The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Anthroposophy and Anthropology

[ 1 ] Max Dessoir's book "Vom Jenseits der Seele" contains a short section in which the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science I advocate is characterized as scientifically unjustified. ^{1Compare Max Dessoir: "Vom Jenseits der Seele", die Geheimwissenschaften in kritischer Betrachtung. The section dealing in particular with anthroposophy comprises pages 254-263.} Now it might seem to some that a discussion with personalities who stand on Dessoir's scientific point of view must under all circumstances be unfruitful for the representative of spiritual-scientific anthroposophy. For the latter must assert a purely spiritual field of experience, which the former rejects in principle and relegates to the realm of fantasy. One could therefore only speak about the humanistic knowledge under consideration with someone who believes from the outset that he has reasons to believe that the humanistic field in question is a reality. - This view would be correct if the proponent of anthroposophy presented nothing other than his inner personal experiences and simply placed these alongside the results of science based on sense observation and the scientific processing of this observation. Then one could say: the confessor of the science thus characterized refuses to regard the experiences of the explorer of the spiritual realm as realities, and the latter can only make an impression with what he presents on such personalities who from the outset take his point of view.

[ 2 ] However, this opinion is only based on a misunderstanding of what I call anthroposophy. It is true that this anthroposophy is based on experiences of the soul, which are gained independently of the impressions of the sense world and also independently of scientific judgments, which are based only on sense impressions. It must therefore be admitted that both types of experience initially appear to be separated by an impassable gulf. - But this is not the truth. There is a common field in which both lines of research must meet, and in which a discussion is possible about what is put forward by the one and the other. This common ground can be characterized in the following way.

[ 3 ] The proponent of anthroposophy believes, based on experiences that are not only his personal experiences, that human cognitive processes can be further developed from the point at which the researcher who wants to rely only on sense observation and intellectual judgment about this sense observation stops. In the following, in order to avoid continuous lengthy paraphrases, I would like to call the scientific direction based on sense observation and the rational processing of sense observation anthropology and ask the reader to allow me this unusual use of this term. In the following explanations it will only be used for what is described here. In this sense, anthroposophy means being able to begin its research where anthropology ends. ^{2Although what I represent as "anthroposophy" stands in its results on quite different ground from the statements of Robert Zimmermann in his book "Anthroposophy" published in 1881, I believe I may nevertheless use the concept of the difference between anthroposophy and anthropology as characterized by Zimmermann. Zimmermann, however, only summarizes as the content of his "Anthroposophy" the concepts provided by anthropology in an abstract scheme. For him, the recognizing vision on which the anthroposophy I am referring to rests does not lie in the realm of scientific research. His anthroposophy differs from anthropology only in that the former first subjects the concepts received from the latter to a procedure similar to Herbartian philosophizing before making them the content of its purely intellectual scheme of ideas.}

