Feelings, wo-o-o feelings...
In Chapter 6 of the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner says:
However, we are not satisfied merely to refer the percept, by means of thinking, to the concept, but we relate them also to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego. The expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure.
This important point in the book is not something I can just gloss over or nod sagely saying "yes, of course that's right". In other journals on this site we've spoken of the "drama of knowledge" and how some of us experience reading PoF as a kind of a dramatic piece, like a play, a musical symphony or something similar. As such, I think it should move us and engage us, motivate us to seek within our own experience, within our own being to see if what Steiner says rings true.
1. The Abstract Bit
With that said, here are some earlier comments I posted on this topic:
What the... ? What is Steiner talking about here? Not satisfied? Where did that come from? How can a feeling (which arises as a percept) be related directly to another percept and also to my own particular subjectivity (which is a percept also)? Isn't that relationship still knowable only through thinking? Is he sneaking something logically inconsistent in through the back door here?
The answer I think must be, most definitely no, Steiner is still playing by his own rules. However I think he is now venturing to characterise (through thinking) typical relationships between certain kinds of percepts as these can be discovered through thinking - here he characterises feeling (crudely, pleasure or displeasure) as an "expression" of "individual" relationships between certain percepts and our own individual subject. That is actually quite a long and abstract chain of ideas that we are then left to try and verify (or not) from our own experience. Whether this characterisation is accurate or not is for us to decide ultimately based on what we find, for example by observing the nature of our own feelings.
What feelings are still can only be known through the route of thinking as established earlier in the book, there is no magic "ding an sich" or "thing in itself" of feeling being snuck in here as some more direct relationship between percept and percept that bypasses the concept and hence thinking, however I might attempt to formulate what Steiner is pointing to here like this:
Inasmuch as I think, I am the All-One Being
Inasmuch as I feel, I am my own invididual Ego
2. The Experiencing Bit
Now, how can I test out what Steiner claims about feelings? So, I feel happy because it's a nice day. There are percepts relating to the sunny spring day, and to my feelings. So far so good, but how does Steiner describe feelings again?
However, we are not satisfied merely to refer the percept, by means of thinking, to the concept, but we relate them also to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego. The expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure.
So, I am not satisfied merely to refer the percept by means of thinking to the concept ("it is daytime") but I also relate this percept to my particular subjectivity (the little "me", this person here and now, not the "big" me of whom Steiner says "Inasmuch as I think, I am the All-One Being"). So I say "it's a nice day" or "I like the weather today" or even just "I'm feeling good" without acknowledging any connection to the spring day.
Or another example - say I open an envelope and read "you have just won ten thousand dollars". I think "I have just won ten thousand dollars"... whoa... "I have just won ten thousand dollars". The feelings, as Steiner says, definitely connect my particular subjectivity, my individual Ego, with the percept (the letter in this case more or less and the experiences I have as I read it).
Now to the important point... how do I find this experience of feeling relates to the experience of observing thinking which Steiner has led us to earlier in the book? I personally find that it is not completely knowable and transparent in the same way that thinking is, there seems to be an element acting within it which is hidden from me, foreign to me, in a sense even influencing or controlling me from outside. I do not find this in the pure experience of thinking itself.
But don't I experience feelings within the experience of observing thinking? Yes I do, and there are certainly degrees, but in general I find the purer the experience of observing thinking the purer and higher the feelings are. The feelings seem to participate in and gain more and more of the spiritual clarity weaving within thinking the further I take this experience.
In this sense my own experience certainly agrees with what Jeff has been implying - that in a sense feeling is contained within this experience of living thinking. Steiner also explicitly stated this in a 1918 Addition to Chapter 8:
If we turn towards thinking in its essence, we find in it both feeling and will, and these in the depths of their reality; if we turn away from thinking towards “mere” feeling and will, we lose from these their true reality.
This of course is worked out in more detail in the rest of Chapters 6, 7 and 8 - stay tuned!
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Tim, I think Steiner's
Tim, I think Steiner's quote from the chapter 8 addition is profound:
If we turn towards thinking in its essence...
