Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

Speaking of abstractly combining words into self-contained theoretical models... the critical philosophy saga continues But I will admit I enjoy reading Felipe's quotes of all these brilliant philosophers and also the way he seamlessly incorporates them. Part of the problem is that those who tried to go against Kant's reasoning indeed went about it in an abstract transcendental way, perhaps often misunderstanding Kant, because that's all they knew how to do, and so the living ideas of PoSA, which will sound similar on the surface, get lumped into that category as well.

Unfortunately, Ashvin, you are once again continuing to beg the question and continuing to take for granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth which the Critical Philosophy expressly calls into question (such that you are once again failing to make actual contact with that which you are attempting [and failing] to critique)—you are taking for granted that “rocks, rivers, trees, squirrels, etc.” must be something distinct from the self’s activity.

Schulze, in his Aenesidemus text, suggested—much like how you suggest that “we would once again be resting on mental representations and our real-time activity would still elude us”—that “Because he insists that all of knowledge is limited to appearances, Kant must also assume that we know the faculty of knowledge too only as an appearance and not as it is in itself” (cf. Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 245). The fact is that both you and Schulze are tacitly taking for granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth—hence begging the question against Kant and the Critical Philosophy—by hypostatizing the subject and its activity as if it were something apart from its representations. “Fichte [in his Aenesidemus review] makes one central point against all of Schulze’s meta-critical arguments: that they hypostatize the Kantian subject, treating it as if it were some kind of entity that exists apart from and prior to our knowledge of it. Here again Schulze’s retention of the concept of the thing-in-itself was working its mischief. When Schulze hears the words ‘faculty of representation’ [what you, Ashvin, call ‘spiritual activity’], Fichte explains, he thinks only of ‘some sort of thing (round or square?) which exists as a thing in itself, independently of its being represented, and indeed exists as a thing which represents’ [very much like you seem to think, Ashvin]. If we conceive the transcendental subject [or what you call ‘spiritual activity’] in this manner, then Schulze’s [and Ashvin’s] objections indeed have their point: there is the danger that all representations might not conform to it, that we know it only as an appearance, and that we cannot apply the principle of causality to it, and so on. But, Fichte insists, we need not accept, and indeed we must reject, this whole conception of the transcendental subject. We cannot think of the transcendental subject as something that exists apart from and prior to its knowledge of itself, as something that transcends all its own self-conceptions, because that is to ignore the simple but fundamental point that self-consciousness is essential to, and constitutive of, the very nature of our subjectivity. Who we are depends on what we conceive ourselves to be; a subject which could not be self-conscious would be a thing but not a subject at all. Hence Fichte states as his counter principle: ‘The faculty of representation exists for the faculty of representation and through the faculty of representation’; or, as he also puts it: ‘The I is what it is... for the I’” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 246).

After Schulze, Maimon too, in his own major writings, offered his own critique of the Critical Philosophy: “The essence of Maimon’s critique is that Kant cannot solve the problem behind the Deduction—‘How do a priori concepts apply to experience if they do not derive from it?’—because of his rigid and sharp dualism between understanding and sensibility” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 249); this Maimonian challenge very closely resembles, Ashvin, your own observation that “self-knowledge eludes critical philosophy”. Nevertheless, once again, like you do, Maimon also begs the question against Kant by taking for granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth: “Fichte’s official account of his reply to Maimon appears in some brief and dense passages from two pivotal works of the Jena years, the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre and the Grundriß des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre. The thrust of his reply is that Maimon too is guilty of his own form of dogmatism. Like Schulze, Maimon assumes that the categories must apply to some object independent of them, though in his case the object is something given in experience rather than a thing-in-itself beyond it” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 252). The idea that Schulze, Maimon, and you (Ashvin) are each proposing—that the self’s activity must be something apart from and removed from the subject’s knowledge itself (e.g., when you write that “If we were to ‘see’ our spiritual activity in this way, we would once again be resting on mental representations and our real-time activity would still elude us”) is precisely to beg the question against Critical Philosophy, to take from granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth doubted by the Critical Philosopher: you (Ashvin) are taking for granted (begging the question against the Critical Philosopher) when you suggest that what you call “our real-time activity” must exist apart from and prior to instantiated representations, whereas the Critical Philosopher “need not accept, and indeed we must reject, this whole conception of the transcendental subject [viz., spiritual activity]”. That the transcendental realist criterion of truth—and, hence, petitio principii—is involved in your hitherto statements, Ashvin, is incontestable and evident.

Once again, Ashvin, rather that satisfactorily critiquing Critical Philosophy, you are failing to make any actual contact with it: your attempt to locate conscious/spiritual activity “behind” or “beyond” representation not only misunderstands the nature of consciousness itself but egregiously begs the question against the Critical Philosopher (as you’ve done continually hitherto, you are only taking for granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth which the Critical Philosopher calls into question, such that it is plain and incontestable that “rather that satisfactorily critiquing Critical Philosophy, you are failing to make any actual contact with it”). Your drawing-hand analogy, while superficially compelling, ultimately misses its mark: the apparent infinite regress it identifies only arises if we assume conscious activity must exist independently of its self-manifestation (that is, if we already take for granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth) precisely the assumption critical philosophy questions. Rather that satisfactorily critiquing Critical Philosophy, Ashvin, you are failing to make any actual contact with it.

Your remarks hitherto, Ashvin, are part of a pattern of misreadings that consistently fail to grasp the fundamental innovation of critical philosophy: these misreadings all share a common error, viz., they hypostatize conscious activity as something existing independently of its self-manifestation (and eo ipso tactitly take for granted the transcendental realist criterion of truth that the Critical Philosopher does not adopt).


The problem in your reasoning here is the same one that I referred to on another thread in the BK Community forum, re: Kant's argument about the hundred actual thalers vs. hundred imagined ones being practically equivalent. That is, the argument is divorced from actual living experience and weaves in abstractions. Similarly, when one does a mathematical problem, one can livingly experience the distinction between the mathematical representations that are manipulated and the *invisible inner gestures* which one performs to manipulate the representations. We can verify the latter is immanent to our experience because the mathematical representations will not calculate themselves in the absence of the invisible inner gestures. One can only conflate the two together by ignoring living experience and resorting to an abstract realm where hundred imagined thalers (representations) are equivalent to hundred actual thalers (real-time spiritual activity). For the person who is starving and needs to buy food, just like the person who is striving for living self-knowledge, the hundred actual thalers are indeed distinct from the imagined ones, just as one's real-time activity is distinct from the representations formed and manipulated by that activity.

Thus, I am pointing out that critical philosophy only remains coherent when it divorces itself from living and immanent experience and lapses into a form of dogmatic metaphysics, where abstract concepts are weaved between themselves with no regard for how we actually experience our spiritual activity and immanent representations of that activity.

[Federica]

Was he also missing that it's the astral nature, and not thinking in LLM-assisted words, that degenerates language

He wasn't missing that, because he wouldn't see any reason to divide them into separate categories, which I think is made pretty explicit in the article.

Here we have yet another demonstration of your soul biases in action. You said you have started to work on them, yesterday, so perhaps you deserve some slack, until your work starts giving effect. In the meantime, let's notice:
Of course Max wasn't missing that. Neither was I. Max spoke of a tithe taken by the LLM. Coming from his pen it's wonderful writing, and poetic. From mine, "a failure". I also recommended that we take action, etcetera. But coming from me, you would have gotten it, it's "failure".

By the way, mine was a (rhetorical) question, but you 'forgot'... to quote the question mark, in my question. Perhaps a pure coincidence (though we know coincidences don't exist). Or perhaps I was wrong when I stated that you are fundamentally well intentioned. Perhaps, you are only well intentioned towards those whom you consider part of your clan - your in-groups. That's the extent and limit of your current Anthroposophical understanding. So that those who do not please your curvatures, those, you try to crush - as you demonstrated many times, and admitted yourself, yesterday, with regards to Felipe. That's also why you are perhaps not yet entitled to write on morality, as I previously argued, until the work you started yesterday begins to yield some fruit.

[AshvinP]

Was he also missing that it's the astral nature, and not thinking in LLM-assisted words, that degenerates language

He wasn't missing that, because he wouldn't see any reason to divide them into separate categories, which I think is made pretty explicit in the article.