[ 4 ] The representative of anthropology stops at relating the concepts of understanding that can be experienced in the soul to sense experiences. The representative of anthroposophy experiences that these concepts, apart from the fact that they are to be related to sense impressions, can still develop a life of their own in the soul. And that, by unfolding this life within the soul, they bring about a development in the soul itself. He becomes aware of how the soul, when it turns the necessary attention to this development, makes the discovery within its being that spiritual organs reveal themselves in it. (I use this expression "spirit-organs" by adopting, as an extension, the use of language which Goethe followed out of his world-view when he used the expressions "spirit-eyes", "spirit-ears"). ^{3A more detailed description and justification of this idea of "spiritual organs" can be found in my book "Vom Menschenrätsel" page 146 ff. and in my writings relating to Goethe's world view.} Such spiritual organs then represent formations for the soul that can be thought of in a similar way to the sense organs for the body. Of course, they can only be thought of in terms of the soul. Any attempt to bring them together with any bodily formation must be strictly rejected by anthroposophy. It must conceive of its spiritual organs in such a way that they in no way step out of the realm of the soul and reach over into the structure of the body. It regards such an encroachment as a pathological formation, which it strictly excludes from its sphere. The way in which anthroposophy thinks about the development of the organs of the spirit should be sufficiently strong proof for those who are really informed about this kind of development that there are no other ideas about abnormal experiences of the soul, illusions, visions, hallucinations, etc., for the investigator of the real spiritual realm than those which are also justified within anthropology. ^{4The inner experiences which the soul has to go through in order to come to the knowledge of its spiritual organs are described in a number of my writings, especially in my book: "Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? " and in the second part of my "Secret Science".} A confusion of anthroposophical results with abnormal so-called soul experiences is always based on misunderstanding or insufficient knowledge of what is meant by anthroposophy. Nor can anyone who follows with insight how anthroposophy represents the path to the development of the spiritual organs fall into the trap of thinking that this path can lead to pathological formations or conditions. The discerning person should rather recognize that all the stages of spiritual experience which the human being experiences in the sense of anthroposophy on the path to spiritual perception lie in an area which is entirely spiritual, and beside which the experience of the senses and the ordinary activity of the intellect proceed unchanged in the same way as they did before the emergence of this area. The fact that there are many misunderstandings about this aspect of anthroposophical knowledge is due to the fact that some people find it difficult to draw a purely spiritual aspect into the sphere of their attention. Such people are immediately abandoned by the power of their imagination if it is not supported by a view of the sensually perceptible. Their power of imagination then dampens down even below the degree of strength that prevails in dreaming, to that low degree that is present for imagination in dreamless sleep, and which no longer becomes conscious. One can say that such people are filled in their consciousness with the after-effects or the immediate effect of sense-impressions, and that this being filled is accompanied by a sleepiness of everything that would be recognized as soul if it could be grasped. One can even say that the soul in its peculiarity is therefore exposed to the sharpest misunderstanding by many people, simply because they cannot wake up to it in the same way as to the sensory content of consciousness. That men with only those degrees of attention which ordinary external life brings about are in such a position need not astonish anyone who is able to see in the right light, for example, what lesson is to be drawn from a reproach which Franz Brentano has to make to the philosopher William James with reference to this matter. Brentano writes that one must "distinguish between sentient activity and that to which it is directed, that is, between sentiment and what is sentient" ("and they are as certainly different as my present recollection of myself and the event which I have in mind as past, or, to use an even more drastic comparison, my hatred of an enemy and the object of this hatred are different") and he makes the remark that one sees the error against which these words are directed "appearing here and there". He goes on to say: "William James, among others, made it his own, and at the International Congress of Psychology, Rome 1905, tried to justify it in a long speech. Because, when I look into a room, my vision appears to me at the same time as the room; because, moreover, imaginary images of sensible objects differ only gradually from objectively excited sensory images of them; because, finally, bodies are called beautiful by us, but the difference between beautiful and ugly is related to the difference between emotional movements: thus psychical and physical phenomena should no longer be regarded as two classes of phenomena. It is difficult for me to understand how the speaker himself did not realize the weakness of these arguments. To appear at the same time is not to appear as the same thing, just as to be at the same time is not as much as to be the same thing. And therefore Descartes could recommend without contradiction to deny at least that the room I see is, and to hold only to the fact that the seeing of the room is, as something indubitable. But if the first argument is invalid, then obviously also the second; for what would it mean if fantasizing differed from seeing only in the degree of intensity, since, even if this were also balanced, the full equality of fantasizing with seeing, according to what has just been said, would only mean equality with a psychical phenomenon? The third argument speaks of beauty ... But it is certainly a strange logic which, from the fact that "the pleasure in beauty" is something psychical, wants to conclude that that to whose appearance it is linked must also be something psychical. If this were correct, then every displeasure would be identical with that which one dislikes, and one would have to be careful not to regret a mistake made, since in this identical regret the mistake itself would be repeated. - In such a state of things it ought not to be feared that the authority of James, who is unfortunately joined among German psychologists by that of Mach, will lead many to misjudge the most obvious differences." ^{5Compare Franz Brentano: "Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie" (Leipzig, 1907), page 96 f.} In any case, this "misjudgment of the most obvious differences" is not a rare fact. And it is based on the fact that the power of imagination can only develop the necessary attention for the sensory impression, while the actual mental process that takes place does not make itself more present to the consciousness than what is experienced in the state of sleep. We are dealing with two streams of experiences, one of which is grasped while awake, but the other - the psychic - is simultaneously grasped only with an attention equal to the weakened imagination of sleep, that is, with almost no attention at all. It must not be disregarded that during the ordinary waking state of man the mental state of sleep does not simply cease, but continues alongside waking, and that the actual mental only enters the realm of perception when man awakens not only to the sense world, as takes place in ordinary consciousness, but also to mental existence, as is the case in seeing consciousness. Whether this latter is denied for the soul - in the crude materialistic sense - by the sleep that persists in waking, or whether, because it is not seen, it is thrown together with the physical, as in James' case, is almost indifferent; the results are almost the same: both lead to disastrous short-sightedness. It is not surprising, however, that so often the spiritual remains imperceptible when even a philosopher like W. James is unable to distinguish it from the physical in the right way. ^{6For more details on this awakening of those mental faculties which are unawakened in ordinary consciousness, see my book "Vom Menschenrätsel" page 156 ff.}

