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- Herausgeber: Youcanprint
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
The Philosophy of Freedom is a magical text, because it activates thought, feeling and will, clears the field of any obstacle that may arise in life, giving everyone the opportunity to find their own direction freely. To the question: "What will remain of your work in a thousand years?" Answered "The Philosophy of Freedom" was Rudolf Steiner.
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Indice
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1894
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION, 1918
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM
KNOWLEDGE OF FREEDOM
1 - CONSCIOUS HUMAN ACTION
2 - THE FUNDAMENTAL URGE FOR KNOWLEDGE
3 - THINKING IN SERVICE OF UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
4 - THE WORLD AS PERCEPTION
5 - THE ACT OF KNOWING THE WORLD
6 - HUMAN INDIVIDUALITY
7 - ARE THERE LIMITS TO KNOWLEDGE?
THE REALITY OF FREEDOM
8 - THE FACTORS OF LIFE
9 - THE IDEA OF FREEDOM
10 - PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM AND MONISM
11 - WORLD PURPOSE AND LIFE PURPOSE (Human destiny)
12 -MORAL IMAGINATION (DARWINISM AND MORALITY)
13 -THE VALUE OF LIFE (PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM)
14 - INDIVIDUALITY AND GENUS
15 - Ultimate Questions
THE CONSEQUENCES OF MONISM
16 - 1st Addition 1918
17 - 2nd Addition 1918
FIRST APPENDIX 1918
On the cover "Widar" terracotta sculpture of Silvano Angelini
RUDOLF STEINERTHE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOMFUNDAMENTAL LINESFOR A MODERN WORLD CONCEPTIONResults of the observation of the soul according to
the method of natural sciences.Translation of Silvano AngeliniReview of Alison Steffen and Katherine Alexandra Clarknative English speaker
RIMINIEDITRICE DODECAUREO GALLERY 2019
Information for the reader:
the first edition of this method, which includes the numbering of the thoughts and the aid of graphic tables outside the text was made in Italian. We apologize to the English reader for the fact that the graphic tables (in which there are the original drawings) are written in Italian, and we gradually hope to translate into English.
We invite readers or scholars to report any error or to advise a better translation of the text, we warmly welcome any help; as far as criticism is concerned, we will try to look at it positively and treasure it, thanks for the collaboration,
Silvano Angelini 2019
For the era of Michael
We must eradicate all fear from the soulas well as the fear of what the future can bring to man.We must acquire serenity in allfeelings and sensations about the future.
We must look forward with absolute equanimitytowards everything that can come;and we must think thateverything that will come, will be given by onedirection of the world full of wisdom.
This is part of what we have to learn in this era:to know how to live with absolute trust,without any security in existence;confidence in the ever present help of the spiritual world.In truth, nothing will have value ifwe lack courage.We discipline our will and look for theinner awakeningevery morning and every night.
INTRODUCTIONThe task of this work is to try to be of help to the fasting reader of philosophy like me, highlighting with graphic illustrations some imaginative processes rich in the Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner.
It is a task in continuous becoming like every inner growth that connects to an unveiling of the etheric.
I allowed myself: to introduce the "Preface to the I Edition of 1894" before the "Preface to the II Edition of 1918", for the simple reason that my intellectual faculties do not allow me to understand the second if I have not read and understood the first of 1894.
I wanted to proceed to the consecutive numbering of every single thought, because I personally found it helpful in the study of this work and useful in group work. Sometimes I felt the need to change number to help the meditation of a concept expressed in the text, even within a more complex sentence, so even after a comma, for the same reason I added italics and inverted commas. In the translation, given that in recent years the new media has broken down the boundaries and limits that the states placed to safeguard their territoriality, I decided to change some words of the text, in order not to hurt the susceptibility of distant people in space and belonging to other ethnic groups, religions, customs; and this not in the fatuous light of a protagonism, but to promote the dissemination of this work so precious for the evolution of humanity.
Silvano Angelini March 2011
In support of the importance of drawing, the author has expressed himself numerous times, I quote this passage:
"Maybe it's a difficult concept to understand; it would be good, however, if you tried to complete this representation with thought, but we can make it clearer with the help of a design." Lecture 11 / 12/1917 by R. Steiner (n.r.)
GRAPHIC TABLES should be interpreted as imaginative, non-exhaustive, not fixed, non-dogmatic suggestions that everyone can expand or reduce in their own soul with the utmost freedom. n.r.
In appendix 66 color GRAPHIC TABLES.
ABBREVIATIONS and various
Author's Prefaces
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1894
Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) are left out here, because to-day they seem to me to be quite irrelevant; whereas saying the rest seems as necessary today as it did then, despite the prevalent scientific trend of thought, and in fact just because of it.
