Wittgenstein the Tartar 9781936320585

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WITTGENSTEIN THE TARTAR

WITTGENSTEIN THE TARTAR

DAVID KUHRT.

ACADEMICA PRESS BETHESDA - DUBLIN - PALO ALTO

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Kuhrt, David. Wittgenstein the Tartar / David Kuhrt. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936320-58-5 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. 2. Subjectivity. 3. Philosophy. 4. Language and languages--Philosophy. 5. Steiner, Rudolf, 1861-1925. I. Title. B3376.W563T73354 2012 192--dc23 2012046998 Copyright 2013 by David Kuhrt

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Academica Press, LLC Box 60728 Cambridge Station Palo Alto, CA. 94306 Website: www.academicapress.com to order: 650-329-0685

for Laszlo Szego

CONTENTS page Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Wittgenstein the Tartar

27

Chapter 2

On the Ethical and Political Import of the Tractatus

47

Chapter 3

Doing Philosophy: logos and the Primacy of Language

57

Chapter 4

Diversion: towards Rudolf Steiner

75

Chapter 5

The Epistemological Problems of Materialism & the Human Context

101

Chapter 6

Wittgensteiner Part 1 / Part 2

107

Chapter 7

On Liberation: The Matter of Light

131

Bibliography

161

Index

167

 

PREFACE

Faith, and the conviction of a belief in something, springs from the evolutionary history of the best adapted species: humanity articulates and explores the universal breadth of everything that Nature gave. As our narrative of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus unfolds, we see how that something corresponds to the Greek idea of a given Logos-order so that a personal experience is wrested by intentional acts of thought from the predisposing forces of hereditary and environment and our thinking (our cognitive acts) transcends what is purely personal. The individual concerns and personal interests of a species thus evolved are not genetically tied to the common interest: our being together is not given but chosen. The future survival of our species is then - for better or worse - the collective product of conscious enactments by individuals. To achieve this optimally, each must sublimate purely personal ambition in the interests of a higher ego whose unitary being is expressed in the grammar, the logos of ordinary language use, for the signifier ‘I’ points to myself. This transcendent ambition for something which is beyond myself is neither politically theoretical nor an act of religious faith but, in the light of evolutionary history, a

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matter of common sense: humanity is here because, in all preceding species, natural law ensured that individuals served the common interest. In the case of humanity, a conscious choice is required: a free will is discovered in that act of love. However, the discovery of this destiny in a culture of individualism based on product-marketing is frustrated by habits of thought whose message is this: whereas individuals need faith in something, ‘faith’ is incommensurate with proven knowledge called ‘scientific’. Only such knowledge (we are told) will guarantee the common welfare: being ‘scientific’, that knowledge is objective whereas, according to the prevailing culture, whatever an individual may instinctively know and hope for is unproven and necessarily subjective. On the basis of an analysis of the Tractatus however, and with the complementary epistemological insights into the human condition of Rudolf Steiner, we show that, on the contrary, no such contradiction between subjective and objective standpoints exists: in reality, every premise in the canon of knowledge we call ‘scientific’ is inseparable from its source in the human subjectivity from which all judgements proceed. Applying the scientific method to determine objectively what is true, the explanatory truth of this or that proposition must be decided: truths do not decide themselves. Hence Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the proposition: “Of that whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent”. The separation of belief and knowledge is thus - as far as the search for truth is concerned - the biggest of red herrings. This, above all, impedes our present and future progress towards a global community free of competing ideologies, religious or secular. Wittgenstein the Tartar puts Wittgenstein in the forefront of current debate about claims that the status in reality of our consciousness reduces to brain chemistry. Pointing out that the tune is called in philosophy (as in every other branch of knowledge) by a human subjectivity in the context of evolutionary time, we find

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that the notion of subject-object dualism is itself subjective. Interrogating this matter in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein remarks that, just as the eye has a field of vision but cannot itself be seen, subjectivity is the being-present in the thinker of the world to which he belongs. In the Tractatus, the logical function of the ‘I’ is to oversee that apparent subject-object divide. To that subjectivity we owe every creative act in history; a history illuminating human existence as the means by which our planetary evolution became conscious; a narrative which it is far beyond the mechanism of a brain to invent. In accounting for our knowledge of that world we acknowledge a given order of intelligence; for that logos (as Wittgenstein calls it) which governs the evolutionary process, produced an organism capable of articulating a whole within which - thanks to physical embodiment - its viewpoint takes an active part. Being conscious in us, that logos becomes the motor of the linguistic invention we use to denominate a world which is “everything that is the case”. Our acts of knowledge are framed within the order of that logos; and were it not for conceptual activity under those human conditions, the unitary reality would subsume all specific identities together in the unconsciousness to which all other, non-human species are subject. Thus, in the Tractatus, I am the arbiter of that unitary reality. Although without that ‘I’ which connotes my self and yours together, no knowledge is possible, according to the reductionist philosophy of positivism, ‘the mind’ in which I experience that being together is a product of brain chemistry. It is here that the Tartar invades: the drift of Wittgenstein the Tartar is brought into sharp focus by the texts which most conspicuously oppose the notion of metaphysical being, as in The Immortalisation Commission: the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, by John Gray. The Tartar invades to open up horizons wherever a complacent sedentarism threatens the perspective of a future which is the evolutionary responsibility of humanity together. Thus we see the essential

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premises of the Tractatus illuminated in the epistemology of Rudolf Steiner whose narrative of human cognitive development extends from the cultures of the ancient near east to the first intuition of quantum mechanics.

INTRODUCTION

Wittgenstein the Tartar is concerned with the fact that the tune called in philosophy, as in every other branch of knowledge, is called by a human subjectivity in the context of evolutionary time. The attribute of our consciousness is inseparable from the being of all else from which humanity has evolved. If, as the opening premise of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus puts it, “The world is everything that is the case”, then the unconscious presence of that ‘everything’ in the material ground we stand in with our bodies provides the context for all acts of cognition, irrespective of the method of verification called ‘scientific’. Not only is the human viewpoint subjective: it is crucial to our planetary evolution, for in our acts of thought we enter a perspective that transcends the separate existences of a physical world in space-time. In that human dimension, what is true is discovered consensually through time; a continuing evolutionary process, for our species is equipped to perceive and articulate both the specificity of its own circumstances and the universal context; a context we limit by being in space-time, bringing the reality down to the point where we find ourselves in the physical firmament. The instrument of thought we

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have to articulate this relation, transcending the limits of physical circumstance, is not naturally given: though each of us has a given standpoint, the thought-form which makes us the person we are is voluntarily controlled. Knowing our knowledge is limited, we use language to discover consensus, other viewpoints, and the brain has evolved to provide the vehicle for this evolutionary path. Were it not for the conceptual activity that takes place in those human conditions, the unitary reality would subsume all specific identities together in the unconsciousness to which all other species are subject; having that gift of thought we are partners in the evolutionary process of our planet. Thus, as far as human subjectivity is concerned, if the activity of our thought-formation were the product of brain-chemistry (as the drift of contemporary philosophy maintains) then neither consciousness nor knowledge at all would be possible. In Wittgenstein the Tartar, we follow the given logical order underpinning our thought activity along two paths which were equally clear to Wittgenstein in his Tractatus: that of the logos on the one hand and of a physics of the material ground on the other, for that logos (the concept in ancient Greek of something in which all order originates) orders both the material ground and our consciousness of it. We then speak that ordered world and our language mirrors the reality we perceive. Speaking it to others, truth is discovered consensually. So it is that the drift of this book is brought into sharp focus by the texts which most conspicuously oppose the notion of our transcendent and metaphysical being; in particular, The Immortalization Commission: the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray, whose natural attachment to his human condition nevertheless finds him telling us that our “modern myths are further from reality than any that can be found among traditional peoples, while the absurdities of faith are less offensive to reason than the claims made on behalf of science. The resurrection of the dead at the end of time is not as incredible as the idea that humanity, equipped with growing knowledge, is marching towards a better world”. As for that better world, the Tartar invades whenever a complacent sedentarism threatens the perspective

Introduction

3

of an enduring reality whose future is the evolutionary responsibility of humanity together. To make that point clear, the epistemological works of Rudolf Steiner underwrite our interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; for the exposition in that work of the logical order governing the concepts we form about the world also illuminates our moral responsibilities for the an evolutionary process whose articulate voice is human. Introducing the narrative of Rudolf Steiner’s epistemological works, we expose the false dichotomy (posed by a positivist philosophy reducing conscious existence to the inherited mechanism of adaptation) between the intuitive grasp we have of our experienced reality as a whole and the physical specificity of things in space-time. We see that this dichotomy then serves the departmental interests of a ‘religion’ concerned with hereafter while scientific technologies are applied in the interests of a ‘progress’ in time which we cannot control. Steiner’s theory of knowledge redeems the passivity of that determinism and underwrites Wittgenstein’s conclusions about our human responsibility for the evolutionary future. ****** All those who are tempted to read this narrative because the title identifies Ludwig Wittgenstein with the mythical Tartar should be warned: the author is no academic with a record of accredited research in the vast field of scholarship generated by the Tractatus and the extraordinary personality of Wittgenstein, but a nobody from the margins of contemporary intellectual discourse. Margins, however, of the sort from which, with the passage of time, the fabled Ghinghis and his Mongol horde brings a breath of fresh air to stagnating cultures, throttled by their own bureaucracies.

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This nobody will have one thing in common with his readers: whatever a mediated, fashionable consensus of our time may require, he is capable of thinking for himself. This instrument, the faculty of thinking, self-evidently does not exist simply in order to label and quantify the component phenomena of our ordinary reality as if our embodied being in the physical world were without meaning. The world can make sense only if its constituent parts, including our own being within it, are meaningfully inter-related in and by the presence in us of that logos - that given and transcendent order - which orders our thinking.1 If, in the course of time, it is with the very matter of thought - not of cerebral chemistry - that we articulate the world in our use of words, then it is on the grammatical order of that logos (essential to the narrative of the Tractatus) and its expression in words that the structures of stable societies depend; for our knowledge of that order is not given: each has a spatio-temporal viewpoint of his own and, in order to establish a consensus or logos of knowledge about that world, we argue the case in politics as in every other field of knowledge. Thus the question of what thought is, of the nature of the given order that informs truthful assertion and by what method such truths are verified, will be seen to be essential to the narrative of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; that essence of course provides an epistemological premise consistently informing the whole of his work.2 This writer assumes that, though his readers may not be professional philosophers, they nevertheless find the enduring essentials of philosophy exciting (whatever its epistemological premises might be) because it is built on the ordinary usage of the everyday language we use to communicate in an evidently unitary world; for we do communicate, and do so irrespectively of whether or not we claim to grasp either the nature and operation of that order or of our being within it. As Joyce makes Mr Deasy say to Stephen Dedalus, “All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God”, whereupon Stephen immediately points to the window as a shout from the street is heard, and says: “That is God”. If humanity needs a god who retires from the mundane it’s because, with an entrepreneurial

Introduction

5

and competitive economy, we have yet to slow down and discover that one allencompassing presence in the sacrament of everyday life. It is thus an assumed premise of our research into the matter of thinking that ordinary language-use both presupposes that unitary presence and represents humanity as spokesman for the cosmos from which it has evolved. For, as a glance at the work of Shakespeare shows, it is in ordinary usage that the vast and mysterious dimensions of our world find the vernacular forms of expression on which all understanding depends. ***** Epistemology is the science of how knowledge is acquired in our cognitive acts; i.e. in acts of thought we become cognate with the reality of the world we are in, and from the viewpoint of our bodies located in space-time. For if, in our cognitive acts, we form concepts to explain things, thoughts cannot be abstractions produced by the neuro-chemistry of a brain responding to external stimuli. True, rightly or wrongly conceived, thoughts do ‘cross our minds’ uninvited. But as far as the problem between belief and knowledge is concerned, we think in order to throw light on the composite inter-activity of the phenomena we encounter. Thoughts are not the prerogative of intellectuals: the complex interactivity of the phenomena composing our world is apparent to common sense and informs all ordinary discourse. In our acts of enlightenment we experience (or not, according to the veracity of the concepts we form) a formal and structural order which is present in all the phenomena together, including ourselves. That is the structural order we call logos. Even the scientific methods we apply experimentally to verify conclusions we draw about the way our world is, must logically presuppose the prior existence of that logos as an order which informs both the world and the being in it of the

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thinker. That proposition, concerning the logical priority of our being before the application of experimental method to ‘prove’ a proposition, is the essence of Wittgenstein’s opening proposition in his Tractatus: his assertion that “The world is everything that is the case” presupposes both the being-present of the one who articulates the proposition and the inter-activity between his subjectivity and the objectively given reality. We argue and discover in order to evolve. The proposition that the world is “everything that is the case” is evidently indisputable. It is equally evident, as far as the narrative of philosophers like John Gray (cited above) is concerned, that such a proposition cannot be experimentally verified: knowledge of “everything that is the case” (my emphasis) could not logically be acquired, even by the end of time, since time is evidently finite. That is the logical problem of what is called ‘metaphysics’: there is a presupposition that things we actually experience and denominate in ordinary language as real (such as ‘humanity’ or ‘world’) can have no actual, exemplary presence whose dimensions we can measure. The individual things our words signify and define evidently have limited existences in space-time; were those descriptive terms the criteria our experience of reality depends on, then neither our ‘humanity’ nor the ‘world’ could have a real presence on which an evolutionary future could depend. Thus although what is ‘real’ is held a priori to be measurable and to have measurable effects in a predictable future, those outcomes are said by much of our science to occur by chance. However, although the brain-activity that minds depend on can be measured, no causal relation can possibly be established between a particular thought and experimentally observed brain-events. We decide whatever it is that we call knowledge. Thus our thinking calls the future tune. This stumps those nominalist and positivist philosophers who, discrediting the possibility that a thought-act transcends spatio-temporal experience, cannot

Introduction

7

resolve the logical problem of a world we take to be real enough for the conduct of everyday life on the evidence of ordinary intuition. If, by the same token (concerning limits to knowledge) it is clear that, even at the end of time, everything that is the case could not be known, that is because again, a logical contradiction is entailed: the leap of imagination by which we move from a world in which each thing we claim to know is known by not being some other thing is apparently incompatible with the principle of positive knowledge; and yet it is precisely due to the limited temporal condition of our being in spacetime that our separate existences with apparently incompatible viewpoints occur. Only if everything that is the case under those temporal conditions were known could individuals see naturally eye-to-eye: then, as Paul the Apostle (also concerned with the principle of logos) puts it, I should “know even as also I am known”.3 At this point, concerning our examination of the Tractatus, we anticipate the problem of indeterminacy in particle physics; for, without the passage of time in the physical realm, there could be no spatial distinction between bodies. Were all things naturally subsumed by the presence of unitary being, then the spatiotemporal conditions for the existence of individuals who, in consequence of embodiment, know, could no longer obtain. Further, with regard to the issue of knowing, it must not be forgotten that the problem of this dichotomy between individual and corporate existence arises in consequence of an evolutionary process producing consciousness in the case of the human species: although cognitive activities naturally serve the interests of corporate survival, in human society cognitive activity becomes the vehicle of individual enfranchisement. Thus the thought-forms required to ensure the security of our common interest as a species together must be voluntarily learned. In reality, the Higgs Bosun particle is not floating: if outcomes seem indeterminate, indeterminacy is the product of

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the human condition.4 If, at the evolutionary summit we choose, that is the condition of evolutionary fulfilment. The account of a dichotomy between one and all is mirrored in the general drift of the Tractatus: “[6.113] It is a specific characteristic of logical sentences that their truthfulness is recognised in the [linguistic] symbol alone, and this fact subsumes the whole of philosophy. Thus it is also among the most important facts that the truth or falsehood of illogical sentences cannot be signified only symbolically”. He means that although we have signifying words pointing to things, the issue we grasp can only be intuited; for the sum of things pointed to with words there is no word. Thus Wittgenstein continues: “[6.12] That the sentences of logic are tautologies points to the formal - logical - character of language, of the world.” In other words, while the specificities of things can be named, for the meaning that we grasp there are only more words: the drift may be understood but it cannot be named. The application of our words to particular circumstances and the value they have within the governing structure of the logos cannot be consistently clear as related propositions are in pure mathematical logic: the application of words depends on context, and all such contexts involve two or more parties communicating. Thus - as Wittgenstein insists throughout the Tractatus - the resolution of apparent tautology is a moral problem. In the closing proposition of the Tractatus Wittgenstein concedes to the empirical facts of social conduct, effectively acknowledging that in practise the resolution of a dilemma depends not on the logic of agreed verbal constructions but on goodwill, so that “[7] Of that whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent.” So also, in the penultimate proposition [6.54], Wittgenstein is pointing out that my logical sentences are illuminating in that the other recognises their ‘unsinn’ (the German has not the English connotation ‘nonsense’ but simply the ‘notmaking-sense’). Wittgenstein means that although my formulation has illuminated the other’s view of what is the case (and of what needs to be done), the truth is

Introduction

9

decided between us; the other must therefore “(so to speak, throw away the ladder he climbed up with). He must master/come to terms with this sentence formulation, then he will see the world rightly”. If the logic of Wittgenstein’s conclusion about the autonomy of individuals cannot contradict the fact of unitary being, then the experience of a personal existence and our enactments of contradictory knowledge are evolutionary norms. In Wittgenstein’s terms, misunderstandings are indeed a precondition for our further evolution, so that we must ask if the dimension in which our acts of thought occur is not self-evidently timeless. Time is not simply a linear dimension we inhabit with our bodies, but a reality present to us in our thinking. Acknowledging it as common sense that the whole we experience and call ‘the world’, being present through time, is not the corruptible body we locate from the viewpoint of a space-capsule, the issue is immediately clear (and also to common sense!): there can be no doubt that all acts of thought are metaphysical. It follows also that the death of these bodies (whether human or planetary) cannot signify the end of the reality we experience as present to us in time: the transcendent ‘world’ with which we are actually cognate in our thinking comprises a relational immediacy with all that is. Embodied in time, the material foundation of that relational flux is that indeterminate field which is the object of knowledge in particle physics. That world is indeed “everything that is the case” and, being conscious within it, our species moves forward to constitute that unitary being - in time, and under the given conditions of planetary life. As far as truths are concerned, and with regard to what is called ‘positivism’, logical prescriptions do not apply themselves to the phenomena: they can be applied by the human subject only to the spatio-temporal phenomena external to himself; ‘external’, however, not to his unlimited subjectivity but to his physical body. Hence, John Gray, John Searle, Stephen Pinker and others like them, whose anti-religious secularism dominates the contemporary intellectual consensus,

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suppose that cognitive activity (including our apprehension of the supposed reality) reduces to ‘brain-events’ and neuro-chemistry and is in no sense the product of an autonomous mind. This raises interesting questions (beyond the scope of this work) in that, in the absence of any philosophically acceptable religious prescription concerning human destiny, Karl Marx substituted an economic collectivism whose moral foundation was its universality. Since this, however, could be achieved only in economic practise, nation-statism and the sanctity of a capitalism underwritten by the absolute autonomy of individuals, effectively continues to support the epistemological falsehoods of an antireligious intellectualism in Western societies. Although the positivist’s methods of verification cannot be applied to the thinking agent whose doubt and questioning invites the experiment, if that agent is not presumed - a priori and without ‘scientific’ evidence - to exist as a person5, he must explain how the experiment occurs in the absence of his metaphysicallypresent person. Don’t tell me what ‘knows’ is his brain chemistry! The agent of every conclusion the positivist draws from his observations is evidently a subjective consciousness directing the thought process. Although that enquiring presence of the human is real and is the evident cause of what he does experimentally in the pursuit of knowledge, it cannot be reductible to the physical processes on which his embodied being in time depends. Although the necessary a priori being of the knower evidently transcends the boundaries of what is empirically known, being conscious of this is not a normative state. As Rudolf Steiner remarks in The Boundaries of Natural Science, “… the experience of the external world coalesces with man’s inner life, and … he makes subjective what ought to have remained objective … One lives too deeply within oneself.”6 Consequently, the experimental method assists objectivity in the sciences, while the apparent subjective-objective dichotomy poses the false dilemma between spiritual and material dimensions of knowledge

Introduction

11

which is typical of our time; a dilemma to which Steiner first addressed himself at the end of the nineteenth century. With regard to the experiential flux within which our consciousness is situated, the general drift of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is also conceptually related to the explanatory methods of the New Physics. When he says that “The reality is to be compared with the sentence.” [4.05] it follows his discussion of grammatical descriptions of the world whose logical order informs the speaker’s words, so that (taking the point further in [6.3431]): “We must not forget that all mechanistic descriptions of the world are entirely general. They are, for example, never about any specific point in material terms, always about any at all”. Discussing the sentence, Wittgenstein is concerned about zusammenhang (making sense, the ‘sense’ being given by the human perspective) while in the case of mechanics in the physical realm, whatever is specific in a theoretical field of related parts has a geometric identity within the same indeterminate whole. With regard to indeterminism and the matter of cognition, in his Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead explains that the experience we have of an enduring reality informing our consciousness of the world is effectively the experience of a whole which cannot reduce to the spatio-temporal parts composing it: I mean that endurance is the property of finding that a total event carries an enduring pattern … an intrinsic value identical for the whole and for its succession [he means ‘in time’] of parts. Cognition is the emergence, into some measure of individualised reality, of the general substratum of activity… 7 that is, in the activity of the quanta composing the material firmament, the events we experience resonate with the presence of a unitary whole greater than ourselves; a being whose grasp in us of the phenomena, depends on the presence in our linguistic usage of the structure Wittgenstein calls logos, for neither the objective event nor the experience of it can be the product of particles. Thus, in acts of cognition Whitehead tells us, the phenomena themselves speak to that

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unitary presence in our consciousness. Thus, in the narrative of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the truthfulness of scientific propositions is subject to the a priori presence of that logos. In the context of the problem of indeterminism, as far as positive, empirical fact is concerned, that indeterminism in the material foundation is the very condition of our human nature. Furthermore, our interpretation of that drift in physical theory concerns the notion that ‘the world’ throughout time is a composite, evolutionary whole: since whatever we understand in a so-called ‘scientific’ sense must impinge on, and be of consequence for, all other human activity, then the division of knowledge between a religious and a secular realm is a dangerous red herring in a global community which increasingly confronts the accumulating problems of planetary cohabitation. As far as Steiner’s theory of knowledge is concerned there is no such dichotomy. His epistemological viewpoint is drawn from the writings on science of Wolfram Amadeus Goethe, whose Mephistopheles tells us (in Faust): He who seeks knowledge of living things First tried to drive out spirit’s wings; In his hands the separate parts lie dead Unjoined, alas, by spirit’s living thread. that is, the reality of the world we apprehend in normative experience transcends and is a priori to) all analysis. In his Where on Earth is Heaven? Jonathan Stedall showed that Goethe was aware that the achievement of objectivity was not the only problem of knowledge: “Goethe … was also aware of the danger of subjectivity when he wrote: ‘The senses do not deceive; the judgement deceives’.8 ****** As far as the stable order of our societies is concerned, what we normally take to be thought is polarised between mental habit (of the sort on which a status quo depends) on the one hand, and, on the other, the departmentalised cognitive

Introduction

13

activities of an intelligentsia whose abstract ideas are as essential to the maintenance of that order as are the mental habits we practise every day, conforming as required to ensure the welfare of kith and kin. Those habits of thought ‘insure’ (underwrite) such conditions only for the time being: no society can afford to ignore the evolutionary necessity of adaptation and change as circumstance requires. Is it not that elastic and invisible limb (thinking), that movement we can learn to direct as it constantly streams out from our subjective being towards the phenomena, which unveils the reality we commonly agree to call “the world”? Am I, like you - the ordinary citizen minding his business to look after his own so perplexed by the conflicting narratives underpinning the politics of power that to think at all beyond the requirements of livelihood is to risk upsetting the quotidian order our lives depend on; an order in which we have invested as much as we have to give? For, if circumstances require the active suspension of thought for the sake of peace of mind, to mind one’s own business is then to invite the collapse of the civilized order on which, for the time being, so much depends. It was precisely in such circumstances, where vast regions of Central Asia had succumbed to the small-mindedness of tribalism, that Ghinghis Khan swept in to upset the prevailing order; for every dictum which pretends to explain all possible futures to suit instituted norms without the contingency of my viewpoint and without further thought, excludes and reduces the complexity of a real world, underwriting its own reduced perspectives. Hence the opening proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus provides no epistemological certainties whatever: it asserts simply that “The world is everything that is the case”.9 As if to make a similar point about the provisional nature of ‘norms’, a recent satirical article in Le Monde10 discusses the Greek Euro-default as if it were the revelation of an unsustainable Euro-bonding. Thus Greek political convenience can be seen to defend an old European order against immanent, more global

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economic association: we learn that, via a dynamic economic association with China and India, Greece may well out-do the Europe of her immanent failure by “becoming the commercial hub of the Southern Mediterranean”. So it is that, to understand the life-giving nature and substance of cognitive activity in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, we must grasp the fact of its presence and movement, more or less consciously, in every human being irrespective of current political alignment; a cognitive presence which, in evolutionary terms, clearly supercedes, in the case of our species, the role played in animal organisms by genetic predisposition; providing that is, that we choose individually to exercise the common faculty concerned, for the useful engagement of our thought with concrete reality cannot be the prerogative of competing political economies. Everybody does thinking: and yet we have succeeded, since the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, in shaping a world – an everyday life – which confronts the knowledge arising in us as common sense as if that knowledge were incapable of constructively shaping a common and shared political reality: hardly daring to ask if the expert knowledge underpinning our institutions could be at fault, we continue to depend on it, failing to think for ourselves. When common sense tells us that government cannot prevent migrating insects and winged birds from contaminating organic crops with genetically modified seed from an adjacent field by edict and stipulates a ‘safe’ corridor, we defer, by habit, to those who are presumed to know. We do so, wondering how insects and birds are to be informed that this regulation must be obeyed; or, if they are to be exempted, on what grounds? We can hardly claim ‘because they are not human’, since the biological sciences have withdrawn the privileged classification previously distinguishing humans from animals. We are even, according to Richard Dawkins, “privileged to be lumps of matter”, a point of view which in logic (of which there is little evidence in Dawkins’ thought), entails the conclusion that even the formal common sense distinctions we make between

Introduction

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abstract material particles (“lumps of matter”) and plants, and between plants and animals are the subjective constructs of a human viewpoint which has no scientific foundation. The actual thoughts which might reasonably make such self-evident distinctions, are themselves, in Dawkins’ book, also “lumps of matter” shunted between synapses in the brain; if these are the causally determined processes which shape our thoughts then ‘presence of mind’ is indeed the misnoma he takes it to be. Such an account of our presence in the evolutionary process is quite clearly a philosophical nonsense founded on epistemological ill-logic; yet, during the twentieth century, this ill-logic has, like a cancerous, unicellular growth, created the very intellectual consensus which currently reduces our thinking (and with it, our humanity) to the status of an impotent bystander. Thus it is that our fate appears to be entirely in the hands of those institutional inertias which move corporations and nation states. In such a cancerous climate of thought, as far its ill-logic is concerned it is above all (with the exception of the writings of a small fraternity of physicists and philosophers like Eddington, Schrödinger, Bohm and Whitehead and, as we shall show, Rudolph Steiner) to Ludwig Wittgenstein that we must turn in order to recover our philosophical senses and to grasp the relation, in reality, between logic and common sense; for Wittgenstein asserts that “logic precedes all experience” (Tractatus 5.552), and points out that this assertion about the given structural foundation of knowledge is, and can be, articulated in any case only by the human subject who thinks. Thus the existence of such a foundation cannot be evident in an experimental process called ‘objective’ whose very illogical purpose is to by-pass the presence of the thinker whose questioning directs the experiment. Wittgenstein realised that the principles of logic which underlie our discovery in science of the regularity of the phenomena and the rules governing their

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appearance do not justify the reduction of our primary intuition of “the world” to those rules on which the behaviour of its physical phenomena and processes are grounded.11 ‘The Tartar’ (the metaphor we have chosen to represent Wittgenstein’s relationship with the conventions of epistemological narrative) is his own man: he stands in for that dimension of reality whose otherness seems threatening; ‘threatening’ that is, as far as prevailing assumptions about human nature and required social norms are concerned. The account given here of the message in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is based entirely on the author’s reading of the original German text without reference to the corpus of critical texts interpreting Wittgenstein’s life and work. ***** Wittgenstein’s Tractatus must be understood against the general backdrop of philosophy in the English-speaking world since the end of the Middle Ages, whose drift is as follows: whatever knowledge we may claim to have about reality springs from no determinate and enduring metaphysical source but from our experimental observation of the physical phenomena we are engaged with; ‘engaged with’ in consequence of our embodiment in, and economic dependence on, that same physical dimension. We intend to show that the form and content of a thinking activity that is evidently metaphysical cannot logically be given by an order of existences that are discrete in space and time and whose being at all in time is contingent on that physical discontinuity. Thus the transcendence of thinking logically necessitates the existence of a formal logos order informing the physical phenomena, in space and through time, within the material ground (matter) which, in and for itself is indeterminate and without form or structure. We therefore see the physical realm of space-time from that transcendent perspective in our enacted thought. Without that transcendence (which the antiGod lobby denies) there could be neither cognitive acts we call thinking nor any knowledge of the evolutionary process by which the world becomes conscious in

Introduction

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our thought processes; for it is in that thought and its human dimension that the evolutionary process is articulate. A sense of our physical proximity with and our being in the reality as we define it provides the sense of ontological security on which our stable existence in that indeterminate flux depends. However, that physical proximity also deceives: the evident fact that, in the activity of thinking, we transcend spatio-temporal boundaries, knowing ourselves and knowing the phenomena in an interactive growth-process, has been obscured in the perspective of materialism. Although increasing knowledge about the material and physical phenomena has enabled us to instrumentalise nature for the benefit of humanity, our control over nature and access to information about its processes now dominate our political vision while the absence of international agreement about consensual norms of social order ensures that competing political interests keep the matter of shaping our global future to suit survival off the agenda. The ethical problems of knowledge troubled Wittgenstein throughout his life. Alfred Ayer’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Philosophy at Oxford articulated the classical take on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Discussing the issue of the relationship between non-natural objects like universal concepts and the physical objects they are supposed to name, he challenged the assumption by medieval philosophers, that if words ‘named’ the physical phenomena, then those words predicated transcendent ideas in an enduring realm of being. The concept ‘horse’, according to Ayer, was not an existing being or entity since no such ‘being’ could be sentiently perceived or quantified; that is to say : “No single, unitary thing can exist in a multiplicity of things”, as the being of the horse is said to inhabit each sense- perceptible horse.12 Occam, in the thirteenth century, anticipates modernity. Occam argued this point on the premise that the “things” composing his “multiplicity” are not (as in the physical realm) informed by a unitary essence

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since no one thing can be unitary and plural at the same time. That is, he assumed an identity of thingness among both signifying concepts and their referential, named objects in sentient experience. But it is the common form of things physical that composes the unitary essence of their species, and if the informing essence of that logos cannot be physical, then there is no such contradiction between one and many. Indeed, if the physical things grow and evolve in a firmament of material particles, then no thing is immutable except in respect of that informing essence by which individual members of a species are identified as one. The principle that the single unitary thing is not present in the multiplicity is true only in mathematical terms where each integer is either an individual or a multiple of the single unit.13 According to Occam’s (and Ayer’s) premise, the content of the thought concepts we represent in words (the horseness of individual horses we may point to and quantify in science) is therefore not real: it is a purely nominal abstraction. According to Ayer, the content of a thought thus has no substance in the empirical reality defined by science. Since science proceeds from a recognition of the world by human subjectivity, a science that fails to comprehend that subjectivity is no science at all. It is in accord with Ayer’s nominalist logic that all entities comprising the reality as we experience it are quantifiable in space-time. For this proposition, however, there can be no scientific justification, if only because, whereas one can verify experimentally what is the case, with regard to the external phenomena of circumstance, the conclusions drawn depend on the consciousness the subject has of the effect of his own viewpoint. Although experimental methods theoretically by-pass a personal viewpoint, the experimental results can nevertheless be argued. If not, knowledge of what has yet to be in time is ruled out a priori. According to Ayer, the philosophy of positivism (and the veracity of the experimental method) reached a turning point with the advent of the linguistic philosophy on which his

