Philosophy Unbound: Schopenhauer vs. Steiner (Round One)

[SanteriSatama]

If we haven't transformed the forces of egoism, whatever we create will receive the imprint of tumorous growth.

Well said. So, how to avoid the trap that the "higher" means just following/becoming/creating yet another superego?

[Cleric K]

If we haven't transformed the forces of egoism, whatever we create will receive the imprint of tumorous growth.

Well said. So, how to avoid the trap that the "higher" means just following/becoming/creating yet another superego?

The first step is to realize that in knowing we share in the essential being of All. This is what we try to bring attention to, in practically every post in this forum (with questionable success). As long as we view knowing as a local soul-phenomenon, where growing in knowledge only inflates the ego and weighs it down with concepts that stand between it and reality, we can't make even the tiniest step forward. On the other hand, when we behold the untainted facts of the given, we realize that when we live in Cosmic Ideas, we weave together, we're one with the beings of the Universe. This intimate knowing is what unites us with the Whole. In order to distinguish this living knowing, the luminous weaving within Cosmic Thoughts that thread the fabric of man and the Universe, from knowledge as understood in the trivial sense - as local accumulation of data - we can call the former - Wisdom.

So that's the one thing. Man is a knowing being, sharing in the living Idea of the Cosmos. The second thing is that man is also an acting being, constantly feeding back into the whole. If Wisdom lifts knowledge from the purely personal, into the shared living Idea of the Universe, so acting is lifted from egoistic deeds when it becomes the tool of Love. Wisdom unites with the Whole in knowing, Love unites us with the Whole in acting.

These two are interdependent. We can't act Lovingly without Wisdom. Otherwise we can't see if we're not harming others instead of helping. Wisdom on the other hand remains sterile if we remain only a passive knowing being. We need to use that Wisdom for good.

Both Love and Wisdom seek one thing - Truth. Wisdom seeks the sublime beauty of Truth, which inspires and gives the strength for sacrificial deeds of Love.

Every expression of egoism can be ultimately traced to impairment of this Divine Triad. Egoism issues when we seek Wisdom for its own sake, without using it to guide with its Light, our deeds of Love. Love becomes egoistic if we don't seek to elucidate it with the Light of Wisdom. In that case Love can never be distinguished from a purely personal desire, seeking our own gratification on Cosmic pretext. If we seek only our own Truth, without the ever expanding horizon of Wisdom, or the sacrifice of personal desires, that true Love demands, we become self-seeking. The Divine Triad shows us how growing knowingly into the Cosmos doesn't turn us into super(cosmic)-egoists, but into servants of Truth through Love.

[findingblanks]

"Today I made one of the simplest and most obvious discoveries, yet I find it profoundly significant. It's the simple fact that when I observe my thinking I behold something that mirrors my activity. Other things I don't know why I perceive but my thoughts I know why I perceive, with absolute certainty - because I bring them forth."

Yes, I work with children. Many of them will tell you that they are the one's who make their thoughts happen. I am perfectly aware of this intuition that nearly everybody has.

"So now my question is, what more do I need in order to turn this assumption into certainty? Please be as phenomenologically exact as possible. What kind of experience you would advise me to go through which will transform my direct intuition (as I see it), which you claim is nothing but an assumption, into certain reality?"

So, let's go into this keeping in mind that before Steiner himself experienced the transformation of thinking that he eventually gets to in PoF, he still had great doubts about what is real and not when it comes to self, experience, thought, world. He writes about this as a young man. He certainly would have agreed with the basic intuition that it is he himself who is thinking. His uncertainty came when he tried to understand how he could know this for certain. I'm sure you've read that.

So all of us, including children, have an intuition that we are the ones thinking our thoughts. And you are saying this is the fundamental experience that Steiner is hoping the reader can have.

Cleric, one clue Steiner is giving us that in Chapter 3 he is not speaking from his developed point of view is when he says "Other things I don't know why I perceive." He is speaking from the point of view of the stage he is developing not from the point of view of grasping the the true union of self and cosmos.

