Stebbing Summary - Chapter 5

Chapter Summary Of The Philosophy Of Freedom
Rita Stebbing

Chapter 5 Attaining Knowledge of the World
Chapter 4 shows how the world would appear to us if thinking did not bring law and order into the chaos of our perceptions. In Chapter 5 we see how thinking is related to its own product: concepts, ideas, and thoughts. The power of thinking to see ideas, Steiner calls intuition. “Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perceptions.” This power which he later also calls “spiritual love” may dive down into shallower or deeper strata of the phenomena. To begin with it may see only as much of the idea of a thing as is actually revealed by the physical aspect of that thing or---when stronger---it may penetrate the physical veil and see what creates the object, as did Goethe when he saw the archetypal plant, i.e. the idea which creates and exists in all plants. Goethe could then visualize not only existing plants but plants which do not yet exist, but could do so.

Such entities as the archetypal plant have an existence completely different from physical existence: there are many different plants but only one idea that creates them. There are many kinds of triangles but only one idea, “triangle.” The one idea may reveal itself in innumerable ways, yet it is always the same idea, somewhat like the beautiful princess on the fairy tale who may have a thousand dresses, each of which makes her appear different, yet she is always the same princess. Steiner expresses this in the following way: “If Plato thought a certain thought and I today think the same thought, then Plato's head and my head are not two heads, but one.”

This line of thought culminates in Chapter 5 in the sentence: “Insofar as man feels and perceives, he is a being among other beings; insofar as he thinks, he is the All-One-Being that pervades everything.” In other words, insofar as man thinks (and not merely “has thoughts”; the difference is explained in Chapter 3), man and God are one-- “When man attains to the reality of thinking within himself he attains to the divine within himself.” From this one may realize the necessity of exercises in concentration and meditation for self -development.

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