a commentary on Scott E. Hicks' remarkable essay:
Spiritual Beings Dwell in the Ground of Propositions*
Brentano, Husserl and
Steiner
on the Content of Thought
by Joel A. Wendt
The first point I'd like to make is that I intend
to
confirm a great deal of what Hicks has written. At
almost every
point I was able (eventually, see below) to find agreement
with Hicks
exposition. I did, however, have a constant experience
such that
I would have often emphasized a slightly different nuance
(especially
when he was writing of the experiences of thinking we all
share).
That said, and while the overall situation is a bit
complicated,
perhaps even tricky (so to speak), I remain hopeful what is
written
below will, in any event, be useful to others. As a
general
matter, this commentary is not so much directed at repeating
what Hicks
has offered, or at criticizing its apparent limits, but rather
the
effort here is to place Hicks' work in a wider context, for he
(and
Brentano, Husserl and Steiner) are not the only ones to take
an
interest in these questions.
- some preliminary
considerations -
I have read Hicks' essay several times. I
found
reading this essay difficult for a number of reasons. In
the
beginning, it seems he was trying to separate his work (and
ultimately
Husserl's) from current thinking in such fields as linguistic
analysis,
and perhaps even postmodern thought, yet without expressly
doing so.
This made a lot of sense in a way, and I could see that
the essay
would have become something else if he had tried to make these
distinctions more explicit. Once past that threshold
problem (so
to speak) he then entered deeply into the specialized and
distinct
language conventions he was creating, and this I found helpful
and
confusing simultaneously. In trying to understand
why this was so, I eventually discovered that I had to use
some
different (made-up to a degree) terminology in order to
approach the
situation carefully, while remaining true to the concepts
discovered -
to the content
of
thought that went with seeking to
understand the underlying riddle posed by the difficulties I
had during
reading this text.
These somewhat made-up terms are: ordinary
consciousness;
meditative consciousness; introspective consciousness; and,
initiate
consciousness.
Having read the works of many different writers -
some
familiar with Anthroposophy as well as other spiritual
disciplines, in
commenting on Hicks work I discovered that I needed to make
distinctions that made sense of the fact that these different
writers
often seem to disagreed in certain respects in spite of either
being
familiar with the works of Rudolf Steiner, or with other
spiritual Ways
or Paths. To give definition and shape to the
above terms - these distinctions, I also will borrow certain
indications of Steiner that I hope will be helpful. The
reader
should, however, consider this idea of definition and shape as not involving an effort to define or make
rigid their
conception, but rather to point a finger in certain
directions as
regards the possible different ways in which experience and
thought (or
percept and concept) can be in relationship to each other.
For example, in what I am calling ordinary
consciousness
the I (in its current stage of the evolution of consciousness)
basically sleeps through whatever its relationship is to these
realms
(experience and thought). In what I am calling
meditative
consciousness, the I creates special moments of concentrated
and
focused inner activity, after which certain forces then flow
into what
was previously ordinary consciousness such that a kind of
inward waking
up slowly arises - experience and thought can over time be
seen to draw
nearer to each other in a way.
In what I am calling introspective consciousness,
the I
regularly practices a kind continuous and ongoing waking up
through
careful self observation, such that the will-in-thinking
slowly
develops inward skills that people who do not practice this
art cannot
even imagine. These purely cognitive skills create
certain forces
(capacities of the will) that then flow into not only ordinary
consciousness, but meditative experiences as well. Over
time
experience and thought draw closer and closer to each other,
so that
when introspective consciousness matures, what Steiner wrote
of as thinking
which has life in it, or it thinks in me, becomes a
general ongoing experience (ordinary discursive thinking
undergoes a
metamorphosis into living thinking).
What I am calling here initiate consciousness
involves
the full development of clairvoyant abilities (not just
momentary
experiences that can arise in ordinary consciousness, in
meditative
consciousness or introspective consciousness), which
clairvoyance is
then afterwards continuously present. The I can attend
to its
clairvoyant experiences, or other more ordinary, mediative or
introspective experiences at will. These clairvoyant
capacities,
however, as described by Steiner, are varied. I'll leave
to his
works the descriptions of the differences and similarities,
except to
point to his remarks in the last preface to his book A
Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, where he points out that in clairvoyance
(supersensible
perception) experience and thought arise simultaneously in the
soul,
whereas (by implication) experience usually precedes thought
in time in
the other forms of consciousness.
A lot more detail could be gone into here, but
the point
being made is not about these terms, but rather to set up the
concepts
behind the terms for their later explanatory power when
considering
what Hicks has offered, and why in certain circumstances his
perceptions and thoughts will be different from the reports of
others.
Essentially I am suggesting that there are different
paths one
can take, and that these paths can be loosely divided
according to
these terms (ordinary consciousness etc.) in such a way that
we will
then find that among those reporting the results of their
inner work,
the differences can be explained in large part by the general
characteristics of the approach which they individually took.
In addition, it is clear that for some
individuals, who
are students of Rudolf Steiner, that they will be combining,
in
different degrees, aspects of both a kind of meditative
consciousness
and an introspective consciousness. I am not sure, for
example,
that this mixing is always a good thing if it results from
trying to
follow the path laid out in Theosophy, then Occult
Science and finally Knowledge
of
Higher Worlds, at the same time as
the
quite different path that was laid out in A
Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception and The
Philosophy of Freedom. My view is
that the
processes and soul forces involved in these two paths are
quite
distinct, and that it may be better to concentrate on one path
to the
exclusion of the other. Everyone, of course, will have
to make
their own choices here.
