- Idea
- Notion
- Thought
- Mental image
- Mental picture
- Mental representation
The debate so far – apologies if other posts are missing –
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Tom:
I like Lipson's use of Vorstellung using idea, mental image and picture in chapter 1 ... We will need to use mental picture regularly later. Lipson gives a good transition to it in chapter 1 from idea to image to picture.
John: [slightly edited]
Everyone understands the term mental image! Picture limits Vorstellung because it cuts out all the other phenomenal sensations that we can hold in the mind, e.g. a song. So does image, but not so severely. Steiner did not mean just pictorial mental appearances so image remains preferable as a compromise.
Vorstellung: idea, perception, conception, imagination, performance, show, belief
Most English readers will not have realised (erkennen!) how rich the German concept of Vorstellung really is. I hope that we are able to exorcise this ghost in our translation. What Lipson has done is his own incursion into the issue of untranslatability. We are not bound to follow his lead here, especially if we can bring out Steiner’s actual meaning, which I suggest has not yet been discovered by English readers.
One native German speaker told me “it’s what you imagine. It is your imagination.” Obviously, in English my imagination of New York may simply be fantasy. The ambiguity is clear, but this ambiguity also stirs in the heart of Steiner’s argument for the reality of thinking. This mental picture business has led English readers down a long and winding side-track as I have painfully experienced in my first encounters with PoF. As a non-pictorial thinker by nature, it was years before I woke up to this. So I recognise I have a bias on this one.
As far as meaning goes, mental picture is an impoverished compromise, no matter how neat it looks in an English translation. I do not have a definitive English equivalent to offer for Vorstellung. The nearest remains imagination. We may be able to call on the verb, to picture (to depict in thought) at some point.
Tom:
mental image/picture
My hunch is if we think it through we will find "representation", which is the philosophy meaning of Vorstellung, to be the only word that can encompass the vast meaning of mental picture. Chapter 4, 5, and 6 try to explain what a mental picture is and give many meanings.
All of these various meanings are ways we represent things. You can find major flaws in the other terms. But "representation" reads very poorly for a new reader.
Hoernle is the only translator that tried to use different words for Vorstellung depending on the context. I am gaining respect for Hoernle. He is the only English translator up until now that actually applied thinking to his translation. The others were anthroposophical society dogmatists who liked to define a word according to "Steinerism" and then just plop it in mindlessly. Hoernle, from what I can find, was very intelligent and accomplished in German, English, philosophy and actually thought through the philosophy issues in the book and wrote about them on his own outside the fixed thinking found in anthroposophy. I haven't found any evidence he was an anthroposophist. I think he was chosen to translate because of his qualifications rather than his loyalty to Steinerism. He wrote to the world as Steiner did in POF rather than to a narrow-minded group of followers which the other barely qualified translators wrote for. (this is not to diminish their contribution but only to put it in perspective)
We can try using various words for Vorstellung but may have to settle for one. In chapter 1 Hoernle used "idea" in 1.4 when the Vorstellung came from the outside and "thought" later when we formed it since chapter 1 was about recognizing how "thought" was behind everything. It was a great try but doesn't seem to fit quite right.
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Here I am revealed as a fumbling beginner. However, if I am to be able to contribute to the translation work effectively, I need to learn.
My current understanding of one aspect of the Vorstellung issue is that a concept will be considered later in PoF as existing in its own right as another given that is attached to a given perception – and not merely the private construction of individual thinking. So we are dealing here with what has been called archetypes elsewhere (this term is disallowed here as it is not a PoF term). The Vorstellung terms listed above are all generally considered to be personal mental constructions except, for example, when one says that ‘an idea’s time has come’.
The ethical individual can also arrive at new concepts through ethical/moral imagination. This comes about as a creative and evolving process of developing existing concepts into previously unmanifest ones. Thus the thinker participates actively in the universal field of thinking and we need a word that distinguishes the individual perception of thought from the universal or general concept itself.
Please put me straight if this is nonsense.
nonconstructed Vorstellung
My current understanding of one aspect of the Vorstellung issue is that a concept will be considered later in PoF as existing in its own right as another given that is attached to a given perception – and not merely the private construction of individual thinking.
Where do you find Vorstellung not being a construction of thinking? Begriff (concept) can be a law existing in nature. I have always considered mental picture and concept different. The mental picture is the concept and percept while the concept is just a concept.
Confusion - my own mental construct?
I was interrupted while writing the above so my confusion probably caused more confusion. But I will ramble on in order to establish that mental construction is probably not a useful concept in PoF. Where my confusion appears to lie is that I am not certain whether I can actually make a mental construct at all. Rather than just answer Tom's question, I include some of my working thoughts.
I meant to distinguish concept as the part revealed through thinking that makes the percept whole. Concept is not only a law, it is substance having existence in its own right (as I understand the term substance in classical philosophy). Therefore a concept is not a mental construct. A so-called 'new' concept is merely the discovery or realisation of a concept that I had not recognised before. This appears to be securely founded in Goetheanism, as is PoF.
