The “inwardly” and “outwardly”
extending differentiation builds (in the case of the example that was
considered) the tree in its own configuration within its world. What occurs
during this construction must however be considered even more precisely.
As cognitive beings, we do not find such a world that would be ready-made,
pre-given. This finished pre-given world, of which one assumes (depending on
the evaluation of our cognitive abilities) that in our striving for truth and
reality we can either copy or not copy, is a false premise that still widely
dominates under the influence of Kant the current scientific paradigm and
disposition. Unnoticed but with a tremendous expressive force, it has taken
possession of the mentality of the entire civilized world as well as its
civilizational vibrancies. It is one of the greatest hindrances to a meditative
culture of one’s personal life. Therefore these deliberations, which purport to
be an incentive to pursue a modern path of meditation, must deal at least to
some extent with this mistake.[1]
The unbiased introspection of our cognitive behavior shows something else than
what the notion of a ready-made pre-given world would want to suggest to us. As
cognitive beings we do not, as is usually assumed today, copy a finished world
pre-given to us with necessarily insufficient means or even with those means
altogether restricted to punctuation. As cognitive beings we rather construct
reality (in a subconscious, continually formative web-of-being) from both of
its basic components: the incoherent percepts conveyed to us by our senses, and
the concepts of our thinking that on the basis of their own nature are
coherent. By virtue of their binding ability as well as their ability to adapt
to the percepts, they are the tireless master-builders of the perceptible
world. They differentiate and integrate the phenomenal richness of the world
from a subordinated state of materiality to the fullness of intrinsically
subdivided shapes incorporated in a universal structural fabric. It is through
our conceptional activity, our thinking will as cognitive beings that we put
this structural event to work.
Reality is, therefore, in so far as we become aware of it in the waking state
of mind, our continual structural enactment. Granted, we perform this for the
most part subconsciously. When one (as is done here) understands under
cognition to be the unification of percept and concept, then one must therefore
distinguish a conscious and an unconscious part of the cognitive process. One
becomes thereby aware that our consciousness realm, independent of its degree
of wakefulness, is permeated by a formative event of a cognitive nature.
Through introspection of our cognitive conduct, we can raise our subconscious
structural act retrospectively to fully elucidated
consciousness.
The consciousness-raising of and the research into this structural enactment of
human cognition (that for the human beings of today proceeds initially to a
great extent subconsciously), is dealt with in the first main part of The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity [2], that work by Rudolf Steiner
that forms the basis of his entire research. In so far as in the framework of
these deliberations about the nature and practice of meditation a
characteristic of the productivity of human cognition must be given, these
deliberations can also be taken as a sketchy introduction into that work. This
introduction is in our context indispensable because without insight into the
nature of cognition nobody can form appropriate notions about the nature and
practice of modern meditation. This will become clear from the following.
What
happens when the conceptual binding components (the means of discrimination or
And-metamorphoses as hierarchically structured forms of discernment) are
unified with the disconnected percepts? They are connected – yet on the basis
of a process that is only possible because the hereby proceeding change is
pre-disposed in the conceptual binding components. The concepts as contents in
each case of a general sort are linked to each other according to their own
intrinsic context. They are therefore in this form not assigned to individual
things. Each concept embraces rather a whole range of individual examples
(of which on their part each one is a structured group of concepts) for which
it is qualified. The concept tree embraces in its universality all trees, the
concept dog all dogs, the concept bud all buds. Concepts are according to the
usage of the Scholastics universals. However, when the general concept tree is
connected with the perceptual realm of a certain tree, a certain oak in a
correlation enacted in an attentive cognitive fashion, it then loses its
universality through this individualized determination. It no longer possesses
this mobility with which it can be connected to numerous trees. It has
coagulated in the open joints of the as yet unconnected partial percepts and
has congealed between them in the solidified state of such a solid bond. This
can be recognized by the fact that after the unification of concept and
percept, one no longer has a mobile formative element that like a Proteus can
assume numerous shapes. Instead, our morphogenic wealth of forms now also
belongs to the shape adapted to the individual case. After the unification
process, we can, like a plastic material hardened in a counter die, detach this
shape again from its perceptual traps and, independent of its detention, make
us conscious of this with the help of its imprint. We become aware of this when
without an outer percept we remember the tree with which we have cognitively
connected ourselves.[3] We are capable of these
remembrances because we can not only form the general fluid concept ”tree”, but
also its individualized and hardened form. Our thinking will has not only
access to the universal “tree” but also to the representation of a certain
tree, the individualized one. The representation is an individualized concept.
From the unformed materiality of our percepts has originated through the
process of individualization, on the one hand, the structured shape of the tree
and from the mobile universal, and on the other hand, a hardened individualie.
The process of individualization demands an even more detailed examination.
This process, as has been shown, is significant for the concept as well as the
group of percepts assigned to it. The individualization of the concept
corresponds with respect to the percepts to an opposite process. For the latter
are universalized. For every percept belonging to a certain tree, a certain oak
is a solitary one as long as it is not integrated by the concept in the
process of individualization into a structural framework. Through this
conceptual act every single percept is spun into the manifold structural fabric
of the oak, making it a part moreover of the multi-membered and
multi-related surroundings. Through the individualization of a concept, the
particulars apprehended by it are universalized. For from each one of them now
run connecting threads to other percepts and through their connections they
partake of an expanding relational fabric of an ever more dilating generality.
Therein now streams however the previously concealed, now disclosed property
manifestation of every perceptual particular on and on.
