The Rediscovery of Meaning is a volume of a collection of essays by Owen Barfield listed here.
Here is a video on Owen Barfield and the meaning crisis. It includes many video clips discussing the history of knowledge from our modern Western perspective. Barfield notes the feeling of meaninglessness that was coming to prominence in the twentieth century and continues on. He asks:
How is it that the more man becomes able to manipulate the world to his advantage the less he can perceive any meaning in it?
The scientific revolution brought with it a time of regarding the universe as mechanical and mindless. We as subjects observe a lifeless objective universe whereas previously through Aristotle there was an understanding of a cosmos filled with intensions. Now any sign of will or purpose has been excluded from most of the history of the universe. The universe is understood using the language of mathematics.
We live in a mathematical universe in which secondary properties like love and beauty are an afterthought. We have become disconnected from the world. We now look out at a mechanical reality as far as our instruments can probe, we have come to regard our own selves as machines. Now even our thoughts are nothing more than wired circuits making and breaking in a few pounds of fleshy microchips and logic gates, All this energetic activity encased in the bony box which nods on the atlas in agreement with this conclusion, just like the nodding dog on the parcel shelf of your grannie’s car.
Blind mechanical laws rule.
Malcom Guite quotes Barfield,
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information, where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
We have, of necessity, become detached and alienated from nature. Guite and Barfield are asking us to learn from the previous participatory relationship, leave behind our exclusive onlooker consciousness, and to gain a participatory understanding with our new found individual self conscious awareness.
Our modern scientific knowledge gives us the letters of nature. Through participation we can form the words and begin to read the script of nature. And that is what Goethe was doing with his “gentle empiricism”. With our mind’s eye we become free from living in the moment and we can make connections that allow us to see the contexts which overcome the idolatry of a restrictive physicalism.
Grasp the knowledge gained by the modern scientific understanding and continue on. Learn to read the script and take the words seriously, “Tat Tvam Asi”, “Thou Art That”.
Newton was attempting the impossible, to exclude the observer from the experiment. Goethe saw the central role of the eye in any understanding of colour.
From ‘Theory of Colours’
From, “light, shade and colour we construct the visible world.” Through this trinity we are able see the world. We perceive spectral colours through the interaction of the exited retinal state that light brings about and the relaxation of the eye in darkness.
You were right
about my sense of sight.
I can see the light,
Forgive me for being trite,
to say it clearly shines so bright.
An image on each eye does alight,
a net of nerves to excite.
What about the inky dark?
Does that not also leave its mark?
Not without an opposing spark.
Don’t be deluded by the dark,
All is made clear by photon and quark.
Do I see the light, or do I see matter?
By the former I can view the latter.
But the shadowy colour cast by the platter
is real too, just ask the Hatter.
We see within and we see without.
We need them both there is no doubt.
(CharlieM, aspiring poet, 2022)
Look west as the sun goes down. You will not see waves or corpuscles of light, you will probably see a reddening sun and a red glow in the surrounding atmosphere. Everything will be bathed in a red light. Look at the contrasting deep blue of the summer sky. Look at a glass of cloudy liquid. Its contrasting colour when lit from the front or backlit. All this conforms to Goethe’s observation of colours arising through darkness behind light or light behind darkness. The prismatic colours are dependent on the interplay of light and the darkness of matter.
Colour affects our eyes, our minds and our emotions, and Goethe did not neglect any of these aspects.
What is light? Would you like to watch a few minutes of the linked video from here and make some comments/criticisms if you wish?
Below is a screenshot of an “invisible beam of light” within an enclosed box.
Unless I am gravely mistaken, modern scientific accounts of colour perception recognize that colours are mental representations of certain aspects of visual information. Hence, this already incorporates the role of the observer. So why does Goethe’s view have more meaning and why do you consider it to be more in keeping of reality?
Haha, Love it!
You are obviously stuck, so let me attempt to further this discussion a little. You have been repeating the same mantra over and over and over. But most people here, after duly pondering your arguments, consider Goethean colour theory to be plain wrong. That is not going to change, so please stop pelting us with youtube videos from weird sites.
Secondly, all of the optical phenomena that you post here, e.g. why we cannot observe a light beam traveling when looking from the side, are easily explained by high school level physics. You must have learned this stuff when you were a kid. Apparently, your brain is on ignore for even the most mundane explanations.
