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The Knowledge of Freedom
Chapter I Conscious Human Action
Chapter II The Fundamental Urge for Knowledge
Chapter III Thinking in the Service of Comprehending the World
Chapter IV The World as Percept
Chapter V Attaining Knowledge of the World
Chapter VI The Human Individuality
Chapter VII Are There Limits to Knowledge?
The Reality of Freedom
Chapter VIII The Factors of Life
Chapter IX The Idea of Freedom
Chapter X Philosophy of Freedom and Monism
Chapter XI World Purpose and Life Purpose (Mankind's Destination)
Chapter XII Moral Imagination (Darwinism and Morality)
Chapter XIII The Value of Life (Pessimism and Optimism)
Chapter IX Individuality and Type
Conscious Human Action
Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom is one of the canonical books of Anthroposophy. In this 1916 classic, Steiner provides the philosophical foundation of his "spiritual science" by explaining the nature of freedom as a function of spiritual activity. As he states in the introduction, "a full justification is won for the idea of the freedom of the will, if only the soul region is first found in which free willing can unfold itself (viii)." So, while this book contains none of the raw data of his famous clairvoyant research, it does provide a philosophical foundation for apprehending the reality of spiritual worlds. "What is striven for in this book," he writes, is to justify a knowledge of the spiritual realm before entry into spiritual experience (ix)."
The first chapter, "Conscious Human Action," opens the philosophical debate on free will with the following question: "Is man, in his thinking and doing, a spiritually free being, or does he stand under the compulsion of an iron necessity of purely natural lawfulness?( 3)" He then makes a short survey of how a number of modern thinkers, including Spencer, David Friedrich Strauss, Spinoza, Hamerling, Ree, and von Hartman, have approached this problem, all of them in an imperfect way because they incorrectly link the notions of freedom and determination to unconscious desires, and many argue that human beings are always somehow slaved to their unconscious motivations, which negates the idea of freedom. No action can be free, they argue, because all actions stem from a deterministic biology or a characterological disposition which includes emotion and unconscious desire.
Steiner refutes this position, saying that motivations and desires can be understood through the process of thinking. Thinking, Steiner argues, is fundamentally an activity of spirit, and as such, is the very activity that makes the human being free. Once we acquire, through thinking, the reasons we want what we want, and the reasons we do what we do, we live in spirit and can attain the possibility for real freedom.
The Fundamental Desire for Knowledge
In this chapter, Steiner begins by observing the fundamental split between the self and the world, and characterizes this split in terms of the desire that the self has to know about the world. People sense that despite being detached from the world they see, they also belong intimately to it. Accordingly they want to know how the world works and to know where they belong in it.
The means with which we approach this knowledge is as much a polarity as the "self and world" polarity itself. Steiner identifies this particular polarity of approaches as "one world monism" vs. "two world dualism." Assigning a variety of terms to dualism, Steiner equates "self and world" to "subject and object," "spirit and matter," and "thinking and phenomenon." To the degree that the self/subject thinks about the object/phenomenal world, it takes part in a spiritual activity, but it does so in a material world.
Steiner argues that neither monism nor dualism are satisfactory for gaining knowledge about the world, because "they do not do justice to the facts (18)." By separating the two worlds into opposed spheres, dualism creates a state of alienation between self and world. Monism for its part either denies the reality spirit, leading to materialism, or denies reality of matter, leading to spiritualism.
Materialism cannot explain the world because any description of the material world must begin with forming thoughts about the world, and thinking is a spiritual activity. The world is never "just what it is," to a human perceiver--it is always thought about and speculated about. On the other hand, spiritualism cannot explain the world fully because pure spirit has no way to make itself known to the human organism without material senses or the object world about which thoughts and ideas are formed.
Steiner argues that the way back to "unity" is to seek out that part of the spirit world that our material organisms have taken into their own beings. "We can find nature outside us only when we we first know it is within us. What is akin to it in our own inner being will be our guide (22)."
Thinking in the Service of Apprehending the World
Steiner opens this chapter with an illustration: billiard balls in collision on a table. In pointing out the difference between observing the balls as they collide and then thinking about the collision one has just observed, he notes that "(a)s certain as it is...that the occurrence takes place independently of me, it is just as certain that the conceptual process cannot occur without my participation (25)."
Steiner asserts that "observation and thinking are the two starting points for all the spiritual striving of man (26)." All concepts must have at their core 1) an observed phenomenon, and 2)the thinking about that phenomenon that turns the observation into a mental image. He argues that thinking is unique among human activities, because we are able to think about thinking itself, creating additional concepts for ourselves. Feeling, for example, is not the same--we get feelings of pleasure from the way something affects us--not from any active "feeling" we apply to that thing. Thinking about the way an event happens is not the same as receiving pleasure or pain from its happening.
The activity of thinking is directed at the object of thinking, not at the personality doing the thinking, nor at the activity of thinking itself. Thus, Steiner argues, "(t)he first observation that we can make about thinking is...that it is the unobserved element of our ordinary spiritual life (30)."
But, we can direct our thinking at the activity of thinking, taking it as the object of our thought, although we can't simultaneously think and think abouth what we're thinking--we can only do the latter after the fact.
The ability to think about our thinking is, for Steiner, vitally important, and what matters in this ability is not how one concept leads to another (in a neurobiological sense), but how the larger content of our thoughts creates the conditions that motivate us to bring certain concepts into meaningful relationship with one another. Thinking then, is not a materialistic (chemical) process, but a spiritual activity.
When we observe our own thinking as an object of perception, we are "confronting our own activity," and we can explore the deeper inter-relationships of our own thinking. When we practice this, it empowers us to explore more deeply our relationships with purely external objects that enter our perception, and use this to acquire a greater knowledge of the object world. Because our thinking is something that we ourselves create, by thinking about our own thoughts, we gain a greater knowledge of the creative process in the larger world. As Steiner asserts, "...there is no starting point for looking at all world happening more primal than thinking (38)."
Steiner takes issue with the idea (popular among many philosophers of his day, including Nishida) that the starting point of his philosophy should be consciousness rather than thinking. "I must reply to this that if I want to clarify what the relationship is between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it (40)." Since thinking arises from within consciousness, it certainly presupposes the existence of consciousness--but the task for the philosopher is not to create a world beginning with "first things," but to understand it using the "last things," of which thinking is the most directly and immediately given.
Ultimately then, for Steiner, thinking is the fundamental spiritual activity; one whose practice and perfection optimizes our ability to understand the world in which we live.
The World As Perception
What's a concept? According to Steiner, we can arrive at an understanding of "concept" if we think about what happens when a person sees a tree. When we observe a tree, we immediately think, bringing forth the idea of tree. Even after the object disappears from view, we continue to hold the thought form of the tree. This is the concept of the tree. The difference between ideas and concepts is that ideas are "fuller in content, more saturated, and wider in scope (47)." Since thinking is the means to acquiring ideas and concepts, thinking precedes concepts--a difference, Steiner notes, between himself and Hegel.
On the matter of causality, Steiner maintains that "cause" and "effect" cannot be understood through simple observation. Only thinking can bring together the observed cause and the observed effect in a conceptual pattern that relates one to the other. Accordingly, an objective science that pretends to rely on "observation alone" is a science that has abandoned thinking.
From thinking to the thinker
Human consciousness, says Steiner, mediates between observation and thinking, which gives the illusion that thinking is a dualistic, subject-object activity. We believe that the thinking subject can either take something from the outside world as its object, or take its own thinking activity as its object. But, Steiner argues, "(t)hinking is beyond subject and object (49)." Thinking is the thing that forms the concepts of "subject" and "object," so thinking is not merely a subjective activity. "I must never say my individual subject thinks; it is much more the case that my subject itself lives by the grace of thinking (50)."
The object comes into consciousness
Steiner invites us to imagine a person with fully developed intelligence dropping out of nowhere into the world. This person starts to see, smell, and hear things, but has no prior experience of any of the world's phenomena. Yet, because this person possesses the ability to think, thinking will begin immediately to form connections between the stuff of the external world. This thinking is not subjective, though--it is the activity that makes observed data intelligible.
The objects of observation, i.e., the things the person sees, hears, and smells are "perceptions."
The subjective nature of perceptions
Perception, says Steiner, is the object of both observation and sensation--but it is not the thing observed, nor the thing sensed. Perception is what happens when the subject, through thinking, takes hold of an object or an emotion, and comes to some knowledge of them. The difference between a sensed observation, and a thought perception seems analogous to the difference between David Hume's "impression" and "idea," the latter being the result of impressions that are reflected upon. Perception is thus a term that can also be used to describe the thinking that first works upon the observed or felt thing to make it a known thing.
After establishing this relationship between thinking and perception, Steiner goes on to say that perceptions will change as other sense data and other perceptions enter consciousness to either build upon or contradict earlier perceptions. "Every broadening of the circle of my perception obliges me to correct my picture of the world (52)."
Elaborating on the subjective component of the perception, Steiner identifies two subjective properties of the perception--the first property, "mathematical," relates to the actual physical position of the observer vis a vis the object; the other is "qualitative," a term which relates to the soundness of the physical organs which sense the object.
The subjective quality of perception
Perception seems to be a highly subjective operation, so much so that many philosophers in the western tradition have denied the existence of any objective world apart from the mind. Steiner quotes George Berkeley at length, demonstrating Berkeley's famous position that if objects "are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit (55)." The logical conclusion of this thinking, as Steiner observes, is the belief that nothing exists outside of perception.