I have been taught that the mental construct arises from my individual awareness of my circumstance appearing mentally, at which point I become conscious of my circumstance. Therefore a term that could describe Vorstellung in PoF is mental construct. Hence this investigation....
Can I make a mental construct through thinking and call that a theory, which requires proof of validity?
For example, I have a theory (actually it is more of a question, but all questions posit theories) that I cannot construct mentally through thinking, but only perceive what is already there. Some things my thinking perceives are true and some things are illusion. Also, I cannot reinvent the wheel, only rediscover it. The inventor of the wheel gathered a cluster of concepts in imagination and put them into a new manifestation and the wheel appeared in the world. So my theory looks false, as it appears to be possible to construct a composite concept mentally out of existing concepts. However the wheel existed in nature before anyone thought of it, so it turns out to be a discovery, even the first time the wheel was imagined.
If my theory proves itself in practice, then my mental construct is revealed as a concept and not my construction at all. If my theory proves false then it is illusion. Is this illusion my mental construct, or is it the result of misperception? Can I construct anything mentally at all? Does the term mental construct have any validity in PoF? If not, we cannot use terms that carry the connotation of mental construction in PoF, except when mental construction is being investigated for validity.
Is the concept of Vorstellung in PoF purely what Tom wrote: the concept and percept together? If so, what appears in my thinking is not constructed because percept and concept were never separate, but the result of Erkennen: mental recognition or realisation. Thus, while admitting my uncertainty, I find no construction in my thinking that produces Vorstellung, Tom.
Vorstellung, a diversionary route?
There is a phrase in common usage in English "the mind's eye". The mind's eye is to the physical eye a bit like a common-law wife is to a legal wife - performs all the same functions but without the formal legal recognition. This phrase recognises a perceiving function of the mind, which in turn may provide a way into Vorstellung from out the English language itself. I do not speak or read German, but then neither does the spiritual world, so I am not suggesting a translation possibility here but a possible way to arrive at clarification of Vorstellung from out the genius of the English language itself. This would need some considered thought and exploration. In other words, if anyone can hold in mind the thinking of the whole chapter in German and consider it in relation to what is contained in potential in the phrase "the mind's eye" then it may open up a way of clarification. What can be said and understood in German in one word may need a paragraph or even the coinage of a new term in English to hoist Vorstellung out of the technical philosophical debate, as I assume you are not doing a translation for philosophers but for any thinker who wants to think POF. It is a very fine line; to be true to the author's philosophic ambitions, this is a work of Epistemology, yet to make it accessible, as Steiner did in the way he wrote it, to any unprejudiced thinker. Clarifying Vorsellung is, to my mind, the single most important thing a new translation could achieve. A way into a new handling of it in English may be the route through common usage - the route Steiner himself chose into all that the book contains, namely, what is the common experience of all thinkers who, as thinkers, go beyond the prosaic.
Caveat lector
Please note the origin of the above suggestion: "a translation for philosophers but for any thinker who wants to think POF" - and that the pose its author chooses here is by identification with the name of a historical personality famous as philosopher. Another revelation of the character of this person who uses Berkeley's name is in his own self-description: "I do not speak or read German, but then neither does the spiritual world".
Yes
I agree with you, BB. In your post you have used another English construction: to my mind. There are others:
In my view...
Bearing in mind...
It comes to mind...
My perspective is...
What I hear you saying is...
Now, I get it!
Enough examples demonstrating that non-visual thinkers are not marginalised in English!
These examples prove that, in English, there exists a clear conception of a mindscape that can be perceived. I am only dimly aware (in my mind) of the dispute over the illusoriness or, can I say, substantiality of the content of the mind.
In our translation we have to guide readers carefully through the language of the disputed territory before and after Steiner to a clear and unambiguous perception of Steiner’s contribution to the philosophical debate. PoF aims to bring the reader a specific Vorstellung of freedom.
Your reflections on our attempts, and further suggestions for formulations, are most welcome.
Vorstellungen something different than other 11 experiences
Der Inhalt von Empfindungen, Wahrnehmungen, Anschauungen, die Gefühle, Willensakte, Traum, und Phantasiegebilde, Vorstellungen, Begriffe und Ideen, sämtliche Illusionen und Halluzinationen werden uns durch die Beobachtung gegeben.
3-1 The contents of our sensations, perceptions, views, our feelings, acts of will, dreams and fantasy images, mental pictures, concepts and ideas, illusions and hallucinations, are all given to us through observation.
This list may be a help in translating Vorstellungen (mental picture) as it puts it in its proper context. It has to be something different than the other things on the list.
Mr. Last: Isn't everything different from everything else?
Vorstellung (like all words with suffix -ung) has a double meaning - one referring to the activity (Vorstellen) and the other referring to that which is the object of this activity (das Vorgestellte).
Why don't you explain what your concept of "different" is, if you emphasize the trivial?
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