All I am trying to do now is understand why you consider the Goethean account to have more meaning. What I am getting from your comments is that you like the Goethean account better and that’s it. That’s fine with me, but preference does not equal meaning, nor does it dictate what reality is like. It certainly does not qualify as science. Would you not agree with that?
I don’t work on color perception, but from what little I’ve read, it’s more complicated than that. Color perception is multiply context dependent: the same surface reflectance can be seen as different colors depending on the surface reflectance of adjoining surfaces (hence the famous “what color is the dress” meme from a few years ago), atmospheric conditions (moisture, dust) can affect things, the nature of the light source (e.g. daylight, incandescent, fluorescent, etc). And these varying conditions are pretty stable across cultures and languages. Then there’s the much-debated issue of color terms — can people see a color that they don’t have a term for in their language?
One important issue that tends to get swept under the rug in these debates is the difference between (1) phenomenological vs scientific attitudes and (2) physical vs bio-psychological theories.
The Newton vs Goethe debate, although historically fascinating, leads to bad philosophy because it encourages the thought that these two distinctions are the same: that one must adopt a phenomenological attitude in order to build a bio-psychological theory.
The rise of experimental psychology is usually dated to 1879 (57 years after Goethe’s death) with the establishment of the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt. Since then psychology has gone through numerous conceptual and empirical revolutions, all turning on this basic question:
can taking a non-phenomenological, scientific attitude allow us to describe and explain bio-psychological phenomena? Or does taking the scientific attitude inevitably lead to a covert reductionism of the bio-psychological to the ‘mere’ physico-chemical? If so, must we take a phenomenological attitude in order to do justice to the mental lives of animals (including humans)?
These issues were certainly being hotly debated as recently as the mid 1990s, when I started cutting my teeth on the question of the relation between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. There is at present an uneasy truce, with most serious cognitive theorists accepting a plurality of methods, with the idea that phenomenology and cognitive science are mutually illuminating and mutually correcting.
In the book, “Catching the Light, The Entwined History of Light and Mind” Arthur Zajonc, (the pronunciation of Zajonc sounds remarkably like “science”), takes us through a history of human understanding of light from ancient times with talk of the “Eye of Horus” and the goddess “Iris” to modern quantum physics. The rainbow, once seen as God’s covenant now becomes the effect of photons striking nerve cells.
The genius Faraday had paved the way for minds like Maxwell to give his ideas mathematical substance, and then on to Einstein’s radical ideas about light which contradicted the materialistic views of the nineteenth century.
From the book Zajonc writes:
The concept of light aether was a last gasp attempt to account for light in a materialistic way. However subtle the aether was, it was still seen as a material substrate in which light waves could propagate.
The book then goes on to relate the development of quantum theory and where our present understanding of light might lead us.
No two people can see the same rainbow. What we see are, in Barfield’s words, collective representations. The reality of rainbows only comes into focus when our outer sight is combined with insight and we accept the polarity in “seeing the light”. There is no objective material thing that constitutes the rainbow.
“Material” is a shibboleth here — it’s used in lots of different ways and really gets in the way of genuine understanding.
After all, if “material” meant “posited by our best contemporary physics” than photons surely are material!
In any event, I don’t think it’s right to say that the ether was the last attempt to make sense of light “materialistically.”
The ether was posited as a consequence of understanding the concept of wave univocally, with light waves being waves in the same sense as sound as traveling in waves across air, water, or land. Since sound waves need a medium across which they propagate, ether was posited as the medium across which light waves propagate.
The discovery that there is no ether meant that light waves needed to be understood as a very different kind of wave than sound waves. That doesn’t mean that light isn’t physical.
It always is. I agree with your remarks about context dependence.
Hold on, that is new to me. Of course they can, can’t they? Perhaps you meant that they have trouble distinguishing it from shades that resemble it?
It is pretty obvious that Charlie loads the terms “Newtonian” and “Goethean” with a lot of implicit bagage, so your distinction is very useful. Thanks.
His wikipedia page ends with the following suggestions:
You are feeding us a bit of a one-sided diet, Charlie.
That anthroposophists share your bleak view of contemporary science is unsurprising, but I found nothing in that quote that illuminated why you find this view lacking in meaning. Like you, Arthur Zajonc just expresses his distaste for certain narratives and expects everybody to nod in agreement. I am starting to suspect this is all you’ve got.
