("I")

The Ego

and

Thinking:

Doors to Higher Cognition in

Steiner, Novalis and Fichte:

These themes are found in “Fichte Studies”, by Novalis (Edited by Jane Kneller. Cambridge University Press.2003.) The studies are Novalis's detailed notes about Fichte's philosophy and this page contains my jottings and cross references, essentially notes about Novalis's notes. I also write an occasional comment on the notes.

A=A

Not simply the mathematical tautology of reflexivity, Fichte’s formulation is a positing of A through differentiation and analysis. “=” refers to the universal content of A. The second A is not identical, the original A  abandons the identical to present or represent itself.

( May be better understood as A=A’ where A’ is the determined representation of A. Or A=s(A) where s(A) is the “sign” of A. The first A is the essential or pure being of a thing, while the second A is the information that is presented to our consciousness. The first A is not necessarily Kant's "thing-in-itself" because the first A may be knowable if its representation and manner of representation is unmediated. The representation may be an essential attribute of the thing itself. Our thinking about the first A may be an essential structural component of the first A. So A truly equals A or at least an essential part of A. But this getting ahead.--ed)

A=A

The first A is an “isomorphic determining thing” that determines a “sign” for A. A represents or presents itself by “what it is not”-by its “not-being”.

(If the second A is the "not-being" of the first A, then how can they be equal? More importantly, what process takes place in a pure"isomorphic" unity that allows that unity to be reflexive and creative of its sign. How may a Unity differentiate? --ed)

Genius-The thing may determine its “sign” without any mediation. Here the sign is an immediate result without the causality of my intention.

Taste-But the sign may result from a mediating representation of my cause. This is taste.(?-ed)

“I”(ego)=”sign” for “I”—

Is the determined sign unmediated?

“I AM the I AM "

^"And God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And He said, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel , "I AM has sent me to you."'-Exodus 3:14

(It is interesting that the God of the Old Testament determines his “sign” for himself to Moses and the Hebrew people and that sign is the “I”. God is the ego but felt outside of human consciousness.-ed)

What is the “I”?

• Absolute universal faculty that encompasses all things.
• It is content and recognizes all content.
• Ground of all determining and of all form.
• Ground of its own determination and its own form.

The “sign” (or determination) for the I is determined by the “I” freely because the “I” presupposes no other mediating cause or no other “I” in the determination “I”=”I”. What we realize as our “I” is 100% determined from the primordial “I” so all universal content is cognized only within the self.

(This is all Fichte, Novalis is sceptical.)

....'Hearken once more
I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant time behoves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse, and sound, and light was none;
And God said, "Throb!" and there was motion
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,
But forever doth escape,
Like wave or flame, into new forms
Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms.
I, that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine,
Pouring of his power the wine
To every age, to every race;.
Unto every race and age
He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each, and unto all,
Maker and original.
The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are and think.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the next a special nature;
The third adds heat's indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light which eats the dark;
Into the fifth himself he flings,
And conscious Law is King of kings.
As the bee through the garden ranges,
From world to world the godhead changes;
As the sheep go feeding in the waste,
From form to form He maketh haste;
This vault which glows immense with light
Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What reeks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity?
Alike to him the better, the worse,--
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky.
Than all it holds more deep, more high.'

(I=God=He=Nature=I)=Mount Monadnok

From Emerson's" Monadnok"(note the shifting point of view and the superpositioning of the human onto a map of nature and how the God-I creates the great mountain as "sign". The mountain awaits "the poet", the bearer of the Future Word/Logos, to quicken its future evolution. Enlivened human thinking solves the riddle of A=A. Thought is the solvent that unites pure being with its determinations:

 

Monadnoc by Ralph Waldo Emerson (excerpt)

(from Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations.The Library of America.1994. pg49. )

'Every morn I lift my head,
See New England underspread,
South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,
From Katskill east to the sea-bound.
Anchored fast for many an age I await the bard and sage,
Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
Shall string Monadnoc like a bead
Comes that cheerful troubadour,
This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,
It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There's fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil.
There's a berry blue and gold,--
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold
Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
Asia's rancor, Athens' art,
Slowsure Britain's secular might,
And the German's inward sight.
I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan's immortal meat,
Bread to eat, and juice to drain;
So the coinage of his brain
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.¹
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk,
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath,--
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow:
Open the daunting map beneath,--
All his county, sea and land,
Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day's ride is a furlong space,
His city-tops a glimmering haze.
I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;
"See there the grim gray rounding
Of the bullet of the earth
Whereon ye sail,
Tumbling steep
In the uncontinented deep."
He looks on that, and he turns pale.
'T is even so, this treacherous kite,
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on forever;
And he, poor parasite,
Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,--
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not,--
Risk or ruin he must share.
I scowl on him with my cloud,
With my north wind chill his blood;
I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.
Then, at last, I let him down
Once more into his dapper town,
To chatter, frightened, to his clan
And forget me if he can.'

