Federica wrote: ↑Sat Aug 10, 2024 12:53 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Aug 09, 2024 11:53 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Fri Aug 09, 2024 8:57 pm
I'm not sure how this relates to my critique. I can agree that whenever we evaluate something as 'beautiful', we are necessarily attaching certain meaningful intuitions to percepts. When those intuitions are unduly colored by personal soul factors, we call it subjective, and when they are experienced in more purity, we call it objective or transcendent.
So it's clear, the critique I am making can also be applied to the bold - the mere titling of an essay can only have a negative impact on us, the reader, if our thinking is associative. It can only distract our thinking from objectively working through the recursive thought-organism if we are not in full control of our thinking, but rather under the compulsion of subconscious associations that distract us.
We are no longer resonating with the soul perspective of the author but attaching our personal meanings to the textual perceptions. If our thinking is not associative, on the other hand, not only will the title not distract us, but it may even give us
more opportunity to resonate with the underlying soul perspective. We may approach the textual meaning from an angle we are not too familiar with and therefore perceive shades of meaning in the text, corresponding to the author's intention, that would otherwise be obscured. In any case, the title won't phase us.
It seems to me that you are still not getting what I am trying to say. So let me refresh: Your critique is that I am stuck in particular words, and that means that I attach by association personal meaning to them, which blocks me from resonating with the author's perspective. In your words:
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Aug 09, 2024 7:11 pm
I think this is a really important point but I'm not sure how to convey it differently. Why are WE reducing and flattening Steiner's work by simply using the word "epistemology" to characterize it? That could only be because our thinking
automatically associates "epistemology" with some theoretical inquiry. It is similar to when Eugene et al. would automatically associate "thinking" or "idea" with floating thoughts in the intellect and therefore remained incredulous that they could characterize much more integrated and unified spiritual experiences. There is no need for our thinking to automatically make these associations if it pays attention to the overall meaningful context in which such terms are used and therefore brings more dynamic meaning to the otherwise fixed word-forms. This is an example of 'saving the appearances' through our spiritual activity.
My reply to that was - and is - that your point is true
for discursive communications - science, philosophy, conceptual illustrations, and the like. Proof that I am able to avoid attaching subjective, associative meaning to words and "resonate with the perspective of the author" is that both you and Cleric have often discussed the same spiritual scientific ideas, with very different intuitive contexts, styles, and vocabulary, and despite that I could resonate with both, and recognize that it was a case of two different viewpoints on the same ideas. And this is one thing.
HOWEVER, when we exit the realm of discursive communication and enter the realm of
artistic expression in language, the realm of beauty, then words do have a precise, symbolic value. It's not anymore a matter of keeping the concepts and ideas flexible. It's a matter of resonating with the word as symbol, and touching its resonance (beauty) in the context. That this is true is easy to verify if we consider a poem. If a poem could be approached in the way you have described - not appreciating the exact words, but remaining flexible to the author's perspective - we would lose the beauty and reason for being of the poem. The exact words expressed in the poem are essential. Similar words could maintain the concepts, but compromise the beauty of the poem, obviously. Which is also why Kühlewind says that spiritual science cannot be summarized or reproduced, like it is for a poem, or the Gospel of Saint John.
I really hope that with this I have made my point very clear!
So, when Miller, or anyone else, wants to discuss PoF, work with it, elaborate on it - as you and Cleric have done hundreds of times here - that is perfectly fine, and your reasoning applies. Words are used not as tokens of beauty, but precisely to stimulate the reader to resonate with a perspective.
HOWEVER, when someone decides to reproduce a poem, the Gospel of Saint John, or the overall idea of PoF - not elaborate it, discuss it, work with it, which is fine - but summarize it, reproduce it, within the words "Steiner's epistemology", then it's as if one was trying to re-title a poem, to condense it under a label, the summarize it, which is, as just argued, not beautiful. As Kühlewind says: "just as a poem cannot be rendered in other words, so too fairy tales, myths, and the communications of spiritual science cannot be reproduced".