“No two people can see the same rainbow. What we see are, in Barfield’s words, collective representations. The reality of rainbows only comes into focus when our outer sight is combined with insight and we accept the polarity in “seeing the light”. There is no objective material thing that constitutes the rainbow.”
Then how can my camera record a picture of a rainbow?
Well, how would we know? If someone’s behavioral criteria all indicate that they don’t distinguish (say) red and green, or don’t recognize light blue and dark blue as different shades of the same color, what basis would we have to saying that they really see the same colors that we do?
No worries — I spend most of my time thinking about the history of psychology and it’s relation with phenomenology. My current book project is about the influence of cybernetics on cognitive psychology, and why it was unfortunate for the history of cognitive psychology that the early cybernetic influence was forgotten.
Since we all have at some point learned the proper terms for the colours we recognize in our native tongue, it stands to reason that we were capable of seeing those colours prior to learning the word. Having to learn the term for a colour you are only capable of seeing when you already know the term seems a bit of a catch 22. Barring locally fixed visual defects It seems reasonable to generalize that logic to all colours humans are capable of distinguishing. That the term for a particular colour is lacking from a language most likely signifies that the speakers have no use for the term, rather than that they are incapable of seeing that colour.
I’ve read that some languages do not have separate words for green and blue, and their term for this color is usually translated as “grue”.
As for actually seeing different colors, this is a function of the different types of cone cells in the eyes. We can confidently say that some animals can see more colors than we can, because they have more types of cones. And we might note that color blind people have defects in one or more types of cone. Given the same cones, visual systems see the same colors. It’s not a matter of observing behavior, it’s an observable result of a genetic defect or certain diseases.
Transmit the light from a sodium lamp, a laser pointer or any light source in space, or more practically, through an evacuated box, towards a receiver (obviously not your eye in the case of a laser). Is the intervening light between the transmitter and receiver visible or will a camera register it?
Until it is interrupted by either it will be registered by neither.
Did you notice that when you close your eyes you can’t see anything? How do you explain that?
Yes, this is a serious question.
So why single out magenta as being produced in this way?
What is a diffraction grating if not a material object which disrupts any light it gets in the way of?
Goethe discusses this effect under the heading of “catoptrical colours” in his book “The Theory of Colours”. He takes a piece of polished silver to reflect sunlight and gets a dazzling light but no colour. He then scratches the surface and is rewarded with the appearance of colours. This was his way of producing a reflection grating.
Also in the book he discusses what he calls “nosological cases” affecting the colour perception of individuals. He writes about “a very remarkable state in which the vision of many persons is found to be:
About these people he noted that, “In general they appeared to have a very delicate perception of the gradations of light and dark”. A failing in one direction is compensated by an enhanced ability in another direction.
Obviously he did not know about the rod and cone receptors in the eye nor about genetics. But he was aiming at an understanding of colour itself and he wasn’t interested in speculating about underlying causes. He was interested on what could be revealed by careful observation of known processes. He left it for others to argue over waves and corpuscles.
How would we label Arthur Zajonc? Arthur Zajonc is a man, a Christian, a Buddhist, a physicist, an anthroposophist, a scientist, a scholar, an educator, a professor, an author, etc., etc.
Here is a link to some lectures he inspired. And from it a section of a video summarizing some of his work
Some of us have been discussing colour perception and on a few occasions I have referenced the book by Zajonc entitled, “Catching the Light, The Entwined History of Light and Mind”. In my opinion any criticism of him should come from a place of familiarity with his work over the years, so reading books such as this one would be a start.
In the book he researches the history of colour from ancient times and he goes into detail about how colour was perceived in those times. He asks why the colour blue is not talked about by the ancient Greeks. Among other things, they spoke of kyanos from where we get the word “cyan”, but in their sense of the word, it conveyed “darkness” and not “blue” as we know it. This is surely not because their eyes were any different from our eyes. It is similar with their term chloros which only later became associated with green. They used the sme eyes but their interpretation was not the same as ours is today. Inner vision is as much a part of colour perception as is eyesight.
So black is not a colour unless I am referring to the colour black. Yes I’m referring to impressions I get which I think of as “black”. For instance when I look at coal or charcoal or newsprint or a person’s hair colour.
Only if a person does not have the foresight or imagination to think how this experiment could be developed further. What if the lens in each eye was of a different colour? What if each lens was split between colours?
