"Kant took this basic intuition, though, and drew a troubling conclusion: as we think about anything, we continue to draw on our concepts and perceptions. As I think of the table, I think of its woodenness, for example. But now I am thinking not woodenness itself, the actual state of being made of wood, but rather my concept of woodenness. And again, this seems necessary and obvious: my concept of woodenness is not itself made of wood."
I think the problematic assumptions in 'critical philosophy' begin here, and therefore cannot be considered a pure phenomenology. For example, when we squeeze our hand in a fist we feel the actual muscle tension in a specific part of phenomenal space. This is phenomenal feedback on our inner will gestures, our intent to 'clench the fist'. Now we can relax our hand and repeat the squeeze but by only imagining it, or basically by trying to actively remember what we just did. Naturally, this imagined movement feels much more ghostly. It by no means has the same intensity of the burning sensation we get when we squeeze our physical fist for a prolonged time.
But notice how it is still essentially phenomenal feedback on our inner activity, except now the meaning we experienced is lifted from the physical kernel and embedded in our ghostly mental images. These are the only kinds of distinctions we can make phenomenokogically. As soon we start saying the meaning of our imagined clenched fist is not 'made of' the meaning of our physically clenched fist, or they are somehow separated, we have strayed into dogmatic metaphysics. All we can consistently say is that the imagined meaning that feeds back on our inner will activity is more ghostly, more volatile, less stable, etc. than the physical meaning that feeds back. There is no reason to assume we are not interacting with the very same reality of 'clenched fist' in both cases, though, only that reality is being expressed through a different constellation of constraints.
You raise an important issue here: does the noumenal/phenomenal distinction necessitate believing that we have no access whatsoever to the "real" physical (that is, noumenal) fist, for example? My own view is that Kant does not commit to such a position, though I do think that some people have interpreted him that way. I have more to say in my 2 part series, Postmodernism vs. Postmodernism:
My argument is that postmodernism, as the expression of Kant's "critical philosophy", took 2 paths: one does fall into the error you indicate above, while the other doesn't. Unfortunately, the former path is by far the better know and more influential. My hope is that this could be changed!
Thanks for these additional resources. I think this distinction between ontic and epistemic postmodernism can be very helpful. Have you come across the epistemic work of Rudolf Steiner? One could say he is a stellar example of epistemic postmodernism, similar to Husserl, however, he extended the phenomenology of cognition (or "spiritual activity") much deeper.
His first major work was on Goethe's epistemology, where the latter is set in contrast to Kant. In that, he writes:
"Kant believed that philosophy before him had taken wrong paths because it strove for knowledge of the being of things without first asking itself how such a knowledge might be possible. He saw what was fundamentally wrong with all philosophizing before him to lie in the fact that one reflected upon the nature of the object to be known before one had examined the activity of knowing itself, with regard to what it could do. He therefore took this latter examination as his basic philosophical problem and inaugurated thereby a new direction in thought. Since then the philosophy that has based itself on Kant has expended untold scientific force in answering this question; and today more than ever, one is seeking in philosophical circles to come closer to accomplishing this task. But epistemology, which at the present time has become nothing less than the question of the day, is supposedly nothing other than the detailed answer to the question: How is knowledge possible? Applied to Goethe the question would read: How did Goethe conceive of the possibility of knowledge?
Upon closer examination, however, the fact emerges that the answering of this question may absolutely not be placed at the forefront of epistemology. If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be.
...
So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete."
I think you (again!) raise a good—and difficult—point. I am not familiar with Steiner's work, but I'd definitely like to be (would you recommend one text in particular?)
If I understand you correctly, the issue that Steiner and you raise here is aimed not just at Kant, but at Descartes and the whole modernist/Enlightenment project as a whole, since it was Descartes who famously wanted to generate for himself a new epistemological foundation, one that had no supports or assumptions outside of the knowing subject itself (that is, Rene himself).
It seems to me that your critique above is that such an epistemology actually already assumes too much, because it assumes that we have some kind of pristine interiority unaffected by the "outside" world, which we can define and arrange with clarity *before* we have any contact with that world beyond. And if I have understood you correctly, I think you make a critical point: that, in fact, our epistemological apparatus is already dependent on modes of being and operation that depend on and our indeed continuous with the outside world we are trying to know—even if the full nature of that outside is unknown (and even maybe unknowable) to us.
So, there would be no pristine interiority to which we could retreat, to first get our bearings, and then "look outside" with confidence that we had a perfect paper trail for any claim we wanted to make.
This seems right to me, and it definitely troubles the modernist (and, at least in many of its guides, the postmodernist) approach to philosophy.
I am interested in how you think this connects with idealism and the metaphysics of consciousness. It seems to me that the basic insight here could be taken in many different directions—but do you have a preferred one?
Yes, I would recommend GA 4, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. It is available on rsarchive.org
Essentially Steiner points attention to the part of experience where the appearances and the inner reality responsible for the appearances coincide, in our intentionally directed thinking.
