Meditation, phenomenology and obfuscation

There is an important missing link in the history of philosophy which has significant consequences for the history of phenomenology. This is the work of the young Rudolf Steiner. It is not fair to judge this work by his later abhorrent and manifestly false views as an occultist and cult leader any more than it would be fair to judge Heidegger's Sein und Zeit by his later similar political and cultural-anthropological views. The most important work of the young Steiner (who attended lectures by Brentano) is a work which usually goes under the title of Philosophy of Freedom (1894) but was published and revised numerous times under different titles.  Along with this work there is also much value in Steiner's earlier work on Goethe's scientific method and worldview. 

There can be no doubt that The Philosophy of Freedom, like Sein und Zeit, is a very important work and one of the masterpieces of phenomenological philosophy. In this work (and in portions of his later books such as the one on "Initiation") we find something similar to an exposition of the approach and methodology involving the transcendent self-transparency and self-illumination of thought and consciousness which we have repeatedly attempted to expound, the correct combination of "epokhê" and "satipatthâna".  

Equally important is Steiner's Goethean method of variation and "imagination". This seems to us to be the original and correct form of what later was called the method of "eidetic variation" (and the affinity for Ruskin's approach in Modern Painters seems to have gone unnoticed).  But the consequences are enormous. The combination between the philosophical-spiritual insight offered by Steiner's exposition of the Goethean method on one hand and on the other the development of modern geometric and topological theory of differential equations and dynamical systems would have been a "marriage made in heaven", two complementary aspects of the same essence,  whose union would have furnished the key to a powerful new science.

But the harmful influence of 20th-century materialist cults and their pseudoscientific dogmas (Freudian psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology) hindered the emergence of such a science. This is the tragedy of René Thom whose work flawed by Freudian and materialist-evolutionary dogma did indeed point to such a qualitative topological science with a method based on developing higher dimensional dynamic and geometric intuition. The fact that Thom never mentioned Theodor Schwenk's Sensitive Chaos: The creation of flowing forms in water and air (preface by Jacques Cousteau) which predates Structural Stability and Morphogenesis can only be seen as an example of intellectual dishonesty. As far as I know, Thom never referred to the wonderful book by A.T. Winfree, The Geometry of Biological Time (1980) which shows how advanced topological concepts in applied science can be presented in an accessible, rigorous and clear way (cf. the explanation of phase singularities on p.26).

A major fault of René Thom was also ironically to be found on the mathematical plane. Thom, like V.I. Arnold, engaged in obfuscation and sloppy presentation of mathematical ideas.

An expert in a field has all the right to develop a conceptual shorthand for their own use or that of fellow experts. In particular, a shorthand for writing down ideas to be developed and unfolded in lectures. Such texts can also employ beautiful drawings and diagrams which may impress even the non-expert. However all this has nothing to do with writing a book whose aims is to open the gates of a knowledge to those who, while not having such a knowledge, seek earnestly for it. A book that is a genuine introduction (i.e. initiation) in the full sense of the word, and which does not only "bring in" the neophyte but presents the beauty, clarity and order of the temple in all its details and adornments.  This is the kind of book, the kind of spirit, style and approach, which every student deserves, and certainly the kind of spirit. style and approach which should be employed when presenting important philosophical, scientific and mathematical ideas to the world. To present the young student with any other kind of book can only be considered a pernicious and immoral act of deliberate obfuscation and perversion. On another occasion we hope to develop the topic of cryptography, deliberate obfuscation and "secrets of the trade". Let it just be said that this has traditionally been a not infrequent vice of academia, the deliberately ponderous, opaque, pedantic jargon which not only hinders understanding of comparatively simple concepts and arguments but also masks the author's debt (or even plagiarism) to their contemporaries or predecessors. The aim is also to appear outwardly as outstandingly intelligent, original and sophisticated and to close the doors of science to anyone outside a select few.

Besides in phenomenological philosophy and Goethean science, a tragedy occurred regarding "meditation".  There is no such thing as "meditation" in the popular sense, there is no secret powerful technique of self-help where one sits down, closes their eyes, breathes in and out, focuses their mind or attempts to detach themselves from troubling thoughts, and thus finds a cure for mental anguish or a way to gain paranormal faculties or blissful states. This goes in particular for everything connected to the term "mindfulness".  And there is evidently no easy quick philosophical-phenomenological method for the self-observation and self-transparency of consciousness.

