Philosophical Speculations

I would like to signal a lecture cycle of IX lectures I have recently completed, called “The Origins of Natural Science”.

For me it has been an illuminating reading / listening from more than one angle. All lectures are full of fantastic insights, but lectures VI to IX in particular, pointing to the more recent centuries, have been key for me, not only to get a more cohesive sense of the evolution of human consciousness, but also to understand and sense our human presence in the world here and now.

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One of the key summarizing insights is the inversion of religious-philosophical-scientific perspective that happened with epicentrum around the times of John Locke and Isaac Newton.

Before that moment, man felt that mathematics, mechanics, and physics were first and foremost inner experiences, which he then extended to the outer world in order to interact with it, in a sort of continuum between self and world. The numbers, the arithmetics, the three dimensions of space, the workings of mechanics, the circulation of fluids, were inner, felt experiences: of singularity, duality, and multiplicity in the body, of motion and articulation of the body along the three dimensions in space, and within the body, through the cycle of digestion, for example. Also, the fluids of the body were sensed much more keenly than today, for example the flowing of blood, and how it changes depending on the activity engaged, in connection with the rhythms of the breath, and other fluid cycles. These were the bodily experiences that worked as an inner key, found inside oneself, and then extended outwardly, for the comprehension of the world. Also, before that moment in history, what we call today the qualia of experience - the qualitative experiences of color, sound, warmth, smell and taste - were felt as divine manifestations happening outside oneself, in which human participation was possible through the prism of the sense organs.

Then, with Locke and Newton, all that started to be reversed. On the one hand, man started to find the characters of dimension, form, weight, velocity, and their common measuring tool (mathematics) outside himself, as external, objective characteristics of nature, that could be mesured (at least for physics) but not inwardly felt anymore. That gave birth to the sciences of modern physics, and chemistry, as externalizations of the previous intense experiences of, respectively, the physical and the etheric body. On the other hand, man started to interiorize the perceptions of the senses, such as color, sound and warmth, considering them subjective, not inherent in the measured objects of physics out there. (PoF chapter IV describes some aspects of that, when treating the Kantian philosophers' search for the sensations of color into the eyes, and up to the optic nerves, etcetera). This internalization of the previous experience of the divine, through color, sound, warmth, but only as merely subjective phenomena, gave birth to modern psychology, as science of the subject.

In this inversion, where physicality - formerly born internally to be extended out - became only external (physics), and the qualia of experience - formerly received externally to be treasured internally - became only internal (psychology), was anchored the separation between man as subject and nature as object, which appears to us, to this day, a self-evident character of human experience.

Perhaps I will add some quotes and comments going forward.

Thanks, this is a good series to work with in our time to reconcile the discontinuities between science and spirituality that are so often introduced by secular and mystical/spiritual thinkers alike. I also briefly discussed this is one of the essays:

By exploring this relationship between the meaning of atomized mechanisms and the holistic meaning from which the former was aliased, we are at the same time deconditioning from the default sense-based intuition.

For example, the concepts of ‘mass’, ‘force’, ‘energy’, ‘space’, ‘time’, and so forth, which are used to describe the ‘mechanisms’ of outer nature, are only possible to conceive because we have instinctively learned these qualities within ourselves. We can only conceive that objects exert ‘forces’ on one another because we intuitively know how it feels to influence other objects (including inner ‘objects’) or to have them exert an influence on us. Likewise, we conceive ‘energy’ because we know how it feels to become tired after exerting forces. We can conceive that other objects possess volume because we experience our own inner volume, the relative positions of various bodily components. We can conceive objects in movement because we experience the movements of our own inner processes, particularly those connected with our eyes. We experience the three outer dimensions of space because we have learned to balance ourselves within the Earthly force of gravity (that balancing is also connected with the three canals of the inner ear). As we will see later, the concept of ‘time’ also originates from relative inner experience.