Here we have yet another demonstration of your soul biases in action. You said you have started to work on them, yesterday, so perhaps you deserve some slack, until your work starts giving effect. In the meantime, let's notice:
Of course Max wasn't missing that. Neither was I. Max spoke of a tithe taken by the LLM. Coming from his pen it's wonderful writing, and poetic. From mine, "a failure". I also recommended that we take action, etcetera. But coming from me, you would have gotten it, it's "failure".

By the way, mine was a (rhetorical) question, but you 'forgot'... to quote the question mark, in my question. Perhaps a pure coincidence (though we know coincidences don't exist). Or perhaps I was wrong when I stated that you are fundamentally well intentioned. Perhaps, you are only well intentioned towards those whom you consider part of your clan - your in-groups. That's the extent and limit of your current Anthroposophical understanding. So that those who do not please your curvatures, those, you try to crush - as you demonstrated many times, and admitted yourself, yesterday, with regards to Felipe. That's also why you are perhaps not yet entitled to write on morality, as I previously argued, until the work you started yesterday begins to yield some fruit.

Federica, I anticipated this would happen, and I hope you take a moment to reflect on how my post was completely substantive and addressed the exact question you raised, which clearly presupposed a categorical difference between "the astral nature" and "not thinking in LLM-assisted words". It presupposed these are two different causes for the "degeneration of language" (and this is the point you have been making throughout the entire thread, so I clearly didn't conjure it out of thin air).

How did you respond? Did you address any of the points that I made? Did you avoid those points and instead begin imputing 'soul biases' and nefarious motives? Did you have any interest in discussing the question to begin with, or was it merely a means of baiting me into a response so you could express your lower impulses, yet again?
.
You asked previously for precise indications of your commenting tendencies on this forum. If this comment above doesn't stand as the most shining example of your antagonistic tendencies, then nothing else will. You couldn't even make it past one post before succumbing to them, and that's right after you said you would try.

That's the last thing I will write on it until you are able to resist that tendency and dispassionately speak to the important issues and spiritual scientific facts that I raised in my post.

[AshvinP]

Some more comments:


You are actually egregiously misrepresenting Kant’s “100 thalers” example here, Ashvin: Kant does not argue, as you erroneously suggest he does, about “the hundred actual thalers vs. hundred imagined ones being practically equivalent”; in fact, Kant stresses precisely the opposite of this, insisting explicitly that “My financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real thalers than it is by the mere concept of them (that is, of their possibility)” (KrV, A 599, B 627).

Ironically, then, far from “ignoring living experience” (as you’ve erroneously suggested), Kant very specifically stresses it and emphasizes it (the very basis and foundation of the Critical Philosophy, despite your continued straw-man fallacies, is the very “bathos of experience” after all): “By whatever and by however many predicates we may think a thing—even if we completely determine it—we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is” (KrV, A 600, B 628); namely, and more precisely, “A concept is always possible if it is not self-contradictory. This is the logical criterion of possibility, and by it the object of the concept is distinguishable from the nihil negativum. But it may none the less be an empty concept, unless the objective reality of the synthesis through which the concept is generated has been specifically proved; and such proof, as we have shown above, rests on principles of possible experience, and not on the principle of analysis (the law of contradiction). This is a warning against arguing directly from the logical possibility of concepts to the real possibility of things” (Kant, KrV, A 596n, B 624n).

Not only have you hitherto continued to beg the question against the Critical Philosophy, taking for granted what it calls into question (viz., the transcendental realist criterion of truth), but now you unabashedly misrepresent the essence of the Critical Philosophy too (hence, making you guilty here of the straw-man fallacy).

It is ironic, Ashvin, that you write about the “problem” in my reasoning—ironic because hitherto you have begged the question against the Critical Philosophy and now you are engaging in the straw-man fallacy too: once again, Ashvin, rather than satisfactorily critiquing Critical Philosophy, you are failing to make any actual contact with it.

Furthermore, Ashvin, your suggestion that “one’s real-time activity is distinct from the representations formed and manipulated by that activity” amounts to yet more outright and unabashed petitio principii—even though I already pointed out that the Critical Philosopher “need not accept, and indeed ... must reject, this whole [‘independently of its being represented’] conception of the transcendental subject”, you nevertheless simply re-assert “this whole [‘independently of its being represented’] conception of the transcendental subject”, which re-assertion involves not only unabashed petitio principii but, at this point, involves the invincible ignorance fallacy as well: it seems that you simply refuse to engage with the Critical Philosophy on its own terms, hence why you’re continually failing to actually make any contact with it, hence you’re only begging the question against it (and repeatedly too, hence the invincible ignorance fallacy).

Ironically, by continuing to fail to acknowledge (and to unabashedly misrepresent as well) the essence of the Critical Philosophy (the very foundation of the Critical Philosophy involving what Kant called the “bathos of experience”), and by continuing to take for granted transcendental realism (when you take for granted the conception of the transcendental subject the Critical Philosopher “need not accept, and indeed ... must reject”), not only do you fail to make any actual contact with the Critical Philosophy, but you yourself are more guilty of dogmatic metaphysics than the Critical Philosophy you continue to fail to make any contact with (e.g., when take for granted that “one’s real-time activity is distinct from the representations formed and manipulated by that activity”, even though “By whatever and by however many predicates we may think a thing [e.g., subjectivity ‘independently of its being represented’]—even if we completely determine it—we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is”).


It only begs the question for someone who is unwilling to turn inwardly and experience the reality of unrepresented spiritual activity for themselves, thus knowing there is no transcendental subject needed, like the person who refuses to believe in the "transcendental realm of mathematics" because they never learned how to add numbers together. Only people who are fully satisfied with weaving in empty abstractions are unwilling to experience this immanent reality for themselves in order to maintain a theoretical dream picture of "experience" via critical philosophy.

Kant invoked the hundred thalers example to show that a concept of God can exist as the highest ideal potential yet not refer to any existing God, like one can imagine a hundred thalers without having actual thalers. This reveals he is weaving in abstractions, precisely as Steiner elucidates. Because he has lost sight of his real-time spiritual activity, he imagines there can be "empty concepts" that have no connection with living reality. Yet that is an error because all concepts come from the only living reality we can ever know, our real-time spiritual activity. Even Kant's abstract concepts are not absolutely empty, they only become so when they are arbitrarily held apart from the activity that gives them life.


I understand that you happen to be convinced of “the reality of unrepresented spiritual activity”—nor do I desire to divorce you from that conviction, Ashvin—my only point is that, insofar as you base your critique of the Critical Philosophy on such assertion of “the reality of unrepresented spiritual activity”, then eo ipso you simply beg the question against and fail to make any actual contact with the critical philosophy (because you’d only taking for granted the account of subjectivity that the Critical Philosopher “need not accept, and indeed ... must reject”).

Ashvin, my whole point is that you cannot simply presuppose what the Critical Philosophy calls into question (viz., transcendental realism and “subjectivity ‘independently of its being represented’”) in your attempts to critique the Critical Philosophy—because then you’d only be begging the question.

Your suggestion that “It only begs the question for someone who is unwilling to turn inwardly and experience the reality of unrepresented spiritual activity for themselves” involves blatant ignoratio elechi: you are simply missing the point that the Critical Philosophy’s foundation is the “bathos of experience”.

I do not ask that you abandon your metaphysical commitments, Ashvin; I only ask that you understand that bringing your metaphysical transcendental realism to bear against the Critical Philosophy only begs the question against the Critical Philosophy more than anything else.

I brought up, earlier, the Göttingen Review because the authors of that (Göttingen) Review interpreted Kant’s Critical Philosophy according to their own system of metaphysics (thereby failing to grasp the gist of what critical philosophy is even all about); and Kant, in his reply to the Göttingen Review, rightly pointed out its authors were guilty of “an egregious example of sloppy and careless method” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 89). What you’ve been doing hitherto, Ashvin, is precisely the same as the authors of the Göttingen Review: viz., rather than engaging with the Critical Philosophy on its own terms, you are simply bringing to bear your own transcendental-realist metaphysics, thereby engaging not only in ignoratio elenchi (ignoring the critical essence of Critical Philosophy) but in egregious petitio principii (you are taking for granted what the Critical Philosopher “need not accept, and indeed ... must reject”).

