This is an extract from chapter 9 of my book "Earthly, Transcendental, and Spiritual Logic: from Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy." (Amazon.com) It is slightly revised, since I am updating some elements as I translate the book into German.
Husserl did not recognize the deeper reality of the cosmic organology of logic. But we can look at precisely what he did accomplish. For him, the transition from logical thinking to phenomenological insight takes place when the meaning elements come to awareness in a fully saturated intuition or viewing of the sense of concepts in the thinking-terrain. However, this particulate substance on which the mental images and logical eidetic structures are projected seems to extend to infinity if it is not bypassed through moral development and heart thinking. When it is bypassed through the power of love dissolving its frozen power, we enter into another world, as our soul expands. In this moment we look back to find that the etheric grid is located fairly close to the physical body (in a spatial sense). In this moment we also recognize that every thought picture is a projection onto the dying light grid around the physical body, but that truly soul experiences and spiritual Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition take place beyond this fabric of receptivity of light-forms used in personal thinking. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has carefully taken this insight into deeper territory in his books, such as volume 2 of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, but showing how one can enter directly into this dead etheric skeleton, and through the new etheric Christ forces, resurrect its very substance into new life. In this way, we do not fly away from the body and the earth in a luciferic manner.
It is important to also note that for Husserl part of the powers of human judgment concern the capacity to repeat the viewing of the identical essential concept or judgment again and again. For logical truth to consist, it is necessary for Husserl that the essential elements remain identical. But this quest for secure identity is problematic as has been shown by Derrida and Deleuze, among others. Can logic function, if the content of P is different every time I think it, even in a single syllogism? Is my father the same, every time I think of him? Is what was true of my sister yesterday, still true of her?
Let us look at an example. I am wondering whether I will receive a significant return on my investment on a particular stock on the stock market. First, in analyzing this question, what is the value of the phenomenological turn? What is the value of intuiting the meaning of the concepts with a direct and full saturation in the Husserlian sense? First, it is important to distinguish between pure perception and thinking. I learn nothing from the white papers of businesses from merely staring at the computer screen and seeing black lines on white paper. I can only synthesize the various lines into something meaningful in the first place through thinking. Seeing random faces of the ‘development team’ means nothing until thinking combines the ideas of their accomplishments together into the concept of a company or a business, and their successful cooperation. A green piece of paper means nothing if I do not consciously understand the meaning of the concept of currency. As Heraclitus rightly pointed out, a donkey will choose hay over gold. The donkey obviously perceives the gold, but does not think the significance of the value of gold in the economic processes of humans.
Now, if I analyze and dive into the meaning structures and experiences themselves inside the phenomenological reduction, if I look into the direct evidence of flowing in the experience of thinking the concept of currency, stocks, and profit, this is different from making a decision about the value of a particular investment. The externally perceptible elements are gone, and in the Husserlian sense, I can intuit the concept of currency, profit and loss. When I look into the noematic appearance of the concept of currency, I find that if I can set aside the specific memory images or received ideas about currency, I can find an element that is activated in pure thinking. I can note that there is a meaning-material and a quality associated with the viewing or intentional analysis of the concept of currency. In the thinking act, I can differentiate the meaning of currency as a medium or a representation of value that can be exchanged in a local economy from the concept of a nut, for example. I find that there is a noetic act or a thinking act which can move from observing the concept of a nut as the intended reality or intentional ‘matter’ or content and can go back to the meaning-limits of a currency. The will is working as I focus my intuitional gaze on the meaning structures of one content vs. another. I want to keep the two circles of the Venn diagram from overlapping, but I am a witness to the causal meaning scope of each concept in full saturation. For example, I can trace and locate the precise boundary in the viewing of concepts between green paper and real US dollars. We might be fooled by a counterfeit dollar in our perception, but we can always differentiate between the concept of a real dollar and the concept of a counterfeit dollar. There is a meaning-boundary between the two. What power in me is able to think the difference between the two? How do I return to or, in Husserlian terminology, ‘intend’ [toward] the same concept? Who thinks and how does the thinker weave through time and memories while retaining an identity? These are Husserlian questions.
Steiner would go further and suggest that when the thinker or the I AM wakes up and observes the very activity of creating, combining, differentiating, and linking up concepts in the non-imagistic, non-subjective thinking sphere, another realm opens up that is beyond the physical (and the dying etheric grid of representations) altogether. This can happen if we are able to both hold the two currents in the head apart, and also activate the middle zone with devotion, morality, spiritual scientific fundamental exercises, and self-knowledge. We can experience the spiritual I or thinker outside the body, thinking in the midst of a world of flowing concepts, moods, and Imaginative folds and world-large Imaginative pictures that are supersensible. The whole ‘body’ is involved in this process, not just the head. Thinking is then recognized as an activity that precedes all experience of concepts, and creates concepts by which it orders reality in terms of inner, outer, space, time, quantity, body, etc. The observation of self-thinking activity surfs on top of the observation of the concepts created through thinking, and the emotion and will clouds. We can also become aware of the warm, will-walker, and the spirit-heart gestures, which constitute the soul and spiritual logical actor. The complete logic farmer is present, able to morally walk and plant in his fields, with the sun shining down, supersensibly. And at the far end of this activity, I can give my own personal thinking to be carried by the essential loving cosmic thinking of the angelic hierachies. I am thought as a human persona inside the concept of living cosmic currency.