Modern consciousness has forgotten this inner origin of its concepts and began externalizing the latter as independent realities to be used as rigid ‘explanations’ of phenomenal processes, rather than symbolic testimonies to the inner depths of subtle activity. The modern world is now haunted by these mechanical ghosts that were conjured up and split from our intuitive being. The spiritual retracing technique can never be properly understood when thinking remains under the tyranny of such mechanized and idolatrous habits. Instead, we must re-cognize that the concepts used, even when they sound ‘mechanistic’, are always testimonies to organic and hierarchically structured metamorphoses of sensing, thinking, feeling, and willing experience. The ‘four contextual spheres’ discussed in the previous part are always present in the flow of our experience, structuring what we normally experience as our intentional agency, feeling, thinking, and bodily will (through which we experience the lawful transformation of sensations).

Of all these experiential domains, practically only the last one (sensory rhythms) is considered the proper domain of objective scientific research while the other three are relegated to ‘epiphenomenal’ status, even though their functions are clearly implicit in the meaning of everything experienced through the lawful transformation of sensory life. When we are walking outside on a hot and stagnant summer day, and a strong gust of wind blows through from mysterious origins, the first thing we experience is not the oscillation of airwaves or the pressure differentials, but the meaning of relief, refreshment, and renewal, functions traditionally associated with the Spirit.1 In fact, the oscillation of airwaves is only experienced in our abstract mental space. It is a fictional entity that we insert into an otherwise unbroken stream of inner experience. To gradually retrace this phenomenal experience to its deeper spiritual basis, we should pay attention to all the rhythms of experience (sensory, emotional, mental, transpersonal) and resist inserting phantom mechanisms into their experiential flow.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 4:28 pm Thanks, this is a good series to work with in our time to reconcile the discontinuities between science and spirituality that are so often introduced by secular and mystical/spiritual thinkers alike. I also briefly discussed this is one of the essays:

By exploring this relationship between the meaning of atomized mechanisms and the holistic meaning from which the former was aliased, we are at the same time deconditioning from the default sense-based intuition.

For example, the concepts of ‘mass’, ‘force’, ‘energy’, ‘space’, ‘time’, and so forth, which are used to describe the ‘mechanisms’ of outer nature, are only possible to conceive because we have instinctively learned these qualities within ourselves. We can only conceive that objects exert ‘forces’ on one another because we intuitively know how it feels to influence other objects (including inner ‘objects’) or to have them exert an influence on us. Likewise, we conceive ‘energy’ because we know how it feels to become tired after exerting forces. We can conceive that other objects possess volume because we experience our own inner volume, the relative positions of various bodily components. We can conceive objects in movement because we experience the movements of our own inner processes, particularly those connected with our eyes. We experience the three outer dimensions of space because we have learned to balance ourselves within the Earthly force of gravity (that balancing is also connected with the three canals of the inner ear). As we will see later, the concept of ‘time’ also originates from relative inner experience.

Modern consciousness has forgotten this inner origin of its concepts and began externalizing the latter as independent realities to be used as rigid ‘explanations’ of phenomenal processes, rather than symbolic testimonies to the inner depths of subtle activity. The modern world is now haunted by these mechanical ghosts that were conjured up and split from our intuitive being. The spiritual retracing technique can never be properly understood when thinking remains under the tyranny of such mechanized and idolatrous habits. Instead, we must re-cognize that the concepts used, even when they sound ‘mechanistic’, are always testimonies to organic and hierarchically structured metamorphoses of sensing, thinking, feeling, and willing experience. The ‘four contextual spheres’ discussed in the previous part are always present in the flow of our experience, structuring what we normally experience as our intentional agency, feeling, thinking, and bodily will (through which we experience the lawful transformation of sensations).