For example, we can imagine that we decide to slowly count from 1 to 10 in our mind. As we progress from pronouncing "1" to "2" to "3", etc.. we have a very clear intuitive sense of how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like a foreign object, for example, the erratic movements of a fly buzzing around, but as an orderly progression of inner states guided by our general meaningful intent to count. If we are currently at "5", even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what inner state will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced the next numbers in our mind. This intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present state through the previously pronounced numbers.
Now imagine that we reach "5" and forget we are counting. Then we may try to "explain" the appearance of the perception by clicking together various mental pictures like puzzle pieces until the appearance seems to make some intuitive sense, like thoughts about "neurons", "biochemical reactions", "supernatural suggestion", and so on. This is the standard approach of modern philosophy and science that Kant rightly identified as problematic. Yet he didn't notice how we can reach an entirely different sort of explanation for the appearance by remembering our intent to count. Now we don't seek the essence of appearances by clicking together mental puzzle pieces, but by aligning our inner activity with the overarching intents that shape and steer the phenomenal states of experience.
Can we expand that intuitive resonance to also encompass more of the 'objective world' beyond the phenomenal states guided by our simple intents to count and so forth? That is the question asked and answered through spiritual science, not in any theoretical way, but via living and intimate experience of our intentional activity and its implicit structure. We could call this a "second order epistemology".
"Too little attention is paid (in academia as well as in daily life) to second-order processes. Generally, even when higher-order phenomena are taken into account, this is done in a first-order way, and thus often without awareness...
As an example, no one would expect that a musician, upon verbally delineating to a pupil how each note of a piece is played, would solicit a successful performance from the pupil, no matter how complete the explanation. Obviously what is required of the pupil is actual practice: the rhythmic repetition of a process of trial, error, awareness, and correction. And what if the musician is attempting to instruct the pupil in the art of improvisation? Here descriptions become even more problematic: something needs to be positively indicated to the pupil without forming it exactly, without rendering it into a static prescription that collapses a second-order process only into a first-order bit of data. A whole set of new ideas, new language, and new ways of communicating must arise between the musician and pupil that serve to elicit a higher-order change in a way that does not also block its unfolding. The musician must, in a very real way, improvise the teaching of improvisation. The same is true in epistemology when what is at stake is not merely a description of some epistemological idea or another, but the solicitation of an actual epistemological shift: a change in thinking, not just a change in thoughts about thinking. Instead of the ends justifying the means, the means also justify (and change) the ends, because the means are recursively linked with the ends; they are mutually self-generative."
"Kant took this basic intuition, though, and drew a troubling conclusion: as we think about anything, we continue to draw on our concepts and perceptions. As I think of the table, I think of its woodenness, for example. But now I am thinking not woodenness itself, the actual state of being made of wood, but rather my concept of woodenness. And again, this seems necessary and obvious: my concept of woodenness is not itself made of wood."
I think the problematic assumptions in 'critical philosophy' begin here, and therefore cannot be considered a pure phenomenology. For example, when we squeeze our hand in a fist we feel the actual muscle tension in a specific part of phenomenal space. This is phenomenal feedback on our inner will gestures, our intent to 'clench the fist'. Now we can relax our hand and repeat the squeeze but by only imagining it, or basically by trying to actively remember what we just did. Naturally, this imagined movement feels much more ghostly. It by no means has the same intensity of the burning sensation we get when we squeeze our physical fist for a prolonged time.
But notice how it is still essentially phenomenal feedback on our inner activity, except now the meaning we experienced is lifted from the physical kernel and embedded in our ghostly mental images. These are the only kinds of distinctions we can make phenomenokogically. As soon we start saying the meaning of our imagined clenched fist is not 'made of' the meaning of our physically clenched fist, or they are somehow separated, we have strayed into dogmatic metaphysics. All we can consistently say is that the imagined meaning that feeds back on our inner will activity is more ghostly, more volatile, less stable, etc. than the physical meaning that feeds back. There is no reason to assume we are not interacting with the very same reality of 'clenched fist' in both cases, though, only that reality is being expressed through a different constellation of constraints.
You raise an important issue here: does the noumenal/phenomenal distinction necessitate believing that we have no access whatsoever to the "real" physical (that is, noumenal) fist, for example? My own view is that Kant does not commit to such a position, though I do think that some people have interpreted him that way. I have more to say in my 2 part series, Postmodernism vs. Postmodernism:
Here is part 1, with part 2 linked at the end: https://phenomenologyeastandwest.substack.com/p/postmodernism-vs-postmodernism-part
My argument is that postmodernism, as the expression of Kant's "critical philosophy", took 2 paths: one does fall into the error you indicate above, while the other doesn't. Unfortunately, the former path is by far the better know and more influential. My hope is that this could be changed!
Thanks for the great comment.
Thanks for these additional resources. I think this distinction between ontic and epistemic postmodernism can be very helpful. Have you come across the epistemic work of Rudolf Steiner? One could say he is a stellar example of epistemic postmodernism, similar to Husserl, however, he extended the phenomenology of cognition (or "spiritual activity") much deeper.
