I tried the imagination exercise presented in Section 4.3: " We must imagine that a being with fully developed human intelligence originates out of nothing and confronts the world. What it would be aware of, before it sets its thinking in motion, would be the pure content of observation."

It was a beautiful afternoon and I stood under the oak trees, trying to relax my mind and let all thoughts fly away, watching the moving light and shadow, feeling the light breeze, breathing in the fragrance of the meadow. It was relaxing and enlivening at the same time. Thinking was like a hawk hovering high up, looking for something to strike.

I couldn't achieve complete thoughtlessness, but could almost pretend I had. There was a kind of breathlessness about it too, or as if I were holding my breath, and the next moment thinking had plunged in, drawing invisible connecting threads everywhere. Later other things appeared: memories, associations, opinions, mild anxieties, etc., tarnishing the day's beauty.

But the original thinking hadn't tarnished the beauty, or diminished it in any way. It was all focused outwardly and made my outer experience richer. I thought, if only I could focus my thoughts outwardly all the time, how happy I might be!

I know that's not really true, but it seemed so at that moment.

It's interesting to me that the Realist, in order to answer the simplest question about the objects of observation that we all encounter, is led to an exercise in imaginative thinking that requires her to imagine a completely unrealistic situation!

By following the argument in Section 4.3, the Realist comes a few steps closer to being able to identify with the Idealist point of view.

She realizes, through an imaginative exercise, that the relationships she "sees" in the real world around her are only given to her by thinking. At first this makes her a little nervous. The very basis for her point of view is that the real world can be understood and worked with. If her thinking is merely subjective, how can she trust it to give her an accurate picture of the world?

Then she sees how thinking can be checked for logic. For example, the erroneous "pure subjectivity" of thinking can't be used to disprove the validity of the relationships thinking establishes. This doesn't prove that the relationships are valid, but only that they can't be proven invalid with this argument, leaving the question open.

The topic of the next section, which shows how ideas are corrected by percepts, gives the Realist even more confidence in thinking.

There are so many things to love about this section: Copernicus replacing our sensory experience of the sky with an abstract idea of the Sun as the center of our Universe; the Sun itself, director of this Empiricist chapter in a manner of speaking, appearing as a character, like Alfred Hitchcock stepping off a train in one of his movies; the child reaching for the moon; the man born blind who receives his sight, not directly from Christ now, but through the agency of modern science.

But in order to get at those things I love, I have to leap over the hurdle of percepts correcting percepts. Not sure I can do that! Percepts can't correct anything -- they just are. They bear no relation to anything else whatsoever except what thinking gives them!

1) What's the relation of myself, as conscious subject, to the object of my observation? Without myself as conscious subject, there could be no object of observation! At least not the way Steiner defines it here. (And without an object of observation, would I be conscious for long?) Even if the object of observation is an Idea, it needs someone to be conscious of it for it to really live in the world. It has to have a home in some being or other!

2) Steiner defines "percept" at great length here. In the last section, it was more or less a sensation coming from outside or even from inside (pleasure or pain.) Now the definition is broadened to include all feelings, and thinking "as it first appears." But it's also carefully distinguished from "the process of observation." All sensations are percepts, but can the process of observation itself be a kind of percept? I wonder!!! Perhaps the process of observing is like thinking. They both have products (percepts, concepts) but we can't observe them as we do them, only a moment later looking back?

3) Now we meet the Naive Man, who believes the external world is independent of him. He sees a tree and believes that it stands there with the colors that he sees in its various parts. He sees the sun as a disc and notices that it changes position throughout the day. He believes that all this happens as he sees it with his eyes. Then a new percept comes to his attention. Perhaps he walks up to the tree and sees that its bark is not brown, but rather grey, black, green, a whole bunch of different colors. Then the next time he walks by it at a distance he sees that the bark looks brownish again. He's not going to presume that the tree changes its colors when he walks up to it, so he's going to change his idea about colors. What's multi-colored close up can look brownish from a distance. This is a concept. The next time he sees some other tree with what looks like brownish bark, he'll have this concept in his repertoire. He''ll look at the tree and pull this concept out of his store of concepts, but in order to do so he'll have to perceive it by remembering it. The percept of "muli-colored-to-brownish" corrects the percept of "brown." Both are actually concepts, but for the one to correct the other they have to be percepts as well. Otherwise they wouldn't come to the forefront of his mind and interrelate. But as long as he retains his character of "Naive Man," he won't notice himself doing this. He'll think his eyes are fooling him when they show him the brownish, distant bark.