One final small caveat: It is possible sometimes
for
people to read the works (ideas and thoughts) of a highly
developed
personality, such as Rudolf Steiner, and as a result make too
complicated their view of the present. Steiner has given
us much
that belongs actually to our farther future states of
consciousness,
and if we import some of these ideas into our present in such
a way
that we judge this present by this future potential, we will
make it
harder to realize what actually is possible in this present.
The spiritual researcher engages in a delicate
art when
they bring to our present what really belongs to our future,
and
Steiner even pointed this out with respect to the Being he
called
Ahriman - that Ahriman (according to Steiner), in that he was
or did
evil, did so because he brought things ahead of their time.
We
make a mistake, for example, if we look to such a personality
as
Steiner and believe they make no errors, and that every
judgment they
make is perfect. Steiner still makes karma, otherwise he
would
never have been able to join his karma to
that of the
members of the Anthroposophical Society.
For example, it is possible to come to think that
we need
to do in this incarnation that which really belongs to a
later
time, because a spiritual researcher has told us of this later
in time
possibility. This is particularly present today in
the
Anthroposophical Society and Movement concerning the
relationship
between the Consciousness Soul and the Spirit Self. It
is
possible to try to skip past the tasks of the Consciousness
Soul
inadvertently, in part because Steiner could only speak of it
in the
language of the Intellectual Soul. With respect to this
possible
confusion, it has helped me over the years to keep in mind the
following:
Christ is Love. As Love He does not
put any
barriers between us and Him. Any barriers we
discover are
those we ourselves create. Part of what this means is
that we
don't have to become different or practice meditative
consciousness, or
introspective consciousness or even initiate consciousness in
order to
be near to Christ. Ordinary consciousness is just fine.
Do we believe, for example, that Christ is only
to be met
on the path of Anthroposophy? Why would the Divine
Mystery place
such obstacle-like tasks in front of any human being?
Christ participates in our ordinary consciousness
all the
time. We just don't notice it because it comes as
Grace,
and unannounced. He doesn't even say hi (although
we can
learn to feel his Presence) - He just keeps his promise: I
will be with
you unto the ends of time.
As ordinary thinkers often say: We are all going
to the
same place, even though each individual journey is certainly
different.
This is not to imply that work by such as Husserl,
Steiner and
Hicks has no meaning, just that its meaning is ultimately
meant to
serve others, not just our own assumptions as to its
significance.
Spiritual research serves the development of
future
culture, and needs not be done by everyone, any more than
everyone
ought to become a theoretical physicist in order to benefit
from
discoveries in that field of research. Below I will go
into
certain details.
- Hicks discovery -
After his preliminary discussions, Hicks defines
the
territory of his inquiry in this way (page 2, column 1 of the
PDF
document): "...when
a
person investigates the reality of meaningful thought with
a
keen sense and an open mind, by attending to the deeper
conceptual
processes linked to the sounds and symbols with full
consciousness, an
entire realm of living thought forms becomes apparent.
This is a
pure realm of meaning without representations in either
imagined
pictures or a particular language."
Others have made this journey, and I have tried
to
suggest above that while we might assume that our experiences
are fully
universal (that for everyone they would be the same), this
turns out
not to be the case. It is in fact quite difficult to
separate out
clearly our universal perceptions from our individualized and
subjective perceptions. The above quoted statement is
true, but
when we read the next sentences where Hicks tries to express
his actual
experience metaphorically ( ...imagine bursts, flashes, and lines
of colored light
shining in the air... page 2,
column 2) we
wander into the more dangerous subjective territory.
The reason I say discovery is
that while Hicks
next proceeds with an analysis of the writings of Brentano,
Husserl and
Steiner, he eventually shifts his approach back for a while to
his own
subjective experiences at a certain point, and then relates
his
thoughts about his experiences, to their ideas. However,
for
reasons I hope will eventually make sense to the reader, I'd
like to
skip past that aspect of Hicks essay, and start near the end
of his
essay first. I am assuming the reader of this has read
that
essay, and if not they should leave this aside and do so,
otherwise
they might get quite confused. If the reader needs to,
they might
even reread Hicks essay before continuing here, for it grows
inwardly
with multiple readings.
Near the end of his essay, Hicks creates a
diagram, by
which he hopes to lay out a kind of ladder of experience,
leading from
ordinary thinking to finding (discovering/confirming) that
spiritual
beings dwell in the ground of propositions,
or the meaning of the content of thought.
Here is the ladder, represented in a horizontal
form,
rather than a vertical (as Hicks has done, page 13 column 2),
going
from the top down: 1) Meaning-Fulfillment: Angelic Being dwelling inside Essence - Spiritual World; 2) Dynamic Archetype in the Substance of
Flowing
Susceptibility - Astral
World; 3) Husserlian Essence (Eidos)
- A
reflection of Dynamic Archetype - Etheric World; 4) Pure Meaning Shapes in Life-ether - Etheric World; 5) Linguistic Propositional Shapes in
Tone-ether - Etheric World; 6)
Husserlian Noemata - reflections of Pure Meaning
Shapes (4) Etheric/Physical
World; 7) Meaning-Intention: Dull
Mental Images/Representations - Physical World; 8) Dull Sense of Inner Speech centered around
the
Larynx - Physical
World.
I need here to make a couple of critical
observations.
First, I am not sure the term "dull"
is
useful, because ordinary consciousness is quite special from
the
point of view of the Divine Mystery, and perhaps a term with
less
pejorative implications would be better, such as yet necessarily incomplete. In
other
places in his essay, Hicks makes (or implies) similar negative
judgments of the content of ordinary consciousness, such as
when he
uses the term "emptily" or writes that
"She
barely considers the concept of snow at all, and it
is only dimly contained in the course of her conversation.". Both Hicks and Husserl appear to make
value
judgments of ordinary consciousness to the extent that it is
not as
awake as are they, or lives as fully in the realm of concepts
as they
do. The whole story in the essay of the woman observing
the snow seems a bit dismissive of her state of consciousness,
and if
this is so, then I find this troubling.
