The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Human Individuality

[ 1 ] Philosophers identify the main difficulty in explaining mental images as lying in the fact that we are not the external things themselves, yet our mental images are supposed to correspond to those things. Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that this difficulty does not exist at all. We are indeed not the external things, but we belong, together with the external things, to one and the same world. The section of the world that I perceive as my subject is permeated by the flow of general world events. For my perception, I am initially enclosed within the limits of my bodily skin. But what lies within this bodily skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Thus, for a relationship to exist between my organism and the object outside of me, it is not at all necessary for something of the object to slip into me or make an impression on my mind, like a signet ring in wax. The question: how do I become aware of the tree standing ten steps away from me, is completely misguided. It arises from the view that the boundaries of my body are absolute partitions through which information about things flows into me. The forces acting within my skin are the same as those existing outside it. I am therefore truly the things; though not I, insofar as I am the subject of perception, but I, insofar as I am a part within the general course of world events. The perception of the tree lies with my I within the same whole. This general course of world events evokes the perception of the tree there to the same extent as it evokes the perception of my I here. If I were not a perceiver of the world but a creator of the world, then object and subject (perception and self) would arise in a single act. For they are mutually dependent. As a perceiver of the world, I can find the commonality of the two as interrelated aspects of being only through thought, which relates both to one another through concepts.

[ 2 ] The so-called physiological proofs of the subjectivity of our perceptions will be the most difficult to refute. When I apply pressure to the skin of my body, I perceive it as a sensation of pressure. I can perceive the same pressure through the eye as light, and through the ear as sound. I perceive an electric shock through the eye as light, through the ear as sound, through the skin nerves as a jolt, and through the olfactory organ as the smell of phosphorus. What follows from this fact? Only this: I perceive an electric shock (or pressure) and, in response, a quality of light, or a sound, or a certain smell, and so on. If there were no eye, the perception of a mechanical vibration in the environment would not be accompanied by the perception of a quality of light; without the presence of an organ of hearing, there would be no perception of sound, and so on. By what right can one say that without organs of perception the entire process would not exist? Anyone who, based on the fact that an electrical process in the eye produces light, concludes: therefore, what we perceive as light is, outside our organism, merely a mechanical process of movement—such a person forgets that they are merely moving from one perception to another and by no means to something outside of perception. Just as one can say: the eye perceives a mechanical movement process in its surroundings as light, so too can one assert: a lawful change in an object is perceived by us as a movement process. If I paint a horse twelve times around the circumference of a rotating disc, precisely in the postures its body assumes as it runs, I can create the illusion of movement by rotating the disc. I need only look through an opening in such a way that I see the successive positions of the horse in the corresponding intervals. I do not see twelve images of horses, but the image of a horse galloping by.

[ 3 ] The physiological fact mentioned above cannot, therefore, shed any light on the relationship between perception and mental images. We must find our way in some other way.

[ 4 ] The moment a perception appears within my field of vision, my thinking also comes into play. A link in my system of thought, a specific intuition, a concept connects with the perception. When the perception then disappears from my field of vision: what remains? My intuition regarding that specific perception, which formed at the moment of perception. The vividness with which I can later recall this connection depends on the way my mental and physical organism functions. The mental image is nothing other than an intuition related to a specific perception, a concept that was once linked to a perception and has retained its connection to that perception. My concept of a lion is not formed from my perceptions of lions. However, my mental image of the lion is based on perception. I can teach the concept of a lion to someone who has never seen a lion. I will not succeed in imparting a vivid mental image to him without his own perception.

[ 5 ] The mental image is thus an individualized concept. And now it becomes clear to us that, for us, the things of reality can be represented by mental images. The full reality of a thing becomes apparent to us at the moment of observation through the convergence of concept and perception. Through perception, the concept takes on an individual form, a relation to this specific perception. In this individual form, which bears within itself the relation to perception as a distinctive feature, it lives on within us and forms the mental image of the thing in question. If we encounter a second thing with which the same concept is associated, we recognize it, along with the first, as belonging to the same kind; if we encounter the same thing a second time, we find in our conceptual system not merely a corresponding concept in general, but the individualized concept with its characteristic reference to the same object, and we recognize the object again.

[ 6 ] The mental image thus lies between perception and concept. It is the specific concept that points to perception.

[ 7 ] I may call my experience the sum of everything about which I can form mental images. The person who possesses a greater number of individualized concepts will have the richer experience. A person who lacks any capacity for intuition is not capable of acquiring experience. They lose sight of objects because they lack the concepts with which to relate to them. A person with well-developed intellectual faculties but with perception that functions poorly due to crude sensory organs will be equally unable to gather experience. Although they can acquire concepts in some way, their intuitions lack a living connection to specific things. The thoughtless traveler and the scholar living in abstract conceptual systems are equally incapable of acquiring a rich experience.

[ 8 ] Reality presents itself to us as perception and concept; the subjective mental image of this reality appears as an idea.

[ 9 ] If our personality were to express itself solely through cognition, the sum total of everything objective would be given in perception, concept, and mental image.

[ 10 ] However, we do not content ourselves with relating perception to the concept through thought; rather, we also relate it to our particular subjectivity, to our individual self. The expression of this individual relationship is the feeling that manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure.

[ 11 ] Thinking and Feeling correspond to the dual nature of our being, which we have already considered. Thinking is the element through which we participate in the general workings of the cosmos; feeling is that through which we can withdraw into the intimacy of our own being.

[ 12 ] Our thinking connects us to the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves, making us individuals in the first place. If we were merely thinking and perceiving beings, our entire lives would pass in undifferentiated indifference. If we could merely recognize ourselves as selves, we would be completely indifferent to one another. It is only because we experience self-awareness as a sense of self, and through our perception of things we feel pleasure and pain, that we live as individual beings whose existence is not exhausted by the conceptual relationship they have to the rest of the world, but who still possess a special value in and of themselves.

[ 13 ] One might be tempted to view emotional life as an element that is more richly imbued with reality than the intellectual contemplation of the world. To this, one must reply that emotional life has this richer significance only for my individual self. For the world as a whole, my emotional life can only acquire value if emotion, as a perception of my self, connects with a concept and, through this detour, integrates itself into the cosmos.

[ 14 ] Our life is a constant oscillation between participating in the general events of the world and our individual existence. The further we ascend into the general nature of thought, where the individual ultimately interests us only as an example, as an exemplar of the concept, the more the character of the particular being, of the very specific individual personality, is lost within us. The further we descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resonate with the experiences of the outside world, the more we separate ourselves from universal being. A true individual will be the one who reaches highest with his feelings into the realm of the ideal. There are people in whom even the most general ideas that take root in their minds still bear that particular hue that unmistakably shows their connection to their bearer. Others exist whose concepts approach us without any trace of individuality, as if they had not sprung at all from a human being of flesh and blood.

[ 15 ] The mental image already gives our conceptual life an individual character. After all, everyone has their own vantage point from which they view the world. Their concepts follow from their perceptions. They will conceive of general concepts in their own particular way. This particular specificity is a result of our position in the world, the sphere of perception connected to our place in life.

[ 16 ] This certainty is countered by another, one that depends on our particular constitution. Our organization is, after all, a specific, fully determined particularity. We associate particular feelings—in varying degrees of intensity—with our perceptions. This is the individual aspect of our own personality. It remains as a residue once we have taken all the determinations of the theater of life into account.

[ 17 ] An emotional life completely devoid of thought would gradually lose all connection with the world. For a person oriented toward totality, the understanding of things goes hand in hand with the formation and development of the emotional life.

[ 18 ] Feeling is the means by which concepts first acquire concrete life.