4) I can only correct my mental image of sunrise and sunset by forcibly replacing a breathtakingly lovely, moving experience with the image of vast cosmic bodies in motion. The only way I can imagine these vast cosmic bodies is to picture them as about the size of beach balls, baseballs, and peas. Very undignified! I read somewhere that such a thing as our solar system could never be directly perceived, that the distances are so vast that if someone could get far enough back in space to see the entire solar system, the planets would be invisible because they'd be so tiny. The earth travels around the sun, but the Idea that the earth travels around the sun can never be anything other than an abstract one, one that lives completely in the realm of ideas and only has a home on earth because it lives in our minds. First Copernicus's mind, and now ours. We each have to repeat, in miniature, the Copernican revolution for ourselves. The fact that we do this despite our senses' evidence to the contrary shows the power of Ideas.

Hi Lori,

Interesting reflections... on point 2), my initial reaction is that I think the way Steiner defines his terms does not really allow us to speak of "the process of perception or observation" in an abstract way as something observable unless we conceive of it as including some kind of thinking activity and therefore taking place on the stage of consciousness.  For otherwise I think this would mean in Steiner's terms something like "the process of bringing the percept into being or creating it".  This kind of idea brings a whole lot of presuppositions with it.  I believe his meaning is that percepts just are...  See his later comments in Chapter 5 where he says that the question as to what a percept is is meaningless:

What, then is a percept? The question, asked in this general way, is absurd. A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thinking? The question concerning the “what” of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept. From this point of view, the question of the subjectivity of percepts, in the sense of critical idealism, cannot be raised at all.

I think Steiner's whole striving in this part of the book is to avoid the subjectivist trap which leads to Kant's dreaded "ding and sich" or "thing in itself" which exists but cannot be known. 

What I mean is that, as soon as we start believing our thinking activity is subjective, that is, restricted to our individual being, we immediately lose sight of the connecting link with the rest of the world.  Then we say, percepts (or perceptions) are created by our own individual organisation so we cannot "really" know what is outside of us.  Steiner goes into this in great detail later on in this chapter.

In 3 and 4 I think you are leading on to the later presentation of the idea of a mental picture as an "individualised concept".

"Every extension of the circle of my percepts compels me to correct my picture of the world." If this is true, how can we ever trust our mental pictures? For they'll be constantly exposed to new percepts that may reveal their folly. And since there's no possible end to perceiving, no mental picture I could come up with would ever be really safe from further percepts!

This has been bothering me, but then I got to thinking about what an "extension of the circle of my percepts" might mean. I used to think it meant every new percept, but now I'm not so sure. What if it means, every percept that comes to me from a larger or a different point of view? If I'm adding to my store of percepts but staying within the limited circle of my experience, my world view stays the same. But if I gain percepts from outside my experience, everything within the original circle could shift and change.

It occurs to me that even with the most clear-cut mathematical determination of our percepts, it's possible to grant validity to all points of view. No one can deny the validity of the experience of sunrise and sunset. From a larger point of view that's not what happens; the sun neither rises nor sets, and the idea that it could hide behind a cloud is laughable. But from the largest point of view of all, all viewpoints are valid, because the largest point of view sees how all the other points of view arise. The largest point of view contains all others, and transcends them.

Therefore, my goal and my joy should be to look at life from this largest of all possible points of view.

Yes I agree I think the sunrise/sunset example is great, thanks Lori!