on the organizing ideas of experience

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.

―Erwin Schrödinger

The perception of any phenomenon necessarily entails having made sense of an impression in light of its correlative idea(l)(s). These impressions can be sensory or non-sensory, but irrespective of the channels by which we encounter them, they will always require some cognitive activity on our part if they are to be perceived. Aristotle and the Scholastic philosophers identified this epistemological complementarity under the rubric of matter (ΰλη, causa materialis) and form (εἶδος, causa formalis), respectively, Steiner under the rubric of concept (Begriff) and percept (Wahrnehmung), and Husserl under that of noesis and noema. In traditional iconic language, these aspects were conceived as “Heaven” and “Earth,” respectively. “Letter” and “spirit” or “meaning,” they could also be called. Essentially, the first term consists in what something is made of or how it announces its presence to us, and the second, with what the thing is that is so made or so announced.

For my purposes at this site, I have employed the term theoria to designate the state in which our intentional stance is transparent to us and our theories become windows through which we perceive phenomena. This state is contrasted to what Husserl called “the naturalistic attitude,” which could be characterized by the inverse of the above: to wit, our intentional stances are opaque to us and we hypostasize our theories as scientific facts. In the first instance, the human being mediates Heaven and Earth in himself, as the priest of Creation in the manner that God had originally intended. In the second, Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart and Man is doomed to subsist in a no-man’s land of dessert, and feel the breath of empty space on the back of his neck.

on “the Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant” and the mystery of intentionality

Once these intentional relations are grasped in respect to immanent phenomena, like tables and pachyderms, the exploration can be extended to transcendental ones, like space, time, and causality. Consider, for instance, Steiner’s illustration of the transcendental ordering function that the concept of causality performs in ordinary perception:

When I hear a noise, I first look for the concept which fits this observation. It is this concept which first leads me beyond the mere noise. If one thinks no further, one simply hears the noise and is content to leave it at that. But my reflecting makes it clear to me that I have to regard the noise as an effect. Therefore not until I have connected the concept of effect with the perception of the noise, do I feel the need to go beyond the solitary observation and look for the cause. The concept of effect calls up that of cause, and my next step is to look for the object which is being the cause, which I find in the shape of the partridge. But these concepts, cause and effect, I can never gain through mere observation, however many instances the observation may cover. Observation evokes thinking, and it is thinking that first shows me how to link one separate experience to another.¹

Without the organizing idea of temporality, I would have no means of distinguishing between memory images, perceptions, and anticipations. Consider the following testimony from Helen Keller:

BEFORE my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.²

Lacking a tacit idea spatiality and extension, I would have no way to make sense of the flux of perceptions in my visual fields. Their continual metamorphosis according to changing spatial relations, which we ordinarily scarcely even consider, would be completely unintelligible to me.

Devoid of a paradigmatic intuition of selfhood, I would be unable to link perceptions with the thread of memory by indexing them to conserved biographical quantity. This is one of the reasons that we have no memory of our experiences in the early years—they are not ours in that we have no personal imprimatur to stamp them withal before we learn our own names. Without this intuition, I would have no way of grasping the fact of my own existence. How do I know my experiences belong to me? Among “The Tales of the Dervishes” is handed down a story that is particularly illustrative:

THERE are different kinds of awakening. Only one is the right way. Man is asleep, but he must wake in the right way. There is a story of an ignoramus whose awakening was not correct:

This idiot came to a huge city, and he was confused by the number of people in the streets. Fearing that if he slept and woke again he would not be able to find himself among so many people, he tied a gourd to his ankle for identification. 

A practical joker, knowing what he had done, waited until he was asleep, then removed the gourd and tied it around his own leg. He, too, lay down on the caravanserai floor to sleep. The fool woke first, and saw the gourd. At first he thought that this other man must be him. Then he attacked the other…³

Of course, we take for granted that our experiences are our own but the greatest mysteries are those we fail to notice. Confucius observed that “a common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.” If God hid himself in our hearts, we may never notice him, just as we never notice the streams from Heaven that sustain our apparently mundane experience, as by a lifeline. Helen Keller further illustrates the tacit architechtonics of selfhood and phenomenal experience:

Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another. So I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my brain when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions she taught me. I thought only of objects, and only objects I wanted…When I learned the meaning of “I” and “me” and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me.