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19

nominalism rests. But for every logical system there is another premise: in pure mathematics, at which of course Wittgenstein excelled, the order is numerical and every integer is unreferential except to others within that order; the logic of an argument about conclusions drawn from experimental evidence however, depends on the assumed premises. Thus the logical order given in the syntax of language varies according to contexts given by the sentient existences of circumstance in space-time whose narrative drift depends on the observer. It is evidently for this reason that Wittgenstein emphasises the tautologous relationship between the sentences of pure logic and their application: until they are employed to validate the incommensurate specificities of a real world seen from different standpoints, they illuminate nothing but each other. Knowledge is not the determinate product of ‘external’ causes but a consensus established in the course of time between apparently incommensurate viewpoints. In the thought-acts of a social consensus the concept formations evolve, transcending time. Ayer takes it that Wittgenstein’s conclusions in logic justify the fundamental position of nominalism, that reality must be measurable. Thus, according to Ayer, in the Tractatus: due to “the shift in Wittgenstein’s philosophy from the metaphor of treating words as pictures to the metaphor of treating words as tools”, Wittgenstein delivered a final blow to the subjective presupposition of naive realism that (a) meaning (what words signify) has an objective foundation in a purely metaphysical or spiritual realm; and (b) that this invisible order governs the behaviour of phenomena in the sentient realm. Ayer concluded (as he supposed, following Wittgenstein’s logic), that: “Linguistic signs are meaningful, but there are no such things as meanings”; meaning that words are not meaningful in any absolute sense but only as nominal signifiers we use to communicate. We therefore communicate about a world composed of finite existences and having a no more enduring foundation that we do, who happen, by the chance processes of a random evolution, to be here

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articulating it. We use words as instruments to signify and point to a reality only as far as the sentient phenomena are concerned (what Shakespeare pointed to, we are not told). It is the appearance of the phenomena in that physical world alone which is real, and we articulate the reality only in respect of assertions about things whose truthfulness can be determined experimentally; that is: things known scientifically to occupy fixed points which have been located empirically, such that these objects or processes reappear predictably wherever the same laws apply. Logically therefore (so Ayer argues) no purely formal or spiritual constants can exist in some transcendent and enduring realm beyond space and time. His logic however, is founded on the premise that, in whatever dimension of experience a thing is real, that reality is the product of causally determined processes we can measure in space-time. As we shall see, according to the logic of Wittgenstein’s argument in the Tractatus, this viewpoint is fallacious because its premises, in fact, are illogical: no proposition could be understood if every referent required a spatio-temporally defined presence; for in all acts of comprehension the whole inter-active field of the sensory phenomena is predicated in a composite relation on which intelligibility depends; the composing parts signify only themselves. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray” is comprehensible only if it entails the notion of sheepness. Understanding will advance only when every prejudice about possible conclusions is suspended. Things observed relationally articulate what otherwise cannot be said. Ayer (as he saw it, on the foundation of Wittgenstein’s logic) did no more than reaffirm the logical principle put forward by William of Occam in the 13th century to which we have already referred: that “no universal thing can exist in a multiplicity of things”, from which he concluded that words are merely nominal abstractions. But if words were merely tools which point to and show the phenomena, what then are the concepts which inform the thought? For, if from Occam to Ayer it has seemed that concepts are not real, is the mind - which calls all presumed certainties in question - non-existent? What does it mean when we

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say: “the thought crossed my mind”; and what is it to have ‘presence of mind’? Furthermore, if mind is indeed non-existent spatio-temporally, then where is it, and why are we so sure, existentially, that we are here if we claim to know the world that crosses our minds as a neuro-chemical event in the physical brain? That on logical grounds the movement of thought must occur independently of the physical limitations in space-time governing the objects we think about, is the conclusion drawn in the Tractatus; a conclusion which learnèd commentary, in the English-speaking world, has obscured to suit its own materialist agenda. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus stands the anti-metaphysical propositions of nominalism and logical positivism on their sedentary heads. Thought, like the figure of Christ in the poem The Twelve by Alexander Blok, pierces the myth of materialism and exposes both the brute facts of space-time and the so-called imperatives which limit our being in the world as free agents. Thought shapes our use of words as tools for understanding the world according to the same logic informing the genesis of that world in time: in our thinking we transcend the spatio-temporal boundaries of its objects and enter the realm of the logos (the governing, relational order of the reality which we denominate) to become co-authors of its future narrative. Notwithstanding the opinion of Frederick Ayer and like-minded colleagues, that is the message (according to the reading of a Nobody Author) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. “The Tartar” (we said) “stands in for a dimension of reality whose otherness seems threatening.” If we are to stand our customary reality (our materialist perspective) on its head, the intention is not to replace it with an anarchist’s flux in which nothing is fixed, but to point out that this materialist perspective is the product of the deeply-rooted, very British conviction in English language philosophy (first predicated by the Lord Verulam, Francis Bacon, in the Elizabethan era) that although the measurable dimensions of our existence fluctuate in time, our being through time is not instrumentally observable, so that

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the reality is not in the enduring concept but in the perishable goods. As far as my own (the author’s) perishable goods are concerned, and the conviction that an enduring reality informs the physical world, my dear mother, giving birth to me in that same city of St Alban’s, unwittingly served the cause of my determination to put Bacon’s philosophy in its place as the cornerstone of reductionist nominalism. What better place to start! Once it is clear, as the Tractatus makes plain, that the decisive factor in our relations with the physical realm of space-time is our thinking activity and concept-formation, then the enduring and formal constraints of the logos whose order preceded evolution and now sustains its product will become apparent, for our comprehension of the world is a unitary experience not given in the physical realm of discrete and corruptible phenomena. The ineluctable processes of nature – the elementals, whose activities it is our habit to call ‘fate’ – no longer appear, like the invading Tartar, only on the distant horizons of idealism or romanticism: they are present with us in our thinking. So also our thinking is evidence of the active presence in us of a composite reality which cannot be positively known within the temporal limits of existence. The manner in which the truthfulness of that being-present-in-us of the world depends on our cognitive acts is the main drift of the Tractatus. In this narrative, Wittgenstein is not only the Tartar, he is also the healer he wanted to be. ****** Finally, let’s put the philosophical issues in a political perspective, for if the metaphysics of more ancient traditions seems incompatible with modernity, the figure of modernity itself is that of iconoclasm. Asked what he thought of his “Baloon Flower” sculpture selling in 2008 for £13m (ten times the ‘value’ of a Poussin he happened to own) Jeff Koons thought a moment and replied: “Everything turns to dust”.

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The values of the past threw light on things that endured. Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” reduced the dignity of renaissance classicism to the conspicuous stuff of a brush-stroke which formerly served as a quiescent and self-effacing instrument of a whole composition. Contemporary histories of art failed to perceive that the bottom line is the value of whatever it is in the human perspective that endures. This, with the advent of modernity, the West has forgotten. So it is that at the moment when the monolith of communism collapsed (and with it the idea of the equality of our collective inputs to the economy) and Islam began to emerge, replacing the political equality of humanity with a reversion to the notion of equality before God, Salman Rushdie, the atheist, produced his “Satanic Verses”. Aside from the matter of provocation and the extremism of Islamic reaction, effectively (if not intentionally) this work underpinned that secularist iconoclasm in the West on which capitalism depends: ‘enduring values’ are a challenge to the commodity-oriented consumer economy. ‘God’ is an anachronism. Thus the final triumph of modernity was to provide a narrative revoking the values of a universally-given order (the logos which illuminates the Tractatus) in the interests of the individual and of the egotism on which capitalism continues to thrive. Hardly surprising in these circumstances that the relevance to the controversies of Western philosophy of the Iranian Illuminationists (whom we discuss in our closing chapter) is obscured by a political concern for the security of the Israeli state, as if Israel were the last-ditch stand of Western individualism. Moses - with whose forebears in Sumeria all three monotheisms have their origins - is certainly disappointed. Indeed speaking of Sumerian origins, the political context of the fattwa smacks of the Aryan invader: systematically extinguishing the inner light and complexity of the human inheritance, he substitutes the hegemony of the purely genetic form in the service of a dominant commerce; a

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variety and complexity of goods is OK but the resistance of some cultures to commodity fetishism is the product of traditions which safeguard enduring values. Notes: Penguin Books, 2012. According to Gray, who considers such philosophy a futile attempt to cheat death, our ‘ordinary reality’ is indeed without meaning, for “There’s no such thing as human progress, and science cannot save us.” (in The Independent on Sunday, 30 January 2012).

1

2

epistemology: Greek episteme, knowledge.

3

Paul the Apostle; The First Letter to the Corinthians, ch. 13 vs. 12.

For Steiner’s research on the divorce in modern knowledge between theoretical perspectives and the human experience, see his lecture “The world-view in recent science” (27 March 1920); in Fachwissenschaften und Anthroposophie; Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2005, in which he discusses the implications of Einstein’s relativity concept for our normative experience of ordinary reality. 4

All anti-metaphysicians are obliged to acknowledge ordinary usage and refer to the being of themselves and of other persons. Were ‘person’ to signify a physical body only, a great deal of research would be required to explain the reliable continuity of friendship. The anti-metaphysical posture is purely intellectual and those who adopt it use a language whose terms of usage entails continuous reference to the realm of being. The person is on an evolutionary path towards a goal of completion represented in ordinary discourse with the use of the term ‘I’: employed alike by all others whom I am not, it denominates the presence in themselves of the unitary being we are not yet. Employing the term ‘I’ to signify myself, I experience that unitary being knowing perfectly well that you are not me. 5

Rudolph Steiner, The Boundaries of Natural Science; Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley N.Y. The Introduction to this translation is by Saul Bellow.

6

7

A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World; Penguin Books 1938.

Jonathan Stedall, Where on Earth is Heaven?; Hawthorn Press, 2009. See also Rudolf Steiner’s exegesis of Goethe’s epistemology: The Science of Knowing: outline of an epistemology implicit in the Goethean world-view; Mercury Press N. Y. 1988. In his scientific writing Goethe opposed the dualism of Kant’s philosophy.

8

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Tractatus logico-philosophicus: Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung; Ludwig Wittgenstein. Edition Suhrkamp, 1966. All references to this work in the present text draw on the author’s translation.

9

“A Greece which laughs while Germany weeps”; Le Monde, Sunday-Monday 8-9 April, 2012.

10

“The concept of objectivity, which logical absolutism”[he might have said “ positivism”, author] “brings as an offering to the world, cannot dispense with the one concept from which, above all, objectivity takes its model, that of an object we call the world”. Theodor Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie; Edition Suhrkamp SV 1970. 11

William of Occam. Quoted by Anne Freemantle in The Age of Belief; Mentor (New American Library) 1954.

12

13

see “The method of mathematics”, (6.2341) and (6.24) in the Tractatus.

CHAPTER 1 Wittgenstein the Tartar Vienna, “a proving ground for world destruction”. Karl Krauss

In Vienna the oil-lit lamp accentuates the cornices of the high-ceilinged room, the white undershirts laid out on the chaise-longue and the blood red impeccable uniform which hangs on the door of a commode; a commode melting in the black shadow of a room whose darkness comforts, softening the weight of the Biedemeier, relieving somewhat the ponderous duties of Empire preoccupying the mind of the Captain. The atmosphere was portentous. In one week, Vienna, the comfortable house of his parents, the excited voices of siblings returning from school, would be displaced. In his room, next to the office of the Commandant, there would be silence, plain wood furniture, a window overlooking a courtyard, stables, the fort ramparts whose watch he was to supervise. An eternity during which his vigil would not once be rewarded with the least verifiable trace of the fabled Tartar to

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whose whirlwind incursion from nowhere Europe, and everything he held dear, might one day succumb. Or so Dino Buzzati, in his Desert of the Tartars, imagines it.1 As the Viennese themselves have imagined it. A brooding, unacknowledged sense of insecurity since Suleiman, whose armies sat at the city gates for three months in 1529, lifted his siege and withdrew through the Balkans, consolidating the foundations of Ottoman power. The crescent moon, seen at the pinnacle of the cathedral by Suleiman’s forces as an augury of conquest, had been removed in 1638 by the Austrian emperor and never restored. The celebrated croissant, prized as a breakfast delicacy across Europe, became an ever-present memento, a talisman for the sedentary heart whose eternity is measured by the reliable, twelve-hour cycle of the mantelpiece clock. An insurance against the logic by which, with regard to our pragmatism and the reality it upholds, nature and its creative powers ineluctably oversees the decline and fall of civilizations. Not an insurance only: a wager even; a wager favouring gilt-edged investment, the triumph of modernism, of an enduring present which obscures the interests of the long term. For who will remind us of, or dare to define, a reality which is accessible only to the insane and to clerics who presume to know what is in the mind of God? That is, a reality in which it becomes clear that the ordinary words by which we define it, and so determine our values, are the yardsticks by which we construct a parallel universe which is human; which answers to that logic and not the other way round. A universe in which the possible and more perfect reality whose existence we pragmatically disparage, is never an abstraction culled from the critique of pure reason but a fluid and vital continuum, whose constructed form conforms to the laws of nature and space-time and whose only articulate agent is human. For in every object we touch and see, inheres that same logic of syntax and grammar which shapes and organises the ordinary language we use to describe the reality; a logic which governs our conduct of everyday affairs, so that the eternal values we mistakenly ascribe to subjective intuition, attempting to reduce them to

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abstractions, are immanent, always present with us in the activity of our thinking. So present that Buzzati’s captain, who longs to see the Tartar on a literal horizon (just once would have been enough!), discovers that unsettling force already active in our midst. In reality we must ask: who or what was it at the gates of Vienna? Suleiman’s armies? Nietzsche with his apocalyptic nihilism? The dialectical materialism of Karl Marx? Freud’s suppressed libidinous energies? The Authorities in Kafka’s The Castle? Or was it a far more subtle enemy; a disarmingly innocent strategist wearing his heart on his sleeve, but whose formidable intelligence would expose the logical errors by which Europe, since the end of the Middle Ages, stood the intuited reality of human experience on its head; substituting instead the hypothesis that the common experience of this reality boiled down to the fiction of superstitious minds so that nothing we think we know in ordinary discourse justifies any claim to knowledge if it does not pass muster by empirical experiment? Within the sanctuary of Cambridge University, the message that “The world is everything that is the case” was, and still is, taken to mean that the world as we claim to know it is the totality of empirically established facts about it; facts, moreover, which therefore exclude the being of the subject who proposes the experimental proofs, since the prior existence of the subject can be an experimental object only with regard to his corporeal and spatio-temporal presence in a physical body. It is however an empirical fact that the numinous presence of something (as Wittgenstein calls it) which unites the plenum of material objects prior to our thinking and knowing must antedate the evolutionary appearance of our human consciousness. That unitary being is logically prior to our supposed knowledge of a world which is indeed empirically proven to exist but a posteriori. That is: after the subject has intuited the fact of its being there with himself the observer, he makes of that world an experimental object,

 

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including himself as the subjective agent; a self, in fact, whose agency - which is evident to common sense - he must circumvent methodologically. The man in the street recognises the illogical nonsense of a world known to exist in common sense being called in question; he knows on grounds of common sense, even if it escapes the philosopher; for the epistemological point escapes both Russell and Moore. Claiming a philosophy of ‘Realism’ they describe a universe having a plenum of material objects on the one hand, and consciousness in humans on the other, as if both must not first be reciprocally interactive before anything is known.2 This howler in common sense is due to the psychology of the rationalist: the experience of his own consciousness is so sanitised by analysis he needs a reminder that, though brain events do occur by themselves in the best interests of the human organism, acts of cognition require presence of mind; for in ordinary experience, in every act of our knowing, both material objects and our consciousness of them are the ingredient constituents. The world cannot be known without my conscious presence as subject; nor can the subject be conscious without re-cognition of the object he is not; for the rationalist also needs a reminder that, in acts of cognition, it is the fact of physical embodiment (our being here and not there) which is the occasion of our being conscious: “Thou art not that” may suit God in the Upanishads, but here and now I am not that, and (unlike God) I am named. As far as the rationalist’s confusion of the before and after of the advent of the human consciousness is concerned, beyond the embodiment on which our consciousness depends, all that is, is inter-related unitary being; a being which is without the located consciousness our human evolution provides. Hence the logically necessary pre-evolutionary being, or conjunction, of both objective world and consciousness (‘prior’ that is to Russell and Moore’s human acts of knowing) is a fact for which rationalism cannot account. In the ontology of Russell and Moore both the realm of material objects and the consciousness

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perceiving it are abstract ideas needing neither a spatio-temporal location nor a numinous presence to conceive them. Although they are in theory the constituent and complementary aspects of a unitary reality, the reality concerned has not been experienced because the real presence of a subject is not required by intellectual abstractions purporting to represent a real world.3 ****** That the existential import of Wittgenstein’s assertion about what is logically the case (systematically developed in the Tractatus with implications for the status in reality of common sense) has so far eluded the consensus in contemporary philosophy, is an index of the magnitude of the investment by western societies, since the beginnings of modernism, in utilities that intensify human engagement with the material world beyond the threshold of common sense. The benefits of that engagement are essential to our future ability to free labour from the productive process so that human society, globally, can exercise its responsibility for the planet collectively. But not only has the development of capitalism since the Industrial Revolution impounded those released energies: it has done so with the assistance of philosophy; for philosophy has consistently extrapolated from experimental prejudices about factual reality so that ethical notions of goals, which might shape our future, are invalidated as forms of knowledge.4 Wittgenstein’s achievement, in the Tractatus, is to have provided a logical argument, to which neither Frege nor Russell had answers, justifying our assertions about the logical priority of being at all; an argument which so unsettles resistance to the metaphysical dimensions of human experience that the literary narrative focusing on Vienna since the siege of Suleiman appears to culminate in the Tractatus; for the Tractatus invites us to stand the comfortable reality of materialism on its head. No wonder that Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and its Enemies, made such a fuss about the poker in his debate with Wittgenstein at Cambridge.5 Metaphysics, for Popper, is the weapon of tyrannies.

 

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Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is an attack on nominalism and the logical errors of the inductive method: in defending the proposition that logic itself is transcendental, yet rooted in ordinary experience, the Tractatus reveals the world that we know in common sense must exist prior to our acts of positive knowledge. The metaphysically-present is thus the reality which, although for the time being unknown, is the province of the Tartar we have never seen; which means (with regard to the problem of knowledge), that the Tartar signifies a world we know intuitively before the first proposition about it can be uttered; an ever-present reality which our culture of materialism teaches us to fear because it cannot be reduced to a measurable or quantifiable process and so to a commodity for consumption. Thus Wittgenstein stood with Buzzati’s captain on the ramparts of his fort; he stood with the defenders at Suleiman’s siege, and he embraced the enemy. As Vladimir Soloviev, his contemporary, also did when he remarked: “Pan-mongolism: the word is music to my ears.”6 The chronometer on the mantelpiece, that measure of sedentary contentment, had come to a stop. The Tartar was at the gates. According to the book of Genesis, the Word was in the beginning, but whose? It can’t have been Suleiman’s, for he withdrew. Was it Hitler’s, or Wittgenstein’s? In the school photograph, Hitler is top right, and Wittgenstein is three from the right in the row below. Yes, in Vienna; in the same class. ***** According to our contemporary understanding of evolution (a process taking place in time) humanity, that singular creature which is distinguished from all others by its ability to think and use words, did not, in the beginning, exist in any real sense; that is, in any sense the new Europe of twentieth-century postRomanticism would call ‘real’. Neither the human being, nor any word he might

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in future, in the fullness of time, speak, was there in the beginning. We have concluded therefore that the things spoken of in the Judeo-Christian and echoed in the Islamic religious traditions belong to a realm of the irrational which can have no credit-worthy scientific meaning. Let’s look at the notion of causality: this is the idea that an event, a process or a phenomenon can be explained in mechanically-predictable terms by the causal effects of interactive phenomena preceding the appearance in time of the thing we want to explain. When the notion of causality is applied to the process of evolution, a problem remains: the very intention of the explanatory sciences is to tell us why this process and that resulting phenomenon (in this case, the human being), ocurred, and not some other. However, the notion that causal mechanism, in natural selection operating through time, explains the evolutionary process, and so invalidates belief in an intelligent agency of the kind which religion attributes to God, is explanatory in the same sense that religious explanations are. It answers the question: Why? and simply replaces the metaphysical agency that religions ascribe to divine premeditation before time and evolution began, with another which operates mechanically, a cause-and-effect necessity, within time. The only issue objectively differentiating religious and empirical explanation in evolutionary theory is the issue between blind chance and foresight or purposefulness. Common sense tells us that in time there can be no determining factual evidence of future states, so that all outcomes are ours to decide. Thus the doubt on which philosophy depends (as also on the natural will to survive) is evidently an ingredient component of the evolutionary process; it is a subjective addition only in a viewpoint which fails to transcend a temporally-limited human perspective. In the physical world, we are not, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke remarked, “at home” as are the migrating birds. We orientate ourselves by thinking because we are insecure. Needing answers to questions like ‘Why are we here?’ we satisfy our

 

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own thinking with philosophies that resist the in-puts of revelation and instinctual prompting, which we suppose are irrational. Yet who seriously believes that the ethical sensibilities governing the conduct of his life are the product of chance? Those who will not admit them and who find their conduct governed by law must acknowledge that Law proceeds from ethical intuition. According to Wittgenstein, the rules which govern the intuition of law are logical necessity. The primary tool of a humanity athirst for survival is the ability to think; a faculty given not by ineluctable process but by the moral will on which survival in a conscious species must depend. When molecular biologists pronounce, on the basis of evolutionary physiology, that the purpose of evolution is to perpetuate the encrypted codes of hereditary mechanisms, it is as if the evolutionary goal were the mechanism of replication and the matter of what is replicated, accidental. The human being however, actually experiences that hereditary transmission consciously and while he conducts his life knowing that his physical embodiment limits his knowing, in his thinking he nevertheless grasps the nature of all else that is physically present; thus he identifies with a community of being composing the whole earth. It is then clear to him that the validity of evidence adduced in scientific enquiry depends on the logic of his cognitive activity; for whatever order informs truthful thought must also inform and structure the reality to which it refers. This is the reality we call ‘the world’ and being known, it logically includes our subjectivity. This is how Wittgenstein puts it, (6.37) speaking of causal necessity: “There is only the necessity of logic.” (6.371) “Fundamental to the whole contemporary world-view is the misconception that so-called Natural Law is given by natural appearances.” He means: as if the subjective act of interpretation could be bypassed and the phenomena spoke for themselves. But Natural Law has made us its articulate agents; thus our conduct (6.372) “… still hinges on Natural Law as if it were sacred, as our predecessors did on God and Predestination. And each is both

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true and false, although the ancients are clearer in that they explicitly acknowledge and absolute, while the recent system supposes everything is explainable.” Thus (6.373) “The world is, independently of my will.” (6.374) .

“Even if everything we desire were to happen, it would be nothing other than, so to speak, a gift of destiny, for there is no logical connection between will and world which might guarantee this, and it would be beyond us to re-will the presupposed physical connection.” Explanation has to do with the use of words (answering to logic) and is therefore rational. It is a task which belongs to philosophy, whose rules of conduct are determined by logic; it therefore falls outside the strictly objective issue of determining scientific facts and those specific sets of circumstances which recur and reproduce them according to an established law. No scientific facts provide knowledge about anything without reflective thought, and we must think whether we exist (a) because genetic codes require our bodies to transmit their numerical paradigms blindly into the biological future (so that we are excused responsibility), or (b) because, prior to the advent of time, that process was foreseen and willed into being by a non-human agency.7 The answer, according to the Tractatus, can be given only by rational thought and the requirements of logic; a logic whose structural order underpins and informs everything. If that Word was in the beginning, and evidently still is, whose is it now? The answer can come only from a human consensus which thinks to grasp the reality truthfully. If that’s the point (Wittgenstein is asking) how can there be no point: (6.5) “The riddle, there is no such thing./ If a question can be asked at all, so it can also be answered.” (6.51) “For doubt can arise only where a question has arisen; a question only where an answer arises, and this only where something can be said.” For the same reason, and on the same rational principle, those of us who are interested in history and in the remarkable conflict of explanatory ideas which

 

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runs through the human narration of its own condition, have no factual or scientific evidence which would entitle us to read Buzzati’s Desert of the Tartars, the account of Suleiman’s siege of Vienna in Edward Gibbon, Kafka’s The Castle and the Tractatus of Ludwig Wittgenstein and conclude that the common signifiers of an ineffable presence in these narratives are (as Freud suggests in his Civilisation and its Discontents), the product of a forlorn attempt by humanity to invent the inertia of a non-existent, rational dispensation. This invented superstructure (according to Freud) simply expresses the irrepressible libidinous urges of the unconscious. However, the ever-present sense of a metaphysical purpose and meaning expressed figuratively and metaphorically in those narratives, and in all religious perspectives, is pure fiction only in the viewpoint of a bourgeois sedentarism whose goal is the stability and future replication of the cultural fixations of its own kind on which capitalist enterprise depends. It was on the fin-de-siècle navel-scratching of this constituency that Freud constructed his theory of psychoanalysis. The epochal narrative of our hopes and fears impinges, of course, on the conduct of political diplomacy which then shapes our so-called pragmatic ‘reality’. Since that reality is necessitated by our commitment to the economic product of goods and services, our conspicuous consumption of its product must be limited by ‘a field of scarcity’; never mind if the terms are taken from Karl Marx, the ethical considerations are logically necessary. Do we think or don’t we? Expending the last drop of energy on which the in- and out-breathing of our planet depends; convinced that the Tartar is at the gates, threatening the hedonism of fin-de-siècle Vienna (as Fridolin is convinced in Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story), shall we continue to insist that these intimations of something more permanently gratifying and more enduringly beautiful are, like the terrorist’s expectation of a virginal innocence, a chimera beyond our grasp and without scientific foundation? Is it conceivable, as far as true knowledge goes, that a belief in the inductive method (and ‘falsifyability’) which by-passes our subjective presence could itself be

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irrational? Wittgenstein thought so: in the Tractatus he says: (5.1361) “A belief in the crucial position of causality is a superstition.” Being cognate with the reality is intentional. Even in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian collapse, the blood-bath of the 1914-18 war and the Holocaust, whose first agitated flames penetrated viscerally the coincidental presence of Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the same gymnasium in Vienna, the establishment of that consensus of philosophy which has since dominated the English-speaking world, through the agency of Frederick Ayer, Karl Popper, and Bertrand Russell, triumphed: the metaphysical enemy – the idea that human existence is not a causally explained accident but is morally purposeful – saw those intellectual misgivings and forebodings about enlightenment which plagued the conscience of Vienna and resisted with a flowering of artistic, literary and scientific genius. Nevertheless, the forebodings continue: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to the commentaries issuing from the English-speaking world, was not the ethical statement he maintained. Philosophy was about matters of fact: ‘the world’ is not everything that is the case, including our cherished hopes for a better world; it is no more and no less than can be veridically and experimentally shown to be so. The replacement of a fallible human agency by digitally-operated systems was clearly inevitable. Were programmes expected to think? ****** Having little idea what mind is, we may intuit the existence of other minds (including the purposeful intelligence of a Creator) but, in reality, according to positivist philosophy, there is only empirical fact which cannot include our subjectivity. This is causally determined; our existence as moral beings, as authors of the narrative, has no bearing on the experimental conclusions of science whatever we may choose to think. In consequence, we suppose, Hitler

 

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emerged from the chaos at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for reasons that have a purely causal explanation. In that absence of thinking, the Tartar barbarian, whose presence had not once been verified on the horizon separating Europe from the Ottomans, incarnated in the tangible reality of Nazism. Did the Darwinian evolutionary process require some members of a single species to exterminate others in gas ovens? Within that illustrious Vienna Circle, to which we ascribe the foundation of logical positivism as a defence against the invading intuition of a controlling metaphysical order (which was, in the beginning, the Word), Wittgenstein was a stumbling-block, but a stumbling-block built on a logical foundation. That this logic successfully opposes the epistemological prejudices of both Frege and Russell with regard to the definition of experience as the context of knowledge (the subject-object relation being reduced to an algebraic formula) would thereafter be written out of Wittgenstein’s metaphysical narrative. As Ernst von Aster observed in his History of Philosophy,8 Russell’s algebraic description of the subject-object relation became a stepping-stone to the neo-positivism of the Vienna Circle, of which (he says) Carnap’s The Logical Construction of the World and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus were the first literary expressions. The subtle complexity of the Tractatus has hardly been grasped. Whereas among anti-metaphysicians the term ‘metaphysical’ presupposes duality, in Wittgenstein the matter of our sentences in relation to the world they mean depends first not on a priori presupposition (dualism is an example) but on understanding; thus in (6.53) he remarks that philosophy is about saying only what can be said, so that if ever someone wants to express something metaphysical, one points out to him that “certain signifiers in his sentence have no meaning”. The Tractatus does not say that a metaphysical realm of experience does not exist, it says on the contrary (6.54) “My sentences are referential in that they eventually recognise whoever understands me as nonsensical if through -or upon – their use he gets beyond

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them”. When langage implies what cannot be said it is understood. Indeed, on the preceding page we read (6.44) “The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is”; and in the context of the whole narrative of the Tractatus, this can only be taken to mean that we are speaking of a whole (“The world is everything that is the case”) for which there are no words (which is certainly a nonsense for neopositivism). ****** So what was there, in the beginning? According to the Book of Genesis, the Word was in the beginning: to get Adam’s feet on the ground the Woman, Eve, , denominated the Tree of Knowledge of which he then eat. But whose Word are we talking about; in what sense, at the very beginning of an anthropological evolution, was it recognisably human? Is the logos a prescient, atemporal being? If not, how is such a faculty as thought acquired in a blind evolutionary process? (If to think at all calls a materially pre-determined existence in question, the Blind Watchmaker has a good sense of humour). The answer is clear in the Tractatus (6.37): “There is only logical necessity”; and (5.551) “Logic is prior to all experience” … if not (5.5521) “how could we employ logic?” He is telling us that the logical order of thought and our sentence construction presupposes a pre-existent logical order in the reality. As far as the agent thinker (whether he thinks so or not) is concerned, thought-acts have a phenomenal status as originators of verbal and explanatory narrative in an otherwise inarticulate reality; thought is therefore the one phenomenal experience informing all else. Thus, irrespective of any subsequent issue (sub-sequent in the perspective of time and so after the advent of the human) between religious and scientific narratives, it is that logos, present in our thinking and sentence construction, which orders the reality. And since this premise evidently concerns the matter of truthfulness, ethics, Wittgenstein tells us, is fundamental.

