The Philosophy of Freedom is the fundamental philosophical work of philosopher, Goethe scholar, and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). It addresses the question of whether and in what sense human beings are free. Originally published in 1894 in German as Die Philosophie der Freiheit, with a second edition published in 1918, the work has appeared under several English titles, including The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (the title Steiner proposed for the English-language translation), The Philosophy of Freedom, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.
"Steiner was a moral individualist". Part One of The Philosophy of Freedom examines the basis of freedom in human thinking, provides an account of the relationship between knowledge and perception, and explores the role and reliability of thinking in the formation of knowledge. In Part Two, Steiner analyzes the conditions necessary for human beings to be free, and develops a moral philosophy that he labels "ethical individualism".Chapter 9, "The Idea of Freedom". The book's subtitle, Some results of introspective observation following the methods of natural science,An alternate translation reads, "Results of Introspective Observations According to the Method of Natural Science" (Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, trans. Rita Stebbing (N.Y.: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1963), p. 3). The German original is, "Beobachtungs-Resultate nach naturwissenshcaftlicher Methode" (Steiner, 1894, title page). indicates the philosophical approach Steiner intends to take. Steiner hoped that the book "would gain him a professorship", but the book "did not receive the attention he had hoped for." In fact, the book was reasonably favourably received in English, with reviews in Mind, the leading journal of philosophy in England, The Philosophical Review, and The Monist,Mind, NS vol 4 (1895) pp. 129-130; Monist Vol. 5 (1895), Philosophical Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (Sep., 1895) pp. 573-574. and in German publications.E.g. the less than favourable review in Philosophisches Jahrbuch Vol 8 (1895), pp. 423-428
According to Gary Lachman, "It's also a work of genius, and one suspects that Steiner's later occult reputation has prevented the book from receiving the kind of attention it deserves." He also wrote, "Mainstream philosophy has as much use for Steiner today as it did a century ago, but his work has been picked up by more alternative thinkers, like William Irwin Thompson and Richard Tarnas."
Historical context Steiner had wanted to write a philosophy of freedom since at least 1880.Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner: Eine Biographie, (Stuttgart: Verlag Freies Geistesleben 1997), pp. 212–3. The appearance of The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894Rudolf Steiner, Die Philosophie der Freiheit: Grundzuege einer modernen Weltanschauung, (Berlin: Emil Felder, 1894) was preceded by his publications on Goethe, focusing on epistemology and the philosophy of science, particularly Goethe the Scientist (1883) and The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (1886). In 1891, Steiner presented his doctoral dissertation, an epistemological study that included a discussion of Kant's and Fichte's theories of knowledge. A revised version of the thesis was published a year later in book form as Truth and Knowledge: Introduction to a Philosophy of Freedom, dedicated to Eduard von Hartmann. In the Preface to The Philosophy of Freedom itself, Steiner described the aim of the book: knowledge should become "organically alive". "All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts. For them, human ideas were their artists' materials and scientific method their artistic technique."Steiner, Preface to the First Edition, 1894, revised 1918. Wilson translation 1964.
While a student in Vienna, Steiner attended some of the lectures of Franz Brentano, an important precursor of the phenomenological movement in philosophy (see School of Brentano).Owen Barfield in The Case for Anthroposophy, Selections from Von Seelenrätseln By Rudolf Steiner, London, 1970, remarks that Steiner was an admirer and assiduous reader of Brentano ; and see Steiner's remark that as a student Brentano's stimulus strongly affected him, and in following years he read most of what Brentano published. Like the later phenomenologists, Steiner sought a way to resolve the subject-object problem.Welburn, Andrew, Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy and the Crisis of Contemporary Thought (2004), chapter 2. Steiner's approach to freedom was also in part inspired by Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man and a response to the scientific works of Goethe, whom Steiner believed had not focused sufficiently on the role of thinking in developing inner freedom.Sergei Prokofieff, Anthroposophy and The Philosophy of Freedom, Temple Lodge Press 2009, p. 206.
Steiner was also deeply affected as a young man by Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason that individuals cannot know things as they are in themselves, and he devotes a long chapter of The Philosophy of Freedom, "Are there Limits to Knowledge?", to a refutation of this view, arguing that there are in principle no limits to knowledge. This claim is important to freedom because, for Steiner, freedom involves knowing the real basis of our actions. If this basis cannot be known, then freedom is not possible. Steiner's argument in favor of freedom also responds to determinists such as Spinoza, for whom human action is just as much determined as anything else in the necessity that governs nature as a whole.