What assumptions are you making about your Betelgeusian? I take it you have provided him with eyes which are the same as earthly human eyes? Do you think he would be able to even see our sun in his night sky? There is a lot to consider in trying to imagine how the eyes of any creature living on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse would have developed. It’s a scenario worth thinking about, so thanks for that.
When I talk about white as a colour I am talking about the image I receive from paper or a mute swan’s feather or some such thing. I don’t regard sunlight as being white. In my opinion sunlight is the illuminant by which I see the world around me in the daytime.
CharlieM,
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to Charlie that his comment makes no sense to me. But I do wonder and would like to ask Charlie, try reading your comment again and see if it makes any sense to you.
I’m sure his comments make perfect sense to him. Unfortunately he’s not able to explain his views to anyone who hasn’t read Steiner, Barfield, or other anthroposophists. Every request at clarification is met with long quotations for us to read, and when we ask questions of him about what they’re saying, we’re given more long quotations to read.
Kantian Naturalist,
Well, you prompted me to check who said something on the lines of “if you can’t explain something to someone else, maybe you don’t understand it well enough.” As far as I can tell it was Richard Einstein or Albert Feynman.
Just in case 😉
Newton was trying to demonstrate a theory. The theory that light consisted of material bodies, however small they were. And if this was the case then they could be dealt with mathematically in the same way that he was able to formulate the mathematics of falling apples and moving heavenly bodies.
Goethe was not interested in speculating about the objective nature of light. Instead of observing the journey of light through a prism onto a reflecting surface, he placed his eye where Newton had placed a surface.
And from this he observed the four spectra and he noticed that boundary spectra appeared wherever light and dark areas met. Gradations of yellow appeared at one edge and gradations of blue at the other. He then went on to examine these colour effects in nature to see if light and darkness were interacting in a similar way. In this way he got to know the behaviour of light and darkness in the production of prismatic colours. He learned through observation and not through proposing theories. In this way he was not prejudging the outcome.
I know I frustrate you, but on the positive side, at least I amuse you if nothing else. 🙂
Goethe wasn’t proposing a colour theory in today’s understanding of the term. I prefer to think of it as Goethe’s colour observations.
Rather than believing everything that Goethe tells us we do better to follow his example and look at these phenomena for ourselves, Get a prism or two, try shining a light through a milky fluid, pay attention to atmospheric phenomena. Be receptive with open eyes and an open mind without speculating as to what might or might not be.
And why would I want to criticize this way of observation as understood by modern physics? I don’t see any contradiction between Goethean thinking and modern physics in this regard.
In my opinion comparing Goethean science with modern science is bit like comparing psychology with physiology. One is concerned with the being or character of nature and the other with the mechanics of nature.
It’s comparing phenomenology with science, which is to say that “Goethean science” is simply a contradiction in terms.
Goethe’s theory about how light and darkness interact to produce colour is as much a hypothesis as Newton’s corpuscular theory. Your insistence that these are merely “observations” just goes to show that you cannot detach yourself from Steiner’s endorsement of Goethe’s phenomenological approach.
This thread is winding down so it’s time to wrap up with some final remarks. My focus has been on your claim in the OP that somehow modern science has left us with a view of the universe that is lacking in meaning. I have repeatedly asked you to substantiate that claim but you seem to have major trouble clarifying yourself. This is where we have been now for weeks: You find current scientific explanations lacking in meaning but cannot explain that beyond “I like the Goethean account better”. All that’s left for me is to advise you to stop trying to rationalize your dislike of modern scientific narratives. You are welcome to build narratives that suit your tastes better, but you need to accept that they are not science.
It is interesting to trace the history of the understanding of visual perception in Western thinking. From Empedocles’ idea of light emanating from the eye, through Euclid’s optics which considered these light rays in geometrical terms, and then to the Age of Enlightenment in which light became a purely objective phenomenon which impinged on the eye of the subject. Newton took the geometry of Euclid, turned it through 180 degrees, and set up experiments which stopped short of the light reaching the eye.
This was too much for a spirit like Goethe to bear, and he made his feelings clear. His criticisms of Newton may have gone over the top, but he did have a point. For light to have any meaning there has to be a source, a radiation and a receiving consciousness. Goethe studied what he called, “the deeds and sufferings of light”.