But, says Steiner, this is a limited appreciation of perception, because the function of perceiving depends on the existence of things outside ourselves.
The object of perception is not only the thing outside ourselves, but also our own "I"s in the act perceiving. "When I am absorbed in the perception of a given object, I have for the moment only a consciousness of it. To this can then come the perception of my self. I am from then on not only conscious of the object, but also of my personality, which stands before the object and observes it (56)."
Once we perceive something, we form a picture of that thing, and retain it. The formation of these "mental pictures," or "representations" (vorstellung), occur as part of our perception of ourselves (in addition to our perception of the thing) and they change us.
Mental pictures and subjectivity
Steiner describes the subjective quality of perception with so much precision you would almost think he is arguing for it--what he's actually doing is showing the degree to which modern philosophy has created the subject-centered definition of perception--only to destabilize it in the final pages of this chapter.
He begins by talking about the "mental picture," which is formed when an external object makes a sense impression on an observer and the observer forms a self-conscious thought about it. The mental picture is now an object of perception too, and the experience of this perception makes an "enriching" change in the observer. The mental picture becomes such a part of the subject observer, that it comes to be seen as the primary object of perception, replacing the external object that was observed in the first place. As Steiner writes, "I supposedly know nothing about the table-in-itself, which is the object of my observation, but only about the change which takes place within my self while I am perceiving the table (57)."
While Berkeley made the radical argument that there was no object world outside of these mental pictures, Kant brought this kind of extreme idealism back to earth--somewhat. He asserted that there could be an objective, a priori "thing-in-itself," but we were unable to know anything of that thing-in-itself beyond what our mental pictures told us. Thus, according to Kant, we are still limited to our mental pictures, and by the cognitive apparatus that perceives them. Our physical and mental "organization" then, is the property that determines the way we perceive the world--the absolute objective Real is not something we can make certain judgments about. The external world is only a source of sense stimuli that the subject's physio-mental organism processes into knowledge.
This assumption about perception has huge implications for modern knowledge because it drives all psychology and cognitive sciences. As long as the brain, nervous system, and senses are the things that determine our perception, we need not worry about any underlying meaning in the object world--not only is it unknowable, it makes no real change to the way we perceive--only the operations between the sense-impression and the brain process does. Quoting Edouard von Hartmann, Steiner writes "What the subject perceives are always only modifications of his own psychic states, and nothing else (62)."
Ultimately (according to this kind of subject-based thinking) any meaningful connection between the external object world and the inner soul is lost to the internal operations of the cognitive, self-perceiving apparatus.
Uncovering the problem of purely subjective perception
Steiner recapitulates the subjective position: if there are no senses, there is no perception. The subject, due to its physical organization produces the perception, and it produces these perceptions on the basis of "mental pictures" of the object.
"But then my sense organs and the processes in them are also merely subjective. I have no right to speak of a real eye, but only my mental picture of an eye. It is just the same with the nerves and the brain process, and no less so with the occurrence of the soul itself through which things are supposedly built up out of the chaos of manifold sensations (64)."
What this means is that even though we may argue that perceptions are derived subjectively from the operations of the physical organism, the physical organism itself can't claim any "objective" reality more absolute than the object perceived. So "critical realism," (subjective realism), is no more authentic than "naive realism" (objective realism)--in fact it "naively" assumes, without critical examination, the objective reality of the subject's perceptive apparatus.
Steiner thus refutes Schopenhauer's axiomatic "The perceived world is my mental picture (vorstellung, 67)." Subjective reality as a model for perception is shown to be unsatisfactory, and "another path must be taken (68)."
Berkeley and Kant
This chapter opens with a recapitulation of the relationship between naive realism and critical idealism. Naive realism, again, is taking objects of perception as things independent and real until a new perception comes to replace them, leaving only mental pictures as the real stuff of perception. Critical idealism, then is the result--in which the objective world comes to be seen as not real at all, because all it leaves are mental pictures. Steiner showed that critical idealism, summed up in the phrase, "the world is my mental picture," holds no water because the apparatus of cognition must have objectively real eyes, senses, brains, and nervous systems to make it work.
Nevertheless, critical idealism has been a dominant mode of consciousness in the modern world, and had sought to understand the reality of the world "indirectly" by gaining information from the mental pictures of a naive objectivity. It doesn't always admit that the thoughts that lead even to this indirect understanding, are by its own definitions, mental pictures.
"Such an idealist," Steiner writes, "will then either deny the thing-in-itself completely, or at least declare it to have absolutely no significance for human beings, which means it is as good as not there, because we can no nothing about it (71)."
This seems to be the understanding most moderns have of God and the spirit world. For the critical idealist, Steiner asserts, "there can be only two types of people: deluded ones, who consider their own dream spinnings to be real things, and wise ones, who see into the nothingness of this dream world and who, by and by, must lose all desire to bother themselves further about it (71)."
Where does modern scientific knowledge fit in? Science continues to look for the "thing-in-itself," but scientists can only do so on the basis of information gleaned from their own "mental pictures." Steiner uses von Hartmann's term "transcendental realism" to describe this search for knowledge.
Getting to "thinking"
Having identified a difference between "illusionism" (dreaming and fantasy) and "transcendental realism," (an acceptance of a true reality that remains concealed beyond the object world) Steiner shows both to be rooted in naive realism, as they both go from observation of the world to mental picture, and try to make reality on the basis of the mental picture.
The first question we might ask transcendental realists (i.e., those who seeks the "thing-in-itself" through mental pictures) is "where do we get these mental pictures?" If experience is just a set of mental pictures, what's the difference between an "I" perceiving the mental pictures of the outside world, and an "I" dreaming? We generally stop thinking about the mental pictures of the dream world when we wake up, but how do we "wake up" consciously from the mental pictures we perceive when we're actually awake? Steiner says that "thinking" is to conscious perception what conscious perception is to dreaming. This suggests that thinking is in itself a mode of conscious reality.
"Thinking presses in"
As Steiner makes clear in these pages (74-77), thinking is the thing that gives perception its true quality, and as such bridges the gap (or embraces the dichotomy) between the objectivity of naive realism and the subjectivity of critical idealism (which, as we should remember, both stem from naive realism, because both depend on a model of simple observation that passes over into mental pictures). The reason thinking is generally overlooked as a key factor in perception is that the naive observation considers thinking to be something that exists "only in man's head." Steiner, though, asserts that thinking, as a mode of consciousness, has an autonomous quality, and is as much a part of the observed objects of nature as it is of the thinking brain.
"Does not the world bring forth thinking in the head of man with the same necessity as it brings forth the blossom of a plant? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth root and stem [...] Set the plant before you. It unites in your soul with a definite concept. Why does this concept belong less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom do? (75)"
Thinking, then, is not something "added on" to a perception by the subject, but part of the objectively real spiritual totality that joins a phenomenon to its perceiver. Thus, seemingly turning Kant's idea on its head, Steiner maintains that "(h)ow I am organized to grasp things has nothing to do with their nature (77)."
Thinking vs. perception
Steiner introduces a new "split," this one between perceiving and thinking, showing that a simple perception derived from naive realism is inadequate to get beyond a purely subjective understanding of the world. Thinking will be identified as the activity that allows human consciousness to embrace the dichotomy between the objects of the external world and the mental pictures of the subject.
Among the various problems of subject-centered apprehension of the world is the inability of subjectivity to see anything but the "individual" quality of things in the world which exist in themselves and in relation to other objects besides just the observer, eg., the color "red" is not "my red," but "red." Thinking allows us to enter into a relationship with the objects of the world that takes us beyond ourselves and even beyond the objects perceived into a universal realm to which all things, including ourselves, belong.
"Everything depends now on determining the place of that being, which we ourselves are, in relationship to other beings. This determination must be distinguished from the mere becoming conscious of ourselves (79)." This indirect jab at Descartes suggests that mere self-perception is a very limited application of consciousness. Our activity of thinking, again, takes us out of self-perception into a universe of autonomous forms, and rescues us from the naive judgment that we create our own concepts of the world. Ideal forms, such as the "triangle," exist independently of our mental pictures of a triangle. Thinking puts us in touch with this world of spiritual forms.
Thinking and the drive for knowledge
After stating that the thinking of the many (i.e., everybody) is itself a unity, Steiner goes on to say that thinking is our nexus to the entire cosmos. Although our feeling and experience are individual matters, thinking puts us in contact with an "absolute power," even if our participation in this power is only peripheral.
The drive for knowledge attends our awareness, however peripheral, of being in contact with the absolute. Our thinking, seeking relationship with the rest of the cosmos, delivers new knowledge to us through its own activity. The concept, which, again, comes in response to the perception of an external object appears within us as received, existing qualities of the object. The act of knowledge, then, is "the synthesis of perception and concept (81)."
More on the primacy of thinking
We should seek no greater world-unifying phenomenon than that of thinking. Our notions of a personal God are too attached to our personalities to be satisfactory, and material or physical forces are too externalized and detached to be satisfactory. What about "will," as Schopenhauer suggests?
In a fairly long passage (pp, 82-83) Steiner rehearses Schopenhauer's own argument, essentially that through the will, the activity of the body, and the activity of willing are brought together. The will prompts the body to act even as it contemplates the act itself.
Steiner refutes this, arguing that perception is still preliminary to willing, i.e., preliminary to those actions of the body that Schopenhauer would interpret as being linked to some willed impulse.