Later (page 6, column 3) Hicks writes of hallucinatory fantasy
or
puerile daydreaming (whether these
are just
his terms or Husserl's is not clear), distinguishing this from a more disciplined
imaginative
process. Granted such is true in a certain sense
(Goethe's exact sensorial phantasy)
- namely that the disciplined imaginative process is
better suited to science, but the role of fantasy and
daydreaming in a
healthy human soul life (psychology) is not to be so easily
dismissed.
For example, to a qualitatively oriented introspection,
one can
distinguish fantasy, daydreaming and reverie as somewhat
distinct
states of consciousness. They are semi-conscious aspects
of an
instinctive picture thinking, and much goes on in this realm
that
serves the needs of ordinary consciousness.
Reverie is more heavenly in its content, while
fantasy is
more earthly. The former is more symbolic and less
ego-centric.
Fantasy is more concrete and more focused on the ego's
wants and
desires. Daydreaming mediates between the two states,
and moves
often from one or the other (fantasy to reverie and back
again) under
the instinctive wise guidance of the I. Introspection
will find
in the content of these states of instinctive picture thinking
a
reflection of aspects of the astral or desire body.
There is
fruitful self-knowledge to be gained by confessing to
ourselves the
nature and personal meaning significance of this content.
Not
only that, but these states of inward relaxation are often a
quite
necessary antidote to the demands placed on the thinking by
ordinary
life. A mind too engaged in one to the exclusion of the
other
(whether an excessive daydreaming disengagement from life, or
a too
rigorous obsessive worried thinking about life) reveals an
absence of
inward balance and can be a sign of psychological disturbance.
The second thing we need to notice is the obscure
and
arcane kinds of language being used (including this in the
title: "ground
of propositions"). During my
multiple readings I had to often go
quite slowly in large part because I had to continuously write
down
several definitions for various terms, just to not loose the
thread of
the discussion. Here is a typical and problematic
sentence
that can be found deeper into the text (page 6, column 2): "One might argue that
because
concepts and (especially perceptual) noemata are often
imagistic in
nature, this would suggest that such noetic or psychological
features
must also be endowed with something akin to profiles."
In an earlier version of this commentary I
lamented that
this essay seemed not to be written at all for an ordinary
consciousness, so frequent was the use of unusual terminology.
Part of the reason for this is obvious, however, in that
Husserl
in particular (who is the main object of most the middle
section of
this paper) himself used a specialized language. Hicks
even
comments that he is doing this: "... I want to examine
these
ideas ... in order ... to build up a special vocabulary (with
its
corresponding conceptual apparatus)"
(page 4,
column 1). This problem* aside, if we look at the
ladder,
Hicks has highlighted for us the fundamental question/riddle
he is
exploring by having put in bold two stairs
of the ladder:
1) Meaning-Fulfillment and 7) Meaning-Intention.
We
could say that he is seeking the causal realm of the meaning of the content of thought, which we experience
in
different ways in our consciousness (soul).
*[We would have a much longer and quite different
essay
if Hicks had gone the other way, which is to unfold the
special
vocabulary and relate it to Brentano, Husserl and Steiner, and
then set
that special vocabulary aside and create thought-forms (word
phrases on
the page) out of which ordinary consciousness would be able to
grasp
what was being offered here. For example, in the phrase
quoted
above that begins "One
might
argue...", it is possible to not use
the terms: noemata, imagistic, noetic and profiles, but rather ordinary
language which might then help the ordinary consciousness to
look at
itself in a new way. Here is this quote, rewritten by me
to
remove the specialized language (don't expect much
improvement,
the task to retrieve the meaning hidden by the arcane language
is
arduous): One
might
argue that because concepts and (especially perceptual) [noemata =] specific
idea-forms are
often [imagistic =] picture-like in nature, this would
suggest that such [noetic =] inwardly
perceived
idea-like
(or psychological features) must also be endowed with
something akin to
[profiles =] sense
world
space-like changes in perspective.
I am not, by the way, at all satisfied with the
above,
but I did hope by merely trying to translate this statement, I
can shed
light on this problem of arcane language. To not use
arcane
language is possible, and this is actually the example set in
Steiner's
The
Philosophy
of Freedom; and, which I tried to
emulate in my first effort to illuminate my own experiences
born in an
effort at introspective science: "pragmatic
moral
psychology" -
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/stgfr5.html]
As part of this quest (and perhaps because of
this),
Hicks has undertaken to look into the written works of
Steiner, Husserl
and Brentano, to see what they were thinking about meaning, and whether there was any interconnection
between the
thinking of these three personalities. As he works with
this
question, Hicks invites us to also observe our own thought
processes.
The matter is made complicated, in large part because
this is a
realm of inner experience few thinkers seek to penetrate, so
for most
readers of his essay the territory will be mostly unknown.
At the same time as I read, I often wrote in the
margins
various comments wondering whether Hicks knew of other
writers' works
that had considered similar questions (for example: there are
the
works of Owen Barfield, such as: Poetic
Diction:
a study in meaning; Speaker's
Meaning; and in particular Saving
the
Appearances: a study in idolatry).
When
Hicks writes of what Husserl called the pre-linguistic field, I wondered whether this was similar to
Barfield's idea
of figuration, or to any aspect of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Primary and Secondary
Imagination.
