A Review of Massimo Scaligero’s “A Treatise on Living Thinking”
“The I that man thinks he is cannot be the true I, if not in living thinking—still unknown to us.”
MASSIMO SCALIGERO: TRATTATO DEL PENSIERO VIVENTE. UNA VIA OLTRE LEFILOSOFIE OCCIDENTALI, OLTRE LO YOGA, OLTRE LO ZEN (MILAN, 1961). Translated by Mark Nazzari Willan, France 2001.
Immanuel Kant’s publication of A Critique of Pure Reason in 1718 represented a symbolic capitulation of Western philosophy to the epistemological “cherubim and a flaming sword” (Genesis 3:24) who, for eons of assiduous spiritual assent, had repelled philosophers from the mouth of Plato’s Cave, in which Truth appears only “as though through a glass, darkly” (Corinthians 13:12). Ever since Socrates’ narration of the famous Parable in Book VII of Plato’s Republic in Ancient Greece, philosophers have striven to transcend this hypogeal confinement. When Kant declared, in the eighteenth century that “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” he seemed, therefore, to announce philosophy’s failure of its own stated aim. The various schools of postmodernism have carried this attitude to such a pitch that today, to speak of “the truth” at all is considered very bad form in academic company.
In fact, however, in several works published in the end of the nineteenth century, the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner revealed the path beyond this guardian of the threshold to the attainment of higher knowledge. Why, one might wonder, has Steiner’s work on epistemology failed to achieve greater influence on mainstream philosophy? One writing in the lineage of Steiner, the Italian lecturer and esotericist Massimo Scaligero, hinted at the answer to this question in his 1961 work A Treatise on Living Thinking, when he observed that:
if today Man were to be told the secret of Being, it would be useless to it because it would not know how to think it. Mankind could think it only on condition of reducing it to that reflection, or abstraction, at which level it is impossible for any part of Being to reveal itself at all.
With these words, Scaligero confirms philosophy’s failure to deliver its adherents from the chains that Plato so fatefully described in the 4th century BC. In the same way that a photograph of a golden chalice is worth no more than that of a cast iron one, and chains of iron bind just as well as chains of gold, so all formulations of Truth, no matter how ingenious or precise are ontologically equivalent because their source in perception is corrupt and their formulation on the level of discursive reason is inadequate. Only a cognition that manages to free itself from reflective consciousness can escape the hall of mirrors in which this mode of thought imprisons the thinker and transcend the flatland of specious dialectical posturing in which he believes to live and move and have his being.
In light of this failure, Scaligero asserts that real philosophy must not be an academic. Instead, bona fide philosophy must become a contemplative and ascetic discipline. Knowledge must not be merely propositional but transformative. Steiner and Scaligero, like Kant, recognised that the world as it appears to the human being is a world of phenomena. Unlike the sophists, however, the anthroposophers did not respond to this observation by positing an unknowable realm of noumena beyond them, as the transcendental yet forever unknowable counterparts of phenomena. Neither, however, did Steiner and Scaligero attempt, in the reductionist manner of empirical science, to apprehend the essence of these phenomena through analysis. Just as Nagasena’s chariot vanishes into śūnyatā upon close scrutiny as each component, in turn, reveals only its parts but not its essence, so scientific dissection leads the investigator ever further astray from the actual object of his inquiry into a world of spectres: “we murder to dissect,” as Wordsworth so memorably stated.
While the Kantians, therefore, posited chimerical noumena beyond appearances, and Empiricists sought the reality of phenomena by disassembling them, Steiner and Scaligero maintain that phenomenon and noumenon reveal their essential unity when a subject cognises a given object accurately. Their position is the fruit of having first striven inwardly to comprehend the real nature of both knowledge and experience:
This essence of cognition, that is simultaneously the essence of the thing, to the extent that cognition can be seen where, through spontaneous movement, it is identical with the thing, already as an ideal root of it.
This is because the carriage of the Buddhist proverb exists through the ideal unity of its various physically sensible attributes (i.e. Steiner’s percepts or Wahrnemungen). The idea (i.e. concept or Begriff) of “chariot” is what the phenomenon in question is, and this idea is the true name of the thing that the sensory letters spell out. The essence of the chariot is not “out there” in the coarse physical sense, since the idea of it reveals itself to be both an activity of, and consubstantial with, the subject who perceives it. The “out there-ness” of the chariot is an experience, but the experience of the chariot is not “out there.” Where then is the experience of the chariot? The question is a petitio principii since it presupposes an essential spatial externality to phenomena that is, in truth, an accident of the mode of perception by which we attempt to grasp them.
Contemplation of one’s own cognitive processes furthermore reveals one’s true and immediate identity beyond the ordinary dialectic mediation of the self-image with which one is inclined to identify. Scaligero leads the reader through careful instruction on who to dis-identify and to recognize oneself as the being who casts it. In contemplation, one may discover that ordinary cognition lacks the lucidity to cognise thinking in its living genesis. Instead, the usual mode of consciousness is capable of post factum apprehension alone, and thus is condemned to grasp its own thinking only after it has already ossified into a thought. In continuing with this inner movement, one will experience that “subject” and “object” are themselves mere thoughts and, with the apprehension of the thinking that first divided them, one realises one’s identity beyond reflection and duality: “the person who perceives is not the bodily being: it is the I, and the I is the L ó g o s.”