Furthermore, Ashvin, it involves a contradiction in terms to talk about how one may “experience the reality of unrepresented spiritual activity”: whatsoever I experience is already a representation by virtue of having reference to the unity of apperception. “Even if we could bring our intuition to the highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby come any nearer to the constitution of objects in themselves. We should still know only our mode of intuition, that is, our sensibility” (Kant, KrV, A 43).


But critical philosophy makes it so that ANY experience which the critical philosopher has not yet experienced, becomes a "metaphysical conviction" or "transcendental realism", and therefore any appeal to such experience "begs the question". Do you see the problem here? The "bathos of experience" for the critical philosopher only becomes what the philosopher has experienced at any given time. Then any unfamiliar experiences, even if immanently verifiable (just as the math illiterate can verify the realm of mathematical experiences by learning new inner skills), is lumped into "system of metaphysics". In other words, anything that questions critical philosophy must automatically be transcendental realism, according to the critical philosopher. This is the quintessence of dogmatic thinking, the absolute culmination of it, against which all prior dogmatic metaphysical systems pale in comparison.

One can call real-time spiritual activity (present thinking) a "representation" if that is simply the name one is using for experience as such, but it then becomes an entirely unique representation unlike all others. It does not refer to the unity of apperception but the latter refers to it. It is that which establishes the unity. Again, its existence only becomes a metaphysical conviction for those who have lost experiential contact with it.


It is simply not the case, Ashvin, that “critical philosophy makes it so that ANY experience which the critical philosopher has not yet experienced, becomes a ‘metaphysical conviction’ or ‘transcendental realism’”—you are once again thinking in terms of transcendental realism, and you are once again begging the question against Critical Philosophy by assuming that the Critical Philosopher must accept transcendental realism as his criterion of objectivity (the Critical Philosopher, however, explicitly insists that the transcendental realist criterion of truth is not necessary to establish the objectivity of representations).

As writes Kant, “Nothing is really given us save perception and the empirical advance from this to other possible perceptions. For the appearances, as mere representations, are in themselves real only in perception, which perception is in fact nothing but the reality of an empirical representation, that is, appearance. To call an appearance a real thing prior to our perceiving it, either means that in the advance of experience we must meet with such a perception, or it means nothing at all. For if we were speaking of a thing in itself, we could indeed say that it exists in itself, apart from relation to our senses and possible experience. But we are here speaking only of an appearance in space and time, which are not determinations of things in themselves but only of our sensibility. Accordingly, that which is in space and time is an appearance; it is not anything in itself but consists merely of representations, which, if not given in us—that is to say, in perception—are nowhere to be met with” (KrV, A 493-494).

According to the empirical realist criterion of truth—the criterion adopted by the Critical Philosopher (a fact which hitherto you’ve continued to egregiously ignore)—representstions have objectivity not because they have some correspondence to a transcendental reality (whether a thing-in-itself or subjectivity “independently of its being represented”) but because they conform to the a priori necessary conditions of experience (categories of the understanding and forms of sensibility), whether “in the advance of experience” or in the present moment of experience.
What you are continually failing to grasp, Ashvin, is that the Critical Philosopher finds himself in and refuses to depart from experience—present experience or “in the advance of experience”—not dogmatically/arbitrarily but because the type of investigation he is carrying out (critical) fundamentally demands it; his aim is to conduct a critical analysis of experience and its transcendental (not to be confused with “transcendent”) a priori conditions (those conditions without which experience would be logically impossible and unrealizable for beings like us).

You write that “anything that questions critical philosophy must automatically be transcendental realism, according to the critical philosopher. This is the quintessence of dogmatic thinking, the absolute culmination of it, against which all other prior dogmatic metaphysical systems pale in comparison”—but here, Ashvin, you are once again showing that you have yet to actually comprehend what the Critical Philosophy is essentially; once again you are completely failing to comprehend the essentially critical nature of the Critical Philosophy. The aim of the Critical Philosophy requires that it limit itself to experience and its a priori form. You may as well complain that the basketball player is in error because he has not brought a tennis racket onto the basketball court—in other words, Ashvin, your critique of the Critical Philosophy amounts to “The Critical Philosophy is in error because it is not non-critical philosophy”. Just as complaining that basketball players don’t use tennis rackets misunderstands the nature of basketball, criticizing critical philosophy for not being metaphysical speculation misunderstands its fundamental project (and this reveals how your critique, Ashvin, fundamentally mischaracterizes what critical philosophy attempts to accomplish); like I’ve said already, Ashvin, you have yet to make any actual contact with the Critical Philosophy.

Worse, not only are you engaging in the straw-man fallacy against the Critical Philosophy, but it seems that you do not even know what a Critical Philosopher looks like because you won’t (or can’t) take your gaze away from the straw-man you’ve built.

Ashvin, your charge of dogmatism against the Critical Philosophy actually only reveals your continued failure to engage with critical philosophy on its own terms: by interpreting critical philosophy’s methodological commitments as arbitrary restrictions you egregiously miss how these commitments necessarily follow (emphasis on “necessarily”) from its fundamental critical project of analyzing experience and its a priori form.
Is the basketball player dogmatic because he refuses to bring a tennis racket onto the basketball court? No; what basketball essentially is demands that tennis rackets have no role in the game of basketball (not arbitrarily but necessarily based on what basketball is).

Is the Critical Philosopher dogmatic because he refuses to engage in transcendental-realist metaphysics? No; what Critical Philosophy essentially is demands that transcendental-realist metaphysics have no role in critical philosophizing (not arbitrarily but necessarily based on what critical philosophizing is).

What you have been doing hitherto, Ashvin, is attempting to smuggle in a tennis racket onto the basketball court—viz., hitherto you’ve tried to smuggle onto the court of Critical Philosophy what does not belong and cannot belong there (viz., transcendental realism, your hypothesis of subjectivity “independently of its being represented”).

It is no understatement, Ashvin, to say that hitherto (in your attempted critique) you’ve made no contact whatsoever with the Critical Philosophy (what you are attempting to critique you have yet to actually comprehend the gist of).


Felipe, it is unfortunate that so far you have misunderstood my posts as a critique of critical philosophy. In fact, I have several times pointed out that critical philosophy is internally coherent and would be perfectly fine as a *starting point* for phenomenology of spiritual activity, by which we finally immerse our cognitive faculty in the 'bathos of experience'. Critical philosophy can serve as an *exercise* in deconditioning our thinking from metaphysical habits instilled by the modern era, and for strengthening our logical thinking skills to their greatest heights (which clearly you have done).

If instead we take critical philosophy as an end-in-itself, then it becomes exactly what Kant said - a system of logically coherence concepts that are, however, empty. Every system of thinking becomes dogmatic when it refuses to emerge from its cocoon of concepts into the more intimate and integrated experiences that imbue the concepts with their life. The critique is of the *way* in which critical philosophy is employed in the search for self-knowledge in modern times. That search can no longer be a passive analysis of experience with familiar forms of thinking but should become an active metamorphosis of thinking itself. This metamorphosis was prefigured by Goethe and comes to full expression in Steiner.

https://rsarchive.org/.../English/AP197 ... 01c06.html
"Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at the most significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the attitude of those who were interested in the highest questions was fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, depending trustfully on his healthy nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that in Goethe he could only turn “to the representative of the purest spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity that has been reached at the present time.” But he had the opinion of Kant “that no human mind can advance further than to the limit at which Kant had stood, especially in his Critique of Judgment.” Whoever penetrates into the world conception of Goethe, however, which is presented in the cloak of naiveté, will, nevertheless, find a firm foundation that can be expressed in the form of clear ideas. Goethe himself did not raise this foundation into the full light of consciousness. For this reason, his mode of conception finds entrance only slowly into the evolution of philosophy, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it is Kant's position with which the spirits first attempt to come to clarity and with whom they begin to settle their account.

No matter how great Kant's influence was, his contemporaries could not help feeling that their deeper need for knowledge could not become satisfied by him. Such a demand for enlightenment urgently seeks after a unitary world conception as it is given in Goethe's case. With Kant, the individual realms of existence are standing side by side without transition. For this reason, Fichte, in spite of his unconditional veneration for Kant, could not conceal from himself the fact “that Kant had only hinted at the truth, but had neither presented nor proved it.”"

[AshvinP]

We managed to work back in a potentially fruitful direction.