Toward the "absoluteness of thinking"
Moving closer to the end of this important chapter, Steiner reinforces his argument for the primacy of thinking as "the activity of knowing the world." Asserting that thinking is "full of content" rather than mere abstraction, he states that only thinking allows us to make any distinctions between the multiplicity of impressions our senses perceive. Thinking is the thing that comes to meet sense impressions, bringing forth concepts and ideas so that the perception can be made intelligible.
He introduces the term "intuition," describing it as the "form" in which the content of thought first arises. Accordingly "intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception (84)," i.e., the interior/subject component of the relational phenomenon. A person without intuition sees only disconnected perceptual fragments.
A thing becomes intelligible when it is placed back into the holistic context from which our perceptions tear them. Our perceptions necessarily distort the totality of reality because through our sensory organization, we only perceive such a thin, individual slice of reality, but actually, "(t)here is no such thing as an object separated off from the whole world (85)." Thinking is the thing that restores a disconnected perception to wholeness, because the world of our thinking is interconnected to all of other thoughts, concepts, and intuitions.
How things "really stand"
The final piece of Chapter Five is a recapitulation of earlier arguments about perception, and a final answer to the misguided impression that critical idealism leaves us with. Steiner reminds us that critical idealism "bases itself on the fact that naive realism, consistently pursued, cancels itself out (86)." As a reminder of what he means by this, remember that naive realism takes impressions of the outside world at face value. The critical idealist argues that these observations are mere sense impressions of the subject observer. The observer then is said to transform the impressions into purely subjective representations, or "mental pictures." These mental pictures eventually form the basis of all knowledge, and we are left with the sense that what we know of the world is purely subjective, and based upon the "cognitive organization" of the sensory organs and brains possessed by the subject observer, summed up in the idea that "there is no color without the color sensitive eye." The problem, i.e., the place where this model "cancels itself out" is in its acceptance of the objective reality of the eye, brain, nervous system, etc., that allows the subject to receive the raw impressions needed for mental pictures. In this way critical idealism can only be held up by its own version of naive realism.
By the end of Chapter Five, we know that "the other way" to correctly know the world is thinking, and "the way this works" is as follows: a perception arises in consciousness, and the subject immediately becomes aware of associated perceptions (sound with color, motion with sound and color, smell with motion, sound, and color, etc.) "Only thinking joins all these perceptions to each other and reveals them in their mutual relationships (86)."
What this means is that the senses don't bring forth knowledge, thinking does, and it isn't the subject that creates knowledge unilaterally. As Steiner tells us, a perception is subjective to the degree that it triggers a conceptual intuition in the subject observer; yet it is also objective inasmuch as it depends upon the presence of an object in the "horizon of perception." As soon as we grasp this we can come to a better understanding of the relationship between the mental picture and the object itself, and more importantly, we can cross "over the boundary where the relationship between human subject and the object belonging to the world will be led down from the purely conceptual field of knowing activity into our concrete individual life (89).
The human individuality
How do we come to grips with the fact that we create mental pictures of the outside world while being separated from it?
First, we realize that we are part of the object world that we perceive; our coming to know the world does not happen through the world making an imprint on our spirit, it rather happens through thinking, because thinking, through concepts, bridges the gap between us and the outer world.
Steiner writes "If I were not a world knower, but rather a world creator, then object and subject (perception and "I"), would originate in one act. For they determine each other mutually (94)." This kind of expression of mutual determination between opposites resonates a great deal with Nishida Kitaro's descriptions of the self-determination of mutually contradictory entities. I have never heard of Nishida referring to the unifying creative activity between opposites as "thinking," but in many of his later writings, he does propose that history might be the self-determination of absolute nothingness in a process that unites the historical world (object) with the creative human historical body (subject). I suppose we could speculate on whether the history is itself an extended network of thinking, in which case our thinking could be seen as the governing agent of the historical process.
From thinking to feeling
In pages 94-96, Steiner introduces another discussion of the phenomenology of perception, this time from the standpoint of individuality. He opens by refuting, as he has done several times up to this point, the idea of the pure subjectivity of perception. It is incorrect to conclude, he argues that an impression from the outside world "calls forth" the functions of the organs of cognition; in other words, it is incorrect to say that without the body and its organs there would be no perception.
In fact, it works like this:
-an object of perception arises and thinking immediately becomes active
-from within the subject, intuition in the form of a concept joins itself to the perception
-(the object disappears from sight)
-later, a mental picture of the object can be recalled--this mental picture is an "individualized concept."
-if a second object of perception arises similar to the first, we add to our concepts of the object, and the sum total of these mental pictures is called "experience."
Our capacity for intuition is directly related to our ability to acquire experience, and reality is always a rich ground for gaining experience because always consists of an interaction between perception and concept.
The passage from thinking (taking part in the activity of the cosmos) to feeling (re-subjectifying experience) comes about when we relate our perceptions to our selves in terms of "pleasure" and "pain." The degree to which we experience pleasure and pain (in addition to merely being aware our own mental activity) is the degree to which we live as human beings.
Feeling as beyond mere knowing
"Reality presents itself to us as perception and concept;" writes Steiner, "our subjective representation of this reality presents itself to us as a mental picture (97)."
How do we get beyond the role of mere "knower" or "thinker about" the perceptions that rise up in our consciousness? When we come to appreciate the difference between the properties of "thinking" and "feeling," we can arrive at better understanding of how these two soul-functions work in the formation of our being. Thinking, as we have noted, puts us into contact with the cosmos itself--it is the means by which we take part in something objectively much larger, larger beyond comprehension, than ourselves. Feeling, though, is the means by which we re-enter, and then come to know ourselves as things distinct from the cosmos.
We feel when we associate pleasure and pain with our perceptions, giving them an individual stamp that differentiates them from the shared realm of thinking. Steiner describes our alternations between thinking and feeling as the movement of a pendulum, and suggests that feeling is most useful when it most closely allied to concept formation. It is essential to keep in mind that thinking is still of a "higher" order than feeling, inasmuch as it represents greater connection to the world. It is almost as if we should hold feeling "at bay" as much as possible, so that our thinking can take us into higher ideal plateaus of cosmic reality.
"A true individuality," he writes, "will be the one who reaches up the farthest with his feelings into the region of the ideal (99)."
While we will always think thoughts in a fashion unique to ourselves, i.e., a fashion in which our own feelings are joined to the concepts of perceptions of outer things, it is still necessary that our life of feeling be guided by our thinking. In this way, our feeling will become enriched, and universalized rather than completely self-reflective.
Are There Limits To Cognition?
Monism vs. dualism
In the beginning of this chapter on the limits of knowing, Steiner begins by drawing a distinction between "monism" and "dualism." His turns out to be a very case-specific definition of monism, i.e., the case in which it is offered as an oppositional argument to subject-object dualism. For this reason it is not a particularly complete or complex definition of monism, and it would be a mistake to take Steiner's characterization of the idea here as exhaustive. Monism is a deeply rich and nuanced term and has been treated from a wide variety of disciplines and intellectual traditions. I only mention this because Steiner's shorthand characterization of a monistic world as a world that our knowing "elaborates into a ... unity" is really a rough one, and should be seen as a provisional characterization that seeks to describe the way human thinking establishes unity from the apparent duality between the knowing subject and the objective "world of appearances."
The point that dualism is a false construct of the mind is made once again, and again, he lays much of the blame for high modern dualism on the philosophy of Kant, who moved beyond the crude duality of "subject" and "object" into the realm of a new duality of "object" and "thing-in-itself." In this schema, the subjective perception is a kind of ground of reality, so it doesn't exactly oppose the object as in the case of naive realism--it is, rather, the cognitive organization that establishes the ordered place of a perception in an object world. So, by Kant's way of thinking (Steiner suggests), the mental creation of the "thing-in-itself" lying behind the object is an "artificial polarity," that actually has no ground, because the object-world premise is itself but a perception.
The raising of false limits to knowing
"Any kind of existence which is assumed outside the region of perception and concept," Steiner writes, "is to be assigned to the sphere of unjustified hypotheses (101)."
The Kantian "thing-in-itself," he adds, is one of these entities, and the reason for this is that it stems from the root perception of a naive realism, and is then given the identity of a mental image, but then assigned transcendental status as an inherently unknowable, yet some how real ideal. It's there, but we don't (and can't) know what it is. Thus dualism creates not only a subject-object divide, but an object-transcendental divide.
If this is the way dualists proceed toward knowledge (and our modern world generally does), then obviously they will claim that there are barriers to knowledge.
Monists, on the other hand, seeing the world as a unity, have no notion of an unknowable "thing-in-itself" alienated from the unified world of space, time, spirit and matter. The activity of thinking within the monistic world is an expression of that world, and no knowledge lies beyond its borders. What keeps a person from knowing is not his cognitive organization, but his ability to use that cognitive organization.
Through and for the ego
Steiner tells us that there can be no limits to knowing, and that the "preconditions" for the activity of knowing are "through" and "for" the ego. This follows from the fact that the "inner being of selfhood (ego?) which first perceives the outside world has to make that perception complete as knowledge through its own thinking activity.
"If we pose ourselves questions which we cannot answer, then the content of the question must not be clear and definite in all its parts (104)."
