Thinking about thinking; OR: Finally, Joe Hipness breaks his silence
"Thinking can never be explained by anything other than itself, because it is always thinking that does the explaining."
This remark (from Don Cruse's book Evolution and the New Gnosis) jogged me out of whatever was keeping me from posting anything for a long time. I suppose all 3 (?) of my loyal readers have given up long ago... I guess I'll have to tell them that there's something new to read.
I still need to pick up on the idea I promised to cover in my previous post, so many days ago, the idea of container and content. What I had in mind was this, from an interview with physicist Henri Bortoft (from http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Bortoft-1999.html):
V. Inversion Of Container And Content
COS: In your book you talk about the inversion of container and content. Conventional science considers theory the container and facts the content of the phenomenon. For Goethe, in contrast, the sensory facts are the container that give rise to encountering the real phenomenon ("theory"). You write
"This transformation from an analytical to a holistic mode of consciousness brings with it a reversal between the container and the content. In the case of positivism, the theory is considered to be only the container for the facts. Now, if the theory, in Goethe’s sense, is the real content of the phenomenon, then it can be said that in the moment of intuitive insight we are seeing inside the phenomenon."
Henri Bortoft: Yes, the unfolding of nature in itself is an epistemological reversal. The source of the idea is the phenomenon itself. That relates to Aristotle’s idea of perception, which has been taken up in an astonishing way in our own time by Gadamer.
COS: When you practice the Goetheanic way of cognition would you go through a sequence where you experience this reversal?
Henri Bortoft: You see the metamorphosis. The plant is a dynamical movement. You see its leaves as traces that embody and manifest certain snapshots of this movement. That becomes so strong when you see it. That is the intuitive seeing from inside of the phenomenon. The dynamic movement is the reality.
COS: What you see are the traces that are left behind. Reality is the movement.
Henri Bortoft: I would call it dynamical.
* * *
It took a couple of readings of Bortoft's short book Goethe's Scientific Consciousness to feel like I was getting a clue about this kind of thinking.
Related to all this is the article "I = Awareness" by the psychiatrist Arthur Deikman:
http://www.zynet.co.uk/imprint/online/Deikman.html
(Abstract: Introspection reveals that the core of subjectivity - the 'I' - is identical to awareness. This 'I' should be differentiated from the various aspects of the physical person and its mental contents which form the `self'. Most discussions of consciousness confuse the 'I' and the 'self'. In fact, our experience is fundamentally dualistic - not the dualism of mind and matter - but that of the 'I' and that which is observed. The identity of awareness and the 'I' means that we know awareness by being it, thus solving the problem of the infinite regress of observers. It follows that whatever our ontology of awareness may be, it must also be the same for 'I'.)
It's covered in more detail in his book The Observing Self.
One quick way to put it is that each of us carries (or is carried by) an inner silent objective observer who corresponds to (or is) our feeling of being "I".
Deikman says that, even though it has often been unwittingly, the purpose of modern psychological work is to strengthen this observer. To go back to Barfield, this observer is one of the landmarks in the way consciousness has evolved over the centuries.
Fortuitously, this key line from the article echoes the quotation I put at the very beginning: "Awareness cannot be made an object of observation because it is the very means whereby you can observe."
And it echoes the ideas about self-reference I mentioned a long time ago.
This remark (from Don Cruse's book Evolution and the New Gnosis) jogged me out of whatever was keeping me from posting anything for a long time. I suppose all 3 (?) of my loyal readers have given up long ago... I guess I'll have to tell them that there's something new to read.
I still need to pick up on the idea I promised to cover in my previous post, so many days ago, the idea of container and content. What I had in mind was this, from an interview with physicist Henri Bortoft (from http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Bortoft-1999.html):
V. Inversion Of Container And Content
COS: In your book you talk about the inversion of container and content. Conventional science considers theory the container and facts the content of the phenomenon. For Goethe, in contrast, the sensory facts are the container that give rise to encountering the real phenomenon ("theory"). You write
"This transformation from an analytical to a holistic mode of consciousness brings with it a reversal between the container and the content. In the case of positivism, the theory is considered to be only the container for the facts. Now, if the theory, in Goethe’s sense, is the real content of the phenomenon, then it can be said that in the moment of intuitive insight we are seeing inside the phenomenon."
Henri Bortoft: Yes, the unfolding of nature in itself is an epistemological reversal. The source of the idea is the phenomenon itself. That relates to Aristotle’s idea of perception, which has been taken up in an astonishing way in our own time by Gadamer.
COS: When you practice the Goetheanic way of cognition would you go through a sequence where you experience this reversal?
Henri Bortoft: You see the metamorphosis. The plant is a dynamical movement. You see its leaves as traces that embody and manifest certain snapshots of this movement. That becomes so strong when you see it. That is the intuitive seeing from inside of the phenomenon. The dynamic movement is the reality.
COS: What you see are the traces that are left behind. Reality is the movement.
Henri Bortoft: I would call it dynamical.
* * *
It took a couple of readings of Bortoft's short book Goethe's Scientific Consciousness to feel like I was getting a clue about this kind of thinking.
Related to all this is the article "I = Awareness" by the psychiatrist Arthur Deikman:
http://www.zynet.co.uk/imprint/online/Deikman.html
(Abstract: Introspection reveals that the core of subjectivity - the 'I' - is identical to awareness. This 'I' should be differentiated from the various aspects of the physical person and its mental contents which form the `self'. Most discussions of consciousness confuse the 'I' and the 'self'. In fact, our experience is fundamentally dualistic - not the dualism of mind and matter - but that of the 'I' and that which is observed. The identity of awareness and the 'I' means that we know awareness by being it, thus solving the problem of the infinite regress of observers. It follows that whatever our ontology of awareness may be, it must also be the same for 'I'.)
It's covered in more detail in his book The Observing Self.
One quick way to put it is that each of us carries (or is carried by) an inner silent objective observer who corresponds to (or is) our feeling of being "I".
Deikman says that, even though it has often been unwittingly, the purpose of modern psychological work is to strengthen this observer. To go back to Barfield, this observer is one of the landmarks in the way consciousness has evolved over the centuries.
Fortuitously, this key line from the article echoes the quotation I put at the very beginning: "Awareness cannot be made an object of observation because it is the very means whereby you can observe."
And it echoes the ideas about self-reference I mentioned a long time ago.