Of all these experiential domains, practically only the last one (sensory rhythms) is considered the proper domain of objective scientific research while the other three are relegated to ‘epiphenomenal’ status, even though their functions are clearly implicit in the meaning of everything experienced through the lawful transformation of sensory life. When we are walking outside on a hot and stagnant summer day, and a strong gust of wind blows through from mysterious origins, the first thing we experience is not the oscillation of airwaves or the pressure differentials, but the meaning of relief, refreshment, and renewal, functions traditionally associated with the Spirit.1 In fact, the oscillation of airwaves is only experienced in our abstract mental space. It is a fictional entity that we insert into an otherwise unbroken stream of inner experience. To gradually retrace this phenomenal experience to its deeper spiritual basis, we should pay attention to all the rhythms of experience (sensory, emotional, mental, transpersonal) and resist inserting phantom mechanisms into their experiential flow.

Yes, I see. I would say that your presentation is somewhat more advanced (more phenomenological) in that it presents things in a way that asks the reader to sense, here and now, what has been casted out of modern consciousness for the most part, and to also realize that such sensing is the template of what has arisen as natural science.

***

I propose that you channel some of your energy in this question: beyond the phenomena of physicality (and ether) which were casted out of man into the objective nature as physics and chemistry - on the other side of oneself - how would you further elaborate on the other part of the scientific consciousness shift, the part of experience that man has fastened on this side of the human subject - namely outward sensing, feeling, thinking, and possibly free will, that is the soul-spiritual phenomena? Have you referred to this inversion specifically in your essays?

Federica wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 5:38 pm Yes, I see. I would say that your presentation is somewhat more advanced (more phenomenological) in that it presents things in a way that asks the reader to sense, here and now, what has been casted out of modern consciousness for the most part, and to also realize that such sensing is the template of what has arisen as natural science.

***

I propose that you channel some of your energy in this question: beyond the phenomena of physicality (and ether) which were casted out of man into the objective nature as physics and chemistry - on the other side of oneself - how would you further elaborate on the other part of the scientific consciousness shift, the part of experience that man has fastened on this side of the human subject - namely outward sensing, feeling, thinking, and possibly free will, that is the soul-spiritual phenomena? Have you referred to this inversion specifically in your essays?

If you mean the evolutionary process through which the soul-spiritual phenomena were extracted from Nature and Culture and 'privatized' into the human 'subject', I have touched on this in a few essays. I have found a very useful way is to focus on the transition of ancient Greek experience to the Middle Ages and then to the Modern age. That seems to be a way that most people can relate to in a somewhat intimate way, and I think that's also why so many people resonate with approaches like those of Barfield, for example. The art historical presentation by JDE that I referenced recently is also a great way of sensitizing to this evolutionary process, as reflected in the changing artistic intuitions and methods of expressing them. We can sense, for example, how the non-perspectival religious paintings reflected a much more integrated feeling for the soul-spiritual essence of 'outer' objects and events, than the modern perspectival paintings where everything is dispersed and isolated from each other in 3D space. I touched on some such aspects in Catch 22 Part I.

To better appreciate and orient to the nature of our modern Catch-22, we should briefly survey where we are and how we got here. There was a time when humans instinctively felt to be woven into the spiritual fabric of Nature and its rhythms. Practically all our thoughts, emotions, and sensations were concentrically aligned with these rhythms which flowed right through our instinctive activity and structured everything we do from waking to sleeping, from birth to death. There was no cognitive reflection on our thoughts, i.e. individual self-awareness, but rather the thoughts were experienced as something akin to forces of nature that many souls shared and were immediately translated into impulses. We were much like present-day animals in that respect, which is especially easy to notice in insects that have a relatively short life cycle.

Steiner wrote:Suppose that we observe an animal during the course of a year. We will find that its life follows the cycle of the seasons. Take for example an insect: according to the time of year it will form a chrysalis (pupate), at another season it will emerge and shed its chrysalis-form, at another time lay its eggs, and so on. We can follow the course of nature, follow the stages of such an insect's life, and find a certain connection between them, for the animal organizes its life according to its natural surroundings
…
We may say, therefore, that the insect has a certain direction in its life through spring, summer, autumn and winter. It does not give its development up to chance, placing itself as it does within certain laws in each succeeding phase of its life. Mankind, however, has left behind the age of instinctive co-existence with nature. In his case it was more ensouled than that of the animals, but still instinctive. His life has taken on a newer, more conscious form. Yet we find that man, in spite of his higher soul-life and capacity to think, has given himself over to a more chaotic life. With the dying away of his instincts he has fallen, in a certain way, below the level of the animals. However much one may emphasize man's further steps forward, towering above the animals, one must still concede that he has lost a particular inner direction in his life. 3