The questions we pose ourselves derive not from the sphere of the subjective perception of objective phenomena of the world, but rather from the "conceptual sphere" that includes the entire mental world. Again, Steiner shows us that the function of thinking is to unite these two spheres, and while thinking is an ego-activity, it is the activity of an ego linked to the entire cosmos in the conceptual sphere.
Dualism breaks the unity of thinking (the unity of perception and concept) into a four-part structure
1. the object
2. the perception the subject has of the object
3. the subject
4. the concept which relates the perception to the object
This structure leads us to assume the reality of a mental process in which perception takes place outside consciousness and the concept formation takes place inside consciousness. Dualism thus reinforces the earlier noted problem between naive realism and critical idealism. As Steiner states it, the dualist "can only create for himself conceptual representations of what is objectively real." The problem of course is that this dualism creates for itself false limits to knowledge by once again placing the "thing-in-itself" (the reality behind the representation) beyond the reach of knowing.
A further elaboration on naive realism
Dualism needs to support its abstract worldview (described earlier as a progression from perception to phantasms of an ideal "thing itself") by establishing "real principles" on which it can be said to be based.
The first of these principles is the core of modern materialist philosophy, i.e., if a thing cannot be perceived with the senses, it does not exist, and vice versa. Strangely, the attraction that many modern materialists feel toward certain kinds of spiritualism, ghosts, messages from "the other side," etc., is actually an expression of this principle. If a medium can channel a dead relative, or if a ghost slams a door, we have the physical evidence required for belief. To the naive realist/dualist, things like "love," "honor," "beauty" are merely concepts--they are actually less real than a good ghostly thing that actually goes bump in the night. To contemplate truth is to merely "think about" truth, and truth, as an idea becomes much more accessible when we associate it to a sensible thing--a fact about which the dualist can say "this is a true fact."
Even God, or the highest good can only be known by analogy, as in the case of the ubiquitous "bearded man on the throne" image of Renaissance art. So, ultimately, when the dualist tries to talk about the ideal "thing-in-itself" he or she always resorts to metaphors or symbols.
Dualism, science, and experience
The kind of science that emerges from dualism (i.e., modern science) is the kind of science that, as Steiner puts it, only makes a "description" of the contents of perception.
"The naive realist regards as real only the individual tulips which are seen; he regards the one idea of tulip as an abstraction, as the unreal thought picture which the soul has composed for itself out of the features which all tulips have in common (108)."
Steiner maintains that lived experience refutes this kind of "science," showing that the tulips we see (the ones the naive realist says are REALLY real) are in fact transitory. They bloom and disappear. But we know by experience that the real thing is the tulip species, which to the naive realist is only an abstraction. Paradoxically, the critical modern science that grows from naive realism says that the real thing is an abstraction, and the passing thing is real. To bridge the gap between the false real and the real falsehood, the dualist invents hypothetical realities like "heredity," the "life force," the "soul," and the "Divine being." Each of these terms, which are invented to indicate something ideally transcendent, generally refer only human attributes and sensibilities. For example for modern dualists who use these terms, the Divine being seems to exhibit human characteristics and judgments, the soul is an amalgam of human emotions and responses, "life force" is some intangible thing that animates nature.
Ultimately, modern dualism in science actually reifies (assigns the status of concrete reality) to the pure abstractions, even as it claims to say that only sense-perceptible things are real. This is a wild mental inconsistency that Steiner refers to as "self-contradictory world view."
Steiner argues that the self-contradictory worldview described below, i.e., the worldview based on assigning perceptible qualities to hypothetical constructs, is the basis of metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism, moreover, is "a contradictory mixture of naive realism and idealism (111)," involving objects of perception in flux, and unperceivable forces that cause these objects to change. While metaphysical realism admits that thinking is necessary for acquiring knowledge of the objects of perception, it fails to properly acknowledge the importance of the "concept" as the substance of the relationship between perceptions acquired through thinking (we should remember that Steiner earlier (p 46) characterized concepts as the ideas that remain after the object of perception is gone from view).
Accordingly, when we dispense with the hypothetical constructs of metaphysical realism, we are left with perceptions and the concepts which make their relationships intelligible.
"When metaphysical realism asserts that, besides the ideal relationship between the object of perception and its perceiving subject, there must exist in addition a real relationship between the 'thing-in-itself' of the perception and the 'thing-in-itself' of the perceivable subject...this assertion rests upon the incorrect assumption of an unperceivable real process analogous to the processes of the sense world (112)."
When metaphysical realism dispenses with the hypothetical constructs of these unperceivable forces, processes, and "things-in-themselves," the result is "monism," uniting, as it does, concept with perception without any artificial mediating processes.
Steiner concludes this important chapter by explaining how monism (interpreted in this specific case) resolves the problems knowing peculiar to metaphysical realism that dualism tends to create. We should remember, in the spirit of the chapter, that "limits" to knowing are created, falsely, when we fail to understand the unity that contains the perceiving subject and the perceived object. The kind of monism Steiner posits here is one in which thinking serves to "bridge over" the antithesis between subjectivity and the object world.
He is somewhat critical of the practical assumptions of scientific induction, i.e., that if enough iterations of an experiment, or enough pieces of experience should confirm a hypothesis, we can take this as knowledge of the "thing-in-itself" of the object under examination.
Steiner's primary aim, in this chapter and in the entire first part of the book is to show that treating knowledge of the world as mere sense-perception leads to a division of reality into the subjective and objective components. The division, which he has characterized in terms of the dichotomies of "naive realism vs. critical idealism" and "dualism vs. monism," leads to the same outcome in each case. This is the tendency to treat the objects of the world as mere sensory perceptions, yet at the same time to seek for an ideal reality behind the mental pictures that these sensory perceptions give rise to. The reason we do this is that to make the world intelligible, some sense has to be made of the mental pictures of which life apparently, ultimately, exists. For Steiner, looking to make sense of the world as mere mental pictures leads us down the road of fantasy.
The notion that all scientific and philosophical roads end in this kind of fantasy is that which leads Steiner to assert that the subject-object division is in fact resolved by thinking. For Steiner, thinking, the forming of concepts and ideas about perceived things, is the means by which the dichotomy is embraced, the divided world is made whole, and limits to knowledge are removed.
The Factors Of Life
Part II of The Philosophy of Freedom is called "The Reality of Spiritual Activity," and in this section, Steiner proceeds (from the basis of the elaborate critiques of subject-object thinking he laid out in Part I) to discusses the phenomenology of spiritual activity.
Chapter eight begins by reviewing this basis.
1) Human beings perceive a richly varied object world
2) Human beings perceive among these objects, their own selves
3) Something (which we call thinking) allows us to connect all of these perceptions to our selves.
Thinking is not merely subjective--thinking itself is objective enough of a thing to be the agent by which we actually know ourselves--and it seems there exists the possibility that through our thinking we might lead a purely ideal (as in idea-based) life. What keeps this from happening is "feeling" which is a re-subjectifying of the perception transaction. "Feeling, from the subjective side," Steiner writes, "is at first exactly the same as what perception is from the objective side (127)."
According to Steiner, feeling actually arises before knowing. To the perceiver, feeling is more immediate than knowing this leads the naive realist to believe that feeling is more important than knowing. This kind of feeling-based definition of reality leads the perceiver to try to universalize the world on the basis of individual experience--to turn the personal into the universal. Steiner asserts that mysticism is one species of this feeling-based definition of reality.
So when we begin to get our heads around Steiner's anthroposophy, the first thing we need to realize perhaps, is that it really isn't a form of mysticism.
Feeling and willing, according to Steiner, are two modes by which the ego/subject takes part in experiencing the outer world.
Feeling occurs when the subject experiences the object directly in relation to itself--willing occurs when the subject experiences itself directly in relation to the object. The focus is still the subject, but in the former case (feeling), the emphasis is on the impression the object makes upon the soul of the subject, in the latter case (willing), the emphasis is on the response the subject makes toward the object.
For philosophers of the will, or "thelists," (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc.), the dominant importance on the subject's active response to the world constitutes the core of reality. Just as feeling becomes, for the mystic, the basis of all knowledge, so does willing, for the will-philosopher, become the basis of the entire world.
Steiner argues that neither mysticism nor philosophy of the will are valid as autonomous philosophical positions. The reason for this is that they share with naive realism the property of a sense-based definition of the world that seeks a transcendent supersensible ideal.
Once, again, thinking is held up as the primary means of properly apprehending the world. Although thinking can seem like a dry, abstract husk for which either the richness of mysticism or the power of will-philosophy might seem like a desirable alternative, Steiner maintains that authentic, life-imbued thinking is not only superior to feeling and willing, but ultimately includes feeling and willing too. Thinking, according to Steiner, "delves down warmly" into the things of the world. "This delving down occurs through a power that flows within the thinking activity itself, which is the power of love in spiritual form (131)."
"Whoever turns...to thinking in its essential being, will find in it both feeling and will, and these also in the depths of realit; whoever turns away from thinking and toward 'mere' feeling and willing only, will lose their true reality (132)."
The Idea of Freedom
Before getting into this chapter, I should point out that Steiner would probably not have liked the fact that I am calling this book "The Philosophy of Freedom." His word "freiheit" can be translated "freedom," but it literally means "freehood." The most commonly used English translation for this book is "The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity," as in the text I'm referring to, which is the fine 1986 translation by William Lindemann.
I think Steiner may have feared that the word "freedom" would summon up for English readers too many connotations of modern political or social freedom--rather than the deep spiritual free-ness that he wanted to convey.
