“I should like to call the dependence of my percept-picture on my place of observation, 'mathematical,' and its dependence on my organization, 'qualitative.' The former determines the proportions of size and mutual distances of my percepts, the latter their quality. The fact that I see a red surface as red -- this qualitative determination -- depends on the organization of my eye”  4-5 The World As Percept.

     This study section harkens back to the above taken from chapter four.  We are given an individual perspective unique to each of us based upon our specific place in the world.  Our percepts are individually unique based upon our mathematical placement.  However, I have another basis for determining individuality that is based upon my organization.  This is a qualitative basis.  If I think of my organization as one whole sense organ, then feeling would be the expression of its sensibility.  The quality of the impressions are based upon how deeply, or shallow, my feelings are—to what extent my organization is able to competently function.  Is my organization “balanced” or “imbalanced?”  These two unique determining aspects of my individuality will be lost to the whole unless I am able to bring them into resolution with the whole, to see how my uniqueness, mathematical and qualitative aspects, are united with the whole of reality.  Only an absolute presence is able to accomplish this.  A presence that is present throughout and within all of creation and is in fact the origin of all creativity.

Hi Gerald,

Thanks for this - as usual, very clear and thought-provoking comments.  I find your connection back to the passage in Chapter 4 very interesting.

It seems to me that in that passage the thinking underlying the presentation was - of necessity in the context of the overall development of the book - much more mechanical, spatial and rudimentary in a sense.  Just applying concepts like distance, proportion, size etc.  Here our world concept has been enriched by finding a place for feelings.  But as you say, definitely building on and connecting back to the development in Chapter 4.

You say "only an absolute presence is able to accomplish this" above.  By "presence", do you mean what we find through the observation of thinking as we are led to earlier on in the book?  Or in plainer terms maybe what is expressed in the sentence "Inasmuch as we think, we are the All-One Being"?

And thanks Tom for the great pictures, I really appreciate them - they really bring the text to life and make it much more real and practical, for me at least!

Section 6.9 at first seemed something of a letdown after the magnificence of 6.8, where feelings climb to the heights of cosmic ideals. Here we've come back to purely cognitive individuality, determined by our percepts, which are determined by the place where we stand in the world, which no other person can share in all its points. This is very much like the mathematical determination of our percepts in 4.5, as Gerald has pointed out. If it were somehow possible for every fact of my external life to be turned into data, and fed into a computer, then a picture could be generated that would be unlike anyone else's.

The picture would have to contain, not only every percept, but every concept that came my way during the course of my upbringing and education. Nevertheless, as long as the factors are all external, the picture would be incomplete. It would be like a connect-the-dots puzzle without its numerical key: a cloud of percepts and concepts with their connections missing. Everyone would have a different cloud of dots, and, taken as is and for themselves, these cloud-pictures would all be equally meaningless.

I have to draw the lines between the dots, and make the percepts and concepts part of my experience, with my own activity. This activity is making mental pictures, and it depends on my mental and bodily organization, how they function (as Steiner points out in 6.2 and 6.4) and how I'm disposed to use them at any given moment.

This is a more intimate picture of what individuality means. What was formerly a cloud of dots now starts to form itself into a recognizable shape.

If I say that percepts and concepts are like the dots in a connect-the-dots puzzle, and that my mental picturing is drawing lines between them, that itself is a mental picture. It's my special way of relating to the percepts and concepts involved, to try to penetrate to some deeper meaning of the words and sentences on the page, to turn them into memorable experiences. This mental picture, the result of my willed activity, has also changed the way I'll experience certain percepts and certain concepts in the future. Whenever I see a connect-the-dots puzzle, it will have been uplifted into significance by being linked to a passage in PoF, for the concept of "mental picturing" will interpenetrate it to some degree, and vice versa.

I'm also free to think of all the dots as the cloud of potential experience that surrounds me at any given moment. I've come to this given moment as a result of all the things that happened to me and all my decisions (and indecisions) in my whole life up to now. This is a "special determination" as Steiner says here, resulting from my place in life. It's my whole past that determines the place where I stand in life right now, but I still have the freedom to connect my percepts with concepts they haven't been connected to before, forming new mental pictures, and thereby shaping the potential of all future moments.

So in that sense the present moment is determined but also holds the potential for freedom, the freedom of thinking and making mental pictures. It's the line drawing of my individuality; what's left is to color it with feeling.

Is there a kind of determinism inherent in the individuality Steiner is describing here? In 6.9, the place where we stand in the world determines our range of percepts, which are what we have to link with our concepts to form our mental pictures. In 6.10, external determining factors are stripped away, and our subjective feelings are left to define our limits. "Our organization is indeed a special, fully determined entity," Steiner says here. Bad news for the idea of freedom, or so it seems!

What happens to some of us when an external limitation is swept away, and our "special, fully determined organization" is given free rein? Life and literature are full of such stories. Someone wins the lottery and can live out his fantasies, with disastrous results. A man of the people rises to political power and bleeds his country dry. And who among us hasn't caught himself reliving the limiting patterns of a parent-child relationship long after all external parental restraints have been removed?

So what are we to do with this "special, fully determined organization" of ours? In one sentence I find that feeling, like the human being, is also three-fold. "Each of us combines special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of intensity, with his percepts."

Thinking is absolutely to be found in this sentence, for a feeling is a percept, and there's no connecting any two percepts except through thinking.

Willing is also implied. Not only is it I who combine my own feelings with my own percepts, but I do this "in the most varying degrees of intensity " To me this variation applies, not just to different individuals, but also to my own active combining of feeling with percept at any given moment. I don't have to pick up the first crayon that presents itself and start scribbling away with force. (Whose box of crayons is it, anyway?)

This may be anthroposophically incorrect, but if feeling can be thought to have a willing part, then it's easy to think that one thing this will-in-feeling might do is to put itself behind a feeling and allow it to unfold further, or let it pass.

A thinking-in-feeling might somehow discriminate, from inside the feeling, as in 5.10, where thinking decides that "the snail belongs to a lower level of organization than the lion." Scenting snail in my first reaction to a phenomenon, the thinking and willing (of feeling) might together nudge me in the direction of lion instead.

So, what I find in this part of PoF, where the determining factors of my organization and my place in life are laid out, is a survey of the basic raw materials we have to learn how to work with, interior and exterior. By learning to work with them, we can start to break through the isolation of being inside our own skins, at least sometimes. As the Chapter Six introduction has it, we can turn (at least sometimes!) away from the I that is "a percept of myself as subject," and toward that I who is "a part of the universal world process." And again, as in Chapter Two ("Two souls, alas, reside within my breast") we can reach the point where we can say, "Here we are no longer merely 'I', here is something which is more than 'I'."(2.10)

Hi Tom,

At first when I saw you were doing these illustrations for PoF, I thought mmmm what is he doing this for?  Being from the old school of studying PoF, I felt all one needed was to really work diligently with the book in one's thinking (with a study group if possible) and wala, "success."   But looking at what you are doing here, I have changed my mind.  I find myself really enjoying your illustrations and looking forward to what you will come up with next.  Keep on keeping on.

Love,
Patri