What we now call “thinking” was at that time a living supersensible force like instincts or passions that streamed in from the depths and stimulated organic mental pictures. These living images were shared by entire communities and compelled this or that impulse, with movement in one direction or another, to complete this or that task, in strict accordance with natural rhythms. The latter were not experienced as mindless mechanistic processes but, instead, as the organic and intent-driven context of cultural and natural life, just as many of our daily tasks are experienced as flowing forth from and being contextualized by our intents. When we intend to visit the grocery store, for example, all our sensations, emotions, and thoughts experienced along the journey will be ‘tinged’ with this idea of ‘visiting the grocery store’. That is also how the natural rhythms, like the seasonal cycles, were experienced by our ancestors, except the intents that ‘tinged’ their experience were felt as not belonging to them personally, but to the Gods.

It is easy to see that humanity has grown worlds apart from this instinctive synchronization with Nature and its rhythms. Many people sleep during the day and stay up at night, if it suits them. Most people reproduce, not based on propitious times of the year indicated by the stars, but based on personal circumstances and preferences. We can go skiing during Summer and surf the waves during Winter by traveling across the Globe. New festivals and holidays pop up at all times of the year. And so on. All of these possibilities reflect the fact that we have been liberated from natural rhythms in our mental life and that has also influenced many domains of physical life. Yet that does not mean the natural rhythms have disappeared or no longer influence our mental life. Rather those rhythms have receded deep into the subconscious context that modulates our thoughts, feelings, and actions. In that sense, we only have the illusion of being ‘free’ in most aspects of our lives, including our intellectual thinking.

At a much broader level, I referenced this process in terms of the 'four contextual spheres' or 'rungs', for example here:

In the previous discussion, we explored how the integrating experiential flow of the purely intuitive Spirit folded in on upon itself, casting reflections within reflections, introducing new levels of indirection into the experiential flow with each new reflective ‘rung’. We can imagine the first rung as purely ‘Subjective’, the way we would experience only a first-person stream of activity imploding thought-memory pictures if our sensations, emotions, desires, and so forth were completely silenced. It is the pure inner meaning of what we dimly know as color, sound, smell, taste, warmth, etc., but expanded to the scale of the whole Cosmos. The imploding ‘thought-memory’ at this scale is like a superposition of all potential states of being, i.e. what we currently experience as our whole temporally extended evolutionary development, with all its fruits in the way of inner qualities and capacities, from beginning to end. On the second rung, a portion of that unitary intuitive stream becomes objectified within an ideal rhythmic process, akin to the pure inner meaning of in-breathing and out-breathing, but still with no experience of a ‘private inner life’.

On the third rung, a portion of the first-person ideal rhythmic process becomes further objectified through reflected images, by which the spirit experiences a dreamy distinction between ‘inside me’ and ‘outside me’, vacillating its experience between the two like the osmosis process of a semipermeable cell membrane. Finally, on the fourth rung, even a portion of the reflected images within the inner soul sphere is objectified and our primordial experience of ‘subjectivity’ is confined almost entirely within a stream of point-like encoded thoughts, rigidly enclosed within a skull, confronting the complex perceptual flow of an objectified World (see also Part II discussion on the conceptual encoding of soul imagery). By the fourth rung of this iterative reflective process, the spirit’s whole perceptual environment (‘perceptual’ means any experiences to which we can direct our activity, including thoughts and emotions) becomes a flattened and more or less externalized image of the previous three contextual rungs of spiritual activity.

