Over the last two years I've enjoyed looking at the structure of POF through the lens of Tom's systematic study of the book. One of the facets he pointed out is that the first four sections of each chapter give expression to what can be seen as four basic points of view regarding the question posed in the introduction.

In Chapter One, sections 1.1--1.4, four different characters express their views about whether freedom is possible for human beings. In 1.1, the idea of "freedom of indifferent choice" is dismissed by Strauss, on the grounds that every choice between two possible courses of action is due to a perfectly definite reason, and therefore can't possibly be indifferent. In 1.2, the dogma of free will, that we're free to desire or not to desire, is rebutted by Spencer, who cites the scientific analysis of consciousness as ample proof to the contrary.

In 1.3, Spinoza distinguishes beings who are able to act freely out of the necessity of their own nature, from those whose actions are necessitated by external forces. Only God acts out of the necessity of his own nature; the rest of us are compelled by external forces, no matter whether we think we're carrying out our own desires or not. If our desires happen to coincide with what we're being compelled to do, we have the illusion of freedom.

In 1.4, von Hartmann demolishes the idea that we're free to create our own motive out of whatever mental picture arouses our desire, by pointing out that our characterological disposition, determined by forces beyond our control, necessitates those desires. So in a way he says, unlike Spinoza, that human beings also act out of the necessity of their own nature, but that necessity is not freedom.

In an earlier study group, Tom asked, which of these four main points of view do we feel most at home with? Freedom of indifferent choice, freedom of desire, freedom of putting ourselves in line with what we're being compelled to do by external forces, freedom of expressing our own character in our choice of motives? Back then, I realized that of the four, I'd choose "freedom of desire." I realized that in a certain way I don't really care why I want to study POF; I just want to, and that's enough. So I suppose that's being willing to accept desire, or affinity, as the origination point of an action.

This puts me in opposition to Spencer, who demands that,in the scientific spirit, we analyze our own consciousness and realize that we don't have any choice in what we desire. So one of my self-chosen duties, as Joel puts it, in studying POF is to take up Spencer's challenge.

The forces that operate on us and cause us to become 'Spinoza's Stone' are manifold. Speaking as someone who has battled with what are officially thought of as 'mental health issues'the struggle with many forces that render me unfree feel, at times, profoundly difficult. Clearly, we do not all carry the same burden in this respect; for some the forces are less crushing than others. I f we look clearly at this aspect of life we can see that, in extreme cases,the forces operating on people crush them entirely, render them numb or send them to sleep on the spiritual plane. It varies massively from individual to individual. The sad thing is that life would have such an enhanced meaning if we could see that to help each other in this respect as the main purpose of living would, in itself, be a long way on the road to healing.

To start with, a question as an aside - In terms of the twelve world views, don't Spinoza's views as expressed here contain quite a bit of Mathematism but especially Rationalism? Apologies if I haven't quite understood these things, they are still new to me.

More importantly, this passage is placing what seems to me to be still a very common way of thinking about the world into the chemist's retort, as it were, and exposing it to the warmth and light of clear and practical thinking.

Today, the attitude of mind and soul applied to study of astronomical phenomena, particle physics etc., is still basically the attitude expressed here: we think of the world as composed of a collection of more or less discrete entities subjected to external forces evolving in time in accordance with strict mathematical laws. Even the revolutionary developments in the last hundred years of quantum physics, field theories, relativity, chaos theory etc. have not really yet stopped most people, including scientists, from adopting this as their fundamental starting point when thinking of physical phenomena.

When we study something like a stone moving in the earth's gravitational field, this approach finds its justification in the fact that we can calculate the parabolic form of the stone's trajectory and confirm that our observations of the stone match our predictions.

However, it is all too common that when we approach the phenomena of human behaviour from the point of view of present-day consciousness, we possess nothing in our intellectual armoury, as it were, that enables us to view these phenomena with comparable clarity.

As a result, we are all-too-inclined to apply a rather lazy approach (and one that, from my recollection, is all too frequently encouraged, labelled as brilliance and rewarded in academic circles) - working by analogy using an example from a field where this clarity of thought exists.

In the case of the thoughts under consideration here, as in many other similar cases, an immense and completely unjustified leap is made in thinking - from stones to human beings - and sweeping, unjustified assertions are made while the fact that we have, in the space of one paragraph, leapt from a realm where we can have comparative certainty (i.e. the movement of a stone thrown through the air) to one where no such certainty exists, at least to begin with, is hidden from view.

Does all of this sound too theoretical? Just listen to scientists, politicians, commentators, academics, experts of various kinds holding forth on any topic to do with human behaviour: global warming, the economy, health etc. Doesn't the way human beings are spoken of in many cases have much more in common with Spinoza's stone than what we know from every day life as the real human being?