I believe there is something very helpful in the phrase "turning towards". My fear of course is how people will read his use of "in":
if we turn towards thinking in its essence, we find IN it both feeling and will, and these in the depths of their reality.
I think so much is lost if we read "in" to say "inside", as in, "If you look in the box you will find a ball and a spring." If we use "in" that way, we end up thinking of the three (thinking, feeling, willing) as standing next to each other
.
However, if we read "in" to point to the nature of the thing itself- as in, "If we really listen the melody we find in it a joyful nostalgia- then we see that thinking, feeling and willing are three manifestations of what is inherently one.
Tim, you said:
I personally find that it is not completely knowable and transparent in the same way that thinking is, there seems to be an element acting within it which is hidden from me, foreign to me, in a sense even influencing or controlling me from outside. I do not find this in the pure experience of thinking itself.
I'm not quite sure how to ask the question I have, so I'll let it come three times. Perhaps you'll taste my question somewhere in the relation between these three formulations...
a. Is there anything that you find in your experience of thinking itself that you then can see is a part of any experience you have?
b. Does your experience of thinking in itself include something that is inherent in all of your experience?
c. Does the experience of thinking itself sensitize you to the essence of your "ordinary" experience?
I guess the corollary might be asked:
Does your ordinary experience include the essence of what you experience in thinking itself?
Your post is helping me ask a new question, but I'll save that for a journal entry...Thanks very much!
Jeff
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Easy to answer those questions...
a. Yes but not always recognised as such at the time.
b. Yes I would describe it as being at the "core" of ordinary experience. But that's not a really good way of saying it...
c. Yes it starts me (little me) on a path of knowledge, of self-knowledge and of world-knowledge. Both are necessary for a true science (natural-spiritual philosophy as a path into the future) which then merges with the paths of art (creation) and religion (reverence or reunion with spirit).
In and Postmodernism
Hi Jeff,
Sorry to post yet again but the questions you raise are just so darned interesting...:-)
About that little word "in" - what comes to mind is Derrida's dictum (I think it was him wasn't it or was that him quoting another postmodernist? In any case that doesn't really matter for a postmodernist does it :-) that "there is nothing outside the text".
I have always thought that in his own intellectualised (but not intellectual) way Derrida was coming at the same reality that PoF leads us to - that there is nothing outside thinking as it is experienced in its true reality.
The quote "there is nothing outside the text" I have always understood to mean that "the text" is recognised to be the all, everything, the complete context including how something was written and why, what was meant and so on. Not just these words on this bit of paper (or this website) but the complete context in which this makes sense. In that sense it must take thinking into account and PoF leads us into the understanding that the true being of thinking is in a sense the all, the All-One Being that we are when we think.
That is why I used the numbers 1, 1a and 1b to try and point to what I think you are also pointing to - that conceptual frameworks like percept, concept, mental picture, feeling are only partial descriptions of a reality (thinking as it is experienced) that contains and transcends them. We can get trapped into them and believe that we are talking about "something" that is "outside the text". But people are coming to realise now I think that that something is not real, it's just something we imagined was there.
When you say:Now, how can
When you say:
Now, how can I test out what Steiner claims about feelings? So, I feel happy because it's a nice day. There are percepts relating to the sunny spring day, and to my feelings.
I want to understand what you are saying from the inside. It's too easy for me to just let your words work alone.
I want to focus on the percepts that somehow relate to other things. In the image you present to us (a day with sun, a certain temp, etc..) you say that there are percepts and that these percepts can be related to "sunny spring day" and to "your feelings"......
Are you saying that you've got your feelings and the sunny spring day in one
part of your experience but that the percepts are apart from those two? It sounds like you are saying that the "sunny spring day" and your "feelings" have some kind of independence from your "percepts" until they are "related" to the percepts....Is that how you experience it? If so, I am interested in the actual experience you have before and after the "relating". Before the relating, what is happening.
As you well know, I have yet to locate the kind of separation that Steiner claims is happening. He says that I am
"not satisfied merely to refer the percept, by means of thinking, to the concept, but we relate them also to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego.
This makes it sound like I woke up and looked around robotically and noted "facts" like "sunny spring day"....and THEN not being satisfied to merely name the things in my environment I found a way to bring these observations into my observation named "self" and THEN generate feelings from this process.