 

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However a thought-construct may, through its human agency, order and inform the reality, it evidently does not do this metaphysically: our existence is spatiotemporally embodied. The concept of a metaphysical logos order refers to a dimension that is timeless, so that the enactment of a thought in time is the potential activity, in the indeterminate quanta of the material ground, of a given order within a reality that is timeless. We call the activity of that order ‘potential’ because the facts of the human condition are, in consequence of evolution, that individuals exercise their thinking in a consensual fraternity comprising a multitude of incommensurate viewpoints so that, however outcomes are predisposed, they are not given. That these viewpoints must be reconciled in the social consensus of historical time before the given order is manifest, is a moral imperative, and it echoes the role of ethics in the Tractatus. We know nothing of that order in thought without its expression (uttered or not) in words. In contrast with empirical facts therefore, whose status in the material reality is contingent on other facts and on the limited contexts in which they can be veridically defined, the phenomenal fact of thinking itself is metaphysical and wholly atemporal; it answers only to an antecedent logos on which all outcomes depend. This logical fact concerns the ontological insecurity, the fear which pervaded the creative activities of fin-de-siècle Vienna: the possibility that, scientific certainty notwithstanding, the arbiter of human destiny in times of crisis might be the consequence of what one chooses to think, was a nightmare. It was much simpler to withdraw; to embrace the benevolent deity of Annie Besant’s theosophy. The moral certainty that the logic to which thinking must answer is the one fact determining all others in the enterprise we call philosophy, explains

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Wittgenstein’s insistence that the Tractatus was an ethical, and not a methodological text justifying the agenda of a logical positivism. Thus there is in the Tractatus the evident metaphysical presence of “etwas” (German: something) experienced as an instinctually-sensed moral purposiveness in the human condition. Of this Wittgenstein says: (3.323) “… we speak of something, saying also that something happens.” We know, whether or not something can yet be explained, that the empirical search for explanation presupposes that something. The reality issues not from facts established a posteriori but from intuitions about something which precedes its discovery and mirrors its structure; for, were conceptual activity neuro-chemically caused, how could the thinker’s presence precede the circumstance with which he becomes cognate? Hence, Wittgenstein says this: (6.4311) “Death is not a life experience. One does not experience death. If, instead of interminable time, eternity signifies timelessness, then the eternal, which lives in the present, is alive. Our life is, in fact, as endless as our standpoint is without limitation.” In what sense could that be true, if the structured activity of thinking did not correspond to a universally primary phenomenon? A phenomenon which, according to the rule of the logos - within which “the Word was in the beginning” - determines the status in time of all else? ***** For very complex historical reasons Vienna, at the turn of the 19th century, became the focus for a cultural confrontation between the utilitarian standpoint underpinning occidental European progress and expansion from the 15th–19th century, and the oriental intuition of a predetermined trajectory for an evolution culminating in the advent of humanity; and yet, curiously and paradoxically, the oriental predisposition, which by-passes the Western obsession with the physical

 

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matter of causality, typically deprecates the intuition of a salvation depending on the moral will and social context of human thought: it is in the West that the individual discovered his worth. The sense in which the creative activities of artists, writers and scientists in Fin de Siècle Vienna hypostatize a historical moment of choice between cognitive freedom and materialist determinism is mirrored in the juxtaposition of Wittgenstein and Hitler in the same classroom: from the thinking of the one there proceeded those terrible events we call the Holocaust; from the thinking of the other there proceeded a philosophical statement affirming that, in logic, there is a possible world - (a Promised Land, for Wittgenstein was a Jew) - which we might constitute in reality on the basis of ethical choice. The nexus or location of moments which determine human destiny is not formed by “an accidental co-location of atoms” (Russell) but by the moral will present (or absent) in what we choose to think; thus (6.421) “The ethical is transcendental” because it bespeaks an immanent reality composed of unbroken relationships. This reading of Wittgenstein will be demonstrated in the exegesis of the Tractatus which follows, underwriting the importance of our conception of acts of cognition in evolutionary time, both for the understanding of that text and for our ability to relate to the statement in John’s Gospel that the creation of Word and World were, and are - in terms of the structural order of a logos - interactive principles. Thus any separation of a causal process in evolutionary time - conceived as a matter of chance - from the consciousness of a structure which, though purposeful in time, is timeless, is an intellectual prejudice (a “superstition” according to the Tractatus) without scientific foundation. In thinking, the human being, participating in that structure, exits from the physical constraints of causal necessity. The metaphysical enemy, the Tartar, invades to clear the ground. The reality, with which we are cognate within, then corresponds not to the limited vicinity of a comfortable existence but to an enduring structure informing everything that, in time, composes our enduring world. The operation of that

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structure in our language use and sentence construction is the essential narrative of the Tractatus. Only if that is the case, is it possible to understand how Wittgenstein managed to tolerate a dialogue, from the moment of his arrival in Cambridge until his death, with so many (including Frege and Russell) who could not understand the logical grounds on which he opposed their materialism. As far as Wittgenstein is concerned in the Tractatus, since “the world is everything that is the case”, its encompassing dimension in experience, in ordinary linguistic usage, is metaphysical.9 Hence Adorno points out that “The concept of objectivity, which logical absolutism brings as an offering to the world, cannot dispense with the one concept from which, above all, objectivity takes its model: that of the world”.10 As for the Tartar, whose fictional semiotics goes back to the Mongol horde: when Ogodei assembled the representatives of the dominions still hoping to avoid the incursion of his armies at his court (including the Vatican emissary Carpolini), and requested that they dispute publicly the attributes of the gods in whom they variously believed, on hearing their querulous and dissenting arguments concerning the existence of a deity who, logically, could not be God if His description could not be agreed, Ogodei roared with laughter. Wittgenstein the Tartar would have understood the joke: the enemy of universal love and brotherhood is that variety of sedentarism which achieves the material benefit of some at the expense of the deprivation of others.11 The engine on which the politics of capitalism depends is the false logic separating a world which, in reality, is “all that is the case” into the compartments of individualism. Thus although a world which corresponds to our consensual human perspective must exist before we experience it individually, no proofs can be adduced. According to the clock on the mantelpiece today, it’s time for the next football match. Global warming is tomorrow.

 

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In order to settle the issue of interpretation entirely on the basis of Wittgenstein’s German text, the author (who purchased his copy of the Suhrkamp original in 1969) has deliberately refrained from reading any English translation. Considering the remarks in the Tractatus about the relationship between umgangssprache (every-day language) and the propositions of empirical science, our position here is that words used to denote key concepts in the Tractatus (Zeichen, Sachverhalt, etc) were, as far as possible, by Wittgenstein to reflect ordinary usage. It is my conviction that he intended this to emphasise that correspondences his concepts might have with other usages in the contemporary narrative of philosophy were not derivative but accidental. Given Bertrand Russell’s reductive account of human evolutionary origins as an “accidental colocation of atoms”, it might well have been his view of molecular activity in the material foundation that Wittgenstein had in mind when he said that “causality is a superstition”, for the gist of his narrative is that our thoughts and our sentence constructions are positive interventions in that indeterminate field which shape an unforeseeable future. Wittgenstein clearly expected his text (excepting those parts where the argument is given in mathematical logic) would be intelligible to any intelligent person who grasped what was being said as common sense. By contrast, part of the problem concerning the interpretations given to the Tractatus in English is that the translated text generates words as conceptual equivalents in ordinary English usage which do not have the same currency as the originals do in the German.12 The matter of common sense concerns not only problems of translation but raises philosophical questions about the relationship between thoughts as they are subjectively experienced and the linguistic form of their utterance now in time: if the right words to express a thought clearly depend on the language, then the

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Babel of languages presupposes a common activity in thinking which transcends the conceptual specificity of the given language. Indeed, when something in the context of ordinary experience is being grasped, provisional concepts are fluid. As far as the practice is concerned, one might remark that conceptual fluidity is the essence of poetry and that the poetry of Ginsberg appealed to a generation opposed to the institutional rigidities of the Arms Race and Cold War. Thus, if our thinking is active, via the neuro-chemistry of the brain, in the molecular foundation on which all human existence depends, then (as my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts it) “the Philosophy of Common Sense” is “the theory which accepts as the criterion of truth the primary cognitions of mankind”. According to the Realism of Russell and Moore, in the human context the composite reality is polarised between a material world experienced as ‘external’ and the human consciousness which encompasses it. Then, however (according to that same ‘realism’) the resulting concept-formation is causally-determined by the content of experience, so that in fact the Realist’s concern with common sense becomes a posture adopted to by-pass metaphysical explanations of consciousness. It does so however at the expense of common sense, for the point of common sense is that no optimal concepts grasping realities are given a piori. Presupposition is not allowed: explanatory concepts and solutions must be intentionally and actively thought. Notes: 1 2

Translated as The Tartar Steppe by Stuart Hood; Carcanet Press, 1985.

Concerning Russell’s ‘realism’ (a universe of material objects confronting consciousness), as we go to press the philosopher J.C. Smart has died. His obituary in The Guardian (31 October 2012), headed “Philosopher whose theory posited that consciousness is a physical brain process”, tells us that Smart drew “the implications that science had for philosophy”. If brains were better at philosophy they would recognize epistemological nonsense when they hear it: as our Preface points out (and as our examination of the Tractatus confirms), ‘science’ is a product of the human subject.

 

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Kantianism.

4

Psychiatry is the same: relief from anxiety now at the expense of the future. Writing in Le Monde (9 August 2012) a psychiatrist conceives of the future as an extension of present pleasures. 5

At which Wittgenstein, leaning back to pick up a poker from the fireplace behind, brandished it to emphasise a point, whereupon Popper reacted as if the poker were to be used to strike him. 6

In his The Crisis of Western Philosophy Soloviev attacks precisely the Positivism of the Vienna Circle; Lindisfarne Press 1996. 7

The reaction of secularist intellectuals to this question are those of naïve realism: “foreseen” triggers “God” yet, as far as we know, the conscious experience of time is an attribute of humanity alone. If a presiding divinity foresees, it can only be because the human comprises divine attributes in space-time by proxy, in consequence of what is (effectively)’ the Creation’; and wqhat we call that is evidently another question of time! 8

Ernst von Aster, Geschichte der Philosophie; Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1963.

9

Regarding the principle of uncertainty, Wittgenstein observes that “… I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.” (In On Certainty; Basil Blackwell, 1974). 10

Theodor Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie; edition suhrkamp SV, 1972. 11

Writing the draft of this first chapter with George Bush senior in power while Mikhail Gorbachev ended Cold War, I remarked that Bush politics were the expression of that same sedentarism. Three decades later, the Chinese are on the same road. The anti-metaphysical philosophies of an increasingly Englishspeaking world clearly have their instrumental uses. 12

As we shall see in Chapter 2, normative usage in the English cannot express a conceptual standpoint identical to that in the German.

CHAPTER 2 On the Ethical and Political Import of the Tractatus

That “The world is everything that is the case” is both self-evident and simple, and yet although that ‘everything’ (that world) is intuitively grasped, everything cannot be said: language in ordinary use will denominate this as not being that, but everything can be said only with time. Beyond the human perspective, theoretically, time has no end, but the thinking which knows that is itself embodied in time, and in time that physical presence dies. And yet, since it is our ordinary usage of words which denominates this as not being that, each thing (not only my body) has a standpoint in time; thus, my viewpoint is not yours, so that the transcendent viewpoint we instinctively share and take on trust is that of “everything that is the case”; this everything, we evidently cannot know in time. For above all, if it is in thinking that I am where my body is, the truth of the knowledge I then claim of the reality depends on its agreement by others whose standpoints share that temporal reality. However, our capacity to experience discordant viewpoints in time evidently presupposes the being of a transcendent reality which is timeless. Thus, in the long-term, the matter of what it is that we,

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as a species together, are, has an import for the matter of what it is that I am. In what sense does this being-together - this being I am - endure, and what it is that dies? These matters (as we shall see in chapter 4) concern the epistemological drift of both the Tractatus and the key epistemological texts of Rudolf Steiner. They do so because for those who, like Wittgenstein, confront the reality by thinking logically, discord is not simply undesirable: it presupposes the possibility of agreement about everything that is the case. That is, in all acts of cognition the essential condition of knowledge is a provisional open-mindedness: knowing the truth in this case must depend on my provisional suspension of everything I suppose, a priori, is known. The contradictions are, moreover, nonsensical: in reality, everything is; the problems in time are relational. For although in time the reality includes our misapprehensions, we have not yet grasped it. However, in elucidating what his English-speaking commentators have termed the “nonsense” in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it will be essential to bear in mind that the connotations of meaningless, unintelligible, frivolous, gibberish, attached to the word ‘nonsense’, are not comparable to those of the German word Unsinn from which it is translated. This is evident where Wittgenstein explains why suchand-such a hypothesis (in a logical argument of Russell’s) is Unsinn, on the grounds that (5.5351) “the hypothesis for a non-sentence as an argument would not be wrong but nonsensical.” It says nowhere in the Tractatus that its concluding remarks concerning the “mystical” are (as famously alleged) “metaphysical nonsense”; only that transcendent states of knowing are unaussprechlich: they cannot be articulated in words, and therefore cannot be the subject of propositions (sentences) which would establish the mystical as empirical fact. Thus (7) “Of that which cannot be spoken, I must remain silent”.

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The syntax and grammar of the German language does not predispose its speakers to raise problems about so-called metaphysical propositions being meaningful. There is no intellectual consensus, equivalent to that prevailing in English, to the effect that ‘scientific facts’ make it a nonsense to propose that the existence of the world in common sense is self-evident without empirical proofs; it would be Unsinn to doubt that the world exists. To take one example, geist signifies things which cannot be subsumed under one concept in English: ghost, spirit, intellect, brightness (mental acuity) etc. The English concepts, ‘the numinous’ (ghostly, invisible presence), ‘spirit’ and ‘intellect’ are all connotations in ordinary German usage (and we are not speaking only of philosophical texts) of the one word geist, which has no English equivalent - a conceptual void in which we have recourse either to ‘God’ on the one hand or to spirits we cannot consume on the premises on the other. This polarisation of the spiritual and sensory aspects of normative experience is not only unnecessary in the German, but commensurate with the common currency in German of ‘Dasein’ (being)1 for example, is an entire school of philosophy concerned with being (phenomenology). When Hegel wrote Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, he was certainly not discussing the English ghost. If, in the language of reductionism, ‘Geist’ becomes Ryle’s “ghost in a machine”, it wasn’t for nothing that Goethe makes Mephistopheles say, in his Faust:2 To know and describe a life which thrives first dismiss the spirit which drives the parts in hand which you depend on. A pity if what’s missing is the bond. In English the numinous is less an experience of interiority and more an attribute of encompassing nature (sublime in Keats, feminine in Robert Herrick) which finds, curiously, its most empirical and indeed cogent expression in the writing of physicists. For instance, Arthur Stanley Eddington, when writing The Unseen World, was perfectly able to explain how the apparent solidity of ordinary objects like chairs could seem theoretical if, as a physicist, one contemplates their atomic composition: although the indeterminate behaviour of molecules and their relative

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spatial location appears to contradict the experiential conviction that a chair can be sat on, Eddington evidently did not doubt the dependability of chairs any more than Shelley doubted the dependability of changing seasons; and yet he perceived the sense in which the separate existences of chairs are subsumed in a material plenum whose unifying attributes are clearly metaphysical: he knew that ‘the chair’ cannot be seen. Nor, a propo our foregoing discussion of positivism, did he question the a priori certainty of his intuition that the world in which they are located exists. Thus the narrative of logical positivism (whose luminaries purport to derive its credentials from the Tractatus) divides the normative experience of our world into a Department of Facts and a Department of Metaphysical Nonsense. Indeed, in order to avoid any appearance of a mind-body dualism, the latter-day positivist opts for a subterfuge: John Searle tells us that, emphasizing “the biological character of mental states” he “avoids both materialism and dualism”. However he also avoids, and cannot account for, the real presence of the subject in acts of cognition and tells us that “We know for a fact that all of our mental processes are caused by neurobiological processes…”.3 Given that false logic, separating the experienced world into manageable departments, as far as our humanity is concerned, what actually happens? There is a Department of Transport so you stand at a bus stop, and just as you board the bus, an old woman appears. She is within a few metres of the tail end of the queue as the open doors of the bus swallow the last in the visible line and close in front of her. “There’s an old woman with heavy shopping” someone says as the driver accelerates away. There is no-one to invigilate, to decide exactly the distance a prospective passenger must be from the door. “You’re not stopping then?” The woman who asks still has her head glued to the window. The driver’s gaze is fixed to the off-side mirror as he moves off and who knows if the old woman was visible in his nearside mirror? Is it our business or the Department of Transport’s?

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Although this moral dilemma comprises empirical facts, the result of any empirical enquiry concerning the outcome depends on an ethical standpoint adopted a priori; in Wittgenstein’s book, this standpoint effectively shapes the very world which he means when he says that it comprises “everything that is the case”. That very world is the locus of a humanity whose nature is inseparable from the being-together of the phenomena composing that world. Whether the old woman has been seen by the driver is not empirically evident and yet that knowledge radical epistemology: Greek episteme, knowledge ly affects our evaluation of what took place. Hence Wittgenstein’s proposition that (6.421) Die Ethik ist transcendental: the given order of the reality must unify the multiplicity of our standpoints. Equally, Wittgenstein’s logic is not a mindless, numerical extrapolation given by a process of causal necessity: it is based on the principle of grammatically contingent sentences referring meaningfully to a unitary world; a ‘world’ which not only self-evidently comprises “everything that is the case”, but a world built to comprehend the contingencies of a reality which can be consciously grasped only in the given context of our humanity and the experience of its subjectivity; a context in which I may apparently assert myself, without due thought, at your expense; ‘apparently’, because, my viewpoint being at odds with yours, the longterm consequences of doing so have not been foreseen. The old woman is still at the bus stop. In ordinary discourse we say that contingent world; we say that world now, either as the ego experiences it, or as it is in its consensual reality. We say it now because, thanks to its evolution in and through time, we have become the instruments of its consensual articulation in the material dimension of the present; a present, however, on which that consensual reality in future depends. Thus, if our explanatory thinking is truthful, it must logically mirror a foundational order which is timeless. Wittgenstein expresses the significance of the human presence

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– its being in that dispensation now, and not at some other time - when he says that (5.5262) “The truth or falsehood of every sentence alters somewhat the total structure of the world” for we are its moral agency. In other words, before any empirical, ‘scientific’ observation of a set of circumstances (whose verbal articulation may affect the welfare of others), the subjective standpoint taken entails an ethical position affecting the way so-called facts are afterwards asserted to be. In the Tractatus we read: (6.37) “There is only the necessity of logic … a cause necessarily determining one event because another preceded it, does not exist.” This means that our empirical assessment of the reality depends on a priori decisions about which facts we allow into consideration before drawing conclusions. The bus driver’s doing of his duty may have excluded the fact of the old woman simply because he had not himself seen her; if so, his logic was the product not of thinking, but of the rule book. That we do not legislate for such contingencies is fortunate: drivers are not yet robots, even if some work to rule. Thus when Wittgenstein says that (6.13) “Logic is transcendental …not a teaching, but a mirror-image of the world”, he means to say that, in thinking objectively, (6.124) “we don’t express … what we want; on the contrary, in logic, the creation expresses, of itself, the signifier which arises from natural necessity”. That “natural necessity” is this: if the world is indeed “everything that is the case”, then, as far as rational thought is able to determine what that world is like, it does so by resolving contradictions and tautologies in experience. However, it does not do that: there are ethical problems because the logic Wittgenstein means has a human agency. That logic is the essence of our experienced reality even if it is not present in our consciousness. This position is also the essence of Christianity: when Paul the Apostle said, speaking of the Christ (Greek original: logos, Word): “He has taken captivity captive”, he meant that, when the subjective recognises the rational necessity of a

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given logic governing human existence as if humanity were one body, it no longer experiences that necessity as a limitation of the kind imposed by the imposition of external law. If captivity has been taken captive, I do not suffer my fate: I choose it, knowing now, if not before, that from now on “the truth or falsehood of every sentence alters somewhat the total structure of the world”. ****** Who can doubt that Wittgenstein’s realisation of the moral imperative entailed in the concept logos explains his expressed sentiments about ‘sacrifice’ when, enlisting to fight as a soldier in the First World War, he insisted on a posting to the front line in Poland? Recognising that “ … every sentence alters the total structure of the world”, Wittgenstein practised what he preached: speaking of possible descriptions of states of affairs, he underlines the importance of descriptions which are possible before the reality (the actual state of affairs according to our assertions) is determined, and points out that, although in such contexts (3.3421) “The individual is shown to be unimportant … the possibility every individual has is consequential for the being of the world” - a principle he applied to the matter of his own enlistment. He is, of course, speaking here of the role of individual factors in the domain of pure logic. But that is the point about philosophy: one cannot talk philosophical sense if one hopes to deprive ones terms of their symbolic connotations in ordinary usage: the ethical foundation of the Tractatus makes individuals in pure logic function as individuals in human society might function morally. An achievement in the history of philosophy which is naturally unsettling in a cultural climate determined by the politics of self-interest; as if (Wittgenstein might have added) the true common interest, in a world which is “everything that is the case”, could possibly be opposed to one’s own.

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So, Wittgenstein’s logic concludes: (5.6) “The boundaries of my speech formulations signify the boundaries of my world” … but (5.61) “We cannot therefore in logic say: This or another thing exists in the world, not that … this would seem to presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities which cannot be the case, since logic would then escape the boundaries of the world: in which case the same boundaries could be seen from the other side”. In other words, supposing logic did “escape the boundaries of the world” then by that same logic that world, those boundaries, “seen from the other side” as unthinkable, can suddenly be thought and recognised as limitations, for “… we are also unable to say what cannot be thought”. Thus the limitations of the supposed world are transcended; for, at the boundaries of my world the existence of others begins. Seen from those viewpoints, my universe expands, for (5.5563) ”Every sentence of our ordinary discourse is, with regard to what matters, a perfectly logical construct” so that -seen from the point of view of the old woman perhaps - “Whatever is most simply said, which we should be giving here, is no likeness of the truth but the whole truth itself.” For after all, “(These problems are not abstract, but probably the most concrete there are).” As far as Steiner’s compatible epistemology is concerned, the anthropos (the humanity) he incorporated in his examination of scientific method at the turn of the twentieth century4, is so conceived that those hierarchies (called ‘spiritual’) in primitive Christianity which explain the cosmic dimensions of the pre-human evolutionary process, are also figures for the real boundaries of human existence, whose restriction to the temporal dimension of fleshly experience at a point-ofsales display serves the interests of a competitive political economy depending on commodity production and consumption. On the contrary, with every act of cognition, the given universe evolves, and this immense perspective on human life is implicit throughout the narrative of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and evident

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(as it is also in Steiner) in the opening proposition that “The world is everything that is the case”. Whether we grasp it or not, in every act of thought, however mundane, we are cognate with that indefinite and all-encompassing reality. The bus driver’s limited perspective may suit his employment but it hardly serves the long-term interests of his species’ survival. Notes: 1

Dasein is composed of da: there (place, physical presence) and sein: being, or ‘to be’. The root ‘being’ in colloquial English usage hardly connotes physical presence although ‘is’ may entail location. 2

In the 1880’s, Karl Julius Schrőer, publisher of Goethe’s Collected Works, invited Steiner to edit Goethe’s writings on the natural sciences. In particular, Steiner, in his own philosophical research, concerned with Goethe’s theory of light and colour, gave a series of public lectures on the epistemological premises of Goethe’s account of the physics of light, whose viewpoint on the nature of our being-present-in the material sub-stratum anticipates contemporary accounts of quantum mechanics (Shrődinger, Heisenberg and Bohm and Bortoft) which raise the issue of the observer’s status in an indeterminate field of particles. 3

John Searle, Mind: a brief introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004). The Mind-Body Problem. How the ‘fact’ of “our mental processes” can be ‘known’ by a non-existent subjective agency, Searle does not explain. 4

See Die Ergänzung heutiger Wissenschaften durch Anthroposophie; Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1987. Discussing the work of the contemporary philosopher Friedrich Vischer he notes Vischer’s assertion that although the soul cannot be in the body it can be nowhere else, recognizing in this paradox the truth of the fact that although the irrefutable logic of contradiction cannot be avoided it is also occasions a thought process transcending it which then grasps the fundamental role of truthfulness in concept formation on which all human in-puts to the evolutionary process depend. He also discusses the work of Du Bois-Raymond, Hegel’s ‘otherness’, Fichte’s proposed resolution of that existential problem, and the logical problems of Bergson’s assumption that the process of ‘becoming’ is the product of an already-acquired maturity.

CHAPTER 3 Doing Philosophy: logos and the Primacy of Language

1 Philosophy is about knowing. The desire to do philosophy springs from the intuition that understanding the phenomena composing ‘the world’ is indissociable from a knowing of, and a mastery of oneself as part of that world. Knower and known are ‘indissociable’ on the premise that, since the knower is an evolutionary product of that world, the form of its possible comprehension is present in the material ground from which that consciousness has evolved. Our experience of that consciousness, however, has a multiplicity of viewpoints, so that a developing knowledge is contingent on a comprehension not only of the phenomena but of relations with others of the subject’s own kind. Without such a relational understanding, apparently ‘external’ events and circumstances appear to determine the reality arbitrarily and without evident purpose. The essential epistemological issue in philosophy therefore concerns the supposed status in that reality of the thinking subject.

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1.1 Acquiring self-knowledge in this sense is a thinking activity which sets things, including its own viewpoint, in a provisional relation within the logicallycoherent, unitary perspective of all possible viewpoints together; ‘provisional’ in the sense that such a consensus can be achieved only consensually in a social context in evolutionary time. In that unitary perspective, one’s own viewpoint as it is being thought is cognate with a reality that transcends the corporeal body which is its vehicle in space-time. As far as that consciousness is concerned, nothing can be externally observed or ‘pointed to’ in the isolated events of neurochemistry which positively identify them in a ‘scientific’ sense with the content of consciousness. Any causally-determined relation is wishful thinking on the part of the behaviorist: imagining the burden of his own conceptual activity to be the causal product of neuro-biological process, he effectively underwrites political inertias which find conceptual autonomy a threat to institutional control. If there is more mental activity than we are conscious of, so that pre-disposition of circumstance and mental habit frequently call the tune, we learn about ourselves. That is our human nature. 1.2 Whether or not the thinker considers himself a philosopher, thinking activity of the sort which questions the given wisdom in every field is essential both to philosophy and to the acquisition of all knowledge on which human futures depend. To a greater or lesser degree, something akin to philosophy is practiced as soon as a reflective consciousness is present. A child’s questioning about the what, the why and the wherefore of his surroundings expresses an innate need to understand and master the nature of his relations with other existences on which, intuitively, he knows his own is contingent. Self-knowledge, and knowledge about that, grow together, and this growth depends on the concept formation that is active in thought. When a concept has been formed and grasped it is remembered, and that memory illuminates parallel moments of enlightenment as they occur, for the formation of a concept is neither a purely subjective nor a purely objective activity: it is the willful engagement of an individual

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consciousness with the whole field it is conscious of; so that, as Wittgenstein remarks, (5.5262) “the truth or falsehood of every sentence alters somewhat the total structure of the world”. 1.3 Nevertheless, in our experience of such a complex reality no exact parallels recur, and since concepts do not apply themselves, we must learn to think. Those individuals who make little effort in thinking therefore adopt habits of thought which mirror the causal processes governing the pre-literate human reality as if evolution were purposeless. Simplifying the apparent complexity of the experienced reality they encounter their understanding distorts it; they are, for the time being, in control of a simplified order, but impending events that habitual thought-forms fail to identify overtake them, and do so because nature herself (and our species is included) proceeds as an inter-related whole. A lesson needs to be learned: the habits of a mind which fears its own subjectivity are not the same thing as the deliberately enacted thought of an individual who recognizes (recognises!) his autonomous being as belonging to that of the species, thus underwriting the contingencies of a consensually created future. For the time being, neither the being of that individual nor of his species has a consensually agreed thought-form on which the common interest of our evolutionary future could depend (see 1.61 below). 1.4 It is then evident that concept formation, which develops with the acquisition of language, is the primary tool whose growing complexity illuminates the general understanding informing a developing, consensually-interactive human consciousness. However, whether there is a clearly-formed conceptual understanding in an alert subjective consciousness or the subject, half asleep, behaves in accord with the stimulus-response mechanism of his organism, the neurological instrument is the same in both cases. All normal human subjects have representations of the world in their consciousness and since these are given by a learned language, although some use them more consciously than others, the

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neurological vehicle is the same. The misconceptions of those whose behaviour is largely habitual so that they react inappropriately to unexpected circumstance are not the product of brain-chemistry: if the thinker perceives the context in which action is required half-consciously and in terms of previous experience the instinctual responses of the organism take over. 1.41 For example, if the causal mechanism of kinship selectivity in evolution favours a competitive culture of nation-statism, the politicians concerned process all the in-puts of contemporary events which relate to the unitary nature of the human species to suit preconceptions based on antecedent histories of conflict, regarding the notion of human consensuality as a mistaken idealism which threatens the short-term stability of the status quo. Thus Wittgenstein’s underwriting (in the Tractatus) of the ethical import of epistemology is not an opinion: it is an insight into the fundamental relationship between thinking activity in the one articulate species and a governing reality which is consensual in the evolutionary context of time; ‘time’ being a dimension of that reality which, in an evolutionary context, only the human species, in a life of consciousness between birth and death, is equipped to grasp. 1.42 As for the intellect, the term refers to a facility, a characteristic of thinking activity, and not to an identified organ which is part of the physical brain. To have ‘intellect’ is to have an ability to apply thinking and manipulate received knowledge, to analyse experience and evaluate contradictory data so that thinking activity illuminates understanding.1 The activity of thinking depends on the employment of that analytical faculty we call ‘the intellect’, but the notion of intellect is an attribute, and attributes do not perform functions: intellect does not think. We refer to it as a facility which provides the active presence of the one who does think with the data required to draw conclusions and illuminate understanding. So what is it that thinks?

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1.5 The content of the mind, prior to the exercise of thought, is previous knowledge which, if undigested (not actively thought in the on-going reality) remains pure information. Such information arises in consciousness at the interface between an experiencing person (the subject who thinks) and the actual phenomena he encounters in the present. It arises, moreover, in the succession of events in space-time through which the person passes in the course of his life. That is the objective world within which the thinker experiences his being, his existence, as a person; a person who illuminates a consciousness, a being of his own, in and by the activity of thinking, so that the information then acquired has a context and purpose which may be at odds with his role in a status quo which it suits him to maintain. Teleology, however, is a far from fashionable science. 1.6 Philosophy is distinguished from the rudimentary thinking we do, and which we normally engage in a framework of common sense for everyday purposes, by the discipline we call ‘epistemology’; epistemology doubts that problems solved ‘philosophically’ (as we say) on the basis of common sense and expedience are answered truthfully and therefore examines the operation of the cognitive activity itself in order to establish that conclusions drawn satisfy an objective, common interest; a judgment known to be truthful beyond the expedient limits of a personal interest in the short term. Epistemology is therefore essential to all scientific disciplines which purport to establish truthful conclusions as knowledge. 1.61 The principle that epistemology is crucial in the matter of knowing is well illustrated by the reactions of evolutionary biologists (who believe, with Dawkins, that the competitive fitness of kinship systems is the primary factor in species survival) to the recent publication of Edward Wilson’s The Social Conquest of the Earth.2 Wilson maintains (as we do here) that an articulate co-operation of our species’ members through time is the key both to its domination and to the planetary survival on which the survival of this best-adapted species evidently

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depends. The evolutionary consequences for a species that achieves consciousness and becomes articulate about its own condition cannot logically be the product of processes governing its earlier, mammalian evolution; that same logic concerns the truthfulness of all conclusions we draw, so that we call the issue between the two opposed viewpoints ‘epistemological’. Epistemology - or the science of how we know - thus clarifies our cognitive responsibilities in an evolutionary context by examining the constituent components of the process by which we acquire knowledge and recognize truthfulness. Self and world together then illuminate that universal agent of knowing which is present in the human form. 1.7 If the objective form of the reality is not immediately apparent to the thinking consciousness, it is because the agent of thinking activity in the personal consciousness is the ego. Though it may be a problem for nominalist philosophers that we cannot point to or quantify the ego, whether or not we agree that the term identifies anything real in our personal experience, the grammatical terms of most languages signify a radical distinction between the speaker and others he addresses: quantifiable or not in physical terms, ‘I’ designates the bearer of a personal experience with a recognisable identity which is his own during existence in space-time. Although, privately, that ‘I’ is ‘me’, as far as knowing is concerned, we must acknowledge on logical grounds that the ego it signifies transcends myself and - in the usage - identifies a being whose presence (affirmed or negated) is the property common of the whole species. The ego is thus an entity undergoing an evolution in time which depends on me and my personal experience. That personal experience may obfuscate the transpersonal reality (which - as the grammatical usage suggests - is the province of the being I am) so that the body becomes an economic target. 2 So it is that ‘I am’ predicates the existence of a being which, paradoxically, is universal. If, in ordinary usage, the same ‘I’ signifies me (for myself) and you (in your case) in a relation which is obscured by our embodiment in space-time, it is

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because we each inhabit that body with a unique standpoint giving a personal identity during a corporeal existence. But, whereas the referent (of that signifier ‘I’) is, due to my separate existence in the physical world, me in each case, the being we all predicate by the use of the word ‘I’ is transcendent: if I am, between birth and death, a contingent existence in a separate physical body, the moment I think and know that I am, the condition of that contingency has changed; for were my unitary being-with-you inherited, we should still be in Paradise. 2.1 It is thus substantially evident in the grammatical operation of ordinary language that ‘me’ is a variable and provisional form of the ‘I’ that we are. In any gathering of me’s (us) together, conversation is marked by evident dissent and deference to other viewpoints; but how is it possible that, nevertheless, the participants always conduct themselves as if the subject of discussion were clearly apprehended by all, and that argument (or dissent) however heated the discussion, is in fact about accidents? That is the ethical dimension of knowledge: although in fact “The world is everything that is the case” (for, if not, no knowledge is possible), for the time being we each have a standpoint on that world, so that argument is essential: the very possibility that things are like this rather than like that, necessarily and logically entails an intuited apprehension of a general consciousness common to all participants. Were this not logically true, and the separate viewpoints of the participants referred to incompatible and discrete essences, no verbal exchange would be possible. “For now we see through a glass darkly… now in part; but then shall I know even as I am known”.3 2.2 The structure of discourse (any casual conversation) therefore, by that same logic, always necessarily answers to the grammatical fact of the universality of that ‘I’, so that the function of the personal pronoun is to represent a being, or state, which embodies the universally human vicariously and for the time being, pending an evolution in which each learns to transcend the accidents of personal identity.

