AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Aug 01, 2024 5:03 pm
Yes, I would encourage to read through the whole article for more context, and preferably without a strong doubt that your experience could be changed
I think it will become apparent that he is not proceeding in any abstract theoretical way or adopting a non-existent perspective and confusing conceptual scaffolding for realities.
I think you are pointing to a key issue in the phenomenology of spiritual activity that is useful to explore further. It is often felt like we should stick with describing immediate states of cognitive experience, i.e. what is generally obvious to everyone. Yet we will never get beyond the Catch-22 in that way because insights into the process of knowing are not contained within anything we already know. Cleric also discusses this in FoHC:
When speaking of phenomenology this shouldn’t be mistaken for investigation of only what is obvious. There are many examples of experiential phenomena that can only be beheld after certain conditions are met. For example, pure mathematics can be considered a form of phenomenology. What we are investigating are the patterns of our own mathematical thinking. Yet for someone who has never attempted to approach such a kind of thinking, these cognitive phenomena will not at all be obvious. It would be similar with a person who lacks some sensory organ and doesn’t find the experience of phenomena that others talk about. So the reader shouldn’t immediately dismiss what we’ll be discussing here, just because it may not be immediately obvious. All care will be taken to provide descriptions of the steps needed to approach non-obvious phenomena but the reader will need to apply certain inner effort to follow these steps.
What SM is expressing is intimately related to the above and this article on the Catch-22, i.e. about using our imaginative activity (for ex. through analogical reasoning) to go beyond our personal sphere of experience and to know the very activity of knowing, to somehow become cognitively sensitive to the processes that structure cognition and thereby always transcend the latter. Miller isn't suggesting that we can literally 'get outside' of or 'beneath' cognition in any metaphysical way, but that some kind of
imaginative effort must be made to become more sensitive to the subtle spiritual activity that is normally unperceived and unknown. We will never find the deeper intuitive movements hiding within the sphere of our past personal experience, knowledge, or worldview (the mind container).
The 'given' in
Steiner's epistemology is essentially the highest Intuitive movements within the domain of potential from which all concrete paths of conceptual-perceptual experience are 'narrowed down' in the sense of the negative 20 questions metaphor. It is what we normally conceive as an 'objective reality' that stimulates our spiritual activity and with which our activity interacts (without assuming anything about the metaphysical nature of that objective reality). By imaginatively eliminating the cognitive structuring of this objective world, we arrive at the sensory counterpole of Intuition - a 'relationless aggregate' of sensory impressions that cannot be distinguished in any of the ways we are used to, i.e. inner and outer, matter and spirit, object and subject, cause and effect, etc.
As discussed through the electrolysis analogy, it is important to imaginatively delaminate these aspects of experience so we can grow more sensitive to the underlying spiritual gestures that are responsible for them. Another example of this is Cleric's alien dwelling illustration in FoHC - this alien dwelling does not exist anywhere in reality, we will never literally experience it as a physical structure, but rather is an imaginative exercise to become more sensitive to those intuitive knowing aspects of our current experience we take for granted, i.e. the merging together of sensory impressions with concepts and temporal intuition that elucidate the former's functions and meaningfully orient our stream of becoming.
This imaginative approach is at the heart of Steiner's epistemological work which is simultaneously a phenomenology of knowing and also becomes ontology, since we imaginatively retrace into the creative knowing processes that structure all domains of experiential reality. Epistemology is simply the science (or phenomenology) of knowing, what it means 'to know'. Anthroposophy and spiritual science are what result when epistemology is freed from limiting assumptions and allowed to run its natural course through the inner life of spiritual activity. There we discover the true spiritual sources of our capacity to experientially know the World.
You were right, Ashvin, reading the whole article has helped. I recognize that it no longer appears that SM is searching for any external vantage point, and there is more subtlety to the reasoning than it appears from the quote. (This is partly because your quote was not accurate. You patched together two separate paragraphs without notice, so that “
This puts us in an interesting situation” points to one thing in the article, and to another one in the quote). Now my impression is, the article is compatible with an understanding of PoF. Nonetheless, I have multiple caveats.