As you indicate, Steiner is simply saying, "Wow, it's pretty amazing to notice that there is one object I can experience that I feel certain that I caused: my thoughts. I'm not sure how that door got there. I don't have a clue where the sun comes from. But I know that I had to recall the idea 'door' to even think it and I know that the concepts for this very sentence require me!"

As you've pointed out, this certainty isn't limited to one form of expresses. The key is to notice that we all intuit it and we all live by this intuition. Somebody says, "Hold on, stop for a second. Let me think about what you said. I need to see if I can grasp the concepts by myself." That person obviously is aware that it is up to themselves to get at the concept. A worried student who says, "Look I've got to understand this math homework because I am the one who has to take the test." And, like I said, I work with children and it is very common when they are asked to reflect upon it that they will say things like, "I made that idea myself!" to various levels of sophistication.

And we have to see that this intuition lives free from our various dogmas. Yes, we can immediately destroy it by reducing it to a spiritual or materialistic dogma. But destroying this fresh and mysterious sense of certainty never lasts long. The materialist who spends an hour explaining why thought is really only chemicals moving around in the brain will delight in trying to solve a riddle on the train ride home and might even say to his friend, "There's nothing like knowing that success depends on my figuring it out alone."

Anyway, Steiner demands that we begin by recognizing this exceptional moment when we are aware that we have our own concept before us.

You want to know how this intuition can become a certainty. And you notice that I equate it with being an assumption. Yes, just as Steiner as a young philosophy student shared our intuition-assumption that he produced his own thoughts, he did not know this for sure and he longed for certainty. It wasn't enough for Steiner to simply have an obvious sense that he created his own thoughts. He shared that with most people. However, like many of the idealists of his time, he was not prone to reduce this process to matter. But he also gained no certainty regarding knowledge from even his favorite thinkers at the time like Fichte. He wanted to go beyond this given form of certainty and obviousness to a direct grasping of the truth.

When I call it an assumption I'm not denying the felt quality of it. A young child has a felt sense of being an individual but they haven't yet grasped the living nature of their individuality. That grasping, in our times, is the transformation that PoF is pointing towards.

You ask for a phenomenology of getting from the naive intuition that you are thinking your thoughts to an essential understanding of intuition. Well, as Steiner says to Rosa, everybody will have a drastically different experience of this and a drastically different pathway towards it. I'm still on this pathway myself, often falling back and casting down my experience to finished thoughts and certainties. I haven't met anybody who started approaching it without it being associated with a profound inner challenge that reflected in their life circumstances. It certainly isn't about just finally grasping a very difficult math problem. It is the turning inside out of everything we intuit. So, I wouldn't trust anybody who claims there is 'an' experience that marks this transformation for everyone.

My belief is that the reason the exceptional state can never be destroyed is because it is directly connected to the transformation, almost perhaps as a child on its way to becoming an adult. Or, better, the caterpillar who has no clue of the its own inner butterfly.

So, while I wouldn't presume how you might experience the fundamental experience of the spirit, I might be able to help you see that the wonderful intuition that we are the ones who think our thoughts isn't as stable as it seems.

An extreme example might point to how less extremes examples live nearby:

A hypnotist tells a subject that for the next three days, every time they see a window they will start thinking about food. This works and the person will often start talking about food or wondering what is for dinner when they look at a window. A friend asks, "Why are you thinking about food right now?" The person said, "I realized it was getting closer to dinner and should figure out what we have that will satisfy all the guests staying here this weekend." The person will certainly feel they are the one causing their thoughts. They won't be worried that somebody else is really thinking about dinner. They won't doubt that there really is 'chicken' that can be cooked. But when they are shown that this is the result of the hypnotism, they will most likely be shocked to realize that what felt to be purely their own process was connected to a cause they wee unconscious of completely.

So to the extent that we are all hypnotized by various aspects of our culture and, therefore, we are often completely unaware of why we are really going down a certain train of thought, or to the extent that we are unaware of how false a set of ideas we hold are, or just to the extent that we haven't woken up to the true living reality of what we are... we can see why young brilliant Steiner still was not yet at all satisfied with the mere intuition that he is the one bringing about his thoughts.

