Philosophy of Freedom - Philosophical Antecedents

Philosophical Antecedents

Philosophers referred to in the book include Kant, Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Eduard von Hartmann, though von Hartmann, as an acquaintance of Steiner, is mentioned more than others. Steiner was influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey and Franz Brentano, who later became important for the phenomenological movement in philosophy, led by such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Ortega y Gasset, and Paul Ricoeur. Like those thinkers, but before them, Steiner was seeking a phenomenological way beyond the subject/object split that had been more or less regnant in various forms for several centuries within philosophy and science. While in Vienna, Steiner had attended lectures on moral philosophy given by Franz Brentano, at the time a Privatdozent at the University of Vienna. Steiner's ideas of freedom were in part a response to those contained in Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man and the works of Goethe. Steiner believed that both of these writers had not focused sufficiently on the role of thinking in developing inner freedom. Fichte's distinction between formal and material freedom might be viewed as parallel to Steiner's division of his subject into the knowledge of freedom and the reality of freedom, except that for Steiner, knowledge is not merely formal like a mere orderer or arranger of the real; for Steiner knowledge is substantial and produces its own real content. Steiner is at times critical of Fichte's philosophy, including a critique in chapter six of a "fundamental mistake" in Fichte's Science of Knowledge. In his later lectures, Steiner mentions Vladimir Solovyov, whose understanding of consciousness corresponds to some extent to Steiner's. Solovyov (somewhat obscurely) writes that "In human beings, the absolute subject-object appears as such, i.e., as pure spiritual activity, containing all of its own objectivity, the whole process of its natural manifestation, but containing it totally ideally - in consciousness."

Steiner's philosophy neither evaluates the moral value of an action only according to its consequences (utilitarianism), nor does it allow any categorical imperative, whether Kantian or otherwise, to be the moral arbiter of human actions. For Steiner, the highest morality exists when a person's inner life actively connects with the external world through deeds of love by means of individually developed moral imaginations, a view that has affinities with the "dilige et quod vis fac" ("Love, and do what you will") of St. Augustine.