But the investor might argue that neither the Husserlian nor the further Anthroposophical dimension improve her capacity to make a winning trade. She might look on the phenomenological move as perhaps opening up a new realm of experience but as a useless addition which adds nothing to her clarity of judgment, like someone who creates a glass dishwasher that is visible on all sides to watch the moment by moment workings of the spraying water, dispensing of soap and rotating arms. Does this really help the dishes get any cleaner? A person thinking in the same vein would argue that I can drive a car without knowing how internal combustion works or how rubber is made. Phenomenological viewing and the further spiritualization of thinking do not provide any ‘real world’ advantage, they might say. One type of investor might go so far as to suggest that if you really believed in spirits, you should command them to show you the future prices of the cryptocurrency or stock markets.
On the other side, the visionary would try to tell the investor that the amazing landscapes and the blissful feelings that one experiences as you learn to see intense and vast images in the mind’s eye are far more valuable than making money in the external world. Once a person has seen the incredible architecture and the impossibly beautiful lands that are within our inward vision, they can never turn back to the ‘dark and dirty earth, with its greedy people.’ This might lead to a new age conversion, where one could become a dharma bum. Husserl does not go this far, but his phenomenology could be distorted into connections with the mystic visionary. Steiner goes in an entirely different direction, but his ideas can also be distorted into a support for personal, subjective soul development.
But if we can truly penetrate into the middle zone between these two extremes, we can find that the spiritualized thinking, which experiences the freedom of the I who thinks both inside the body and outside the body without leaving the earth behind, can experience the most valuable element in the truly moral dimension. Through the spiritualization of thinking, which passes beyond the eidos in Husserl’s works, we come to see out the back of the flexible and open concepts of currency. We find an element in the concept of currency that we never noted before, because we never recognized how our own subjective greed, love of personal comfort, and our hatred of other people were wrapped in the experience of investment in the first place. We can now look back at our whole constitution of soul, feelings, desires, and body as a stranger and can see how that aspect of inwardness distorted all of the meanings of all of the concepts. The reversal was inside every meaning, as Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has pointed out in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century.
Now the spiritual event of the I waking up and being woken up inside the spiritual world of thinking as living beings co-working, wrestling, and producing world consecration, is recognized for the first time. We note that currency is primarily a spiritual living idea of humans giving and taking in a community of soul and spiritual exchange. I become something else by receiving your karmic treasure. The will acts that undergird the economic processes are always already spiritual processes, woven with the whole cosmos. It is not true that I meditate and then bring back subjective inspirations that I then apply to a pre-existing physical world, to transform it economically. Rather, every economic transaction is already woven into all spiritual beings. Only when I begin to perceive this with pure intuitive thinking or with Imagination, can I carry out a free moral technique in the real sense. Thinking with mere representations has also limited anthroposphical endeavors toward threefolding in just this way.
This free intuition of the meaning content and spiritual inspiration behind money, of course, is a different idea than accumulating material wealth or buying material objects to support my ego being. But this doesn’t mean we have to suddenly give away all of our money or possessions. All the potential of trying to pass on spiritual treasure and the most intimate gift to one another rises across the threshold. We hold a gift in our spirit-self which allows the other to find his or her way into a higher grasp of his own self. The spiritual currency is the exchange of transformed consciousness arising through meeting the other. I may even take on the debt of the other as we enter into a spiritual community in spiritual and soul wakefulness. This insight into the spiritual concept of money can then totally change our relationship to investment and the notion of earthly money. Can I invest my own spiritual quest in your spiritual awakening and growth? How can our spiritual wills truly work karmically together, which must transform our whole world?
None of these moral elements are really recognized by Husserl. Yes, he is not concerned with getting rich, but on the other hand, he does not recognize the cosmic supersensible and moral struggle through which Michael and his co-workers are trying to lift up and transform the merely earthly picture-reasoning through memory images inside and around a body into something else: a co-working with the true spirit of humanity and the angelic hierarchies, to transform the evil in ourselves and the world. We need to get real with one another. The deeper meanings and a truer insight into the whole of life is only found through spiritual scientific consciousness. This has nothing to do with following a particular guru or losing my own independence. The spiritual scientist can understand and utilize the ideas of the earthly investor or mechanic as well as the phenomenological researcher, but not vice versa. Multiple new currencies can arise, with the highest beauty of art and utility. I give part of myself to the other, when I give her supersensible ‘currency,’ and she gives part of herself to me. We need the gift of the Other to find the deepest answer to ‘making a living.’
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