Federica,
Your point is very clear but I don't agree with it, as stated. There is no hard line between the phenomenology of spiritual activity and artistic expression because, in fact, the whole technique of the former is to render intuitive experiences of spiritual activity into symbolic language artistically. I am not sure why you call the former (or spiritual science more generally) "discursive communication", in that sense, because that's exactly what it is
not and what commonly blocks people from understanding it properly. That happens precisely because they treat it as discursive communication of facts and information rather than artistic expressions of meaningful intuitions, just as a painting, a poem, a musical composition, etc. Steiner makes this connection clear:
Life is made up of many different realms, and every one of them calls for a different kind of scientific approach. But life itself is a unity, and to the extent that science devotes itself to exploring separate areas it loses sight of the living oneness of the cosmos. We must have a science concerned with discovering in the separate scientific fields elements capable of leading us back again to that living wholeness. Investigators in special scientific fields use the facts they discover to build up a picture of the world and its workings. This book [PoF] has a philosophic goal: that of making science itself alive and organic. The single sciences are only preparatory steps toward the science we are envisioning here.
A similar situation exists in the art realm. A composer works according to the rules of composition. Music theory is a body of knowledge that one must have acquired before starting to compose, and in composing, the laws of composition are made to serve life, to create something absolutely real. Philosophy is an art in exactly the same sense. Real philosophers have always been conceptual artists. The ideas of humankind were the artistic medium in which they worked, and in their hands scientific method became artistic technique. This endows abstract thinking with concrete individual life; ideas become living forces. When this happens, it means not merely knowing about things but transforming knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism, and our true, active consciousness lifts itself above the level of a merely passive taking-in of facts.
My book [PoF] addresses itself mainly to the question of how philosophy deals as an art with the subject of human freedom, what the nature of freedom really is, and whether we already possess it or can develop it. (Soziales Verständnis, Vol. IV, Lecture 2.)
Of course, you and Kuhlewind are correct if someone is trying to
summarize or reproduce an artistic work, like a poem. That has already been established and it has further been established that SM was
not doing that. IF one concludes he is doing that based on the title "Steiner's epistemology" or the use of the word epistemology more generally (which of course is a domain of philosophy through which we can express conceptual art, in Steiner's sense above), rather than the intuitive movements expressed through the substance of the text, then that is associative thinking on the part of the reader. The only way we can
freely reach the conclusion he is attempting to reproduce an artistic work is by moving our thinking through the whole text and seeing if it intuitively feels like an attempt at reproduction, rather than an independent artistic rendering of inner experiences.
What is ironic is that the act of declaring such an article unhelpful based on "symbolic dissonance" in the wording of the title, or whatever other subjective impressions are imported into parts of the text, is a kind of
summary of PoF. It is a statement that "only artistic renderings that agree with my personal sensibility of symbolic resonance can be helpful for orienting to the core artistic phenomenology of PoF". This necessarily delimits the artistic value of PoF, just as if we said that the Christ events could only be painted in certain colors and not others or poetically expressed in a certain language and not others, because that's what
we, as personalities in a particular time, place, life situation, etc., symbolically resonate with. Expressing the thought is a great start, but
embodying it in our thinking is the next step.
We should really strive to approach the work of others in this domain
as if they are works of art:
(The Temptation of St. Anthony, Martin Schongauer)
If I approach the above with some inherent doubt, skepticism, antipathy, with personal sensibilities, without charity and reverence, etc., then I will never penetrate to its true symbolic value for the path of initiation. The meaning will be staring me in the face but I simply won't be able to see it. I will only be able to see in it what I am projecting into it and perhaps rationalize the dissonance as some color swatch of the painting that conflicts with my objective 'sense of beauty'. This is also at the heart of these Catch-22 essays. As long as we treat the prospect of attaining inner knowledge through phenomenology as separate from highly aesthetic and moral development, we will be fundamentally limited in the resonance we can attain through the former.
By the way, why this seeming resistance to the experience of beauty in words?
May I ask you: have you ever written a poem, in whatever form or style, or started writing one, or thought you would?
I have not yet because I don't think I have developed the deep moral (sefless) sensibility that would be needed to carry that task out properly. There is no resistance to the experience of beauty in words, but resistance to
delimiting our capacity to experience beauty in words due to personal sensibilities. Why you are able to experience the beauty in Cleric's posts or sometimes my posts but not in SM's article is something for you to contemplate, since they are all artistically exploring the same underlying intuitive experience of spiritual activity.
