Lori's comments here http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2185 [1] made me reflect again on the role of feeling in the coming into being of knowledge. One of my favourite bands has a song about something a bit similar:
Bigger Picture - The Waterboys
I'm starting to see a bigger picture
I'm beginning to colour it in
I'm starting to see a bigger picture
I'm beginning to colour it in
My soul the sky, my heart a sun
My mind a world - my only one
My thoughts the people, the world around
My dreams the kings - or the clowns
I'm starting to see a bigger picture
I'm beginning to colour it in
I'm starting to see a bigger picture
I'm beginning to colour it in
The continents and the seven oceans
Bound the range of my emotions
My time is long but not forever
My moods are the changing wind and weather
I'm starting to see a bigger picture
I'm beginning to colour it in
I'm starting to see a bigger picture
I'm beginning to colour it in
Colour it in !
Colour it in !
Part of the passage from Chapter 6 of PoF being reflected on in the thread above was:
Distinct from this determination is another which depends on our particular organization. Our organization is indeed a special, fully determined entity. Each of us combines special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of intensity, with his percepts. This is just the individual element in the personality of each one of us. It is what remains over when we have allowed fully for all the determining factors in our surroundings.
What does this mean for me? It means to me that my own individuality has a special role in the coming into being of knowledge (which is not identical with thinking). It certainly may be that "inasmuch as I think, I am the All-One Being". I must start with thinking as Steiner has shown in PoF, however as Steiner so movingly puts it in Chapter 2 of PoF, this quest for knowledge is an individual affair which I must sort out with the world, it is not ultimately a matter of theory to be sorted out by defining words in one way or another, it is a matter of working my way back to it.
However true it may be that we have estranged ourselves from Nature, it is none the less true that we feel we are in her and belong to her. It can be only her own working which pulsates also in us.
We must find the way back to her again. A simple reflection can point this way out to us. We have, it is true, torn ourselves away from Nature, but we must none the less have taken something of her with us into our own being. This element of Nature in us we must seek out, and then we shall find the connection with her once more. Dualism fails to do this. It considers human inwardness as a spiritual entity utterly alien to Nature, and then attempts somehow to hitch it on to Nature. No wonder that it cannot find the connecting link. We can find Nature outside us only if we have first learned to know her within us. What is akin to her within us must be our guide. This marks out our path of enquiry. We shall attempt no speculations concerning the interaction of Nature and spirit. Rather shall we probe into the depths of our own being, to find there those elements which we saved in our flight from Nature.
Investigation of our own being must give us the answer to the riddle. We must reach a point where we can say to ourselves, “Here we are no longer merely ‘I’, here is something which is more than ‘I’.”
I am well aware that many who have read thus far will not find my discussion “scientific”, as this term is used today. To this I can only reply that I have so far been concerned not with scientific results of any kind, but with the simple description of what every one of us experiences in his own consciousness. The inclusion of a few phrases about attempts to reconcile man's consciousness and the world serves solely to elucidate the actual facts. I have therefore made no attempt to use the various expressions “I”, “Spirit”, “World”, “Nature”, in the precise way that is usual in psychology and philosophy. The ordinary consciousness is unaware of the sharp distinctions made by the sciences, and my purpose so far has been solely to record the facts of everyday experience. I am concerned, not with the way in which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with the way in which we experience it in every moment of our lives.
This way back Steiner points to must involve the individual element of feeling.