The Philosophy of Freedom Study Group
The World as Percept
Topics: Mental Picture: After-effect of observation and Mental Picture: Caused by unknown thing-in-itself
4.8 The Kantian view concludes that I know only my mental pictures, not that there is no reality independent of them, but only that the subject cannot directly assimilate such reality.
4-7) PSYCHISM (Pisces)
[22] This leads us to turn our attention from the object of perception to the subject of perception. I perceive not only other things, but also myself. The percept of myself contains, to begin with, the fact that I am the stable element in contrast to the continual coming and going of the percept-pictures. The percept of my "I" can always come up in my consciousness while I am having other percepts. When I am absorbed in the perception of a given object I am for the time being aware only of this object. To this the percept of my self can be added. I am then conscious not only of the object but also of my own personality which confronts the object and observes it. I do not merely see a tree, but I also know that it is I who am seeing it. I know, moreover, that something happens in me while I am observing the tree. When the tree disappears from my field of vision, an after-effect of this process remains in my consciousness -- a picture of the tree. This picture has become associated with my self during my observation. My self has become enriched; its content has absorbed a new element. This element I call my mental picture of the tree. I should never have occasion to speak of mental pictures did I not experience them in the percept of my own self. Percepts would come and go; I should let them slip by. Only because I perceive my self, and observe that with each percept the content of my self, too, is changed, am I compelled to connect the observation of the object with the changes in my own condition, and to speak of my mental picture.
Topic: Mental Picture: After-effect of observation
|
4-8) PNEUMATISM (Aquarius)
[23] I perceive the mental picture in my self in the same sense as I perceive color, sound, etc., in other objects. I am now also able to distinguish these other objects that confront me, by calling them the outer world, whereas the content of my percept of my self I call my inner world. The failure to recognize the true relationship between mental picture and object has led to the greatest misunderstandings in modern philosophy. The perception of a change in me, the modification my self undergoes, has been thrust into the foreground, while the object which causes this modification is lost sight of altogether. It has been said that we perceive not objects but only our mental pictures. I know, so it is said, nothing of the table in itself, which is the object of my observation, but only of the change which occurs within me while I am perceiving the table. This view should not be confused with the Berkeleyan theory mentioned above. Berkeley maintains the subjective nature of the content of my percepts, but he does not say that my knowledge is limited to my mental pictures. He limits my knowledge to my mental pictures because, in his opinion, there are no objects apart from mental picturing. What I take to be a table no longer exists, according to Berkeley, when I cease to look at it. This is why Berkeley holds that my percepts arise directly through the omnipotence of God. I see a table because God calls up this percept in me. For Berkeley, therefore, there are no real beings other than God and human spirits. What we call the "world" exists only in these spirits. What the naïve man calls the outer world, or corporeal nature, is for Berkeley non-existent. This theory is confronted by the now predominant Kantian view which limits our knowledge of the world to our mental pictures, not because it is convinced that things cannot exist beyond these mental pictures, but because it believes us to be so organized that we can experience only the changes of our own selves, but not the things-in-themselves that cause these changes. This view concludes from the fact that I know only my mental pictures, not that there is no reality independent of them, but only that the subject cannot directly assimilate such reality. The subject can merely, "through the medium of its subjective thoughts, imagine it, invent it, think it, cognize it, or perhaps even fail to cognize it." This (Kantian) conception believes it gives expression to something absolutely certain, something which is immediately evident, requiring no proof:
"The first fundamental proposition which the philosopher must bring to clear consciousness is the recognition that our knowledge, to begin with, is limited to our mental pictures. Our mental pictures are the only things that we know directly, experience directly; and just because we have direct experience of them, even the most radical doubt cannot rob us of our knowledge of them. On the other hand, the knowledge which goes beyond my mental pictures -- taking mental pictures here in the widest possible sense, so as to include all psychical processes -- is not proof against doubt. Hence, at the very beginning of all philosophizing we must explicitly set down all knowledge which goes beyond mental pictures as being open to doubt."
|
Topic: Mental Picture: Change in ourselves caused by unknown thing-in-itself
|
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| 4-7.mp3 | 787.38 KB |
| 4-8.mp3 | 1.5 MB |
Mental Picturing
A further stage in our understanding of the difference between percept-pictures and mental pictures is introduced in Section 4.7. Percept-pictures come and go, but mental pictures stick around. When I look at an oak tree, then turn my eyes to something else, one percept-picture succeeds another. So will it ever and always be!
