Yeah, Joel! A good substantial post in just a few sentences.

The problem you outline is exactly the problem I've tried to solve by writing my book on conversation, and by developing the argument up to the present time. The problem is "What is the logical form of ethical individualism?"

I think you point out correctly that

(1) You can only talk about the ethical individualism of one action under conditions where the context in which ethical individualism is applied is identical with the context in which ethical individualism is applied to a different action, and

(2) There is also a sense in which ethical individualism can only apply if all the individuals affected by the action are in some sense the same individual.

All cases where (1) or (2) don't hold are going to have to be referred to a prior and probably Kantian moral law.

Now, where is a case where (1) or (2) apply? The easiest case to understand is the one under conditions of Goethean conversation, where everyone's actions share the same context. The other case is where the individual is spiritually Enlightened, and where actions are universal by nature.

The nonsense we went through yesterday had nothing to do with ethical individualism because there was in place neither proper conversation, which is a case of similarity by social contract, nor the factor of spiritual enlightenment, which is a case of similarity by some sort of natural law.

 RE: your statement” “Real anthroposophists just don't function like a bunch of jungle bunnies in a state of civil war.”  
 
You of course know that the use of the term "jungle bunnies" would be considered a racist statement used as a derogatory term against Black citizens in the USA and around the world.  Most people with any social or racial conscience will know exactly what you are referring to here in an obvious racist remark against Black American Citizens on your part. I always figured you might be a fascist and now I know you to be a racist also. Good work Carl and on the PoF website, and I’m sure you were hoping nobody would notice.  Anyone who wants to know what “jungle bunnies” refers to need only look up the term on the internet.  Or perhaps you just made an unconscious faux-pas.
 
Perhaps you just Kant help yourself.
 
Peace and Love,
Patri

Yay, Joel!

I guess the idea is that there is something pretty profound going on when one comes closer to God. Dying, for example, isn't really a game. Neither is loving.

Social rules, constitutions and governments, on the other hand, are clearly game-like, and they typically play a role in how we experience things like death and love.

Now let's take Steiner at his word: "the laws of the State have sprung from intuitions of free spirits." One way to read this is to imagine that the Beings closer to God have worked out things that look like games, and have passed them down to us. From our point of view, what they are doing isn't very game-like. It's serious stuff. But when it gets projected, by way of our intuition and imagination, into our domain, the domain of human languages and human societies and mutual human accommodations, we end up with games.

I have no problem with the impulse to abandon a game when something or someone more serious comes along, as long as the game is well-defined to begin with. So I want us to understand what the best kind of game is and I want us to become practiced with it. But if someone wants to be serious and assert himself as a free spirit, I'm all attention and seriousness as well.

Hi John,

All games have rules. Even girls' games, where they're just dressing up or moving figures around in miniature houses have rules. These rules would be much harder to codify than the rules of chess or soccer, but they are there, implicit in the activity. The rules that underlie conversation are the same sort of thing - present and at work, but hard to analyze.

Now the point of my post above on PoF as a philosophy of finishing touch, and the point of my book on conversation, is to suggest that we are not really in a position to do ethical individualism unless and until we are playing a prior moral game with some degree of expertise. Only when we've got the hang of this prior game, namely conversation, in a solid, even mathematical way, do we  have a right to ethical individualism.

When you look at the way anthroposophy pans out in the real world, with its endless internal sqabbling and conflict, you can reasonably surmise that people are trying to apply ethical individualism prematurely. That is my diagnosis of the anthroposophical disability, together with my remedy. To me this seems a reasonable position. It's basically the way human societies approach moral education and political legitimacy anyway. We need to know what the rules of anthroposophical conversation are, and we need to be able to execute them. Only then are we entitled to ethical individualism.

Now the interesting thing is, I think it will turn out that even the ethical individualist is applying rules to a game. Self-consciousness is actually a game. I think the game probably extends from cosmic lifetime to lifetime and up through the cosmic hierarchies to the throne of God. Steiner gave us real insight into how that super-game is played.

John, thanks very much for these comments. I also would have very deep reservations about humorless expectations and rulership on the anthroposophical ship. Fascism is not the way to go.

On the other hand, anthroposophy is drowning as it is. The Sacramento Steiner College has been borrowing money and increasing tuitions at a punishing rate for the last couple of years, I am told, just to stay afloat. Sunbridge Collegein New York recently underwent a painful restructuring. The Goetheanum is under all kinds of ridiculous pressure from ridiculous people. Basically, people are trying to do anthroposphy without flotation aids, and the results are what they are. So non-flotation is not the way to go either.