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3 In time, the ego is a mover: it motivates thinking and does so in order to transcend the native condition of an absolute and separate identity given by the body. But if ‘native condition’ refers to a physical ontology (origin) in a separated bodily existence, in reality, the source of that native condition is not (as our examination of the grammar has shown) the physically separate existence in space-time but the unitary and transcendent being-together of the species; for although that unitary state is potentially present during evolution, the determinist who believes in the dependability of physical states denies a reality which is manifest only in time. Thus William James’ (and others’) objection that, because the presence of a conscious ego is not apparent in the child, it’s later appearance is the causally determined product of a competitive social fabric is nonsense; his a priori presupposition is that, since time is chronological, the later state must be the product of the former. Ego-consciousness (in the child) is not yet present, therefore the ego and consciousness are not, like his body, biologically-given phenomena; for although the evolutionary emergence of a species in time implies that the reality is spatio-temporal, it does so by denying the impermanence of physical states. Being is unitary, and existence in time is an enrichment; being is therefore not reductible to a succession of immediate occasions in space-time: it informs matter to produce a physical world in which our acts of thought discover the incarnate form of an evolving structure. 3.1 The conscious presence and being of that ‘I’ in a physically located body awakens the unitary form at its source and causes the primary experience of egohood. This, to begin with, is identified with a purely personal existence: the identity becomes concrete as ‘me’ or ‘you’ in the course of ordinary life. ‘Ordinary life’ could not proceed without such a foundation of egoism: it sets goals and objectives for the achievement of a fulfilled life as the individual chooses, morally, to define it. That liberty to think with, or against, the native foundation is the crux of the issue in philosophy and concerns an apparent

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contradiction between freedom and determinism as far as human volition is concerned. Every decision which compounds objectives (the achievement of personal fulfillment etc), is taken with the awareness, in some form or another, that a wider, moral context exists which is given by the existence of others in a social consensus. Thus, if there is no voluntary and willed limitation on desired goals when individuals act, legislative or customary prohibitions will operate to limit the operation of a native egotism which might upset the social contract and prejudice the common good. 4 The being of that instinctually grounded, primordial I-ness - sustaining humanity in spite of personal egotism - is given in that intelligent structural order which Wittgenstein calls ‘logos’. That Logos informs and sustains the creation; for it is from within that manifest structure, whose order is apparent every day in the objects of sense-perception, that language emerges to denominate the constituent parts of our experienced continuum; a continuum which Whitehead called “a succession of immediate occasions” to account for our being now within the flux of the material substratum; a continuum however which, in our thinking activity, is transcendent and in accord with a universally-given order. Our language and speech is about that something: about the presence of that intelligent order in the visible world which we say, and how its grammatical structure answers to that reality. 4.1 When an individual thinks, his thought forms are embedded in and derived from that intelligent structure: it shapes both the evident creation and the language which articulates it to become conscious, to answer and responds to its existence. Therefore, in every act of thought, the thinker is joined (truthfully, or in negation of the reality as he chooses) to a process of being and becoming in time whose origins are prior to the advent and evolution of humanity. The human form has evolved from, and within, that totality to become whatever the self-conscious individual supposes himself to be at a particular point in time; a point at which the

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creation, and the consensus of other existences within it, will depend on his freedom to act in concert with it. If not, adopting a shorter-term view, he secures sectarian or corporate advantages at the expense of that unitary being from which his personal existence proceeds. 5 The ‘modern’ has come to signify an expansion of the ego in a continuous present which insulates it from intuitions of both the real past and an imagined future. In the so-called ‘modern’ world, it happens by and large that what individuals suppose themselves to be has no unitary being (or form) corresponding to a composing reality in which they nevertheless instinctually believe: identity has become the signifier of a product consumed; the possibility of redemption - the recovery of wholeness - reduces to something given by the grace of God whether or not you have done anything to deserve it. The shibboleth that your life is the product of a transient existence identified with the body is a belief that suits a politically managed order which governs the ephemeral present and shows little concern for future realities. No alliance of thinking activity concerning the long-term informs the consensus; for the media compete for attention and are beholden to markets and consumer trends which obscure the outlines of a Noah’s Ark on the horizon; the fundamentalist newspaper reporting it risks going bust. If that is the outcome we call ‘fate’, it is because our habits of mind do have considerable weight: the media are influential because such habits depend on the suspension of any disinterested cognitive activity that deserves to be called thought. 5.1 The product of interaction between cognitive structures in human consciousness and those individual trajectories which are, so to speak, personal property, is an existent identity or person whose destiny is to enrich the original structure by returning his incarnated complexity to the source. The individual who aspires to self knowledge achieves this by acting in accord (and voluntarily) with the necessities which determine a unitary human existence and our survival

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together in a planetary context. That determination of an individual existence by its submission to a consensual reality is the true meaning of what is so unthinkingly signified by the word love, for this binds existences together in the unitary and original mode of being from which human existence in time and space emerged, and to which it returns. 6 In that position of existential embodiment the activities of intellect continuously interpret the world. The individual experiences the thinker has of that world become conscious so that his thinking builds and constructs an identity he becomes with time; an identity whose motivation is to illuminate, incrementally, the complexity of his localised personal existence in order to transcend its limitations and conform, as far as possible, to the total form of the human; a form which is thus more or less consciously present in him at a particular time according to the life he has lived previously. 6.1 But intellect provides information which is local in time and space: he cannot see the whole of which his existence is part, to which he is nevertheless joined by evolutionary necessity via his body. In his thinking activity, however, he can acquire concepts which illuminate the complexity and the contradictions of his contingent existence; contingent, that is, on the existence of others, whose right to move forward is equal to his but contingent again on others; all others are, for the time being, invisible to each other, in consequence of embodiment. 6.2 The recognition of this contingence on others distances the consciousness from those natural habits of mind (the operations of ‘intellect’) which situate his own existence in conflict with others. This emergent understanding depends entirely on his acquisition of concepts illuminating his relation, as a contingent existence, with all others. From the temporal viewpoint of a personal understanding, those concepts will seem to imply the existence of a transcendent realm of being requiring actions which, in the short-term, may appear contrary to

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personal interest. If the concepts formed are not yet true concepts, then they issue from contradictions apparent to an intellect situated in the present and limited framework of embodiment in space-time here and now. 6.3 The nature of our existence in the physical present commits every form of being in the world to a specific and intelligible mode so that it then survives according to laws of necessity given by its evolution. As far as these separate existences are concerned, the intelligibility of their relations with each other and with the human observer in the context of time cannot be evident to the positive sciences which admit only quantifiable, physical events as real. The biological mechanisms of reproduction which replicate a species are predictable according to laws which have been seen to apply under experimental conditions: they explain what Whitehead calls “the succession of immediate occasions” (governed by embodiment) on the material plane in terms of causality. But the relational context of being through time on which our humanity depends, is evident only in the activity of thought. That is the province of philosophy: its intention is to divine and enunciate those conceptual structures - called ‘logical’ by Wittgenstein - within which all existences together have their being throughout, and independently of, time. We think to shrug off what is transient and adopt what endures. 6.4 The intelligibility of these conceptual forms, as we have previously observed, is inseparable from the use of language in which their structures are embedded. Yet these structures are also fundamental to the formal being of the world which language denominates: language answers to a structure already given and present in nature; its conceptual and grammatical forms are not arbitrary but the product of the process by which the perceived structures have become conscious in time. Speech articulates the world because our thinking actively structures our consciousness of that world. Since a personal body-consciousness is inseparable from a generalised consciousness of existence, the ego – which perceives my life

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as distinct from yours – is awakened at that point in evolution when thought and language first appear; in the enactment of the world in speech is the genesis of the ego, for where language is concerned, I am the one who decides what that world is like. Thus the pre-conscious, pre-ego development of the child mirrors the preconscious development of humanity. 6.5 The ego then, as the radical seat of isolated individual experience, first appeared in a rudimentary form as the focus in time, given by the body, of a group consciousness determined by ethnic difference and climactic and geographical distinctions. Under these conditions, localized cultural practises emerged to produce collective identities. As long as these remained territorially bound, conflict was unnecessary; but climate and geography are subject to unpredictable change which cause migration and territorial invasions and therefore precipitate those interactive historical processes which attended the gradual evolution of personal identities. The crisis we call ‘modernity’ describes the production of a trans-national identity whose ego-centered vehicle our inherited cultures cannot contain.4 6.6 These processes, and solutions to the conflicts which the individual ego generates in the quest for a totalising experience of the human (which we have posited as being unconsciously present throughout the species), will remain opaque and unintelligible to the intellect (which feeds on the sense of individual autonomy), until the nature of those hidden constraints which link existences together within the being of the whole is made intelligible by thinking. Whether it be by whatever we suppose is philosophy, by religion or by their convergence, the required narrative must denominate conceptual structures to which the phenomena evidently answer. That is the logical pre-condition of the Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case”. That logos is, in consequence of our planetary evolution, embedded both in the language and in the spatio-temporal

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structures of its referent object, the world. To know, we have only to think truthfully, and this depends on consensuality. 7 Logos, the term in philosophy signifying the existence of an ordered structure in language which corresponds to an ordered structure in the created world, is the Greek word used in the opening sentence of St John’s Gospel to mean a coherent and composite non-physical form which preceded the creation of the world in time and actively informed its material foundation.5 In doing so it moved (according to the Book of Genesis, “upon the face of the waters”) so that the form appeared as an evolving physical structure, manifest in space-time. It became “visible”, however, only from that point in time when the physical world had sufficiently evolved to produce a species both able to see it and to consciously articulate the experience. The meaning (in the context of that opening sentence of St John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word”) of logos, is that a structural form preceding the physical creation is then potentially present throughout its evolution in time, both as prior cause and terminal destination; in the sense that, once the evolutionary process became conscious with the acquisition of language in man, what he then articulates revealed a purpose (telos) existing in the beginning as an evolutionary cause. The purpose of that evolution is therefore that the original, ordered structure within the void, preceding creation, becomes conscious; it then exists autonomously; voluntarily and not of necessity. It did so in time and on the principle of natural selection until the refinement of the organism made consciousness possible (with the instrument of the brain and central nervous system). Thus this being-present in self-conscious acts of cognition enables the primary cause to participate voluntarily in the recapitulation of that originally ordered structure from within the material firmament in spacetime. Thus Muhiyyadin Ibn-Arabi: catch up with them I laboured In the darkness of a profound night. From afar, I called out to them

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And then I followed the imprints of their steps. Thus humanity may overcome the imperatives of natural law on which its origins depended and align itself voluntarily with the given conditions on which its future welfare must depend. 7.1 Having acquired that autonomy in the thinking processes governing its conduct, without a conceptual understanding of the structure on which its existence depends, the intellect (whose operations have no necessary internal structure except the determinants of causal association and preconceptions derived from the observation of antecedent phenomena), would invent arbitrary structures of its own which best served the private interests of the individual thinker. The act of knowing enlightens: not for nothing that the Lucifer of the Book of Genesis appears with the beginning of knowledge, preceding the appearance of a redemptive word-made-flesh which incarnates the logos of a given order. 7.2 The word creation (which includes human existence) signifies, in ordinary usage, a unitary phenomenon to which all separate existences owe their being. All divisions of the phenomena in time which serve the purpose of a temporal existence (male/female, hot/cold, spiritual/physical, life and death etc) find their resolution within the compass of what is meant when “the creation” is loosely spoken of in ordinary discourse: something exists which transcends the polarised and opposite phenomena appearing in evolutionary time. If the positive sciences warn that we cannot claim to know something which cannot be put into words, the Tractatus terminates with the proposition (7): “Concerning that which cannot be said, one must remain silent”. 7.21 It is precisely in that silence that the unutterable whole is present: attention to specificities and particular existences being suspended, their relational whole is so grasped that subsequent perceptions of the temporal field are more truthfully

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informed. This has nothing to do with mysticism: the whole being-together of “everything that is the case” is self-evidently unutterable. Were that metaphysical reality non-existent, no specific, limited existences could be perceived, named or known. 7.3 Language, precisely, is an instrument for denominating the extension of unitary being in space-time where anomalies and contradictions appear in consequence of temporal location and embodiment. They arise because that is the condition of existences in space-time; they are resolved because thinking is not a product of space-time but an activity which joins spatio-temporal phenomena, in relation, back into the transcendent dimension from which they emerge into existence. Language therefore is not subject to the limitations of scientific method which has very specific, experimental concerns in a spatio-temporal dimension: these concerns are empirical and what is the case will be pointed to. In ordinary discourse on the other hand (proverbs, metaphors, similes), in poetry and, above all, in philosophy, we express those relational truths which put the propositions of experimental science in a meaningful context. Scientific propositions, which are about quantifiable processes and phenomena, mean nothing without that relational context. The term logos signifies the unspoken totality of that context: in the beginning was the Word. Notes: In his seminal work The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale, 2009), Ian McGilchrist illuminates his discussion of the respective roles played in concept-formation by right and left cerebral hemispheres (pps 203 – 207) with reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel depicts the relation between mind and brain as a ‘masterslave’ relationship. McGilchrist explains how well Hegel’s analogy anticipates later discoveries in neurology, in that the mind, in default of explanatory concepts, all too often allows the brain to call the tune, as the weight of available information favours this solution and not that. This occurs when mind cedes mastery to a manipulating intellect, and it is here that an understanding of the respective roles of right and left hemisphere activity is crucial, for: “the premises

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from which rational system building begins … cannot be confirmed by … rationalistic systematization, but needs ultimately to be intuited”. This ‘intuition’ is evidently the same by which, in the Tractatus, ‘the world’ is recognized as being “everything that is the case”. 2

E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth; W.W. Norton, 2012.

3

Paul the Apostle, The First Letter to the Corinthians; ch. 13, vs. 12.

See: Jean-Marie Guehenno, The End of the Nation-state; Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000.

4

For a discussion of the logos concept in ancient Greece see “Plato and Presocratic Cosmology” (ch. 4) in: The Beginning of Knowledge, Hans-Georg Gadamer; Continuum, 2003.

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CHAPTER 4 A Diversion: towards Rudolf Steiner

According to those who know in that field of mediated knowledge called ‘journalism’, we are about to cross the threshold between positive knowledge on which we can rely and mysticism. The Observer for 29 April 2012 reports that proposals for a holistic medical unit at Aberdeen University whose practises are founded on the theory of knowledge of Rudolf Steiner “will ‘tarnish’ the university’s reputation”. The sub-title informs us that the clinic providing the funding “uses mistletoe to treat cancer patients”. According to Edzard Ernst, who is professor of alternative medicine at Exeter University, such “medicine has no basis in science. Its concepts were dreamed up by Steiner and are based on mystical thinking”. In the corpus of Rudolf Steiner’s writing and public lectures, his treatment of the epistemological issue of what we may claim to know truthfully concerns not only the method used in the sciences to prove hypotheses but also, as in the writings of Erwin Schrődinger, the issue of free will and determinism1. Steiner’s argument is

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also (as in the work of Schrödinger half a century later) consonant with the findings of subsequent research in the field of quantum mechanics; for, as far as Steiner is concerned, knowledge is not the product of intellectual abstraction derived from the evidence of empirical enquiry: truthfulness depends on the governing factor of presuppositions the thinker has about the relationship between his subjectivity and the encompassing reality of the natural world and universe to which both belong. As in the Tractatus, in Steiner’s theory of knowledge, truthful enquiry does not by-pass the thinker’s subjectivity; it redeems it, and does so on the premise that no isolation of the thinker’s viewpoint from reality is given by evolution: it is due to the cultivation of an ego-consciousness whose socio-cultural history has deprived humanity of its species-consciousness. That deficit however (as we explain further below) continues to find expression in our everyday discourse, as each of us uses the same pronoun ‘I’ to refer to himself, signifying the common identity. The fact of our unitary being is indeed the ethical foundation on which epistemology must logically depend, and it is on these premises that we move “towards Rudolf Steiner” from an epistemological foundation provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Proceeding from these premises we acknowledge that in ordinary language use this ‘I’ denominates not only my personal consciousness and yours but also the common ground of our humanity. The ego each of us experiences as his own identity is, of course, due to its being present in time, the progenitor of selfinterest. That ego, however evolves: it evolves toward a common ground signified by that I-usage and this governing perspective in its thinking activity is transcendent of time. Our theory of knowledge therefore includes the following: (a) a concept of who or what it is I am which thinks; (b) the adoption of a method by which the subjectivity of my viewpoint is transcended; (c) the premise that, without the subjectivity of a personal viewpoint, no conclusions could be drawn

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in an objective enquiry; and (d) the view that everything I think necessarily concerns personal interest is not only itself subjective: it is a view which hardly squares with the evolutionary fact that, had the behaviour of individuals in every antecedent species not served the common interest, humanity would not have arrived. The subjectivity of our consciousness and its challenges is the essence of both our humanity and the starting point of epistemology. Let me assure my readers that a list of my relevant reading (too long to include in the footnotes of a book addressed, not to specialists, but to the person who thinks for himself) includes the following seminal texts: Werner Heisenberg’s The Goethean and Newtonian Colour Theories in the Light of Modern Physics; Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World; Mind and Matter by Erwin Schrődinger; Physics and the Fight for a World-view by Max Planck and The Problem of Continuity [in quantum mechanics] by Heinrich Buchholz. Others among contemporary writers have crossed this same threshold between human subjectivity and the consensually agreed truths of science. For example, Friedemann Schwartzkopf in his The Metamorphosis of the Given,2 points out that “The split between nominalism and realism can now be recognised as a tragic misunderstanding on both sides. The argument between the two positions originated in the question of whether words were “names” designating “things” or whether they point to concepts and ideas.” Similarly, Ilja Maso3 explains the epistemological basis of Karl Popper’s ‘falsification’ theory to show that our claims to knowledge depend on the assumptions we make about how thinking engages with reality; a reality which Popper supposed is grasped only if the ‘objective’ procedures of our enquiry by-pass personal subjectivity. This, of course, is precisely the issue raised in the Tractatus with regard to the matter of logos/Word: that there are logical structures in language on which our expressed thought-forms depend, structures which embody an order given by a world we may claim to know provisionally but whose reality “is everything that is the case”. If this primary logos structure which informs thought and world

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reciprocally has not been grasped, the notion of ‘positive’ knowledge is a red herring. ****** Are moral propositions sentences? One often asked this question in Cambridge; Wittgenstein’s presence guaranteed it an important place on the agenda, the point being that in linguistic analysis, a sentence was not a sentence unless it signified something; something was a sentient object, a process or an event composed of several objects in a contingent or causal relationship; a something which can be positively identified using empirical methods. Thus the definition of something determined, a priori, the legitimacy - the referential veracity - of a sentence. No illegitimate sentence (one not pointing to something definite) could therefore form the basis of a sensible (sinnvoll), and so meaningful, proposition4. A moral proposition therefore could not satisfy the sentence criteria of linguistic analysis, and was thus ‘a metaphysical assertion’ - that is (as things were until recently), effectively about nothing. As Kant put it, “A man cannot say: It is morally certain; he can say only: I am morally certain.” While Kant’s limits to reason require that scientific method adjudicates while the reasoning ‘I’ stands aside, a theory of knowledge underpins the work of both Wittgenstein and Steiner which requires the thinker’s conscious presence first: whether he speculates or employs empirical methods in his enquiry, he does not relinquish the presence of that consciousness signified by the ‘I’, whereas in the foundational premises of the positivist agenda, as also in Kant, ‘I’ refers to me alone.5 Both Wittgenstein and Steiner, like Husserl and Heidegger, recognised that understanding language use must precede philosophy. The theoretical divorce of subject and object (whose unitary being informs the grammatical usage of the term ‘I’) effectively eliminates the moral presence of the individual as an agent of social collective within the species.

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That on the grounds given, moral propositions cannot be sentences, Wittgenstein had no doubt: “Of that whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent”. However, as far as the matter of metaphysical propositions being meaningless is concerned, it has suited a consensus in English-language philosophy since then to suppose that therefore something (the referential objects of legitimate sentences) is nothing at all if it cannot be pointed to experimentally as a sentient phenomenon. In Wittgenstein’s book, this conclusion cannot follow from its premises, since the notion of that empirically-indefinite something we call ‘the world’, in which all verifiable events called ‘truthful’ occur, could not then itself be logically meaningful. Such a conclusion is evidently nonsensical. In our account here of Wittgenstein, we draw attention to the logical import, for all epistemological issues, of that something in the Tractatus (German: etwas) which, since ‘the world’ is indeed “everything that is the case”, Wittgenstein’s contemporaries at Cambridge failed to grasp. That something for which we cannot find words is the being-together of everything; it not only informs a consciousness which is the essence of our human condition: it expresses that logical structure in the use of language which enables our gasp of reality. This issue concerns us because philosophy plays an important role at any given time in the prevailing intellectual consensus; for such a consensus typically supports an establishment - a status quo - which, as history has shown, is typically seen in retrospect to have been roller-coasting forward to an uncertain future; it does so by eliminating the moral foundation of a possible human consensus: my ability to choose what I think. In our contemporary cultural climate, futures, in spite of uncertainty, are being predicted to suit every possible anxiety and hope: something is certainly being done, but so long as the metaphysical dimensions of that something are ruled out of court (on the grounds that only experimentallyproven propositions about the physical dimension of my existence are meaningful), the futures we are heading for will simply be extrapolations of presently-established knowledge.6 As things stand in the political present, there is

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little hope that futures which concern us all will be consensually created: given the inertias and the vested interests that define ‘something’ in the absence of any metaphysical certainty that is not religious prescription, that something on which you can’t put a positivist’s finger is effectively nothing we may claim to know. Thus in the exegesis of the Tractatus which follows (chapter 6, part 2) we shall note very carefully everything Wittgenstein says about something (‘etwas’ in the German). In particular, we take note that in the context where the usage of etwas is discussed, Wittgenstein has recourse, as he so often does, to ordinary discourse: [3.323] In ordinary discourse it happens extremely often that the same word is signified in quite different ways - so evoking different symbols - or, that two words, signifying in different ways, are used in the same sense. So the same word ‘is’ appears both as a copula, an equivalent, and an expression of existence; ‘existing’ as an intransitive verb like ‘going’; ‘identical’ as an attribute; we speak of something [‘etwas’], but also of something happening. So the most fundamental conflations easily occur (as also throughout all philosophy). Wittgenstein is making the point that ‘something’ is not categorically indefinite, having a forbidden (as if by the invigilators of Kafka’s The Castle) metaphysical resonance: although “… we speak of something” he says, we also speak “of something happening” (3.323). In the German, (“etwas geschieht”), something happening has the additional sense of something being manifest. Whereas in the English a ‘happening’ presupposes a certain randomness (an element of the arbitrary) about which we wonder, what is ‘manifest’ evidently has a rational explanation. Wittgenstein emphasises the consequences of this uncertainty: “In our notation there is an element of arbitrariness, but it [what happens] is not arbitrary: so that if we have specified something arbitrary, then something else must be the case”. If the German “etwas geschieht” is indefinite about what happened, Wittgenstein points out that if ever sentences fail to clarify the event,

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something has been wrongly conceived to start with. With the English “something has happened” a more definite event has occurred. Nevertheless something, in Wittgenstein’s German, is not nothing; on the contrary, because ‘something’ is not defined, it is logically present as a possibility and may determine what actually happens; and (as Wittgenstein certainly had in mind) it is precisely that logically necessary realm of the possible - from which realised events must proceed - which is relegated by positivist materialism to a realm of superstition and occult darkness. We frequently hear the sceptic say: “Never mind what might have happened”, as if the speaker thought possibilities had no effect on outcomes. Not by accident were the foundations of linguistic analysis laid in Vienna: something (possibilities which had, by incremental and methodical turns of thought, become nothing since the end of the Middle Ages) now threatened destruction. From the depths of the unconscious the Tartar, once a fiction on the horizon, twice laying siege unsuccessfully to Vienna, would shortly be seen by Freud to erupt incestuously from under the skirts and below the belts of his clients, while at the same time Hitler (a pupil at Wittgenstein’s school) brought to an end the secure climate of bourgeois contentment described by Stephan Zweig in “The World of Yesterday”: There is hardly a city in Europe where the drive towards cultural ideals was as passionate as it was in Vienna. Precisely because the monarchy, because Austria itself for centuries had been neither politically ambitious nor particularly successful in its military actions, the native pride had turned more strongly toward a desire for artistic supremacy. The most important and the most valuable provinces, German and Italian, Flemish and Walloon, had long since fallen away from the old Habsburg empire that had once ruled Europe; unsullied in its old glory, the capital had remained, the treasure of the court, the preserver of a thousand-year-old tradition. The Romans had laid the first stones of this city, as a castrum, a fortress, an advance outpost to protect Latin civilisation

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Wittgenstein The Tartar against the barbarians; and more than a thousand years later the attack of the Ottomans against the West shattered against these walls. Here rode the Nibelungs, here the immortal Pleiades of music shone out over the world, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Johann Strauss, here all the streams of European culture converged. At court, among the nobility, and among the people, the German was related in blood to the Slavic, the Hungarian, the Spanish, the Italian, the French, the Flemish; and it was the particular genius of this city of music that dissolved all the contrasts harmoniously into a new and unique thing, the Austrian, the Viennese. Hospitable and endowed with a particular talent for receptivity, the city drew the most diverse forces to it, loosened, propitiated, and pacified them. It was sweet to live here, in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation, and subconsciously every citizen became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.

Here, in this milieu, the incubus was hatched which spawned Hitler’s death camps, many of whose victims were contributors to the Vienna Stephan Zweig describes. Had something metaphysical (the unitary being of humanity, for example) become nothing? Was it by accident that in Vienna the “hated” metaphysical object (as Morton White refers to it in his account of Rudolf Carnap in Vienna)7 should have become the chief negative determination of philosophy? ****** The metaphysical dimension of ordinary experience continuously informs our normative perceptions of the everyday world with evolutionary possibility; a dimension not confined to celebrated discoveries, it informs our most mundane concerns. If under some circumstances, a horse can be an internal combustion engine, you employ the concept ‘horse-power’; but even allowing for this relativity between the concepts ‘horse’ and ‘internal combustion engine’, the two species are not confused in the ordinary usage: we live with that metaphysical dimension of something in which everything is inter-related. With horse-power, the profitable linguistic conflation of concepts entails a mutation of what is given sentiently: the world is not simply given but there to be explored. Science knows

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how to deal with both ‘the horse’ and ‘the internal combustion engine’ because they are nominal, verifiable concepts whose referents we separately point to. The ‘horsepower’ itself is first a product not of science but of the imagination: its metaphysical perspectives provide the drive with which science moves humanity forward. The relativity entailed in the association of ideas which produces this useful concept depends on the existence of a provisionally but not finally-evolved world whose structure must answer to the logic of the language we use to describe it. The human spokesman articulates that reality, but not necessarily: he must choose whether he is for or against a consensus in which, although you can’t point to the horse-power, it gets you there. Logic thus provides the a priori frame of reference determining the status in reality of facts and possibilities which have yet to be foreseen and are not causally-determined. Thus the doubt I have about the beingtogether of humanity and about a moral identification of myself with the other, mirrors an evolutionary perspective in which outcomes are not causallydetermined but depend on voluntary in-puts. The errors in logic of Russell and Frege referred to in the Tractatus were precisely of this kind because the metaphysical dimension of moral uncertainty with regard to the determination of consensus is ruled out of court in their thinking: ‘facts’ are not intuited but experimentally given in the absence of subjectivity. What is therefore difficult to grasp, on this logical premise, is exactly why Wittgenstein’s English-speaking readers found it necessary to divide the seamless logical argument of the Tractatus between that part which deals with the status of empirical facts (propositions, or assertions, about reality which can be shown to be truthful whenever the experimental circumstances are identical) and that part which deals with so-called metaphysical propositions; for the latter, according to the same rules of logic, must be taken as self-evident without empirical proof. Once logic is seen to be applied, there are no ‘yes’ or ‘no’ conclusions and no

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argument about asserted facts: there exists only that realm where thinking activity occurs in which something (a presupposition) is either possible or not; and what is possible and not possible in logic is given, paradoxically by the existence of (a) facts which confirm or falsify the positive assertions of science; and (b) the logically necessary order within which things may or may not seem possible; an order, precisely, to whose government all empirical facts must answer; not necessarily now, but in the course of time, so that possible outcomes depend on expectation and hope. And if we ask if our reference to both the ‘given’ and to the ‘potential’ character of a logical order is tautological, the answer is no, because “the logically necessary order” of what is given proceeds from the possible in time, whereas the cognitive instrument which apprehends it is not time-bound. The intelligibility of this order (on which necessarily the foundation of logic depends) is given, Wittgenstein insists (see ch. 6, Wittgensteiner Part II), by the phenomena themselves as they are objectively ordered within nature. All answers to problems in pure logic are therefore perfectly in accord with any truthful conclusions we draw empirically about facts on the basis of scientific method. It is therefore logically impossible (i.e. the real nonsense) to conclude that the kind of knowledge we call ‘scientific’ concerns only empirically proven facts while asserting at the same time that self-evident truths on which they logically depend are metaphysical nonsense. Hence, Wittgenstein concludes, this division of the phenomena between quantifiable objects and processes and the intuited relational contexts in which they occur, so that the former are said to be ‘known’ and the latter ‘nonsense’, confounds the principles of logic on which empirical science is supposed to rest. The problem is within the subject. As Wittgenstein puts it: Were I to write a book, “The world as it came to me”, there would be my body to describe and to report which members [of it] answered to my will and which did not etc; which is, in fact, a method of isolating the subject; or, what is more, to say that in a real sense no subject exists: of that alone, precisely, this book could not speak. (5.631)