Here we mean ‘externalized’ in the sense that the spirit no longer feels creatively responsible for the perceptual flow of passive thoughts and emotions (shadow of 3rd rung), life processes (shadow of 2nd rung), or physical-sensory processes (shadow of 1st rung). These meet the spirit as external rhythms of its inner and outer environments that it can only reflect upon. It is only in the experience of its actively willed thoughts that the spirit finally discovers a concrete overlap between its subjectivity and the World’s objectivity, since it feels creatively responsible for the perceptual flow of such thoughts (e.g. inner voice sounds and pictures) when it intends to think. These willed thoughts act as tiny probes that are ‘sent out’ into the contextual rungs and extract some aliased meaning of their significance within our existential flow. Every act of thinking can be imagined as a movement extending from the spirit’s experienced center to the periphery of the contextual rungs, which integrates intuition of existence from the periphery back to the center (an ideal movement that even comes to expression in the celestial form of the human head).

Of course that is a pretty abstract way of putting it, especially if considered isolated from the context of the previous essays, and Cleric has provided many more useful illustrations of the convolution process from Subject-Object unity to 'subject' confronting a separate 'objective world'.

As we know, the essential task of spiritual scientific phenomenology is to gradually expand the soul-spiritual experience that we feel has contracted into our 'subjective inner life' back to the various 'outer' phenomena of Culture and Nature. At first, we can only begin doing this abstractly through our intuitive life expressed in philosophical-scientific (or sometimes religious and artistic) ideas. We develop various laws, principles, models, doctrines, and so on that relate the 'outer' phenomena to each other in lawful ways. These ideas provide us a dim reflection of the Cosmic soul-spiritual essence that has withdrawn from the mere contents of our mental pictures (whether that content is sensory, emotional, or ideal), but we only realize the intuitive value of those reflections if we remain conscious that they originally stem from our ideas. In other words, we remain conscious that they are invisible aspects of our intuitive life that cohere our mental pictures but cannot be found contained within the content of those pictures.

Then we can gradually bring new life into these abstract ideas by becoming more conscious of the process through which they were formed, i.e. concentration exercises and study-meditations.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 6:47 pm
If you mean the evolutionary process through which the soul-spiritual phenomena were extracted from Nature and Culture and 'privatized' into the human 'subject', I have touched on this in a few essays. I have found a very useful way is to focus on the transition of ancient Greek experience to the Middle Ages and then to the Modern age. That seems to be a way that most people can relate to in a somewhat intimate way, and I think that's also why so many people resonate with approaches like those of Barfield, for example. The art historical presentation by JDE that I referenced recently is also a great way of sensitizing to this evolutionary process, as reflected in the changing artistic intuitions and methods of expressing them. We can sense, for example, how the non-perspectival religious paintings reflected a much more integrated feeling for the soul-spiritual essence of 'outer' objects and events, than the modern perspectival paintings where everything is dispersed and isolated from each other in 3D space. I touched on some such aspects in Catch 22 Part I.

Thanks for the augmented overview, Ashvin. Helpful to connect some more dots (before I forget them again). I've watched the JDE video on painting from renaissance to impressionist. Effective take indeed - it highlights the continuous evolution of perspective well.

Stranger wrote: ↑Tue Nov 19, 2024 1:01 pm Also, if the access to spiritual realities were so easy and automatic for ancient men, why the materialist philosophies were developed in ancient Greece (Leucippus, Democritus, Aristotle)?

Since it's recently been question of the philosophy of Democritus, and how it does or doesn't express a materialistic conception of reality, I thought I would summarize what I understand on this particular question, from the "Origins of Natural Science" lecture cycle. Steiner treated that in Lecture II.

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During the last 3000 years, man has progressively separated from oneness with nature, to end up in the present configuration, when he sees himself like a subject who apprehends nature/reality as an object of knowledge.

Along this trajectory, various phases were traversed. The first phase, or degree, of this separation was the one in which Democritus lived. In that state of human consciousness, man still felt the soul to be the bearer of the Spirit Logos, but it was a muted Logos, whose message had become opaque. At the same time, physicality (both in nature and in the physical body) had become denser. It had been severed from Spirit, so that it couldn’t be seen as its picture anymore. Instead, physicality was beginning to be perceived as the locus of activities of various kinds - though not as yet ruled by 'laws of nature', as it is the case today.