Arrangement and outline of the book
The Philosophy of Freedom is divided into three parts. The first part, "Knowledge of Freedom," is epistemological and, in a broad sense, metaphysical (the nature of reality). The second part, "The Reality of Freedom," is about free will and ethics. The title of the third part, "Ultimate Questions" or, in German, "die letzten Fragen," deals with the nature and consequences of the book's monistic, non-materialist worldview.
In his epistemology, Steiner seeks to show that we can achieve a true picture of reality only by uniting perception, which reflects only the outer appearance of the world, and conception, which together give us access to the world's inner nature.Chapters 5 "The Act of Knowing", 7 "Are there Limits to Knowledge?"
In his account of freedom, this idea is applied to the question of what freedom is. From another epistemological angle, Steiner's account of thinking in Part One becomes his concept of thinking in Part Two. We act freely when we act through the thinking activity of our being. Ethics finds its place in the actions of the free being. The very short Part Three places this activity and the cognitive activity of man in the context of the world considered as an epistemological whole.
Knowledge of Freedom Steiner begins exploring the nature of human freedom by accepting "that an action, of which the agent does not know why he performs it, cannot be free," but asking what happens when a person becomes conscious of his or her motives for acting. He proposes (1) that through introspective observation we can become conscious of the motivations of our actions, and (2) that the sole possibility of human freedom, if it exists at all, must be sought in an awareness of the motives of our actions.Steiner [Wilson translation], Chapter 1 "Conscious Human Action"
In Chapter 2, "The Fundamental Desire for Knowledge," Steiner discusses how an awareness of the division between mind, or subject, and world, or object, gives rise to a desire to reestablish a unity between these poles. After criticizing solutions to this problem provided by dualism in the philosophy of mind and several forms of monism as one-sided, Steiner suggests that only by locating nature's manifestations within our subjective nature can we overcome this division.
In Chapter 3, "Thinking in the Service of Knowledge," Steiner notes that when we encounter percepts, we are compelled to contemplate them and supplement them with concepts. Steiner argues that the process of thinking is naturally incorporated into observations. Steiner aims to illustrate that what he views as the fundamental contradiction between observation and thinking forms the basis for all other related contradictions and philosophical distinctions, such as subject vs. object, appearance vs. reality, and so forth. He highlights that for most objects of observation, we cannot simultaneously observe both the percept and our thoughts about it, as a tree and our thoughts about a tree are inherently distinct; we can only focus on one at a time. In contrast, we can simultaneously observe thinking and observe our thoughts about thinking, for here the percept (thinking) and our thinking about the percept consist of the same element (thought): Thinking and thinking about thinking are the same process; observing the latter, we are simultaneously observing the former.
Normally, individuals do not pay attention to the process of thinking, only its results, the thoughts themselves: "The first observation which we make about thinking is, therefore, this: that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary mental and spiritual life".Steiner [Wilson translation], Ch. 3 p. 26. Steiner connects this "first observation" to the fact that thinking is entirely due to our own activity. It does not appear before us unless we produce it. Nevertheless, when I apprehend the content of thinking, a concept, this is self-justifying, in the sense that it can be asked why I feel this or that way about something, but not why it produces in me this or that concept. Such a question would be "simply meaningless".Steiner [Wilson translation], Ch.3 p. 25. Their contents justify the relations of concepts to one another.
Furthermore, when observing my thinking, it is always a past instance of thinking that I observe, not a present one. That the thinker and the observer of the thinker are one and the same explains why I can know thinking "more intimately and immediately than any other process in the world."Steiner [Wilson translation], p. 27. This is what Steiner calls the transparency of our thinking process.Steiner [Wilson translation], p. 28. To appreciate this point, we must be able to adapt to our own thinking of the "exceptional" procedure mentioned above: we must apply it to itself. If we are unable to do this, and we think of thinking as a brain process, it is because we do not see thinking. After all, we are unable to take up the exceptional position needed to do so.
Steiner takes Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am," to signify that "I am certain . . . that [thinking] exists in the sense that I myself bring it forth,"Steiner [Wilson translation], p 30. Cf. Steiner's own wording, in translation: "My investigation touches firm ground only when I find an object which exists in a sense which I can derive from the object itself. But I am myself such an object in that I think..." However, Steiner advances the objection (common to many others, beginning in Descartes' own time),Cottingham, Meditations, Objections and Replies that the further claim that I am is more problematic.Descartes, it could be said, began his Meditations on First Philosophy I) with doubt about his own outer experience, Steiner with trust about his own inner experience.
Steiner's full view is found in the following passage.