In my opinion instead of looking for a dialectic between Newton and Goethe, we should look at the dialectic between Fichte and Goethe. Fichte was a philosophical thinker and Goethe was a studious observer of nature, but from these opposite positions both arrived at the same understanding of unity. It is worth noting that Fichte attained the philosophy professorship at Jena.
A. N. Whitehead protested against the bifurcation of nature into that which is apprehended and that which causes this apprehension. Which, if either, can be said to have the greater reality, the green grass; or the photons, protons, neutron and electrons that many consider to be fundamental?
Thankyou for your thought provoking comments.
We can play with the definition of physical in order to include light but where does that get us? I would like to put it differently. Light is supersensible and only becomes perceptible when it interacts through refraction or reflection with solid, liquid or gaseous matter.
Of course I am. And I am looking for opposing counter arguments.
Arthur Zajonc loves science, that is why he became a scientist.
The quote I gave was not a criticism of scientists but of those who hold to a nineteenth-century materialistic view.
Because the rainbow it has captured is the result of a unique process of light being refracted and reflected. Anybody who is standing beside the camera and looking at the rainbow will be experiencing their own perspective of the images on their retinas. If you are of the opinion that photons from the raindrops are entering your eyes, will it be the same photons that are being transmitted through the camera lens?
That’s why my guy is Hegel, because of how he saw the need to integrate Fichte and Schelling (who is, arguably, a Goethean philosopher).
But Hegel’s emphasis on dialectics as the unity of opposites is by no means antithetical to a naturalistic metaphysics. Dialectical thinking was transposed in naturalism at least twice in the history of Western philosophy — first in the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, and again in the biological pragmatism of John Dewey.
I think Whitehead was right to urge that the question “which is more real, the world of physics or the world of experience?” is a bad question to ask. The way to wisdom lies in following Aristotle’s remark that “what is first” is said in two ways: “what is first in relation to us” and “what is first in itself.” We must begin inquiry with what is “first in relation to us” — the world as we experience it — and pursue the dialectic of science which leads us to the world as described by physics, chemistry, and other sciences.
But the journey is not complete until we can understand in scientific terms why it is that we experience the world as we do as well as understand how science emerges (and continues to emerge) from the insights and puzzles of experience.
In other words, rather than answer the bad question, “which has priority, the world of physics or the world of experience?” we should try to answer the good question, “how is the world of experience itself understood in terms of the world of science and how is the world of science based on the world of experience?”
Does “perceptible when it interacts through refraction or reflection with solid, liquid or gaseous matter” mean “prior to entering the eye” or does it include what happens when it enters the eye?
If the former, then it would follow that we cannot see emitted light in a vacuum.
If the latter, then all you’re saying is “we cannot see what we cannot see”.
So the claim is either empirically false or trivially true.
I fail to see why this would be unique for a rainbow. The very same thing is true for everything we see and/or photograph. If you and I see a statue of Goethe (by receiving reflected photons in our eyes), we will not both see the same photons. Does that mean that there is no such thing that constitutes an objective statue of Goethe?
faded_Glory,
I was going to chime in but you don’t need my 2 cents. 😉
I can see plenty with my eyes shut. Go to “paint” or a similar app and draw an orange rectangle. Stare at it for a minute and close your eyes. What do you see?
As Goethe states in “The Theory of Colours”, “Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.”
I can also bring up mental pictures with my eyes shut. So it’s not true that I “can’t see anything”.
I know that quite often I could improve on how I try to make myself understood. But I can take comfort in the fact that Goethe, who was far more informed and accomplished than I will ever be, had a similar problem:
He had studied colour intensely for decades.
And didn’t Richard Feynman say words to the effect that nobody understands quantum mechanics well enough to explain it.
There are a great deal of things that I don’t understand well enough to explain them. I’m content in possibly raising questions about deep subjects in the minds of people here, rather than providing answers which others can only attempt to answer for themselves and in their own way.
Even the words of a fool can stimulate thinking in enquiring minds. 🙂
CharlieM,
My simple point, before faded_Glory made it for me, is that you mix up the physics, what light is and does, with the neuroscience, how photons of various wavelengths interacting with rod and cone cells result in our brains reconstructing visual perception from those interactions.
Goethe’s methods went beyond phenomenology. From Physics Today (Not actually today but a couple of decades ago, but who’s counting? 🙂 )
Would you criticize Michael Faraday for not having done scienctific work?