In this phase, the soul was still able to recognize itself as made of Spirit Logos, but without sight into it. Therefore, the physical body had become lost, as an image of the previously all-pervasive Spirit. Instead, it had started to be seen as an interaction of natural forces or activities, severed from the soul-spirit. So, while today the problem is the complete disconnect of body and soul from spirit, at the times of Democritus, the soul was still imbued with its direct connection with the Spirit Logos, and the problem was ‘only’ how to see physicality (nature and body).

Physicality, corporeality, felt lost, unknown, dull. Within this consciousness, Democritus then imagined matter to be made of dense, interacting natural forces, still emanated by the Spirit Logos, since he couldn't see it as a direct image of it anymore. But there were no thought-out laws of nature, as yet - only one principle: that matter is made of forces/activities, and that the smallest possible inanimate centers, or smallest operating units of nature's forces and activities can be called atoms. However, for Democritus, the fullness of atom-made matter must of necessity be self-similar to empty space, out of which it must be flowing out somehow. In other words, atom-made matter must be of the same essence as empty space. The complexes of forces that activate nature must still originate from the Logos, though it’s not possible to experience that directly anymore for Democritus. In a way, this is so because he thinks too much, therefore his thoughts about nature become standalone shadows. They inexorably cut him off of the soul-spiritual life of nature. Thus nature becomes a complex of inanimate, atomized forces in Democritus' head.

To summarize: even if, in a loose sense, Democritus can be called a precursor of materialism, he was in a completely different position from 1800s materialists, and his atoms, though inanimate, are still moving and active emanations of the Spirit-Logos. At that time, man was still directly aware of being the bearer of the Logos, and this philosophy was Democritus' attempt to redesign in his head the recently lost connection between that Logos and dense corporeality. He strived to imagine in thoughts how the former may give origin to the latter, while the possibility of seeing their unity in soul-spiritual vision had just faded.

Steiner wrote:In that time, no conception at all existed as yet of what we call today “the laws of nature.” People did not think in terms of natural laws; everywhere and in everything they felt the forces of nature. When a man looked into his own being, he did not experience a soul that—as was the case later one—bore within itself a dim will, an almost equally dim feeling, and an abstract thinking. Instead, he experienced the soul as the bearer of the living Logos, something that was not abstract and dead, but a divine living image of God.

We must be able to picture this contrast, which remained acute until the eleventh or Twelfth century. It was quite different from the contrasts that we feel today. If we cannot vividly grasp this contrast, which was experienced by everyone in that earlier epoch, we make the same mistake as all those historians of philosophy who regard the old Greek thinker Democritus22 of the fifth century B.C. as an atomist in the modern sense, because he spoke of “atoms.” The words suggest a resemblance, but no real resemblance exists. There is great difference between modern-day atomists and Democritus. His utterances were based on the awareness of the contrast described above between man and nature, soul and body. His atoms were complexes of force and as such were contrasted with space, something a modern atomist cannot do in that manner. How could the modern atomist say what Democritus said: “Existence is not more than nothingness, fullness is not more than emptiness?” It implies that Democritus assumed empty space to possess an affinity with atom-filled space. This has meaning only within a consciousness that as yet has no idea of the modern concept of body. Therefore, it cannot speak of the atoms of a body, but only of centers of force, which, in that case, have an inner relationship to what surrounds man externally. Today's atomist cannot equate emptiness with fullness. If Democritus had viewed emptiness the way we do today, he could not have equated it with the state of being. He could do so because in this emptiness he sought the soul that was the bearer of the Logos. And though he conceived his Logos in a form of necessity, it was the Greek form of necessity, not our modern physical necessity. If we are to comprehend what goes on today, we must be able to look in the right way into the nuances of ideas and feelings of former times.