The German and Swiss readers of this journal are too concerned with the development of their <egos< to make any contribution, whereas the English speaking readers are too concerned with more interesting subjects such as the other journals reveal.

Thinking is necessarily indefinable because it is that which defines all things. Therefore it is beyond subject and object. It cannot be subjective in itself. You do not think. Thinking acts through you. Were it not for thinking you would not know that you have a private mind. Thinking creates all thoughts, concepts and ideas and then looks upon them. It observes its own creations, sees them truely, lives in them, merely experiences them etc. Thinking is the inner god.

What does that have to do with the problem of any difference between meanings of both words?

Edward Udell replies:

Yes! This is one of the central conundrums of Steiner's outlook on things. But I believe it has a solution, and the solution is one of Steiner's most crucial.

1. On the one hand, in the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner tells us that one cannot observe thinking at the moment of its occurance, any more than one can see the back of one's head if one turns around quickly enough. One can only see the object of one's thinking, or else some past thinking (one's own or someone else's past thinking) but one cannot directly observe one's own current thinking.

2. On the other hand, Steiner spoke often about directly seeing one's thinking. How to resolve this seeming paradox? Steiner himself, as I recall, comments on it, in The Boundaries of Natural Science. And since Steiner has imprinted so strongly on my memory, I can find the passage in 5 seconds, though I read it like 20 years ago. It is from Chapter 4. If you go here, and count 5 paragraphs down, you will find this quote:

"One cannot actually think thinking any more than one can “iron” iron or “wood” wood. But one can do something else. What one can do is attempt to follow the paths that are opened up in thinking when it becomes more and more rational, to pursue them in the way one does through the discipline of mathematical thinking. If one does this, one enters via a natural inner progression into the realm that I sought to consider in my Philosophy of Freedom. What one attains in this way is not a thinking about thinking. One can speak of thinking about thinking in a metaphorical sense at best. One does attain something else, however: what one attains is an actual viewing [Anschauen] of thinking, but to arrive at this “viewing of thinking,” it is necessary first to have acquired a concrete notion of the nature of sense-free thinking. One must have progressed so far in the inner work of thinking that one attains a state of consciousness in which one recognizes one's thinking to be sense-free merely by grasping that thinking, by “viewing” it as such."

Of course, what that Steiner paragraph means is not obvious. If someone thinks it's obvious, there's an excellent chance he hasn't understood the paragraph. To understand it is to begin to understand an essential part of the core of anthroposophy.

Steiner's Ph.D. thesis, together with The Philosophy of Freedom, and Goethean science in general, are keys to understanding that passage. But I think those books and that passage, and anthroposophy in general, can only be correctly understood by an intellect that is mobile insofar as one's whole being becomes mobile as a unity. If one works with the intellect alone, one will not be able to make it sufficiently mobile and metamorphic, even though one might be intensely intellectually active in some important ways. Action with one's whole being is the only source of the fundamental data that can allow one to fully perceive the nature of thinking and of concepts.

Action with one's whole being really means some degree, however minor, of initiation, i.e., of stepping into the unknown, of facing death of the known, and facing death itself, intentionally, which is in a sense an ultimate decision requiring courage and therefore tending to mobilize the whole self as a unity. Stepping very consciously into the unknown of one's whole being and of the spirit, dissolves one's being so that one experiences spiritual death and then being reborn in a new form. One consciously experiences transformation from within, which means one sees from within the very process of emergence of new being. One sees, that is, into the core of the creative process, because it is one's own being that is coming to be. In so far as creation is involved, that which emerges is really new, and has in a way no precedent. To that extent, no prior cause explains it. It contains its cause within itself. In the creative process, when it takes over one's whole being in some degree of initiation, one sees for oneself the first cause of what is being created/recreated, the first cause behind which there is no further cause hidden, the first cause wherein everything becomes to some extent transparent and visible and one sees to the very bottom of existence, i.e., one sees God or the spirit to some extent face-to-face.

Only some degree, however slight, of experiences approximating to what I've just described -- experiences of metamorphosis -- can provide the fundamental data without which it is impossible to fully understand the nature of thinking and of concepts -- their endlessly expandable potentials and their current limits. To bring one's whole being into action and decision is much rarer than people may think. Steiner's Ph.D. and The Philosophy of Freedom are conceived by a mind whose whole being of thought, feeling, and will are in a process of transformation, and can best be understood in that way. Those books can help to make more conscious what transformation is. They represent the initiation of the highest levels of Western philosophy.