Thank you for this clarification, Ashvin. And I have to say that, given this clarification, I have to find myself perfectly in agreement with your observation that “critical philosophy is internally coherent and would be perfectly fine as a starting point for phenomenology of spiritual activity, by which we finally immerse our cognitive faculty in the ‘bathos of experience’”. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that that “exercise in deconditioning our thinking from metaphysical habits instilled by the modern era”—namely, critical philosophizing—is a necessary prerequisite for any attempt at a “phenomenology of spiritual activity”.

If it is the case that hitherto I’ve misunderstood your statements as “a critique of critical philosophy”—and if your aim hitherto has been only to insist that critical philosophy can be “perfectly fine as a starting point for phenomenology of spiritual activity”—then I hope you will forgive me for such misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, my point hitherto has been only to defend the methodology of critical philosophy itself—viz., my aim has been to clearly illustrate what critical philosophy is and what it cannot be (even if I’ve misinterpreted your contributions hitherto). Namely, my point is (and has been) that—even if we take for granted that critical philosophy can be “perfectly fine as a starting point for phenomenology of spiritual activity”—critical philosophy, as a method of philosophizing itself, must limit itself to a critical analysis of experience and its a priori form (whether the critical philosopher afterwards commits to a “phenomenology of spiritual activity” or no).

But, Ashvin, I do agree with you that a “phenomenology of spiritual activity” is a natural next-step once a thorough critical enterprise has been carefully undertaken: viz., “From all this it follows that it is not in keeping with the nature of philosophy, especially in the field of pure reason, to take pride in a dogmatic procedure, and to deck itself out with the title and insignia of mathematics, to whose ranks it does not belong, though it has every ground to hope for a sisterly union with it. Such pretensions are idle claims which can never be satisfied, and indeed must divert philosophy from its true purpose, namely, to expose the illusions of a reason that forgets its limits, and by sufficiently clarifying our concepts to recall it from its presumptuous speculative pursuits to modest but thorough self-knowledge” (Kant, KrV, A 735).


Great, so assuming we have both sufficiently deconditioned from metaphysical thinking habits, and therefore the concepts we use are never speculating about transcendental realities, what are the next steps in your view? How do we more thoroughly investigate the structure and dynamics of spiritual activity and thus elaborate and refine our self-knowledge? Have you started exploring these next steps after the critical enterprise?


“Like Kant, then, Fichte attempts to decide the question of the reality of freedom by an appeal to conscience, the awareness of the moral law. We have the duty to believe that we are free because, when we do something contrary to duty, the voice of our conscience tells us that we could have always done otherwise. Fichte realizes that such an appeal is inadequate on theoretical grounds because the naturalist can always dispute the testimony of conscience, which he thinks rests on ignorance of the natural causes of our actions. But, against this objection, Fichte takes his last stand and ends the discussion. He says that he will not contest the fact of the moral law because he ought not to. We cannot go beyond the moral law, the experience of our own conscience, because it is a practical necessity. ‘I cannot go beyond this standpoint because I am not permitted to go beyond it’.
“In the end, then, the Wissenschaftslehre rests the whole question of the reality of freedom on an act of choice, the decision to be moral. Although there can be no doubt that morality commands us to adopt the belief in freedom, Fichte admits that we still have to choose the standpoint of morality. But nothing more can be expected of a philosophy devoted to freedom, Fichte insists, than resting its foundation on an act of choice” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 305-306).

I want to say that “the next steps” in the enterprise to “more thoroughly investigate the structure and dynamics of spiritual activity and thus elaborate and refine our self-knowledge” naturally must encompass the practical dimension—where the question of the reality of freedom takes (and must take) precedence—“nothing more can be expected of a philosophy devoted to [the question of the reality of] freedom”.


I am in full agreement there, the question of freedom and its reality is central. This is the question take up by Steiner in the late 19th century, which culminated in The Philosophy of Freedom.

"There are two fundamental questions in the life of the human soul towards which everything to be discussed in this book is directed. One is: Is it possible to find a view of the essential nature of man such as will give us a foundation for everything else that comes to meet us—whether through life experience or through science—which we feel is otherwise not self-supporting and therefore liable to be driven by doubt and criticism into the realm of uncertainty? The other question is this: Is man entitled to claim for himself freedom of will, or is freedom a mere illusion begotten of his inability to recognize the threads of necessity on which his will, like any natural event, depends? It is no artificial tissue of theories that provokes this question. In a certain mood it presents itself quite naturally to the human soul. And one may well feel that if the soul has not at some time found itself faced in utmost seriousness by the problem of free will or necessity it will not have reached its full stature. This book is intended to show that the experiences which the second problem causes man's soul to undergo depend upon the position he is able to take up towards the first problem. An attempt is made to prove that there is a view of the nature of man's being which can support the rest of knowledge; and further, that this view completely justifies the idea of free will, provided only that we have first discovered that region of the soul in which free will can unfold itself." (GA 4, 1918 Preface)

Have you had a chance to contemplate this work yet? It is most important that we remember, as we have established, Steiner is not doing metaphysics, he is not speculating on or searching for any transcendental reality which can ground human freedom. He went through Kant and critical philosophy in his early years and thoroughly integrated that aspect of it. We can see that, for example, here:

"Monism is quite clear that a being acting under physical or moral compulsion cannot be a truly moral being. It regards the phases of automatic behavior (following natural urges and instincts) and of obedient behavior (following moral standards) as necessary preparatory stages of morality, but it also sees that both these transitory stages can be overcome by the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral world conception both from the mundane fetters of naïve moral maxims and from the transcendental moral maxims of the speculative metaphysician. Monism can no more eliminate the former from the world than it can eliminate percepts; it rejects the latter because it seeks all the principles for the elucidation of the world phenomena within that world, and none outside it.

Just as monism refuses even to think of principles of knowledge other than those that apply to men (see Chapter 7), so it emphatically rejects even the thought of moral maxims other than those that apply to men. Human morality, like human knowledge, is conditioned by human nature. And just as beings of a different order will understand knowledge to mean something very different from what it means to us, so will other beings have a different morality from ours. Morality is for the monist a specifically human quality, and spiritual freedom the human way of being moral."

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this work, or on this direction of spiritual phenomenology in general. Could these be the next steps after the critical enterprise?

[AshvinP]

Here are some additional comments... usually this is the point at which people say "ok that sounds interesting" and then check out and go back to ordinary philosophizing. Hopefully that doesn't happen here and it stimulates Felipe to dig deeper into spiritual phenomenology. I get the sense that he is truly striving for something deeper than the philosophical thoughts about "experience" that float at the surface. Let's see.

There is a particular passage from Frederick C. Beiser’s book on the genesis of neo-Kantianism that comes to mind as I ponder the question of the reality of freedom: “Fries [in his ‘Von der rationellen Seelenlehre’ and ‘Abriß der Metaphysik der innern Natur’] intends his ‘metaphysics of inner nature’ to be the counterpart to Kant’s metaphysical principles of natural science, which was a metaphysics of outer nature. It goes almost without saying, however, that, as a good Kantian, he places severe restrictions on the metaphysics of inner nature. The entire content of a metaphysics of inner nature turns out to be provided by the unity of apperception, by the ‘I think’ that accompanies all representations. Mindful of Kant’s Paralogisms, Fries then insists that we cannot derive any substantial knowledge at all from the ‘I think’. It is the mere form that accompanies all our representations, and to give it any determinate content we need particular empirical intuitions. Fries is careful to say that nothing of metaphysical significance follows from the unity of apperception. From it we cannot infer that either materialism or spiritualism are true. We do not know whether the ‘I’ is an ultimate subject or whether it is simply the property of some other deeper substance, whether material or spiritual. The only value of the idea of a single enduring subject is strictly regulative. Its use consists in providing systematic unity to the study of the mind, in reducing all activities down to a few basic ones, and then showing these basic ones to be derived from a single principle.