Someone else will have to see if that is the
case, but
this should be said here: the problem really comes from the
fact that
Husserl (and Brentano and Steiner) were all investigating a
field of
inquiry, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, which few
others
had been able to penetrate with their thinking, much less even
recognize as being able to be a subject of scientific
observation and
investigation (our interior life as regards thought and
meaning).
Husserl in particular explored this very carefully
and it
is his language with which Hicks has had to deal. Hicks
then,
having as one object the explication of Husserl's thought in
relationship to Brentano and Steiner is compelled (as it were)
to
remain true to Husserl's language conventions.
Now I am not going to try to restate Hicks' work
here,
for given the basic difficulties and limits made necessary by
these
language conventions, created to describe what can be observed
in human
psychology as regards the origin of meaning in the content of
thought,
Hicks' essay itself is the best rendering possible.
Rather I am
going to try to describe some limits (or edges) to these
observations I
believe Hicks ran into, that flow in part from his necessarily
partially subjective and individualized approach to such inner
work,
coupled to what Husserl had himself discovered.
Hicks does on a number of occasions try to suggest that Steiner's own writings on introspective psychology are similar to Husserl's conclusions, and this I think is not as exactly the case that Hicks wishes it were. But even a discussion of those problems would be difficult, and perhaps pointless, because we don't want to analyze (take apart) what Hicks has rendered, so much as confirm as much of it as possible. We (who work at what I'd like to call here: the early stages of a new science of introspective psychology) all enter a territory filled with a lot of detail, and each of us will approach this realm carrying different biases, assumptions and other pre-thought conclusions that make our various ways of representing the riddles of meaning and the content of thought appear in different kinds of terminology.
Husserl expresses things one way, Brentano
another,
Steiner a third, Barfield a fourth, Coleridge a fifth, Emerson
a sixth,
Kuhlewind a seventh, myself an eighth and Hicks himself to a
certain
degree another. This is why I laid out at the beginning
some
attempted observations about ordinary, meditative,
introspective and
initiate consciousness. Again, keep in mind that I am
assuming
the reader of this commentary is familiar with Hicks' essay.
For example, I think if we were to lay along side
each
other these various ways of representing the study of meaning
and the
content of thought, moving Westward from Central Europe,
through
England and then into America, we would find that a different
kind of
emphasis arises, because each of these geographical areas
produces
differently oriented conditions of soul. Hicks, having
delved
into the Central European way of looking at things, will not
use the
same terminology as Barfield or Coleridge (Englishmen), and as
myself
or Emerson (Americans). The subjectivity of the thinker,
and
their own soul (inner psychological territory), will
contribute to
biases and assumptions, and readers of each should then not be
surprised that the investigation of these matters results in a
significant variety of expressions, representations and
terminology.
Let me give a few examples.
If one takes a word-search program to the PDF
file of
Hicks' essay, one will find that the word moral
is mentioned only twice - once in the first paragraph and once
in the
last. We will also find the frequent use of such terms
as attention and intention (or their
variations). In Steiner's The
Philosophy
of Freedom, the term moral has
considerable significance, as in: moral imagination, moral
intuition
and moral technique.
As someone who has practiced introspective
psychology for
over 30 years, these terms have a great deal of significance,
although
my use of them doesn't have to be the same use as that of
other
thinkers. In my experience and practice, the term attention is used to refer to that act of my I by which it
focuses
its thinking activity on a particular object, be it an object
in the
sense world, or an object in the psychological
(soul/spiritual) world.
The term intention, in my way of
seeing these matters, refers to the moral
impulse, or the causal why the attention is focused in a
certain way.
Experience teaches that the meaning or content of
thought that
arises will vary according to the moral quality with which the
thinker's intention imbues its attention.
Barfield, for another and different example,
in Saving the Appearances,
distinguishes three kinds of thinking/meaning creation: figuration, and what he calls alpha and
beta thinking. Figuration he
describes
as the instinctive thought content (meaning) of the world
which appears
to our ordinary consciousness in that we know the names and
the
principle significance of a whole host of objects that come
before our
perception both inward and outward. Figuration is born
into us
through our acquisition of language - it is the inherent cultural meaning of the familiar world into
which we are raised.
Figuration would appear to be possibly related to
Husserl's pre-linguistic field, but of this I have no
certainty.
And the moral (as an independent reality from the I) may
be
related to the supra-linguistic field (again a term used by
Husserl and
Hicks).
Alpha thinking is the kind of thinking done in science, and it produces theories about its objects. Barfield doesn't want to confine such thinking to science, however, but would include history (theories about the past) and such as additional examples of alpha thinking.
Beta thinking is reflective, and could include
thinking
about thinking, or thinking about perception. Most of
Husserl's
thought seems to be beta thinking about objects in our
interior life,
which seeks (according to Hicks) a distinctly phenomenological
orientation (no theory, just pure observation).
To further illuminate the possible different ways
of
seeing (reflecting upon) some of the same things, let me add
this from
Emerson: Nature
is a thought incarnate and turns to thought again as ice
becomes water
and then gas. The world is mind precipitated and the
volatile
essence is forever escaping into the state of free thought (from his essay: Nature, written at age 33 in 1836). Fifty years
later, in
1886, Steiner was to write at age 25 in his book A
Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception: Thought
is
the last of a series of processes by which Nature is formed.
Here is Coleridge on Primary and Secondary
Imagination: The Imagination then, I
consider either as primary or secondary. The
primary
Imagination I hold to be a living power and prime Agent of all
human
Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the
eternal act
of creation of the infinite I Am. The secondary
Imagination I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the
conscious will,
yet still as identical with the former in the kind of its
agency and
differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation .
It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or
where this
process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it
struggles to
idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as
all
objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
Each of these, including Hicks ladder which ends
up with
referring to "1) Meaning-Fulfillment: Angelic Being dwelling inside Essence - Spiritual World", relates the act of
thinking (meaning and content of
thought creation) to what we generally call the spiritual, or
in
Spiritual Science: the spiritual world.
At
the time Husserl was thinking and writing, natural science was
living
in a world view which had come to presume a disconnect between
thinking
and the world, and further that science and religion had
little to say
to each other. So Hicks, in telling us the story
of
Husserl's efforts to penetrate with scientific observation
into the
interior or psychological realm, reveals Husserl as an early
explorer
who sought to remain within the scientific attitude or spirit, albeit with an emphasis on the
phenomenology
of the psychological.
Hicks also is able to confirm Husserl, when he (Hicks) begins his description of his own introspective/meditative work in this way: "First, after closing the eyes, one can orient a primary ray of attention to the lower region of darkness in the field of the mind's eye, while a weaker second ray of attention is simultaneously oriented toward a 'higher' region. This higher region is expressing the concepts that one is thinking by means of unclear images. These vague images, which often have a character determined by the impressions of memory, are experienced as unfolding outside the field of inner vision, in a sense, 'behind' or 'beyond' the primary ray of attention." (page 7, column 2)
Hopefully the reader can now see the variety of
ways in
which one can approach these riddles and questions, both in an
observational sense, and a cognitive (meaning-descriptive)
sense.
For example, Tomberg (often irrationally vilified by
some
anthroposophists) describes a way of inward seeing for which
he uses
the idea of two inward seeing eyes one above the other in a
vertical
array, instead of the two eyes of the face that lie in the
horizontal.
This would seem to relate to Hicks' description of the
two
different rays of attention, one above the other.
In my own work, I have experienced meditatively four fields of soul phenomena, related to the crown chakra, the eyebrow chakra, the throat chakra and the heart chakra, each contributing to the "impression" made by the object of thought. The I can focus on each field individually, or two or more together, with each experience (each summation of the rays of attention) resulting in different inwardly sensed experiences. Some experiences are quite unusual, for example when the throat chakra is made very quiet (no discursive or inner dialog allowed), after which, when a certain rest point is achieved, one discovers that inner silence in this chakra (soul location) also "sounds".
Again, I am not suggesting that one or another way of describing or cognizing these experiences is superior, but rather pointing out how individually unique each is. And, more important, once we recognize these individual approaches, we can work at seeing their similarities and mutual confirmation, while at the same time not letting the differences in terminology come to mean one is wrong and the other right.
This is not to say, however, that there are no
problems
those doing research in this area can and should point out to
each
other. Anthroposophy is meant to be a science, and in
the field
of science a critical examination of each others offerings is
an
essential process. In this regard then, Hicks essay
displays two
additional problems to my thinking (additional to the arcane
language
used, and the possible negative presumptions regarding
ordinary
thinking - both mentioned above).
In the first, to my way of approaching these
questions,
Hicks wanders into a kind of weak or speculative territory
when he adds
a great deal of "Steiner said" to what he wants to comment on.
This in
particular with the evocation of Steiner's ideas on the
different kinds
of ethers (tone, life etc.) that become part of the ladder.
This
concerns the problem that the Italian practitioner of The
Philosophy
of Freedom, Massimo Scaligero,
calls the pre-thought thought (as does, I believe, Kuhlewind).
When we bring prematurely, into our attempts at a
psychological phenomenology, a concept borrowed from another
thinker
(such as Steiner), we have in essence a pre-thought thought
derived
from the reading of a text. The question then arises
whether the
perception (the phenomenological observation) is determined by
the
borrowed concept, or arises directly from the experience of
the
phenomena itself. With the pre-thought thought we will
tend to
see and experience what we expect to see
and experience.
The pre-thought thought becomes an assumption (or what Barfield calls: an idol)
in
the soul, and like a kind of ghost obscures the actual
perception/experience. Anthroposophists, for example,
tend very
much to idolize what Steiner said.
The second problem I find very interesting.
Particularly beginning in pages 5 and onward, starting
with
section III. Profiles, Eidetic Reduction and Ideality (there's
that
arcane terminology problem again), it seemed to me that the
scientific
(observational/phenomonological) approach (an intention) itself began to disturb the field
of observation itself. That is the I, as a thinking
perceiving
subject, has an effect upon the field or objects which it is observing by its acts of attention
and
intention (something the quantum physicist has observed in his
work).
Observation establishes (and this from many
different
writers on this subject) that there is a kind of
co-participation that
goes on in spiritual experience. This is a subtle
problem, and
reveals that it is worth spending considerable time in quiet
reflection
on such riddles. For example, is the inner world similar
or
different with respect to the nature of "outness" which the I
experiences concerning sense experience? Is a thought
(or
meaning) over
there, so to speak, in the same way
we find
(or believe) a tree to be over there in
sense perception?
Hicks comes at this a bit with his discussion of profiles, however, I want to suggest here that this is a
much
deeper problem in a way (See Owen Barfield's book: What
Coleridge
Thought, in particular the Chapter
on "Outness".)
When we attend over time to certain aspects
hidden
beneath the surface of our inner life, we eventually will
begin to run
into the activity of other Beings. This is, of course,
where
Hicks wants to end up, with what he calls in the title to his
essay: Spiritual
Beings Dwell in the Ground of Propositions.
It seems to me, once one begins to notice the existence
of what I
have sometimes called other-presence,
that at this
stage of inner experience one has left the realm of purely
objective
science and wandered into a territory where religious feeling
is called
upon to play a larger role.
