KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 45 (on R16, to Muller and Mutnick)

ON "COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS"
by Maurice McCarthy
14 August 2001, posted 11 September 2001

<1>
Push three pins into a board and stretch an elastic band around them. Pull one pin out and, keeping the band taught, move it around. Simultaneously, do the same with the second and third pins so that all three are moving but the band remains taught. Abstract the pins and band but retain the image of mobile triangularity. This is The triangle. It is not an abstraction or mere generalization from particulars but the universal concept of triangle, mobile yet unalterable and permanent, independently existent. It is intersubjective though we may each picture it differently to ourselves and indeed we lead ourselves to its grasp by means of particular triangles, just as we learn the methods of mathematics by particular exercises.

<2>
A major supposition of early Greek philosophy was the objective reality of ideas, which was felt necessary for philosophy to exist at all. Steiner’s epistemology leads to the conclusion that if such do not exist then knowledge is not explainable, but in order to intellectually perceive them requires a certain subjective act. They are only given to an act of knowledge. His wrinkle is in their mobility which overcomes Parmenides’s

objections to the young Socrates’s theory that particular things partake of ideas by articulating a novel form of participation not found in Plato’s dialogue. The universal is ‘divisible’ yet remains one. The particular partakes of the universal like a drop partakes of the ocean but yet does not diminish the ocean by that drop. The universal actually contains all the possibilities of the particular. It cannot be added to nor taken away from. It cannot be exhausted in forming particulars. (1)

<3>
The concept of the concept is that concept with the mobility to assume the form of any concept whatever. We call it ‘I’, that which has conscious experience of the permanent. This core of the self is the essence of unity running through all humanity, irrespective of race or gender. We all partake of the universal ‘I’ which is therefore "cosmic consciousness". Not I, but Christ in me (see Galatians 2:20). The route to a reconciliation of science and religion is surely through a way of knowledge, an open-minded and honest pursuit of truth.

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Maurice McCarthy