“Fries’s final article for the Psychologisches Magazin—‘Allgemeine Uebersicht der empirischen Erkenntnisse des Gemüths’—attempts to provide a general overview of empirical psychology, one that will serve as a guide for more special investigations. The task now is to find the basic faculties of the mind, and to do so Fries advises following the guiding thread provided by its a priori principles. For each fundamental kind of a priori principle he assumes that there is a basic faculty. Since Fries, following Kant, thinks that there are three basic kinds of a priori principles, he adopts Kant’s tripartite division of the mind into three faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. ‘I know’, ‘I feel’, and ‘I desire’ designate three fundamental forms of experience, which are completely distinct from one another and which cannot be further explained. Fries is again very careful in refusing to draw metaphysical conclusions from his psychology. He is agnostic about which position to take regarding mentaphysical relations, and so he adopts the thesis of interaction only as a hypothesis. But on one point he seems to infract his own embargo on metaphysics: namely, in assuming the existence of freedom. Since the spontaneous activities of reason and understanding do not depend on external causes, we have reason to believe in the existence of freedom, he argues. But here Fries was forgetting his own cautions elsewhere, namely, that the ‘I’ can be the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions. To be consistent, Fries had to hold that freedom too, no less than the beliefs in God and mortality, is only a matter of faith” (Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 37-38).

My concern is as follows: the reality of freedom cannot be sufficiently substantiated a priori because it is logically possible that I am not free (viz., “the ‘I’ can be the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”). It remains therefore that, if the reality of freedom is to be sufficiently substantiated, it must be sufficiently substantiated a posteriori [phenomenologically]; but it seems that I cannot sufficiently substantiate the reality of freedom a posteriori because, even if I rigorously examine experience and my thinking activity with the utmost care, it is always possible that every aspect of my experience and thinking activity “can be the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”.
Well, what about Fichte’s insistence that “nothing more can be expected of a philosophy devoted to freedom ... than resting its foundation on an act of choice”? Yet, even this practical basis for freedom may be insufficient—for, after all, my choice to believe in freedom may itself be “the property of some other substance”.

My concern specifically is that thinking/conscious activity itself (after all, if I understand Steiner correctly, in his Philosophy of Freedom he suggests an attempt to locate freedom not in theoretical proof or practical choice but in the immediate experience of conscious activity itself)—regardless of how it manifests, whether as questions about determination or what have you—“can be the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”; “Fichte realizes that such an appeal is inadequate on theoretical grounds because the naturalist can always dispute the testimony of conscience [conscious activity itself], which he thinks rests on ignorance of the natural causes of our actions”. In other words, my concern—as it pertains to the issue of the reality of freedom—is that no matter how carefully we investigate the manifestation of thinking activity in consciousness, we cannot escape the possibility that this activity, along with our experience of it, might be “the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”.

Can the reality of freedom be shown a priori or a posteriori? Can a “phenomenology of spiritual activity” possibly be sufficient as an enterprise to ground the reality of freedom? Or, must one concede that “nothing more can be expected of a philosophy devoted to freedom ... than resting its foundation on an act of choice”? Well, even attempting to ground freedom in practical choice, as Fichte suggests, faces the same basic problem—the choice itself might be determined.

What is one to do? Even if freedom is an intimate feeling or Ahndung (cf. Fries’s Wissen, Glauben, und Ahndung), by what means can I conclusively show that that feeling/Ahndung is not “the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”? And even if I actively demonstrate that that feeling/Ahndung is not “the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”, how do I then actively demonstrate that that active demonstration is not itself in turn “the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”?

I earlier referenced the transcendental realist criterion of truth—not necessarily to endorse transcendental realism but to underscore my departure from it. However, I believe that any genuinely impartial critical philosopher must concede the problematic status of a transcendental reality—viz., it would involve dogmatism to deny the possiibility of a transcendental reality since it is logically possible that there is a transcendental reality beyond my thinking activity, and it is eo ipso logically possible that my very thinking activity (in every aspect) is “the property of some other substance, which is the source of all its actions”. Of course, it is also logically possible that I am free, there being no transcendental reality affecting me (such that I am the source of my activity eo ipso)—whether I know it or no, whether I *can* know it or no.

Ultimately (come to think of it), I think the question of the reality of freedom is, because not satisfactorily answerable, less important than the question of identity—the question of who I am and what I can come to know about who I am. I can at least know that I am thinking activity—whether free or determined (consciousness is the self beholding/embracing itself).


Thanks for these quotes and comments, Felipe, they stimulate many thoughts for me. I would first point out that the hand drawing hand, etc. illustrates how we can never catch (prove) our real-time spiritual activity (or its free expression) through arrangements of mental representations which flow from that activity. The reason is the same thing you have mentioned many times - the transcendental trap. When we try to prove our freedom in this way, we implicitly presuppose that our mental representations may correspond to some other reality 'behind' them. Especially in the case of a mindless reality, it should be clear that such an imagined determining reality could never become an immanent experience. It would always be a mental representation pointing to the transcendental realm and functioning like a sort of scarecrow, or like the verse in Dante's Inferno - "abandon all hope ye who enter here". We start to feel like there is no path forward toward the hope of freedom because we will never "prove" that our first-person experience of conscious activity and its representations is not still being determined by some other reality behind that experience.

Instead, we can try to remain with the givens of our first-person experience and refrain from speculating on whether that experience corresponds to some other reality or is determined by that other reality. The fact that "I" feel causally related to my thoughts is a fact of direct experience. The natural question, which Beiser raised, is whether this direct experience is just a movie playback determined by some 'other substance'. What is the nature of this question? Let's say I speculatively arrive at the conclusion that the feeling of my causality within thinking is an illusion. How exactly do I do that? Through more thinking! Now "I" have produced more mental representations imbued with the meaning, "you have nothing to do with this very process of producing mental representations, it's just a property of some other substance". So the recursion that you reference is not whether we can ever know if there is some other substance determining our thinking, but whether we can ever get 'behind' our experience of spiritual activity and view it from the side without engaging in MORE spiritual activity.

I think it's clear from both critical philosophy and the phenomenology of spiritual activity, that we cannot do so. Furthermore, if we nevertheless continue to produce mental representations imbued with the meaning "this experience of spiritual activity may just be a movie playback determined by some other substance", we are necessarily engaged in speculative metaphysics, in the sense that we feel the reality of freedom is something to be proven by reference to the existence or non-existence of something beyond our first-person experience. Therefore, I think you are on the right track in your conclusion, that "the question of who I am (as thinking activity) and what I can come to know about who I am" is the only one that matters. Or in other words, what are the inner factors and constraints that provide my spiritual activity with its degrees of freedom or limit those degrees of freedom? Can I know these inner constraints in such a way that, in knowing them, I also gain the capacity to modify their formatting of my spiritual activity and expand my degrees of freedom? These are the fundamental questions explored by spiritual phenomenology (and science).

One of the inner constraints we can know is that which we have been discussing at length already, the metaphysical habit of searching for entities, mechanisms, beings, etc. 'behind' our real-time experience of spiritual activity that are supposed to 'explain' that experience. We have gained knowledge of this habitual constraint on modern thinking and, hopefully, loosened it so that we no longer search for 'explanations' of our experience outside of that experience, but within its immanent dynamics. But how did we come to know this constraint? Was it by producing mental representations and arranging them in just the right sequence that suddenly we know the constraint? Or rather was it by effortfully moving our spiritual activity through the meaning of the constraint (in a sense, resisting it), from many different angles, and symbolizing that meaning with representations that we 'condense' out of the meaning such that we gradually get an intuitive feel for how it has hitherto been subtly influencing our thinking movements? When we see that it is the latter, we can begin to discern a new method of approaching and knowing the inner constraints.

"Today I shall describe a path into the super-sensible that is much more for the scientist. All my experience has taught me that for such a scientist a kind of precondition for this cognitional striving is to take up what is presented in my book, Philosophy of Freedom. I will explain what I mean by this. This book, Philosophy of Freedom, was not written with the same intent as most books written today. Nowadays books are written simply in order to inform the reader of the book's subject matter, so that the reader learns the book's contents in accordance with his education, his scientific training, or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not my primary Intention in writing Philosophy of Freedom, and thus it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire Information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page.