This last point I now want to link to the
discussion
above regarding the absence of some reflection in Hicks essay
on the
moral element of our inward intentions. Steiner has
asked of the
scientist that his laboratory needs to become an altar, and if
our
science is focused on introspective observations, then our own
psychological interior perhaps ought to also become a temple
where
sacraments are practiced, in addition to a place of
observation and
perhaps experimentation.
Because of this fact, I think it is unnecessary
to
reference Steiner's thought on the different ethers (life,
tone etc.).
One only has to recognize that in our interior life we
have come
to the threshold or perhaps a gateway or even a rite of
passage, and
that a basically religious attitude has to be added to our
scientific
impulses. Not only that, but an artistic attitude as
well.
It is not just that spiritual beings dwell in the
ground
of proposition (i.e. that the meaning inherent in the content
of
thought arises out of intercourse with invisible Beings), but
that we
have two other tasks here in addition to being scientific in
our
introspective psychology. One is the cultivation of
reverence,
and perhaps even an understanding of the significance of
surrender.
The other is that our expression (representation in
words) of
these encounters has to include an effort to create beauty.
As a scientist, I seek inwardly the Truth.
As
a religious person I also seek inwardly the Good. As an
artist, I
also need to feel/see the inherent beauty of the whole
experience,
which I then come to render into language. For a period
of time
in my own development, I rendered this experience as other-presence. Then as it became more and more
living in
me, I began to render it as the delicate and subtle presence of
Fullness and fullness
of Presence. Then ultimately I
found I
needed to render it as a communion,
or the Second
Eucharist in the Ethereal, all made possible by the presence
of the
true Second Coming of Christ in the Ethereal. The
meaning or
content of thought, or ground of propositions, becomes then an
aspect
of a sacrament in which I am not the only participant.
Hicks has approached this, and I think wants
this.
Husserl apparently couldn't step outside his need to be
purely
scientific. But to go the final steps up the ladder does
require
something in addition to a scientific observation of inwardly
noticed
facts of experience. And that something (for me) is to
realize,
with humility, that within ones soul we stand in the presence
of
Mystery. It certainly is a crucial fact of this kind of
experience that it isn't just we who seek to encounter the
Mystery, but
that the Mystery Itself seeks also to encounter us.
One of the differences, between my own work and
that of
Hicks (and Husserl), has included meditative work on
individual
concepts. When Hicks writes of the ground of
propositions he seems to be
referring to a what lies behind what we
usually call: a train of thoughts, and Hicks defines a
proposition as
an "individual
line
of thought" (page 1, column three).
At the same time, Hicks spends a good portion of the
essay trying
to get his readers to step away from inner vocalization (what
others
call: discursive thinking - the spirit speaks, the soul
hears), and to
recognize thereby that meaning lies outside (behind or beyond) the spoken and
written language of the thinker.
Thus his use of the Husserlian terms pre-linguistic field, and supra-linguistic field.
The reason I point toward this experience of
individual
concepts (as against an "individual line of thought"),
is because it is possible to isolate single concepts and
meditate on
their meaning in such a way that they unfold from within
themselves
cognitive substance (meaning) that to my experience can't be
otherwise
obtained. For example, I have worked for several years
now with
the Prologue to the Gospel of John, following an indication of
Steiner's in Lecture 12 of the John Gospel cycle. In
deep
meditation on this "line of thought", each
individual term can be made to stand alone and become a
subject all in
itself. "In the Beginning was the Word..." expands under
such
contemplation, and each single word/concept is significant,
with
"Beginning" leading to a contemplation of the idea of Time,
and the
term/concept Word opening out into a seven-fold array, such
that in our
time we are mostly focused on that first aspect of this
seven-fold
rainbow of meaning (what Steiner calls: the Christ Impulse), which first aspect can be represented by the
idea of
"choice". This leads one to know that for modern
human
beings in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, that we could
say, in
recognizing our true spirit (microcosm) as itself unfolding
this
rainbow over time: "In the Beginning was the Choice ...".
The Creation begins with the Choice to create, and
if one
is attentive to the representations of insightful people in
the
present, we will come upon the crucial nature of this single
concept
with respect to our expressions of freedom, out of our own
spirit.
Our whole present time weeps with the dilemmas and pains
of
Choice.
Steiner, in his book A
Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception describes ideas as a complex of concepts.
In his The
Philosophy of Freedom Steiner
distinguishes
mental pictures from concepts and concepts from ideas.
He says
further that we need to recognize that we have to confront an
idea and
experience it, otherwise we will fall into its bondage.
In my own work, I make distinctions between the mental picture of a particular book, the generalized concept of books collectively, the pure concept of bookness which can be used to think
metaphorically of
the Book of Nature for example, and the idea
of "book" or "bookness" as an independent reality (see
Steiner's
discussion in A Theory... that there is only one concept for a triangle,
which all
thinkers will encounter).
My experiences have lead me to conceiving of
ideas as the
ethereal garments of Beings. This is something of a
Platonist
conception, and as such is more common today than many might
think.
We should keep in mind, however, that we need to let the
experience speak, and not just come toward it out of the mood
of a
pre-thought thought.
Kuhlewind recommends in some early writings that
one
meditate on the individual parts of speech, learning thereby
to notice
subtle distinctions between nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives,
propositions, articles etc. There can be found a kind of
ladder
of abstraction, moving from the very concrete nouns and verbs
to the
highly abstract articles. Franz Bardon recommends one
meditate on
individual concepts, seeking to know whether one or another is
more
related to the different elements, such as fire, air, water
and earth.