When something catches my attention about a percept-picture, it automatically turns into a mental picture. I remember the sight of all those brown moths fluttering around the oak tree., because it disconcerted me that there were so many. When I deliberately observe something, I add a whole other dimension of self-conscious willing into my mental picture.
Kristina Kaine, in her article, Right Understanding--Two: The Real Image, not the Mirror Image (http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/1497) tells how the Rev Mario Schoenmaker "spoke of this use of Imagination or imaging. He would say that if we saw something with our senses, then we closed our eyes, after a while the image would fade. If we could keep the image there by using our will, we could step through that mirror image into spiritual reality." That must be mental picturing taken to its height.
My friend Jack, who runs a cattle ranch in Hawaii, once told his cowboys that they could learn to distinguish each member of the mostly black herd by observing it, for instance as it was brought into a corral alone for innoculations. There'd be a patch of white somewhere, or a scar, a reddish tinge, a difference in gait or conformation or shape of ear or tail. If they looked for this, instead of passively receiving a series of percept-pictures, the cowboys would start to form a mental picture of each cow, and this would help them wake up in their work.
In this way, Steiner says, we enrich ourselves by consciously observing the world around us, turning our percept-pictures into mental pictures.
Awake with eyes closed
Hi Lori
This is interesting; a curious thing has been happening in my experience. I will be wide awake with my eyes closed and I will see scenes happening - it is not the scene I have just seen with my eyes open but almost like 'dreaming' but wide awake with my eyes closed. Has this happened to anybody else? The article Kristina wrote and your post supports this. Also the title; The Real Image, not the Mirror Image is thought provoking in Astrology.
The basic philosophy of Astrology (from William W. Hewitt) is based on the observation that events on Earth are instantly reflected in the heavens. A simplistic analogy might be: If you look into a mirror while trimming your eyebrows and you accidentally pierce your skin with the scissors, you will instantly see the wound bleeding in the mirror. The mirror did not cause the wound or the bleeding. The mirror accurately reflected an event at the precise time the event occurred. In astrology, the heavens (the planetary positions and movements), are our mirror of earthly events.
The title made me think of this above sentence - and has me quite perplexed!
Thanks for writing this Lori - lots to think about.
Caryn
Cosmic Mirrors?
Hi Caryn
This idea of the stars as mirrors is strange but intriguing. It's strange because, as far as I can tell, everything happens with great regularity and predictability with the planets and their conjunctions etc. Meanwhile here on earth we do and experience all kinds of crazy things! You'd think the planets would be a clown show, if they really reflected what we do on earth!
But it's intriguing because for the analogy to hold it must mean that the real earthly events that the planets reflect are the ones we don't see. That is, we can only see them by looking in the mirrors. For instance, in the collective Psyche a time of greater-than-usual confusion and erroneousness may be about to flower, as it does regularly during the course of the year, but we can look at the calendar and see that Mercury is about to go retrograde, and so prepare for it. So the mirror is set at such an angle that we can see what's coming around the corner!
The Tree and Me
1) We've turned toward the question, what role does our perceiving have in the bringing forth of a percept? In 4.7 we look at ourselves as subject, but as soon as we do that, the self also becomes an object, unique in its stability and in the ability we have to call it up in the midst of whatever else we're perceiving at the moment.
What is this "stability" that we perceive as ourselves, "to begin with?" If I experience my sense of self as a kind of steady light behind my eyes, is it really all that steady, or does it flicker as soon as my attention scatters and I'm not being at all mindful of where I am or what I'm doing? Can I increase its stability without becoming self-absorbed, for instance by doing all those anthroposophical exercises?
2) There's something a bit passive in the idea that, "The percept of my "I" can always come up in my consciousness while I am having other percepts." It's as though we occasionally just happen to perceive ourselves, almost by accident. On the other hand, I can add the percept of myself as the observer when, absorbed in some percept, I suddenly come to my senses and remember my own being. Then an element of active willing enters, and a kind of exciting tension builds up, between perceiving the object and perceiving myself. Do I perceive the tree less acutely when I also perceive myself, or do I actually increase my perception of the tree, because my conscious will is added to the equation? Conversely, do I perceive myself less acutely when I'm directing my attention with great concentration on something that is not me? Can I practice this until I perceive both with the greatest possible precision?