In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one's own efforts, from one thought to the next. The book constantly presupposes the mental collaboration of the reader. Moreover, the book presupposes that which the soul becomes in the process of such mental exertion. Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously has not read Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one's usual thinking [Vorstellen] into a thinking independent of the senses [ein sinnlichkeitsfreies Denken], in which one is fully immersed, so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book. One should be able to say to oneself: now I know, as a result of the inner thought activity I myself have expended, what pure thinking actually is." (Steiner, GA 322, VIII)

[AshvinP]

I would actually disagree with your observation that “we can never catch (prove) our real-time spiritual activity”. In fact, I’d say that we can catch/prove nothing other than our real-time spiritual activity (whether we can prove that our spiritual activity is connected or unconnected with a transcendental reality beyond it is a different issue, however). To be more precise, whatsoever is involved in my experience—viz., in that set of my “arrangements of mental representations”, “whether of the intuition which is to be met with in it or of the thought”, (cf. KrV, A 94, B 126)—rather than “flowing from” some productive and allegedly/supposedly behind-the-scenes “real-time spiritual activity”, actually is constitutive of and simply actually is my “real-time spiritual activity” qua my “real-time spiritual activity”. Viz., with Fichte, I am prepared to pronounce that “The faculty of representation exists for the faculty of representation and through the faculty of representation” (prepared, that is, to pronounce that “The I is what it is ... for the I”). Viz., “We cannot think of the transcendental subject as something that exists apart from and prior to its knowledge of itself, as something that transcends all its own self-conceptions, because that is to ignore the simple but fundamental point that self-consciousness is essential to, and constitutive of, the very nature of our subjectivity” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 246).

What you call “the transcendental trap”, or what I’d like here to take the liberty of calling “the freedom paradox” (pun somewhat intended), I do not think arises when we endeavor to catch our real-time spiritual activity—because, at least as I’d argue, we cannot catch anything other than our real-time spiritual activity (what we catch *and* the act of catching, both, are constitutive of and simply are our actual real-time spiritual activity qua our actual real-time spiritual activity). The “freedom paradox”, more precisely arises—at least as I’d like here to propose—only when one attempts to establish the reality of freedom: any attempt to establish freedom’s reality must proceed from consciousness (viz., from spiritual activity), yet consciousness itself (viz., spiritual activity itself) might be “determined by some other reality behind that experience”.

You consider, Ashvin, the possibility that I may “speculatively arrive at the conclusion that the feeling of my causality within thinking is an illusion”—yet I fail to see how in principle I can achieve such speculative insight; namely, “Of course, it is also logically possible that I am free, there being no transcendental reality affecting me (such that I am the source of my activity eo ipso)—whether I know it or no, whether I *can* know it or no”; viz., for the same reason that I cannot sufficiently substantiate a priori that I am free I cannot sufficiently substantiate a priori that I am not free.
I also am not convinced that, as you write, “if we nevertheless continue to produce mental representations imbued with the meaning ‘This experience of spiritual activity may just be a movie playback determined by some other substance’, we are necessarily engaged in speculative metaphysics”—I’d say that we’d be necessarily engaged in metaphysics is we pronouned either that “This experience of spiritual activity *is* just a movie playback determined by some other substance” or “This experience of spiritual activity is *not* just a movie playback determined by some other substance”. Speculative metaphysics involves dogmatic assertion concerning the transcendent, whereas the mere acknowledging the possibility of the hypothetical/problematic transcendent cannot rightfully be classified as dogmatic assertion (and hence cannot rightfully be classified as speculative metaphysics)—“That is to say, we have an understanding which *problematically* extends further” (Kant, KrV, A 255, B 311). To either affirm or deny the transcendent (not to be confused with the transcendental) involves speculative metaphysics, naturally; I fail to see, however, how the acknowledgement of the meer possibility of the transcendent can be rightfully deemed “speculative metaphysics”. I insist that there is a difference between “the metaphysical habit of searching for entities, mechanisms, beings, etc. ‘behind’ our real-time experience of spiritual activity that are supposed to ‘explain’ that experience” and merely acknowledging the logical possibility of the reality of “entities, mechanisms, beings, etc. ‘behind’ our real-time experience of spiritual activity”; the former is to dogmatically affirm or deny the reality of “entities, mechanisms, beings, etc. ‘behind’ our real-time experience of spiritual activity”, whereas in turn, the latter considers the logical possibility of such “entities, mechanisms, beings, etc.” with the aim, not to affirm or deny their reality, but to accentuate the scope and limits of our possible knowledge; namely, the former is speculative metaphysics whereas the latter is constitutive of critical philosophizing.

Can I say that “now I know as a result of the inner thought activity I myself have expended, what pure thinking actually is”? “I can at least know that I am thinking activity—whether free or determined (consciousness is the self beholding/embracing itself)”; viz., “what we catch *and* the act of catching, both, are constitutive of and simply are our actual real-time spiritual activity qua our actual real-time spiritual activity”.

Can it be suggested that I am guilty of speculative metaphysics when I assert that “what we catch *and* the act of catching, both, are constitutive of and simply are our actual real-time spiritual activity qua our actual real-time spiritual activity”? I do not believe so, because I am simply discussing what I can know about myself, rather than what I cannot know about what (if anything) has transcendental reality beyond myself.

I am curious, Ashvin, as to why you suggest that one’s real-time spiritual activity is *not* one’s very instantiated set of “arrangements of mental representations”; in other words, I am curious as to why you are in disagreement with I and Fichte when we hold that “The I is what it is ... for the I”.
Perhaps the quest for freedom must be futile unless one has obtained a “modest but thorough self-knowledge”?



We can certainly say, with Fichte, the 'I is what it is for the I', which is basically the culmination of the critical enterprise. However, if we are to continue further into phenomenology, we need to begin making some differentiations within the mental representations.

Just as we can differentiate the experience of colors, sounds, smells, tactile, warmth, etc., we can differentiate certain aspects of our spiritual activity. As Fries did, we can differentiate the 'I perceive/think', 'I feel', 'I will/act'. Yet we can go further than this as well. We can also differentiate between the experience of already receded spiritual activity (thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, etc.), i.e. mental representations, and the real-time activity. This is a very subtle distinction to make and the whole phenomenological pursuit rests on making it. This distinction is the reason why we can never 'get behind' our spiritual activity, because whenever we try to do so, we are once again employing our spiritual activity to 'get behind' the now receded activity.

As a metaphor, the mental representations are like the movements of celestial objects that testify to the existence of a black hole which constrains and steers them through its gravitational force. The black hole and its gravitational force are never seen, neither are they known by combining the celestial objects together into various combinations, but their existence is intuited through the way in which we experience the relative positions of those objects morphing. Our real-time spiritual activity is truly like an event horizon at which potential experiences are continually 'imploding' as concrete representations. We can intuit this activity through the way in which it morphs those representations, to begin with in our thinking experience. The attached gif of time-spirals can also serve as an analogy - the receding spirals are like our mental representations which have become concrete thoughts, perceptions, memories, but the event horizon of spiritual activity is always where we are at the implosion of receding spirals and cannot be seen or thought about like its receding content.

Of course, these are only metaphors for our first-person experience and, through concentration exercises, we can indeed sense the immanent distinction between real-time activity and receding representations. When you say "the mere acknowledging the possibility of the hypothetical/problematic transcendent cannot rightfully be classified as dogmatic assertion", I agree with that up to a point, UNTIL the acknowledgement of the possibility is taken further to actually steer what our thinking can and cannot investigate, what potential experiences it can or cannot explore at the event horizon of its spiritual activity (in other words, it becomes another inner constraint on that activity). Once we cross that point, the possibility begins to function just like the "dogmatic assertion concerning the transcendent". In a sense, we are then trying to 'have our cake and eat it too' - to avoid speculative metaphysics, on the one hand, but to also incorporate all its functions into our thinking such that we "accentuate the scope and limits of our possible knowledge". How would this be different from the speculative metaphysician who either positively affirms the existence of inaccessible things-themselves or a God who reveals himself in our intelligence and sense perception?

[AshvinP]

I appreciate your further elaboration, Ashvin, especially because I have lately been rather focused on not only the implications/significance of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism (KrV, B 274-279) but on the “new and fundamental assumption [in the B edition of the first Kritik] that Kant articulates only in several places in the second (B) edition of the Kritik: that inner states [in time] must be represented spatially. The dependence of empirical self-knowledge [viz., not transcendental apperception but *empirical* apperception]—the awareness of myself in time—on the perception of space stated in the Refutation [of Idealism] is only one case in point of a more general argument [viz., that aforesaid ‘new and fundamental assumption’] in the second [viz., B] edition [of the first Kritik] about how the representation of time [entailing ‘receding content’] depends upon space [entailing what you, Ashvin, have called ‘the event horizon of spiritual activity’]” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 126)—and your further elaboration here, Ashvin, I feel enables me to have a more intuitive sense of what Kant is getting at in his articulation of his said “new and fundamental assumption”. I am curious, Ashvin, if you see a relationship at all—as I see one—between your suggestion that “the event horizon of spiritual activity is always where we are at the implosion of receding spirals and cannot be seen or thought about like its receding content” and Kant’s B-edition “new and fundamental assumption” and Refutation of Idealism.