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i.e. the subject can be conscious of processes in his central nervous system (sense data, thought) but not in his metabolic/limb-system which is governed in unconsciousness by the will. Hence in the Book of Genesis, Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge but not that of the Tree of Life. The importance of Steiner’s epistemology is that he sees how this archetypical, contextual background of human knowledge continues to operate in the normative use of language on which our concept formation depends: his concept of the human presence in evolution also informs his epistemology.8 It is in that realm of natural force which we cannot enter objectively with our consciousness and where will is active in the laws of nature, that we have recourse to scientific methods in order to grasp what cannot be directly seen by any exercise of thought. In thought, the will, which is active in nature, becomes partially conscious. Will is therefore defined by Steiner as that force in the material firmament which moves between and joins together the formal beings or essences within the logos whose presence in matter determines the evolutionary form of the world. This we grasp or define in our consciousness (using scientific methods) as the laws of nature. The will as we experience it in consciousness is therefore the expression of that joining force in the material firmament; and if, in so far as it becomes conscious, the intention is to unify what the intellect, in separate cognitive acts, fragments, our concepts become entirely clear when we realise that therefore the unitary substance we mean (which informs matter as will) is the essence of that thing we experience in our relationship with the real world as love. For if not, the logic of my own limited perspective in time would deprive the future of an outcome which is possible only on the basis of that autonomy, which is the unique contribution of our human condition to evolution. Social cohesion, for the time being in default of love, is the product of an agreed legislative order. Love, at the risk of loss, gives in expectation of reciprocity,

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presupposing a mature social order of the sort humanity alone is equipped to inaugurate. ****** The coursing in our bodies of the blood gives something we vaguely call ‘life’; which we experience as such even if, according to Crick and Watson, it can be properly explained only by the operation of a genetic code. When a doctor explains how the blood is (a) created by the lymphatic system, (b) composed of haemoglobin and (c) depends on the presence of red and white corpuscles in a certain balance, we do not conclude that life itself is non-existent because its presence depends on the interaction of other phenomena: the existence of life can be verified experimentally only because its consciousness in us depends on sentient phenomena we can quantify; even if the ‘life’ itself is not immediately, tangibly present as is the lymph-system or haemoglobin, notwithstanding its termination with death, we hardly doubt that life is real. The rules governing the existence and appearance of the lymph, from which the blood life depends on is created, will not explain the existence and appearance of blood: the constituents of blood, which exist in and for themselves, do not create the blood. What creates the blood is the existence of another formal principle to which the separate constituents of blood conform only when they are brought into a certain relationship by that formal principle which is life itself.9 The substance we then identify as the blood is the product not of its constituent elements but of the presence in that relationship of a different formal principle from that governing the existence of those elements separately. What matters therefore is not the degree to which the phenomena we talk about are measurably present as sense objects: life is most evidently measurable when it withdraws, when a body dies. Its presence may have sentiently perceptible effects or otherwise be evident prior to that moment, but although its presence is less evidently measurable than

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the activity of the blood which supports it, we are still willing to allow that life exists as a phenomenon independently of its constituent parts. If we point to it in a meaningful sense even when it is most evident in the effects of its absence, that is because, in acts of knowledge, it is our thinking and not the positivist’s literal finger which points to whatever is known. Contemplating the absence of life in a body, were the thinking subject not still with that life in the reality, it could not recognise physical death. In the case of thoughts (the instrument by which alone any knowledge of the phenomenal world is possible) there is almost nothing we can point to as sentient evidence for their existence: the brain event to which we point is identified as corresponding to the presence of unidentified thought on obvious empirical grounds, even if no specific thought can be pointed to. The presence of something that knows what is thought is a logical requirement, for the brain-event to which we can point cannot be identified with a particular thought; for each thought is seamlessly inter-related with other thoughts on which its conceptual truthfulness depends. It is on these grounds that Wittgenstein asks (5.633): “Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be seen? You say, here, what is present is an entirety, as with the eye and the field of sight. But the eye you really don’t see. And nothing in the field of vision permits the conclusion that it is observed by an eye”. Thus (5.632): “The subject [thinker] is not part of the world, but is a boundary of the world.” A boundary that is physically present in a world with which he is “seamlessly inter-related” in thought. The brain-event of the subject, on the contrary, is not simply a limited, spatio-temporal occurrence: it is the instrument of his experience as being a part of that world whose complexity is beyond words. In saying that thoughts are the only instrument by which knowledge is possible, we clearly refer not to abstract knowledge stored, but to knowledge as it is actively present in consciousness; for, prior to any acts of cognition which join

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thinking subject and objective phenomena in the production of logically-ordered concepts, and prior to there being a species able to do that, knowledge of the world is present unconsciously in all organisms; present in terms of sensory stimuli at each and every interface between one organism or event and another. If that unitary being is not directly experienced, it is because a corporate humanity is not given but depends on an admission of moral responsibility by individuals.10 Disordered concepts which we impose on the phenomena erroneously as explanation are caused neither by the phenomena (which are as they are given in that standpoint and at that moment) nor by the sensory apparatus under normal circumstances (the latter may be disturbed: inherited deficiencies, the presence of artificial stimulants etc.). Disordered concepts are the product of conditions obtaining in the psychology of the soul when it uses thinking as its instrument of knowledge. That is, the soul (or subject-entity) is not a purely passive receptor of sensory inputs from its environment: even allowing for any sensory abnormalities in one’s organism, one processes what is experienced or perceived by actively ordering concepts to explain what it is. One does so, normally, on the basis of an existing set of assumptions constituting knowledge, by excluding and including potential evidence and, accordingly, increasing incrementally what is already known. Depending on the truthfulness of the knowledge already acquired, normally (ie on the basis of previous experience) that knowledge will either compound existing errors in the explanation of reality or it will enhance the truthfulness of what was previously known or believed to be the case, depending on the truthfulness of the observer forming the concepts. The presence of such truthfulness is neither prescriptive nor ‘principled’: it answers firstly to the evolutionary fact that humanity is a single species and secondly to the intuition that if ‘the world’ must indeed be “everything that is the case”, then my standpoint may be subjective and (if yours contradicts it) also untruthful. The apparent logical problem is compounded in that, as we have

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observed, without a subjectivity that permits error, the concept of knowledge is unthinkable. According to positivism, no such moral issue can arise because, precisely, the task of philosophy is not to interrogate subjectivity but to by-pass it, as if the phenomena might then speak for themselves. If they evidently do, what better proof of an innate intelligence than the evolution of a comprehending subject? Supposing (reasonably) that no possible knowledge-state can be entirely truthful, then nothing guarantees the possibility of an incremental improvement in true knowledge except a radical and intentional adoption in consciousness by the soul (let’s call it that, if only because an intention presupposes a conscious entity) of a predisposition, prior to the formation of concepts, to meet every act of cognition with no presupposition at all about the correctness of knowledge previously acquired. Thus it happens that new discoveries may require a revision of all previous knowledge. That is, of the context and perspective in which ‘facts’ were previously seen. So it is that Steiner acknowledged the fact that the premises of his theory of knowledge were made clear in the study of Goethe’s writing on human subjectivity and the truthfulness of scientific knowledge.11 The arbitration which therefore continuously occurs, in the normative activity we call ‘thinking’, between possible concepts before conclusions are definitively formed as clear concepts about actual realities, is not passive or causally determined at all: it is the expression of something more or less active in thinking that we recognise in ordinary experience as the exercise of will. Either or; for if not, then although we can easily explain as normative the behaviour of those who conform and are entirely passive in adverse circumstances, no explanation is possible for the on-going revisions of perspective about what reality is like which have characterised the evolution of human civilisation; for these revisions have occurred in spite of that normative conformity which appear to mark the behaviour, in every epoch, of the majority. No argument to the effect that radical

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revisions of previous thought, which existed as precedent in the minds of either individuals or in a cultural consensus, can be attributed causally to the naturally existing phenomena, has so far been given a rational foundation; for all such arguments have effectively entailed a denial of the metaphysical presence of the subject who thinks. This is the starting point of Steiner’s epistemology: all knowledge depends on the dimension of the human context; a context which, given by an evolutionary process in time, is itself articulate, speaking for that process in a cosmic perspective. It is not rational to maintain, as empirical positivism does, that no such denial (of the subject) is entailed on the grounds that the existence of the thinker is given by the evidence of synaptic brain chemistry or by an account in molecular physics of the neural events in the cortex; to argue thus is to ignore both the logical problem raised in the above discussion of the evidence for the existence of life (evident most tangibly by its absence) and the coherent logic and import of the whole of the Tractatus. That thought-acts are actually substantial12 is evident above all as a negative determination: their possible absence as a constituent component of the reality is denied by our recognition of an active interdependence of all the phenomena (a world composed of “everything that is the case”); a coherence that only our thinking grasps. In other words, logically, the existence of ‘the world’ and that of the cognising subject are inseparable on the grounds that, with no observer present, that world could not be known to exist. But we do not thereby say that the world has no objective reality independently of our being: we say that its being and our own are equally the product of the unitary, evolutionary process of something; of a unitary being-in-the-beginning from which both the world and our cognate being-with-it has evolved in time so that the material firmament and the transcendent spirit are two poles of a single reality that must be re-cognised; a reality for whose further evolution the human dimension - its cognitive activity and the matter of truthfulness - is therefore crucial.

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It will be clear from the above account of the cognitive process that the human entity is not a causal construction of physical processes but a composite, layered being; a being indeed whose presence within the phenomenal world is given by the existence of the several subtle bodies described in the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner. These ‘subtle bodies’ correspond with and are products of developmental stages in human evolution and are not, as Professor Ernst believes (note: believes, because his opinion has no epistemological foundation) “dreamed up … and based on mystical thinking”.13 They are (a) the physical body which, although substantial in the material firmament, is given shape in that flux by (b) what Steiner calls an ‘etheric’ dimension informing the material constituents (in the case of animal organisms, that etheric form being unconscious - and so inarticulate - operates in, and governs, the being of the species). This being of the species (c) Steiner calls the ‘astral body’, or soul, which (articulate in the human case) is also individualised. That is, the universal nature of the species becomes conscious as me; my ‘soul’ is that astral body. The instrument of personal consciousness in that astral body is then (d) the ego, whose means of expression in that dimension of human consciousness is the Word; the syntax and grammar of language then mirrors the fundamental order of logos which, in time, informs the material foundation so that evolution occurs. The articulate human dimension is the summit of that evolution because that is where the unitary being of the universe is conscious. At that point it says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to what is given. This is the problem of free will which Steiner describes in his The Boundaries of Natural Science.14 The existence of the subtle bodies described (physical, etheric, astral and ego) is presupposed in our preceding account of cognitive acts; it is however beyond the scope of the present work to provide further exegesis. Nevertheless, in what follows and in the concepts outlined in chapters 5–7 we provide an introduction in terms of the evident compatibility between the theories of knowledge in Steiner and Wittgenstein.

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****** As far as the logical necessity of being at all (in any sense which is not a physical state) is concerned, Wittgenstein says: (6.3): The exploration of logic is the exploration of all regularity. And outside logic, everything is chance [Zufall: a falling together of things]. (6.31): The so-called Law of Induction [attributing our evolution to causal process] cannot, in any case, be a logical proposition, because it is evidently a sense-full sentence … that is, determinism refers, points to a definite mechanism outside the context of a logical proposition, whereas logic concerns only the inhering order itself and not the phenomena thus ordered. Thus it is the logically intelligible order in the natural phenomena which governs what happens. Since the law of induction attempts to proscribe causal processes it fails to account for those cognitive acts which enable the thinking human subject to freely determine his congruence with “everything that is the case”; with that something which cannot be said. With regard to that congruence, Hegel, speaking of our subjectivity, says that its “identity of being with the objects of its consciousness is immediate.”15 Thus whatever is given (on which evolution depends) is not, in the human case, determined: in every case, the known is not given but decided within the constituency of time, as if the order of that given presupposed a human autonomy. If, in the German, metaphysical propositions do not deal with the experience of sensory phenomena, the boundary in English usage between the subjective soul experience and so-called objective facts is not clear. This produces great poetry but consequent uncertainty is rectified by those tendencies in philosophy which attempt to make the intuitions of speculative thought a subject of empirical enquiry. Wittgenstein however, elides the subject-object dilemma of being:

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(6.32):The law of causality is not a law, but the form of a law. (6.371): Foundational to the whole outlook of modernity is the illusion that so-called natural law is an explanation of nature. [But] (5.1361): Nothing is given in the future which can be conclusively known from the present. Belief in causality is a superstition. (5.1362): Free will depends on the fact that future acts cannot be known in the present. Only if causality were an inner necessity, like the conclusions of logic, could they [future acts] be known. (5.133): [Therefore] All outcomes happen a priori. That under these circumstances “outcomes happen a priori” means that if indeterminate outcomes are possible but could not be causally determined, they are nevertheless logically present a priori as possibilities. However, the notion of a thing being potentially present (i.e. an evolutionary concept presupposing a human goal) is a nonsense to nominalism because, on its terms, only those things are real which actually occur, so that the notion of future outcomes as possibilities is nonsense: whatever occurs must then have antecedent causes. I described to a friend the important position of nominalism in English philosophy: whereas named objects denominate real phenomena – i.e. individuals, like horses, whose existence could be spatio-temporally verified – the names, or signifiers referring to them, are nominal abstractions: in the usage they are not the signifiers of a real essence present in each member, each horse, of the species as they are in the German. My friend’s response was this: it is self-evident that the essence is real because, on seeing a horse, whether I continue to observe it or turn around, what I actually see (even when my back is turned) is the essence or concept by which that horse is identified. The individual horse, in the empirical and spatio-temporal reality we sense, is composed of interactive physical processes and events which, if I wait long enough will see its death. That mutable existence is not the reality I see and am cognate with in thought. In the English we need to think in order to grasp what is given in the German.

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In a further discussion of the Tractatus we got stuck on this problem of nominalism. I stated what I took to be the foundational premise of the Tractatus: that whatever the case might be with regard to what is real in ‘the world’, all propositions which signify that world must answer to logic; and I explained that therefore there could be no contradiction between empirically proven, so-called ‘facts’ (horses) and our intuition of the self-evident world they are in; because, if the universal essence ‘horse’ were not self-evident, no individual horse could be indentified. There is thus a sentient, physical ‘world’ in which individual horses exist; that physical world is known, however, in the metaphysical realm of our conscious human experience. The apprehension of that sentient realm in our acts of cognition is thus governed by the given metaphysical order of the logos, for it is this order alone that informs the one reality which the human thought-acts divide; it does so because the thinker experiences (feels that) the unitary being of the reality informs his personal existence from the standpoint of his body. Although we can point to existing horses, the world thus known is informed by essences we cannot point to in space-time. If this known world is thus the realm of what is logically possible, it is because, without it, we could not recognise or know the temporal actuality we see and denominate in order to achieve objectives in an uncertain future. If, on the premises of nominalism, humans are cognate with the world entirely in consequence of causally-explained and therefore predictable processes, this ‘knowing’ then does not differ from the unconscious and instinctual ‘knowing’ of non-human mammal behaviour. Thinking has not been accounted for. Wittgenstein’s position, “No sentence can express something about itself because the referent object [it signifies] is not contained in it” (3.332), implies that nothing in actuality, no sensate phenomena, can be known simply because it is present to the sensory apparatus in the subject. But speculative thought in the reality is then theoretically impossible only because the subject who thinks joins the phenomena conceptually as they are not necessarily joined in physical fact. However, it is

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from within thinking (not a process of abstraction but a state of being conscious) that we recognise the objects of perception as being given within the governing order of that logos: since the physical realm also conforms to that logic, we inhabit it with our thinking by being in those joined relationships; relationships which are however not predetermined but given in time, in the course of an evolutionary process on which future realities depend. If in the dimension of physical fact things are separated by space-time, they are related (that is, re-related or redeemed) in acts of cognition which are not causally-determined. It is therefore a logical nonsense to propose that knowledge, in a field of separate phenomena, is constructed in the mind piecemeal (as nominalism supposes) by the impact and stimulus of sensory phenomena. (In fact it is on this premise that Wittgenstein confounds Russell’s “Theory of Types”, 3.331). In thinking, the phenomena which exist separately (fragmented by the intellect) enter the metaphysical realm of being we are always in ourselves to become transcendent of their spatio-temporal contingency. In reality, we are, in our thinking, always and already in that realm (with more or less consciousness) of the logos-order from which the evolutionary order of the world, in time, emerged in the first place. Thinking (enacted thought) takes us into that predisposing order of an intelligence which preceded and informed the evolutionary process in time. We rule out the possibility of such an intelligence because (as secularists) we suppose that an anthropomorphic being is meant. But the intelligence we have is given by that logos. The egotism of modernity inverts our perception of the reality because it fails to understand that without the presence of human consciousness, beginning and end are one. The experience of evolutionary time is a product of the human condition. As we have already remarked, according to the premises of nominalism, the existence in any meaningful sense of undetermined, possible outcomes for the being of the world is logically untenable: and indeed, in our time, a probable

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majority will normally suppose that, whatever we think, all possible futures are determined here and now in the temporal present. Thinking activity is in no sense transcendent: we cannot conclude from the fact of our thinking about the given phenomena, that this activity is our own and not the response of the organism to the phenomena: in our brains, the experience of a determining impact on the organism of the phenomena sentiently becomes conscious and no logical order is present in our thinking a priori. Wittgenstein’s answer to this in the Tractatus is: Can we comprehend two names [linguistic signs], without knowing if they denominate the same or two separate things? – Can we comprehend a sentence in which two names occur, without knowing if they mean the same or different things? (4.243) He means that all verbal formulations about the nature of the reality are provisional. They are so because our human condition (present in a continuum of consciousness independently of time) requires that truth is consensuallydetermined. This takes time. If our cognitive ability to distinguish one thing from another (as Adam is said to have named things on the basis of difference kinds) depended only on their being physically distinct in the phenomenal world, then the logic and order we think with must be learned empirically and cannot be innate. Wittgenstein’s question about how sentences are comprehensible shows that, were that logos order not inherent in both the phenomena and in our cognitive structures, it would be impossible to entertain two contradictory but equally possible explanations in mind at once until the empirical facts of subsequent experience showed the one to be true and the other false. We think to resolve such contradictions; they are not resolved by experiencing contradictory phenomena because, objectively, such contradictions are the product of our partial standpoints; these, only an exercise of will in thinking can rectify. That is, the human being must penetrate the subjective determination of his individual standpoint or soul in order to think and know what the given, logical, consensual

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reality is actually like. That given and logical reality is there in the natural phenomena from which, in evolution and through time, the human individual has evolved. However, if that order is not given necessarily in the activity of thought, it is because individual standpoints are, due to hereditary and environmental circumstance, subjective. The evolutionary purpose of that subjectivity however is the discovery of its consonance with an objectively-given reality. Thus we are (logically) entitled to conclude that although empirical methods, whether of commonsense experience or of science, may speak truthfully of the individual processes and phenomena in nature, the totality of facts making the world “everything that is the case” is infinitely complex and so cannot be known on so-called empirical terms; whether or not it can be articulated positively, that world is the object of a metaphysical knowledge given with our human consciousness. That totality of facts which is ‘the world’ therefore exists within an evolutionary order which preceded not only the appearance of humanity but of the planetary system it inhabits. That order - that logos - is present phenomenally in space-time within the sentient creation. There, it is perceived by a rational intelligence whose exercise predicates the existence of the intelligent order at its source. The intelligence manifest both in the creation and in the intelligence which divines it in human thought, answers to the original order of that logos. This is the conclusion which Wittgenstein, due to his cohabiting with the circle of linguistic philosophers who dominated philosophy at Cambridge, did not explicitly formulate, but it inheres in every line of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein was moved to write the Tractatus by his moral enthusiasm for the idea that the future well-being of humanity must depend on the logic with which we choose to think now; for that logic is necessarily present throughout the creation and is not the product of that process we so arrogantly term a scientific method while using it unscientifically to divide our experience between short-term pragmatic goals and hoped-for ideals; for we call those hoped-for ideals ‘pie-in-the-sky’ on the

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grounds of so-called, self-interested pragmatism adopted a priori. We do so because, of course, it makes life easier. The sadness, disappointment and anger we sometimes feel about even the small things we hope for, and do not achieve, are emotions which occur only because we actually need, quite objectively, the better world which humanity is equipped to hope for as an evolutionary goal; this future hardly crosses our minds. To achieve that better world, or to do one’s bit towards it, requires an effort of will. By nature, we prefer more comfortable and dependable circumstances in the short term than faith in long-term goals seems likely, from the point of view of the present, to provide. Similarly, to all those philosophers who embrace pragmatism and who pigeon-hole ethics and morality as the by-product of subjectivism, the idealism (itself an unfortunate term in the history of philosophy) of a Wittgenstein or a Steiner seems but a forlorn and titillating hope. What is the point of thinking; what, in fact, is thought? This question is not Wittgenstein’s concern: he considered it to be self-evident that, whatever its ontogenesis, the existence of thought is foundational for all philosophy; and not being emotionally predisposed to tolerate argument with those whose logic contradicted this reasonable assumption and whose logical errors he exposed, he lived for the self-evident truths his logic vindicated, and suffered intensely the frustration of not being willing to confront (as the terminating proposition of the Tractatus suggests) the ontological issue of the relationship between that realm of logical necessity to which all empirical facts are evidently subject and the status in the empirical reality of the thinker; a reluctance no doubt inspired by the prevailing polarisation of so-called ‘religious’ knowledge and the product of scientific enquiry; a polarisation which Steiner refused to accept. Though the general drift of the Tractatus does express a given metaphysical order witnessed during a spatio-temporal existence, the last thing Wittgenstein wanted was to seem to provide grounds for an accommodation between philosophy and

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religion. Rudolf Steiner, however (also no stranger to the cotemporary culture of Vienna) experienced this same suffering: the experiencing subject being displaced by positivist descriptions of the phenomenal world, its contemplative object. This provided the motive for his doctoral thesis, Epistemologie der Goethsche Weltanschaung, in which he took issue with the foundational positivism of Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge, for it was the scientific writings of Goethe the poet - his narrative of the human condition - that inspired the Steiner to illuminate the evolutionary context of human knowledge. Notes: 1

Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter; Cambridge University Press, 1958

2

Friedrich Schwartzkopf, The Metamorphosis of the Given: towards an ecology of consciousness; Peter Lang, 1995. 3

Ilja Maso, New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Edited by Willis Harman with Jane Clark; An Institute of Noetic Sciences Book, 1994.

4

see: George Moore’s account, Some Main Problems of Philosophy; 1953. (Chapter 1). 5

Kant: the Theoretical Cognitive Act.

6

See, for example, Meet the people who are building our future”, The Observer, 29 April 2012; in which we are told that “… a group of top thinkers from Silicon Valley … help to create incredible new technological solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.” Meanwhile, for example: “Authoritarian states have long seen cyberspace as the ultimate threat to their source of power … turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a tool for surveillance and control”. John Kampfner, The Guardian, 23 August 2012.

7 8

The Age of Analysis, Morton White; A Mentor Book, 1955.

The scope of this work is vast and much of the published English translations discouragingly bad. There are however research publications by students of his work who are engaged with issues of contemporary knowledge which are exemplary; e.g. The Heart of the Matter: discovering the laws of living organisms; Olive Whicher; Temple Lodge, 1997; and Three Fundamental

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Problems of the Anthroposophical Knowledge of Man: 1 The Bodily Foundation of Thinking; Eugen Kolisko, Kolisko Archive, 1943. 9

“In nature all the threads are one single tissue”; Herder, in his Essay on the Origin of Language. Quoted in Iain McGilchrist, op. cit. See also The Mind-Body Problem. 10

See: Hans Küng, Global Responsibility: in search of a new world ethic; SCM Press, 1990.

11

Rudolf Steiner, Wahrheit und Wissenschaft; Freies Geistesleben, 1961.

12

‘substantial’, in Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought (Allen Lane, 2007) only in measurable physical terms: “Metaphor in science … is a way of adapting language to reality, not the other way round”, as if the logos-order informing thought had nothing to do with what he calls “genuine laws in the world”, he fears the very subjectivity by which, thanks to evolution, his going with it must be consciously chosen.

13

Further to our reference to Professor Ernst at the beginning of this chapter, we note that The Times Educational Supplement for 26 April 2012, commenting on the proposed establishment at Aberdeen of a chair in alternative medicine, reports that Ernst called treatments based on Steiner’s medical research “pure quackery”.

14

See in particular Chapter 6. The Boundaries of Natural Science; op. cit.

15

G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes; Akademie-Verlag, 1967 (p.208).

CHAPTER 5 The Epistemological Problems of Materialism and the Human Context

Whether we speak of things we claim are proven truths or whether we speak of those things in which we simply believe, everything is contingent on our being in something called the world. If, on logical grounds, there are no possible proofs in the scientific sense for either one’s own existence or for the existence of something we call ‘the world’, both are self-evidently real to the rational mind where the cognitive act originates. The unproven self-evident reality of self and world precedes all forms of explanation about what that reality is like. Experimental methods in the empirical sciences affirm not ‘existences’ but the quantifiable, measureable states of the things we experience as existent. Strictly speaking, whatever is experienced that the inductive method cannot quantify is an object of belief about a dimension of experience which philosophy calls ‘metaphysical’. This doctrine, on which all contemporary nominalism depends (as discussed in our Introduction), was first articulated by Francis Bacon, who

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originated the inductive method in the reign of Elizabeth I. He did so in his Novum Organum1, dividing clearly between scientific knowledge (properly called) and speculation. His argument is of such length and eloquence that to refer to it at all without a summary is almost an impertinence; nevertheless, the fundamental error of his epistemological drift is evident as soon as he begins (on the second page): “The subtlety of Nature is far beyond that of Sense or of the Understanding: so that the specious meditations, speculations, and Theories of mankind are but a kind of insanity, only there is no one to stand by and observe it”, meaning that we cannot transcend our subjectivity. Thus, having thus praised a natural order whose subtlety is beyond words, he then tells us that the observer, being the natural originator of those ‘specious meditations, speculations and Theories” about it, must cede his claims to know what he actually experiences to the methodological devices of empirical experiment: a “scientific attitude” of CH Waddington’s sort must rule out the presupposition and the embroidery of imagination; that is, ‘rule out’ speculation as if the empirical methods of science apply themselves to the phenomena without human assistance. This logical problem of empiricism - the view that the human observer who makes the propositions cannot be present in any scientific sense - is the departure point of our ‘Wittgensteiner’ epistemology in chapter 5; for “to stand by and observe it” (the thinking subject being invisible), the tools and methods he employs to record weight, dimension, velocity etc. to give evidence independently of himself, are not only the invention of his subjectivity, but the evidence produced by his empirical enquiry must be adjudicated. How is it then, in this court of enquiry, that since the Elizabethan era (until now with John Gray), the judge who adjudicates at every hearing has been tied hand and mouth while the often-conflicting evidence inundating the court nods to the highest bidder, ensuring that conclusions called ‘scientific’ all too often suit whichever interests dominate in the prevailing culture? Hilda Murrell might know.

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Notwithstanding the logic by which it is reasonable and rational to conclude that one’s existence and that of the world are self-evident (since the product of scientific enquiry could not otherwise exist) and the irrationality and absurdity of the denial, we inhabit an intellectual culture of materialism which thrives on this absurdity; it does so because acknowledgement of the logical problem of positive knowledge entails the conclusion that the presupposed a priori existence of the knower must rest on an epistemologically sound foundation even if that assertion cannot be falsified.2 Indeed, we argue below that precisely by exposing the illogic of Russell’s “Theory of Types”, Wittgenstein proves the presupposition of existence. Thus we are entitled to take it as logically necessary that what Wittgenstein calls something (whether that is the presence of soul/astral body or of thinking agent/ego we have discussed in chapter 4) must exist substantially in those acts of knowledge by which we learn to know what is or is not the case. As we have seen, the Tractatus explains that sentences denominate definite entities and occurrences. Though these events do logically comprise the reality, descriptive sentences refer to facts which are tautologous (conflicting) as far as their presupposed unitary being is concerned. That unitary being then, is something metaphysical which transcends all spatio-temporally discrete phenomena: it composes ‘the world’; a world comprising an immeasurable - and so metaphysical - “everything”; an “everything that is the case”. That world is the ‘something’ with which we are cognate at every waking moment. If sentences must point to, then, like it or not, the so-called ‘inductive method’ (of Francis Bacon and his contemporary ‘nominalist’ successors) presupposes the existence of that indefinite, epistemologically-suspect metaphysical ‘world’, while claiming it can be ‘known’ only in respect of its constituent parts.3 No one has argued this epistemological point more cogently than Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus. No one has researched the implications of this epistemological standpoint for our understanding of human nature, of its

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distinguishing attributes, of its evolution in time and for our knowledge of what material events are, with greater objectivity than Rudolph Steiner. If the achievement of the Italian Renaissance is to have de-mystified the separation of belief and knowledge by the Catholic Church so that the individual thinker confronts the dilemma in himself, Steiner’s achievement is to have provided an epistemological account of knowing - applicable to every branch of knowledge – which explains the individual’s moral responsibility for his acts of thought within the whole context of human experience. That is to say, the fact that the presence of the human viewpoint is essential to knowledge presupposes an identity between the being of our humanity and the universe we observe, an identity which positivism effectively denies. It is this standpoint that we illuminate in our commentary on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, so providing logical grounds for Steiner’s epistemological perspective. In elaborating our argument that being itself (the realm of contingent existences) is substantially present both in our acts of knowing and in defining the evident forms existences take (the latter, in acts of thought, being literally engaged with the material foundation via the brain)4, we shall conclude the following on logical grounds: that the problem of how thinking activity in the knowing subject is related to events in the physical brain is a problem of the same kind as that of the relationship between life and death. In other words, the consequences for our understanding of ourselves and of existence in general of the irrational presupposition that thinking is identical with, and caused by, brain activity, are logically interrelated with the presupposition that our being at all terminates with the death of the physical body. That such a conclusion is, on logical grounds, irrational, stands the conceptual premises of modernism and materialism on its head. We shall demonstrate that this is what Wittgenstein and Steiner between them have effectively achieved: the terminal sickness of contemporary materialism is the premise that, since death is a terminal experience, now is a matter of all or nothing, so that we saturate ourselves with material consumption.

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But, says Wittgenstein (6.4311): “Death is not a life experience” so that “Our life is as endless as our field of vision is unlimited”. This present work also makes clear that the problem of knowledge as we outline it here concerns not only our understanding and application of the sciences, but also our understanding of the human context. Thus in Steiner and Wittgenstein the evolutionary context of our humanity is not an obstacle to true knowing which scientific method must by-pass: it provides the referential framework, given by evolution, for every possible descriptive term in the language-use on which our knowledge depends. That these methodological issues concern the human context means that they are of equal importance for contemporary literature. We are indebted to the literary critic Owen Barfield for pointing this out and to his biographer Simon Blaxlandde Lange whose “Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age” was generously reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement for 12 January 2007. In his introduction, Blaxland-de Lange (and so of course also Owen Barfield) anticipates our discussion here of the identification by positivists of mental states with physical presence when he says of Barfield: “He even had a term that he used to refer to this problem: RUP, or the ‘residue of unresolved positivism’; that is, the mental perspective of those who, while consciously dissenting from the philosophical view (first formulated by Déscartes) that there is an unbridgeable gulf between mental experience and the outside world, continue to be governed by it in the way they conceive of mental activity as being encompassed within a specific physical body”.5 This matter of the affective nature of concept formation in our inter-activity with the material world and the evolutionary consequences of that inter-activity for the longer term, is the main drift of our discussion about knowing in Chapter 6

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(Wittgensteiner Part I/Part II) where we examine the common ground in the epistemological narratives of Steiner and Wittgenstein. Notes: 1

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum; George Routledge & Sons, 1898.

For a discussion of Popper’s falsification theory, see Ilja Maso, ch. IV in New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science; Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1994.

2

Tractatus (6.31): “The so-called rule of induction cannot in any case be a rule of logic, for sentences are evidently meaningful. – “ in the sense that they point to, so that “[a sentence] cannot be a law a priori.” As we shall see in Chapter 7, the philosophers of the Iranian Ishraqi School illuminate the same presence of that ‘something’ which is essential to Wittgenstein’s account of the cognitive act.

3

“… even if it were possible for mind to be ‘reduced’, as we say, to matter, this would necessarily … compel us to sophisticate our idea of what matter is, and is capable of becoming …”. Ian McGilchrist, op cit..

4

Simon Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Comes of Age; Temple Lodge, 2006.