I see the word “EQUIVOCATION” blazing red in my field of vision. Can you see it too?
Conveniently, you forgot to list the inky darkness of the black starry sky. Heh.
Of course not! What a weird assumption to make. He’d have to be at least a dichromat capable of detecting what we call blue, but that’s all. Could have insect eye, squid-eye, etc, etc,
Huh? Why does that matter? He could travel…
Given your awesome anthropocentrism, color me unsurprised by your geocentrism.
Quaint that you would try to analogize from your ability to explain optics and color perception to Feynman’s ability to explain QM, but no: you have the quote wrong. As Alan riffed on earlier, that’s an Einstein quote, and Einstein was probably riffing on Rutherford’s infamous crack that “it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.”
The Feynman line about QM has nothing to do with explaining QM, and is absolutely hilarious, but the context is that he is pointing out that relativity is not as difficult as it’s cracked up to be:
So let’s not mangle that.
Have you made many observations under the conditions that Goethe describes in his book, “The Theory of Colours”? Whether we are looking through a glass of milky water, or at the blue mountains in the distance, or the halo round the moon, or the blue of the sky, or coloured shadows, or a red sunset; or light or dark rays, two factors are required in observing the colours produced. These two factors are light and darkness. The polarity between the light and dark spectrums are hardly discussed. This polarity is not a theory, it’s a reality which can be observed.
Modern science has allowed us to drive the bus so to speak. And where would we be without this practical ability? Goethean science is a method which allows us to gain an understanding of the bus in the context of how it fits in and develops in relation to human history. These ways of gaining knowledge compliment one another.
I think there could be plenty of life left in this thread with lots of questions still to be asked and points debated.
What this place needs is there to be a more active production of threads from the members.
Agreed. I’ve been reading and writing a lot about teleology in biology, and I might start a new thread on it if there’s interest from other people. But it would have to wait until the semester is over.
The dynamics of Hegel’s dialectic was partially inspired by Goethe. Goethe the scientist studied the metamorphosis of nature and Hegel the philosopher studied the metamorphosis of the idea. Goethe was an observer while Hegel was a thinker.
Hegel: “…the supposed hidden essence behind appearance, was in fact not hidden at all but was actually itself working its own way out in history as it shape-shifted itself in time.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, xxvii)
As Goethe’s archetypal plant is revealed through his exact observation so Hegel’s absolute idea is revealed through conceptual thinking.
The dialectic can be seen in plant growth. In the latter stages the calyx is negated as it expands in the petal, which in turn contracts in the reproductive parts, with a final expansion as the fruit. The early forms give up their existence in the progression through expansion and contraction. Plant life is a development of the becoming of these opposites. This is an example of natural dialectics.
Neither Goethe nor Hegel considered the significance of the individual. For Goethe the individual is at the mercy of nature and for Hegel the individual is subservient to the community.
And of course Marxism is a prime example of Hegelian thought turned upside down. Hegel’s geist becomes the materialism of Marx and Engels.
In my opinion you are right that it is a bad question, but the way that some might answer it can be telling. To begin with why should we look at these things in terms of cause and effect? Surely epistemology begins with thinking. Not a brain that thinks, nor a thinking mind, but just “thinking”.
When I talk about perception I am talking about interaction with the senses, in this case the eye. But the eye does not sense light, it senses images. When we look at the light shining through a box in the picture I posted here, what do we see? We see the light beam outside the box caused by the light being disturbed by the smoke. But within the box we see a black square as the light has passed through it undisturbed. This may seem trivial to you but it tells me something fundamental about light and the nature of seeing.
We need not speculate about what lies behind light and darkness to understand that our vision relies on the polar nature of these two entities. Together they produce the phenomena and both have an equal share in our ability to see images.
The lack of definition within the box tells us that we are unable to form images of or by pure light, nor are we able to form images within total darkness.
Exactly. The perceived world is subjective. Through concepts we reach objectivity.
Rudolf Steiner: “To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.”
The plants use the power of sunlight as a means of growth. And so they exhaust their ability to make further use of this power. But because they build up living substance in this way it becomes available for animal life to use. The light of the sun freed from the necessity of producing growth can then be used to light up consciousness, and ultimately a consciousness of self. If we can be said to stand on the shoulders of giants, the plants are those giants that have borne us aloft.
That’s absurd.