I don't use "spiritual activity" because it seems too linguistically remote from the word "freiheit," and much too New-Agey to do justice to the complexity of Steiner's philosophy.
In this chapter, Steiner begins to describe more concretely what he means by thinking. Thinking is "a self-contained entity" that can be observed by the thinking subject. As Steiner writes, "(w)hoever observes thinking lives during his observation directly within a spiritual, self-sustaining weaving of being (134)." Thinking is thus "founded upon itself" and is the key to grasping the spiritual quality of the human condition.
Thinking and intuition
According to Steiner, thinking brings about the unity of perception and concept, two things which are usually considered separate in most modern mental constructs. If we don't recognize (and presumably think about), the role that thinking plays in making this unification, we will be stuck with both flawed perceptions and flawed concepts, and will tend to falsely favor one over the other as the chief characteristic of reality.
The most interesting comment in this section is an introductory remark about intuition--Steiner maintains that when thinking arises in our consciousness, it is not a "shadowy copy of reality, but rather self-sustaining, spiritual, essential being (134)." He goes on to say that this "being" is present for him through "intuition," which he characterizes as "the conscious experience, occurring within the purely spiritual, of a purely spiritual content (135)."
What this means is that the "being" of thinking is purely spiritual, and that through our intuition (a word with layers of meaning in the Steiner lexicon) we participate in this purely spiritual enterprise. Whether his readers buy into this or not, it's fascinating to ponder the idea that the material object, the material eye, the material brain, etc., permit us access to an experience that is autonomous and wholly non-material--moreover this is not deep meditation, or a revealed vision of something, but merely day-to-day thinking.
Thinking and the human organism
In this section, Steiner puts forth one of his most peculiar ideas about thinking, but one that becomes an essential piece of the teachings of Anthroposophy.
When we come to grips with the intuitive (and spiritual) quality of thinking, we realize that the human physical organization "can bring about nothing with respect to the essential being of thinking (135)." In fact, the operations of the human organism withdraw, or make room for thinking as it makes its appearance. This means that the body is not "doing" the activity of thinking, rather thinking appears "through" the body.
But, even though thinking is not dependent on the bodily organization, "I-consciousness" is, because thinking leaves traces upon the bodily organization which contribute to the subject's sense of ego-identity. Steiner makes a distinction between the "real I" and "I-consciousness." The "real I" can be found in thinking, but "I-consciousness" is a by-product of thinking, again, the "trace" or imprint of thinking upon the thinker.
Acts of will
In relation to acts of the will Steiner distinguishes between "motives" for action, and "mainsprings" of action. The former is a "conceptual or mentally-pictured" factor, or an "immediate" cause for action; the latter is the "directly conditioning factor of willing in the human organization," in other words sustaining quality underlying the action.
He refers to a "characterological" disposition, or individual make-up for each individual that largely influences the acts of will--this disposition is formed over the whole of life, influenced by the experiences and concepts each person holds, in particular the individual's life of feeling.
"When I feel pleasure or pain with respect to a definite mental picture or concept, upon this will depend whether I want to make it a motive for my action or not (138)."
So, a positive felt response to a concept becomes a motive for action, but the characterological disposition of a person will determine the way energies are marshaled to act.
Steiner then makes an unexpected, but not unreasonable leap to morality, suggesting that the feeling and willing that prompt our actions, and the motives and mainsprings associated with feeling and willing are all moral in nature.
Mainsprings of morality
The mainsprings of morality, Steiner tells us, are located in the "elements" from which our lives are composed.
The first of these elements are perceptions (the nature of which he has discussed at length in previous chapters, but), which are now discussed as "drives," or, impulses that activate the will in an attempt to satisfy desires triggered by the perception. He distinguishes between the drives activated by the "lower" senses with those drives that activate the higher senses; his example of the latter is "social propriety" or "tact." It's not entirely clear how the perception of a higher order phenomena should lead to a "mainspring of morality" as pedestrian as tact, but it does invite us to consider the degree to which social order may be maintained through the apprehension of higher order objective truths.
The second "element" of human life is feeling--feelings become attached to perceptions just as willful desires do. Pity, shame, pride, honor, remorse, revenge, etc., can all in their turn become mainsprings for moral action of one kind or another.
The third "element," or level of life is the level of "thinking and mental picturing." Our mental pictures, especially those we can call up in memory become powerful as sustained mainsprings for moral action. When these pictures become "models" for action through repeated associations with similar kinds of perception, we can call them "practical experience."
The highest element of life is conceptual thinking without regard to a specific content of perception (italics mine). When we can summon up a concept through pure intuition (which, we remember, Steiner characterizes as the conscious experience of spiritual content) and have this concept become the core of willful activity, we can say that the mainspring of our moral action is pure thinking. If too, we want to equate pure thinking to reason, we can call the mainspring of this moral act "practical reason."
More on motives of moral acts
Having discussed the motives and mainsprings of willed actions, Steiner turns his focus to moral acts and the 1) mental pictures and 2) concepts that serve as their motives. He rejects the standard utilitarian idea that "pleasure" is a motive to action, because at the point of motives, there is no "pleasure" in existence, but only the mental picture of the pleasure to be attained.
According to Steiner, "egoism," is the name of the principle by which one seeks to attain personal pleasure as the consequence of one's acts, and the egoistic desire (which come in varying degrees) can serve as the mental picture which moves a person to act. From this point, concepts also play a role in sustaining the action, as they link the action to a pre-existing moral landscape that generally conditions the ways in which one acts. The "conceptual content" may be less immediate than the desire-motive, but it makes the performance of the action intelligible in a larger inner-life context. When we act consistently with the conditions of our inner life, we can be said to be obeying our conscience.
"It signifies moral progress," says Steiner, "when a person no longer simply takes the commandment of an outer or inner authority as the motive of his action but rather when his striving is for insight into the reason why one or another maxim of action should work in him as a motive (144)." This progress here is the movement from authority-based moral action to free action based on acquired moral insight.
A person who has made this progress has sought and attained knowledge of the "needs" of moral life. Steiner lists these as:
1) the greatest possible good of all mankind
This need is something that may be a matter of personal interpretation depending on life conditions and knowledge
2) cultural progress (which seems to refer to moral development in the historical world)
This kind of progress comes with a cost as "development" in history necessarily involves the destruction or abandoning of older forms
3) the realization of "individual goals of morality grasped intuitively."
This "third" need is especially interesting because it shows the importance of personal development--the importance of forming high ideals and living up to them, not by internal violence, but by "pure intuition." Within this "need" we can identify another kind of process taking place, and take note of the differences between actions that are made with a "moral" end in mind, and actions that "spring" from intuition and can later be seen to have had a clear moral origin. There are times when we act with the greatest good in mind, and other time when we act with human progress in mind, but the "highest" moral acts are those that emerge directly from our conceptual intuition.
A principle of ethical morality
Steiner has now identified both the highest disposition of character (pure thinking), and the highest motive for moral activity (conceptual intuition). The combination of these two things indicates an elevated definition of ethical freedom. Our most morally ethical actions are those that spring from purely ideal, or spiritually intuitive motives.
It goes to reason that people who lack the capacity for moral intuition are not capable of free moral activity. They will act under some compulsion from external, or even internal forces (whether these be conditioned responses, dogma, brainwashing, etc.) to execute moral acts.
Steiner suggests that this kind of moral activity is the "antithesis" to the Kantian principle of ethical morality that is often called "the categorical imperative," which Steiner summarizes as "(a)ct in such a way that the basic tenets of your action can be valid for all men." Steiner believes that this imperative is "the death of all individual impulse to action."
Reconciling moral and personal motives
Following his surprising assertion that Kant's categorical imperative is the "antithesis" of moral activity, Steiner goes on to state that in performing authentic moral acts, we should not worry about what might hold true for "all men" but only what holds true for us.
How can it be that our actions can stem from motivations particular to ourselves yet also claim to be purely, objectively ideal actions? It's possible, Steiner says, when we consider the difference between motives to action, and the perceptible content of an action. The ego is always looking at the perceptible content of an action, but does not have to be determined by it--accordingly there is a difference between the concept formed about an action (and its result) and the motive to action itself. When a person decides to do a positive act for the good of society or the world, he or she will think about it, forming a "cognitive concept" of the action and its outcomes. The "moral concept" of the act is not something that the ego can take ownership of--it adheres to the morality of the act from an ideal standpoint. The actor seems to experience points of contact with the moral content of an act in two ways: 1) in intuiting the ideal moral quality of the act and 2) and in choosing the manner in which he or she carries out the act.
Again, owing to circumstances in life, people differ in their capacities for moral intuition--the degree to which we allow an objectively real morality come to life in our activity, in spite of the multitude of choices available to us, is the degree to which we exercise "ethical individualism."
Love and moral acts
In this section Steiner offers a radical way of thinking about the connection between action, freedom, morality, and love.
He distinguishes between the kind of ethical acts that are historically or culturally constructed, and those that appear authentically, from the core of intuition as the fruits of love. Mundane lawful acts that appear to emerge from the deepest source of ethical rectitude are most often the results of cultural conditioning, and as such are not really free--they are more like programmed responses that seek to fulfill the standards of good religious morality, or good progressive righteousness. The person who executes these acts is only functioning as "a higher kind of automaton."