Am I just being difficult here? Or is it true that Steiner seems to be saying that are feelings are the result of a process that starts with mere naming. I wake up and notice, "Boy, I feel great today!"....at what point did I become "dissatisfied" with the robotic naming of things in my environment.
I'm not saying that I can't think of special cases where we name things in a mechanical way and then...WOW....we suddently notice that we have a personal connection to them. But that is a special case and I think Steiner is trying to point to the structure of our typical experience. That is why I am so happy you chose a typical experience to bring to his analysis. I keep begging for examples because they let us actually relate to the book. Thanks for your "Great Day" example.
I don't want to come across as nit-picky. I don't want to come across as not being able to agree with the simplest things Steiner says. I really want to slow down and notice if my "feelings" are generated in the way he describes. Fortunately he does not present us with a complicated or obscure process; it is one we can easily examine in relation to our daily experience of feelings. I don't think it is a coincidence that I can't observe his notion of "relate" in the same way that I can't observe his notion of "connect" or "link" when he talks about "llinking" conepts to so-called percepts. This could be that I don't want to observe them for some reason. But I don't think so. My experience is that somebody is pointing at the table and asking me to look at the ball on it. I look right where she is pointing and I just see the surface of the table.
I've read your post very carefully before asking these questions. On the one hand, yes, I have a bias and I state it (it's related to my distrust of language; not inherently but in how modern concepts work their way into it)...But at least I'm wanting to stay with descriptions of experience so that my nit-pick can be picked on itself. I don't mind nit-pick when it's about describable pheneomena. It's hard when the nit-picks are about things that sound descriable but probably aren't....like if somebody says:
"when we greet a friend our soul expands into happiness because we relate the subtle energies of unnoticed memories to the unconscious anticipations of what is about to happen".....
is that use of "relate" as describable as the grammer makes it sound? Oh, grammer!!!!!!
Jeff
Relating Feelings
Hi Jeff,
Thanks I really appreciate how you take the time to read and reflect, I don't think you are nit-picking at all, your questions seem quite justified to me. I think there is always, always a better way of saying it, whatever "it" is... :-) Perhaps that's something of what Carl's getting at with his Principle of Reproduction, not sure yet...
I think the question you are always asking all of us on this website in different ways is "do you really experience this separation you seem to point to in your use of language"? In this case you've asked the question:
Are you saying that you've got your feelings and the sunny spring day in one part of your experience but that the percepts are apart from those two? It sounds like you are saying that the "sunny spring day" and your "feelings" have some kind of independence from your "percepts" until they are "related" to the percepts....Is that how you experience it? If so, I am interested in the actual experience you have before and after the "relating". Before the relating, what is happening.
To be quite honest, I have to say that my whole experience is a little bit artificial in that I have to, as it were, put on the conceptual glasses of PoF and apply them to my experience. I find this to be an incredibly beneficial exercise but it is an exercise, it's not something that I would do naturally.
Steiner's conceptual presentation forces me to do this "artificial work" in thinking and observing to see if the result I arrive at agrees with what he claims or not. That's why I have recently compared my relationship to PoF to an exercise bike or something like that, I get on it to derive the benefit it gives me, but ultimately it (PoF) does not constrain me to rely on its particular framework. It (in conjunction with my own inner work) helps to make me a freer being, like one of those unfolding roses we see on this website...
All of this is said just as a preamble so you won't think I'm avoiding your question - I do believe like you do that unless we can relate abstract ideas to our own concrete personal experiences we are ultimately just reasoning off into oblivion - it has to mean something! And I mean "mean" ;-) in the deepest possible sense.
So let me go back again and see how it comes out this time in the light of your question:
I am looking in my experience for:
1. The polarity of "percept" and "concept" experienced in its reality through the living experience of thinking. Within that reality I am then looking for:
1a. Mental pictures - in Steiner's charming terminology already characterised as "invididualised concepts" or "the particularised percept which points to the concept".
1b. Feelings - characterised as something that "relates a percept to my individual subjectivity, to my individual ego". Contrasted with mental pictures under 1a.