This is not what "bhavana" or "katharsis" as in neoplatonism and the ancient mysteries was about. Rather bhavana can be likened to the building of a beautiful high-towered palace or temple, including the preparation and purification of all the materials needed as well as the ground and foundations. The "mindfulness" at work here cannot be separated from action. The popular concept of "meditation" actually only corresponds to the final royal stage in which one enters the newly built palace and climbs up many flights of stairs to survey the beauty of all the sparkling rooms and luminous windows until reaching the most wonderful of all views at the top. Before that it is the long toil and active work of the artisan and soldier - which can be be interwoven with periods of peaceful surveillance and contemplation of yet unfinished work. We do not meditate as some kind of easy, all-sufficient, way to overcome our desires, rather we first diligently and actively uproot desire-images-complexes in order to attain the peace and illumination of "meditation".  Using a software engineering metaphor, we must start with cultivation at the abstract object-oriented level before proceeding to reverse engineering at the assembly level. Thus taught both the Pali suttas and Plotinus.

Short philosophical considerations on AI

Hegel and Heidegger were thinkers about their own time, thinkers about historical events and happenings. Few have the insight and courage to fathom the full depth of the meaning of an historical event, the coming to be (coming of age?) of an historical process. Tragically,  it is only some time after the event (the time of monsters?) has hit humanity with full force that Hegel's famous owl can spread her wings. Is it not true that some of what the prophetic author of Sein und Zeit wrote about technology only makes full sense at the present?

This seems to us particularly true of the emergence of the age of the Internet and the age of generative AI which is its logical development.

And yet nothing could be further from our own philosophizing than any form of historicism or historical philosophy. As such both Hegel and Heidegger, for all their interest and insight, must be considered as having crafted systems based on an incorrigible error. 

Social progress is not a law of nature but a legitimate hope - even if at present it seems a distant one - and it is our moral duty to work towards it in the midst of uncertain outcomes.

The advent of the internet was the advent of connection between people. This connection carried rhetorically moral undertones and echoed enlightenment ideals about the desirability of sharing and making knowledge available.  In the present age of the generative AI based Internet powered and controlled by corporations and governments aligned to anti-enlightenment ideals, it may be that it is morally called upon us to practice instead the process of disconnection and the purification and preservation of knowledge(not obviously in the sense of the 'great simplification' of the Canticle of Leibowitz).   

The most basic step is ensuring locality of core information. That is, to be in possession of machines onto which have been downloaded significant portions of Internet Encyclopedias (despite their serious shortcomings) as well as some decently performing LLM. To this we add, it needs not be said, massive of digital preservation of human cultural artifacts, notably libraries.

One can use Kiwix and download for offline viewing the most recent English Wikipedia (50GB text-only 150GB with pictures).  With a AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor with 16GB RAM and 2GB Radeon Graphics one can use Ollama and download and use some decently performing LLMs (gemma4 comes in E2B, E4B, 31B and 26B A4B). 

Most living beings alternative between states of being awake and of sleep. Can would we design a dynamic LLM which similarly alternates between states of user interaction and re-training based on this interaction? The most important being the correction and/or updating of knowledge or perhaps the removal of harmful and biased content and "thought patterns". If LLMs can improve then it is not only  a question of having the number of parameters equal to the number of neurons of the human brain.

Computers can enhance and aid human cognition as well as hinder and destroy it (there is a growing body of evidence concerning the disastrous effect of excessive or inappropriate generative AI use for individual mental health and cognitive development, not to mention for society as a whole). 

But the harms of generative AI have little to do with lesser-known extremely powerful and beneficial aspects of the computer for human cognition. We cannot go into this in detail here. Let it just be said that it involves using adequate software for the rigorous formalization of human scientific theories and concepts (specially logic and mathematics and formal methods in the sciences) and the vital feedback-loop between human thought and the software interface (IDE) which results in the simultaneous enhancement of human understanding and production and the quality of the software-based formalization and implementation. 

The software in question includes not only Rocq (formerly Coq), Agda and functional programming language but such languages as Python, Javascript and C/C++. Python is a multi-paradigm and highly versatile language with an elegant syntax. Python comes close to achieving the ideal of a universal language in the Leibnizian sense and is a wonderful tool for formalization, implementation,  verification and exploration in a variety of areas in mathematical logic and finite mathematics. 

We note also the importance of minimalism (using as few dependencies as possible) and building things from the ground up - this goes for scientific and philosophical projects, not of course for commercial and industrial ones.  We will address in the future the question of the possible role of machine learning in this process.