In contrast to this we have authentic moral acts:
"Only when I follow my love for the object is it I myself who acts. I act on this level of morality not because I acknowledge a master over me, nor outer authority, nor a so-called inner voice. I acknowledge no outer principle for my action because I have found within myself the basis for my actions: love for the action. I do not test intellectually whether my action is good or evil; I carry it out because I love it (149-50)."
Thus our most ethical acts are not done in response to, or with the expectation of meeting, externally defined norms or standards, but emerge freely from within.
Free acts and criminal acts
Steiner entertains an objection to the idea that the freest and highest moral acts are those that come from the deep core of intuitive individuality. If, the objection goes, a person only does what suits him or her, regardless of religious or ethical norms, then there seems to be no difference between good and criminal acts.
The problem with the logic that bad deeds are as real and individualized as good deeds is that it fails to recognize the difference between pure intuition (the source of good acts) and blind drives (the source of criminal acts).
The blind drive which leads to a criminal act is, in fact, not free. When a person responds to a blind drive that leads to the commission of a crime, he or she is actually acting in a way consistent with the non-ideal and unindividuated mass of humanity--responding to the lowest, most common, and most coarse denominator of the human species.
"What is individual in me is not my organism with its drives and feelings, but rather the unified world of ideas which lights up within this organism (151)."
Accordingly criminal acts are not just as free as good acts--they are, by Steiner's understanding, decidedly unfree.
"A person is free only insofar as he is in a position at every moment in his life to follow himself (152)."
The free human being
Freedom does not ignore the laws of morality, it conforms to the--but an act that "includes" the laws of morality is of a higher order than a law that is "dictated" by them. In this sense, Steiner maintains, the bare concept of duty excludes inner freedom, because it appeals to submission not free action--again, the freest actions are those that spring from ethical individualism.
A truly free moral community is not bound together by moral laws. It is bound together by the fact that each member of that community lives freely in the world of ideas that all humanity shares--the world of thought that is alive in all of us.
Our individuality stems from the fact that our intuitions of the ideal world differ from those of our fellow human beings. We are free individuals when we acknowledge and honor the fact that others belong to the same world of ideas, but may have different intuitions of that world.
"To live in the love for one's actions, and to let live in understanding for the other's willing, is the basic maxim of free human beings. They know no other "ought" than that which their willing brings itself into intuitive harmony; what they shall will in a certain case, this their capacity for ideas will tell them (154)."
The freedom of the indwelling spirit
Steiner observes that the ability of human beings to live together in society derives from their shared participation in the spiritual world. We seek each other's approval and company in the realm of free spiritual activity.
Behaving morally and ethical simply because we are compelled to do so is not free morality or ethics. It may be the general belief of systems of the world that behaving morally is a duty not a free act, but if we do act morally under compulsion, this activity is not free.
"Whether one controls this non-freedom through physical means or through moral laws, whether a person is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual drive, or because he is bound in the fetters of conventional morality is, from a certain standpoint, a matter of complete indifference (155)."
Even in a world of enforced order and political correctness, we are still capable of attaining true freedom, when the "deeper being" that dwells in us expresses him or herself in an authentically free way. This "free spirit" is the "purest expression" of man's nature.
In the final pages of chapter nine, Steiner returns to the ideas of "perception" and "concept" in order to support the assertion that "the intellectual and moral life of the human being lead us to his twofold nature: perceiving (direct experience) and thinking."
He then links free moral activity (the dominant subject of chapter nine) to his earlier notions on the primacy of thinking to show that free spirit, which he calls the "purest expression of man's nature," also helps to heal and "bridge" our divided natures. The division between "perception" and "concept" is made whole not only through the process-act of thinking, but through the unifying autonomy of free moral action.
This then leads to the way we, as objects of perception, can transform ourselves through free moral acts.
"The plant will transform itself because of the objective lawfulness lying within it; the human being remains in his unfinished state if he does not take up the stuff of transformation within himself and transform himself through his own power (157)."
Freedom, duty, and morality
Free spirituality, Steiner tells us, is the "human being's last stage of development." Free spirituality trumps duty as a human value, because it does not derive from compulsion. As before, he makes the contrast between duty and freedom, comparing it to the difference between a "merely law-abiding and a free morality."
He points out that every "rule" we have come to obey as law was once the spiritual intuition of a free being expressing morality, not a fettered person trying to impose morality on other fettered people. As Steiner puts it:
"The free person acts morally because he has a moral idea; but he does not act so that morality will arise. Human individuals, with their moral ideas belonging to their being, are the prerequisite of a moral world order (160)."
Philosophy of Freedom and Monism
Chapter Ten is a brief but potent essay on the nature of Monism as a philosophy of inner freedom. I think it's unfortunate that in reaching a conclusion to this lengthy philosophical argument, Steiner would choose a term whose meanings are so fluid that they often refer to their own opposites. As a philosophy, Monism is usually used to describe a thought system that opposes dualism or pluralism. Against those who argue, for example, that there is a distinction between a perceiving subject and a perceived object, or that there is a difference between body and soul, spirit and matter, etc., a Monist will argue that these distinctions are false, and that the difference is resolved in some higher unity. In my own opinion, (I may be wrong) Steiner is actually arguing for a dialectical synthesis between the perceiver and the perceived, between the subject and the object, between mind and body, etc. He has already referred to this synthesis as "thinking." To now say that the synthesis is also Monism is only a partial step to get past the "naive" dualism, but Steiner, in his many, many books and lectures is anything but a Monist. (In a later chapter in this book specifically dealing with Monism, he will refer to the world as a "unity," but in his own cosmologies and studies of nature, reality is anything but homogeneous--it is wildly diverse with a multiplicity of spirits, angels, elementals; in short, a variety of natural, sub-natural, and super-natural beings).
So, I think the best way to look at these later chapters is to bracket out the word "Monism" (and try to become acquainted with the great variety of philosophical monisms) and concentrate on the thing he is critiquing, which, once again, is naive realism and the dualism that informs it.
In the opening pages he traces a kind of hierarchy of development. Naive people will seek to follow a trustworthy person. More "advanced" people will follow the norms of a society of civilization. More advanced people will seek truth from "higher," i.e., spiritual, powers," and the most advanced people will act upon the moral idea as an impulse that comes from within the conscience, and not from any external authority.
At the point where moral ideas are "generated" by the free self and not treated as commandments to obey, they appear to be entities unto themselves--as if moral ideas were accessed rather than invented--and have an identity of their own, completely independent of the thinking subject.
Monism as Inner Freedom
"Both naive and metaphysical realism, to be consistent," Steiner writes, "must deny our inner freedom for one and the same reason, because they see in man only the one who executes or carries out principles forced upon him by necessity (165)."
Naive realism denies freedom by forcing submission to some authority, whether real, or symbolic, or even conscience-based. Metaphysical realism denies inner freedom because (a la Kant) it sees the human being as being so far removed from the external authentically free "thing in itself" that man is really just "mechanistically or morally determined" by that thing.
The monist, Steiner asserts, sees that naive realism is partially correct, inasmuch as it validates perception as a means of acquiring truth--which is to say, it validates the notion that ideas can be acquired--whether from the outside (unfreely) or from intuition (freely). But monism (this kind of monism, anyway) rejects the metaphysical idea that truth can be gained from an abstract external thing that compels us to act in any way.
For the monist, the activities of human beings are both free and unfree; unfree in the world of perception, and free in the world of thought (spirit).
Monism, Morality and Freedom
The final section in Chapter Ten recapitulates Steiner's argument that no imposed or coerced code of morality can be truly free. "The moral commandments," he writes, "which the merely inference-drawing metaphysician has to regard as flowing from a higher power, are, for the believer in monism, thoughts of men (166)." Our mission in life is not, Steiner says, to satisfy the will or intentions of a higher power, but to achieve the purposes of the the free spiritual self as it unfolds.
"Each of us is called upon to become free spirit, just as each rose seed is called upon to become a rose (167)."
Monism is thus a "philosophy of inner freedom," and understands the human being to be constantly "self-developing."
The thing that seems difficult to nail down in this chapter is the reconciling what appears to be a precise kind radical subjectivity, i.e., the inherent freedom of the self, with a very ambiguous definition of monism, which in this case is merely a reality in which there is no distinction between subject and object. The difficulty comes from the fact that in Steiner's hundreds of later writings and lectures, he states quite clearly that we are constantly under the influence of external spirit beings, spirit impulses, thoughts, passions, etc., all of which have an objective identity of their own. This reality, which Steiner's own work proves clearly that he believes, seems to undermine his own definition in this work of a monistic nature in which the human is capable of acting freely without external influence.
Indeed, his reference to "nature" is interesting and if not contradictory, is at least a bit conflicted. "Monism knows that nature does not release man from her arms already complete as a free spirit, but rather she leads him to a certain stage from which, still as an unfree being, he develops himself until he comes to the point where he finds himself (167)."
Does this mean that man is under compulsion from a nature that apparently has the power to "release" him, "lead" him, etc.? Where is man's freedom in this relationship with nature?
While the argument for a purely spiritual, intuitive freedom is elegant and compelling, Steiner's logic seems to either break down here, or suffer from a lack of clear explanation of what "monism" is really supposed to mean. If man is at once free and unfree, a monism that permits unqualified freedom can't really exist, right?
