As the unredeemed Dualist, something in me couldn't give assent to any of the monistic arguments so far presented in this chapter. Now I've decided to follow my own advice and look for the answers to my questions where I live.

Steiner tells us to consider that against all the monistic theories yet presented here, stands the fact that we meet with the duality between ourselves and Nature first in our own consciousness. To me, that means to focus on the part of my consciousness where it appears. Where is that? In my thinking, I suppose. But in my perceptions and feelings too. I suppose I have to perceive this bothersome duality before I can ever start to think about it.

I want something and don't get it. I try to do something but fail, because of some incompetence on my part. I meet something I don't like, such as a big, fat, shiny black widow spider.

I remember, as a very small child, finding a centipede and playing with it. When I told my mother later about my new friend, she told me centipedes were poisonous. But she didn't seem very concerned about the fact that I'd been playing with one all afternoon.

At that age, I thought that if some creature was poisonous, it meant that if it bit me I would die. I didn't know to distinguish between deadly and mild venom. As a result, I was shocked to think that my mother hadn't been able to watch me better. And I began to feel alone in a world full of dangers.

If I hadn't learned at some point to watch out for myself, I probably wouldn't be alive today. So I can appreciate how necessary it was to break away from Nature so as to step back and assess her dangers.

As the centipede was transformed by my mother's casual words from friend to enemy, my inner life of feeling was also transformed. It began to hold more fear and uncertainty, as well as more curiosity about the world around me for purely practical, survival reasons. In my inner life, I began to oppose Nature while at the same time seeking to understand her.

Someone like Goethe could take this feeling, thinking life and develop it to the Nth degree, until it grew together to become a means of perceiving the world. Although I've never read his essay "Nature," I have no doubt that in the writing of it he drew upon this highly developed unity of feeling and thinking.

Most of modern science rejects Goethe's discoveries, but Steiner says that the brief quotation here expresses fully and beautifully the whole situation of our deeply felt duality with Nature.

"Living in the midst of her...we are strangers to her." Everything we know about the world around us we have to learn. "Ceaselessly she speaks to us," in a language we don't understand.

How do we get from here to the unity that Goethe describes? "Men are all in her and she in all." At this point, these last words remain theoretical, yet hopeful.

Probably a basic comment not being German but I had never realised until now reading Lori's comment to what an extent Chapter 2 is a Gothean/Faustian chapter - after all:

1.  The chapter is titled 'The Fundamental Desire for Knowledge'  If Faust is about anything I think it is certainly about human desire in the more profound sense!

2.  The chapter begins with the quote from Faust

3.  Faust is about a man who suffers from an excess of head-knowledge which alienates him from real life (separation or dualism)

4.  The pact with Mephistopheles offers him a way to true knowledge which is experiential and involves reunion with the true spirit of the world (leading him to Gretchen who becomes, by the end of Part 2, the representative of the "Eternal feminine" whom Faust strives to be united with throughout his life)

5.  Later on in Chapter 2 Steiner says "We can find Nature outside us only if we have first learned to know her within us"

6.  In terms of Faust's disastrous relationship with Gretchen we can see that initially he strives outwardly to unite himself with her, however his later path in life could be seen as a ceaseless striving to unite himself with Gretchen or the Eternal Feminine in love more inwardly and truly (hence her reappearance at Faust's death at the end of Part 2)

7.  As if to reinforce the connection, Steiner has a second quote from the author of Faust in which Nature is personified as feminine - significantly, Steiner carries the same language into his own discourse at this point (for example, "we must find the way back to her")

8.  Stretching it a bit maybe, but in the "Walpurgis Night" scene from Faust Part 1 a succession of strange characters appear, some representing particular world views - I think especially the appearance of the thoughts of Fichte and Lange (who is comically compared to Baron Munchhausen) is a little similar to the spirit of that scene.

 

 

Tim, this is great! I'm looking forward to reading this book. Can you recommend a good translation?

Hi Lori,

I found the older translation by Philip Wayne which used to be the standard Penguin books translation was quite good.  You shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy of that I would think.

I see from the Penguin website that they now have a newer translation by David Constantine which "conveys the innate lyrical liveliness of Goethe's original" - if that is true it might be worth trying that one also as the English verse translations of Goethe's plays can sometimes "limp" a little because of the very different sound patterns in the two languages.  But I find Wayne's translation reads quite well.

Regards,

            Tim Bourke 

Can I transform my thinking-feeling life so that, like Goethe, I can experience the wholeness of the world? This wholeness is now hypothetical to me, as if it were there behind a veil that I can theorize through, but not see through, much less reach through to grasp.

The fact that I've estranged myself from Nature is always in my face. Living even a relatively low-key version of the American way of life makes that certain.

The fact that I belong to Nature is definitely always in my face too. Try being a farmer without thinking about your natural limitations!

But Steiner mentions a third fact here in section 2.8, the fact that, despite our estrangement from Nature, we feel that we are in her and belong to her. This to me seems like a third fact because we can belong to Nature, just as we can estrange ourselves from Nature, without feeling anything about it at all. Our material culture pretty much takes care of that for us. So the feeling part is optional.

What does it mean to me, to feel this estrangement from nature and that in spite of this we still belong to and in her?

Well, to spite something means to go against it. So our feelings of unity go against our estranging actions, I suppose. We can try to cut ourselves off from our feelings, but they always come out one way or another.