In our early days, we were tasked to undertake the Herculean labors of learning to coordinate our movements, focus our eyes, grasp the ideas—immanent and transcendental—that I have indicated, and proceed to grasp phenomena through them, and a thousand other things that we largely take as a matter of course but without which our entire existential being would melt like breath into the wind.

At a certain point, which varies among individuals and cultures, our development tends to plateau and we merely hang on for the ride until we are gathered to our fathers. But, of course, there have always existed individuals and schools which have balked at the prospect that our development should be arrested when a certain adequacy in respect to everyday life has been met. Instead, our evolution can continue apace, howbeit only by dint of our own free initiative.⁴ Steiner offers an illustrative analogy as to what is needful in respect to such evolution:

People surrender themselves to thoughts, as it were; they do not control them. Imagine what it would be like if you did the same with your limbs as most people do with their thinking organs today. Ask yourself if the modern human being can be inclined—I say can be—to randomly take in a thought and randomly shut down a thought. Thoughts are bubbling up in people’s heads today. People cannot resist them; they automatically surrender to them. A thought arises, the previous one disappears, it flies and flashes through the mind, and people think in such a way that one could best say: it thinks in the human being.

Imagine that your arms and legs would behave similarly, that you would be able to control them as little as you can control your thinking. Imagine a person walking down the street, his arms moving in the same uncontrolled way as his thinking organ moves! You know how much goes through a person’s head when he walks down the street, and now imagine how he would continually gesture with his arms and hands in the same way that he does with the thoughts in his head!

And yet, we are facing the age when people have to learn to control their thoughts in the same way they control their arms and legs. We are entering that era. A particular inner discipline of our thinking is what has to occur now and from which people today are still exceedingly far away.⁵

In the same manner that the apprehension of the so-called “transcendental ideas” indicated above provides for a certain lawfulness and intelligibility in outer life, a comparable apprehension of such ideas—or perhaps the elaboration of the same ideas in different dimensions—confers a similar lawfulness and intelligibility to our psychological and spiritual lives. People, of course, will be liable to pretend that they are in no need of these things because they are not necessarily and besides they already have them. But why then do the same people fail to apprehend the causal relationship between the thoughts they entertain and the tenor of their emotional lives, for example? Of course, people are free to think what they please and feel what they want. But no one is free to feel a certain way after having thought in a contradictory one. These contingencies are disclosed in light of the transcendental idea of causality (howbeit oriented inwardly) or they will not be disclosed at all and people will continue to feel themselves to be at the mercy of the whims of their psychology.

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1. Steiner, PoF (1894) https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/RSP1964/GA004_c04.html

2. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (XI) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27683/27683-h/27683-h.htm

3. https://archive.org/details/tales-of-the-dervishes-teaching-stories-of-the-sufi-masters

4. Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, ch. 9.

The plant transforms itself because of the objective natural law inherent in it; the human being remains in an incomplete state unless he takes hold of the material for transformation within him and transforms himself through his own power. Nature makes of man merely a natural being; society makes of him a law-abiding being; only he himself can make of himself a free human being. Nature releases man from her fetters at a definite stage in his development; society carries this development a stage further; he alone can give himself the final polish.

In a lecture, he elaborates on the same theme:

We may say, therefore, that the insect has a certain direction in its life through spring, summer, autumn and winter. It does not give its development up to chance, placing itself as it does within certain laws in each succeeding phase of its life. Mankind, however, has left behind the age of instinctive co-existence with nature. In his case it was more ensouled than that of the animals, but still instinctive. His life has taken on a newer, more conscious form. Yet we find that man, in spite of his higher soul-life and capacity to think, has given himself over to a more chaotic life. With the dying away of his instincts he has fallen, in a certain way, below the level of the animals. However much one may emphasize man's further steps forward, towering above the animals, one must still concede that he has lost a particular inner direction in his life. This directing quality of his life could be found once more by seeing himself as a member of the human race, of this or that century. And just as, for a lower form of life, the month of September takes its place in the course of the year, so does this or that century take its place in the whole development of our planet. And man needs to be conscious of how his own soul-life should he placed historically in a particular epoch.

5. Rudolf Steiner, “The Mental Background of the Social Question” (1919) https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA190/English/UNK1954/19190414p01.html