In a way, I provided a small phenomenology into our basic intuition that our thoughts come from us, a phenomenology that might point to why this intuition contains a tacit longing for a deeper experience. I have to go but I can certainly give this request more thought.

[AshvinP]

As you've pointed out, this certainty isn't limited to one form of expresses. The key is to notice that we all intuit it and we all live by this intuition. Somebody says, "Hold on, stop for a second. Let me think about what you said. I need to see if I can grasp the concepts by myself." That person obviously is aware that it is up to themselves to get at the concept. A worried student who says, "Look I've got to understand this math homework because I am the one who has to take the test." And, like I said, I work with children and it is very common when they are asked to reflect upon it that they will say things like, "I made that idea myself!" to various levels of sophistication.

And we have to see that this intuition lives free from our various dogmas. Yes, we can immediately destroy it by reducing it to a spiritual or materialistic dogma. But destroying this fresh and mysterious sense of certainty never lasts long. The materialist who spends an hour explaining why thought is really only chemicals moving around in the brain will delight in trying to solve a riddle on the train ride home and might even say to his friend, "There's nothing like knowing that success depends on my figuring it out alone."

FB, I just want to make a small observation here. The bolded statement simply isn't true. I know for certain I did not "live by this intuition" you are speaking of until very recently, and I went to three years of law school. Maybe your idea of "living by" something is much different than mine, but very few people live by the intuition that they are engaged in an activity which "exists in and through itself" and which cannot be explained by anything outside of itself. We see that plenty right here on this forum - a great many posts are made from the simple failure to recognize that essence of Thinking, even at the lowest possible resolution. To "live by" it would be to reflect on Thinking and its spiritual essence much more seriously and effortfully than most people do. I suspect most people who get to Chapter 3 of PoF feel that they have, in fact, realized something profound when carefully considering what Steiner is writing, and only later do they manage to rationally convince themselves it was not very profound and they had been "living by" it the entire time before reading it. Cleric has already explained at length why your example above where "somebody says" is not at all what Steiner is referring to and it is very easy to see the qualitative difference between that which you find in "worried students" and actually dwelling in observation of one's own Thinking activity. Seriously, it's not even close to a fair comparison. Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

[findingblanks]

Ashvin, you need to be careful about assuming we all know what each other mean...clearly we don't. That is the theme of even the larger topic regarding Bernardo's limited take on Steiner's take on Schop take.. You say:

"I know for certain I did not "live by this intuition".."

The way I am characterizing this intuition is that if we aren't 'living by it' (you can choose ANY OTHER phrase you want to say that), we will have the psychotic (or sometimes 'spiritual' experience that we aren't thinking our own thoughts.

By 'living by', I mean that it is humming along in the background most of the time, unless we have a psychotic break (which is an utterly terrifying experience) or a spiritual experience of being a medium for some other beings thoughts. If you were playing checkers and thinking about your next move and then you suddenly felt that you were not doing the thinking and these weren't your thoughts, you might fall apart. But when you are just playing checkers and thinking about the moves, this intuition that these are your thoughts coming from you is doing it's job. That's all I mean. And sometimes, it is an exception, we will be in a context in which we self-reflect on this and say things like, "Oh, yeah, that's my thought. I thought that thought." or, "Oh, yeah, I'm thinking about that table's shape."

Only if we are being dogmatic will we insist that the phrases we use conversationally to point must mean only this or that. It is the pointing. I hope you see that 'live by' can mean many many things and my examples were all trying to point to the way it functions in our everyday experience.

[AshvinP]

As you've pointed out, this certainty isn't limited to one form of expresses. The key is to notice that we all intuit it and we all live by this intuition. Somebody says, "Hold on, stop for a second. Let me think about what you said. I need to see if I can grasp the concepts by myself." That person obviously is aware that it is up to themselves to get at the concept. A worried student who says, "Look I've got to understand this math homework because I am the one who has to take the test." And, like I said, I work with children and it is very common when they are asked to reflect upon it that they will say things like, "I made that idea myself!" to various levels of sophistication.

And we have to see that this intuition lives free from our various dogmas. Yes, we can immediately destroy it by reducing it to a spiritual or materialistic dogma. But destroying this fresh and mysterious sense of certainty never lasts long. The materialist who spends an hour explaining why thought is really only chemicals moving around in the brain will delight in trying to solve a riddle on the train ride home and might even say to his friend, "There's nothing like knowing that success depends on my figuring it out alone."

FB, I just want to make a small observation here. The bolded statement simply isn't true. I know for certain I did not "live by this intuition" you are speaking of until very recently, and I went to three years of law school. Maybe your idea of "living by" something is much different than mine, but very few people live by the intuition that they are engaged in an activity which "exists in and through itself" and which cannot be explained by anything outside of itself. We see that plenty right here on this forum - a great many posts are made from the simple failure to recognize that essence of Thinking, even at the lowest possible resolution. To "live by" it would be to reflect on Thinking and its spiritual essence much more seriously and effortfully than most people do. I suspect most people who get to Chapter 3 of PoF feel that they have, in fact, realized something profound when carefully considering what Steiner is writing, and only later do they manage to rationally convince themselves it was not very profound and they had been "living by" it the entire time before reading it. Cleric has already explained at length why your example above where "somebody says" is not at all what Steiner is referring to and it is very easy to see the qualitative difference between that which you find in "worried students" and actually dwelling in observation of one's own Thinking activity. Seriously, it's not even close to a fair comparison. Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

There is another simple consideration here. Does anyone doubt that BK is a very well educated and seriously reflective philosopher? But if you read and or watch his response linked in the original post you will see that he gets Steiner's criticism at some level and disagrees with it. Or, even if we say he doesn't get it at all, that just proves the point even further. What Steiner is talking about, even in Chapter 3, is not at all obvious and accepted by even the brightest philosophers in the 21st century. You have spent a lot of time with these ideas so I am gving you the perspective of someone who has not - the realizations around Thinking reached even in Ch 3 are just as profound and unorthodox for the modern era as they were 120 odd years ago.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, you need to be careful about assuming we all know what each other mean...clearly we don't. That is the theme of even the larger topic regarding Bernardo's limited take on Steiner's take on Schop take.. You say:

"I know for certain I did not "live by this intuition".."

The way I am characterizing this intuition is that if we aren't 'living by it' (you can choose ANY OTHER phrase you want to say that), we will have the psychotic (or sometimes 'spiritual' experience that we aren't thinking our own thoughts.

By 'living by', I mean that it is humming along in the background most of the time, unless we have a psychotic break (which is an utterly terrifying experience) or a spiritual experience of being a medium for some other beings thoughts. If you were playing checkers and thinking about your next move and then you suddenly felt that you were not doing the thinking and these weren't your thoughts, you might fall apart. But when you are just playing checkers and thinking about the moves, this intuition that these are your thoughts coming from you is doing it's job. That's all I mean. And sometimes, it is an exception, we will be in a context in which we self-reflect on this and say things like, "Oh, yeah, that's my thought. I thought that thought." or, "Oh, yeah, I'm thinking about that table's shape."

Only if we are being dogmatic will we insist that the phrases we use conversationally to point must mean only this or that. It is the pointing. I hope you see that 'live by' can mean many many things and my examples were all trying to point to the way it functions in our everyday experience.

OK then I would choose to rephrase your observation as follows - "we are all actually bound to live by the 'rules' of Reality, even if we are not aware of them, and those who actively deny those rules will experience psychotic breaks". And then my objection shifts to, what is the relevance of that objection to anything being written in PoF? Do you assert Steiner is merely trying to tell us in Chapter 3 what is always happening when we engage in normal thinking activity throughout the day and nothing more? Honestly, I am sure you see all of these comments as defensive reactions to assaults on our "spiritual guru", but really, to the extent I am getting defensive, it is because I view this as an assault on plain meaning of words in a text and sound reasoning which accounts for the context in which those words are being written.