In the addenda to this chapter, Steiner fails to address this question, and instead rushes back to the idea of "thinking" being the bridge between the self and the object world. In the first addendum, he says that thinking about the contradiction between the universal (ideas) and the concrete (individual morality) is itself a "living concept." I can't help but see this as a kind of dodge. The second addendum jumps up to a more transcendent level, and places the life of ideas in contradistinction to materialism. This is ground on which Steiner is much more comfortable, talking about spiritual realms as a more authentic mode of reality than material phenomena. The chapter would have been much more satisfying if he had been a little more rigorous in defining monism.
World Purpose and Life Purpose (The Vocation of Man)
In this short, but interesting chapter Steiner discusses the issue of purpose and purposefulness. First, he destabilizes the idea of purpose as a matter of causality, arguing against the commonly held supposition that the purpose of outcome "X" is the thing that determines "X." He will argue, rather, that the outcome "X" (at least in human action) is the thing that determines that which appears to be the purpose.
In the realm of nature, no "purpose" exists, says Steiner, adding that only in the realm of human action do we find anything like purpose. Thus, the blossom of a flowering plant is not the purpose of the root--the flower is governed by the laws (not purposes) of nature. But, a concept formed by a human being indicating the texture of a potential future reality (not yet achieved) is the something, indeed the only thing that we can call purpose.
Based on the earlier section on Monism, we can quickly conclude that Steiner would see this human purpose as springing from the inner freedom of the person, and not imposed by any external power.
"My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders (174)."
Steiner then goes on to "bash" the poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling (1830-89) who argued that the great purpose and plan of nature is revealed in nature's laws. What Hamerling called "purpose," says Steiner, is merely a series of perceptions about nature "harmonized" into a whole by an observer of nature. The perceptions of the phenomena of nature have nothing to do with purposes, Steiner maintains, instead saying that the objects of nature are but "lawfully formed." There is no thing "out there" giving purpose to the objects of nature--they are merely doing what they are, in a sense, programmed to do.
Human actions are different, because their "causes" are the concepts of "effects," and, as suggested earlier, the purposefulness of human life can be seen as anti-causal.
"For monism," Steiner writes, "with the falling away of the absolute world being who cannot be experienced but is only hypothetically inferred, there also falls away any reason for ascribing purposes to the world and to nature (177)."
So what does this mean? Is Steiner arguing that we live in an orderless universe?" No--nature may be "purposeless" but it is not "orderless," and nature is not the absolute. In the addendum to this chapter, Steiner cautions (or reassures) his readers that the search for external purpose is yet another example of naive realism looking for a transcendent, non-real thing acting behind the material world. What really exists "out there" is far more complex than the transcendent thing our dualistic minds attempts to imagine, and it operates at a level even higher than human purposefulness.
Moral Imagination (Darwinism and Ethics)
the need for moral imagination
As Steiner has indicated repeatedly throughout this book, the difference between a free spirit and an unfree spirit is the degree to which the spirit either authentically performs free moral actions, or merely performs actions according to existing moral laws and commandments. To state this in another way, the free spirit acts according to an ideal concept that will have a yet-unknown or unrealized perceptible outcome. The unfree spirit acts according to the image of a mental picture already in place. As an illustration, Steiner refers to the way Christians use Christ as a model, or an exemplar of moral conduct. Unfree spirits do better at following the concrete deeds of Christ than they do at acting upon the less concrete, conceptual teachings of Christ. It is also easier for the unfree spirit to avoid certain actions when the mental picture of punishment is vivid. In situations where positive action is to be encouraged (as opposed to the discouragement of negative actions in the form "thou shalt nots"), a mental picture has to be created of the concept that impels the positive action.
Thus, to act in a truly free, morally free manner, it is necessary to possess moral imagination, so that ideal concepts can become perceptual content (ie, so a high ideal can be realized in the world). A person with moral imagination is a "morally productive" person, as opposed to a mere "preacher of morality."
Moral Imagination: moral technique
In this section, Steiner discusses the "technique" of realizing the mental pictures that can be produced through the proper activity of the moral imagination. "Man's action," Steiner asserts, "does not create any perceptions, but rather reshapes the perceptions which are already present, imparts to them a new form (181)." What can this mean, other than that our mental images (which Steiner has earlier called "an intermediary between concept and perception") are actually the fruits of a creative activity, and have more authentic "realness" than even perceptions (which are in a sense predetermined according to sense function?--I don't know!)
It makes sense though, when we consider Steiner's next point, which is to say that the moral activity of making mental pictures demands a knowledge of natural law (scientific, not ethical). We can only influence the world of perceptions lawfully--i.e., "impart" a new form to them by understanding the natural laws that govern the world of perceptions. This knowledge is the basis of "moral technique," which can be learned.
Moral life vs. biological life
"Generally, people are in fact better able to find the concepts for the already existing world, than productively, out of their imagination, to determine not yet existing future actions (182)."
With this statement Steiner again draws a distinction between the person who is able to create a moral life for him or herself and the person who merely adopts or borrows established laws and norms, presumably from others who have, at some time in the past created them for themselves.
While it is probably better to adopt a good pre-existing moral code than to manufacture a false personal one, the truly evolved, morally free person cannot continue to live on a borrowed morality.
"Moral imagination and the capacity for moral ideas can become the object of knowing only after they have been produced by the individual (183)."
Any attempt to compare moral laws with natural laws will run into trouble (despite the best efforts of present day materialists to attribute moral behavior to natural selection). A biological organism operates in accordance with the natural laws of its species--the moral laws of the mind inhabiting, or perhaps, sharing space with the biological organism are created by the individual mind.
Steiner observes that his view of self-created moral life seems to stand in opposition to the theory of Evolution, but it does so only superficially.
"By evolution is understood the real emerging of the later out of the earlier in ways corresponding to natural laws (184)."
In other words, (assuming that evolution can be thought of as progress), more perfect material forms descend from less perfect material forms. In order to make these judgments the evolutionary theorist has only the finished material product to work with. The only way the evolutionary connection between "amniotes" and "reptiles" can be applied is for the theorist to have already assigned categories of "lesser" and "greater" perfection to them.
In terms of non-material concepts though, we can't "draw" the moral concepts of a later age out of the moral concepts of an earlier one. Ideas do not operate in nature the way that matter operates in nature.
Ethical individualism and evolution
"Ethical individualism does not . . . stand at odds with a rightly understood theory of evolution, but rather follows directly from it (186)."
Moral ideas that spring from the imagination of any individual may derive from those held by his or her ancestors, Steiner maintains, but they are not valid unless the individual arrives at them independently. It is possible for entirely new moral ideas to emerge from the moral imagination of an "evolved" being, but, if we are consistent in our view of evolution, we should not think that these are introduced from outside by some external agent. "(T)his theory . . . should reject any influence from the beyond, any (metaphysical) influence which is merely inferred and not experienced in idea (187)." (Italics mine)
Steiner is arguing here that just as the causes of material evolution are found inside, not outside, material reality, so must the causes of moral evolution be found inside, not outside, mankind, which is the species that bears morality in the world. Thus, even an external moral code is not moral if it is not freely apprehended (and indeed, originally grasped) by each person.
While Steiner's logic seems to limit the scope of the supernatural by "slaving" morality to humanity and to a material process of evolution that produces the human, if we look at it closer, it actually does the opposite. It assigns to humanity the status of divine image that makes it the bearer of morality, and opens the possibility that there is much more to evolution than merely natural selection. Morality, spirit, and the human organism, are for Steiner all bound together in the idea of evolution.
As he puts it, the evolutionary theorist maintains "only that humans have evolved out of ancestors that were not yet human. How human beings are constituted must be determined through observation of humans themselves (189)." Which is to say, not through observation of their ancestors or of moral codes that exist in history. What all of this seems to lead to is the idea that human freedom, on an individual-by-individual basis is the true ground of moral ethics. Human beings are, in the exercise of authentic moral freedom, in touch with something authentically spiritual and ideal.
Back to the original question!
So, are our actions free or determined?
Steiner revisits proposals made earlier in the book
1) "we are free when we are able to do what we want" and
2) "we are free when we are able to want what we want"
He reminds us that the poet-philosopher Hamerling (Robert, 1830-89) believed the first of these statements and thought the second to be an absurdity. Yet, Hamerling, who believed that the will is determined by stimuli to actions, is essentially admitting the validity of the second statement.
Steiner argues that true freedom lies in the ability to determine for ourselves the ground of our willing, which means that we are free when we are able to will the conditions of the ideal to which we then direct our actions. Here he makes a distinction between a) the organism and its processes, and b) the will and its ideals, and relates the latter to spirit and soul activity.
"Man is free to the extent that he is able in his willing to realize the same mood of soul which lives in him when he is conscious of giving shape to purely ideal (spiritual) intuitions (192)."
The Value of Life (Pessimism and Optimism)
In this chapter, Steiner reflects on the philosophical debate between optimism, summed up as the belief that "the world is the best imaginable (193)," and pessimism, summed up as the belief that "life is full of agony and misery, that pain everywhere outweighs pleasure, and suffering everywhere joy (193)."
He distinquishes between the pessimistic philosophies of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, both of whom had large followings in the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer, argued that existence was dominated by an impersonal Will, striving for unattainable satisfaction in a world full of suffering. The thinking person, accepting this chooses not to waste energy striving for fleeting satisfaction and will work to suppress that desire which only leads to pain.