That might be true of Goethe but it surely is not true of Hegel. Hegel’s entire philosophy is oriented by the question of how to theorize the interdependence of individual and community (“The I that is a We and the We that is an I”, as he puts it in Phenomenology of Spirit).
Hegel is quite explicitly responding to other critics of Enlightenment individualism, esp Rousseau. Hegel thinks that Rousseau went too far, threw away the baby (individuality) with the bathwater (individualism). He thinks that we need to understand both individuality (“subjective spirit”) and society (“objective spirit”) as interdependent.
One person’s “turned upside down” is another person’s “right side up,” I suppose. What was in Hegel the activity of Spirit (Geist) becomes in Marx and Engels the activity of human being living in society.
Marx and Engels completely agree with Hegel that we need a social organization based on the interdependence of individuals and society, with neither emphasized at the expense of the other. Hegel, Marx, and Engels all agree that the error of antiquity was to make the community everything and the individual nothing, and that the error of modernity was to make the individual everything and the community nothing.
Marx’s complaint against Hegel is that Hegel has failed to be genuinely dialectical at precisely the point where he most needed to be: in his political philosophy. (Put otherwise, Marx thinks that Hegel should have been as dialectical in his practical philosophy as he was in his theoretical philosophy.)
The failure of dialectics in Hegel’s political philosophy (Marx argues) is that Hegel resolves the tension between the individual and society in an undialectical way: by making the individual everything in one dimension of society — the economy — and making the community everything in another dimension of society — the state. But this simply dichotomizes the relation between them.
In contrast, Marx thinks that recognizing the interdependence of individuals and community will require a new form of social organization in which both the market (with its one-sided emphasis on the individual) and the state (with its one-sided emphasis on the community) have been transcended.
Why assume that epistemology must begin with anything? For one thing, a great deal depends on what one means by “begin with”!
In some disciplines, such as logic and elementary mathematics, it is helpful to reconstruct our knowledge in terms of a few primitives and rules operating on those primitives. The axiomatization of geometry (by Euclid), set theory (by Zermelo) and arithmetic (by Peano) certainly were important advances in our understanding of the formal languages.
Hence, given some successful axiomatization, it is plausible to think that we are “beginning with” defined primitives and permissible operations on those primitives.
But, of course, the axiomatization comes very late in the game. Egyptian land-measurement (geo-metry) was a few thousand years old by the time Euclid wrote down in one book all the proofs known to ancient Greek mathematicians, and Peano’s axiomatization of arithmetic was one of the huge successes of 19th century mathematics. So in one sense, understanding what it is that we are really beginning with is something that comes about after we understand what we have been doing all along.
In any event, it seems hugely questionable to think that epistemology, which is very obviously not a formal language (since it necessarily contains terms whose senses are not constituted by syntactic operations and whose referents involve actual occurrences, and not merely necessity and possibility), could be axiomatized in the way that geometry, set theory, and arithmetic have been.
On the other hand, one might “begin” epistemology simply by starting to ask epistemological questions, and those can arise at at any time, whenever one becomes aware of the possibility of asking for a reason for an assertion. Children are competent at this by the time they are four or five, much to the exasperation of their parents (unless their parents are philosophers).
I am talking about how we experience colour vision whilst trying to ignore metaphysics as much as possible.
There is no direct correlation between our experience of a colour and any particular wavelength that may be associated with that colour. How true is it to say that the wavelength of yellow is 570-590 nm? Our experience of yellow need not depend on light of this wavelength.
I do know that looking through a milky liquid with a dark background the liquid appears blue but the same liquid looked at against a light background it appears yellow. This is one instance of a general phenomenon.
Colour is much more dynamic than being constrained by the rule one colour one narrow range of wavelengths as is taught in most textbooks.
Don’t you see a role for after images and coloured shadows in the study of vision?
Is the visual cortex not involved in the apprehension of these phenomena as much as in apprehending coloured objects?
Yes but you are unable to explain your own experience to yourself. It’s painful to watch. None of us can do this.
You *see* a role for after images and coloured shadows after looking at a orange rectangle? How very odd. Maybe you should visit an ophthalmologist for that.
What fun we have when we ignore all context dependence of the word “see”, don’t you agree? You knew very well what I meant when I told you that you can’t see anything with your eyes closed. But instead of seizing the opportunity to clarify your position, you preferred to muddy the waters. This makes it impossible to have an intelligible conversation.