78. Exploration of the Soul

Anthroposophy is meant to be a challenge to the scientific way of thinking.

Science has expanded the realm of its way of thinking.

It also wants to embrace the science of the soul.

On the one hand, it has slipped over into physiology.

On the other hand, it has become experimental psychology.

Neither can lead to a true science of the soul.

In the past, nature was not thought of as separate from the life of the soul.

Now, however, the ideal of natural science is to eliminate everything subjective from the natural. This can only lead to a presentation of nature that satisfies subjective soul needs. What is achieved for nature in this way is achieved by the soul simply by experiencing itself. The observer must first be sought for the soul.

The usual methods of knowledge only provide the questions. At the borderlands of knowledge. Experiencing the questions. Soul organs. Imagination. Inspiration. Intuition.

As long as one wants to interpret natural events, one is on the wrong track. The spiritual does not present itself as an interpretation of nature, but rises from natural experience like the content of what has been read by following the sequence of letters and words. Through natural experience, one becomes independent of it. The actual soul cannot be investigated experimentally: 1.) The observer can never determine the onset of observation. 2.) Attention is switched off. 3.) No observation can be repeated under the same circumstances. 4.) The conditions cannot be determined under different circumstances.

Special characteristics of mental perceptions:

1.) Non-reminiscence.

2.) They can only be grasped in the mind to the extent that preparatory concepts are present. Anything beyond that would lead to visions, etc.

3.) The more often a mental fact is perceived, the more difficult it is to grasp it clearly.

Ordinary mental facts can only be seen correctly if they are observed with the consciousness of vision. - Bergson connects the “I” with life.

What is united in the soul (thinking, feeling, willing) does not necessarily come from the same root. According to Bergson, the intellect pulverizes experiences. Memory is akin to the power of inheritance.

Abstract concepts are tied to the material body.

According to Bergson, the brain is a kind of telegraph center.

Why can't the mental facts be calculated? Because the result enters into ordinary consciousness, but not what leads to that result.

Benedikt:

The fact of consciousness through brain cell excitation is not essentially different from the fact of gravity bound to matter.

Wundt:

[Should the concept of matter therefore be reformulated to include the possibility of physical and mental events simultaneously, it would thereby expand into a more general concept of substance. It is clear that the question of the admissibility of such an extension can only be answered by empirical psychology at the end of its investigations. Until then, we must adhere to the premise directly required by experience, that psychic events are regularly accompanied by certain physical phenomena, and that lawful relationships consistently occur between these internal and external life processes.

Through imaginative knowledge, we obtain the formative forces of the body as mirrored in the life of ideas; through inspired knowledge, we obtain the soul, which actually lies outside the course of life; and through intuitive knowledge, we obtain the spiritual (I), which lies outside both the soul and the body. The spiritual (I) is united with the soul-generating forces.

These statements may be taken as the results of someone's work – not someone who negates natural science, but someone who has such a high opinion of this newer natural science that he ascribes to it the ability to produce a spiritual science – if it does not merely want to age, but wants to pass on its basic character in offspring.

The experimental psychologist has given up defining the soul. He takes as soul what ordinary experience calls soul. Metaphysically, it has become nothing less than a horror.

In the sensation, the emotional tone is already seen.

One would like to summarize as physiological sense substance: sense organ. nerve. place in the cerebral cortex. Skin sensation: Blix. Goldscheider. v. Frey paradoxical cold sensation (stimulus above 45 °C). pressure. warmth. cold. pain.

Taste sensations: Kiesow. Öhrwall: sweet, sour, bitter, salty. - Functional diversity of papillae.

Smell sensations: Olfactometer. Zwaardemaker: 9 groups of smells: Essential. Aromatic. Balsamic. Ambrosia / Amber-Musk. Leek-like. Allyl-Cacodyl. Fiery. Buck-like / Capryl. Repulsive. Disgusting.

Ear sense:

Otoliths (location); semicircular canals (passive movement of the body. Dizziness). Snail: (auditory sensations).

Perception. Apperception. Physiology of reading.

Imagination:

Külpe: centrally excited sensation. Memory images.

Koffka attempted to separate the life of imagination from the life of sensation through the experiment. - The terminating tendency. Theories.

2 spir. should fail: 1. that animals have imaginations. 2. that reproduction depends on the brain.

1. Physiological image theory (dismissed): 2. Traces

Theory (Hering)

R. Semon: Engram. Sum of engrams. Mneme.

Semon sees the essence of the mnemonic in the fact that repetitions occur when the earlier conditions are not perfectly recurring.

synchronous. temporary.

engrafisch. constantly transforming. maintaining effect.

Ekphorie.

When observing the soul:

1. The observer can never determine the onset of an observation; he can only wait for the observation to occur. 2. He must be able to switch off attention.

2. No observation can be repeated under the same circumstances.

3. The conditions under which a mental phenomenon occurs cannot be determined by varying the accompanying circumstances, because the altered conditions no longer apply to the same mental experience, but to one that has been altered by the preceding circumstances.

Observation of the mental:

1. The content of consciousness does not remain unchanged? You cannot observe a train if you are inside it.

2. In memory, illusion lives? You have to get to know the conditions of illusion as laws of mental perspective.

Strangely enough, when it comes to the soul, there is an immediate desire to have it different from how it is.

Ed. v. Hartmann: never apodictic certainty. (Hypotheses of causes. Hypotheses of laws.

Content and form of consciousness: Fortlage, Herbart,

Benecke – content becomes independent

Rehmke: form becomes independent.

Consciousness: product, not producer: but then it must not develop an opinion about itself. What is not produced by consciousness therefore does not remain unconscious.

Ed. v. Hartmann:

However, such an activity (which spans the experiences of consciousness as a unifying thread) does not occur in consciousness, nor does its carrier, [the individual of a higher order,] and therefore [psychology, which is limited to consciousness, can never explain the synthesis of several consciousnesses into one.

Feeling: passion, mood, ...

Memory: the ideas themselves cannot be remembered.

In a dream, it is not an X that is known by the lower parts of the brain, but the activity at the lower parts of the brain is known.

Ed. v. Hartmann: Pleasure: discharge of accumulated chemical tension.

Aversion: inhibition of the same. —

In Hartmann: feeling effect of wanting.

Aversion when unconscious wanting is hindered in the realization of its goal. —

Pleasure when this inhibition is removed. —

Representation when the volition is paralyzed in the realization of its

goal. —

Life when the paralysis is lifted.

Ed. v. Hartmann: Every volition is determined by a representation. But every representation is also determined by a volition. Volition: like child to man. Volition becomes representation. But representation gives birth to volition.

Hartmann: the unconsciousness of volition.

Wundt: the characteristic feature of a volitional process is “the apperception of a psychic content.” Ed. v. Hartmann: “The motif acts like the pressure of a finger on the button of a galvanic line, through the closure of which a hundred mines explode at once.