[findingblanks]

Ashvin, keep in mind that Steiner himself was deeply disastisfined with his 'certainty' about the real nature of thinking, even when he already had a deep grasp on the core idealist philosophers of his time. I think it is somewhat disparaging to Steiner to say that when he felt this deep doubt about thinking he clearly hadn't yet had the experience that he thinks his thoughts. Can you for just one minute try to imagine the way a person could have the intuition, "I think my thoughts' and yet this would not yet eradicate a deeply felt need to truly grasp the nature of thinking. If you must, please remind yourself that Steiner says this necessary foothold does not yet give us real certainty regarding the essence of reality. Try for one minute to fully submerge yourself into this possibility. I not only lived in your current thoughts for nearly 7 years, but I still work consciously to be able to go back into them. That's not a brag. It is hard and I don't always do it very well. But I think you'd be surprised at what happens if you even could just pretend there is a difference between the kind of certainty that comes with "I am thinking that thought" and the profound need to verify this via direct knowledge.

Since you've become an adult have you had the direct intuition of being an "I"? If so, do you equate that with the utter certainty that you were an "I" that you had as a 7 or 14 year old? If you are unsure as to if you've intuited your essential being, then you haven't. Which is a very exciting thing to know. The same goes for the kind of certainty we have that these are our own thoughts. Steiner is aware that this basic intuition needs to be stabalized and protected if we are to take the first real steps towards knowledge. He saw clearly that modern philosophy and science doesn't protect this intuition; rather, they cover the intution with 'explanations' that already deny thinking and self. And because Steienr was Steiner, he saw clearly that even a well studied Anthroposophist can easily cover over this intuition by embedding it within spiritual representaitons about the true nature of the Cosmos.

The beauty of chapter three is how cleanly he marks its importance as our foothold. I know exactly how Cleric thinks and why he says the foothold is the transformation into a deeper certainty of knowledge, is THE fundamental experience of the spirit. I see his logic and I realize why he is somewhat struck that I don't see how clear this all is. That's fine. All I can do is try to keep showing it from different angles.

But Steiner was already a genius and had deep spiritual experiences when he was longing for a different kind of certainty about the nature of his being. This doubt wasn't due to the fact that he was committed to some ideology that said thinking wasn't real. Not at all. It was because he hadn't yet grasped thinking fully from within its present life. He was still trying to have ideas ABOUT his nature, ABOUT thinking. And even though he knew that many of these ideas (and those from his favorite mentors and philosophers) were accurate and true and mainly correct, he intuited that there was something deeper that needed to be discovered. I really encourage you to just try on the idea that Steiner, at that age and in that deep longing, knew what it was like to feel a thought he was having had come from himself. Just try. You can go back to thinking I'm obtuse and deeply confused. But if in your own unique way you can imagine young Steiner having that kind of experience yet longing for a deeper verification of the truth, then you'll at least start to see a glimmer of what I'm trying to point to.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, keep in mind that Steiner himself was deeply disastisfined with his 'certainty' about the real nature of thinking, even when he already had a deep grasp on the core idealist philosophers of his time. I think it is somewhat disparaging to Steiner to say that when he felt this deep doubt about thinking he clearly hadn't yet had the experience that he thinks his thoughts. Can you for just one minute try to imagine the way a person could have the intuition, "I think my thoughts' and yet this would not yet eradicate a deeply felt need to truly grasp the nature of thinking. If you must, please remind yourself that Steiner says this necessary foothold does not yet give us real certainty regarding the essence of reality. Try for one minute to fully submerge yourself into this possibility. I not only lived in your current thoughts for nearly 7 years, but I still work consciously to be able to go back into them. That's not a brag. It is hard and I don't always do it very well. But I think you'd be surprised at what happens if you even could just pretend there is a difference between the kind of certainty that comes with "I am thinking that thought" and the profound need to verify this via direct knowledge.