His first major work was on Goethe's epistemology, where the latter is set in contrast to Kant. In that, he writes:
"Kant believed that philosophy before him had taken wrong paths because it strove for knowledge of the being of things without first asking itself how such a knowledge might be possible. He saw what was fundamentally wrong with all philosophizing before him to lie in the fact that one reflected upon the nature of the object to be known before one had examined the activity of knowing itself, with regard to what it could do. He therefore took this latter examination as his basic philosophical problem and inaugurated thereby a new direction in thought. Since then the philosophy that has based itself on Kant has expended untold scientific force in answering this question; and today more than ever, one is seeking in philosophical circles to come closer to accomplishing this task. But epistemology, which at the present time has become nothing less than the question of the day, is supposedly nothing other than the detailed answer to the question: How is knowledge possible? Applied to Goethe the question would read: How did Goethe conceive of the possibility of knowledge?
Upon closer examination, however, the fact emerges that the answering of this question may absolutely not be placed at the forefront of epistemology. If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be.
...
So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete."
I think you (again!) raise a good—and difficult—point. I am not familiar with Steiner's work, but I'd definitely like to be (would you recommend one text in particular?)
If I understand you correctly, the issue that Steiner and you raise here is aimed not just at Kant, but at Descartes and the whole modernist/Enlightenment project as a whole, since it was Descartes who famously wanted to generate for himself a new epistemological foundation, one that had no supports or assumptions outside of the knowing subject itself (that is, Rene himself).
It seems to me that your critique above is that such an epistemology actually already assumes too much, because it assumes that we have some kind of pristine interiority unaffected by the "outside" world, which we can define and arrange with clarity *before* we have any contact with that world beyond. And if I have understood you correctly, I think you make a critical point: that, in fact, our epistemological apparatus is already dependent on modes of being and operation that depend on and our indeed continuous with the outside world we are trying to know—even if the full nature of that outside is unknown (and even maybe unknowable) to us.
So, there would be no pristine interiority to which we could retreat, to first get our bearings, and then "look outside" with confidence that we had a perfect paper trail for any claim we wanted to make.
This seems right to me, and it definitely troubles the modernist (and, at least in many of its guides, the postmodernist) approach to philosophy.
I am interested in how you think this connects with idealism and the metaphysics of consciousness. It seems to me that the basic insight here could be taken in many different directions—but do you have a preferred one?
Yes, I would recommend GA 4, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. It is available on rsarchive.org
Essentially Steiner points attention to the part of experience where the appearances and the inner reality responsible for the appearances coincide, in our intentionally directed thinking.
For example, we can imagine that we decide to slowly count from 1 to 10 in our mind. As we progress from pronouncing "1" to "2" to "3", etc.. we have a very clear intuitive sense of how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like a foreign object, for example, the erratic movements of a fly buzzing around, but as an orderly progression of inner states guided by our general meaningful intent to count. If we are currently at "5", even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what inner state will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced the next numbers in our mind. This intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present state through the previously pronounced numbers.
Now imagine that we reach "5" and forget we are counting. Then we may try to "explain" the appearance of the perception by clicking together various mental pictures like puzzle pieces until the appearance seems to make some intuitive sense, like thoughts about "neurons", "biochemical reactions", "supernatural suggestion", and so on. This is the standard approach of modern philosophy and science that Kant rightly identified as problematic. Yet he didn't notice how we can reach an entirely different sort of explanation for the appearance by remembering our intent to count. Now we don't seek the essence of appearances by clicking together mental puzzle pieces, but by aligning our inner activity with the overarching intents that shape and steer the phenomenal states of experience.
Can we expand that intuitive resonance to also encompass more of the 'objective world' beyond the phenomenal states guided by our simple intents to count and so forth? That is the question asked and answered through spiritual science, not in any theoretical way, but via living and intimate experience of our intentional activity and its implicit structure. We could call this a "second order epistemology".
"Too little attention is paid (in academia as well as in daily life) to second-order processes. Generally, even when higher-order phenomena are taken into account, this is done in a first-order way, and thus often without awareness...
As an example, no one would expect that a musician, upon verbally delineating to a pupil how each note of a piece is played, would solicit a successful performance from the pupil, no matter how complete the explanation. Obviously what is required of the pupil is actual practice: the rhythmic repetition of a process of trial, error, awareness, and correction. And what if the musician is attempting to instruct the pupil in the art of improvisation? Here descriptions become even more problematic: something needs to be positively indicated to the pupil without forming it exactly, without rendering it into a static prescription that collapses a second-order process only into a first-order bit of data. A whole set of new ideas, new language, and new ways of communicating must arise between the musician and pupil that serve to elicit a higher-order change in a way that does not also block its unfolding. The musician must, in a very real way, improvise the teaching of improvisation. The same is true in epistemology when what is at stake is not merely a description of some epistemological idea or another, but the solicitation of an actual epistemological shift: a change in thinking, not just a change in thoughts about thinking. Instead of the ends justifying the means, the means also justify (and change) the ends, because the means are recursively linked with the ends; they are mutually self-generative."