5

CHAPTER 6 Wittgensteiner Part 1

1 There is no knowledge of any kind that has not been acquired in intentional acts of thought. Even if a thought explaining an event (and so constituting knowledge) ‘occurs’ it does not ‘happen’ by chance that, on observing it, I consciously confront that thought to decide whether or not the facts it refers to are explained: that judgement - that cognitive act - logically requires the real and substantial presence of a thinker who enacts the thought intentionally and consciously.1 1.1 Evidently the above proposition (the first sentence) could not be denied if it were false. Here, one raises the most fundamental question about the theory of knowledge in contemporary philosophy, for (as we have seen) it has been objected that such an assertion is meaningless since it cannot be falsified: but the effect of the argument in Wittgenstein is that acts of knowing are logically impossible unless the world, including the knower, actually exists a priori. Only a madman would wish to falsify the proposition that he exists. When Wittgenstein says: “All consequences happen a priori” (in advance), he means that everything

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that could happen is logically entailed in every proposition except the possibility that nothing might happen, for then no possibility could be asserted.2 If the truth is unknown, then the widest possible viewpoint on what might be the case is a prerequisite for knowledge. 1.11 The human species is the only species equipped by evolution to enact thoughts in which everything present at that point in space-time, being conscious in an act of cognition, might be remembered. Since whatever is grasped in acts of thought depends on the evolutionary predisposition of individuals (called ‘karma’ in The Upanishads), the function of thinking activity in individuals is crucial for the evolutionary future of humanity together. Hence knowledge has an ethical foundation in both Steiner and Wittgenstein. 1.12 Each of us, in his thinking activity, is cognate with a phenomenal world which includes other thinkers. Whatever that thinking subject experiences as other than itself is given in consequence of the physical boundary of his body where that being-in-thought is located. The human being thus experiences his own being-present in acts of cognition (of knowing) as not being that: not the phenomena he knows as beyond the physical boundary of his body. In The Upanishads, this is the principle of “Thou art not that”: in not being what my body determines I am all that which my acts of thought illuminate. 1.13 Even though that evident physical boundary is permeable in terms of cognitive acts and the perceived phenomena (mineral, organic elements, for example, ingested as nutrients) interpenetrate with the organism of the body that locates those acts of thought, my identity does not break down within the flux: oxygen, nutrients etc cross that boundary and in consequence of sensory perception my being is experienced as contingently interactive with what I am not, while what I know myself to be (that I am) remains stable;3

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1.131 for, without that conscious presence of his being I am, and without those acts of cognition with which he acquires knowledge, his physical body alone (being that body and no other) could no more determine his identity as an experienced fact than the separate body of a cow distinguishes its being conscious from the distributed consciousness of the herd. If the human identity and ego proceeded from the physical fact of separate bodily identity alone, then not only all mammals but all living things would share the attribute of self-consciousness; this rose, being physically distinct from others, would say so (I am this rose) and the waterfall would distinguish itself from the ocean into which, eventually, provided it does not evaporate to become rain, that water passes. Evolution provided only the human being with the equipment required to make such distinctions self-consciously: Adam denominated all that he saw. That is the naming.4 The naming denominates the logos of the real. Only humans do it. Only humans think. If, through the human agency in time, the reality emerges into consciousness, that is the product of the process we call ‘evolution’; what evolves is the whole of which human thinking activity alone is conscious. If it is the case that, whether or not it does thus emerge, we decide, then that ethical responsibility is also a product of evolution. 1.2 Since all mammals have brains but only humans think, it follows that brains do not think. The relative sophistication of the mechanism in each case is of course not irrelevant, but in the human case, it is evidently the evolutionary complexity of the instrument that enables a unitary grasping together of self and world in which the individual experiences himself as consciously present. The brain is the vehicle of this experience; it does not produce the conscious standpoint of self and world which the individual then articulates. 1.21 Apart from the purely epistemological considerations entailed in the foregoing propositions, what stands or falls according to their logical soundness is no less than the existence in the reality, with the phenomena we claim to know

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positively in the sciences, of the human being: for, if that knower is not there a priori and in a world that is self-evidently the case, then no acts of knowledge are possible. (A sentence being meaningful does not depend on its falsifyability: we clearly know that the world, including ourselves, is there before we think about it. That science cannot design an experiment to prove a self-evident fact of this kind does not render the assertion meaningless since then, no contingent proposition in science that can be falsified could be meaningful either). 1.211 Therefore, whether or not my being I am is, in any substantial sense, a fact that affects all other phenomena interactively (as all other phenomena reciprocally affect each other), or whether the apparently existing thinking consciousness of my being is an illusion (a nominal construct of the intellect) that perishes with my physical death, if I am not present there is no other means whereby anything can enter consciousness.5 1.212 For if not, then it follows that though humanity throughout history has experienced itself, in consciousness, as distinct from all other natural and causally determined beings and has interacted with nature to create so-called civilizations, all that is illusion; “an accidental co-location of atoms, destined to perish” (as Bertrand Russell put it) “in the vast death of the solar system”.6 1.22 It further follows (if 1.2 is false), that once the distinction between the human and all other beings (on the grounds of its being I am in consciousness and able to think) are dismissed, so that thinking is reduced to brain activity (because non-human mammals have brains), then there are no grounds for distinguishing the acquisition of knowledge by humans from the supposed ‘acquisition’ of knowledge by digital systems; 1.221 from which it would follow that then, the information stored in a software system constitutes knowledge. However, the knowledge contained in all soft-ware

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systems together is an arbitrary compilation of both true and false knowledge generated not by computers but by the cognitive agency of human beings. Distinctions between true and false knowledge can only be made by a computer on the basis of information in a programme predetermining the assessment (the processing) of the data. Since in-puts that might upset the processing could not be identified by a previously conceived programme incapable of anticipating them, the programme then offers an assumed limited knowledge as if there could be no argument; as if the knowledge informing the programme were absolutely truthful. Furthermore, the idea that a computer can ask a question is nonsensical: a question presupposes an intuition that the presupposition in question is limiting, but a program remains a program even if it is designed to generate arbitrary and random paths beyond the compass of a given presupposition. Questions are logically related to a conscious appreciation that the import of the presupposition cannot explain something that the presupposition does not logically entail (and we shall see that this metaphysical ‘something’ is the motivating essence of the Tractatus). Unless the user questions that presupposed knowledge in-put, as far as the computer is concerned, there is no question, no dialogue, no doubt, and therefore no thought. 1.23 The relationship in this case between thinking as enacted knowledge and the existence of stored data in the PC parallels the relation between the thinker’s thought and the knowledge we suppose is ‘in’ his brain; but in both cases the information cannot be or become knowledge prior to the moment when it enters consciousness in the thought-act of an existing human agent.7 What is interesting as far as this argument is concerned is that this assertion (that stored information does not constitute knowledge until it is actively thought), is logically true or false even if our present scientific knowledge is unable to say where or in what organ, if not in the brain, thinking is to be located.

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2 Human individuals perceive, indirectly by inference, that all other members of the species are able also to enact thoughts. They do so because although only one’s own thoughts can be directly perceived, the empirical consequences of the thought acts of others are visible in the same public domain as one’s own. We form that reasonable and empirically verifiable conclusion8 about unseen thought acts in others even if the only evidence for its existence to which we can point is (so positivists and reductionists maintain) the clinical evidence of brain activity in the cortex of subjects known to be thinking; and because all we may claim to know from such evidence is that when thoughts cross our minds their passage through the mind depends on there being a brain in the organism where that person’s presence is located (ie in space-time, where his body is). 2.1 However, since no-one but the thinking subject sees, or can, in an empirical sense, point to, his own thoughts directly, and since no scientific experiment has been devised to equate a particular thought with a brain event (the correspondence would have to be presupposed and could not, for obvious reasons, be proven), there are no logical grounds, no epistemologically coherent, rational grounds, for the following kinds of assertion on which the prevailing wisdom of contemporary philosophy largely depends: (a) that a conscious thought is caused by a brain event; or (b) that a conscious thought therefore reduces to a brain event. 2.11 From the unproven presupposition that the conscious freely-directed thought activity distinguishing the human species categorically from all others cannot be autonomous in any respect because it is organically conditioned and determined, it would follow (as we anticipated above in 1.211), that the experience, the empirical experience of this autonomy, of being able to think my own thoughts is, on methodological grounds, illusory.9 However, such a conclusion is irrational since it denies the being-present of a knowing agency.

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2.111 How it was possible for a whole epoch to conduct its sciences on such an evidently fallacious logical foundation is a question one cannot afford to leave to posterity at a moment in history when the abdication of moral responsibility for the thought crossing the minds of individuals may have the cumulative effects currently being predicted on the future condition of the planetary environment. Even if it were not clear on logical grounds that the content of thinking, and therefore its outcomes, is causally determined only by default, it would be rational, in the circumstances, to proceed to plan for the future by acting now as if the consensus on which future outcomes must evidently depend were and must be the product of individual thought acts. If not, those outcomes will inevitably be the consequence of the inertias operating in existing institutions. These are largely the product of engagement with environments in which most of the crucial factors confronting humanity had yet to be foreseen; so that, in many cases, the executives of the institutions concerned institute practises that compound the problems. Part of the problem is that the epistemological foundation of so many disciplines entails the hidden assumption that knowledge and information are identical, that brain activity is the same thing as thought and that what individuals choose to think is therefore of no consequence and the feeling of autonomy an illusion. 2.12 Not only does it follow from the positivist presuppositions under discussion that because all mammals have brains, the so-called ‘privileged’ distinction of humans from animals has no scientific foundation (because brains ‘think’): it also follows that animals, having brains, think and are self-conscious in the same sense that humans are. 2.121 This logical nonsense is of course encouraged, in a liberal society, by the sentimentality into which an appropriate Buddhist reverence for all life descends in consequence of political correctness, so that, in some quarters, it is regarded as

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human arrogance to prioritize between the expendability of human and animal life. 2.13 It is clear, in the sense of being rational (even if it cannot in a positive sense be proven for reasons given above in 2.1), that if animals other than humans, do have thoughts, then those thoughts (and we beg the question of what a thought might be) can neither be conscious - as thought activity is in the human case - nor verbally articulated; for we reasonably infer that since we do not hear animals speak they are not individually conscious, although there is evidently a group or a species consciousness: a distributed consciousness. Equally reasonably, we may expect those who prefer communicating with nature because they despair of human beings, nevertheless to acknowledge that, within nature, evolution provided only humans with a larynx, a tongue and teeth and an epiglottis with which to articulate in an audible form what is going on; and not for themselves only, but for the sake of all other existences that depend on them; for, in consequence of the evolutionary facts, those others cannot speak for themselves. 2.14 Without that nexus of attributes distinguishing the human from other mammal species (self-consciousness, thought, speech, and a contingent sense of moral responsibility), there is among mammals only dreaming, the natural desiring of organisms for procreation and sustenance ensuring survival. This occurs in an astral body10 whose formal identity belongs to the species and not the individual and whose specific character, or form, has determined adaptation to a particular set of interrelated environmental facts, geographic, climatic and so on.11 The human has evolved so as to be undetermined in precisely those limiting respects so that his being, his conscious thinking, transcends those boundaries which determine other species and so that his astral body or soul is individualised. Hence, in the verbally expressed form of his being he utters both his identity (I am myself; this, not that named person) and the being of the species predicated in the general form ‘I am’ which is common universally.

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2.2 But if non-human mammals could be said to think on the grounds that thinking is caused by the brain, and it then follows (as we have previously remarked) that the human experience of autonomy is not only illusory but purposeless, we must ask, first: Is such a conclusion compatible with the evolutionary facts? And secondly: How does evolution normally deal with redundant mechanisms? For example, the appendix is a vestigiary organ that once served a purpose; in the case raised here (the experience of autonomy) the ability even to suppose one thinks autonomously, can never have served a purpose in evolution, unless it were precisely to upset the determining mechanisms by which, in all antecedent evolution, the interests of the species prevails over those of individuals. 2.21 Here, the subtlety of our epistemological problem is manifest; for, in fact, in consequence of evolution the human being does have, is equipped with, a faculty enabling him to contravene the determining path of his evolution; a faculty moreover that appears to be far from redundant. That is, a faculty enabling a man to say ‘I am’ and to think: fuck you! The same faculty however also enables him, instead of identifying ‘I am’ with ‘me’, by thinking it over, to choose to cooperate with others knowing that (as in the articulation of the verb to be) ‘I am’ signifies ‘me’ in every case. 2.22 From which, since it would contradict the fundamental principles of evolutionary theory to suppose that this faculty is useless and it is clearly far from being a redundant mechanism, we may logically conclude that the purpose of human evolution is to make the practise of love a consciously enacted mechanism (as we have previously proposed) so that the originally-given, natural reciprocities sustaining the world and its existences are then joined consciously and intentionally; for the inevitability of those given reciprocities are ruptured in the human cognitive act.

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2.23 That is (either perhaps or evidently, depending on how much thought one has given it) what the Apostle Paul meant when, speaking of the Christ being as the universal ‘I am’, he said that “He has taken captivity captive”. In other words, the evolutionary constraints requiring the subordination of the individual to the determining needs of the species cease operating causally in the human species in consequence of the linguistic development that externalises his conscious, actively-thought experience of individual existence: that existence asserts itself to prioritise self-interest. Those constraints that previously operated through natural selection in the interests of species survival (that “captivity”) appear, with the advent of the self-conscious ego, to frustrate individual advancement. Only when the individual consciously acknowledges that his being ‘I am’ for himself alone is contrary to his long term interests within the species, can his own ego acknowledge the real presence of who (universally) that I am is.12 Then: “captivity is taken captive”; not in consequence of religious belief or precept, but rationally and intelligently. 2.24 However, since according to the prevailing wisdom, human existence terminates with death, in spite of the logic of our argument from evolutionary principles to establish the conclusion that human thinking serves an evolutionary purpose, we are again confronted with an anomaly: since death is a fact,13 it is thought to be rational to conclude that individuals can be expected to act entirely in their own interests since, in one life between birth and death, whatever sacrifice an individual makes for the sake of the rest will have little effect on the general conduct of the epoch. We therefore have laws, if customary constraints have been eroded, to limit the presumed innate selfishness of individuals. If so, and there is therefore still no rational explanation for the evolutionary facts outlined in 2.14 to 2.24, then we are obliged to turn our attention to the question: on what logical grounds do we conclude that human existence terminates with the physical death of the body? First however, we must ask how, and on what criteria, individuals

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decide to act in practise if they do not generally experience their decision-making in an evolutionary perspective. ****** Wittgensteiner Part 2 The Tractatus, conclusions to premises: why the Word was in the beginning Wittgenstein concludes that the uttered Word of that logos (key to the given order of the world and articulate in the creation) is itself unsayable: (7) “Of that whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” is the closing proposition in the Tractatus. Our exegesis here therefore moves forward from the starting point of that unsayable and unitary whole to the articulate realm of the denominated phenomena, which includes ourselves as narrators. Note: bracketed thus [ ] in Wittgenstein’s text are the translator’s added enhancements to clarify the meaning of a word or phrase for which the English equivalent is ambiguous when the exact sense of the German is (a) untranslatable, and/or (b) non-negotiable as regards meaning. 7 Of that which one cannot speak, one must remain silent But we are not to conclude that therefore something we cannot speak of is unknown, because it has already been demonstrated, in incremental stages by the inexorable logic of Wittgenstein’s argument, that the things one claims to know by inductive argument, as sentiently perceived objects or processes we can point to, using sentences or propositions we can verify experimentally in science, are known in such a limited sense that this knowledge (of separate things and processes) is useless and our sentences (propositions) about those things meaningless unless we actively relate those objects and processes we claim to know together in that inner movement of thought which is ordered and governed

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by the being of that logos, whose unsayable form is expressed in the inexorable logic of Wittgenstein’s argument. Hence (5.1362): “The coherence of knowing and known is that of logical necessity” and the conscious instrument of that logical necessity is thought. For logic determines what is and is not possible in the actuality of space-time where all sentient objects and processes about which we claim to make scientific assertions are located if and only if they are, a priori, logically possible and can therefore be, or become, actively thought; for (3.02) “Thought entails the possibility of the situation it conceives. What is thinkable, is also possible.” and (3.03) “We can think nothing illogically, otherwise our thinking would need to be illogical.” In thinking therefore we know, intuitively and a priori, that the world, being “all that is the case” (proposition 1 in the Tractatus) contains those objects of positive knowledge we can point to, exists, even if we cannot assert that it does so using sentences which are defined as meaningful (sinnvoll, in German, is literally ‘sense-full’) by the criteria of linguistic analysis on which positivism bases its concept of knowledge. In short, the answer to the question “What is that ‘world’ you say exists?” is that only its parts can be positively defined so that, being limited by their definition, ‘the world’ cannot be so defined. However, all positive assertions about facts composing that world presuppose that we know it as unsayable and in a meaningful sense. The things about which we cannot meaningfully speak on the premises of positivism include all those intuitions we have about the existence of the world (and of ourselves as thinking subjects in it) before any scientific assertions are made of the sort we call ‘knowledge’. Thus the claim to know, in a meaningful sense, what Shakespeare is talking about would provide good grounds for a refutation of logical positivism, for language is the instrument of contextual meaning: however positive the pointing-to of experimental evidence may seem to be, the moment a judgment is passed about what it points to, the speaker can

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understand it only in the context of a world which is “everything that is the case”. If he cannot meaningfully claim knowledge of that world, then positive knowledge won’t help, for an inventory of ‘proven’ facts obscures the sight of it. But the very grammatical usage of the speaker presupposes a reciprocal intuition of common ground between himself and others, a condition of language use on which the genius of Shakespeare depends. 6.54 My sentences mention [refer meaningfully to something] in that, effectively, they acknowledge the one who understands me as [being] nonsensical if, through them – by them – he transcends them. (He must, so to say, throw the ladder away after climbing it). He must overcome these sentences, then he will see the world rightly. i.e. the sentences we use to assert positively, in scientific propositions, what is the case piecemeal, with regard to the nature of reality in support of our claims to knowledge, signify things in-and-for themselves, and nothing beyond themselves. As far as that unsayable context is concerned, in Western thought, Kant’s separation of the experienced and the theoretically abstracted idea of the phenomena (in a priori judgements: see 6.521 below) ensures that the phenomena do not speak for themselves of that wider context; that is, the context given by the fact of their perception in our human perspective, for that perspective is the product of an evolutionary process in which that wider context is now self conscious and articulate. The whole point then of the experimental enquiry we call ‘scientific’ is to redeem the eccentricities of personal perspective, for each thing that we denominate predicates the total context we experience as ‘the world’. The existence of that totality, according to the Tractatus, must logically be entailed in all factual assertions we make about separate phenomena; assertions

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whose truth or falsehood is determined empirically only subject to that rule of logic. Hence Wittgenstein’s assertion that the principle of causality as a criterion of truthfulness is (5.1361) “a superstition”, for causal relatedness is variable according to context. Only the context, not precedent or causality, answers to logic. Although our sentences and assertions, give only that very specific knowledge about things which is pure information, it is above all about their unitary context that language speaks. The sentence tells us nothing about that. They tell us nothing except that. We must already know a priori, in an intuited sense, the reality of whose existence the specified things form part; even if the composite reality, in-and-for itself, is infinitely complex, and cannot therefore be the subject of a simple assertion forming a sentence according to the criteria of positivism. The positive assertions which form the propositions of science about sentient things we can point to (with words) are therefore the rungs of the ladder we must ascend to acquire knowledge; but this ladder has an infinite number of rungs: “The world is the totality of the facts, not of the things.” (1.1). Thus the totality is inexpressible in sentences; the act of cognition which joins those knowledgepieces together in a unitary concept, occurs only when the attachment to (and focus on) the specific things which predicate the existence of something else, is relinquished; when, that is (as Wittgenstein has pointed out in 6.54) the ladder is thrown away. Then, that transcendent perspective which sets them in relation, thereby constituting an act of cognition, enters and illuminates thought as knowledge. The rungs of the ladder alone are mere information. 6.53 The correct method for philosophy would actually be: to say nothing except what is sayable, meaning the propositions of natural science – that is, something which has nothing to do with philosophy.

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6.522 There exists, nonetheless, the inexpressible. This shows itself, [and] it is the mystical. 6.521 The solution to life’s problems becomes noticeable as this problem diminishes (why people for whom the meaning of life becomes clear after a long period of doubt, then cannot say in what that meaning consists). Here we must ask if Wittgenstein hesitates to draw the conclusion entailed in the logic of his argument about the metaphysical status of thinking itself in order to avoid crossing the disciplinary boundaries dividing linguistic philosophy from theology and religion, which Rudolf Steiner did in his discussion of Kant. In that work Steiner effectively proceeds from Wittgenstein’s conclusions about the status in reality of thinking which are later made clear in the Tractatus; for whereas in Kant the thinking subject does not exist except in that pure subjectivity from which moral opinion proceeds without objective foundation (we cannot say ‘it is’ but only ‘I am morally certain’), in Wittgenstein thinking is inseparable from the logical knowing which predetermines every possible order that science enables us to see partially in actuality. So what happens if thinking itself is accorded a purely subjective ontology whose apparent being and presence in consciousness must be displaced by its own epistemological objects in space-time … i.e. if brain events are phenomenally real while their content is subjective? 6.52 We feel that even when every possible scientific question has been answered, the problems of life have hardly been touched. Admittedly, then no further questions remain; and this is clearly the answer. So what is this ‘answer’? That if all possible scientific questions may be answered without the problems of life being addressed, and this poses a question about the nature of true knowledge, the answer must be that scientific methods generate knowledge of the kind that, being specifically about facts (which can be only in

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specifically defined spatio-temporal contexts) says nothing about life as we experience it; about which something can be meaningfully known only if those facts are set in a relational perspective by thinking (context again). And where does thinking occur?14 It occurs within that order of logic whose possibilities, given by logic, determine what things can occur as fact in the actual world: (3.02) “What is thinkable, is also possible.” (3.03) “We can think nothing that is illogical, since otherwise we could only think illogically.” That ‘within’ is also the where of thinking, whose narrative runs (as we shall see) throughout the Tractatus. As for the ‘what’ – what thought is – Wittgenstein says nothing. He does not need to: since thinking expresses a logos order that inheres in everything, our very knowing of the phenomena presupposes its reciprocal presence in both; for if not, the phenomena could be known only in the abstraction of their separated spatio-temporal states; of which (as Wittgenstein points out in relation to Russell’s Theory of Types, 6.123)) thinking cannot logically be a component element; for then it (thinking) could not transcend and unify their spatio-temporal states in acts of knowledge. 6.51 Scepticism is not intractable, but evidently nonsensical, if it insists on doubt where no question arises. When Wittgenstein remarks that no question can be asked for which no answer exists (in 6.5) he means, for example, that the expressed desire to disprove the existence of God implies the existence of something we know is not yet explained. It is therefore not accidental that thinking itself, in contemporary philosophy, should be accorded as much a purely causal explanation (in cognitive psychology and neuro-biology) as the ontogenesis of the world and of humanity itself is accorded in the prevailing viewpoint of the evolutionary sciences; for thinking, precisely, cannot admit those disciplinary boundaries which separate the intuitions of religion and mysticism from the intuition of existence which logically precedes all scientific enquiry.

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6.5 To an answer which cannot be formulated [spoken], the question also cannot be framed. Riddles do not exist. If ever a question can be put at all, so it can also be answered. This is because questions are about something specific: if the object in question is not defined, the question cannot be asked. When one asks: Does God exist? no answer can be given if God is not first defined within conceptual limits. If this has been done, one can then argue whether what has been asserted is logical. If the answer is not a formulation of pure logic it cannot be about God, for the propositions of pure logic are about nothing; they are pure relation: (6.124) “Logical propositions describe the structure of the world, or rather they represent it. They are ‘about’ nothing” - even if we suppose that ‘God’ (something) is the source of that logical purity.” If what is asserted is a logical sentence (entailing neither contradiction nor tautology), then it is a proposition of natural science about sensory phenomena and therefore also not about God, since no such propositions can be ‘about’ the totality of facts composing a world which is “everything that is the case”. However, just as there are no grounds for denying the existence of a world which must, logically, be self-evident, there are equally no grounds for denying the existence of God. We may assert and formulate meaningful sentences only about things which can be defined and limited within a totality of self-evident being. 6.45 The viewpoint of the world sub specie aeterni is its viewpoint as wholeness-within-boundaries. A feeling for the world as a bounded wholeness is the mystical.

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6.44 How the world is, is what is mystical, but that it is. 6.4321 The facts all belong entirely to the problem, not to the solution. 6.432 How the world is, is a matter of complete indifference for the higher realm. God does not reveal Himself in the world. We repeat: what is not logical about how the world is, cannot be thought (see 3.03), so that our thinking about its spatio-temporal states is not (cannot be) contingent on the space and time determining the boundaries within which they appear, or we could not be conscious of them. Thinking is not in time, for acts of thought conceive the relational being-together of events which do occur in spacetime. So (Wittgenstein asks) how, logically, could this being-conscious-in-thought (knowing we have life) be subject to the same changes and spatio-temporal limitations that we perceive in the sentient realm? 6.4311 Death is not a life experience. For one does not live death. So Wittgenstein, someone will say, contradicts what he seemed to assert about the on-going life of the soul after death: he merely referred to a commonly-held belief because, here, he states that “one does not live death.” No, he does not contradict himself: he points out that the physical body in death, has no life and that, precisely, since death is the negation of life, the mortality of the body is not the termination of life: death is therefore not lived. Life is not a physical construct; it endures. It is a relational being which is, in the active verbal sense, thought. In the human case, its formal existence continues, ensouled, because it is thought. If instead of interminable time, eternity signifies timelessness, then the eternal, which lives in the present, is alive.

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Our life is, in fact, as endless as our standpoint is unlimited. 6.431 Just as by death, the world does not change, but ceases. In what sense? The world will not cease with my death or yours. It will remain for the unborn, but it will cease being present (in that moment of passing from spacetime) for you, and for me only as far as its sentient being in space-time is concerned. However, let us remember: 6.4312 The temporal immortality of the human soul, by which is meant its eternal, on-going life after death, is not only in no way concealed, but rather, above all, this supposition does not at all entail what is imputed to it. Would something of a riddle thereby be solved, that I live on eternally? Is then this eternal life not as much a conundrum as the present one? The solution to the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. A fact which depends on what we suppose occurs - and how - in space and time . Thus (as we shall see from our analysis below of the German word usage) on Wittgenstein’s terms, ‘the world’ is not in space and time as spatio-temporal thingness is, but as non-spatio-temporally related facts are, by being thought, both in that world and compose it as we experience it. This returns us to the opening proposition of the Tractatus: to a world which is “everything that is the case”, and which is (1.1) “the totality of facts, not of things”, and which (1.11) “is determined by the facts, by their being all the facts”. (1.12) “For, the totality of the facts determines both what is the case and all that is not the case”. (1.13) “The facts in logical space are the world” and (1.2) “The world dis-integrates into facts”, so that (1.21) “One instance can be the case or not the case and everything else remains indifferent” [gleich: the same]. (2) “Whatever the case is, the facts, is the established situation (what is the case: sachverhalt”). This relational nexus, in

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quantum mechanics, would be a nexus of causality (in Schrődinger’s terms, “a pattern of aspects”); but Wittgenstein meant precisely that, apart from (or because of) the accommodating behaviour of matter itself, there is an enduring presence of being; as if being itself inhered within the sachverhalt (all that is the case) to which the logic of the world refers. Wittgenstein calls this “a combination of gegenständen;” whether of circumstances or of things is not clear since the German has the metaphysical sense of things/circumstances as a ‘standing-overagainst-ness’, the presence of a being ‘other-than-I-ness’. Thus, being present as we are here and now in time, we anticipate Wittgenstein’s premise that we, in our acts of cognition, are being within “jeder Verbindung von Gegenständen” every relation of circumstance. Gegenstand, in the German, is ‘all that stands-over-against’ our consciousness in experience, for which there is no equivalent concept in English. Wittgenstein is saying that we draw our existence as conscious beings from within every combination of thingness or circumstance. This being within is then the being of something (etwas): something, in-forms our conscious experience, as thought; a ‘something’ which is always present in and to the individual; something without the prior existence of which no knowledge of any kind is logically possible; a presence, moreover, that can only be enacted by being thought, precisely as we asserted at the outset (Part I, proposition 1). Notes: Bertrand Russell (The Problems of Philosophy; OUP, 1980) refers to “what it is that our immediate experiences make us know.” Yet since “our immediate experiences” are neither the same thing as their external causes nor the same thing as the concepts we form (often, the content in the experience itself “calls forth” a concept as knowledge) the notion that “our immediate experiences make us know” anything is very naïve philosophy.

1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus; Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966: 5.133

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These are experiential facts. That one cannot point to them is logically irrelevant because one cannot, in the positivist sense, point to “the world” in which ‘facts’ must occur. Its existence then cannot be falsified. However, ‘the world’ selfevidently (and logically) contains everything about which we assert propositions that can be falsified. 3

Since the things that are named and thus have identities all exist in a reciprocally interactive state through time, the name (the concept) signifies their identities not as physical objects (the tree moves from being seed to maturity) but as beings. The prevailing trend in philosophy in the English-speaking world until now has been that of nominalism, holding that words and concepts are intellectual constructs, utilities we are entitled to use claiming they signify something we know, only if subject to experimental proofs in science: what is signified by the name is a provisional abstraction; a label, not a substantial being. In both nominalism and positivism, nothing is. True, the tree is not in any of the separate states it passes through in time; no one, knowing those alone, can know the existence of the tree, its being. But if that tree has no substantial reality, it follows that the empirical phenomena are also not real. That I am being now and choose what to think the reality is like and must agree it consensually with others, is the one empirical fact on which all other being in time depends. 4

When Bertrand Russell says that things are present to the mind not by virtue of the mind being a categorically different kind of thing that witnesses the contents but simply because the sensory perception of all things impinges on it “to make us know” (op.cit.), he quite rightly fears a dualism of mind and body; but that is because his premises assume that physical bodies are immutable spatio-temporal existences so that one thing (the mental concept/idea) cannot, as Occam puts it, “be present in a multiplicity of things”. But we object that first, the things he means are spatio-temporal appearances; being mutable, the material constituents pass in and out according to formal laws governing their presence: fruit rots, blossom withers, bodies die; secondly (and therefore), the being-present in the mind of the related concept in an act of cognition, not being a spatio temporal presence, endures and is not mutable. Both the enduring form as perceived by the mind and its temporary presence in the life of the plant and the organism have a material foundation. The formal being that is present (the one enduring, the other ephemeral) is the same; the difference is a function of the radically different relationship in each case between that formal being and the material firmament: the difference is a matter (sic!) of time; and the importance (under discussion in 1.211) of the appearance of the human being in evolution is that his thinking and his being I am is the point at which the interface between the so-called ‘divine’, the enduring formal realm and the spatio-temporal realm we call ‘physical’ existence, becomes conscious. Everything however takes place in the material firmament, even if “the concept of matter is a logical fiction”, because “it” can never be located (as Russell admits in the Appendix to Problem of Philosophy, where his confusion with regard to “existence of the subject” is apparent). We 5

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may note that the interface between matter and ‘dark matter’ in the cosmos is related to the formal structuring (fractal hierarchies) in the visible universe and the inchoate energy issuing into it from ‘dark matter’, a process that seems analogous to the way in which the material energies ingested by humans are internalised, formalised and re-enacted in the external world by the thinking agent (see “Fractal Universe”, New Scientist, 10 March 2007). Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian and other essays on religion; Touchstone Press, 1967. If this were true, and evolution ensured the survival of the fittest, how did it happen that the ‘fittest’ emerged with illusions of this magnitude? How does the evolutionary theory of Richard Dawkins explain the natural selection of so much wilful absurdity, so much ‘civilisation’? 6

The brain is an instrument, not an agent. By default, its owner can make it an instrument of animal imbecility. An animal cannot be an imbecile. A human imbecile is not an animal. Neither he nor the animal has a choice. The human agent chooses (or can choose) what he does with his instrument. Even if the local authority pays up when he trips on a loose paving, there is no law that makes him trip or the local authority would repair pavements more often to avoid bankruptcy.