A good game is improvisation indeed, but I suspect in reality a very great number of sophisticated and subliminal rules are in play in improvisation. My book proposes about 150 rules implicit in improvised conversation, and I think there are probably more by at least an order of magnitude.

The basic idea of this Conscious Conversation Journal is to peg our discussions to the several principles (rules) that the theory most crucially hinges on, and to encourage discussion of these as a way to prepare for actual, real-time conversations at local venues. I do not think internet conversations are the final objective. The important principles are Truth, Reproduction, Causal Reference, Ontological Striving, Self-Control, Commitment, Economy, The Weakest Link, Tolerance, Right, and Freedom, plus a few others, as yet unposted and undiscussed here. From these follow others, and to these still others will probably be added.

On your feedback question, I guess we could ask how well these fit together in peoples' minds, and whether given these it is felt that members of this Community are capable of real-time conversations that use Collective Intelligence and establish reliable contact with real cosmic entities and forces.

"Wittgenstein knew that he had thought his way to a vantage point that is superior to concepts and systems. But he stopped just on that line. No further way of thought seemed possible. The Oxford movement that wanted to follow him, actually fell back somewhat. It rightly emphasized that a word means its use in situations — the word marks or changes something in the situation in which it can be said. A word's use-contexts have no single picture or pattern in common. As Wittgenstein said, a word's situations are a "family," not a common pattern. But then the Oxford Analysts tried, after all, to define the use of a word, if not by a concept then at least by a rule, to capture what a word marks or does. That effort failed; rules don't limit what a word can mean, either. It has led to discouragement. The intricacy Wittgenstein opened, has left in his works — seemingly only an endless number of disparate instances. The crucial question was not asked: How does implicit intricacy function? How do words work — so intricately and in novel ways that are not limited by forms and rules?"

from "Thinking Beyond Patterns"

But look what he says later: I love how he can take us into what was happening within phenomenology in the last century:

In the same period, a little earlier than Wittgenstein, Husserl also found (what I am calling:) the intricacy. That also led him to reject the old theoretical concepts. Husserl found that ordinary experience can give rise to very different descriptions that are also much more specific than the old theories. For example, we never see objects from all sides at once, always only from one angle, and yet they don't look flat. The actually experienced time-relations are also very different from how time is usually rendered. He also found that every event is in some ways definite and in some ways vague. Husserl found layer upon layer of further specificities in whatever he examined in this experiential way. He went far beyond all the old theories and created a vast catalogue of specific explications.

Rather than considering ourselves to be within the universe constructed by logical science, Husserl said that science is possible only within phenomenological laws.

Husserl thought he could codify phenomenological laws of how all experience is constructed. He thought he found these characteristics of phenomena. But it is obvious that he found them in response to certain distinctions and schemes which he brought to his descriptions. He didn't ask whether, when, and how any kind of finding can be distinguished from bringing. He did not ask what he would find if he began with different distinctions. For example, he began by dividing everything into three realms: perceiving, feeling, and willing. Over the years he often modified this three-way division but always, as it seemed to him, to make it more accurate. He never asked how the experiential intricacy might give different results if one first divides in some other way. So his explications do not use the capacity of intricacy to be further explicated in various ways. Nor does he let it continue to function in other ways that we will employ and examine here. He formulated a great many valuable specifics, but he did not develop a way in which implicit intricacy could function in thinking.

Why did Husserl not ask about the effects of various possible distinctions? I think it was because he was so sure — and right — that what he found was not just the result of his distinctions. He always found much more than could possibly derive just from the simple distinctions. He was not wrong, that phenomenological description differs from mere theory or speculation. His critics overstate the trouble as if phenomenology were no more grounded than any other philosophy.

Indeed Husserl's distinctions were rewarded by findings that were not the result just of his distinctions. The implicit intricacy always rewarded him with much more than he brought to it. What he did not see was that the intricacy can also reward other distinctions and divisions, yet differently. Evidently intricacy is not this or that set of distinctions.

The questions he missed and we will ask, are: How does intricacy function in response to various forms and distinctions? How can we let it continue to function in our thinking with and after the forms and distinctions?

To examine how intricacy functions, we must find a way of thinking and speaking in which the implicit intricacy continues to function along with (one or more) explications. The terms must bring the intricacy along with them, so that it can lead to further steps that are not limited by the explication.

The Phenomenologists who followed Husserl each used different distinctions and got different results. None of them asked how that was possible for Phenomenologists claiming that they were not speculating, only describing phenomena. The early Heidegger and then Merleau-Ponty did write powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. But they each brought to it their own conceptual patterns different from Husserl's. No one found or looked for a way to think with that which is more intricate and can respond to many different distinctions. [3]

Heidegger, in his early work, came close. In Being and Time (1926) he presented a fascinating "analysis" of being-in the world. It included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. In our felt understanding (for example, in a mood) we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach," he said.