[ 5 ] Whoever is as unable as W. James to separate the essentially soul-like from the soul contents experienced through the senses, it is difficult to speak of that area of the soul's existence within which the development of the mental organs is to be observed. For this development takes place precisely where his attention is not able to turn. It leads from intellectual to visual cognition. ^{7An even more extensive justification of these explanations can be found in the "Sketchy expansions of the content of this writing" at the end: "I. The philosophical justification of anthroposophy."}

[ 6 ] Now, however, nothing more has been achieved through the ability to perceive the essential soul than a very first precondition that makes it possible to direct the spiritual gaze to where anthroposophy seeks the development of the soul organs. For what first presents itself to this gaze relates to what anthroposophy speaks of as the soul being equipped with spiritual organs, like an undifferentiated living cell to a living being equipped with sense organs. The individual spiritual organs themselves, however, only become conscious to the soul as its possession to the extent that it is able to use them. For these organs are not something dormant; they are in perpetual motion. And if they are not in use, one cannot be aware of their existence. For them, therefore, perception and being in use coincide. How the development of these organs and thus also their perceptibility comes to light is described in my anthroposophical writings. I will only point out a few things in this direction here.

[ 7 ] Whoever devotes himself to reflecting on the experiences brought about by the sense phenomena will encounter questions everywhere, for the answering of which this reflection initially seems inadequate. In the pursuit of such reflection, the representatives of anthropology arrive at the definition of the limits of knowledge. We need only recall how Du Bois-Reymond, in his speech on the limits of knowledge of nature, speaks of the fact that one cannot know which is the essence of matter and which is that of the simplest phenomenon of consciousness. One can now stop at such points of reflection and give oneself up to the opinion that there are insurmountable barriers to knowledge for man. And accordingly one can reassure oneself that man can only attain knowledge within the area enclosed by these barriers and that beyond that only a sense of foreboding, feeling, hoping and wishing is possible, with which a "science" can have nothing to do. - Or at this point one can begin to form hypotheses about an area that lies beyond the sensually perceptible. In such a case one makes use of the intellect, which is believed to be allowed to extend its judgments over an area of which the senses perceive nothing. With such a procedure one will expose oneself to the danger that the unbeliever in this respect will retort that the intellect has no right to judge a reality for which the basis of sense perception is withdrawn from it. For these alone would give content to its judgments. Without such content, its concepts would remain empty.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not relate to the "limits of knowledge" in one or the other of these two ways. Not in the second, because it must be of the same opinion as those who feel that one loses, as it were, all ground for reflection if one leaves the ideas as one has gained them from sense perceptions and yet wants to apply them beyond this area. - Not in the first way, because it realizes that something can be experienced in the soul at the so-called limits of cognition that has nothing to do with the content of the conception gained from sense perception. If the soul only visualizes this content, then with true self-reflection it must say to itself: this content cannot directly reveal anything to cognition other than a reproduction of what is sensually experienced. The matter becomes different when the soul proceeds to ask itself: what can be experienced in itself when it is filled with such ideas to which it is led at the ordinary limits of cognition? With appropriate self-reflection it can then say to itself: I can recognize nothing in the ordinary sense with such ideas; but in the case in which I make this impotence of cognition quite inwardly vivid to myself, I become aware of how these ideas work in myself. As ordinary cognitive ideas they remain mute; but to the same extent that their muteness is increasingly communicated to the consciousness, they gain an inner life of their own, which becomes one with the life of the soul. And the soul then notices how it is in a position with this experience that can be compared to the position of a blind being that has not yet experienced any special development of its sense of touch. Such a being would initially bump into everything. It would feel the resistance of external realities. And from this general sensation an inner life could develop, filled with a primitive consciousness that no longer merely has the general sensation: I bump into things, but which manifolds this sensation within itself and distinguishes hardness from softness, smoothness from roughness, etc.