Or take any of the multitude of theories advanced over the last hundred or more years to explain human beings: Richard Dawkins' assertion that all of life is simply a manifestation of the "selfish gene", Freud's assertion that all of human behaviour is controlled by repressed unconscious urges, Skinner's claim that all of human behaviour is controlled by Pavlovian "carrot and stick" conditioning and so on.

Do we really believe that the certain knowledge and application of ONLY chemical laws will enable us to improve community health, prevent undesirable behaviour in human beings and so on? Or that the application of ONLY economic thinking in the right way will increase human prosperity and happiness? or... the examples go on.

Surely we need to start, as Steiner does here, with the real phenomena we are interested in: human deeds. As soon as this is done, the absurdity of Spinoza's approach becomes apparent.

I wonder if we can take it for granted that when a philosopher speaks about his ideas of freedom, he's speaking out of his own experience of his own limitations. So Steiner tells us, in 1.1, that Strauss thinks he has grasped the concept of indifferent choice, refuted it within himself, and decided that it has no bearing on the moral life. Steiner finds this to be a superficial approach. Perhaps Strauss had the experience of feeling free, morally, in spite of believing in the materialistic philosophy, and just decided to stop thinking about it at that point. (I suppose the instruction in this section could be, examine our thoughts and have the courage to follow them all the way to the end.)

Then in 1.2, Steiner presents Spencer, in a book about psychology, deriding the dogma of free will. He must have analyzed his own consciousness a lot and discovered that all his desires depended on something else. He couldn't "want whatever he wanted." This is a step forward from Strauss's position because he's taking a stand based on thought. The instruction might be, "Analyze your consciousness, and see where your desires come from."

In 1.3, Steiner gives us Spinoza, and his analogy of the rock. Whenever I read this part, I remember what Josiah Royce, an American philosopher contemporary with Steiner, had to say about Spinoza in his book of lectures, "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy." You can't read it without feeling that Spinoza was a beautiful soul. Condemned as an atheist, he retracted from society and carved out for himself a narrow, but deep, simple life as a watchmaker. His philosophy is also said to be narrow but deep.

Royce, speaking of the naturalist philosophers of the 17th century, said, "These men may be cold; for my part I find a clearness about the snowy mountain summits amongst which they live, which goes far to compensate for the hardness of the outlines of their world. That they, too, have a genuine and lofty piety to proclaim to us, I shall try to exemplify in the case of Spinoza."

And he said, "This great thinker himself was, to be sure, no universal genius in philosophy. His doctrine, compared with those that have come since, is comparatively simple, clear-cut, crystalline in its hardness and isolation, and yet, how many-sided even this crystal, how varied the impressions that it has produced on those who have seen it in different lights! Judging by some of the commentators of Spinoza, you would regard him as merely a lover of mathematical clearness and coldness of statement, as a believer in the hard and fast, eternal, but purely natural order of things. Others, on the contrary, have called him, in a phrase that has been too often repeated, "a God-intoxicated man," so that, far from being an atheist, it was the existence of nature that he in truth denied. Others have named him a mystic, a seer, a prophet; have taken, as the young Goethe took, an almost sentimental interest in him; have found his doctrine poetical and romantic. Others still have prized in him the gentle humility of life.....
"What, then, was Spinoza? The cold and merciless mathematical thinker, the remorseless fatalist that some call him; or the romantic and poetic soul, the mystic, the seer; or, finally, the saint of gracious and gentle life that others find him? In fact, Spinoza had something of all these traits in his character and in his thought." (All these quotes are from Lecture 2 in "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy".)

But here in POF, Steiner is giving only one facet of him, presenting only one idea of his that sums up the determinist point of view that flowers in later philosophies. When I hold, in my mind, the concepts that Royce gave me of Spinoza, and read the text Steiner wrote, I begin to feel the presence of this Idea as a spiritual being, the way Joel describes in his journal entry, "Comparative Mind, Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science." At least, I begin to imagine that the presence exists and that someone might be able to feel it!

Thanks Lori you've inspired me to go and search out more of Spinoza's life story.

I recall reading once a really good short story called "The Spinoza of Market Street" by I.B. Singer. I recall the Spinoza-like character in that rather amusing but also moving story ends up marrying an old woman somewhat reluctantly but being much happier for it, the point I recall being that he has finally become a part of life rather than just sitting in his room thinking.

I thought it would be easy to dismiss Spinoza's analogy that we're all like rocks being hurled through space, but it turned out not to be the case.

It's easy to say, "I'm not a stone." If a piece of a stone gets broken off, it stays broken off. If a piece of my thumb gets sliced off with a knife, it usually grows back, thanks to life processes. If a stone gets rolled down a hill, it can't pick itself up and go back up the hill again, as I can, thanks to soul processes. The life processes might heal my thumb in "a fixed and definite manner," but I can go back up the hill any number of ways. So it does seem as if thinking of some sort plays a role here that Spinoza ignores.