As in the old poetic fame
The gods are blind and lame,
And the simular despite
Betrays the more abounding might,
So call not waste that barren cone
Above the floral zone,
Where forests starve:
It is pure use;--
What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind
Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days,
Thou grand affirmer of the present tense,
And type of permanence!
Firm ensign of the fatal Being,
Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief,
That will not bide the seeing!

Hither we bring
Our insect miseries to thy rocks;
And the whole flight, with folded wing,
Vanish, and end their murmuring,--
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which who can tell what mason laid?
Spoils of a front none need restore,
Replacing frieze and architrave;--
Where flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;
Still is the haughty pile erect
Of the old building Intellect.

Complement of human kind,
Holding us at vantage still,
Our sumptuous indigence,
O barren mound, thy plenties fill!
We fool and prate;
Thou art silent and sedate.
To myriad kinds and times one sense
The constant mountain doth dispense;
Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
Thou seest, O watchman tall,
Our towns and races grow and fall,
And imagest the stable good
For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind,
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.
Thou, in our astronomy
An opaker star,
Seen haply from afar,
Above the horizon's hoop,
A moment, by the railway troop,
As o'er some bolder height they speed,--
By circumspect ambition,
By errant gain,
By feasters and the frivolous,--
Recallest us,
And makest sane.
Mute orator! well skilled to plead,
And send conviction without phrase,
Thou dost succor and remede
The shortness of our days,
And promise, on thy Founder's truth,
Long morrow to this mortal youth.” (End of Emerson’s “Monadnok”)

Matthew 21 in the New Testament similarly points to a future stage of human evolution:

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”

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(See Emerson’s Essay “The Poet”. RWE treats the poet as an aspect of the divine logos which helps humans evolve to a state where they internalize the God-“I” and “move mountains”.

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The internalization of the Divine ego disrupts the processes of the spiritual-archetypal world. Christ (the internalized "I" of the human's future evolution) destroys the group soul spiritual connections that supported meditation and clairvoyance which separated humans from the Earth. The "fig tree" was an archetypal form perceivable by the higher cognitive powers of initiates. Christ will also transform our present sense of ego consciousness. The mountain is a spiritual form, the seat of the higher self to where the meditator ascends. It will unite with the "sea" of the life forces as the full "I" comes into being with the force of the world-creating logos.

Fichte and Novalis:

“What I don’t know, but feel, I believe”

The “I” feels itself as content.

The “I” is created by two acts(?):

1)     The “pure I” is created by the act of becoming aware. This must occur outside of consciousness and is an unmediated determination. Free?

2)     The “empirical I” is the act of positing content outside of our “I”.(?) Mediated.

Cognition (Knowledge) v. Feeling

(“Fichte Studies”, by Novalis (Edited by Jane Kneller. Cambridge University Press.2003.pg5)

Pure being determines its sign or systems of signs and within those signs, the "determined" part of pure being, Knowledge refers back to the pure being. Feeling refers to the experience of the "signs" or the determined part of being.

Consciousness=sphere of knowledge and an image of being within being.

Knowledge-consciousness has a direct contact with Pure Being

Feeling-consciousness contacts pure being only through mediation.

Signs-images or representations-Fichte treats as "non-being" within "being" which allows Being to "be there for itself" or perhaps creates self-awareness within pure-being. Pure being is a "chaos" until something is posited in reference to it. The reference is differentiation of the original being. The movement from unity to multiplicity is the creation of Ficthe's "non-being" .

Life is an intermediate sphere between being and not-being. Life oscillates between being and not-being. The awareness of the "I" cannot include the act of its own creation or determination because the "I" was not yet existant. The original I becomes self aware by multiplying itself-creates copies or mirrors of itself. Basis of alienation. Can the consciousness of the determined "I" penetrate back into its own creation from pure being? How can non-being exist? Why are images and signs non-being?

Novalis wonders if the "I" is a determination of pure being. Pure being undergoes a process of differentiation somewhat like a fertilized egg. The pure being must "atomize" itself in order to perceive itself . There must be a reflection of pure being to create consciousness. ( “Fichte Studies” page 6.) But Fichte considers the pure being as a pure manifestation of the "I". But if pure being is an "I" or primordial ego then how can it be a complete unity and self-aware? Novalis challenges Fichte's view that pure being is an "I" and the source of all determinations. He also wonders about the necessity of "not-being" which must be part of the original Gedhead if reflection and differentiation are to occur."I" needs an antithesis.

“Fichte Studies”, by Novalis (Edited by Jane Kneller. Cambridge University Press.2003.pg7.

Now Novalis begins to formulate a theory of signs to help him understand the puzzles of Fichte's philosophy. On page 8 of "Fichte Studies" Novalis notes that the Sign (S) and Signified (SD) come from different spheres and are free effects. S and SD are brought together by a signifying agent. If the signifying agent is free in its choice of a S, then S &SD are only related to the signifying agent who brings them together and not neccessarily another Signifying Agent.

Novalis then defines Space as the outer condition of sensible intuition and Time as the corresponding inner condition. Then thought can go from SA1 to SA2 via space. So for communication SA1 must have knowledge of the inner being of SA2 and communicate a Sign that has a necessary relationship to the Signified in the being of SA2.