I also find, in this context, insightful your observation concerning how “possibility begins to function just like the ‘dogmatic assertion concerning the transcendent’”; viz., “It is always possible, he [that is, the Cartesian problematic idealist] argues, that all my experience is an illusion because all my perceptions might have their cause from a malicious demon rather than from the spatial order of things. For Kant, however, such doubts amount to a transcendent use of the principle of causality [for Kant, such doubts amount, that is, to trying to ‘have our cake and eat it too’]. Rather than using it [namely, the principle of causality] to determine truth or illusion about specific events within our experience [within ‘receding content’, that is], we extend it to experience as a whole [to ‘the event horizon of spiritual activity’]” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 119). Beiser adds that “Hence Kant’s final response to Cartesian skepticism is that it is self-defeating, its intelligibility parasitic on the very rules it would question. The Cartesian skeptic attempts to cast doubt on the normal rules of experience because he doubts if we can make a reliable inference from the whole of experience [namely, ‘the event horizon of spiritual activity’] to the thing-in-itself; yet in doubting the truth of the whole of experience [namely, ‘the event horizon of spiritual activity’] he [that is, the Cartesian problematic idealist] still presupposes the basic rules of its possibility” (Ibid.).

What is involved in Kant’s B-edition “new and fundamental assumption” and Refutation of Idealism is the view that self-consciousness in time (what we may think of as ‘receding content’) fundamentally depends upon and would be in principle impossible without a corresponding permanent transcendental condition (which we may think of as what you’ve called “the event horizon of spiritual activity”): “Whatever the precise details of Kant’s argument [in his B-edition Refutation of Idealism and ‘new and fundamental assumption’], its general point and structure seem plain. Kant attempts to show that, to know the time in which any of my representations occur [receding content], I must be able to locate them [locate my ‘receding content’, that is] within a framework that is permanent relative to them [which permanent we may think of as what you, Ashvin, have hitherto called ‘the event horizon of spiritual activity’]. But this framework [or ‘event horizon of spiritual activity’] must be distinct from the representations themselves [distinct, that is, from ‘receding content’] because (a) it is that in which their change is measured, and (b) it is permanent while they are changing” (Beiser, German Idealism, Harvard University Press, 2002 p. 125).

For what it’s worth (and en passant): “There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which *precedes* all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original *unchangeable* consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception. That it deserves this name is clear from the fact that even the purest objective unity, namely, that of the a priori concepts (space and time), is only possible through relation of the intuitions to such unity of consciousness. The numerical unity of this apperception is thus the a priori ground of all concepts, just as the manifoldness of space and time is the a priori ground of the intuitions of sensibility” (Kant, KrV, A 107).


Thank you, Felipe, these are great additions to the discussion and it appears Kant, with his 'new and fundamental assumption', was indeed intuiting the distinction between the event horizon of spiritual activity ('a framework that is permanent relative to the representations') and the receding content of that activity. And Descartes' malicious demon doubt is exactly what I had in mind with the possibility beginning to overreach into functioning like a dogmatic assertion.

It is interesting to also note we can intuit a *depth* gradient of these 'event horizons'. For example, if I intend to go from my house to the grocery store, all my representations in time - thoughts, feelings, sensations - will be 'tinged' by this intent, they will feel as if unfolding within its overarching aura, so to speak. Even if I have quite random thoughts along the way and walk on autopilot, when I get to the store it will feel as if I have gone through a continuous stream of representations and I will have intuitive orientation to how I got there. Yet we can also say this intent to go to the grocery store - this particular event horizon - is nested within more encompassing intents, like my intent to get an education, get a job, start a family, understand reality, and so on. My representations in time on the walk to the store are also 'tinged' by these higher-order intents. All of these nested event horizons structure how the infinite potential of experience will 'implode' into my concrete representations receding in time.

With that said, for our phenomenological pursuit, we need to return to the event horizon that is 'closest' to our immediately receding mental representations, i.e. our thoughts. For example, we can concentrate on the title of a song. We have a mental image at the focus of our conscious experience which anchors our overall intuition for the sphere of potential experiences (receding content) that can manifest if we were to start singing the song, i.e. we have some intuitive sense for the time span of the song and the rhythmic transformations our inner voice would have to go through. Then we can begin singing the song, experiencing the playback of our holistic intuition. Now our singing mental voice moves through the 'intuitive curvature' that was previously anchored in the song title. There are a lot of representations in this playback - our words are not only monotonically pronounced but their pitch is bent up and down according to the melody. The melody can be grasped as repeating patterns grouped in measures, phrases, verses, and so on.

It is most important to notice how all these diverse representations are explained *through* our intentional activity that unpacks the holistic intuition of the song title. We know them by feeling how we live in something meaningfully intended, which we can’t see perceptually as a ‘thing’ (like we can the playback of representations), yet it clearly gives us intuition for the way the representations unfold - from whence they came and to whence they are going. We can also orient to this inner experience using a metaphor to the presently fictional warp drive. (see attached pic)

Here it is imagined that the spacecraft somehow warps spacetime and causes itself to fall forward. It’s like a fancier version of the donkey with a carrot on a stick. Instead of a carrot, we hold a blob of concentrated mass/energy (like a small planet) just in front of our spaceship. The mass/energy curves spacetime and our spaceship falls forward in its gravity well. As we move forward, however, the blob also moves forward (as if attached to the stick) and thus keeps accelerating us. We can imagine that our intent to sing IS the morphing spacetime curvature (the intuitive essence of our conscious space), while the spacecraft is, for example, the representations of our singing voice. Such images are not meant to build some speculative model, but are only used to help us feel how the 'curvature' of our spiritual activity leads the condensation of its receding representations.

It should be noted that nothing in modern life or modern intellectual inquiry prepares us to suspect the possibility of more deeply investigating these event horizons. Therefore it will necessarily appear as something unfamiliar and somewhat discontinuous from old ways of thinking, just like new evolutionary forms cannot be linearly extrapolated from old forms before the fact. It is only after we discover the new way of thinking through our spiritual activity can we discern how it was entirely continuous with the old ways. I am reminded of a quote by Hegel here:

"A main point of the critical philosophy consists in the fact that before it sets out to develop a knowledge of God, the essence of things, etc., it is demanded that the faculty of knowledge must be investigated as to whether it is capable of doing such things. One must know the instrument before one undertakes the work that is to be achieved by means of it. If this instrument should prove insufficient, all endeavor would be wasted. This thought has appeared so plausible that it aroused the greatest admiration and agreement, and led knowledge, motivated by an interest in the objects of knowledge, back to itself. If, however, one does not want to deceive oneself with words, it is quite easy to see that other instruments can be investigated and judged in some other way than by undertaking the work with them for which they are meant. But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge; in the case of this so-called instrument, the process to test it is nothing but knowledge itself. To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water."

[Cleric]

Leaving aside the question of gender dysphoria (on which I agree with you) I thought I will try again to stress that I don’t suggest “fighting language”. As said, language is a divine prerogative. Nonetheless, I think that today language is, through the LLM technologies in particular, a key domain of evil attack on humanity, in particular written language - its most indirect form. Even before the advent of LLMs, we were prone to speak or write mindlessly, to associate, to babble, to lose meaning and still keep uttering or writing word sequences. But today this tendency is becoming much worse, under the effects of this technology, primarily through the written symbols. This technology's effect on the brain is to make us captive of words in themselves - that is of their associative, thoughtless quality, which is anchored by their perceptible side (mere strokes).This is the same exact quality we find in worded LLM outputs.

I think there is no argument that this is happening: the human ability to use language thoughtfully is rapidly decreasing. And so, putting this into perspective, language has been first stripped of its feeling quality, and now it’s being stripped of its meaningful content. There is no thought content in the LLM output - obviously - but our linguistic output is also losing its thought content. As I said, more and more often we don’t have enough fuel to sustain the thought process with enough strength to properly form and express an articulated reasoning. Artificial support is more and more required. What Steiner blamed as the lazy habit of thinking in mere words is now being institutionalized in our brain, through the LLMs. We are continually encouraged to externalize reasoning, and so our intellectual muscles atrophy.