Since you've become an adult have you had the direct intuition of being an "I"? If so, do you equate that with the utter certainty that you were an "I" that you had as a 7 or 14 year old? If you are unsure as to if you've intuited your essential being, then you haven't. Which is a very exciting thing to know. The same goes for the kind of certainty we have that these are our own thoughts. Steiner is aware that this basic intuition needs to be stabalized and protected if we are to take the first real steps towards knowledge. He saw clearly that modern philosophy and science doesn't protect this intuition; rather, they cover the intution with 'explanations' that already deny thinking and self. And because Steienr was Steiner, he saw clearly that even a well studied Anthroposophist can easily cover over this intuition by embedding it within spiritual representaitons about the true nature of the Cosmos.

The beauty of chapter three is how cleanly he marks its importance as our foothold. I know exactly how Cleric thinks and why he says the foothold is the transformation into a deeper certainty of knowledge, is THE fundamental experience of the spirit. I see his logic and I realize why he is somewhat struck that I don't see how clear this all is. That's fine. All I can do is try to keep showing it from different angles.

But Steiner was already a genius and had deep spiritual experiences when he was longing for a different kind of certainty about the nature of his being. This doubt wasn't due to the fact that he was committed to some ideology that said thinking wasn't real. Not at all. It was because he hadn't yet grasped thinking fully from within its present life. He was still trying to have ideas ABOUT his nature, ABOUT thinking. And even though he knew that many of these ideas (and those from his favorite mentors and philosophers) were accurate and true and mainly correct, he intuited that there was something deeper that needed to be discovered. I really encourage you to just try on the idea that Steiner, at that age and in that deep longing, knew what it was like to feel a thought he was having had come from himself. Just try. You can go back to thinking I'm obtuse and deeply confused. But if in your own unique way you can imagine young Steiner having that kind of experience yet longing for a deeper verification of the truth, then you'll at least start to see a glimmer of what I'm trying to point to.

I beg of you, FB, not to revert back into approach of, "I will guide you into the deeper truth of Steiner by letting you figure it out for yourself from my mysterious and enigmatic hints". Just state what it is you think about these things plainly. We tried that other approach and Cleric and I simply could not figure out what you were hinting at. When you stated things plainly, we gained a much more clear understanding of your position and perspective on these matters.

Right now, I am left with the impression that you feel Steiner wanted us to figure out that what he was doing through philosophy and spiritual science was not very exceptional or trailblazing in any way. He was a normal human being with normal biases, assumptions, short-sightedness, etc. Sometimes he made errors or his predictions were off. Even after having the intuition that he was the source of his own thoughts, presumably even after he wrote the entirety of PoF first edition, he remained unsure and skeptical if what he had written was actually accurate and/or complete. You have pointed to these things many times now so I think that I understand at least some significant portion of your concerns here and the "glimmers" about Steiner and his work that you are trying to make us see.

But the fact remains that none of what you are saying accords well with the careful and reasoned consideration I have given PoF or any of Steiner's other books and lectures. It's not like you are asking me to consider a slight adjustment here or there, but rather to discard the plainly spoken and immanent meaning I get from his writings and replace it with abstract thought experiments which will reveal to me that my intellect, reason, and imagination have been betraying me for the last 6-9 months of careful reading. And what's more is that my reason points out clearly to me that what you are saying is not internally consistent with your own arguments, externally consistent with Steiner's writings, consistent with my own experience, or of any practical relevance to how we must continue to grow spiritually from where we find ourselves in the current day.

When you brought up Barfield, I tried to show why his arguments undermine the points you are making, but those were mostly ignored. I am sure you have had your fair share of unpleasant experiences with dogmatic Anthroposophists, but of course that is not really relevant to anything we are discussing. You provided two examples where you think Steiner was wrong, and I think Cleric did a great job explaining the reasons for why he was wrong on the specifics of physical science and also why the essence of the spirit-soul qualities he was addressing still remained well-founded and intact. I probably should not have jumped back in here, because Cleric's suggestion to leave Steiner out of it for now and pursue the rigorous phenomenology of Thinking was a good one. So I will try to refrain from further comment until you guys have a chance to flesh that out more.