This conceptual framework itself which Steiner has so carefully built up feels to me quite realistic, subtle and nuanced in that it allows me to place myself as an individual (little "me") within the bigger whole while still being able to know the connection. This contrasts with other sets of conceptual glasses like materialistic science which for me don't acknowledge the connection at all and completely obscure the presence or possibility of the free individual within reality.
So let's start again. It is a sunny day. I look out the window and think and feel "what a nice day". Now I reflect and see how the above framework of abstract concepts relates (or doesn't) to my actual experience:
1. Thinking weaving between the polarity of percept and concept. My starting point for reflection is that I think "what a nice day". That is a fact. I experience that feelings are associated with that thought.
1a. Mental pictures - now I start to dissect and realise that there are a swarm of initially unrecognised associations at work under the covers. I have previously experienced days throughout the year, both "nice" and "not so nice". I have memories of previous days in spring. Warmth and light are present and call up past associations. These seem to me to fit somewhat into the category of mental pictures as Steiner describes them.
1b. Feelings - the associations are not merely abstract "pictures" or individualised concepts, I find feelings within them that relate "spring day" to my individual subjectivity. This is already implied under my description of 1a. above. Certainly the conceptual separation into "percept", "concept", "thinking", "mental picture", "feeling" immediately sets a trap for me in that I may through applying this framework too rigidly fall back into what you so beautifully characterise as the "Separation Imagination".
But I feel good seems to me one way of describing some of the feeling aspect, as I said above. There are many many more, for example if I were to write a poem inspired by the feeling of this particular morning. But there is the possibility of simply wallowing in this feeling without further reflection. On the other hand, there is also the possibility of pushing the feeling away for a while because I have to concentrate and write another waffly post on this website :-)
I hope this has at least touched on some of your concerns and questions, I appreciate how you always make us question how we express things and revisit the actual experience rather than resting in some comforting abstraction that may not reflect reality at all. As Steiner said many times, one of the pitfalls of our modern era is the "love of ease". Staying put in mere intellectuality is increasingly becoming one of those easy-chairs from which we can pontificate about many things without really feeling or doing anything in particular at all. Perhaps it's even one of those self-massaging chairs, sounds very nice until one day the massaging mechanism goes crazy... :-)
Directly Referring
Tim, you're simply great. Thanks for responding.
You see my experience is that our ongoing experiencing can absorb any schema/symbol/mental picture/conceptualization we bring to it. And our experiencing will respond in exact ways using the specific schema we bring into it and being changed by that schema via their particular interaction. So you've just seen a beautiful moment between a man and his aging father in the park. Your heart is moved in a very profound way and you want to formulate your experiencing in some way. Now, pretend we can magically keep going back to the moment you are turning towards the felt-sense and we can give you all sorts of different schemas to take into it. At first we say, "find the flower of that moment".....so you turn towards it with "flower" and find that:
a. the man watched his father wilting and felt proud of his growth. Yes, that captured the felt-sense.... now take the concept of "concept" into your experiencing (felt-sense, intuiting)...
b. The man finally connected the concept of the father to the percept. yes, carries forward my intuiting... now take some mental pictures of dancing into the felt-meaning
c. The old man is now finally letting his son lead. experiencing is what Gendlin calls an unseparted multiplicity; there is no end to how it can be formulated. and the process of formulating carries the intuition forward uniquly, changing it by how it is changed by it.
My point: You wake up and experience something. If asked to put it in words you might say "what a wonderful day"....but before those words do their work, the unseparated multiplicity is there directly. If you read PoF and take it's terms into the experiencing, you will find those terms in the experience. This is why you will never find a PoF study group (or any other study group) that isn't finding the book to be true. I'm am never arguing against what anybody finds after they bring their particular schemas into their bodily felt-knowing. That is pointless because by the time anybody has carried forward an intuition with a particular set of mental pictures, they are fairly commited to the way those specific symbols interact with the pre-separated multiplicity that is their experiencing. I won't fight with that; that's like fighting with a song somebody is singing.
