TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 44 (to Szirko (TA36B-C3), van der Meijden and Müller)

THE "SECRETS" OF THE GIVEN.
by Maurice McCarthy
18 July 2001, posted 11 September 2001

This is another, and I hope better, attempt to interpret essential content of the epistemology of Rudolf Steiner – see C7. It has striking resemblances and differences to the target article.

<1>
It is widely acknowledged that epistemology should try to derive a theory of knowledge from a starting point with no presuppositions. Since any beginning makes or is an assumption, this looks difficult. No one is completely without the product of knowledge and it follows that an absolute starting point, if there is one, must be led to by conceptually removing this knowledge. This cannot be done by trying to place ourselves in another mind, such as that of a baby, as this makes very large suppositions that we understand this mind.

However, we all begin from an attitude to the world which is often called naïve realism. This worldview is the simplest, most uneducated and least critical of all. It accepts immediate perception – the intuitively obvious – as true reality without any further consideration. As it contains the most obvious assumptions, it is from here that the way should be led to the starting point. Abstracting knowledge away makes no positive assertions and so makes no errors, and offers no truths – which is just what is required.

<2>
Traditionally, it was thought that physics and physiology revealed that actual perception cannot give direct apprehension of reality but at best an indirect indication. A host of intermediate percepts between the object of perception and its arrival in consciousness were linked by a causal chain. This is epistemologically dubious.

Firstly, the object of perception has merely been altered but these new objects are accepted as real in an equally uncritical manner – and no proposition can be refuted by assuming it. Hand, eye and ear are instruments for consciousness so that interposing a 12 inch rule, or other measuring device, makes no difference to this observation.

Secondly, thinking is now added to yield more accurate knowledge but why should this be assumed? All philosophic speculation and all science presuppose this right of thinking to whatever knowledge we have and so must be grounded by sound epistemology. In practical life a theory of knowledge makes little difference to the reliability of technology etc. but when we rise to understand ultimate matters we must be able to judge the value of different points of view.

<3>
Epistemology is the study of the human subjective activity of cognition, critical philosophy. As such it must presuppose its objects:

1. that there is a world content
2. that there is an activity of cognition.

The removal of the first leaves nothing to be known and of the second that it could not be known even if it did exist. The content cannot be assumed the content of consciousness, as that is a judgment of cognition. The content and activity are undefined. Their coming-to-be is outside the province of epistemology and belong to empirical and speculative disciplines. The activity cannot be, at least at first, that of a subject since subject and object are categories of cognition.

<4>
To reduce actual perception to a merely given content all identification must be removed from individual objects – all naming and all relations, such as "same" and "different" must be disconnected. This leaves a single undifferentiated chaos, or "commiscuum", to use Mariela Szirko’s delightful word. "Perception" is used here in a global sense to include not only sense perception but feelings and emotions, memories and other internal observations. To put it at its most absurd, a toenail is indistinguishable from a moral resolution.

<5>
Cognition, hovering in the midst of this given, must find somewhere to make a start to understand the world it finds itself in. No one object, lifted out for inspection, has any right of attention above any other. There is no constraint, no imposition or solicitation, no impelling or inducement of the activity towards anything to make a beginning. The sheer obduracy of the merely given lends the first impulse to the act of knowledge. Unless the activity does something no knowledge can be achieved. Cognition cannot be purely passive observation. The world must be approached but how?

Since the merely given yields no knowledge of its own accord then it must be transcended. It must be demanded of it that it contain something not truly given. It must contain a "secret" and that secret can only be postulated from it. If this demand cannot be met then knowledge cannot be explained. If something is not given then it has to be created by cognition (unless a supernatural cause is accepted – by supernatural I mean anything unknowable in principle) and in this act of creation it is given. If there is a region of the world content which can only be "seen" to be given in the act of creating it, then there is something in the given entirely determined by the activity – the given would contain a form not requiring to be known by a further act, such as recognition, a form transparent to the activity itself. This would constitute direct connection to the world content.