[Cleric K]

So to the extent that we are all hypnotized by various aspects of our culture and, therefore, we are often completely unaware of why we are really going down a certain train of thought, or to the extent that we are unaware of how false a set of ideas we hold are, or just to the extent that we haven't woken up to the true living reality of what we are... we can see why young brilliant Steiner still was not yet at all satisfied with the mere intuition that he is the one bringing about his thoughts.

Blanks, you are intermixing here two quite different things. What you describe is critically important but it is really what PoF goes on to consider gradually. In Chapter 3 we're dealing with something much more immediate. Let's consider an example, which I'm sure you know well: the words "I think the speech". This is a thought. It really captures the kind of observation of thinking, Steiner invites us to do. We can think this thought and at the same time try to observe it. What we behold is thought-perception (verbal words sounding in our consciousness) but at the same time we're in full awareness we indeed think that thought (which is further reinforced by the very content of the thought). If it wasn't for our thinking activity, this thought wouldn't be perceived.

What you suggest above is something which takes us away from the immediate experience of thinking. We now begin to think about the possible reasons that make us think exactly this thought and not some other. For example, in this very example, someone can say "I'm not free because this thought was suggested to me, I didn't come to it by my own free activity." This doesn't matter for what we are considering here. You see, we're talking of something much more intimate and immediate here. It's the A and B coming closer together. Standing face to face with a thought (what else could 'observation of thinking' mean?) and recognizing something for which we feel causally involved. The moment we begin to speculate what the origin of thinking is, whether it is free or something is feeding my thoughts with a spoon and I simply play along, we immediately put that current thinking (the one speculating) in the blind spot. We already philosophize for the origin of our thinking while forgetting that we're doing that thinking at the same time. If we're to be true to what Steiner asks us for, we should immediately try to observe in the same way the speculating thought. We should ask the same question about the speculating thought. If we really get a proper feel for this, we realize that we stubbornly try to escape the direct experience of thinking. We try to distance ourselves from that experience by injecting doubtful thoughts between us and the observation. If we snap out from this viscous circle, we're left with the bare observation - we can't really find any more immediate explanation for our thoughts than the direct experience, that these thoughts are the mirrors of our most intimate activity. What is the context of this activity, how I reached to that point, are very important questions but they don't change the nature of the immediate experience.

When you say that young Steiner was struggling for certainty, it is exactly the stubborn viscous habit that seeds the uncertainty. This was Steiner's great insight. The certainty is given, the uncertainty is grafted from our cultural and philosophical environment. It's a thought-reflex unconsciously implanted into us. It can be expressed as this "sure it seems that thoughts reflect our activity. But in our age we're way too smart to fall for a naivety like this. We know very well that everything is just an event in a chain of causes and effects. I'm being naive if I think that in my thinking I have something real. It's just a result of other processes that I must seek in order to explain my thoughts." This was what Steiner struggled with. How to explain thoughts in such a way that it becomes clear that they proceed from our most intimate spiritual activity?
The breakthrough comes when we find that the very desire to explain thinking with more thinking is what is misplaced. I know that this sounds too elementary to be true but it's actually not an intellectual judgment. It's the first lucid intuition we can have. I can't stress this enough. We don't grasp this if we think to ourselves "OK, then I'll just stop doubting and settle on what seems to be naively real". No, this simply sweeps the uncertainty under the rug. We really grasp it at the moment we lift ourselves in our thinking to a point that is not yet affected by the uncertainty. In other words we're stricken by a real spiritual experience, much like our hand has been paralyzed all our life and we suddenly realize we can move it. It's not a mystical or inexplicable experience, it's lucid and completely meaningful in itself. We realize that in our Spirit we're actually above the thought of uncertainty, we've been wearing it as a piece of clothing that had been ingrown with our skin. "The most important observation we can possibly make" is when we feel that the stubborn thought which as a tic causes us over and over again to seek other thoughts to explain thinking, is something that we have consciously or unconsciously united with our soul life. When we find the freedom not to identify habitually with that thought, we realize that we're no longer slave to it. The we step in the firm point where we can truly observe how thoughts - including the thoughts that doubt the nature of thinking - proceed from the one and the same spiritual reality.