The proper evaluation of the morphogenetic process sketched here is impaired
above all by two prejudices that have nestled into the current scientific, but
also general mode of consciousness. Since they are not only suited to raise
doubt concerning the reality content of the foregoing, but also to lead to
serious disorders of a modern meditative undertone, it is necessary to briefly
deal with them here.
One of these prejudices concerns the intrinsic nature of the general concepts,
the universals. One sees in them, according to a highly influential theory,
namely only abstract summaries of uniformities or essentials of the perceptible
things. This theory of abstraction therefore does not concede any proper
content to the concepts, which is only supposed to appertain to the perceptible
things. The so-called general concepts would thus not possess any objective
reality, they would merely have a subjective significance as orientational
patterns of cognitive human beings. The theory of abstraction fails to
recognize the process of becoming aware of reality as characterized in the
foregoing. It presupposes this as something ready-made, from which individual
components can be abstracted for subjective use. It does not practice the
introspection of the unification process of percept and concept, which does not
copy reality but brings reality about. It moreover does not observe the
distinctness of the basic elements that merge into this unification process.
Unprejudiced introspection namely demonstrates that, contrary to this theory of
abstraction, contentless patterns of orientation from the supposedly
contentful, perceptible available reality is not possible. For the pure
concepts are on the basis of their incoherence completely contentless. They can
therefore not be the contentual precept of the process of abstraction. The
general concepts are therefore the conveyors of content, and generality as such
precedes logically and also processually the forming of individualized
formative structures. Not generality is posterior but individuality.
The other prejudice to be considered here is namely determined by the still to this day continuing influence of Kant, even though it has roots with a long history. According to this prejudice, all conceptual means of classification that we have at our disposal are ascribed to the human species. Our general human psychic organism is supposedly natured in such a way that we become aware of the impressions of an outer reality conveyed by our senses in certain structural ways of a conceptional nature, which are characteristic for human perceptive behavior, but which have no similarity with reality as such. All ordering features of the contents of our consciousness would accordingly be of a subjective nature. This hypothesis contains numerous defects, of which only the following are mentioned:
1. It likewise presupposes a reality that for the human process of cognition is ready-made and pre-given, whereas the content of consciousness that exhibits the characteristic of reality, also according to Kant’s construct, originates first within the cognitive process and is afterwards transposed to a hypothetical beyond.
2. This supposed reality beyond our consciousness must be represented within the – as subjectively premised – consciousness realm necessarily without consciousness-like features, thus totally contentless. It is therefore an outwardly transposed element of the cognitive content, namely the totally contentless percept, which is thereby arbitrarily duplicated.
3. The concepts are admittedly grasped through a subjective act of the thinking will, yet present themselves in their logical legality inaccessible to subjective arbitrariness. They are a spiritual realm based on its own foundations that within its order (which Kant fails to notice) assigns to the subjective as well the objective element its proper conceptually befitting place and rank in this supersubjective and superobjective realm. What is first capable of explaining the nature of human cognition and even the nature of the human being as an instance superior to them, cannot in turn be explained from human nature, which after all cannot be understood out of itself. The conceptual world is such an absolute instance of self-determination from which all other determinations first contingently emerge.
4. The unification of percept
and concept cannot be attributed to the activity and nature of our organism.
For in the forming and handling of concepts we suppress the activity of
our organism. It is the latter that through our nervous and sensory system
conveys us the percepts, to which on the basis of their incoherence must first
be directed the constructive structural function of the concepts. The context,
which as such pertains to reality and which is driven back by our organism, is
therefore returned to the derealized reality by the suppression of our
organism. The contextualization is therefore not part of our organism but is
contrary to the latter. Now it could indeed be objected that hereby merely one
of the systems of our organism suppresses another one, the
constitutional-subjective realm would thus not be exceeded. This objection
overlooks the self-determination of the world of ideas that is superordinate to
all other determinations. The absoluteness of this order, from which all other
structures are only derived, is evident from the fact that after the conceptual
grasping of the objectively corresponding context we are capable of making
predictions and result-oriented preplanning. If our structural means were only
of a constitutional-subjective nature, they could not achieve objective
successes. Thinking is therefore a superconstitutional structural element that
empowers us to grasp a subject and object overlapping reality and thus to
harmonize the subjective and objective in a predictable procedure.
With that, enough may have been said for the present context to refute these disturbing prejudices. What has been put forward
here could in a more elaborate cognitive scientific and anthropological context
be motivated in much more detail. Especially the significance and activity of
our organism within our overall constitution and the total reality would become
understandable. From this would in the face of doubt emerge solidly ascertained
criteria of discernment about the constitutionally contingent and the
constitutionally unspoiled and untouchable.
[1] The author
has dealt extensively with this matter elsewhere, e.g. in his works Intuition und Beobachtung, Vol. I and
II, Stuttgart 1977 and 1978. Partly translated as Intuition and Observation, by Sophia Walsh, Spicker Books
1986 (sold-out).
[2] This was the
original title suggested by Rudolf Steiner. It was subsequently also translated
as Philosophy of Freedom and more
recently in Intuitive Thinking As a
Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, both first mentioned title are
used here as seemed appropriate.
[3] The process
involved here can in the framework of this essay not be covered in detail.
Extensive presentations can be found in the following books by the author Struktuurphänomenologie, Dornach 1983
(“Structural Phenomenology”, not yet translated) and Goethes universalästhetischer Impuls, Dornach 1987 (“Goethe’s
Universal Aesthetic Impulse”, not yet translated either.)
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