<6>
If it is asked what kind of thing this may be, it can only be answered ideas and concepts – these are entirely human products. The crucial subjective act of cognition is free conceiving, creative conception. To create what in a sense is already given is paradoxical in its very nature but it amounts to the effort required to wrest the being of the given into consciousness. (I am impressed that Steiner had a constructivist approach 100 years before today.) In order to gain knowledge, cognition tears the commiscuum asunder into a region truly given and one subjectively given but by that act of creation restores the original unity. If everything were truly given cogniton could not exist, no act would be necessary. If everything were created by cognition there would be no mystery to know. Yet for the given commiscuum every concept postulated already exists, though its category of being needs further determination.

<7>
Every actual percept carries the "brute fact" of its being; "being is not a predicate." (Szirko) But the concept of being itself only exists as known after it is created and found among the percepts. This indicates that all actual perception – the reality of naïve realism – contains thinking, contains ideas, in an unconscious manner.

<8>
That actual perception contains a hidden "more", a "secret", may also be illustrated in colour. Seeing the colour black implies knowing white, unconsciously it is actually known in its opposite. Black is something in its own right but gains its certitude or determination, its form, through its relation to another. Similarly yellow really *is* in relation to the other colours. The idea of knowledge, the relation between content and cognition, is completed by the permeation of percepts with thinking. Error arise from misconceiving and former ideas are often replaced by more comprehensive ones.

<9>
Observe-postulate-realise is the idea of knowledge and the question of certitude now arises. How is something categorised as dream or reality when cognition co-creates the Appearance before it? Essentially from its coherence. The grade of reality is a function of how ‘useful’ it turns out to be, or from what further relations emerge as if of there own accord. If, for example, prediction is enabled then the postulate has inner connection with its objects – understanding is achieved – and is not merely the description of a dream with no reality.

<10>
There follow some isolated observations.

1. Cognising precedes all ideas which in turn precede their names. The activity of thinking is thus utterly indefinable but orders the given, makes sense of it, makes it a ‘cosmos’. Words are not concepts but labels for concepts: words are concepts rendered as givens.
2. All knowledge is ‘a posteriori’. Kant demonstrated what thinking could not do, not what it was capable of. Neither he nor Hume granted thinking a creative capacity and so never grounded their epistemologies soundly.
3. It might be objected that if this epistemology were true then thinking would be a constant revelation but this is not so. This requires no further answer than to ask the commentator to reflect upon the observation itself. It announces that we rarely think at all, in the proper creative sense of the word.
4. Since the idea of knowledge has a given which is at once a plurality and a one with a functional relation between these then it is capable of providing an appreciation of all worldviews, of judging their value both separately and together.
5. The given is, to itself, an original unity of concept and percept but, when it comes to knowing the given, every content of consciousness, including itself – i.e. what consciousness is for knowledge – is an original separation which is then restored to unity by cognition. It is only through this original two of consciousness that we know at all. It is not the world which presents dualities but our own nature.
6. If perception is knowledge then the arrival of sentience on the Earth must lead to cognition. Now since cognition is a free act then, though I cannot yet articulate it clearly to my own satisfaction, this implies that Natural Selection and free will are bedfellows. In turn, this means that you cannot accept the theory of evolution and remain determinist. This is not a result I should at first have expected from an introspective discipline – but then again perhaps I should not be surprised. Epistemology ought to capable of removing naïvety and modifying worldviews by understanding what the act of knowledge is.
7. Steiner was convinced he had an epistemology completely able to support all the science of his day. I have yet to find a reason why he should be wrong now.
8. This presentation has been as that of a doctrine. This is at odds with the import of the text which pleads for freedom of thought, and I note that the Theaetetus was presented with a negative result, as if not to impose upon the freedom of another or hinder a student. This having been said, by what right do I presume that an age still overcoming the gods had a consciousness uniform with that of today? Has it not been implied above that cognition is a spectrum of possibilities from the largely perceptual to the largely conceptual?

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Maurice McCarthy