I know you'll object that all this is to deep to be the task of chapter 3. And it's true that I extend it much further in order to make my point. But at the same time, if we read without prejudice we'll see that it is all there implicit in the important observation. You are not the only one who objects to this. Exactly objections like these caused Steiner to add in 1918:

A personality valued very highly as a thinker by the author of this book has raised the objection that thinking cannot be spoken of in the way it is done here, because what one believes oneself to be observing as active thinking is only a semblance. In actuality one is observing only the result of an unconscious activity that underlies thinking. Only because this unconscious activity is in fact not observed, does the illusion arise that the observed thinking exists in and through itself, in the same way that one believes one sees a motion when a line of single electric sparks is set off in quick succession. This objection is also based upon an inexact view of the actual situation. Whoever makes it does not take into account that it is the “I” itself that, standing within thinking, observes its own activity. The “I” would have to stand outside of thinking if it could be fooled as in the case of the quick succession of the light of electric sparks. One could go still further and say that whatever makes such an analogy is deluding himself mightily, like someone, for example, who truly wanted to maintain of a light in motion, that it is newly lit, by unknown hand, at every point where it appears, — No, whoever wants to see in thinking something other than that which is brought forth within the “I” itself as a surveyable activity, such a person would have to first blind himself to the plain facts observable before him, in order then to be able to base thinking upon a hypothetical activity. Whoever does not blind himself in this way must recognize that everything which he “thinks onto” thinking in this way leads him out of the being of thinking. Unprejudiced observation shows that nothing can be attributed to the being of thinking that is not found within thinking itself. One cannot come to something that causes thinking, if one leaves the realm of thinking.

This is chapter three. I repeat "Unprejudiced observation shows that nothing can be attributed to the being of thinking that is not found within thinking itself" If this doesn't speak clearly enough, I don't know what else. Or you'll say that even here Steiner makes an overstatement?

The problem is not that we disagree where the above realization happens. The problem is that if it's not realized how this realization happens, then it won't be found anywhere else further down the pages. And this can already be seen from the kind of answers you gave to my question:

You ask for a phenomenology of getting from the naive intuition that you are thinking your thoughts to an essential understanding of intuition. Well, as Steiner says to Rosa, everybody will have a drastically different experience of this and a drastically different pathway towards it. I'm still on this pathway myself, often falling back and casting down my experience to finished thoughts and certainties. I haven't met anybody who started approaching it without it being associated with a profound inner challenge that reflected in their life circumstances. It certainly isn't about just finally grasping a very difficult math problem. It is the turning inside out of everything we intuit. So, I wouldn't trust anybody who claims there is 'an' experience that marks this transformation for everyone.

My belief is that the reason the exceptional state can never be destroyed is because it is directly connected to the transformation, almost perhaps as a child on its way to becoming an adult. Or, better, the caterpillar who has no clue of the its own inner butterfly.

It's perfectly true everyone will experience this realization in their unique way but it can already be seen from the above that you attribute this realization to something completely different - and that's the reason you must deny that chapter three speaks of it. What you describe above simply pulls the veil of mysticism all over again. "There's something which kinda happens, no one can explain when and how exactly but once you experience it you'll know it." Compare again with Steiner's words - we can't find nothing of the being of thinking which is not found in thinking. You turn this upside-down. You practically say "the certainty of thinking can never be found in the being of thinking. We must step outside it and have that certainty revealed through mystical feeling". In other words we don't find the certainty of thinking as direct and lucid intuition within thinking itself but are supposed to leave thinking and have mystical insight which 'somehow' tells us that thinking contains its own cause. I don't expect you to change your view but I hope that you at least realize that this is not what Steiner speaks of.