(3/6) Goethe's Theory of Knowledge: Thinking - A Higher Experience within Experience

Jeff, Alexander and I continue our series looking at Steiner's description of Goethe's theory of knowledge as derived from Goethe's artistic and scientific productions.
In this conversation we consider chapters 8,9, and 10 of the book

Thinking as a Higher Experience within Experience
Thinking and Consciousness
The Inner Nature of Thinking

00:00 What Sets the Stage for These Chapters? Introduction to thinking's role in knowledge
7:15 How Does German Differ from English? Discussion of language precision and flexibility
14:45 What Makes Chapter 8 Unique? Thinking as revealer of lawfulness in experience
21:30 Why Does Pure Experience Need Thinking? Exploring thinking's role in unifying experience
28:45 What is Thinking's Relationship to Consciousness? Chapter 9's examination of subjective/objective
35:15 How Does Thinking Bridge Subject and Object? Discussion of thinking's unifying function
42:30 What Makes Thinking Different from Perception? Active vs passive aspects of cognition
50:15 Why Must Thinking Form a Whole? Chapter 10's exploration of thinking's unity
58:45 How Does Art Relate to Truth? Discussion of artistic completion and truth-feeling
1:07:30 What Role Does Personality Play? Final reflections on individual and universal

#goethe
#schiller
#epistemology
#scienceofknowing
#theoryofknowedge
#rthinking

[subliminal]

Maaan,
these talks are slow like a snail and deep like Mariana trench.
It is not for average people.
Similar to phenomenon a
"koan".
Whatever,
Bless on Your consciousness.

[robertalenrichter]

"Conciseness" is actually "concision". Leaving that aside, German was a revelation for me. I also speak French, but German is just so divergent in terms of vocabulary and the way that the grammar enables a diversity of ways to organise material. It's a wonderful medium for theoretical thought, in particular. I'm not surprised that so much philosophy was written in that language.

[jeffbarney]

Something I would love for us to pick up next time as I think it will overlap nicely with what is to come. In Chapter 9 Steiner after laying out the objective nature of thinking does a thought plausibility experiment of sorts. He makes the statement that the thought world or thinking consciousness is not a different reality individual to individual. Before this he says something that seems to contradict this statement . He says that thought doesn't exist out in the world like facts it only exists in human consciousness.

This is where the statement of plausibility comes in. He says imagine that there is only one sphere of thought and that we bring our own individual personalities into the world's thought center. If this were the case such a thought center would have to be in human consciousness. Is he speaking of a collective human consciousness? Knowing that other species evolve as a collective there would seem to be such a reality that binds a species. First is that binding what we experience as human thinking consciousness? At first this would seem absurd.

But lets take another step in the experiment. If there is consciousness like my dog "lower" than mine, that is to say the area of concern is more narrow and temporal, Is there consciousness higher than human? If so would not that include and exceed human thinking consciousness just as I share and exceed animal consciousness?