3) A mental picture is the after-effect of an act of observation, willed or not. It's an enrichment of the self. I can imagine forming so many beautiful mental pictures that one grew, as it were, spiritually fat and bloated with inner treasures. And what good would that do? It would be as though something else were supposed to happen, but didn't. Something that went outward! I wonder if this waste of opportunity could be avoided by holding the thought that the tree (or whatever other object one is making those beautiful mental pictures of} has its own being just as great as one's own.
Degrees of reflection
Hi Lori
It is intriguing. The Planets do move on their course through the Fixed constellations with such precise regularity we are able to note their paths in the past, present and future; this is a fact.
If we look into a mirror – the mirror reflects us at the time we are looking into the mirror. The mirror has recorded the moment in time we looked into the mirror – we might have brushed our teeth and combed our hair - we did this in front of the mirror reflecting our actions.
When we read Rudolf Steiner’s Life Beyond Death and in this work ‘what happens between sleeping and waking life’ we see he tells us; everything we did during the day, who we encountered, what we said etc. is acted out again in the time when we are asleep. During this time though it is reversed and it is shown from a spiritual point of view. And the spiritual point of view does encompass a far more dynamic perspective.
If we apply this to the Planets are mirrors they record the event while awake and when we are asleep they reflect it back to us from a spiritual point of view. If a person does or thinks positive actions while awake the Planet records this and reflects it back during sleep and it is carried forward into the next day being a vibration upon the astral body. Likewise with a negative action or thought. This vibration which directly affects the astral body is a matter of tuning into the level or degree of altitude and here we talk about our Universe consisting of various dimensions.
The precise way of looking at this is to look at the Zodiac first. The Zodiac represents our Ego and our personality including our past karma (deeds). During this life we belong to a particular Zodiac home, mansion, realm, spiritual country or dimension. It is my thought when we sleep we go to our spiritual home every night where our Sun sign was placed at birth – at the same time, during sleep, we reconcile the daily events which happened to us, our work life, our home life, our friends etc. also having their degree / dimensions in the various Zodiac signs - before we reach our ultimate home for the night.
The Planets travel through the Zodiac, some stay for much longer in some than the ones closer to the Sun. It is the Planet(s) which picks up the degree of vibration and reflects it back to the person and his/her environment. So we could say; the dimension or spiritual home may be a clown house or it may be a positive experience leading to further growth. It is our free will which we will live with in the short and the long run.
I think this quote from Meister Eckhart, explains this concept quite well; ‘The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same’.
A retrograde is a pause and reflect time; again the level of degree will be reflected during the pause and reflect period.
Regards.
Talking Mirrors
Thanks, Caryn
I like the idea of mirrors that talk back to us. Kind of like the mirrors in fairy tales that try to give advice to wicked kings and queens, but they don't listen. Or like the portrait of Dorian Gray if it could move and speak.
Talking Heads
Hi Lori,
It would make a great children's tale ... possibly Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is about this!
First Fundamental Proposition
"The first fundamental proposition which the philosopher must bring to clear consciousness is the recognition that our knowledge, to begin with, is limited to our mental pictures. Our mental pictures are the only things that we know directly, experience directly; and just because we have direct experience of them, even the most radical doubt cannot rob us of our knowledge of them."
Sometimes in the web of all this philosophising I think it's good just occasionally to imagine trying to explain one of these "fundamental truths" to a child:
Parent: My dear child, I am sorry to have to tell you that you cannot really know anything apart from mental pictures.
Child: What are mental pictures?
Parent: They are all you can ever really know.
Child: Are you a mental picture?
No, I'm a mental parent.
No, I'm a mental parent.
Actually ..
:) Better then as some 'philosophy's' think 'I am an illusion'
Child: Are you a mental picture?
Parent: No I am an illusion
Child: What the?
Me and My Mental Pix
The last section was about "myself" as a subject, but this one considers other beings. The objects of the world are beings that have their own reality that Kant says we will never know. But they exert forces on our being. In some unperceptible way they cause percepts to arise in us.