“Truth seek we both –
in outer life you;
I in the heart within.
By both can Truth alike be found.
If the eye is healthy,
meets the Creator without;
If the heart is healthy,
it mirrors the world within..”
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Translation Italian graphic:
We both seek truth
Rudolf Steiner
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION, 1918
Everything discussed in this book centers around two root problems of the human soul.
The first is: can we understand human nature in such a way that this understanding serves as the basis for everything else we may meet through life experience or through science,
for we often feel the results of scientific investigations are not self-supporting,
because doubt and critical thinking can drive it into the realm of uncertainty?
The other question is: can man being, as willing entity, ascribe freedom to his
will, or
is freedom of will an illusion arising out of his inability to recognize the threads of necessity on which his will depends, just like a process in nature?
This is no artful structured question. In a certain disposition it arises quite spontaneously in the human soul.
And man could feel that the soul would be less than it should be if it has not at some time come face to face with these two possibilities: freedom or necessity of the will.
In this book the intention is to show that the inner experiences caused by the second problem depend upon what attitude man is able to take towards the first problem.
It is possible to attain such
a conception of man
’s nature, that can support
all
other knowledge, and further that this insight completely justifies the concept of freedom of will, provided that one finds the region of
the soul where free will can develop.
Translation Italian graphic:
Two problems
The relation to the two problems is such that, once attained, it can become a living content of man’s soul life.
No theoretical answer is given. Once will is acquired, it is merely carried about as a conviction, retained by memory.
For the whole manner of thinking on which this book is based, such an answer would be an illusion.
Such a finished, limited answer is not provided here , but a region of experiences within the human soul will be pointed to, where, through the soul’s own inner activity, living answers to the questions are to be found ever anew and whenever a human being needs it.
Once the region of soul is discovered where these questions unfold, a real insight into this region provides man with what he needs for the solution of these two problems of life so that, with what he has then attained, he can penetrate further into the breadth and depth of life’s riddles, as need or destiny leads him.
It will be seen that a knowledge has here been outlined, which proves its justification and validity, not only through its own existence, but also through the relationship it has with the whole soul-life of man.
These were my thoughts about the content of this book when I wrote it out twenty-five years ago.
Today as well, I must characterize
the book’s
aim in the same way.
In the first edition I limited myself to saying no more than was in the strictest sense connected with the two root questions described above.
If anyone is surprised to find nothing in this book as yet, any reference to that region of the world of spiritual experience described in my later writings, then he must consider that at that time it was not my purpose to describe results of spiritual research, but first to lay the foundation on which such results can rest.
This “Philosophy of Freedom” does not contain any special results of that kind, any more than it contains special results of the natural sciences. But what it contains cannot, in my view, be dispensed by anyone who strives for certainty in such knowledge.
What I have said in this
book
might also be acceptable to many who, for reasons of their own, will have nothing to do with the results of my spiritual scientific research.
But anyone who can regard this research as something to which he is drawn, will recognize as important what is attempted here.
It is this: to prove that an open-minded consideration of just the two problems I have indicated, problems which are fundamental to all knowledge, leads to the view to recognise the fact that man is living within the reality of a spiritual world.
In this book the attempt is made to validate cognition of the spiritual realm before entering upon spiritual experience.
And this justification is undertaken in such a way that, for anyone able and willing to enter into this discussion, there is no need, in order to accept what is said here, to cast furtive glances at the experiences which my later writings have shown to be relevant.
Thus this book seems to me quite separate from my actual
spiritual-scientific writings, on the other hand, it is also most intimately connected with them.
For this now, after twenty-five years, I can republish
the text essentially unaltered.
I have, however, made additions of some length to several chapters.
Misinterpretations of what I had said made such detailed extensions seem necessary.
The only passages I have modified are those in which, a
quarter of a century ago, I had clumsily expressed. (Only ill
will could find in these changes occasion to suggest that I have changed my fundamental conviction.)
The book has now been out of print for many years.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the fact, apparent from what I have just said, I feel that the same things need to be said today as twenty-five
years ago, I hesitated a long time about the completion of this revised edition.
Again and again I have asked myself whether at this point or that, I ought not to define my position toward the numerous philosophical views which have been put forward since the publication of the first edition.
Yet the heavy demands on my time in recent years, due to purely spiritual scientific research, prevented me doing as I might have wished.
A survey, as thorough as possible, of the philosophical literature of the present day has convinced me that such a critical discussion, tempting though it would be in itself, has no place in the context of what this book has to say.
All that, from the point of view of the “Philosophy of Freedom,” seemed necessary for me to say about recent philosophical tendencies, may be found in the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy.”