7

ie that others also have conscious, subjective experiences. In The Problem of Knowledge (Penguin, 1957) A. J. Ayer denies that such a conclusion constitutes knowledge because he argued from premises precluding the existence in the same reality of the thinking or knowing subject and its sentiently perceived objects, assuming a priori that objects can be known experimentally without reference to the prior existence of the knowing subject. When I raised this point following a lecture he gave at University College in 1965 (“That All Metaphysical Propositions Are Meaningless”), he replied that he did not understand the question. On his premises, it could not be asked.

8

Everybody who reads the philosophy of Steven Pinker or John Searle or even the astrological column of his newspaper and in theory assents to the notion that causal mechanisms (genetic, environmental or divine) determine his apparent free will, in practice cannot move forward one inch at any moment of the day in his life without being conscious of the decisions he makes as if they were his own; even if that procedure entails the recognition that he is constrained by circumstance, he surmounts it and exercises his freedom in acknowledging it. 9

In Chapter 4 we have said what this is in Steiner, but the ‘astral body’ of his ‘anthropo-sophia’ concurs with ‘morphic resonances’ in the work of the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past; Fontana, 1989 and with Henri Bortoft’s account of the phenomena in his The Wholeness of Nature; Floris Books, 1996. 10

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Whether we say that the evolved form is time-determined because it manifests at the end of the evolutionary process, or whether we say that the process in time, given the environmental factors, is determined by the evolving form, is a semantic problem depending on the viewpoint of the subject and his enquiry. The environment also has evolved. The timescales of all evolved beings are, in retrospect, hierarchically interrelated. Only in the human activity of thinking are beginning and end encompassed. That form, that logos, perceives all others.

11

For a phenomenology of the being-present (in individuals) of the universally human, the reader is referred to the Illuminationist (Ishraqi) school of Iranian philosophers from Yahya Shiabuddin Suhrawardi in the 12th century to Mulla Sadra Shirazi in the 17th century whose chief contemporary commentator is Henry Corbin. Not only is the notion of presence of mind in this work compatible with the Christology of Paul the Apostle, it also resonates with the philosophy of A.N.Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard. (See Henri Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, Kegan Paul International, 1996; and: David Kuhrt, Identity at the Limits: on Not Being Another, in “Transcendent Philosophy” March 2003, at www.iranianstudies.com).

12

Relevant questions (which we discuss below) about the nature of facts are raised by Ludwig Fleck, in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (University of Chicago Press, 1979). 13

A current concern: New Scientist, 1 September 2012, carries an article entitled “The mind isn’t where we thought it was”, discussing “Recent advances in functional neuroimaging – a technique that measures brain activity in the hope of correlating mental functions with specific regions of the brain”.

14

CHAPTER 7 On Liberation: The Matter Of Light

Synopsis According to the drift in Stephen Hawking’s concept of time, at the level of quantum events in the material ground, apparently separate points in linear time become co-terminal in the perspective of the observer.1 But that event (of timelessness) cannot be directly observed, for in a co-terminal state, the firmament is a unitary and undifferentiated substance without ‘thingness’: the physical world of visible forms, although sentiently present because the observer is awake, is transcended: it can be experienced and is present without time, only in thought. We therefore argue here that, in consequence of what is called ‘the New Physics’, there are established grounds for the view that that human thought is not a purely mental superstructure: although our thoughts affect events only in consequence of decisions we make and act on afterwards in the physical world, that thinking is itself interactive with the material foundation in every act of cognition. Our thinking evidently matters. It does so in more than the colloquial

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sense of that word; for, on the grounds that we experience the content and movement of our thought as a unitary being (a presence within which we know ourselves as ‘I am’), we are entitled to call that presence a Divine Presence; for in the essential narrative of the three monotheisms (never mind, for the moment, the pedant clerics and their creeds), the revered object of worship is precisely the unitary being of ‘something’ (as Wittgenstein puts it) that is unitary and informs everything in the substantial firmament; including everything in the thoughts by which we recognize that firmament. We shall therefore illuminate the discussion of these issues with reference to the Iranian Shi’ite philosophy known as ‘Ishraq’ (the Illuminationist School, from the 12th to the 17th century); for, in that philosophy, the spiritual presence in us of thinking clearly illuminates the material darkness of the physical world. The spiritual activity of thinking is also the single most important factor, from an evolutionary point of view, distinguishing the human from the non-human; a factor, moreover, without the existence of which there could be no knowledge at all of anything. The premises of this philosophy of the Illuminationists is thus in perfect accord with the theory of knowledge (about thinking) of both Rudolf Steiner and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Our particular concern here is to show that thinking done by individuals is an activity which is not purely subjective (‘think what you like, it will have no effect’) and is therefore an activity which carries a moral responsibility: we choose what to think and, in interaction with others, create events in the real world from within an evolving social consensus; events on which the evolutionary future, and not ours alone, depends. On Liberation is thus concerned with realisation that the seeming impotence of the thoughts we suppose are, in ‘scientific’ terms, mere ‘neuron events’, simply mirrors the political effects of those institutional powers by which we consent to be governed; powers whose forward planning is disconnected from its true authority in the consensus; a consensus whose foundation can only be thought; a thought that is willingly and morally engaged with the material foundation.

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What thought is and is not In order to elaborate our concept of liberation, we are concerned here with the question of what thinking is in terms of enlightenment; for thinking is an activity, like it or not, which is continuous during our waking lives, and whose content and form (like it or not) positively affect both present circumstances and future outcomes. Since all others with whom we associate also think, and positive or negative effects and outcomes issue from that interactivity (whether it occurs locally and intimately or in the broader context of economic, political and cultural debate), that thinking-together creates, incrementally, a consensus that future generations will remember as the hall-mark of our present time. Our present time will then be recovered, for better or worse, in the now of that future, so that in human thinking there is an enduring co-presence of everything throughout time. A co-presence that, in being thought, is time-less. Although this description accords with normative experience (and with common sense), the question arises - in a world where nothing occurs as a real event without having a material foundation - of what our thoughts actually are and of what that consensus is in the reality; for the advent of quantum physics changes the terms of reference with regard to what we, in the Western hemisphere normally think of as ‘real’; and we must acknowledge that, although it is not present in the tradition of philosophy which is our focus here (the Iranian Illuminationists), there is, in the set minds of Western positivists, a so-called ‘metaphysical’ problem between material and immaterial, or so-called ‘transcendent’ events. That is, the general drift of Western philosophy is (or has been) to confuse the concept of undifferentiated matter with the thingness (ipseity) of whatever has visible form as a physical body: we suppose that what appears in the physical world as a form is a ‘material body’ and so fail to distinguish formative forces2 (which move through time in a process of

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evolutionary growth) from their material embodiments. In the sense that a body is defined as a fixed spatio-temporal phenomenon under experimental laboratory conditions it is a mental abstraction removed from the fluid field of the evolutionary reality; for nothing in the phenomenal world, though its movement is imperceptible on the human scale of time, is ever static.3 Let us examine this issue more closely; for, in the absence of any equivalent concept of formative forces distinct from the physical presence of bodies, contemporary science (pace Sheldrake) presupposes a dead, and not a living, world. In my early twenties, at Emerson College, whose study programmes were oriented to the epistemological insights of Rudolf Steiner in a number of different fields, I was privileged to meet the mathematician George Adams. This was a memorable experience for me because shortly before, when I began to read philosophy while at art school, I had read Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World4, and George Adams had studied mathematics under Whitehead. A student of Adams in turn, the botanist-mathematician Olive Whicher taught plant morphology at the college. She had made it her business to interpret Steiner’s understanding of the effects on the thought-forms of the human species of the spatial relationships given by the orientation of the body. In his The Origins of Natural Science,5 Steiner describes the loss, in the process of early human anthropology, of the instinctually interiorized identity with nature which characterised human experience before self-conscious thoughts began to emerge: “Once, the human being experienced the three perpendicular orientations of space within himself. And these three spatial orientations - right-left, in front-behind, and above-below - are the basis of the three-dimensional framework of space, which is simply the abstraction of the experience described above”. In her book The Heart of the Matter,6 illustrated with drawings of spatial dynamics relating to the growth forms and developmental stages of plants, Whicher explains their nodal growth-points as functions of spatial dynamics;

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these are given in the material firmament and are intelligible as mathematical forms. Following Adams’ work,7 Whicher explains Steiner’s introduction (on epistemological grounds) of the term ‘etheric’, a word he used to designate the phenomenal realm of non-physical forces that inter-acts with matter to produce the sentient world we call ’physical’. As Adams tells us (1933): “Ethereal space is plane-wise and peripheral. Its functional infinitude is an infinitely small point [in mathematics, called] a ‘star-point’, and it forms the Absolute of this so-called ‘negative’ or ethereal space” (and we must ask if this ‘point’ is not the missing intersection in contemporary philosophy between our conceptual grasp of an evolving physical world and the actuality of its momentum in the material firmament which we call ’quantum mechanics’). What Adams calls ‘negative space’ is the form of all volumes in space-time which govern the appearance of sentient beings. The mathematical ‘Absolute’ to which he refers is that infinitely distant plane which governs the metric regularity of the physical forms composing our planetary space. The negative quality of the etheric form is its no-thingness. Into this nothingness matter, otherwise subject to gravitational force, is drawn so that in all physical bodies the polarity of a concentric and eccentric movement of forces is balanced; it comes to rest in a particular way, depending on the evolutionary complexity of the body concerned. Steiner was the first to provide conceptual materials for distinguishing the form of our being in space-time from those material constituents of embodiment which (without that human presence) answer to the laws of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics. The logical structure of our thought processes then is the expression, in the mobile substance of the cerebral cortex, of those formal hierarchies which order the visible realm of sensory phenomena; and being conscious, we manipulate those structures grammatically to form our descriptive concepts of the reality we experience: we utter that world, beg to differ and think again. But nothing we do in our heads conceptually is in any sense a purely ‘physical’ event: the brain is the sophisticated vehicle of the consciousness evolution provides, and its sub-cortical

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energies are adapted to mirror the objects of our attention. In animals, the responses are instinctual and governed by the species’ survival mechanisms: no individualization and no consciousness. In humans, that mirrored image becomes articulate in speech. Furthermore, the experienced consciousness is individualized so that what I do to survive no longer necessarily serves the interest of the species; I may see and conceive the reality truthfully and, in articulating the thought, choose to lie in the service of personal interest. Such is the condition of the ego: that the unitary mechanism of Nature is effectively in my hands is the hall-mark of the human condition. Since that logos is evidently intelligent, we conclude that the evolutionary process is purposeful: the best-adapted species, aware of its identity with the being of the whole thing, must now decide its own destiny. Matter therefore, without form, is a unified and invisible substance; and because it is universally extensive, it is also the vehicle for whatever appears as things take on form to become tangible in space-time. Matter, without form, is thus indistinguishable from spirit; indistinguishable, that is, from the spiritual presence of that unitary Being (at that distant plane described in the work of George Adams) from which, in time, everything that is proceeds. Madonna’s Material Girl ostensibly signifies a physical body, but there is more to matter than meets the eye: it also connotes the modus vivendi of a woman who knows that the different directions there are in the spiritual cosmos are, as far as humanity is concerned, competing forces. A girl needs a material embodiment to get where she’s going. Her womb is the earth’s. The distinction between matter (the vehicle) and spirit (the form) is given only by the existence (in consequence of an evolution in time), of the human form which mirrors the universal: its thinking capacity, its perspective, enables the individual thinker to become cognate with something (as Wittgenstein puts it) that moves in the material firmament; something that, in the course of its movement, evolves

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and is evidently purposeful; for, with the advent in evolution of the human form, a universal and unitary Being becomes cognate with itself. That is what thinking is for. The division of that reality between the abstract concepts of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ is an epistemological mistake. It requires the revision of our terms of reference: we must distinguish correctly between the physical realm of things having a spacetime extension in matter, and the spiritually mobile firmament in which events, including the movement of our thoughts, occur. It is from this point of view that Stephen Hawking remarks, that “Backwards causality is an angel’s eye-view from outside the universe”.8 For when we say that a thing matters, the usage is no accident: things that matter are also movements of thought in matter; of a spiritual realm in which beginning and end are coeval, and whose focal point, in time, is human thought. As Merleau-Ponty affirms, as far as the brain is concerned “the central nervous system is not a storehouse of images. It is a centre endowed with the organisation of movements. It is only the locus of a function”.9 Hawking, however (no doubt due to prevailing prejudices concerning the ‘unscientific’ nature of so-called ‘religious’ concepts) fails to grasp the fact that the “angel’s eye-view” is that thinking: it moves in, not outside, the universe. What moves outside, or rather (being immobile and without plasticity) stays there, creating an inertia we cannot control, is the corpus of theoretical abstractions that so often passes for knowledge: concepts, beliefs, presuppositions, without reference to the mobile reality; for the abstractions we make of the reality are reduced to the description of physical events; embedded and sanctified in their institutional channels, those concepts take over our lives with disastrous consequences. Rudolf Steiner identified the source of this inertia with the Lucifer of the narrative in the Book of Genesis. He did so because there, Lucifer is described as a lightbeing; one who, coveting the light-power for himself and wanting to be the source, fell from Paradise. For Steiner, this mythical descent into the darkness of

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personal ego is evidently an analogue of how matter came to be created: matter, in and for itself, is going nowhere. More recently an interesting analogue occurs in particle physics, where energy and matter are interchangeable depending on the velocity of particles. “The difficulty of combining these two so different character traits in one mental picture”, Schrödinger says, “is the main stumbling-block that causes our conception of matter to be so uncertain”.10 The significance of the fact that the two are already combined in the conceptual act (present in the thinking of the observer) was already evident to Schrödinger in the sense that this presence evidently affects the perceived behaviour of the particles; but the possibility that therefore matter itself, in its evolutionary passage through the human organism, effectively becomes a self-conscious thought-substance putting the evolutionary future in our hands, would have seemed to entail, at that time a leap from the scientific attitude into occult obscurantism. That shifting, explanatory ground is the threshold before which we now stand, for the two realms are one seamless reality. If therefore we ask how, or in what sense, does a thought occurring in the material firmament exist, we are able to ask only because, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out,11 the process of evolution has provided the human form with a physical instrument making it the unique point in that firmament where evolution is self-conscious. As Ibn Arabi expressed it: “How can other than God know God?”12 Matter as matrix If it appears that the matrix we call matter is not inert, but a foundation for an evolving reality in which we participate, experiencing it subjectively, how is it that we experience our thinking as if independently of determining factors in the physical vehicle of the body, unless (contrary to the present consensus among cognitive scientists)13 we are autonomous beings responsible for our own destiny? If laboratory research into the impulses of the central nervous system and the

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cerebral cortex detects the activity of subjective thinking in those impulses, do neuron processes therefore shape and determine our thoughts so that our experience of autonomy is an illusion? According to the present consensus among scientists dealing with neural and cognitive processes, human life, its history and culture, are not the creations of autonomous beings but the chance product of a blind evolutionary process calling the tune - a tune that was a hit before the human form appeared. Yet those same scientists cannot answer the obvious questions that arise; for, were our minds not liberated, by the evolutionary process itself, from predestination, such questions could not possibly be asked: we ask questions and think because the answers are not given, and because what is given - the physical phenomena of our environment, including the solar system and our bodies - have defined boundaries, while the plasticity of our thinking allows it conform with and conceptualise whatever the thinker intends. The existing, given order of things is resistant to that only in as far as there must be human intervention in that reality to actualize the thought (the premise of every invention). It is here that the moral dimension of thinking is encountered: given the dimensions of the present environmental crisis confronting humanity and the political factors that both cause it and obstruct possible solutions, strategists and arm-chair intellectuals alike speculate that the management of the planet may be beyond human capacity: robotic systems may manage it better. But the general failure of humanity to have foreseen the crisis sooner is primarily the consequence, not of political disagreement, but of incertitude about the status of humanity and its thought activity within the creation; an incertitude in the prevailing narrative of the sciences. As the Independent science editor Steve Connor wrote (reviewing proposals for computers “to match human brains by 2030”), “Although the brain cannot match computers in terms of straight storage and retrieval of information, it has an unrivalled capacity of associating different

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strands of information, to look ahead and plan, as well as performing the imaginative creativity that is at the heart of human existence”.14 However, the issue between brains and computers does not concern capacity and performance levels: the radical difference between a robot and a human performance is not numerical or quantitative but in the conscious thinking that activates the areas of the brain where consciousness is located, for the brain itself is no more able to initiate a thought than a computer.15 The brain may give rise to motor impulses when the subject is asleep or is (as we say) ‘absent-minded’; but when he or she is present, that thinking is directed, and (depending on the psychology of the individual concerned) directed towards an objective which is evaluated and chosen. The question of what is present when this cognitive activity occurs has been ruled out of court a priori on the epistemologically mistaken presupposition that all events that occur, occur only in the physical fabric of space-time. So long as this prejudice blinds humanity, in the observation of the facts, to the existence of the thought form16 and to its human agent as a transcendent presence, crises will continue to overwhelm. In Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, the very fact that we experience the physical phenomena as resistances predicates the non-physical presence of the thinker: “The point is that the phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity underlying the objects …The primary situation disclosed in cognitive experience is ‘ego-object amid objects’ … The ego-object, as consciousness herenow, is conscious of its experient essence [in terms of] its internal relatedness to the world of realities, and to the world of ideas”17; ‘ideas’ however which, although once seen to originate self-evidently in the formal and mathematical structures governing the existence of an evolving world (that same logos of which Wittgenstein speaks), in our time have been reduced (without proofs that bear philosophical scrutiny) to mental constructs, generated by the brain and answering to the prerequisites of behavioural conduct; a conduct said to be determined by

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genetic and environmental factors. But the brain cannot speak for itself: we do. The brain is the instrument evolved for our being-present in time. As far as that presence is concerned, the physical realm as we experience it now resists a greater fulfillment; a fulfillment further postponed with every technological intervention we make at the expense of a properly scientific appraisal of the status in reality of our human condition; for the notion that Man, the end-product of the evolutionary process, is “the measure of all things” is not a literary invention but a statement of fact. Thus, in the absence of due thought, the process breaks down. Wittgenstein agrees: when, in the Tractatus, he states (para. 5.556) that “The empirical reality is limited by the totality of the things”, the “things” mean, (in the German, Gegenstände), ‘resistances’ which are ‘other than’ or ‘opposed to’ the subject; for when I think about the world, I discover it as an assembly of things I am not, of bodies other than my own. Being resistant (in those respects) to my own presence, I discover myself, my being who I am, as not being those things. The thinker therefore recognises a thing as it is only because he, in the plasticity of that essence where his thinking occurs, is empty of any thing or body that resists the totality (this, as we shall see below, is also the explicitly stated position of the Iranian Illuminationist philosopher Mulla Sadra Shirazi).18 Furthermore, Wittgenstein continues, with regard to that limited, empirical and present reality: “The hierarchies are and must be independent of the reality”. That is: the viewpoint and presence of thinking (a presence which is logically necessary for explanation to be possible at all) cannot be determined or shaped by the limiting conditions of the things it explains. This especially applies to the incarnated presence of that thinking in a physical body; for the being-present of that viewpoint is a conscious presence precisely and only because the objects of spacetime it contemplates are limitations on its own essence, an essence which is part of a shared totality; a totality from within which the human emerges in evolutionary time to experience itself autonomously as agent. With the advent in evolutionary time of homo sapiens (about 60,000 years ago), the first individual

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thoughts are formed; half-consciously to begin with, and then consciously, with the acquisition of language.19 Given our evolutionary perspective, that logos, on which utterance in the present depends, is constitutive of the future reality. The political consequence of the new narrative now emerging from the consensus of determinism among scientists (that we are not autonomous beings because our thoughts are produced by the brain, and the experience of autonomy is therefore illusory so that in no sense is life, or the evolutionary process, purposeful), is that we begin to comprehend the consequences of our submission to the authority of established institutions and to their prescription (including surveillance) of our behaviour. We do so (a) because our thoughts, being necessarily subjective, are only personal opinion; and (b) because then (as Galbraith put it), “given the techniques by which the individual is made to conform to the planning process … our behaviour is guided so that we will not, by undue independence of will, upset the convenience of those who serve us.”20 And here we have a paradox: the motivation of the secularist intellectual who denies the possibility of evolutionary purpose, is to deny the existence of something he calls ‘God’; in doing so, he commits the error of ‘liberal fascism’, consigning the evolutionary movement of communities towards a consensually-agreed future, to the welfare of state custodians.21 If we ask why that should be, consider again Madonna’s Material Girl: she knows she needs a body to have a material foundation for being, but what she is and what she is giving is more than the sum of her parts. The secularist’s problem is that he wants a god he can lay hands on. Instead, he depends on the determinations of the political state. Here, our argument is that thinking is not a phantom of physical processes but a dynamic movement operating in the nexus of the material firmament; that although this matter, being in permanent movement, is not visible, it is the substance on and in which, both the physical world of space-time, and its thought form, depend and are composed; and further, that this ‘matter’ is confused, in the

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terminology of the contemporary sciences, with the notion of the physical world which comprises the material substance in extension in space-time: in fact, the socalled ‘physical’ world in-forms that substance. Thus what is formally present in matter is an evolving spiritual world whose possible form is given in the foundation; and being given in space-time, it is towards the realisation of that possible form that evolution tends; an evolution whose outcome - since the advent of the thought form - depends on the consensual, moral complicity of the human being who is its free agent and whose existence is not purposeless because the formal constructs into which his thinking fits belong to the same formal realm (or foundation) in the cosmos from which, in time, the evolutionary process has proceeded. That is the realm we recognize and comprehend in our narrative as the logos: “In the beginning was the Word”. Consensus: intellectual and institutional impediments The word ‘liberation’ implies release from bondage, from an imprisonment. It is a word with many connotations: in particular, in the West, it has recently signified a release for women from masculine domination. During this political process of women’s enfranchisement, the prevailing intellectual consensus has proved to be the unreconstructed product of a general tendency in Western philosophy (whose evolution has occurred chiefly in the English language) to reduce spiritual forms to their external (in this case, behavioural) expression. Thus, in spite of the men whose liberation from themselves the women inspired, the outcome has been less the emancipation, in the male, of the spiritual faculties he had previously failed to realise than the relative enhancement or substitution of female for male power in a socio-political context. Thus, on the one hand (in a case that is typical of many) after 20 years of marriage, in which there are children, the wife (of a friend of mine) confronts her husband saying “I want to be me” and gains legal possession of the property leaving the husband (who has been breadwinner while she managed children and household) to fend for himself.

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On the other hand, there has been a reactionary increase in homosexuality on the part of men who love women but cannot confront the problems of procreation and co-habitation. These strategies are the ostensibly ‘left-wing’ socio-political symptoms of western societies in which the materialist presuppositions of intellectuals continue to provide the political consensus, supporting inherently masculine forms of control (surveillance, policing, the manufacture and deployment of weapons) at home and abroad, on which the institution of the nation-state has depended since its emergence in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. The nation-state however, in the context of an increasing political awareness of the global dimensions of human society, cannot obstruct the manifestation of the spiritual reality of which the physical world is the evolutionary expression in space-time; an expression that necessarily either evolves progressively forward, with the willing assent of an enlightened humanity, or is obstructed by the collective and accumulating effects of industry and pollution; so that the publication in 1979 of James Lovelock’s Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, originally greeted with scepticism and accusations of pandering to new-ageism by his peers, has become the thin end of a growing wedge: that is, of a dawning realisation that the firmament we inhabit moves, taking us with it (willingly or not) in a firmament of purposeful being. At the head of this, the human being stands delegated, by the process of that evolution, with the responsibility of managing the movement forward in time with the right and moral use of his rational endowment. And here we should remember that that this responsibility has been understood (if in a more instinctual form) by all antecedent cultures: for the goddess to whom James Lovelock appeals has many forms,22 all essentially distinct from the pagan tradition of male deities (Jupiter, Woden, Pan) embodying the various powers governing the custodial responsibility we call ‘husbandry’; powers which once governed the relation between human societies and the

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resourceful earth. In that sense (if what is meant is not to be misunderstood by anti-godmongers) the form signified by the goddess in that ancient narrative maintains the given reciprocities within the cosmos on which life on earth depends. The goddess however, whether she is Gaia, Ishtar or Isis, is thoroughly earth-oriented. The male of the human species, on the other hand, is naturally inclined (if he does not think) to invent new perspectives that threaten the conservative stability of the given systems on which life depends. For example, the cash-point card: the quick purchase enhances consumption. It comes in handy when there is little time to think long-term. If the additional wealth created by unpremeditated purchasing vanishes in a financial crisis, that is because the manufacturing processes are subject to equally unpremeditated investment: movements of capital are unpredictable as profitability waxes and wanes. Sudden shortages of cash are an inevitable consequence if investors drag their heels, adversely affecting employment. Cash injected by the state is a typically masculine remedial measure, a ‘scenario’: that injected cash value does not yet exist in terms of commodities, for its reality depends on transaction, and the investor’s whim intervenes between the realities of production and purchase. A salutary measure might be to put a voluntary brake on this volatile process by proscribing the use of cash-cards, but that is unthinkable: once a man has invented something, he will not renounce it. But will she? In our time, we know perfectly well that no woman or man is necessarily determined by natural gender, so that (at least in our institutions) the male role may be equally the prerogative of the woman, for she also exercises institutional power. But in the short-term, as far as the state is concerned, its institutions are formidably masculine. They must be obeyed as Ms Thatcher thought. Denis wasn’t asked. The problem of secularism Although feminism has brought a greater institutional sexual equality, in a species whose future depends on reproduction, as any magazine rack shows, male and

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female essences remain marketable products. But in the primordial landscape of Gaia, earth-mother and progenitor of planetary life, there is a toughness which puts the hot issue of gender in a quite different light. In the narrative of competing consumer identities on which purchasing depends in developed economies, although the emancipated feminine has not moved far from the province of vulnerable, cosmetic surfaces towards those primordial landscapes of a life-giving earth, following the revelations of the Gender Trap, Western attention has turned to the predicament of women across the globe who are still subjected to paternalism, often focusing on Islamic communities operating with conservative constraint in underdeveloped economies. Considering the relative standing of women generally, in the history of what remains of empire East and West, that standing differs significantly between cultures mainly in the forms of marriage within divergent kinship systems. The perception by Western media of the contemporary situation of Muslim women has gone hand-in-hand with a political attempt, following 11/9, to demonise Islam. In a now celebrated debate in France in 2002, the philosopher Régis Debray argued that the wearing of the veil by Muslim women in Europe had nothing to do, as far as the wearers were concerned, with any consent to male control: for a Muslim woman choosing to adopt the veil, it was a matter of modesty in a secular society in which women are encouraged by men to flaunt their sexuality.23 Conflicts of this kind occur when differing, yet compatible, value-systems are maneuvered into conflict by the institutional inertias of redundant strategic alliances. It is not by chance that mutterings in pubs and in the tabloids about the alleged Islamic repression of women home-in on the conduct of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the media failing to remind us that in 2002, the Taliban leader Mulla Omar ordered the hanging of two men who had raped a woman during a raid on a village. Afghanistan is a largely tribal society whose traditions, in the countryside, are threatened by an encroaching modernity, a modernity bearing the typical signature of nation-state governments; a modernity whose instrument, in the case

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of Afghanistan, happens to be a nominally Muslim state seeking to impose its control on remote territories within its jurisdiction. Karzai is a good negotiator, but his abilities are frustrated by the power politics of new strategic alliances formed - in the vacuum left by a terminated Cold War - to protect the interests of the powers that be against those of an emerging global consensus for which the conventional practice of government by nation-states is an obstruction.24 Thus, in newspaper reporting on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban are deliberately conflated with something called ‘al-Qaeda’ by the use of the epithet ‘Islamist’, obscuring the evident problem (in both countries) of conflict between rural communities and the aspirations of government to perform as a nation-state on Western terms. Such pressures exerted by nation states manifest the difficulties of managing a transition from locally perceived values to values held in common by a global community; a process - an awakening - whose beginning we might well identify with the exemplary and untiring liberation struggle of Nelson Mandela, for whom the use of that word ‘liberation’ resonated with his painful personal experience of slavery. The problem that arises with the fashionable currency the word ‘liberation’ has achieved in the West, is twofold: firstly, the necessary attention given to the repression of the feminine nature and the need, in individual cases, to seek separation and fiscal compensation (often at the expense of the children concerned), helps to obscure the political reality: that the source of the paternalism in fact is a refusal, in secular societies, to acknowledge the spiritual reality that permeates and informs all existence. The experience of that reality is not divided between the archetypical male and female natures for nothing, for the evolution of humanity in time requires procreation; but the intellectual (a Lucifer who cannot abide the constraints of his self-imposed material darkness) inhabits his stratosphere of abstractions, experiencing the passage of time as a

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considerable pain, an impediment frustrating the realisation of his strategies. Thus the fashionable denial of the reality of gender difference finds political form as an instrument of liberal government in the name of equality, an ‘equality’ which over-simplifies and reduces the complex reality to a slogan boiling down to “I want to be me”. It does so because, as in every other department, alternatives to government by the nation-state entails the concept of a free-thinking consensus, bound not by external institutional controls but by moral consent; and what bodies will fund research into those alternatives if their viability depends on re-thinking the political structure of government from square one?25 Secondly (with regard to what is meant by ‘liberation’), these circumstances also conspire to prevent us from acknowledging our intuition of a reality which is continuously present half-consciously but, under the conditions of materialism, is never admitted: that the primary experience of limitation in our freedom to become, or to have, all that we most desire, is our existence within the confines of a physical body. The issue of Islam is thus a distraction serving the interests of an intellectual climate of presuppositions which need to change. Global consensus: the Islamic impulse and the Judeo-Christian tradition In one sense I am Christian; it has to do with the relation I perceive between that limited existence in a physical body in time and the being I am to become in the fulfillment of my humanity; for that humanity, in the spiritual reality, has an exemplary form; a form whose foundation is given in the logos; that order whose existence was first proposed by the ancient Greeks and which governs the logic of Wittgenstein’s narrative in the Tractatus. Language being given in the beginning with an emergent consciousness, that order in homo sapiens finds expression in the concept of the Word26 (in Greek: logos). Moreover, since it informs and structures our understanding of everything we claim to know, it also governs the movement forward of life on this planet. That logos or Word is foundational to

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the viewpoint I occupy when I say I am Christian. However, in consequence of the divided consensus among Christians concerning the two natures of the man Jesus, that logos - the Word which might change the world - reduces to the sentimental image of a nice man (in the painting by Holman-Hunt) who stands at the door and knocks. If the issue is representative humanity, The Christ Pantocrator of the Byzantines is more up my street. But, in another sense I am Muslim: the institutions and practices of Christianity are, in my opinion, forever compromised with the interests of materialism when it comes to changes in the political structure that would enable us to experience the reality of the human form in social and economic interaction; to experience it such that its highest common factors - not simply expedient politics - provide the legislative foundation for the conduct of society. Instead, egoism and personal advancement provide the drive on which so-called ‘Christian’ states thrive. Socalled Muslim states are no less imperfect, but in the contemporary post-Cold War world (and, let it be said, in the absence of Marxism) Islam’s most singular characteristic is its trans-national and yes, fundamental concern for the unitary principle that humanity is one body. This principle - essential to Shi’ite Islam the notion of humanity as one body having many members is also the essence of Pauline Christianity; but that essence, for the time being, hardly shines. Moreover it was given to the Prophet Mohammad to bring the message home while Christians, as Byzantine ascendancy waned, squabbled over doctrine; as Mohammad’s followers were later to squabble between those who claimed his spiritual inheritance and those who laid claim, on grounds of the blood-tie, to his secular power; whereas, of that message, and with regard to allegiances, the Prophet himself said “It is simply an instruction for mankind … I call you to God, I and whoever follows me: and the glory be to God”.27 The possible reciprocity between Christianity and Islam is of great political consequence. Both (in their different ways) are rooted in the antecedent tradition