I had a therapist who used to say, "Feelings need to be felt." Not picked apart or explained away, that is. It's as if they had a life all their own, like an animal that belongs to you, and you have to give it food, water and room to move around if you want it to thrive.

So I have this thinking part that makes plans and sets goals, and this physical body that uses the things and forces of nature to make its way in the world, and I also have these feelings that I have to deal with by feeling them.

These feelings are like our Molokai friends' pet pig Axel, who has no apparent purpose in life but to roam around his paddock, get fed his raw food diet and get doctored with homeopathic remedies when he ails. Axel was a wild piglet given to Jack and Ellen by a hunter friend about fifteen years ago -- about 6500 pig-feeding days ago, that is.

To the calculating part of my mind, Axel makes no sense whatsoever, especially given the exhausting round of other chores our friends have every day. And since I didn't know him as a cute little piglet, I don't have the memory of his former cuteness to soften the impact of the 500-pound black hairy boar that he is now. It seems to me that Axel is just there, always needing to be considered in the daily plan. Don't forget to feed the pig!

Good grief, is that what I really think of feelings, that they serve no purpose and are just there?

Jack manages a grass-fed beef operation for the big ranch where they live, and he's passionate about how animals should be treated. One night when we were recently visiting them, he started talking about the way people normally feed pigs in Hawaii and on the mainland too. They take all the moldy bread, rotten garbage and inedible leftovers of the household, mix them together in a foul concoction called "slop," and pour it over the pigs' heads in their reeking sty. They do this all the pigs' lives, and then they eat their meat. Meat made out of garbage!

Caring for Axel all these years, our friends have come to appreciate that pigs have discerning tastebuds. Axel loves coconut in any form, but there are some vegetables he just won't eat. And when he got so excited about the leftover beets from the fermented kvass drink Ellen makes, she decided to try them herself, with the result that poor Axel is now out of the loop. So I guess he does fulfill a purpose as a sort of household taster. And as a spokesman for pigs, a witness against all our arrogant assumptions about them, our cruelty.

Is that what our feelings are as well -- tasters? Witnesses against all our arrogant assumptions and cruelty? Is that why we lock them up and feed them the slop of our material culture?

I'm not at all sure Steiner intended for us to go down the sideroad to a pigpen in this section of PoF. That's just where I ended up, by thinking about feelings as a third factor in the human vs. Nature equation.

In our friends' bathroom there's a small watercolor of a half-grown piglet with a red bandana tied around his neck, standing by a palm tree. It looks like there's a soft tropical wind blowing the palm fronds and the piglet's spikey black hair. The piglet is either Axel or his brother Guinea, who lived with Axel in the paddock until he died a few years back.

Ellen says she could never kill a pig because they have human-like eyes. I guess a third purpose Axel has is to be loved by Jack and Ellen.

I wonder about the working of Nature that pulsates in us, and how we get to it. I used to have a recurring dream about a whole houseful of animals that I'd locked up and forgotten about for years. I knew that after years of not being fed and watered they'd all be long dead, but when I worked up the courage to open the door, they were always still miraculously alive and, even more miraculously, not even resentful.

Moving to Psychism ( "ideas are bound up with some being capable of having ideas") we are given a perspective of how the I-world separation involves more than just developing abstract theories to explain the world but is "bound up" with our being. The primary polarity occurs in our own consciousness. We are taking a stand as individuals and contrasting ourselves with the world. Our view of the world isn't necessarily the result of careful impartial consideration to determine what view is correct as we would suppose, but more so is the result of the make-up of our whole being. So our whole being is on the line when we present our view. If rejected it can be, in a sense, the rejection of our unique being that has something special to offer.

This need to contrast our "I" with the world makes me think of raising teenagers who seem to be looking for a view or behavior that will contrast with parents or society, even in the most trivial things. They want to separate in the strongest way yet just as strongly want to be part of a group. When my son finds opposition to his view, it is not the start of a rational discussion, but more an experience of his existence and validity being challenged.

In international diplomacy you hear terms like "saving face". A solution needs to be found where both sides can save face. If they cannot save face a leader may take a country to war to protect the honor of who they are as a person and a nation. As our views are so tied up with our very existence, it points out the need to be respectful of other peoples views. For the view we hold, it may be more than just a view, much more.

In 2-7 we live in the lonely "I"-world duality of separating ourselves from the world around us. Living in the midst of the world we are strangers. This brings to mind the often mentioned crowded city of lonely strangers packed against each other in a subway car. Complete strangers physically pressed against each without any other connection leaving the soul unsatisfied. Or having an everyday conversation of mundane events and wondering who the person talking to you really is. Or someone posting about a book or philosophy with terms you are not familiar with and wondering what they are writing about. Ceaselessly they speak yet betray none of their secrets. The separation just grows greater.

At the end of 2-7 a third element is brought in. "She in all." Then in 2-8 nature pulsates within us. It is dim but it can be felt within. We have received something from the outside world. Now something stirs within, a part of the outside world has been received within. Something rises from within. The separation will be resolved when what rises within matches up with what is confronted in the outer world.

Further inner work to get in touch with the feelings, thoughts and outer work to investigate the world further is needed to arrive at the match. But whether I put the effort into the situation or not will depend on the intensity of the desire.