In my previous post I introduced Henri Bergson and Rudolf Steiner as two key sources of intuitional cognitive tools for solution generation, and touched on three key factors for applying Bergson’s approach. In this post I will do the same for Steiner. Don’t get me wrong, both Bergson’s and Steiner’s intuitional methodologies are far reaching and what I’m laying out may be seen possibly as a distortion or oversimplification, although my intention is to take from their work, not the entire philosophical system, but useful perspectives that can be applied by anyone, in all areas of their lives, my focus being software implementation and organizational change.
While much of Steiner’s writing, where not specifically topical, about the Waldorf Education, the social structure of bee colonies, farming, or architecture, tends to drift more into esoteric terrain, one book in particular outlines his approach to intuitive thinking, an approach that he as used to develop his many innovations, as well as having had a huge impact on many innovators of notoriety, such as Albert Schweitzer, Wassily Kandinsky, Joseph Beuys, Saul Bellow and Andrei Tarkovsky, just to name a few. In English this book has been alternatively entitled The Philosophy of Freedom and Intuitive Thinking as Spiritual Path. It is a work in which he explores the ramifications of Goethe’s ideas, without making them its central theme. It borrows heavily from the western philosophical tradition to make its arguments, though it doesn’t really work as a book of philosophy. It is more of a journey into thinking about how we think, and how to do it more effectively.
Steiner’s Intuition
Monism vs. Dualism
In dualist thinking there are subjects and objects, and an attempted distinction between subjective and objective thinking. It says that thinking is generally subjective, since the thinker is working within a frame of a limited perspective, taking into consideration only those experiences one can retrieve from memory, sidled with one’s own beliefs and prejudices or expectations. The conclusions are at best partial and distorted, since even disciplines of applied logic and reasoning can be swayed by one’s need to make them conform with expectations and world view. But somewhere out there in the void is an Objective World one aspires to knowing, a Truth, that may be hard or impossible to grapple with, that somehow exists beyond a curtain of our own perceptual and cognitive limitations.
From Steiner’s perspective, no such subjective/objective distinction really exists on its own, but is a product of our thinking. It is like Bergson’s false problem, or a way of thinking that is best to be avoided in order to better understand how we apprehend the world and what to do with it. It’s not that our sensory and mental apparatus is incomplete, broken, or insufficient, but that it was never meant to do the things we have imagined for centuries it was supposed to do.
In fact the whole subject/object distinction falls apart because we are actually part of the system that through our thinking and perceiving is in fact apprehending itself. My thinking about what appears to lie outside myself, in other words, is the world thinking about the world. It is an activity in the world, the Whole System, that doesn’t begin with me, and doesn’t end with me. It is not myself who has formed the language, the concepts and percepts, I use while thinking. The material of my thoughts are acquired from a space outside of the bundle I call myself, which I have received through my education and experience, which I pass back out into the world. In other words, while being an individual, with a powers of perception and the ability to reshape what has come into my awareness, I am also part of a circuit, and my thinking’s main role is not to hit or miss its mark in an objective actuality as much as it is to operate within it, to be part of its own feedback systems and to help manage the system as a whole. It is part of a life system.
This intuition of Steiner’s, like many of his intuitions in general, is in part aligned with current cognitive theory that assumes that our perceptual and cognitive equipment was not designed to determine actuality, but has evolved as a way to promote survival. The objective world was an invention of religion and inherited by science, meant to pose as the something beyond our immediate understanding.
The key difference however is that Steiner is looking from a more monistic perspective, while scientific thinking is by a rule, an attempt at generating some sort of objective conclusions. Instead of objective knowledge, we have direct experience, the perceived world informed by thinking.
Percepts and Concepts
An important distinction for Steiner’s explication of thinking, is that of Percepts and Concepts. For instance, I may throw a ball and watch it rise and fall along a curved line. I may not have a concept for line or curve, but I see a shape of some sort, which is a perception that happens in time and gets stored in my memory. It is what we call a percept. When that shape, the curved line, becomes something I recognize as repeatable and variable, I begin to form a concept, say a curve or arc of the ball. The concept grows as I begin to label it, attach to it the concept of gravity, the mathematical algorithms that can produce a similar shape, but the actual birth of the concept begins when I begin to recognize the path as an arc. It is important to remember, as well, that at no point in time does an actual arc or curve exist, but it is something perceived over the duration of time, which you may remember was a key point in Bergson’s intuitional discipline.
Another example is the process of blooming and wilting of a flower. At no moment can we observe entire process, but only individual moments when the flower starts as a bud, is open partially, fully opens, and begins to decline. In this case, says Steiner, it is our thinking that allows us to have a fuller understanding of the flower, or flower-ness in general, by connecting each state in a stream of causality, since each individual percept is only a fragment of its whole life.
The raw materials of perception are always available, are unavoidable, so the reception of percepts and the forming of concepts can progress more or less on their own, quite passively. And so thinking begins as a passive phenomenon of the natural world, much like the growth of the flower, at least from what we typically think of from the human dichotomy of active/passive behaviors. Choice, or what we typically call free will, is only available through our ability to actually observe of our thinking.
Observation of thought
Freedom and will, or the ability to take a stand, think creatively and generate new approaches to problems, can only arise from self awareness, an observation of one’s own thoughts. Then we can begin to be selective and make modifications to this haphazard and automatic process. Steiner points out that it is not possible to actually observe a thought while we are thinking it, as we cannot observe both the contents of our thinking and the thought simultaneously. There is always a delay. We must look back our thought and begin to think about it, ask ourselves what ways we can change the thought that would result in different results or consequences, perhaps a better approach at apprehending and providing a more useful impetus for action. To some degree this is something we do all the time, what we call meta-cognition.
It is the next step, however, that is the crucial one, the real jump toward freedom of will and creativity, in which we may begin to observe and think about how we observe and think about our thoughts. If that seems like a jumble, understand that it is exactly what you’ve begun to do at this point while reading this text.
If you have come this far, you must have been able to say to yourself something like, “yes, I agree, I realize that I am somehow aware of what I am thinking and am able to modify it, direct my attention differently, take another’s perspective, and come up with a different set of results.” That ability to realize that is the very meta-meta-thinking, the very magic, we are talking about. We practice this type of thinking most often when we are brainstorming, redesigning or rewriting, to some degree, in brief flashes. It is also what innovators and artists do more often than the rest of us. Later posts will include exercises to help you pop out of frame into this type of thinking, and how to recognize when you are doing it.
Moral Imagination
For Steiner, Moral Imagination is the jewel that sits at the top of all we’ve discussed so far. It is the ability to translate principles into actions in sort of a reverse direction from what we’ve discussed earlier. Instead of percepts leading to concepts, it is when we imagine new percepts based on concepts, principles being a type of concept which we attach meaning and value. For instance, the concept of equality led Martin Luther King and other leaders to produce a series of percepts, and those percepts led to the actions that helped to eventuate the Civil Rights Act. It starts with taking a simple idea, and imaging how things can be made different.
Most of us may not be faced with such moral imperatives on a day to day basis, but we can all benefit from the practice of asking what a concept or idea would mean made manifest in a particular situation. We are always faced with practical imperatives, problems that need solutions, and the desire to make things better than they were the last minute. We take the idea, one in a long sequences of changes we plan to make, we see it form in our thoughts, and into the world as we act.