"Concepts cannot be derived from perception. This is apparent from the fact that, as man grows up, he slowly and gradually builds up the concepts corresponding to the objects that surround him. Concepts are added to perception." (GA 4)
What would it take to verify the above? Would we need to investigate every single perceptual experience to figure out where the conceptual element came from? Or would one single instance of a perceptual experience in which the corresponding concepts arrive from an 'orthogonal direction', i.e. from within our intuitive activity, serve to validate this experiential principle?
Unless we believe that cognitive-perceptual experience is continually changing in its underlying lawfulness, sometimes allowing for concepts to arise from perceptions and sometimes allowing for concepts to incarnate through our intuitive activity, then we have to conclude a single instance is sufficient to heighten our attention to what is always happening for all perceptual experiences. The only question then becomes when/how it happened, i.e. as the result of 'past' intuitive activity or 'present' intuitive activity?
Our thinking has been habituated to feel, for example, that if we add the concept of ‘redness’ to another concept of ‘blueness’, we get the concept of ‘purpleness’. Yet careful attention to living experience reveals that is not the case – the concept of ‘purpleness’ only appears as a flash of insight from mysterious depths when we encounter the corresponding perceptions that anchor and kindle our intuitive activity. We only feel the perceptions already possess the concepts because this incarnational process already occurred during our instinctive development. Neither can the concept of ‘twofoldness’ be reduced to two concepts of ‘oneness’ that we add together, but must arise as a flash of intuitive insight concerning all things that come in pairs.
Likewise, we can imagine writing a letter on a sheet of paper with certain ideas and intimate feelings. Then we put the paper in an envelope and seal it. Now we can place this letter somewhere and anytime our gaze glances over it, it acts as a rich symbol that anchors everything that we have expressed there. We should really try to feel how practically none of that inner richness can be seen by just staring at the sealed letter, for example, if someone else were to look at it. The inner contents come from the opposite direction of the perceptual image of the letter, from within our memory intuition of steering our intuitive activity through meaning that we condensed into written form. Is there any reason to doubt that all of perceptual reality is of the Logos-nature of a letter?
What happens once we realize this experiential principle applies to all conceptual relations that we have woven into the ordinary perceptual world around us and within us through intuitive activity? Then we may feel the only way to become more sensitive to our intuitive activity that structures perceptual experience is to unwind these conceptual determinations through our imagination.
"As we have seen in the preceding chapters, an epistemological investigation must begin by rejecting existing knowledge. Knowledge is something brought into existence by man, something that has arisen through his activity. If a theory of knowledge is really to explain the whole sphere of knowledge, then it must start from something still quite untouched by the activity of thinking, and what is more, from something which lends to this activity its first impulse. This starting point must lie outside the act of cognition, it must not itself be knowledge. But it must be sought immediately prior to cognition, so that the very next step man takes beyond it is the activity of cognition. This absolute starting point must be determined in such a way that it admits nothing already derived from cognition....
Only our directly given world-picture can offer such a starting point, i.e. that picture of the world which presents itself to man before he has subjected it to the processes of knowledge in any way, before he has asserted or decided anything at all about it by means of thinking. This “directly given” picture is what flits past us, disconnected, but still undifferentiated." (GA 3)
Do we think Steiner is simply providing us a metaphysical assertion, an informational communication like he is describing a landscape to us over the phone, or rather is he prompting us to do something inwardly to 'reject existing knowledge' and experience the 'starting point' that leads into the activity of cognition? In other words, the above-quoted paragraph is analogous to the image right below. When we see the image, we won't assume it intends to give us third-person pictures of people doing asanas so we can memorize them, but rather it is giving us symbols that can anchor our first-person experience of going through the same physical motions. Likewise, Steiner is providing us with symbols of 'thought-asanas' to anchor our first-person experience of the same intuitive movements he went through. We only realize the value of these asanas if we effortfully move our intuitive activity through the various formations that are offered, without analytically dissecting them into third-person pictures about the 'nature of cognitive experience'.
Are we led in this way to some illusory reality, since we are trying to imaginatively eliminate the conceptual determinations that we actually find interwoven in our ordinary experience? Take a look at an object with a uniform white or black surface. Now use your imaginative activity to perceive another color overlaid on top of the surface, like red, blue, green, etc. Although we may have a dim sense of this imaginatively overlaid color, we must admit that the sensory color 'outweighs' it. Does this mean the imaginative overlay is an illusion, some state that doesn't correspond to reality? No, there is no reason to conclude that. Our imaginative state with the overlaid color is just as much an experienced reality as the conceptual state with only the sensory color. All that this experience indicates is that our imaginative state is unfolding within the context of a conceptual-sensory state that 'outweighs' it. Nevertheless, the imaginative state still serves a valid function in orienting us to reality, namely the reality of our own activity - the limitations and possibilities of that activity within the context of more 'heavy' constraints. We would never discover this inner reality if we didn't effortfully move our imaginative activity but simply remained passive and observed the sensory state as it is given to us.
When we unwind the conceptual determinations, what are we becoming more inwardly sensitive to? Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant arrived at the conclusion that there must be 'categories' that structure our cognitive perception in various interesting ways. For Aristotle, these were substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, doing, having, and being affected. For Kant, these took on a more refined conceptual form. Yet for all these philosophers it wasn't conceived that we can experience these categories more intimately, not just as abstract mental pictures that we imagine "structure our experience", but as real-time 'curvatures' along which we can experience our mental, emotional, and sensory states of being unfolding. In other words, can we experience the intuition of these categories in greater purity? The only way to become intimately aware of such constraints is to resist them. If we are entirely submerged in water and flowing along with the current passively, we will never become conscious of the water and our relation to it. Likewise, if we are free-falling within a vacuum.
Only when we begin resisting the current in some way do we create the conditions for becoming conscious of this medium through which our states unfold. It is the same principle for the inner life. We have to resist the conceptual determinations we habitually make out of the perceptual flow to become more conscious of our conceptually determining activity, the intuitive 'categorical' mediums through which our perceptual states unfold. As we can see, there is nothing very exotic or complex about the above. It may even seem trivial and boring at first, like it's putting an end to all our interpretive fun, so we look for more 'nuanced' ways of interacting with the text. Yet the real fun begins when we resist our habitual determinations and participate with Steiner in the thought-asanas. Then we learn about the 'nature of cognition' in an intuitively experiential way that is completely unsuspected from the perspective of standard intellectual philosophy and science.