[ 9 ] In this way, the soul is able to experience and to multiply within itself the experience that it has with the concepts formed at the limits of knowledge. It learns that these boundaries represent nothing other than that which arises when it is touched by the spiritual world. The realization of such boundaries becomes an experience for the soul that can be compared with the tactile experience in the sensory field. ^{8Limits of knowledge such as those discussed above do not merely occur in the small number in which some people become aware of them; they arise in large numbers on the paths that reflection must take through its inner being in order to come into a relationship with true reality. In the last section "Sketchy expansions of the content of this writing", compare the chapter: "The appearance of the limits of cognition."} What she previously described as the limit of cognition, she now sees as the spiritual-soul contact through a spiritual world. And from the reflective experience that it can have with the various boundary concepts, the general sensation of a spiritual world becomes a manifold perception of it. In this way the lowest kind of perceptibility of the spiritual world becomes an experience. This only marks the first opening of the soul to the spiritual world. But it has also been shown that what I mean by anthroposophy as spiritual experiences does not refer to general nebulous emotional self-experiences of the soul, but to something that is developed in a lawful way in a real inner experience. It cannot be the place here to show how the first primitive spirit-perception is heightened by further soul-perceptions, so that, like a spiritual-soul touch, we can also speak of other, so to speak, higher kinds of perception. With regard to the description of such spiritual processes, reference must be made to my anthroposophical books and essays. Here only the principles of the spiritual perception of which anthroposophy speaks should be indicated.

[ 10 ] I would like to use a comparison to illustrate how different the whole behavior of the soul is within anthroposophical spiritual research than in anthropology. Imagine a number of grains of wheat. You can use them as food. But you can also plant them in the earth so that other wheat plants develop from them. You can hold ideas that you have gained through sensory experiences in your consciousness in such a way that you experience in them the reproduction of sensory reality. And one can also experience them in such a way that one allows the power to be effective in the soul which they exert in it through that which they are, apart from the fact that they depict a sensory reality. The first mode of action of the ideas in the soul can be compared to what happens through the grains of wheat when they are taken in as food by a living being. The second with the production of a new wheat plant through each seed. - The comparison may, however, only be thought of in such a way that one takes into account: the seed becomes a plant similar to the ancestor plant; the conception active in the soul becomes within the soul a power serving the formation of spiritual organs. And it must also be taken into account that the first awareness of such inner forces can only be ignited by such strongly effective ideas as the marked boundary ideas are, but that once this awareness of such forces has awakened, other ideas can also be of service to it, albeit to a lesser extent, in order to continue on the path taken.

[ 11 ] At the same time, this comparison points to something that emerges from anthroposophical research into the nature of the life of imagination. Just as the seed, when it is processed into food, is lifted out of that current of development which lies in its very nature and leads to the formation of a new plant, so the imagination is diverted from its essential direction of development when it is used by the imagining soul to reproduce a sense perception. The development corresponding to the imagination through its own nature is that of acting as a force in the development of the soul. Just as one does not find the laws of development proper to the plant when one examines the seeds for their food value, so one does not find the nature of the imagination when one examines the extent to which it produces the reproductive cognition of the reality it mediates. This is not to say that this investigation cannot be undertaken. It can do this just as well as the one about the nutritional value of plant seeds. But just as through the latter one enlightens oneself about something other than the laws of development of plant growth, so through a theory of knowledge which examines the representations with regard to their reproducing cognitive value, one obtains information about something other than the nature of the life of representation. As little as the seed has it in its nature to become food, so little does it lie in the nature of the imagination to provide reproductive knowledge. Indeed, one can say that just as the use as food is something quite external to the seed, so is the cognitive reproduction for the imagination. In truth, the soul grasps its own developing being in the ideas. And it is only through the soul's own activity that the ideas become mediators of the cognition of a reality. ^{9A more detailed explanation of the thoughts given above can be found in the last section of the 2nd volume of my "Riddles of Philosophy": "Sketchy outlook on an anthroposophy" (pages 594-627).}

[ 12 ] The question of how ideas become such mediators of knowledge must be answered differently by anthroposophical observation, which makes use of the organs of the mind, than by theories of knowledge that reject this observation. The following results for this anthroposophical observation.