Tomberg wants us (in his book Meditations
on
the
Tarot) to practice creating small
statements (trains of thought) toward which one can go through
the
process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Barfield considers the true poet and the true
philosopher
to be creators of new meanings, and that language evolves
through this
process whereby terms constantly shed old meaning and acquire
new ones
(see his History in English Words).
My experiences have lead me to thinking of the
world of pure concepts (which
Steiner describes as a thought-world) as
having certain qualities, which at its lowest level
can be described as similar to a landscape (ones thinking can
move
around in it), and at its highest level as musical (Individual
concepts
and ideas are in varying degrees of mutual harmony or
disharmony, which
thinking then feels
-
in a sense we touch
an idea with our thinking, in the same way we react out of
feeling to
music which we enjoy. See, for example, the highly
abstract
little booklet of Irene Diet: Imprisoned
in
the Spiritual Void, where she
laments the
absence in much anthroposophical work of the application of
finer
feelings to the reading and inner recreation of Steiner's
lectures.).
When Hicks writes (page 9, column 1): "...in the
psychological or
noetic sphere one experiences different noemata, different
images,
different constructs of meaning, and different associations of
feeling,
nevertheless, the eidetic proto-structural processes that
compose the
ideal or spiritual world are always the same.",
I
have to disagree. There are no processes without the will of spiritual beings. Nor
are all
spiritual beings are the same. Where Hicks goes next
after this
statement, by ultimately importing* Steiner's ideas of the
ethers
(tone, chemical etc.), - in this Hicks is just accepting
Steiner's
personal definitions, meanings, associations etc. The
content of
spiritual science, absent religious and artistic feeling,
often misses
out on connecting to the Beings, whose will stands behind it
all.
We won't get that connection in an intellectual way from
Steiner,
however much we read. We only get that connection through our own inner efforts and experiences.
*[In this part of this essay, Hicks does not
claim
personal experience, but relies entirely on his (Hicks')
interpretation
of Steiner's names for the different levels of activity that
end up
comprising steps (or levels) 5 and up, perhaps including level
2.
In Level One he does get to Beings. This returns
us to the
problem mentioned above of the pre-thought thought, or the
interpretation of experience in order to conform it to a
concept gained
from the reading of a text by another thinker, and assuming
that this
connection (between our idea based on the
text, and
our experience) is justified. We would have to
say
that from this point (page 9, section IV: Formative Forces,
Recognition, and Memory) on, Hicks' essay is a decent
representation of
Hicks' theoretical understanding of Steiner's thought, but
does not to
Hicks himself represent personal knowledge and experience.
Hicks
admits this (page 13, Column 3): "I am certainly not
claiming
any spiritual authority, I just mean that I have practiced
eidetic
variation with success, and have received impressions
indicating the
correctness of Steiner's deeper insights, which I have tried
to
assimilate logically and explain thoughtfully in the course of
this
article.". For details on this
problem
see my essay-review of Prokofieff's book Anthroposophy
and
The
Philosophy of Freedom.]
Let me now make a kind of brief summary:
Hicks has investigated a question which in the
late 19th
Century Central Europe was approached scientifically by only a
few
(such as Brentano, Husserl and Steiner). This question
might be
stated in a couple of ways: What lies beyond or behind that
activity of
thinking, which appears to the naive consciousness as a stream
of inner
wording? Or, if we carefully observe inwardly our mental
pictures
and other thought-like activity, where does meaning or the
content of
thought come from?
This question remains with us today, although
main-stream
science (and even such fields as linguistic analysis and
postmodernism)
hardly recognize that such a question can even be asked, or
answered.
Hicks has done a wonderful service by bringing this
question
alive again in our time, and by adding to it his own research.
Hicks has also done a service by bringing the thoughts
of Rudolf
Steiner into a deeper relationship with this question.
That others, who do similar research, don't write
about
it the same way as has Hicks, does not at all diminish what
Hicks has
contributed, for if we are careful in our appreciation of this
work, we
will realize that there are many pathways to doing research in
this
field of inner experience. What is called for is more
research,
and hopefully Hicks' essay will find over time its true
audience and
inspire them to deeper contemplations of the nature of
thinking, the
questions of meaning and what really lies behind the content
of thought.
At the same time, please keep in mind the
limitations
imposed on the essay by its descent into obscure, arcane and
specialized forms of language representations. Anyone -
scientist, philosopher, saint, or housewife, is necessarily
confronted
by their own thinking. We can't escape it, although we
can learn
to manipulate it, even transform it. Even the doubter
only casts
doubt by his thinking.
The question asked by Hicks, Brentano, Husserl
and even
Steiner, is on one level: What does thinking mean? The
answer, in
an existential postmodern sense is: It can only ultimately mean
itself. This is the freedom given to us by the Creation.
In the 19th Century, when a certain kind of
triumph of
the solely rational occurred, it seems that Husserl and
Steiner
wanted to use this hyper-rationality itself to remove any
doubt about
the meaning of thinking and the thinking of meaning. I
would
describe this impulse of theirs as a kind of disease of
consciousness.
I know anthroposophists have a hard time believing
Steiner could
be so spiritually inspired and still on occasion make an error
of
thought, yet in this impulse, to move the hyper-rationality of
pure
science toward a capacity to explain all Mystery, I find a
fundamental
weakness. This weakness is one that bothered Valentin
Tomberg*
and led him to believe Anthroposophy could never be a science,
because
the authentically spiritual contains too much magic, mysticism
and
mystery to ever be explainable using hyper-rational modes of
thought.
*[I don't agree with Tomberg by the way, but so
few
anthroposophists are familiar with the results of actually
reproducing
the content of Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom in their
own soul
life, that this makes it very difficult to explain why
Steiner's work
can justly be called: a Science of the
Spiritual.
