Category: Spirit

Toward an Aesthetic Epistemology – Slideshow Overview

In February 2014 I successfully defended my PhD dissertation, titled “Toward an Aesthetic Epistemology: Transforming Thinking through Cybernetic Epistemology and Anthroposophy.”

The following is the abstract and a slideshow presentation that pulls out the crux of my arguments.

Abstract

The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today’s rapidly changing world requires an epistemology—a way of thinking about our knowing—capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change how we think, not just what we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face.

This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order—between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the whole human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology aesthetic, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling.

Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin.

The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit.

Keywords: anthroposophy, autopoiesis, cognition, cybernetic epistemology, distinction, epistemology, esotericism, logic, recursion, Rudolf Steiner, second-order cybernetics, spirituality, thinking

Slideshow

Please note that Slideshare translated the Greek letter Theta into the letter Q. This is unfortunate, because I used the Greek letter for its geometric shape, pictured correctly at left.

Towards an Aesthetic Epistemology: Transforming Thinking through Cybernetic Epistemology and Anthroposophy from Seth T. Miller

February 13, 2014
Video Games and Spiritual Development, a preliminary analysis

Introduction

Video games are a huge global phenomenon, driving well over $70 billion dollars in sales in 2011—a number that is only rising year by year. For comparison, global music sales in 2011 was about $16 billion, while global theater tickets was about $33 billion. This has consequences—largely unexplored—for people that are interested in spiritual development. It is thus important to look at the phenomenon of video games from a spiritual perspective, because almost no one growing up today can avoid them. The time in which human beings could develop spiritually without the presence of modern technologies is essentially over, and video games are now deeply integrated into the fabric of modern society. Their ubiquity means that human beings who wish to undertake spiritual development will often do so in contexts that are not devoid of video games. We can thus ask the question, how might video games impact spiritual development? (more…)

June 19, 2012
Observing the Observer: Exploring a Cybernetic Epistemological Recursion

All epistemologies are observer-dependent; i.e. there is no single epistemology that applies to all possible observers, because every observer is unique in some way. The necessary inclusion of the observer in any description of the world is a deeply obvious and yet profound principle. It was neatly expressed in Heinz von Foerster’s article Cybernetics of Cybernetics, where he builds off of Humberto Maturana’s phrase “Anything said is said by an observer,” by indicating that “Anything said is said to an observer” (2003, p. 283) (figure 1). This is in contrast to the view that anything said is simply… said, as if into a vacuum. This older view, championed by the scientific revolution, took up the principle that statements could simply be true or false, and were about the world but not really of the world (the roots of these two views can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle). Cybernetic epistemology modifies this assumption by re-introducing the observer as a part of the world.

Figure 1. A cybernetics of description following Heinz von Foerster. There are two different observers involved in any description; observer 1 is the describer, and observer 2 is the one to whom the description is directed.

(Side note: it is important to indicate that perspectives on just what this word “observer” might mean can be helpfully explored also through esoteric methods. In an significant way a central—perhaps even the central—aspect of esoteric practice involves the closing of the loop of observation. Esoteric practice in general (always with caveats) can be thought of as the experiential exploration of the cybernetic epistemological injunction that no description of reality can be complete without an integration of the describer in the description.)

While von Foerster links the principle explicitly to the social realm (2003, p. 284) by distinguishing (more…)

April 15, 2012
Transformative Learning

“What is the connection between a transformative learning approach and the sense of one’s own spirituality? In what way does transformative learning nurture the spirit any more than any other learning style does?”

There are many styles of transformative learning. In general, however, one key aspect of transformative learning the explicit recognition that learning is not an activity that only takes place at a specified time and place built specifically for “learning”. Rather, learning is understood to be a life activity, and as such should be connected to all aspects of life in an integral way. The old, medieval style of education based on disciplinary structures that still dominates Western culture is fraying at the edges — thankfully.

Much of traditional academia is dominated by approaches where one learns “about” topics and ideas. In transformative learning, one learns “with” and “through” ideas by embodying them outside the classroom, in one’s daily life and work. The best transformative learning closes the loop by reciprocally inviting one’s outside activities into the classroom. This sets up a recursive relationship that helps unlock avenues for creative, integral inquiry that otherwise get stifled by a need to fit within an established epistemology, such as the kind implicit in most traditional educational offerings.

Transformative learning styles nurture the spirit because room is made both implicitly and explicitly for what we could call the appearance of the unknown. What you know limits your knowing, and making space for the arising of what is beyond one’s current understanding is central to any transformative process. You can’t fill a cup that is already full, and transformative learning styles take advantage of this wisdom directly by integrating opportunities for unknowing. What is spiritual in the human being is nurtured more by unknowing than by the addition of data to an already established way of being. Transformation occurs not when we change our ideas, but when we change how we know. Learning styles that are transformative in nature utilize this principle directly.

“Is there a place in the workforce for transformative learning? In what way might it be applied on the job?”

