. We are thrown into a world that imposes certain assumptions upon which the world was built. Consider the implication for any attempt to perceive and know without preconceptions. I would suggest the best we can do is fully grasp the assumptions and preconditions of the world and its historicity in which we are thrown and question them critically. Today, that means rethinking the assumptions of metaphysics and scientific reductionism - two sides of the same coin of subject/object metaphysics.”

Yes, we should critically examine all our naive assumptions and think them through to the end. Thus, we attempt to find a point of the given, a point without assumptions, because they have become conscious to us and can thus be addressed. Until today, hardly any philosopher has had this endeavor.

“5. Being reveals itself within this world and the world colors how we perceive. Today, the dominant mode is further reduction. In physics, revelation takes place as wave collapse. In what passes for philosophy, Being is reduced to systematic inventions and logic, mainly out of a felt inferiority to scientific knowledge. Both contemporary philosophy and physics block us from the truth.We will also need to rethink what truth and reality are.Our world is the product of 2500 years of metaphysics. Metaphysics creates systems as worldviews. Systems are rigid and dead. As anti-life, they are dogmatic, which leads to authoritarianism. As we are thrown into a world, it is natural to unconsciously accept the dogma as “just how the world is.” It is the work of the poet and thinker to decalcify the world by revealing its underlying strangeness, and by doing so set a world back into motion. Only then can we, as thinking and experiencing beings, regain our natural rhythm.The above is just a brief topology of the question at hand, and meant only as an introduction to a deeper discussion.”

Yes, I also agree with you, even if physics is just a description of perceptions and reduces them abstractly. I have already touched upon this above. There is still much to say and a new direction to discover, but for now, the written suffices, in my opinion. The discussion will deepen and the right questions will arise. To that end, I will prepare more writings to introduce topics.

Güney27 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 18, 2024 8:25 pm Dualism focuses only on the separation made by human consciousness between I and world. Its whole striving is a powerless wrestling for the reconciliation of these contrasts, which it alternately calls spirit and matter, subject and object, or phenomenon and appearance.
Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom (Chapter 2)

This a great quote to start with and one that JW should have no problem resonating it, since it also aligns with the view he has expressed. I have not gotten to the rest of your response yet, but just wanted to point out that the Wilson translation is best for PoF. In that, it is translated as "thinking and appearance", which makes a lot more sense than "phenomenon and appearance".