Heidegger called his terms "Existenziale," i.e. aspects of how we exist, and said that they were not concepts. They were explications of (formed in and from) our being-in the world. But just in what way were they more than concepts? Heidegger called them "hermeneutical": they explicate a pre-explicit, pre-thematic understanding. But he did not go further into the general notion of hermeneutics, and later rejected even that notion. How could he have failed to pursue this opening he had made for a more-than-conceptual thinking?

Like Husserl, Heidegger did not ask how other patterns could differently explicate our pre-explicit understanding. Nor did he ask how we might let the implicit understanding continue to function when we think on any topic. But his reason for not asking it was the opposite of Husserl's. Heidegger did not assume that experience can be described independently of our assumptions; rather the full opposite: Heidegger assumed that our pre-thematic understanding is always already shaped by historical determinants. Now he wanted to understand how such historical determinants arise.

Heidegger did not see in his "Existenziale" a more-than-conceptual way in which to carry on his further thinking. It seemed to him that what could be thought in them would still be determined within Western historical assumptions. How the historical determinants arise and how they could change seemed to him thinkable only on an ultimate meta-philosophical level. Therefore right after Being and Time Heidegger went on — purely conceptually! — to look for an over-arching "meta-ontology" from which the "Existenziale" would be seen as derived (1928). He discarded Husserl's renditions of experiential intricacy, and he also rejected his own precise more-than-concepts. He merged all intricacy back into a single question: If anything is inherently historical, how do historical determinants arise?

Later he also used poetic language, but always to point to that one encompassing question. For example, Heidegger said (in Holzwege) that painting does add something original, but still only within a "clearing" made by the over-arching determinants of language and history. Only by thinking the determinants as such could we hope to think the openness.

He knew two ways to think those over-arching historically given assumptions: either trapped within them, or in a way that reopens the questions they closed, so as to regain the openness which hides itself in them. In this way Heidegger was able to provide a powerful critique — he called it a destruction — of Western philosophical concepts. He made them so visible and re-opened them so thoroughly, that it has become impossible any longer just to assume them and to argue comfortably from them.

Heidegger deeply believed the dictum of his country and his period, that a genuine thinker can only be the thinker of a particular nation and culture. (For example, Ranke said that a genuine historian must be German in attitude throughout, or some other nationality, or — superficial.) What is universal in people seemed only the poorest common denominator. Heidegger did not read the part of Dilthey's work to which I referred above. He did not find the universal human nature of cross-understanding.

On the other hand Heidegger argued intensely against Nietzsche's view that cultural forms are merely imposed, and that aside from them there is only indeterminacy. Behind the forms Heidegger saw an openness from which they all arise which they hide and cover by their very formedness.

We must think of Heidegger not only as the thinker who most undermined the Western Enlightenment and brought the current relativism. He is also the thinker who most strongly opposed relativism. He insisted that if we deeply enough grasp the overarching historical forms in which we find ourselves, we can think through them to the openness that "gives" them. More recently this openness has been lost, replaced by Derrida's assertion that new distinctions simply displace old ones; no openness seems possible.

In his last works Heidegger again comes close to the more-than-conceptual thinking that opened in his early more-than-concepts with their beautiful precision. He calls for a more-than-conceptual way of thinking he called a "dwelling." But it was to think only beyond the most over-arching assumptions. Since it had to be beyond everything, it seemed that "dwelling" could not be about anything. So it could not even begin.

Having left all but the ultimate determinants behind, Heidegger could not think how that which is more than form actually functions — as I would say — in each situation and in each moment of thinking. He did not see how any bit of life and practice can talk back more intricately so as to change the determinants which are implicitly at work in it. So he could not investigate further just how the historical determinants actually work (as I would say:) implicitly, and how they change by working-in a wider intricacy. He could not further examine the role of individual humans in the coming of new history. (See Scharff on Vereinzelung.) He could not further develop a more-than-conceptual thinking. As he would say we will reopen these questions.

One can also read Heidegger in my way: The openness is implicit in anything — and can function in our thinking further from anything. (See my "Befindlichkeit" and "Dwelling.")

Why did it seem so impossible to Heidegger that practice and actual situations could be a source of new determinants? (See Kolb). It was for the same reason that Kant thought it so obviously impossible to get logic from experience: they both assumed that experience has always already been organized by certain determinants so that no change in the determinants can come from it. Experience can happen only within the determinants.

We need a critique to limit this "always already" and "only within." Anything human does indeed include implicit concepts and cultural forms, but we will see that they do not work by a one-way determination.

Let us first briefly look at philosophy today.