Hartmann's pessimism, on the other hand, is rooted in the supposition that the pain and suffering of the world is the pain and suffering of God, and that God seeks relief from cosmic suffering through the creation of the world and humanity. On the cosmic pain-pleasure "balance sheet," pain always outweighs pleasure. The goal of God, thus, is the eradication of divine pain--human beings can assist in bringing this about by accepting the reality that life is suffering, and opt not to seek personal satisfaction, but take up the ethical project of delivering the world (and God) from its pain. All pleasure is ultimately an illusion, says Hartmann, so the mature person, ethically chooses to renounce selfish desire for the sake of the universal good.
Steiner had big problems with both of these pessimisms, and forcefully validated the correctness of human striving. Arguing that striving for satisfaction, honor, and high ideals was a source of joy, he repudiated both Schopenhauer's call for "universal laziness," and Hartmann's call to act ethically in a world in which there were no real rewards for doing so. Neither of these pessimistic schools, Steiner argued, were rooted in real human experience.
Striving for Gratification
According to Steiner, striving is integral to the human experience. Striving after a desire is not the source of pain, but a great source of pleasure. Failure to attain the thing we strive for may cause pain, but not the pursuit. Thus, Steiner says, Schopenhauer is wrong to equate human desire with pain. Should a person be devoid of of desire, (and thus "liberated" in the Buddhist sense) he or she will suffer boredom, which is a greater source of misery than striving. This is a very important consideration when it comes to figuring out what the balance of pleasure and pain may be in any life.
Pleasure and Pain
Steiner calls attention to the conventional philosophical arguments (in particular those of Eduard von Hartmann) that treat the positions of optimism and pessimism as being dependent on some kind of measurement of the quantity of pain or pleasure that exists in the world. The pessimistic philosopher believes that a sober look at reality will yield that there is more pain than pleasure. As Hartmann observes, this can only be a subjective judgment, based on experience, and never really an "algebraic" equation. A clear thinker, then, should make an attempt to bracket out his or her "feelings" in order to arrive at an objective assessment of the value of life.
We need (says Hartmann) to:
1) admit that our will distorts our ability to analyze the quality of feeling--we also have to
2) recognize that the things about which we have feelings of pleasure are only illusions
--our rational intellect, properly functioning will help us see through these illusions, because rationally, we have to admit (says Hartmann) that all pleasure leads ultimately to suffering. (Recall that Hartmann espoused a kind of heroic pessimism in which human beings were the vessels of God's own pain).
Steiner challenges von Hartmann's position, saying that feelings of pleasure are not based upon illusory objects. The feelings themselves are the objects of pleasure--to try to rationally assess whether or not a feeling can be a valid form of pleasure creates room for philosophical error. If for example, we rationally conclude that there is a surplus of pain in the world, and yet somehow we experience pleasure (however illusory), and don't decide to commit suicide to escape the world of pain, we need to question our own conclusions. If the goal of helping to expiate God's pain is a noble one--a good reason for living--then shouldn't the pursuit of that goal be a source of pleasure?
"The pessimism of Eduard von Hartmann comes in a very peculiar manner to the point of declaring life worthless, because pain predominates in it, but of maintaining, nevertheless the necessity of undergoing it (206)."
Desire as the yardstick
Eduard von Hartmann's argument, Steiner tells us, depends on thinking that moral ideals somehow emerge in the void where pessimism realizes that striving for satisfaction is useless. After we realize that striving for pleasure will bring only pain, we submit heroically to the task of helping to alleviate the cosmic suffering of God. As noted earlier, Steiner has a difficult time with this logic, using the example of a merchant who continues to stay in business even after his bookkeeper has shown him that he is operating at a deficit--in other words, if the human being operates at constant deficit of pleasure (one way of stating the pessimist's argument that pain outweighs pleasure), then the human being is living a kind of philosophically bankrupt life. A rational person is supposed to value pleasure over pain, but realizes that pain is the only reality--what then brings pleasure? If we take pleasure in absorbing divine pain, then it can't really be pain. It would seem that the only really rational thing to do is commit suicide, because the rational conclusion is that pleasure is either a) illusory, or b) simply impossible to attain. But if we commit suicide, we would not be fulfilling the purpose for which we are created, which is to bear God's pain. The whole argument, as Steiner points out, has several holes in it.
The problem, Steiner suggests, comes from using pleasure as "yardstick" of the value of life. As long as we evaluate life experience in terms of "units" of pleasure, we're not understanding the value of life properly.
Desire, not pleasure, Steiner says, is a better yardstick for measuring the value of life.
"Pleasure is measured against the needs of life. Our desires are the yardstick; pleasure is what is measured (211)."
More on willing and desire
Steiner elaborates on the assertion that desire, rather than mere pleasure is the proper "yardstick" for measuring the value of life. Satisfaction can be considered attained when desire felt and pleasure experienced are evenly matched. If pleasure falls short of the quantity of desire, we are still left wanting, and when pleasure exceeds desire, that pleasure becomes pain--as in the case of a hangover, or stomach-ache. The very presence of desire suggests that the pessimist's assessment of life as value-less is misconceived from the start. We desire specific things, which gives us pleasure in anticipation, pleasure in pursuit, and pleasure in attainment. Even the failure to attain the desire cannot diminish the pleasure that was felt in desires attained in the past. Moreover the presence of pain that must be overcome can add to the pleasure of attainment. There is no thing we can call general pleasure--pleasure is specific to the desire to which it adheres, thus to try to come up with an abstract balance sheet of pleasure and pain makes no sense--or, as Steiner would say, it doesn't conform to life as it is experienced. The pleasure gained from taking a walk is not the same as the pleasure of eating a meal.
Steiner concludes that willing, based on desire, is so fundamental to human experience that humans will strive to attain their desires in defiance of suffering and pain. We accept the bad parts of life as long as there is value in life to be had.
"Even if pessimism were right in its assertion that more pain than pleasure is present in the world, this would have no influence on our willing, for in spite of this, living creatures strive for whatever pleasure is left (216)."
The failure of pessimism to understand moral striving
In the remainder of Chapter thirteen, Steiner demonstrates that pessimist philosophy does not properly treat the problem of ethics and moral striving, and says, again, that the reason for this failure is the false attempt to come up with a "balance sheet" for pleasure and pain.
We don't merely strive for "pleasure" or "happiness" as ends in themselves. We enjoy the pleasure and happiness that comes as a by-product from willfully acting on our desire to attain appropriate goods. Accordingly, the pessimist idea that we take up the duties of life only after we learn that life is futile, and thus stoically resign ourselves to the task of alleviating divine pain, is all wrong.
We seek the good for its sake, and gain pleasure thereby.
"Morality lies in striving for a goal that one recognizes as justified; it lies in man's being to pursue this goal, as long as the pain connected with it does not lame the desire for it. . . this is the nature of all real willing (219)."
Moral greatness is also linked to the function of willing.
"Whoever strives after ideals of noble greatness," Steiner writes, "does so because they are the content of their being, and realizing them will be an enjoyment for him compared to which the pleasure that pettiness draws from satisfying commonplace things is trifling (220)."
Steiner finishes this chapter with a very nice return to the question of morality and freedom, concluding ultimately that a pessimist philosophy would negate moral freedom.
"Whoever wants to eradicate the pleasure of satisfying human desires must first make the human being into a slave who does not act because he wants to, but only because he ought (220)."
With this statement, Steiner seems to deflate Hartmann's notion that we must stop striving in order to live morally, thereby easing divine pain. To do so, Steiner implies, would be a capitulation to necessity rather than a free act.
"The ethics which builds upon pessimism springs from a disregard of moral imagination (220)."
A fully developed person, Steiner believes, will not spend his or her life merely seeking pleasure, and will endure pain freely (not under compulsion or out of failure) for the sake of pursuing a higher, self-generated ideal. In the final analysis, a mature developed person will acquire the moral qualities capable of determining what the "value of life" is, and doesn't need to be concerned with the fruitless task of measuring pleasure against pain.
Individuality and Genus
In this last (and relatively short) formal chapter of the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner takes up the issue of individuality and genus in the human being, and explains the degree to which humans are truly individual, or embedded in their generic identities.
By genus, Steiner is referring to race, gender, family lineage, "folk," religion, and nationality. Steiner maintains that people bear "the general characteristics" of the various groups to which belong, and that genus identity can answer the question of why people "appear in the forms" in which they appear. The collective qualities of genus function as a "medium" through which people express their particular being.
On the question of individuality, Steiner argues that the cultivation of intuition (including thinking, matters that are discussed in more detail in earlier chapters) allows a person to break free of the limitations of genus identity (whichever genus identity it happens to be) and to define him or herself as a true individual.
Taking note of the tyranny that social and gender identities can exercise on a person--in particular the case of women, who are constrained by constructed generic expectations--he asserts that "they must be allowed to determine for themselves what is in accordance with their nature (226)."
It is the task of each individual to break through the boundaries of their defining groups, and attain that intuition that enables them to become truly free, and truly unique. In turn, we must learn to understand the individuality of others, and not assess them according to their generic qualities. If we learn to do this, by entering into the individuality of the other, we increase our own ability to break free of the constraints of the generic. As Steiner puts it:
"People who immediately mix their own concepts into every judgment about another person can never arrive at an understanding of individuality (228)."
The degree to which a person can become individuated is, to Steiner, the degree to which he or she can become "a free spirit in the human community," and, by implication, a moral person living ethically for the sake of the human community.
"All moral activity of mankind springs from individual ethical intuitions and from their being taken up into human communities (229)."