First, since you reiterate the wording, let me say that the expression “Steiner’s epistemology”, for my sense of beauty, is slippery spiritual taste. In the simplest terms, this is because as soon as we utter the word, and think of “epistemology”, we are contemplating a theory. That’s what the -logy does to the reality of episteme. But because this contemplation is poured onto itself - knowledge itself - the conundrum of recursiveness shows up, which can only be appeased if we at the same time invite, not “the given” as a conceptual hero of the tale, coming to liberate human cognition from perpetual relativity, but the
experienced consciousness of a
process. As the hologrammatic encoding of such process, PoF is stripped of its dimensionality when reduced to an epistemology.
To be fair, SM expresses this point very well (but too late in the article, in my opinion) at page 11, when he brings in the hard problem of consciousness and criticizes the materialists' attempt to explain cognition with brain: “
cognition is not a result, but rather is the living process out of which all the results fall”.
Unfortunately, in the next passage, the previous pieces are not clearly put into fruition, but rather the reasoning is troubled with the idea that one has to find “the beginning”: “
“The brain” – as concept – does not declare itself, out of itself, the necessity for cognition. “The brain” is rather a passive element of the given, equivalent in this way to “a truck” or “the self” – none of these can provide a proper foundation for cognition, no matter how detailed and thorough the concept of “the brain” becomes. The whole point is to not begin in the middle, but at the beginning. In this respect the “brain” – which is only what it is because of how we approach it in and through our cognition – cannot be a proper foundation, as it is ‘in the middle’ as it were.”
Yes, the concept “brain” can’t be a foundation, but the same applies to “epistemology”. And this idea to strive to begin at the beginning seems misleading to me, to the extent that it suggests linearity and sequence, while the ingrained cognitive patterns of linearity should be made flexible, not borrowed as such, since they are right in the middle of our existential struggles. And so, in an effort to explain “Steiner’s epistemology” along these lines (literally, lines) he ends up making improbable statements such as: “
The question is, rather, where within the given do we find something that is not passively given, but is given only to the extent that it is actively being produced in the act of cognition?”. Another one: “
it is only through the act of cognition that our ideas and concepts arise and come to us as a part of the given.” Helpful to someone who is attempting to approach PoF?
The way Steiner puts it, in PoF Chapter V, avoids all such conceptual ruggedness and is more conducive to understanding, in my view, as in “
if I want to assert anything whatever about it [the percept], I can do so only with the help of thinking. If I assert that the world is my mental picture, I have enunciated the result of an act of thinking. And if my thinking is not applicable to the world, then this result is false. Between a percept and every kind of assertion about it there intervenes thinking” and subsequent sentences, where the question is illustrated: “
What right have you to declare the world to be complete without thinking?”
On the contrary, statements like SM’s run a big risk of putting whoever has not
already reflected on, and worked through, “Steiner’s epistemology” in a state of frustrating confusion. In my view, the only idea of beginning that is meaningful in relation to “Steiner's epistemology” is the beginning of one’s conscious coexistence with these ideas: the moment one learns about and begins to approach a book such as PoF. Other than that, I don't think there is a useful way to break down what follows that beginning, in smarter cognitive
sequences.
And, I would say, PoF is already an extreme summary. To pick an expression you often use, it’s an
artistic conceptual expression of a holistic, omnipresent reality. Therefore, any attempt to make an ulterior summary of it (not saying SM had that as a goal) is misled and doomed to fail. One can discuss it, work with it, write *about* it (which is possibly what SM aimed to), further elaborate and/or illustrate related ideas dialogically, analogically, but summarizing it is preposterous. Would anyone ever attempt to summarize a temple, a poem, a concert?
For these reasons I doubt this article is a useful recommendation for someone who is struggling with PoF.
PS. I agree - obviously - with your last paragraph. I imagine you felt it was necessary to write it, since my comment on the expression "Steiner's epistemology" was given in passing, it was maybe unclear. I hope I have made it clear in this post. By the way, I don't think the imaginative approach you describe is obvious in the article. Probably it would be more evident if I read more of his writings (though it's not my priority) but I don't see it in these pages.