Tomberg did not follow Steiner's own path (described in
The
Philosophy of Freedom), but rather that path laid out in the
sequence
of books Theosophy, Occult Science and Knowledge of Higher
Worlds.
This path, so common in practice today, is not
(according to
Steiner in Occult Science near the end of Chapter 5) as sure
and not as
exact as the path of The Philosophy of Freedom. It is
that
exactness, then made possible through the metamorphosis of
thinking
undergone by the achievement in the work of The Philosophy of
Freedom,
that enables us to take the experiences of the spiritual, with
all its
sublime and delicate magical, mystical and mystery qualities,
and
render that into a science. Tomberg had not experienced
this
possibility.]
To me this weakness becomes a problem of language
(and
ultimately of meaning), and the fact is that Steiner, in
adopting many
conventions of Natural Science, ended up confusing his
followers far
more than he intended. He split off from his lectures
his more
poetic statements into the Calender of the Soul, the Four
Mystery Plays
and finally into the aborted (unfinished) lessons of the First
Class.
By this separation of the magical, mystical and mystery
aspects
of the Universe and of human nature (which poets of far
greater gift
than Steiner clearly know), from the lecture-language (as
distinct from
the poetical) of Spiritual Science in the forms of a thought
content
adapted to the Intellectual Soul (see my essay on Prokofieff's
book: Anthroposophy
and
the Philosophy of Freedom), Steiner
students can lose a connection to the mystery and virtues of
ordinary
consciousness.
There are multiple ways of expressing these
Mysteries
(neither is better than any other, and perhaps it is - for the
reader -
useful to see all as contributing something unique to their -
the
reader's - own investigations):
Here is part of the conclusion to Hicks essay
(the last
sentence, page 14, column 1): "Therefore, in the new awareness of
enlivened thinking,
there is not simply a manipulation of Spiritual Beings into
typical
boxes of abstract expression or practical verbalization by the
human
being alone, but there is a deep interaction between Active
Beings of
Ideal Thought and the human thinker."
Here is the John Gospel, on the same idea, with
perhaps a
more magical, mystical and mystery orientation: John 3:8 The wind blows where
it
wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know
whence it
comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born
of the
Spirit.
Or me, from my essay: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul:
"The
outer
world is but a seeming, and what is brought by the Culture of
Media mere pictures of the Stage Setting for the World Temple
that is
home to our biographies. When we think away this outer
seeming -
this logos formed and maya based sense world, and concentrate
only on
the Idea of the moral grace (Life filled holy breath) we
receive and
then enact out of the wind warmed fire of individual moral
will - as
individual law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and the
prophets -
we create this Meaning of Earth Existence. Every act of
moral
grace, given greater Life within in the deepest intimacy of
our life of
soul, is an ethereal communion with Christ, even though we may
only
experience it as what to us is a mere thought of what is the
Good at
some moment of need in the biography.
"Christ
gives
us this Gift, by Grace, freely out of Love, and with no need
that
we see Him as its Author. We hunger inwardly to know
what the
right thing to do is, and when this hungering is authentic, we
receive
Christ's Holy Breath. This does not come so much as a
thought-picture of the Good in response to our questing
spirit, but
rather as the contentless breathing substance of Christ's
Being.
We are touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we
shape
that Breath into the thought that we then know. The nature of
its
application and form in which we incarnate this thought is
entirely our
own. We shape the thought completely out of our own
freedom - our
own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it accurately in
the
individual circumstances of our lives.
"As
the Age of the Consciousness Soul unfolds accompanied by this
Second
Eucharist, the Social World of human relationships begins to
light and
warm from within. For each free act of moral grace rests
upon
this Gift of Christ's Being to us - an ethereal substance
received in
the communion within the Temple of the own Soul, freely given
in Love
whenever we genuinely: ask, seek and knock during our search
for the
Good. Our participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire
leavened
by Holy Breath, leads us to the co-creation of new light and
new warmth
- the delicate budding and growing point of co-participated
moral deeds
out of which the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.
"This
co-creation
is entirely inward, a slowly dawning Sun within the macro
Invisible World of Spirit. Moreover, we do it
collectively (as
humanity). While each of us contributes our part, it is
our
collective conscious celebration of the Second Ethereal
Eucharist
(creating the Good) that begins the transubstantiation of the
collective (presently materialized and fallen) thought-world
of
humanity into the New Jerusalem."
Too much Steiner harms more than it supports.
Hicks
essay suffers the same problem. We must enrich our
reading from
as many sources as possible, and in America this includes film
and
television. The wisdom (present day inspirations of the Divine Sophia)
of the
world is distributed
- that is it is everywhere. It
doesn't
just come from single sources (such as Steiner), because all true
thinking is an effort at engagement with true and ultimate
meaning.
Stand-up comics and cartoonists (see, for example,
the
works of George Carlin and Bill Waterston) in America are
often deep
philosophers of the mysteries and enigmas and riddles of human
existence. In fact, it will be our immersion in the
language of
the ordinary consciousness that will give us the best
vocabulary in
which to express our spiritual understanding born in our work
with
Anthroposophy.
I, personally, am also grateful that Hicks' essay
was
published by John Beck in the spill-over page, and thus made
available
thereby to wider aspects of the anthroposophical community.
Eventually, I suspect, we will need a journal that
is not
just for anthroposophists, but which is open to all manner of
neo-platonists, postmodern thinkers and instinctive
Aristotelians.
There needs to come to be a vehicle where all these
kinds of
similar thought activity encounter each other in a way that is
disciplined (criticism is expected and supported) and at the
same time
mutually confirming.
In this regard, Hicks' essay is a bold excursion
into
this territory, and should not be left to stand alone.