Thinking, Feeling and Willing: and their Reflections in the Three-Fold Social Order

by
Dany Ghassan Charbel, Msc.
Robert W.D. Gorter, MD, PhD.

19th August, 2024

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Thinking as cognitive function:

Thinking is an essential process for humans; and one could state that on earth, only human beings can think. Thinking (reflecting) allows us to solve problems, collect new information, understand concepts, and process our experiences.

Thinking involves all these processes of learning, remembering, and organizing mentally to understand and the interactions of this information better and recall it later.

Thinking, also known as ‘cognition’, refers to the ability to process information, hold attention, store and retrieve memories and select appropriate responses and actions. The ability to understand other people, and express oneself to others can also be categorized under thinking.

Feeling

A self-contained phenomenal experience. Feelings are subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts or images evoking them. They are inevitably evaluated as pleasant or unpleasant, but can have more specific intrapsychic qualities.

Feeling with others, empathy-sympathy-antipathy:

Empathy is a broad concept that refers to the cognitive and emotional reactions of an individual to the observed experiences of another. Having empathy increases the likelihood of helping others and showing empathy and compassion which the building blocks of morality. Empathy and compassion are also key ingredients of successful relationships because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others.

What is Autism?

Autism is a neurological and developmental disorder that affects how people interact with others, communicate, learn, and behave. Although autism can be diagnosed at any age, it is described as a “developmental disorder” because symptoms generally appear in the first 2 years of life and to stay.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a guide created by the American Psychiatric Association that health care providers use to diagnose mental disorders, people with autism often have:

  • Difficulty with communication and interaction with other people
  • Restricted interests and repetitive behaviors
  • Symptoms that affect their ability to function in school, work, and other areas of life

Autism is known as a “spectrum” disorder because there is wide variation in the type and severity of symptoms people experience. In the medical world, it is now generally accepted that autism is directly related to the introduction and application of these 25 adjuvants in all early childhood vaccinations.

Current rapidly increasing social problems are directly related to the rapidly increasing phenomenon of autism. Autism is a lack of empathy with all its consequences. Since the early 2000’s, autism is becoming a rapidly increasing social burden and directly related to the approximately 25 “adjuvants” added to childhood vaccinations like organic mercury, aluminum and formaldehyde (the most carcinogenic= cancer causing substance known to science).

And, through additions of these adjuvants, the IQ score goes down with 3 points per decennium.

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Willing, is a fundamental concept that reflects and individual’s readiness, motivation and openness to engage in certain behaviors, take actions, make changes, or pursue personal growth. It plays a significant role in the process of behavioral changes, therapy, and self-improvement. One of the most important German philosophers and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe pointed out that knowing by itself is not enough but we must apply. And willing is not enough; we must also do.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1748-1831)
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Circle of Colors by Johann von Goethe to symbolize the human Spiritual and Soul life (1809)

Three Realms of Society

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) distinguished three realms of society:

Steiner suggested the three would only become mutually corrective and function together in a healthy way when each was granted sufficient independence. Steiner argued that increased autonomy for the three spheres would not eliminate their mutual influence, but would cause that influence to be exerted in a more healthy and legitimate manner, because the increased separation would prevent any one of the three spheres from dominating the others, as they had frequently done in the past. Among the various kinds of macrosocial imbalance Steiner observed, there were three major types:

  • Theocracy, in which the cultural sphere (in the form of a religious impulse) dominates the economic and political spheres.
  • State Communism and Socialism, in which the state (political sphere) dominates the economic and cultural spheres.
  • Traditional forms of capitalism, in which the economic sphere dominates the cultural and political spheres.

Rudolf Steiner related the French Revolution‘s slogan, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, to the three social spheres as follows:

  • Liberty in cultural life (education, science, art, religion, and the press),
  • Equality of rights, democracy, in political life, and
  • Cooperation (brotherhood) in a decentralized, freely contractual, economic life outside the state and operating within the legal and regulatory boundaries, including labor laws, set by the democratic state. Economic “cooperation,” for Steiner, did not mean state socialism, but cooperative types of capitalism, such as are sometimes referred to today as steward ownership and stakeholder capitalism.

According to Steiner, those three values, each one applied to its proper social realm, would tend to keep the cultural, economic, and political realms from merging unjustly, and allow these realms and their respective values to check, balance and correct one another. The result would be a society-wide separation of powers.

References

Johannes Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner: A documentary biography, Henry Goulden Ltd, 1975, ISBN 0-904822-02-8, pp. 117–120. (German edition: Rowohlt Verlag, 1990, ISBN 3-499-50079-5).

Steiner, Rudolf, Toward Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 4th edition, April 2000.

Preparata, Guido Giacomo (Fall 2006). Perishable money in a threefold commonwealth: Rudolf Steiner and the social economics of an anarchist Utopia. Review of Radical Political Economics, 38(4):619–648.

https://Dictionary.apa.org American psychological association

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