Does he ignore it rightfully, because we don't really think? On the outset that seems like a silly question. Of course I think, every day, about any number of different things. At least, I thought I did. But after a few days of ruminating over the idea of "riding Spinoza's stone," I grow less and less sure that the level of thinking where I'm normally engaged really makes a difference in the equation as Spinoza lays it out.

I may not be a stone, exactly, but I can sure get on the stone and go for a ride. It can be something simple, such as having that second double espresso. It can be anything that will put me on a course generally defined by an external cause: become a drug addict, betray a friend, sit around and eat junk food all day. I used to be that child who cried for milk. I was on the stone then. I used to be the bullying older sister. On the stone. Many times I ran away from something I should have faced with courage. On the stone. Many times I said and did stupid things when drinking. On the stone!

For, as Spinoza says, I was conscious of my desires but ignorant of what caused them? Is that true? Apart from being the crying infant, it's easy to point to those actions and say, I may have felt free in doing them, but the desires arose out of the parts of my personality that aren't on the side of freedom. Therefore, taking my cue from Steiner's brave soldier, scientist or diplomat, I can raise myself up to a different level of life by learning where my desires come from and exercising some control. That sounded great to me, but when I really looked at the first group of desires, something else about them became apparent.

I started to wonder about where those freedom-opposing desires come from. When the baby cries for milk, the desire must come from something divine in him that wants to preserve his life. For the bully, the desire for vengeance must be something like the urge to thrust his anger out of himself, where it's painful, and onto the world. (For the same reason that in frustration I curse.) For the coward, the law of self-preservation is stronger than the need for social approval. For the drunk, the more basic urges trump sober judgment, including the urge to get in the car and drive home so she can sleep it off. These urges all seem like various forms of self-preservation to me, and as such inescapable, and certainly not bad in themselves. Perhaps they even have a divine component, as the divine expresses itself in nature.

What is this stone that we all have to ride? Seen from a great height, such as Spinoza may have seen from, is it life itself? You get on the stone when you're born and do you ever really get off, no matter how brave, skilled, scientific or virtuous you make yourself? Is the USA like one big stone that we Americans are riding to wherever it's going to come (soon) crashing down?

What about the view close up? Every morning I wake up full of determination and say, "Today I'm going to try to stay awake inside my thinking." At the end of the day, looking back, I can count the times I remembered to do that on my fingers (or finger!) The rest of the day was just one long stone-ride, or maybe a series of them, like a bus trip with multiple transfers. Discouragement, however, doesn't seem like an impulse that's even remotely related to self-preservation, unless it's just that it lets you rest from your striving until your courage comes back.

With von Hartmann we seem to step more fully into the realm of ideas. An idea, or mental picture, becomes a motive for me when I adopt it as such. But first it has to arouse a desire in me.

Okay. Suppose I decide, in the abstract, to take up some kind of exercise for my health. I look around at all the options, and choose walking, because it's the simplest, and for me the most fun because I can walk and think at the same time. Other options are swimming, biking, and Yoga, but they don't arouse my desire to do them, because of my personality. It doesn't matter how many rapturous descriptions of these other forms of exercise flood over me from health books, television, or enthusiastic friends. I have to be the one to adopt the mental image of the exercise as a motive. I get to pick, so I feel free. I choose independently of external impulses.

But this doesn't really make me free, because when I turn around and look at my own personality that's doing the choosing, there are definite restrictions there. Laziness about driving to a swimming pool, incomprehension of machines such as bicycles, and distaste for the kind of mental focus Yoga requires are all part of my character. I like the phrase "characterological disposition," because it implies that my character is disposed to certain things. Why, I don't even know. It's just me, that's all, and something I don't like to do is "not me."

There are some people, on the other hand, who loathe exercise in any form. I feel so lucky not to be one of those people! The idea that exercise is good for the health, and for making us feel happy too, is everywhere in our society. But exercise-haters don't seem equipped with the right kind of characterological disposition so they could take that idea up and do something with it. It's as if that were one of the options that came with their new car, and they forgot to ask for it. So they're stuck driving around without air conditioning or whatever.

Well, that line of thought can only go so far before it stops making sense. It's like saying, you've never done something before, so you can't do it now. You can't look at your situation and decide to take one small step toward positive change, because it doesn't matter what you do with your consciousness. I suppose that if someone does decide, for the first time in her life perhaps, to permeate her potential motives with her consciousness and decide on that basis which of them to take up, the determinists would say, it's because she's been pre-programmed to start changing her life at that very moment! But they can say that about anything that happens, in magnificent hindsight!