I love paragraph 9, it's almost like the first trumpet call in the midst of the overture to the symphony of the book.

I think in another English translation it reads something like: "We have distinguished between the knower and the doer and left out of account precisely the one who matters most - the one who acts out of knowledge."

Den Handelnden und den Erkennenden
unterschied man,
und leer ausgegangen ist dabei
nur der,
auf den es vor allen andern Dingen ankommt:
der aus Erkenntnis Handelnden.

(Unacceptable literal translation:)
One differed
the one acting and the one knowing,
and gone out empty is thereby
only the one
on whom it matters/depends before all (other) things:
the one acting out of knowledge.

In the last section, we've come to the point where motive and character are differentiated, and where ideas or mental pictures become motives when they arouse our desire. But the difference in the degree of consciousness that we apply, or fail to apply, to the motive before we act on it is still not addressed.

Acknowledging this fact leads us to the next step, which is the point of view from which are going to consider the subject of freedom. Our first task is to consider whether the question of the freedom of our will ought to be considered one-sidedly, or if something else is involved.

Now things get put into two columns, as it were. In one column, unconscious urges/blind impulses. In the other, conscious motives. This pulls me back irresistibly to the two groups of characters in the Spinoza section. On one side the bully, the coward, and the drunk. On the other side the soldier, the scientist, the diplomat.

"If there is a difference between a conscious motive of action and an unconscious urge, then the conscious motive will result in an action which must be judged differently from one that springs from blind impulse."

Do these two sets of characters ever do the same actions? Does the brave soldier ever run away? (I hope so!) Does the diplomat ever converse at a cocktail party? Does the scientist ever resort to bullying a colleague to stop him from throwing obstacles in the path of her research? All of them may have the need to do these things at one time or another, in order to carry out a larger plan. They do it consciously, so their actions will legitimately be judged differently than the actions of the other set of characters.

We engage in this differentiation of judgment all the time, rightly or wrongly. If someone normally courageous, or good-hearted, or intelligent acts in such a way that it seems out of character for them, you give them the benefit of the doubt, and think they must have had a good reason for acting so, even if you don't know what it is yet. You trust them, and trust their judgment. If someone you don't yet know does the same kind of action, you might withhold judgment and wait to see what else that person does. If someone you know from experience does stupid things all the time, such as bully his co-workers, and is seen bullying somebody, then you take the behavior at face value.

Having acknowledged that it is part of my life experience, to judge actions differently according to how much trust I have learned, from experience, to place in another person's judgment, I take that deeply acknowledged concept and look at it from another side. What does it mean, to know the reasons for our actions?

I recall being in the position of having to bully a man who used to work here at the farm. Various things he did showed me vividly that he did not respond to trust being placed in him, but rather abused any privelege that he was given, and sneered at the atmosphere of mutual cooperation that the rest of us valued so highly. I considered the predicament, and realized that, if I wanted to let him keep working at the farm, I had to set aside my own dislike of playing the boss role, and play it so unambiguously that even he, with his blunted sensibilities, would take notice. The next time he misbehaved I siezed the opportunity to do so, much to his discomfiture and the delight of the other crew members. I was quite pleased with myself afterwards, not only for pulling it off, but for recognizing what he needed to bring him to his senses, and for giving it to him.

When I compare that bullying with the bullying that I did as a child on my youngest sister, I can find the difference between the same kind of action, one out of a conscious motive and the other out of blind impulse. I may be able to work out the various reasons that I felt the urge to bully my sister, and I can certainly work out what the results have been, but in this case the knower is separated from the doer by a span of many years. A rather ineffectual system for living one's life! But as "a knowing doer," I not only knew why I was bullying the hapless employee, but could also predict the results, accurately as it turned out.

Having considered this incident, and others like it, as a way that I can experience this part of The Philosophy of Freedom for myself, I feel ready to go on to the next section.

Hi Lori, thanks for the examples. If you haven't noticed by now, I am a HUGE fan of examples and stories to help illustrate these rather abstract conversations.

I wonder, if the farm worker had faught back with aggressive words and left angry and threateningly, would that have changed your assessment of your decision to meet him in the manner you did? You probably know my bias well enough that I would suggest that no reaction on his part should have anything to do with the nature of your act. But I'm interested in how you perceive that situation when you imagine a drastically different reaction on his part.

Also, I'm obviously interested in the question of what it means "to know". I want to say something like:

What we KNOW is never what we think we know, but what we KNOW demands that we think we know it.

When you wrote:

"and realized that, if I wanted to let him keep working at the farm, I had to set aside my own dislike of playing the boss role, and play it so unambiguously that even he, with his blunted sensibilities, would take notice."

I could imagine that while sipping a lemonade and talking with me on the porch you might lean back and say,

"You know Jeff...now that I really think about and really go back and remember what it was like when I was considering what to do, I see that it really had nothing to do with putting aside my 'dislike of playing the boss role', but it actually was all about me putting away the notion that I didn't like being the boss!"

or

"You know, I've always thought it was all about that boss stuff, but...yea...it was really only about one thing: Respect! Nothing to do with all that other stuff."

My examples don't matter because I imagine that they could change endlessly as you explored your felt-sense of meaning in that moment, but I use the examaples to help myself ask this question about what it means "to know" or "to be conscious" of our motives. It seems to me that the type of knowing that is absolutely essential is not the type of knowing that will always change and find new ways to be said. This is why I always harp on the nature of the felt-sense of meaning being the primary starting point and source and destination of freedom.

You know, I'm fairly certain I bought food from you back in Santa Cruz back in the day...

Jeff

I used to wonder how Tom could possibly have found "Mathematicism" in this part of the text. There aren't that many numbers in it! But yesterday it struck me as I was thinking about how we judge people's actions according to how much we trust their judgment, based on our past experience of the person in question, that this really is a kind of weighing and measuring.

It also strikes me, once again, that a kind of bifurcated thinking is expressed, in dividng the conscious actions from the unconscious ones, and in dividing the knower from the doer. The first division is legitimate and necessary, because it puts us on the road to understanding thinking. The second division is illegitimate and has to be overcome with a different kind of thinking.

I had the idea that Steiner said in a lecture somewhere that the number "2" couldn't really get us anywhere, as numbers go. Maybe that was just what I decided after living with the ideas that he expressed in that particular lecture. Anyway, I found something close to that in the 5-lecture series The Cycle of the Year (Dornach, 3/31-4/8 1923):

"Think of the cyclic course: joining together, intermingling, unifying; an intermediate state when the differentiating takes place; the complete differentiation; then again the merging of what was differentiated with the uniform, and so on. There you see always besides these two conditions yet a third: you see the rhythm between the differentiated and the undifferentiated, in a certain way, between the in-breathing of what was differentiated-out and the out-breathing again, an intermediate condition. You see a rhythm: a physical-material, a spiritual, a working-in-each-other of the physical-material and the spiritual: a soul element......
"When, by complementing the Easter thought with the Michael thought in this way we have become able to perceive rightly the primordial trinity in all existence, then we shall take it into our whole attitude of soul. Then we shall be in a position to understand that actually all life depends upon the activity and the interworking of primordial trinities. And when we have the Michael festival inspiring such a view in the same way that the one-sided Easter festival inspired the view now existing, then we shall have an inspiration, a Nature/Spirit impulse, to introduce threefoldness, the impulse of threefoldness into all the observing and forming of life. And it depends finally and only upon the introduction of this impulse, whether the destructive forces in human evolution can be transformed once more into ascending forces." (The Cycle of the Year, lecture 3)

I don't really know enough about mathematical thinking processes to say that they're inherently destructive, but they certainly are destructive in many of the ways they're applied in our world today. Especially when they're applied to nature and to people!

In considering the question of freedom, the one who matters most to us is "the knowing doer," because we want to see if freedom is possible for him.

Now we seem to make a leap, with a couple of sweeping statements. Freedom is defined as this, and freedom is defined as that. It's being controlled only by your reason, rather than your animal passions. It's having your life and actions determined by purposes and deliberate decisions. Freedom means being controlled by this, and determined by that. But it is, after all, self-control we're talking about here. I decide not to give in to my urge to eat those doughnuts someone left on the counter. I choose my purposes and make the deliberate decisions that determine a at least a portion of my daily life. Isn't that a kind of freedom? Why does Steiner say, "nothing is gained by assertions of this sort?" Is he saying that reasonableness is on the same level as "animal passions?" Or purposeful activity as free as purposeless activity? Surely he's not just addressing the semantics of "being controlled by," and "being determined by," as if to say, "if you're controlled or determined by anything then obviously you can't be free!"

He says, "the question is just whether reason, purposes, and decisions exercise the same manner of compulsion over a man as his animal passions." Does that mean, different manners of compulsion have to be distinguished here? Is compulsion by reason really the same as compulsion by passions?

"If without my co-operation, a rational decision emerges in me with the same necessity with which hunger and thirst arise, then I must needs obey it, and my freedom is an illusion."

How could a rational decision possibly emerge in me without my cooperation? How can it just overtake me the way hunger or thirst does? How does thirst, for instance, emerge in me? I have no idea! All of a sudden, I just realize that I'm thirsty. Could a rational decision possibly emerge in the same way? As if, instead of saying, "I'm thirsty," I could suddenly announce, "I'm rational!" I don't know where the rationality came from, but somehow it popped up?

Rationality doesn't always get you where you want to go, to be sure. Try, as a head-centered person, to learn the samba from a television demo. I could say (if she'd only go a little slower so I could actually see it), that foot goes there while this arm does that and the hips are over there and then swing back the other way, while the other foot does this, and----- it doesn't work. That kind of dancing doesn't come out of the head, and trying to learn it with the head is a complete flop.

Another way rationality doesn't work is trying to understand emotions. I run into this with my husband all the time. "But you shouldn't feel that way." "But I do feel that way!" "But you shouldn't!" Because, by a certain type of rational logic, it doesn't make sense. So he remains baffled about many things that people feel and do.

Thinking over these and other examples, I can see that if you're a head-centered, super-rational person, you might not be able to be any other way but rational. And then it would be as if rational decisions emerged in you with the same necessity as hunger or thirst. You might want to understand your mate, but because you don't admit the evidence of things that fall outside your own definition of rationality, you can't learn anything about the other person's point of view and are condemned to go on making the same kind of mistake in the relationship.

I was wondering, in what kind of situation could a rational decision clearly emerge in the same unconscious way that hunger and thirst do, "without my cooperation?" How often in life do we meet someone and feel, without knowing why, that something just isn't quite as it seems about the person? But without stopping to wonder what it is, and determined not to judge someone we just met, we find ourselves behaving with our normal openness toward the stranger. Because he behaves normally, his behavior calls up, automatically, a kind of skin-deep confidence that everything is normal about the situation. So we take an action that seems quite rational, such as getting into the elevator with him, or walking beside him on the street. Most of the time this turns out all right, but sometimes not. Looking back at the situation later, even if it did turn out all right, we might say to ourselves, "What possessed me to get into that elevator with him when I felt scared?" Our rationality, or at least our ability to rationalize, had suppressed the rest of our intelligence, which only later could catch up with us and ask "Why don't you listen when I say something?"

Ok, Lori- I'm done praising you. My gratitude for your writings- from here on out- should be implicit in the fact that you wrote it. Wait...one more: THANKS for typing that up!

As you well know, I think PoF is about learning to let go of all control. At its root it is about overcoming the fixation of the subjective self, recognizing the split into I/World as a temporary appearence resulting from the belief that separation is real. I'm not getting all Eastern here because I'm not saying we need to melt the split away. PoF is unique because it reestablishes cognition as the antitdote to the I/World split.

From the point of view of the split-off ego (What Steiner calls the percept of the subjective ego) it is TRUE to say that PoF is about self-control because from the split ego's perspective the separate self is REAL. From the point of view of any intuitive occurence there is no separate self that needs to be controlled.

The person who has identified herself with the rational capacities of the mind will always use reason to keep the separation feeling real and important. The person who idententifies himself with the emotional fluxuations of his mind, will always use sentiments to keep the separation real.

PoF does not ask us to deny our reason, emotions, habits, urges or compulsions. It does not ask us to become stronger so we can resist tempation. That's old school and other paths teach better methods for becoming strong in that sense. PoF teaches us how to courageously listen to our "temptations" and let them teach us of how we- each in our individual way- use our favorite compulsions to keep the split alive. PoF teaches us to notice the will that is always there in our thinking. This is a massive letting go of every self-concept we've ever believed true.

It's almost like we are asked to trade in our compulsion to control for God's compulsion to control and ego fights that with all its blood, sweat and tears because it wants credit for making progess. No, I suspect the deeper motive for ego's fight against God's will is that ego perfectly understands that its will is a temporary (and very dramatic) illusion and God's is an eternal (and unworried) reality.

As you can see in all my writings, I am smack in the middle of this dynamic. It really helped me to read Steiner's words at the back of PoF about how we don't notice the extingushing of our thinking when in conversation because of the speed in which we move back and forth between intuiting and splitting.

Ok, time for work, but I want to say that your last sentence Lori is the subject of an entire series of talks that Krishnamurti gave called, I believe, "Awakening to Intelligence". He tries to make your point from a series of different perspectives. He describes beautifully the aspet of PoF that is pointing to the letting go of the split. As your words implied, we can suppress the intelligence that we actually are by staying within fixed, habitual rational responses and grooves. I would add that the intelligence is not in need of liberation. It just waits to be kindly greeted at the door. these are my guesses.

Jeff

p.s. your title of the post, "reasoning from ignorance"...the story of my life!