Philosophy of Freedom - Overview

Overview

Steiner writes about thinking,

...thinking must never be regarded as merely a subjective activity. Thinking lies beyond subject and object. It produces these two concepts just as it produces all others. When, therefore, I, as thinking subject, refer a concept to an object, we must not regard this reference as something purely subjective. It is not the subject that makes the reference, but thinking. The subject does not think because it is a subject; rather it appears to itself as a subject because it can think. The activity exercised by man as a thinking being is thus not merely subjective. Rather is it something neither subjective nor objective, that transcends both these concepts. I ought never to say that my individual subject thinks, but much more that my individual subject lives by the grace of thinking.

An important part of the book analyzes and rejects the view that subject and object (mind and world) are sharply divided from each other and that a person cannot experience the world itself but only subjective images somewhere inside the brain (or in the soul inside the brain). Steiner points out the inconsistency of treating all our perceptions as mere subjective mental images inside the brain. If that were true, the brain itself, our knowledge of which is after all derived from perception, would have to be a mere subjective mental image inside . . . the brain. The absurdity of that becomes clearer in Steiner's more detailed discussions, during the course of which a profoundly different understanding of perception dawns.

With regard to freedom of the will, Steiner observes that a key question is how the will to action arises in the first place. Steiner describes to begin with two sources for human action: on the one hand, the driving forces springing from our natural being, from our instincts, feelings, and thoughts insofar as these are determined by our character - and on the other hand, various kinds of external motives we may adopt, including the dictates of abstract ethical or moral codes. In this way, both nature and culture bring forces to bear on our will and soul life. Overcoming these two elements, neither of which is individualized, we can achieve genuinely individualized intuitions that speak to the particular situation at hand. By overcoming a slavish or automatic response to the dictates of both our 'lower' drives and conventional morality, and by orchestrating a meeting place of objective and subjective elements of experience, we find the freedom to choose how to think and act.

Freedom for Steiner does not consist in acting out everything subjective within us, but in being able to love our own actions because we are acting lovingly, thoughtfully, and creatively. To the extent we can love our actions in that way, our actions are uniquely and individually our own, and do not come from mere obedience to some external moral code or compulsive physical drive. Steiner wrote

There are many who will say that the concept of the free man which I have here developed is a chimera nowhere to be found in practice; we have to do with actual human beings, from whom we can only hope for morality if they obey some moral law, that is, if they regard their moral task as a duty and do not freely follow their inclinations and loves. I do not doubt this at all. Only a blind man could do so. But if this is to be the final conclusion, then away with all this hypocrisy about morality! Let us then simply say that human nature must be driven to its actions as long as it is not free. Whether his unfreedom is forced on him by physical means or by moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual desire or because he is bound by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view...Only let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by a force other than himself.

Steiner coined the term moral imagination for the free inner act which conceives free actions in the world. He suggests that we only achieve free deeds when we find a moral imagination, an ethically impelled but particularized response to the immediacy of a given situation. This response will always be individual; it cannot be predicted or prescribed. This radical ethical individualism is, for Steiner, characteristic of freedom.

Freedom arises most clearly at the moment when the spiritual individuality of the human being becomes active in pure thinking; this is, for Steiner, spiritual activity. The goal that follows is to learn to let an ever larger portion of one's actions be determined by thinking in its purest form, rather than by habit, addiction, reflex, or involuntary or unconscious motives. Pure thinking then becomes what Steiner calls "moral intuition" (ideas for action), "moral imagination" (developing concrete images of how ideas for action might be realized), and "moral technique" (the how-to aspect of making real the images and ideas of action).

In Ch. III, Steiner interprets Descartes' famous dictum, I think, therefore I am of the "Meditations" and the "Discourse on the Method", and takes it further:

My searching first comes onto firm ground when I find an object from which I can derive the sense of its existence out of it itself. This I am myself, however, in that I think, for I give to my existence the definite, self-sustaining content of thinking activity. Now I can take my start from there and ask whether the other things exist in the same or in a different sense.