What I am saying is, since language is under attack, we should: revive language by rediscovering its sound quality (I'll not develop on this now) and we should also, not fight verbal thinking or language, but fight its progressive separation from meaning, by strengthening pictorial thinking and direct connection with meaning. I realize that “thinking in words in itself is not the culprit of the problem”, still, we are more and more thinking in mere words, in disconnection from meaning, because of LLMs, not only because of astral nature, and this is a serious problem. At this rate, we will soon be mere outlets of what an LLM has instructed us to say, with less and less control and internalization of what it actually means, even on a mere intellectual plane.

Not to blame the original nature of language, as I tried to say many times. But language is being colonized and served back to us in a deceiving manner. I don’t deny the effect of the astral nature on thought, and the necessity to purify the astral nature, in order to purify thought. But I am highlighting something additional. Something that acts already at the basic intellectual level, and needs to be taken into account also by someone who is not called to develop higher cognition and work on their astral nature. And I believe that someone who is interested in developing their sense-free thinking is also subject to this threat, to the extent that one is generally exposed to the technological world. I believe that, once pictorial, living meaning is strengthened (as you have illustrated in various posts! for ordinary and less ordinary people this strengthening may correspond to different experiences) the ordinary person and the awakening soul alike will express themselves with better purposefulness and a more solid connection between the underlying meaning and the verbal rendering, be this in form of the inner voice or communications of some kind.

Please believe me, I don’t dream of an inner world where verbal thinking is eliminated or policed I am not crazy. I realize that “language degenerates as it mirrors the degenerate astral flow”. But I would add that language also degenerates because written language is being severed from meaning in our head as an effect of the LLM intrusion in our linguistic processes. And if we don’t actively counter that, it’s going to work on us (excluding the Initiates), even regardless of how critical of LLMs one may be, or how much one is actively using them as external thought aid/replacement.

I believe that the sense of abstractness, mannerism, separateness from meaning that I personally receive from words, not in everyday life or when writing here, but when I try to imbue them with as much meaning and feeling as possible, depends partly of this epochal ‘LLM mood’ but perhaps more on the feeling numbness typical of normal modern language. With respect to both problems, I feel it’s helpful for me to meditate on an image rather than on a string of words, to accompany prayer with visualization, and sometimes to avoid familiar words, or words alltogether, to instill a prayerful mood in an extended sound for example. With this said, I don’t deny or minimize that there are other and deeper astral causes that also affect these activities.

Alright, we can put to rest the question of what is the blame for degeneration. In the broadest sense, just like the water and riverbed, things should be investigated in their complicated interplay.

What is more important for someone who has settled on drawing the words from their inner depth, is to have better clarity on the nature of spiritual activity itself.

We can begin by reminding that the ancients – who arguably infused the words with much more inner life than was the case later – called the spirit ‘breath’ or ‘wind’. It is said that in the beginning, the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Then God said “Let there be light” and there was light. Today, we can try to experience all this from a more first-person perspective. What I’ll write cannot be an authentic account of creation but only a limited stretching exercise.

In these primal conditions, we should imagine only first-person Cosmic inner space. There we have the inner movements of the Spirit and the receding effects reverberating in that space. We can imagine how spiritual activity becomes more focused, much like the sound of the Euler's disc you posted. Another metaphor we can use is that of sonoluminescence.



Of course, we should not imagine some watery inner space that the Spirit looks at and focuses into to produce light. Instead, the light in Cosmic-scale watery space is the receding image of the inner breath vibratory activity. When that activity becomes sufficiently focused (high pitch as it were) the image attains luminous quality. We can symbolize this:



We shouldn’t be carried too far away with the analogies, the point is that at Divine heights, light indeed feels like the faithful image of what the spirit is intuitively doing. This is not the case in our present human condition.



Our inner flow is embedded in the Cosmic. In a sense, it is like a filtered (aliased) version of the carrier Cosmic flow. It’s important to realize that filtering the light flow shouldn’t be imagined as the visual objects of the outer world coming into being. Rather, light can be seen as the inner experience of a nervous system. Thus, contrary to materialistic conceptions, existence is not built from light particles that eventually make up the body, and then are experienced, but at the foundations of existence is the simple flow of becoming – intuitive activity and perception (receding memory). This is like a white light of all kinds of potential 'nervous systems' superimposed into Cosmic totality. They may be of the most varied natures but at their foundation they all share the essential primordial flow. In our human condition, this flow is filtered in very complicated ways, which blots out potential and what is left reminds me of the complicated figures that can be generated by repeatedly replacing their parts:



Everything that is blotted out is not lost but is still concentric and complementary to the experienced filtered state and can be considered to form the environment, other beings, etc. Thus, the key idea is that World creation happens through the complexification of the inner perspective.

Anyway, these are topics for another day but I wanted to bring to attention that in our constrained human condition light is not the direct reflection of our inner activity, that is, we do not create light ourselves. Rather, our inner gestures can be thought of as valves that direct the general flow. The Minority Report video that Ashvin often uses comes to mind.

This is something that we should comprehend very clearly. While pictorial thinking is much more panoramic and rich, we should be clear that our activity rather steers through its flow. It’s not like we create every image from scratch in its full details. Not only that, but the channels of this pictorial flow are also a kind of vocabulary, in the sense that they constrain our becoming in unknown ways.

They key here is to realize that these ‘swiping’ gestures that we navigate the flow through, are of the nature of the Spirit – the breath. I’m not saying that they are ordinary verbal words but only that in ordinary verbal thinking there is concealed the vibratory flow of the spirit. If we become enamored by the richness of the pictorial content, we may conclude that we raise on a step higher in this way. And to an extent this is true, but only if we are fully aware that we navigate this flow through ‘swiping’ actions of our inner breath. We are already ascending toward Inspiration when we become much more conscious of these inner vibratory gestures of the Spirit (and thus why it is said that the Devachan is 'heard'). The pictorial content is still there but it becomes more translucent and meaningful, not by virtue of what we read in it while swiping our way through the flow (which is still somewhat the case in Imagination), but by becoming innerly one with the vibratory intuitive movements that structure the flow.

As a side note, on a preliminary basis, I find the concentration through the Euler's disc and trying to feel how focused spiritual activity is reflected in a 'light photon', to be a good way for meditative concentration (but more experimentation is needed to see how fruitful this could be in the long run). I think that if carried over into the Intuitive depths it can really help experience the reality of 'Let there be light'.

[Federica]

While pictorial thinking is much more panoramic and rich, we should be clear that our activity rather steers through its flow. It’s not like we create every image from scratch in its full details. Not only that, but the channels of this pictorial flow are also a kind of vocabulary, in the sense that they constrain our becoming in unknown ways.

They key here is to realize that these ‘swiping’ gestures that we navigate the flow through, are of the nature of the Spirit – the breath. I’m not saying that they are ordinary verbal words but only that in ordinary verbal thinking there is concealed the vibratory flow of the spirit. If we become enamored by the richness of the pictorial content, we may conclude that we raise on a step higher in this way. And to an extent this is true, but only if we are fully aware that we navigate this flow through ‘swiping’ actions of our inner breath. We are already ascending toward Inspiration when we become much more conscious of these inner vibratory gestures of the Spirit (and thus why it is said that the Devachan is 'heard'). The pictorial content is still there but it becomes more translucent and meaningful, not by virtue of what we read in it while swiping our way through the flow (which is still somewhat the case in Imagination), but by becoming innerly one with the vibratory intuitive movements that structure the flow.

Thanks Cleric, will keep this in mind along the way. I’m not anywhere near a proper first-person experience of much of what you describe, so I have no objections or reasons to doubt it. At this point, your illustration reads to me like a refined insight of the Spirit, the general flow, which I roughly and abstractly conceive as a spacetimeless, hourglass-shaped, breathing Cosmic flow, within which we are carried, down into matter and up into resurrection, cyclically (as if cutting your hourglass drawing in paper and glueing top and bottom together, for the human perspective). In any case, I easily believe it when you say that the pictorial flow is also constrained and guided, though I can’t sense it directly. Don’t plan on becoming enamored by its content to the detriment of language. Thank you for the heads up.