What we have to realize is that transformative learning is not just another system of facts and ideas that can be “applied on the job” without a recursive feedback effect on the business itself. It’s not like you can go to work and have an isolated “moment of transformative learning” to fulfill that week’s quota — transformative learning is more like an attitude than a specific system of ideas or practices, and as such it bleeds beyond borders. Most of the techniques and methods used in transformative learning approaches are designed to loosen us from our habitual ways of being in the world. They recognize, for example, that pretty much all the interesting stuff happens at the boundaries. This is where the juice is: where systems, ideas, events, and (most importantly) people meet and interact. Providing avenues for a greater diversity of interactions yields far more than a directed process where the outcome is dictated in advance. That’s good for building widgets, but not so good for the spirit. This has been known in some education circles (like Waldorf education) for about a century: play is not an activity for recess, but a core mode of learning that is, by its nature, transformative. A stick becomes a magic wand, a tent-pole, a sword, a sand-writing tool, and so forth in a dynamic flow. Only the adults, stuck with their more rigid, non-experimental epistemologies, see “just a stick”.

My father, who has been a business consulting psychologist for 25 years with the top management of major corporations like Best Buy, summed up his entire job to me recently by saying that his most important function has been to help his clients learn how to learn. This is an explicit recognition of the difference between the first-order concept of “learning” and the second-order concept of “learning how to learn”, which Gregory Bateson identified decades ago as a key to understanding complex goal-directed systems. In second-order learning, the snake bends back to bite its own tail and in so doing initiates a process of self-digestion. This self-digestion is a part of what is necessary to create the space for something new to arise, and is a stage on the way to an “adult” way of playing that is called “creative inquiry” and “transdisciplinarity” in academic circles.

Transformative learning invites higher-order transformation: not simply a change in what we think and do, but in how we think and how we carry out our actions. More businesses are starting to recognize the value of spaces (both physical and metaphorical spaces) that are not already locked into a pre-defined form, but which invite modification and multiplicity. This is a way of calling attention to and allowing human beings to bring forth the parts of themselves that get excited and passionate when they are simply given the space to be so. Some places, like Google, MIT, and other “big names” consciously utilize principles of transformative learning as a way to nurture diversity, openness, interaction, experimentation, and transformative involvement at various levels. The next level is when businesses begin to re-humanize their practices with the attitude that every “worker” or “employee” is first and foremost a whole human being. But to get there our whole understanding of business will have to transform as well…

October 29, 2010
Goethean Studies Notebook

PDF: Goethean Studies Notebook (40mb)

PDF: Higher quality, print version (180mb)

This notebook was created as a personal record of the 1999-2000 Goethean Studies program at Rudolf Steiner College. This unique course, conceived of and taught primarily by Dennis Klocek, is still being offered — it is now called Consciousness Studies. When I took the course, which was seven months long and met for about three hours every weekday, I liked to call it “Being Human 101”, because it offered some basic perspectives about being human that spanned the spiritual, psychological, and physical worlds in a very deep and coherent way.

There are certainly errors contained herein: it was often simply not possible to record more than the merest fragments of the vast pictures that awakened in the little Emerson classroom and flowed like honey across our minds. This record is like a six year old’s crayon rendition of a Michelangelo: it may contain something recognizable, but is no substitute for the real thing, which I encourage everyone to experience.

It is likely that the only people who will see this document are those already familiar with the course in one of its various incarnations. For you I hope that it re-awakens a commitment and enthusiasm for the hard and necessary work of spiritual transformation by connecting you to the feeling you had sitting in the uncomfortably cold room on uncomfortable chairs, listening to another mind-blowing morning lecture by Dennis: the feeling that you were exactly where you needed to be and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

For those who have not been able to take the course, this gives a tiny taste of some of the content that was presented in its 1999-2000 incarnation, and will hopefully inspire you to research the current, more highly refined and potent version.

For those who have found this page but have no idea what I’m talking about even though you’ve read this far, just flip through it like it was you long-lost friend’s photo album and see what tickles your fancy as you skim on by.

October 15, 2010
Levels of Dreaming and the Makeup of the Human Being: The Spiritual Ontology of Dreams

By Seth Miller

Full PDF

Everyone dreams, but few people find sufficient interest in their dreams to move beyond mere curiosity at their strange contents. Even many who work with dreams as a part of a transformative practice usually concentrate on their content, and only more rarely question their form, ontology, and origins. Exploring these aspects, however, can help provide a context that helps orient dreamers to some of the esoteric underpinnings of dream etiology (their meaningful origins), and can help enliven dream-based transformative practices. This article is an attempt to show how a spiritually-oriented understanding of the makeup of the human being gives a context for understanding different types of dreams, their origins, and some associated consequences for dreamwork.

The language of spiritual science, also called anthroposophy (human wisdom) will be of help in this endeavor, because it maintains its cogency across multiple phenomenal realms (such as those of sleeping and waking), and because it has as its aim the ability to make clear and coherent processes which work within the physical realm but have their source beyond it, in the spiritual worlds. Fundamental anthroposophical terminology will not be explained in this article for reasons of space, and neither will the basic anthroposophical view of dreaming in general. For a brief introduction, I highly recommend that readers peruse this article: Sleep and Dreams in Anthroposophy, which provides the context (more…)

September 17, 2010
Inception: Dreams, Waking, and Epistemology

The movie Inception is the best “question reality” movie since the Matrix (ultimately the Matrix is better, in my opinion), and it raises many fascinating questions having to do with the differences between the two primary states of consciousness available to humans today: waking and dreaming.

This issue has been around for about as long as recorded history, and has formed a central piece of some very detailed philosophical considerations. It shows up in the 4th Century B.C.E. in the famous Taoist Zuangzi’s “butterfly dream”:

“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”

It also forms a central part of Indian philosophy, especially advaita vedanta, which explores cosmological questions through the exploration of (more…)

July 18, 2010