Berkeley says that there are no such beings. There are only God and human spirits. God causes pictures of the world to arise in the human spirits for reasons of his own.
Both ideas have a kind of awkwardness about them. Berkeley's raises a lot of questions, and ultimately makes me ask, so what? If it's all some kind of super-illusion, there are still sub-illusions that have to be identified as such and dealt with. For instance, I might wake up thinking the bedroom was the kitchen, and try to make breakfast on the dresser. That would be a sub-illusion. If I wake up thinking I'm in the bedroom, according to Berkeley, it's because God put that idea in my head. So that makes it all right, I guess.
Kant says I'll never know the table because its essential being is unperceptible. Steiner will be showing us in various ways the awkward results of such thinking. It sets up a whole other realm of activity that's inaccessible to thinking and observation but is a kind of occult Rube Goldberg apparatus that connects us with the unknowable objects in some unfathomable way.
One odd thing I notice now, though, is that Kant seems to be treating mental pictures similarly to the way Steiner treats thinking. That is, Kant says our mental pictures can be known directly. He says, "even the most radical doubt cannot rob us of our knowledge of them." The difference, or at least one of the differences, is that Kant says that they're the only thing we can know. And he says that this is so obvious that his argument doesn't require proof.
Steiner says, in Truth and Knowledge, Chapter Five: "the only instance where proof and definitions are not required is in regard to the content of pure logic." The only thing that doesn't require proof is proof itself.
He's about to start poking all kinds of holes in Kant's theory, but here all he really says is that both Kant's and Berkeley's theories about mental pictures arise out of a one-sided view that places all the emphasis on the subject and ignores the object. Sounds like self-absorption to me!
Grumpiness-in-Itself
A couple of observations: Kant, at least in the version Steiner quotes here from O. Liebmann, assumes thinking is only subjective. And, if Volkelt is right in the way he presents Kant's ideas, Kant lumps "mental pictures" with "all psychical processes," and says that these and only these are what we directly know. That makes Kant's definition of mental pictures much broader than Steiner's individualized concept with some kind of perceptual content attached. Kant's mental pictures would include feelings, for instance.
Steiner has already prepared us most carefully to disallow both of Kant's assumptions. If thinking creates the idea of subjective/objective polarity, then it can't be exclusively one or the other. And if all inner processes, our entire inner world, even our thinking, is available to us at first only through perception, then there's hardly any reason to value our perceptions of our own inner states more highly than we value the perceptions of the outer world.
If I can only perceive my mental pictures of the table, then likewise I can only perceive my mental picture of any inner state the table calls forth in me. Feeling grumpy because I've let stuff pile up on it again? I can only possess a mental picture of that grumpy feeling, not grumpiness-in-itself!
How about...
How about a mental picture of a mental picture then... Now that's really mental!
Sections?
I'm new. Perhaps someone can help me to understand how you are breaking the chapters into sections. How do you know what section 7 and 8 is? I include below my summary thoughts for ch. 4:
By means of thinking and observing do all things become known to me. Without thinking, all observation would be a chaos of meaningless perceptions. With thinking, the ideal element in all things is revealed to me and remains with me, united with the percept, as a representation after I am no longer directly perceiving the given thing. Critical Idealism is unable to refute the objective character of percepts in that it uses Naïve Realism to accept the objective perception of a given sense organ—say the eye—while refuting the objective character of everything else, in order to declare that all that we can know are our own representations. Steiner declares that he has more than proven that the arguments used to support CI are fallacious, but whether percepts are themselves objectively real, or not, still remains a question to be addressed.
The sectioning was based on
The sectioning was based on applying the world-outlook diagram in Steiner's Human and Cosmic Thought to The Philosophy of Freedom. It is explained here.
To have a study group it helps to take a part of the text at a time to work on so a person can ignore the H&CT part and find that the sections are natural topic breaks for the most part.
Your contributions to the study pages are appreciated. We are trying to build an archive of comments that others could refer to in the future. Your posts indicate you have spent a lot of time working with the POF content.
Thank You
Thank you Tom for clarifying the study approach. I've always been a loner when it comes to this material and it is exciting to give it a fresh look from this, new to me, perspective.