[ 13 ] As the ideas are in their very nature, they form a part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious in the soul as long as it does not consciously use its spiritual organs. As long as they are alive according to their own nature, they remain unconscious in the soul. The soul lives through them, but it cannot know anything about them. They must attenuate their own life in order to become conscious soul experiences of the ordinary consciousness. This attenuation occurs through every sensory perception. Thus, when the soul receives a sensory impression, a paralysis of the imaginative life comes about; and the paralyzed imagination experiences the soul consciously as the mediator of a cognition of external reality. ^{10Compare with this the 3rd section of the "Sketchy Extensions of the Content..." given at the end of this writing: "On the Abstractness of Concepts."} All concepts that are related by the soul to an external sense reality are inner spiritual experiences whose life is paralyzed. In everything that one thinks about an external sensory world, one is dealing with the extinguished ideas. But the imaginative life is not lost, but leads its existence, separated from the realm of consciousness, in the non-conscious spheres of the soul. And there it is found again by the spiritual organs. Just as the deadened ideas of the soul can now be related to the sense world, so the living ideas grasped by the spiritual organs can be related to the spiritual world. - The borderline ideas described above are those that cannot be paralyzed by their own essence, which is why they resist a relationship to sense reality. This is precisely why they become the starting points of spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical writings, I have called ideas that are grasped as living by the soul imaginative ideas. One misunderstands what is meant here as "imaginative" if one confuses it with the pictorial form of expression that must be used to indicate such ideas accordingly. What is really meant by "imaginative" can be illustrated in the following way. If someone has a sensory perception while the external object impresses him, then the perception has a certain inner strength for him. If he turns away from the object, he can visualize it in a mere inner image. But the imagination has only a lesser inner strength. It is, so to speak, shadowy in relation to the imagination that is effective in the presence of the external object. When man wishes to animate ideas that are shadowy in his soul for ordinary consciousness, he imbues them with echoes of sensory perception. He makes the imagination into a vivid picture. Such pictorial conceptions are certainly nothing other than the results of the interaction of imagination and sensory life. The "imaginative" conceptions of anthroposophy do not arise in this way at all. In order to bring them about, the soul must know so precisely the inner process of the union of imaginative life and sense-impression that it can keep the flow of sense-impressions, or their after-experiences, completely out of the imaginative life. One can only keep the after-experiences of the senses at a distance if one has learned how the imagination is seized by these after-experiences. Only then is one in a position to connect the mental organs vividly with the essence of the imagination and thereby receive the impressions of spiritual reality. The life of imagination is thereby penetrated from a completely different side than in sensory perception. The experiences one has in this process are essentially different from those experienced through sensory perception. And yet there is a way of expressing oneself through these experiences. This can happen in the following way. - When a person perceives the color yellow, he has in his soul not only the eye experience, but an emotional co-experience of the soul. This can have different strengths for different people, but it will never be completely absent. Goethe described the emotional side-effects of red, yellow, green etc. very vividly in the beautiful chapter of his Theory of Colors on the "sensual and moral effect of colors". If the soul now perceives something from a certain area of the spirit, it can happen that this spiritual perception has the same emotional side-effect in it that occurs in the sensory perception of yellow. One then knows that one has this or that spiritual experience. Of course, one does not have in front of one's mind the same thing that one has in front of one in the sensory perception of the yellow color. But one has the same inner experience as an emotional side effect that one has when the yellow color is before the eye. One then says: one perceives the spiritual experience as "yellow". Perhaps, to be more precise, one could always say: one perceives something that is like "yellow" for the soul. But no one who has learned from anthroposophical literature about the process that leads to spiritual perception should need such a complicated way of speaking. This literature sufficiently draws attention to the fact that the beingness accessible to spiritual perception does not stand before the spiritual organ in the same way as a diluted sensuous object or process, or in such a way that it could be reproduced by conceptions which in the ordinary sense are sensuous-vivid ones. ^{11The fourth chapter of the "Sketchy Extensions of the Content" given at the end of this work sheds further light on what has been said here: "An Important Feature of Mental Perception."}