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of Judaism. Thus, in the sense that Winstanley was, I am also a Jew: brought up, as I was myself, in a Protestant tradition that adhered closely to the narrative of the Old Testament prophets, Winstanley, participating in the Putney Debates as a soldier in Cromwell’s army, voiced the expectation that Zion was about to be fulfilled: “We being like Jews and in expectation of Zion…” his speech began; for, with the Promise of Zion in mind, he naively imagined that the ownership of aristocratic lands, now that monarchy had been abolished would, under Cromwell, pass to the commons. How mistaken he was, Ireland was about to find out. The mission of Jewish prophecy was the revelation of Zion as the Fulfillment, the ultimate goal for all humanity. In the parched wilderness, en route for Canaan under the leadership of Moses after the Egyptian captivity, all eyes among the children of Israel were trained on the metaphorical dimension of the literal horizon: as the psalmist David put it later, “I will lift up my eyes to the horizon from whence cometh my help”; for, above all else, in the desert, water is needed. The figure of Zion, the Fulfillment, was therefore “a cloud the size of a man’s hand” which signified rain. Hope for the future has small beginnings and needs nurturing. For the time being, the interpretation of Zion as a goal for all humanity has been nipped in the bud by those who identify Israel with Zion. Yet the apostasy of the religious Jew, when it comes to politics, is no worse than that of Christians and Muslims: the identification of Zion, the Fulfillment, with a piece of real estate contradicts (without prejudice to his ancestral entitlement to make a home there) the meaning of the prophecy that “the Messiah of Israel would be the messiah for the whole earth”28 As the 13th century Persian poet Sa’adi of Shiraz puts it (quoted by Barack Obama in his New Year address to the Iranian people): “The children of Adam are one body”. This one body has, so far, no political history, and the many aberrant forms of social and political conduct, East and West alike, have obstructed the vision of a social order manifesting that one body. In the contemporary world,

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there are no social forms by which the expressions of an individual psyche can emerge from an ego-confinement adopted to survive in a competitive environment. If responsibility for the liberation of the spirit from its being alone in one body is the responsibility of the psychiatrist in consequence of a defaulting and self-centered consensus, it is not by accident that the works of Freud and Karl Marx were written as the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire prepared Europe for the First World War. The tension here between the temporal and spiritual poles of human existence have never been so universally felt as at present, but they have been expressed, from time to time throughout history, by the few who were determined to state the long-term interests of humanity as they seemed evident in their time. The apostle Paul, in his letters to the Roman Church, put it like this: “I reckon that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparison with the glory we shall see in future; for the most earnest expectation of physical existence is the embodiment of a universal humanity, for the naturally-born man is subject to vanity; not willingly, but so that he reasons and recognises it freely. Because then, the naturally-born man will be delivered from the bondage of physical embodiment into the liberty of the humanity he shares with all others. For we know that the whole creation yearns for this liberation until now”.29 Here, this liberation, the unity of humanity, is an evolutionary goal. Contrasted with the blind determinism currently accorded to the evolutionary process in nature, although this goal is universally and consciously desired and can be freely chosen, it can be enacted only by the consensus, by the community of humanity together. That notion of a voluntary surrender to the consensus is the essence and meaning of Islam: it mirrors the unitary nature of that Being from whom, in evolutionary time, the creation proceeded. In the West, the imagination, in philosophy, of that process towards political consensus has proceeded from the presupposition (of many, but in this case, of

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Francis Bacon) that sentiment and moral scruple obstruct the instrumentalism on which successful enterprise must depend: “In civil actions, he is the far greater and deeper politician that can make other men the instruments of his ends and desires … so as they shall do what he wills and yet not know that they are doing it”.30 Moreover, the presently-secular intellectual consensus currently supposes there is a conflict between something called ‘evolution’ and something called ‘creationism’ (between science and religion) so that perspectives called ‘metaphysical’, including the ‘divine presence’ of thinking, are ruled out; for that thinking might inconveniently mirror a consensus that the nation-state, for the time being, is too inflexible to accommodate. Yet the anomaly between the sciences and religious or metaphysical narratives exists only in default of an understanding of time: it is from the point of view of the physical body that the process of creation, of necessity, takes time; its development is evolutionary and progressive. From the standpoint in consciousness of the over-seeing thought process, the beginning, end and intermediate points in space time of such a process are grasped in an act of cognition in which, at that moment, they are coeval: joined in the enduring timelessness of that purely formal realm from which the forms of existences in space-time have evolved. Even the possibility of being able to state that such a process as time occurs at all, is possible, in logic, only from a viewpoint beyond time; a point at which the concepts of beginning and end, separated in space and time, are grasped together in a timeless act of thought; for the presence in us of acts of thought (even while shopping) is fluid and mobile, and it is from within that moving and plastic being-present-with-us of the world that we decide what we are (want to buy, so to speak) and want to become; for even if we have not given thought to the consequences, the effects of that present are long-term. This is a painful and slowly-moving evolution. We hope it will turn out to be forwards.

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Such a viewpoint (transcending time) must logically be present in a cognitive act by which a human being is able to understand what time is. This logical necessity is clearly explained in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but since his writings are supposed to derive from the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle31, the matter of his metaphysics is still in abeyance. So also is the matter of consensus, a fulfilment we shall not see while religious communities, compromised with secular investments, prefer to postpone the consensus until hereafter in order to save souls now for their cause. The epistemological problem and the Iranian philosophy of Ishraq If we turn to the tradition in Iranian Shi’ite philosophy called Ishraq (the Illuminationist school), the matter is quite different. It is the reverse of all forms of positivism, clarifying the enduring structures which inform our human understanding of the world. As in Wittgenstein, the presence in our acts of knowing of something that is clearly transcendent and beyond time, is selfevident. In the philosophy of Ishraq it is, moreover, not simply a human but a Divine Presence; on the obvious grounds that if there is present, in human thinking, a faculty of cognition that identifies timelessness, then its content belongs to the reality which is timeless; for whereas the objects of cognition themselves, in the spatio-temporal realm of sentient perception, are corruptible, the act of cognition recognises (in Plato’s sense of remembering) their essences as being in that timelessness, where together they constitute the human form. It is that form whose presence, in our acts of cognition, illuminates the darkness of the material firmament. By contrast, in the contemporary narrative of positivism, the cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker32 cannot distinguish between an externally perceived neural-network signal in the brain and the thought in the mind for which that physical process provides the vehicle. This is an epistemological mistake, for no

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process comprised of discrete events or component parts can articulate itself. Richard Dawkins, similarly, finds no grounds for such a distinction: admitting no concept identifying an act of cognition (which would imply the existence of an autonomous metaphysical presence) he concludes that a thought-act is braindetermined, and is so in consequence of the causal factors operating in the molecular structure of the physical vehicle. But were this the case, how is it possible to think otherwise? If the matter is debated, it cannot be causallydetermined. The thinking activity by which the human being cognises the world is essentially plastic. In form, it answers to the governing reality (logos) but is subject to the particular perspective of the individual concerned, and to his ability to eliminate the prejudices of presupposition. Although the phenomena in the sentient realm to which thinking activity conforms, in acts of recognition, are unstable (the phenomena live and die in time), the forms of the spiritual realm in which thinking moves are enduring and beyond the threshold of time. The characteristic activity of thinking, however, is movement, and in consequence of its cognitive acts it, in turn, in moving becomes the mover. Its instrument in so moving the world is the human agency whose aims, in so moving, are for better or worse. In the light of what we have learned from quantum physics, knowledge we have of the process is inseparable from self-knowledge. That is because, since “the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe”33 and could not be conceived in other than human conditions (that is, of a being equipped by evolution to grasp in consciousness what lies beyond the boundary of his own organism), the thinking agent at the centre of that nexus of knowing must learn how to isolate the predispositions of a personal and temporal standpoint in his cognitive acts. An important difference between Western philosophy (even including the phenomenologists but excluding Steiner) and the principle Islamic philosophers,

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is that the a priori importance in philosophy of self-knowledge is self-evident, whereas in the universities of the West it is an embarrassment smacking of mysticism. Strange: it was Socrates who, at the very beginning of Western philosophy, argued so cogently that true knowledge presupposed the liberation of thinking, in the formation of judgments, from the small confines of a personal perspective; implying, at the same time (for the benefit of Karl Popper perhaps), that the rigorous application of scientific method could not rationally entail the elimination of that subjective standpoint, since otherwise no thinking could be done. We shall bring this discussion of liberation to a close with two descriptions of how thinking, as a spiritual activity, moves. The first is from Shihâboddîn Yahyâ Sohrawardî (12th century), the founder of the Illuminationist school of Ishraq. The second is from Mullã Șadrā Shīrāzī (16th century), the last of the philosophers of the Iranian Ishraqi school. It should be born in mind that the point of these quotations is to return the reader to our opening thesis: that liberation, in all its forms of discourse, concerns firstly, the liberation of the human spirit from its bodily confinement; and secondly, the realisation that what is then present (the world in its fulgurant complexity, one’s autonomous self within it; everything together) is a presence transcending personal viewpoint, and in that sense, a Divine Presence; a presence liberating the individual from the confinement of a body that is corruptible in time. For whereas the body is the product of a descent into matter, in the thinking that body is permeated with light. Ishraq is the narrative of that Divine Presence in the philosophy of the Iranian Illuminationists. Sohrawardi: That which necessitates renewal in itself is movement. Of all movements, the absolute, uninterrupted continuous one is a circular movement. Circular and perpetual movements can only be produced by the revolving of the firmament. This is the cause of the occurrence of all the happenings in this material world.34 From our point of view, Suhrawardi (b. 1155) here anticipates

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the standpoint of contemporary physics: acts of cognition in space-time by human beings draw the objective perspective to a point round which the cosmos revolves; a point whose function, being volatile in itself (like the Higgs-Bosun particle) permits possible indeterminacy throughout the material plenum. In time however, there is no such indeterminacy because the spatio-temporal realm of the physical provides the context in which thoughts about it are formed. That order may be given with physical existence but thanks to evolution, the reality is accessible to us only if and when our acts of thought mirror that given logos. Thus although in time every human perspective differs, within that movement of the many the mover is one. So Wittgenstein says: “In a vase there are equal numbers of white and black spherical pellets (and no others). I take out one pellet after another out and put it back in the vase. Then I can verify by this test that the numbers of the black and white pellets move progressively towards equalisation as they are taken out”.35 That is how truth, in time, establishes itself in the consensus. What Wittgenstein terms elsewhere “the limiting circumstance of probability” depends on the accidents of the counting, but the outcome can be determined only by what is the case. Thus he concludes “That [the outcome] is therefore not a mathematical fact” because although that outcome is necessary, it cannot be predicted. It cannot be predicted because the events have a human agency; an agent who, being able to think, is liberated from the necessity of what is the case and chooses it freely. Mulla Sadra: The reliance of the laity and the externalists … is upon the forms of this world because of their inability to separate every form from all the material properties.36 As we have already remarked, in the preceding discussion of terms with regard to the use of the word ‘matter’, material properties can be taken to mean the properties of bodies in extension in space-time. In his Spiritual Psychology,37 the form to which Sadra refers, “having measure without matter” (and here he quotes Aristotle) “is the icon of the form which is there” in the natural world as an object of sentient perception. In the plant, the form “is living.

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That is because the plant is a ‘Word’ [from within the logos] bearing the life”, and that is His [God’s] emanation … a share from the Light to liberate [existences] from the dominance of privation, and have victory over the ‘darknesses’”; the “darknesses” being those othernesses referred to previously (in the Synopsis) as limitations (ipseity) of the essence that is present in the consciousness of the observer; that is “the particular ipseity contradicting …[the] eminent life and elevated perfection which flow into [it] … contradicting what …[the eminent life] encounters”. Of these resistances to enlightenment (figures of the plurality of viewpoints nurtured on presuppositions obstructing a possible political consensus) Sadra says: “Whenever the boundary of their qualities and the firmness of their particular existences is broken … it receives some other kind of existence … from the perfecting form”. This then is the process whereby the forms comprising the Word, the logos that is in timelessness, being invested under the limiting conditions of thingness in the sentient world of space-time, are liberated again and returned to their source by the one who utters their signature. He does so because, in that consciousness where his thinking occurs, the structure of that logos being present, he recognises, in acts of cognition, the signs which point to his nativity. As Wittgenstein puts it: “The moment when, on hearing the word eternity, one understands timelessness and not a limitless duration of time, then whoever lives in the present lives eternally” 38 Notes: 1

Stephen Hawking’s Strange New Universe; New Scientist, 22 April 2006.

2

Called ‘etheric’ by Steiner. See Chapter IV, p. 64.

3

see: Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past; Fontana, 1989.

14

A N Whitehead op. cit.

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5

Rudolf Steiner, The Origins of Natural Science; Anthroposophic Press, 1985 (in Lecture III). 6

Olive Whicher, The Heart of the Matter; Temple Lodge, 1997.

7

first published as Raum und Licht der Schöpfung in ‘Natura'; Dornach, 1933.

8

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time; Bantam Books, 1988.

9

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language; Northwestern University Press, 1973. 10

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Matter?; Scientific American, 1953. This bifurcation of the phenomena (waves and particles) is essential to Steiner’s physics of light (Dec.-Jan. 1919/20) in a series of lectures translated as The Light Course: Light, Colour, Sound; Mass, Electricity, Magnetism; Anthroposophic Press, 2001.

11

Rudolf Steiner, Man as a Being of Sense and Perception; Steiner Book Centre, 1981. On the epistemological problem: Truth and Knowledge; Steiner Books, 1981. 12

Ibn ‘Arabi, Whoso Knoweth Himself’; Beshara P:ublications, 1976.

13

Mark Kingwell, Consciousness Conundrum; Bookforum, April/May 2009.

14

Steve Connor, The Independent; 16 February 2008.

15

In his account of consciousness and regional brain activity, Ian McGilchrist tells us that “Narrative forms of thought are associated with the right hemisphere; they are associated with self-other inter-actions…”; op.cit. p191. And David Papineau, reviewing John Searle’s Freedom and Neurobiology (The Times literary Supplement, 18 January 2008) tells us that “Searle aimed to show that computers could no more think than he could understand Chinese”. 16

Note: the grammatical form of ‘thought’ meant here is a verb.

17

A N Whitehead, op cit.

18

Mulla Sadra Shirazi, Spiritual Psychology, ICAS Press, 2008.

19

Lluis Quintana-Murci, Insitut Pasteur, Paris (in Le Monde, 18 April 2009).

20

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Industrial State, Princeton University Press, 1967.

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21

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, Penguin Books, 2007.

22

Maria Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses; University of California Press, 2001.

23

Régis Debray, Ce Que nous Voile le Voile; Gallimard, 2004.

24

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-state; University of Minnesota, 1995. 25

see Andreas Whittam Smith’s Reclaim Politics for the People; The Independent, 5 September 2012. 26

Anne-Marie Schimmel, in Deciphering the Signs of God: a Phenomenological Approach to Islam (State University of New York Press, 1994), remarks that “People have pondered the origin of scriptures that contain such power [that] … in 1971 a considerable number of bags [were found] in the Great Mosque in Sanaa which contained thousands of fragments of early Koran copies mainly on vellum … and while in India the Vedas are regarded as having emanated [or been] supernaturally begotten, a widespread belief is that of the pre-existence of the Scripture”. This ‘belief’ is perfectly compatible with the drift of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

27

The Qur’an of the Prophet Mohammad, Sura XII (Rodwell’s translation); J M Dent & Sons Ltd, 1943. 28

Gerson D. Cohen, in Zion in Jewish Literature; ed. Abraham S. Halkin; University Press of America, 1988.

29

Paul the Apostle, The Epistle to the Romans, ch.8 vs.18 (my version from the King James version). 30

quoted by Robert K. Faulkner, from the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon, in Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress; Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1993. 31

Victor Kraft, The Vienna Circle: the Origin of Neo-positivism; Philosophical Library of New York, 1953.

32

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought; Allen Lane, 2007.

33 Stephen Hawking, op. cit. 34

Hazrat Shihabuddin Yahya al-Suhrawardi, The Shape of Light; Fons Vitae, 1998.

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35

Ludwig Wittgenstein, op. cit. 5.154.

36

Mulla Sadra Shirazi, The Hermeneutics of the Light-Verse in the Qur’an; (?).

37

Mulla Sadra Shirazi, op. cit. Ch. XI.

38

Ludwig Wittgenstein, op. cit. (6.4311).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abul-Fadl, Mona M. “Towards Global Cultural Renewal: Modernity and the Episteme of Transcendence”, Occasional Papers, International Institute of Islamic Thought, Herndon USA 1995. Adams, George Physical and Ethereal Spaces, Rudolf Steiner Press 1965. Adorno, Theodor Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnirtheorie, Suhrkamp 1970. al-Suhrawardi, Hazrat Shihabuddin Yahya The Shape of Light, Fons Vitae 1998. Ayer, A. J. The Central Questions of Philosophy; Penguin Books 1976. Bacon, Francis Novum Organum, Routledge 1898. Blaxland-de Lange, Simon Owen Barfield: Romanticism Comes of Age, Temple Lodge 2006. Bohm, David “Some Remarks on the Notion of Order”, in Towards a Theoretical Biology, proceedings of the Second Serbelloni Symposium, Hafner Publishing NY 1962. Bortoft, Henri The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science, Floris Books 1996. Braudel, Fernand Civilisation and Capitalism 15th-18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life, Vol. I The Limits of the Possible, Collins 1981. Bucaille, Maurice Moses and Pharoah, the Hebrews in Egypt, NNT Mediascope Inc. 1994. Buzatti, Dino The Tartar Steppe, Carcanet 1985. Chomsky, Noam On Nature and Language, Cambridge University Press 2002.

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Cartesian Linguistics: a Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, University of America Press 1966. Syntactic Structures, the matter of logos, Mouton & Co. The Hague 1965. Cohen, Gerson D. Zion in Jewish Literature, ed. Abraham S. Halkin, University Press of America 1988. Corbin, Henri History of Islamic Philosophy, Kegan Paul International 1996. Dawkins, Richard Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin Books 1999. Debray, Régis Ce Que Nous Voile le Voile, Gallimard 2004. Diamond, Jared Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Press 2005. Eccles, John “The Brain and the Unity of Conscious Experience”, the 19th Arthur Stanley Eddington Memorial Lecture, Cambridge 1965. Eddington, Arthur Stanley “The Decline of Determinism”, in Great Essays in Science, ed. Martin Gardener, Washington Square Press 1957. Evans, John Understanding Thinking: Maps Models Meanings Values Goals Motivation & Neural Networks, Fluffbuster Books 2007. Faulkner, Robert K. Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, Roman and Littlefield 1993. Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, Roman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. 1993. Feynman, Richard P. QED: the Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Penguin Books 1990. Freemantle, Anne The Age of Belief, Mentor 1954. Gadamer, Hans-Georg The Beginning of Knowledge, Continuum 2003. Galbraith, John The Industrial State, Penguin 2007. Gimbutas, Maria The Living Goddesses, University of California Press 2001. Goldberg, Jonah Liberal Fascism, Penguin Books 2007. Gorbachev, Mikhail Manifesto for the Earth: action now for peace, global justce and a sustainable future, Clairview 2006. Gray, J. The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death, Penguin Books, 2012. Gribbin, John Schrődinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1995. Guehenno, Jean-Marie The End of the Nation-state, Minnesota Press 2000. Harrison, C. G. The Transcendental Universe: Six Lectures on Occult Science, Theosophy and the Catholic Faith, Temple Lodge London 1988. Hawking, Stephen A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books 1988.

Index Hegel, Friedrich

163

Phänomenologie des Geistes, Akademie-Verlag Berlin 1967. Heisenberg, Werner “Die Goethesche und die Newtonsche Farbenlehre im Lichte der Modernen Physik”, in Goethe in the XX Century, ed. Hans Mayer, Suhrkamp 1999. Heisenberg, Werner “Natural Law and the Structure of Matter”, Frontiers of Modern Scientific Humanism – The Athens Meeting 1964, Elsevier Publishing Company 1966 Hyde, Lewis The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Canongate 2006. Ittelson, William H. Environment and Cognition, Seminar Press NY 1973. Jakobsen, Roman Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, Basil Blackwell 1985. Jaynes, Julian The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Penguin Books 1993. Kafka, Franz “Die Angst vor der Transzendenz”, in Philosophisches Jahrbuch vol. 60 nos. 2 & 3, Fulda 1950. Khan, Quamaruddin al-Mawardi’s Theory of the State, Islamic Book Foundation, Lahore 1983. Kingwell, Mark: Consciousness Conundrum”, in Book Forum, April/May 2009. Kraft, Victor The Vienna Circle: the Origins of Neo-Positivism, Philosophical Library New York 1953. Kuhrt, David “Identity at the Limits: on not being another”, in (journal) Transcendent Philosophy, March 2003. Küng, Hans Global Responsibility: in Search of a New World Order, SCM Press 1990. Latakos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, editors Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge University Press 1970. Martin, Ian We’ve turned our backs on faith but … the gods are hurling down hurricanes…Headline to article in The Guardian Review, 22 October 2012. Marx, Karl Early Writings, Penguin 1975. The Poverty of Philosophy, Martin Lawrence 1892; first published by the Cooperative Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR. Maso, Ilja New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, An Institute of Noetic Sciences Book 1994. McAlpine, John Tait Mad Science, Published 2006 by the author, PO Box 5198 Dumbarton G82 2YG. McGilchrist, Iain The Master and His Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press 2010. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

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Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Northwestern University Press 1973. Moore, George Some Main Problems of Philosophy, Allan & Unwin 1953. Pinker, Stephen The Stuff of Thought, Allen Lane 2007. Planck, Max “Die Physik im Kampf um die Weltanschauung”, lecture given in Berlin 6th March 1935, Johann Ambrosius.Barth, Leipzig 1935. Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1963. Rabinow, Paul and Dan-Cohen Talia A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles, Princeton University Press 2005. Russell, Bertrand The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press 1980. Russell, Bertrand Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion, Touchstone Press 1967. Schimmel, Anne-Marie Deciphering the Signs of God: a Phenomenological Approach to Islam, State University of NY Press 1994. Schrődinger, Erwin Mind and Matter, Cambridge 1958. “What is Matter?”, in Scientific American issue no. 189, 1953. Schumacher, Diana Small is Beautiful in the 21st Century: the legacy of E.F. Schumacher, Green Books 2011. Scwartzkopf, Friedemann The Metamorphosis of the Given: Toward and Ecology of Consciousness, Peter Lang 1995. Searle, John Mind: a Brief Introduction, Oxford 2004. Sheldake, Rupert The Presence of the Past, Fontana 1989. Shirazi, Mulla Sadra Spiritual Phsychology, Islamic Centre for Academic Studies/ICAS Press 2008. The Hermeneutics Snow C. P. “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, The Rede Lecture, Cambridge U. P. 1961. Stedall, Jonathan Where on Earth is Heaven? Hawthorne Press 2009. Steiner, Rudolf “The world-view in recent science”; in Fachwissenscchaften und Anthroposophie, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 2005. Die Ergänzung heutiger Wissenschaften durch Anthroposophie, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1987 Die Philosophie der Freiheit: Grundzüge einer modernen Weltanschauung, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1998. Truth and Science, Mercury Press 1993. The Origins of Natural Science, Rudolf Steiner Press 1985.

Index

165

The Boundaries of Natural Science, Anthroposophic Press, 1983. “Philosophy Cosmology and Religion”, ten lectures, Anthroposophic Press USA 1984. Anthroposophy and Science: observation experiment mathematics, Mercury Press 1991. Wahrheit und Wissenschaft: Erkenntnistheorie der Goethschen Weltanschauung, Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 1961. The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View, Mercury Press NY 1988. “The Light Course: Light, Colour, Sound Mass, Electricity, Magnetism”, Anthroposophic Press NY 2001. von Aster, Ernst Geschichte der Philosophie, Alfred Krőner Verlag 1963. Waddington, C. H. The Scientific Attitude, Penguin Books 1948. Whicher, Olive The Heart of the Matter, Temple Lodge 1997. White, Morton; ed. The Age of Analysis, Mentor 1955. Whitehead, Alfred North Science and the Modern World, Penguin Books 1938. Wilson, Edward The Social Conquest of the Earth, Liveright 2012. Wittgenstein, Ludwig Tractatus logico-philosophicus; logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt-am-Main 1966. On Certainty, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1974. Zweig, Stefan The World of Yesterday, Pushkin Press, 2011

INDEX

a priori

concepts of evolution presuppose the human context, 93; “All consequences happen a priori”, (para. 1.1) 51, 107 abstraction 28, disembodies the phenomena, 122 Adam and the Tree of Knowledge, 85; his Naming and the logos order, 96 Adams, George concepts and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics, 134135 Adorno, Theodor even objectivity must presuppose ‘the world’, 43 Aryan uniformity invades, 23 Ayer, Alfred contrary to the Tractatus: “no such things as meanings”, 20 belief systems and government, (para.5) 66; effect on commodity production and consumption, 54 birth presupposition of death and the experience of time 41, (para. 6.4311) 105 blood and life natural constants: the thought of death transcends it, 86 bodies exclude being, 29; as economic targets, (par.1.7) 62; as standpoints, not physically-separate being. (para. 3.1) 64 brains as instruments of thought, (para. 1) 107; not causes of thought, (para. 1.2) 109; do not think, (para. 2.2) 115; individual thought-act, consensual future, (para.2.111) 113; brains and computers, 139 Buchholz/Eddington/Heisenberg/Planck/Schrödinger seminal texts: physics, knowing, linguistic structures, 57 capitalism 23, 31, 43 Carnap, Rudolf 82

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Catholic Christianity and Renaissance moral foundation of knowledge, 104 causality 33, 37 cognitive acts and open mindedness, 48 Cold War 45, 147 collectivity and survival, (para. 6.5, 6.6) 69 commodity culture the ideology, 23 common sense 30, presupposition in Russell’s anti-metaphysics, 34 communism and Karl Marx, 10 competition survival and the cash-point card, 145 concept formation 45, acts of cognition illuminate, 153 consciousness and evolutionary purpose, 51-54 consensus 40, 51, product of free agency, 141-143 Cromwell, Oliver 150 Dawkins, Richard 14, natural selection: of wilful absurdity?, 128, 154 death and physical bodies 87, (para. 2.24) 116 democracy institutional inertia and expert knowledge, 15 Déscartes 105 dialectic materialism 29 dictatorship of the body: transcending the viewpoint, (par.3.1) 64; the terminal sickness of materialism, 104 Eddington, Arthur 49 ego access to the universal, (para. 2) 62; personal identity and species, (para. 6.5) 69; who ‘I am’ in the Epistles of Paul, (para. 2.23) 116 epistemology the science of epistemology, 5, 90; instinctual and intellectual knowledge, 38, 99; ethical import of false logic, 50; essential to all scientific disciplines, (para. 1.6) 61 ethereal space and matter, 135 ethics in Rainer Maria Rilke: law is absent instinct, 34; in the Tractatus is transcendental, 51 evolution naturally-given and consensual futures, (para.1.3) 59; recognition: the problem of heredity, 97 fatwa Rushdie and enduring values, 23 free will an illusion?, (para. 2.11, 2.21, 2.22) 112, 115 Gaia as Earth Mother, 146 gender equality 108, consensus and political control, 145, 147 genetic determinism hereditary mechanism, 34, and telos, 70 God as ‘something’ in the Tractatus, 41, 80; the problem of definition, 123 Goethe and epistemology, 49, 89 global perspectives anthropo-sophia in Steiner’s epistemology, 54; consensus as evolutionary fulfilment, 142 grammar and the reciprocal intuition of common ground, (end of para. 7) 119 government free-thinking consensus and the nation state, 148

Index Hawking, Stephen Hegel, Georg heredity Hitler

169

vs. Merleau-Ponty on the central nervous system, 137 Gilbert Ryle’s ‘ghost’ and subjectivity, 49 as exculpation: the transmitted paradigms, 35 Austro-Hungary and the Vienna Circle, 37; a pupil at Wittgenstein’s school, 81 human articulating the naturally-given in time, (para.1.61) 61; where unitary being is conscious, 90 Ibn Arabi if “I followed the imprints” the path is not heredity, 70 individual identity beginning or end of evolution?, (para. 1.211) 110; complexity: enrichment of a given simplicity, (para.1.11) 108 intellect (para. 6.1) 67, (para. 6.6) 69; fragments reality, 85 intuition knowing “even as I am known”, (para. 2.1) 61 Iran the Iluminationist philosophers, 153 James, William 64 Judaic Promised Lands Zion, the fulfilment of what?, 150 Kant, Immanuel 78, (para. 6.54) 119, (para. 6.521) 121 knowledge positive knowledge a red herring, 78; of relational things cannot be positive, 119-120 liberalism and equality, 148 light and matter (para. 7.1) 71, 137, 147 logical order 5, (para. 7) 70 logos in Wittgenstein and Paul the Apostle, 52; structural order of reality, (para. 4) 65 love (para. 5.1) 66, 85 Mandela, Nelson 147 Marx, Karl 10, 29 Material Girl “… more to matter than meets the eye”, 136 matter indistinguishable from spirit, 136 memory of the past serves futures we decide, 33 McGilchrist, Ian mind and brain, (para. 1.42) 72 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice nervous system: not cause but locus of a function, 137 metaphysics the reality is present metaphysically, 16, 42; Wittgenstein: the subject cannot be seen, 87 mind presence of the thinker, 15; modernity inverts our perception of reality, 96; as a momentum in the material firmament, not cerebral cortex, 135 modernity advent of, (para. 6.5) 69 moral conviction (para. 2.111) 113, (para. 6.521) 121, 139 Moses 150 Murrell, Hilda 102 nature identity: instinctually interiorized, 134; spatial orientation/extension of subjectivity, 102

170 nominalism

Wittgenstein The Tartar

Francis Bacon: perishable goods of nominalism, 22,101; and realism: names designate things or ideas?, 77 order naturally given, not intellectual construction, 96 Pinker, Stephen 9, 100, 153 Popper, Karl falsification theory, 77 presence of mind of something that knows, 87 positivism 6, its concept of knowledge, (para. 7) 119 quanta material bit-parts and logos order, 11, 143 random process is accidental: natural law makes us articulate agents, 88 Rilke, Rainer Maria why are we here?, 33 Russell, Bertrand and the Vienna Circle, 38; his Theory of Types confounded in the Tractatus, 95 Reductionism 10, thanks to Lord Francis Bacon of Verulam, 22 scientific attitude the methodological devices of experiment, 102; problem of scientific method, (para. 1.6) 61 Searle, John mental process as biological product, 50 secularism of absent minds: Gray, Searle and Pinker, 9 Shakespeare 5, on positivism, 118 silence 71, 117 Sohrawardi/Mulla Sadra Iranian Illuminationist philosophers of Ishraq, 155 Socrates 155 soul in the perspective of a spiritual science, 91 species cessation of causality, (para. 2.23) 116; limitation on essence within a shared totality, 141 speech articulates the world, (para. 6.4) 68 Stedall, Jonathan on Goethe’s scientific method, 12 Steiner, Rudolf what I am thinks: the starting point of knowledge, 60; his achievement, 75, 99; epistemological boundary of natural science, 90-92 thinker and thought the metaphysical problem: not being in time, 131; copresent in the material foundation, 133; outside space and time, (Tractatus para. 6.4312) 125 time product of the human perspective, 95, 154; and eternity, 157 an articulate evolutionary process, 16 transcendence truth/truthfulness neither prescriptive nor ‘principled’, 88; in Goethe and Steiner, 89 Whitehead, A.N. 11 Wilson, Edward O. 61 Winstanley 150 Wittgenstein his achievement, 16, 21, 31, 37-39 word was in the beginning, 35; the sciences presuppose a referent world, 72

Index world values vernacular Zweig, Stephan

171

‘the world’ includes/comprises subjectivity, 34; ‘world’ and cognate observer are inseparable, 90 enduring, 23 philosophy is built on ordinary usage, 4; Shakespeare and the vernacular, 5; ordinary usage and intelligibility, 47 81