But where I get protective is when somebody then takes the formulations that came as a result of the particular workings of particular schemas and speaks as if those results were in there in the first place. Is there a way of studying and speaking about experiencing that does not lay our formulations "inside" of it as if we found them there? This is the edge that postmodern philosophy knows well. Derrida and Husserl and Sarte (and all the rest really) tried to map out this edge; they mostly decided to place some type of limit in cognition or language. PoF came before them and, therefore, did not have the benefit of what they accomplished, but it did have the solution!!!!! Steiner said that there would be thinkers shortly after him who would begin creating much more funcitonal language to explore epistemology...They came! I think Gendlin's loving mind has found wonderful links through the last century of western phenomenology.
I have no problem if the guy says, "I watched my father wilting today"....His words can take me into empathy. wonderful.... but it is different if he tries to place the "wilting" into the structure of the intuiting. He might write a great book on epistemology in which he argues that intuition is plant-like, and he might make all sorts of incredible analogies between our cognitive experiences and plant-growth, but I would not let the glory of his expressions distract me from recognizing that intuiting is prior to the wonderful ways his sybmols are interacting with it. No matter how cogently he tried to argue his symbols into the nature of intuition, I would not lose sight of the fact that I can directly refer to the nature of intuition and watch how it can absorbe and work within any set of symbols. It will only allow those symbols to carry it forward in very percise ways, but there is no conceptual gesture that inuition rejects.
This is why I don't buy the specific formulations in which Steiner tells us our feelings are the result of relating "over-there-percepts" with "over-there-concepts" with right-here-percept-of-self...while I do see how I can take those concepts into a felt-sense of my wake up experience and that they can "lift" out aspects of that experience...I'm not comfortable forgetting that what they "lift out" was not there before.
So when you start with
So let me go back again and see how it comes out this time in the light of your question: I am looking in my experience for:
1. The polarity of "percept" and "concept" experienced in its reality through the living experience...
I want to stop you fast. I have no beef with you "looking in your experience for 'the polarity of '''percept""" and """concept""" experienced in its...." because I know your intuiting will glady use those to be carried foward and articulated. And there are obviously contexts (the anthroposophical society) in which those very formulations will have people's attention. But my questions are asking you to say what you can about your experiencing before it has been asked to interact with any particular set of symbols (from a philosophy book, mental pictures from you past...)....This requires I call "turning towards" and Gendlin somtimes calls "Direct Reference"....I believe that Direct Reference is the actual starting point of PoF, not the Imagination Separation. The difficulty is in describing Direct Reference in a manner that doesn't usher in the effect of later concepts as if they were found originally. The effects (extentions... carrying forward...work...help) of the symbols is wonderful but we still can study Direct Reference itself. PoF, PoF!
My scepticism is not that your words are nonesense. I am only sceptical that the results of your "looking" were there in the actual experience. It seems to me that every spiritual teacher will lay down a set of very useful symbols and mental pictures. That due to our particular conditionings (as groups and individuals), we will be drawn to the different types of conceptualizations/practices....But what I find breathtaking about PoF is that it offers something new and fresh. It offers the chance to not just formulate a new vocabulary, but to actually begin finding ways to study intuiting without being forced to simply follow the power of our formulations. We can always go back into the felt-sense and go from there. We can find ways to let the "going back" be our teacher rather than the wonderful formulations that fall out. So Steiner said:
we are not satisfied merely to refer the percept, by means of thinking, to the concept, but we relate them also to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego. The expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure.
He says that "feeling" is the expression of a specific type of relationship: we first "relate" these conceptual things to these perceptual things and then we relate the combination of them to this thing that is our particular subjectivity. The effect of this relating is pleasure or displeasure. Ok. So i wake up and feel great. If I take all those terms into my felt-sense right then, I'm certain they will draw out so much (I know because that's all I used to do!!). But what about staying with the intuiting itself? What about watching IT as opposed to watching the effects of how it will interact with a particular set of symbols? (we will see that no matter what anyway) I am saying that all of the "relating" that Steiner speaks of will not be found if one places ones attention on IT. However IT will relate in very specific ways to any conceptual schema brought to it, including, of course, the schema of "relating". The power of PoF, in my opinion, is that we can finally observe this relationship between intuiting and conceptualization without coloring what we find with the results of the conceptualizations we bring to the observing itself. But iti's late now......
Thanks so much, Tim. Jeff