[ 15 ] Like the spiritual world that lies outside the human being, the soul learns to know the spiritual essence of the human being itself through its spiritual organs. Anthroposophy observes this spiritual being as a member of the spiritual world. It progresses from the observation of a part of the spiritual world to such ideas about the human being that make it aware of what reveals itself in the human body as the spiritual human being. Anthropology, coming from the opposite direction, also progresses to ideas about the human being. If anthroposophy develops the types of observation described above, then it arrives at views of the spiritual being of man, which is revealed in the body in the sense world. The flowering of this revelation is consciousness, which allows the sense impressions to continue to exist in the imaginative being. As anthroposophy progresses from the experiences of the extra-human spiritual world to the human being, it ultimately finds him living in the sense body and developing in it the consciousness of sense reality. The last thing it finds on its way from the human being is the living conceptual being of the soul, which it is able to express in coherent imaginative concepts. Then, as it were at the end of its path of spirit research, it can continue to use its gaze to see how the essential imaginative life is paralyzed by the perceiving senses. In this paralyzed imaginative life, illuminated from the spiritual side, she has characterized the human being living in the sense world, insofar as he is an imaginative one. In this way she arrives at a philosophy of man as a final result of her research. What precedes it lies purely in the spiritual realm. It arrives at a characterization of the human being living in the world of the senses with that which has emerged to it on its spiritual path.

[ 16 ] Anthropology explores the realms of the sensory world. As it progresses, it also reaches the human being. He presents himself as summarizing the facts of the sensory world in his bodily organization in such a way that consciousness arises from this summary, through which external reality is visualized in ideas. The anthropologist sees the ideas springing from the human organism. In observing this, he must stop in a certain sense. He cannot grasp an inner lawful connection of the imagination with mere anthropology. Just as anthroposophy, at the end of its path in spiritual experiences, still looks at the spiritual nature of man, in so far as this is revealed through the perceptions of the senses, so anthropology, when it is at the end of its path in the realm of the senses, must look at the way in which the sense-man works imaginatively on sense-perceptions. And in observing this, it finds that this activity is not supported by the laws of bodily life, but by the laws of thought of logic. Logic, however, is not an area that can be entered in the same way as the other areas of anthropology. In thinking dominated by logic, laws prevail that can no longer be characterized as those of bodily organization. As the human being operates within them, the same being is revealed in him that anthroposophy encountered at the end of its path. Only the anthropologist sees this being as it is illuminated from the sense side. He sees the paralyzed conceptions and, by conceding a logic, also admits that in the conceptions laws from a world prevail which unites with the sensuous world but does not coincide with it. In the imaginative life borne by the logical being, the anthropologist is revealed the sensory human being who projects himself into the spiritual world. In this way anthropology arrives at a philosophy of man as the final result of its research. What precedes it lies purely in the realm of the senses. ^{12Just like the thoughts on page 19, those indicated above are also illuminated in a certain direction by the "Sketchy Extensions of the Content" given in the first chapter of the "Philosophical Justification of Anthroposophy" at the end of this work.}

[ 17 ] Once the two paths, the anthroposophical and the anthropological, have been legitimately traversed, they meet at one point. At this meeting anthroposophy brings with it the image of the living spirit man and shows how he develops the consciousness existing between birth and death through the senses by paralyzing the supersensible life of consciousness. Anthropology shows in this encounter the image of the sensory man who grasps himself in consciousness, but who lives towering into spiritual existence in the being that lies beyond birth and death. At this meeting a truly fruitful understanding between anthroposophy and anthropology is possible. This must occur if both are to develop into a philosophy of the human being. The philosophy of man that emerges from anthroposophy will indeed provide a picture of man that is painted with quite different means than the one given by the philosophy of man that emerges from anthropology; but the viewers of the two pictures will be able to find themselves in a similar agreement with their ideas as the negative plate image of the photographer with appropriate treatment with the positive photograph.

[ 18 ] These remarks seem to have shown in what sense the question alluded to at the beginning of this essay about the possibility of a fruitful discussion between anthropology and anthroposophy can be answered in the affirmative, especially from the anthroposophical point of view.