Philosophical updates

Heidegger's Being and Time must be considered a brilliant and profound work and if not a vast improvement over Husserl then at least a realization of what in Husserl was just reified meta-talk and illusive promise. Being and Time actually shows in a clear, concrete and beautiful way how phenomenology is possible and indeed phenomenology itself is rectified in several essential ways (by recovering the indisputable central importance of being and "existence") and set on solid and clear foundations which in fact are deeply rooted in Hellenic thought.

Being and Time also offers a section which might be described as the proto-topology of the Dasein's Umwelt which certainly echoes some of our previous work.

This work retains great value even if we consider the Dasein considered to be deluded and unenlightened Dasein (the essentially worldly Dasein). Also we can argue that Heidegger misread Hegel and that the Hegel-Heidegger connection might be a rich field of investigation.

Heidegger's approach to language, logic, thought and intellect is deep and illuminating and suggests (besides offering overwhelmingly powerful tools for the strangely non-embarked upon task of  destroying analytic philosophy once and for all)  some radical developments for our paper on Analyticity, Computability and the A Priori. What does it mean for us to learn something, to learn to do a thing, for instance, to learn to add, to learn to calculate, to learn the rules of game vs. to learn how to play the game? This is the principal question of our paper and Heidegger's method (combined perhaps with the work of Piaget) seems well worth pursuing. When we learn how to do something then when we do a thing, the thing itself becomes far from us having been close when we struggled to learn it. We have at present no clear understanding what it means for us to calculate or to play a game.  

Heidegger also offers some interesting insight to our spiritual and anthropological investigations: a shift of focus from early eastern traditions (like Pali Buddhism) to the overwhelming deep luminous source of Hellenic traditions - in which genuine questioning and freedom is found without the shadow of despotism and projected absolutism as in the typology of a 'lord of the world' (which was overcome somewhat in the purely philosophical Mahayana schools and more so in the sublime transformation in Chinese Buddhism grounded in Daoism: if you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him - could not have been easily uttered by an Indian Sage, only a Chinese or a Greek one).  A study of the mysteries, Orphism, Greek Drama, the pre-Socratics, the Platonic texts reveals more and more and shameful plagiarism and perversion which Hellenic thought and traditions (and their sources and influences) were subject to by certain later currents of Alexandrian and Mediterranean Hellenistic cultures (specially the so-called "gnostics").

We point out that Heidegger also has some very disappointing and serious anthropological blunders wherein he reveals himself to be a child of his own time blinded by typical German pseudoscientific racism and nationalism. In the Black Notebooks we find anti-universalist  anti-humanist   Blut und Boden type utterances which are unworthy of a philosopher. But at the same time the correction of these errors is of immense philosophical importance - and it seems it is up to us to engage in this.

There can be no authentic inquiry into being and into man unless the selfsame dignity of every single human being (and indeed animal) is acknowledged without exception (to reject the Dasein of another is to reject one's own Dasein).  All human beings are equal before Being though evidently not all human beings and cultures at a given time have the same purity and openness to Being. 

There can be no valid onto-theology without the fundamental doctrine of Apokatastasis. The eventual universal salvation of all beings can be taken as the fundamental ground of the very essence of divinity without which we have nothing but monstruosities and human calculation and construction.

Heidegger's reading of Eckhart suggests that Eckhart is deeply Hellenic and - if we allow some key clarification and rectification so as to leave no doubt about the unconditional adoption of Origen's doctrine of Apokatastasis - then Eckhart can indeed by considered an important spiritual guide providing a concrete practical complement to Plotinus. Happiness consists in dwelling peacefully in the clearing of Being. We must show in detail how Eckhart's thought is admirably compatible and suggestive of Origen's doctrine of Apokatastasis. Indeed in Wagner's Parsifal the redemption of all of nature is celebrated, even of the redeemer Himself. Spiritual love means liberation from the limitations of place, time and finite fixed embodiment and yields a measure of intemporality, omnipresence and multidimensional integration, reflection, flow and radiation.

And of course with regards to the philosophical understanding of technology it almost seems that Heidegger was a philosopher that was prophetically born not so much for his own time but for our present time. Heidegger is vastly relevant and important to understand the horrors of the contemporary technocratic dystopia and what is designated by the misnomer artificial intelligence. In fact generative AI, large language models, those electrically animated Frankenstein corpses of adulterated human language and instrumentality are the most perfect embodiment of everything Heidegger wrote about technology.

Another interesting anthropological-spiritual source concerns the Persian and Hermetic traditions understood through Henry Corbin's interesting Heideggerian hermeneutics.