In Fichte, the Signified is the original unity so one wonders how a determination (Sign) can come from "a different sphere"? Furthermore the Sign is applied by a Signifying Agent presumably from a third sphere. No wonder why God is a Trinity! God is always the Signified and perhaps Christ, the Logos, is the master Signifying agent which applies the mirror Signs(Holy Spirit-Sophia). All this becomes extemely differentiated in a neo-Platonic sense.

Sophia is "The Being of Signs"

The Signified, the Unity, becomes the many Signs or determinations. Unalloyed pure being differentiates and becomes the beautiful, manifold, complex system of signs. This mirroring manifold is the Sophia. The following description of Sophia from the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz continues the medieval tradition of feminine portrayal:

Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz

excerpt-the appearance of the Goddess

"But in as much as this, and the like from the Devil (who had done me many a spight) was no new thing to me, I took courage, and persisted in my meditation, till some body after an unusual manner, touched me on the back; whereupon I was so hugely terrified, that I durst hardly look about me; yet I shewed myself as cheerful as (in the like occurrence.) humane frailty would permit; now the same thing still twitching me several times. by the coat, I looked back, and behold it was a fair and glorious lady, whose garments were all skye-colour, and curiously (like Heaven) bespangled with golden stars, in her right hand she bare a trumpet of beaten gold, whereon a Name was ingraven which I could well read in but am as yet forbidden to reveal it. In her left hand she had a great bundle of letters of all languages, which she (as I afterwards understood) was to carry into all countries. She had also large and beautiful wings, full of eyes throughout, wherewith she could mount aloft, and flye swifter than any eagle. I might perhaps been able to take further notice of her, but because she stayed so small time with me, and terror and amazement still possessed me, I was fain to be content. For as soon as I turned about, she turned her letters over and over, and at length drew out a small one, with which great reverence she laid down upon the table, and without giving one word, departed from me. But in her mounting upward, she gave so mighty a blast on her gallant trumpet, that the whole hill echoed thereof, and for a full quarter of an hour after, I could hardly hear my own words."

Note how the lady is a personification of our sensory relationship to the Cosmos. She also is a bearer of signs and languages. She appears with the sound of thunders. The Chymical Wedding's description of Sophia is intimately related to the appearance of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Paintings of the Pentecost usually depict Mary in the center of the disciples:

El Greco's Pentecost Mary

 

But is the sign an illusion, a veil that covers the reality of the thing-in-itself, or is it an integral part of pure being? Can pure being be reconciled with its system of signs?

Where is Thinking?

Obsession with the origins of things, origins of consciousness, along with the desire to pin down "pure being" and "determined being" requires minds or beings such as Fichte to to employ a rather important activity which we call thinking. But it seems that to Fichte, thinking is totally transparent. He examines and studies the objects of thinking--things and other beings. He thinks about himself as an "I", a subject that comes into relationship to the objects. But the very thing that defines the objects and communicates to to the subject and defines the subject, the very thing that connects all experience and is the universal menstruum in which we live-that very thing, thinking, always seems to remain unexamined and transparent.

In his book "Vocation of Man" Fichte discusses the "laws of Nature":

"Nature proceeds throughout the whole infinite series of her possible determinations without outward incentive; and the succession of these changes is not arbitrary, but follows strict and unalterable laws. Whatever exists in Nature necessarily exists as it does exist, and it is absolutely impossible that it should be otherwise. I enter [329] within an unbroken chain of phenomena, in which every link is determined by that which has preceded it, and in its turn determines the next; so that, were I able to trace backward the causes through which alone any given moment could have come into actual existence, and to follow out the consequences which must necessarily flow from it, I should then be able, at that moment, and by means of thought alone, to discover all possible conditions of the universe, both past and future - past, by interpreting the given moment; future, by forecasting its results. Every part contains the whole, for only through the whole is each part what it is, but through the whole it is necessarily what it is."

Here Fichte presents the modern scientific view where an observer, an "I", enters into the chain of phenomena and uses thinking to observe and learn the laws of nature. The "I" can then recreate these laws internally through thinking and "forcast" results from a given set of circumstances.

But this observing "I" remains separate from Nature. Fichte misses the fact that thinking is also responsible for:

1. The objects themselves: thinking applies concepts to the unordered chaos of sense impressions to give form to the objects.
2. Causation: chaotic sense impressions (what Rudolf Steiner calls "pure experience" ) can never say what event will follow another in time. Only thinking can weave these links into the experience.
3. Laws of Nature: Thought links concept to perception to form objects and links events into time sequences to form causes. Thought gives the feeling of necessity to the sequence of events. The Laws of Nature are the laws of weaving Thought.

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1Rudolf Steiner, in his book Cosmic Memory, extrapolates the future being of man from carefully examined current conditions and concludes that humans will have the power to create images as detailed and real as present day objects and that humans will later become the creators of the essence of the objects themselves: