We've set out on the trail of the origin of thinking, and what do we encounter first? Goethe and Goethe's Faust, complaining about his duality of soul; personified Nature endowing us with more needs than she fulfills; a tree whose branches move; a creature hatching from an egg. And we encounter this idea: our thirst for knowledge arises out of our own fundamental desire nature, and is just a special instance of the larger reality of our ceaseless, restless desire.

We met Desire by name in chapter one, where Herbert Spencer derides the dogma of free will ("that everyone is at liberty to desire or not to desire"), and Spinoza also belittles it: "...the human freedom that everybody claims to possess ... consists in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined." Von Hartmann reminds us that we can adopt a mental picture as a motive only if our character is such that it arouses a desire in us. And later in the chapter Steiner distinguishes between motives that rise above "purely animal desires" and those that don't.

Now it would seem that we're back to the idea that we have no choice in what we desire, at least when it comes to knowledge. Being human, we have to want to know what's going on in the world around us, just as we have to want food, shelter, etc. This is not the origin of thinking yet, but rather the origin of our desire to know, which differs from thinking, just as thirst differs from drinking.

Our thirst to know meets a tree, and it meets a creature hatching from an egg. I like to picture this tree, which we meet several times in PoF, as tall and graceful, perhaps an elm in full leaf. The creature hatching from an egg to resemble its mother I make a crocodile, in honor of Steve Irwin, and because baby birds don't look like their mothers.

Both the elm and the crocodile go through changes, and our thirst to know makes us ask why. "Why, we ask, does the tree appear to us now at rest, now in motion?" The odd thing about this statement is that it's so easy to pass it by, because it's so obviously true. But if I put the tree in my imagination and stand there watching it, I don't actually hear myself ask that question. I might hear myself ask, "What direction is the wind coming from?" or, "Should I really be walking under these trees in the wind?"

I'm aware of the practical questions further on down the line, as it were, but not of the original question, "Why is the tree moving?" That question has to be there somewhere, or I wouldn't be thinking about wind, but it's asked and answered so fast I can't see it, like the quick draw of the gunslinger in the joke.

But what if we could see it, or rather, feel it? What if we could experience, consciously, that "every glance at Nature evokes in us a multitude of questions." What if we could feel that thirst for knowledge literally every time we glanced at Nature, or sensed anything whatsoever? As if, watching a baby crocodile emerge from its egg, we could feel our deep longing to know how such a thing could possibly be -- how one creature could give birth to another -- how it is that there will always and only be crocodiles hatching out of crocodile eggs? Then maybe we'd all be passionate poet-scientists, like Goethe and his Faust!

I know Steiner's going to address how thinking jumps in to make sense of observation, later on in Chapter Three, but it interests me to see how he prepares the ground for it here, by putting a question in our mouths that really doesn't get that far in ordinary life. By trying to duplicate the illustrations he provides, in my imagination, I nearly always find something in the text that my first reading passed right by.

I can become aware of the questions behind my questions.

We've had our attention gently directed to all the questions we ask, not just the conscious ones but the ones behind those, which we don't always notice. Now Steiner says that this understanding that we seek and thirst for, splits our whole being into two parts.

Instead of a plant or an animal, it's the whole world we now confront. It's as if we ourselves had broken out of our protective egg and suddenly the whole world was all around us: the world that is us, and the world that isn't.

What is this barrier that Steiner says we throw up between us and the world as soon as consciousness lights up in us? Is it just the barrier of consciousness itself? Does our present consciousness say one thing while our memory says another? Separation vs. unity; thinking vs. feeling. Unless we cut ourselves off from that feeling and that memory, or from our thinking (perhaps through drugs or other ecstasies?), we have to try to find a way to think about the world that allows us to keep our feeling of unity.

I do this all the time, quite consciously. Something has happened that doesn't sit well in my soul. I try to find some way to look at the situation that will turn its poison into medicine.

The very hardest poison to do this with has been, for me, the one the seeps out from what's called, among other names, "The Meaninglessness of Life." When I look at the religious believer, the artist, and the thinker that Steiner brings before us here, I recognize myself in all my former attempts to overcome this poison. I tried different religious experiences that satisfied my feelings but my thinking and my aesthetic sense went into a snit. I tried, youthfully, to find an artistic form for my angst, but didn't enjoy the gloom and doom, or find in them a real basis for a happy, productive life. Thinking was always there, but somehow I knew my home could not be in that cold, analytical thinking that dominates most science. It wasn't until I stumbled onto Anthroposophy that I found a different kind of thinking, and the religion that both my thinking and artistic sense could embrace.

One thing I didn't notice before about this paragraph is that Steiner introduces someone who could be seen, not just as an illustration of "the thinker," but as a whole fourth character: the research scientist whose task is to be conceived "at a much deeper level than is often the case." Now I wonder if we can give this research scientist a face and a name: Steiner, Goethe, even ourselves as we conduct the inner experiments that Steiner has carefully laid out for us, and perhaps document them in our laboratory notebooks.

My experience of this is, looking ahead to a later part of PoF:

I observe the world, which includes my own thoughts and feelings as per Chapter 3 of PoF. 

If I focus on anything other than thinking itself, I am impelled by my own nature to unite concepts with it through thinking in order to understand it. 

But if I focus on thinking, I find that there is no need to add to what is observed by weaving further thoughts.  I myself have brought forth what I observe and my "fundamental desire for knowledge" is satisfied.

That is why I like the way Steiner explicity points out in this chapter that we are driven by a fundamental desire for knowledge. 

If we keep that in focus we may also be able to entertain the thought that a truer test of a philosophy might be, not whether it meets certain theoretical criteria, but rather whether it meets our fundamental human desire for knowledge.

Will we be satisfied with a merely theoretical dualism, a merely theoretical monism or some other "ism" that is merely given to us from outside and not fully grasped by our own being?

Or, on the other hand, will we plunge anew into the chaos from which philosophy and thinking arise and satisfy our fundamental desire for knowledge?

Thanks, Tim, for what you just said:

"That is why I like the way Steiner explicity points out in this chapter that we are driven by a fundamental desire for knowledge.
If we keep that in focus we may also be able to entertain the thought that a truer test of a philosophy might be, not whether it meets certain theoretical criteria, but rather whether it meets our fundamental human desire for knowledge."

What a great way to put it! I have a few questions to ask myself about how to know whether a philosophy meets my fundamental desire for knowledge, beyond just feeling so sure that it does.

"The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena, and strives to penetrate by thinking what he experiences by observing. Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we again find the unity out of which we had separated ourselves." (PoF, 2.0).

For me, doing PoF means giving myself the time to find the concrete examples Steiner provides and try them out, attempting to be that thinker who strives to penetrate by thinking what he must first experience by observing.

When, in the introduction to Chapter Two, Dualism and Monism duke it out on the stage of history, I see this as my chance to slip into these characters and see how the fight looks from their perspective.

The instructions are clear: First, as the Dualist, I pay attention only to the separation between I and World, while struggling to reconcile three sets of opposites: spirit/matter, subject/object, thinking/appearance. Why the struggle? Because despite what I've learned about the separation between myself and the world, I still feel it can't be true! So, living with the separation, I still want the unity back.

In Luke 16, Jesus gives his disciples the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, who gave Lazarus the crumbs from his table. After they both die, the rich man looks over from his side of the spiritual world, where he is suffering an unquenchable thirst, and sees Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. He asks Abraham if Lazarus could cross over to give him a drink of water. Abraham answers that there's no way to cross the gulf between the two worlds from either direction. To me this is a mysterious parable, which has often been quoted to scare people into being more compassionate toward their fellow men. But now the Dualist's dilemma reminds me of it. I thirst for unity but see only the gap between me, in my thirsty separated state, and it.

Approaching the role of Dualist as an actor might, I try to discover what motivates my character. The boxing match between me and the Monist is about to begin. What's going through my head? I can't find the bridge between the two worlds, but am condemned to feel that it must exist. I can't even reconcile my own spirit with my own body. In short, I'm a mess!

But is my opponent, the Monist, any better off? Like me he sees the two opposing realities, but has decided simply to ignore their opposition. As a Dualist, I know that spirit and matter both exist, and that they follow completely opposite trajectories. The Monist can deny the existence of spirit or the existence of matter. Either view I find fundamentally dishonest. Or he can simply assert that spirit and matter are always found together everywhere, which to me is just circular logic that doesn't explain anything. My opponent, the Monist, can't answer my two simple questions:

If thinking has no material part, how can it sieze hold of anything in the material world to understand it?

If my thinking intention has no material part, how can I sieze hold of a hammer and build a barn?

Unless the Monist can answer these two questions honestly and convincingly, he'll lose the match. I'll keep my Dualism, painful as it is. At least it's honest!

In the opening of Chapter 2 Steiner says:

Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we again find the unity out of which we had separated ourselves.

I was doing some unrelated research and came across this comment to the work men after someone asked him what this world-content was if everything we see exists only as a product of our thinking of it.

He points us to the experience of a child.

I stated in my Philosophy of Freedom that it is only by making the world-content into our thought-content that we restore to the world the unity it lost for us in childhood. As children we we saw only the sense perceptible aspects of the whole. Thought, however, is an integral part of the full reality. So we can say the child has access to only half of what the world consists of. Only later, when we have grown up sufficiently to develop thoughts, do we have access to the thought aspect. But it is not just in us. We know that thoughts are an integral part of everything, and we treat our thoughts as part of the reality of things and we use them to reconnect us with it.
-Rudolf Steiner