April 1918 RUDOLF STEINER
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM
KNOWLEDGE OF FREEDOM
1
CONSCIOUS HUMAN ACTION
Is a human being in his thinking and acting a spiritually free being, or subject to the iron necessity of purely natural law?
Few questions have been debated with so much ingenuity more than this one.
The
idea of the freedom of the human will has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty.
There are those who, in moral zeal, declare it to be sheer stupidity to deny so evident a fact as freedom.
Opposed to them are others who regard as utterly naive the belief that the uniformity of natural law is interrupted in the sphere of human action and thinking.
The same thing is here declared as often to be the most precious possession of humankind, and as its worst illusion.
Infinite subtlety has been expended, to explain how human freedom is compatible with the working of nature, to which, after all, man belongs.
No less effort has been taken to make comprehensible, from the other side, how a delusion like this could have arisen.
That here we are dealing with one of the most important questions of life, religion, conduct and science, which is felt by everyone whose character is not totally devoid of depth.
And indeed, it belongs to the sad signs of the superficiality of present day thinking that a book which attempts to develop a “new belief” David Friedrich Strauss’s
The Old and New Belief
out of the results of the latest scientific discoveries, contains, on this question, nothing but the words:
“Here we must deal not with the problem of human will.
The supposed indifferent freedom of choice has always been recognized as an empty illusion by every philosophy worthy of the name. The moral valuation of human conduct and character remains untouched by this question.”
I mention this
passage, not because I consider that the book from which it derives
has
any special importance, but because it seems to me to express the only view which most of our thinking contemporaries are able to achieve on this question.
Nowadays everyone who claims to have advanced beyond a kindergarten education seems to know that freedom cannot consist in choosing
arbitrarily between two possible actions.
There is always a quite specific reason why, out of several possible actions, a person carries out a particular one.
This seems obvious.
However in present-day, by the opponents of freedom, the principal attacks are directed only against the freedom of choice.
Herbert Spencer, who has views which are gaining wider acceptance, says: “That anyone could desire or not desire arbitrarily,
which is the fundamental principle in the dogma of free will, is negated
through the analysis of consciousness, as well as by the contents of the preceding chapter.” [on psychology].
From the same point of view also
others, proceed
in combating the concept of free will.
In germ, all the considerations
can all be found as early as Spinoza
All that he brought forward with clarity and simplicity against the idea of freedom has since been repeated countless times, but usually veiled in the most complicated theoretical doctrines so that it is difficult to recognize the simple and direct course of thought on which all depends.
In a letter of October or November, 1674, Spinoza writes:
“I call free a thing which exists and acts out
of the
pure necessity of its nature, and I call it compelled, if the existence and action of which are exact and fixed manners determined by something else. The existence of God, for example, though necessity, is free because He exists only through the necessity of His nature. Similarly, God knows Himself and all else in freedom, because it follows solely from the necessity of His nature that He knows everything. You see, then, that I locate freedom, not in free decision, but in free necessity.
“But let us descend to created things which are all determined to exist and to act in a fixed and definite way by external causes. To look at this more clearly, let us imagine a very simple case. A stone, for example, receives a certain momentum from an external cause acting upon it, by which necessarily continues to move it after the impact of the external cause has ceased. The persistence of the stone is compelled,
not necessarily
, because it has to be defined by the thrust of the external cause. What applies here for the stone is fair also for everything else, however complicated and multifaceted it may be, namely, everything
is
necessarily determined by an outside cause to exist and to act in a fixed and precise manner.
“Now, please, assume that the stone during its motion, thinks and knows that it is striving as much as it can, to continue in motion. This stone which is conscious only of its
effort and
is by no means indifferent, will believe that it is
completely
free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than its own will to continue. But this human freedom that we all claim to possess and that only consists
in people
being aware of their desires, but do not Know the causes by which they are determined.
So the child believes that
it freely
desires milk, the angry boy who is free in his demand for revenge, and the coward flight. Alike, the drunken man believes that he says of his own free decision what, sober again, he would wish that he had not said, and as this prejudice is innate in all
humans, it
is not easy to free oneself from it.
In fact, although experience shows
us often enough that man, least of all, can moderate his desires and that, moved by conflicting passions, he sees the better and pursues the worse, yet he considers himself free, simply because there are some things which he desires less intensely
and many desires which can easily be inhibited through the recollection of something else
that they think often
.”
Because this view is expressed so clearly and definitely, it is also easy to discover the fundamental error in it.
As a stone necessarily continues a definite movement after being put in motion, just as necessarily is a human being supposed to carry out an action if impelled to it by any reason.
Only because man is aware of his action, he imagines himself to be the free originator of his action. But, in so doing, he
overlooks the fact that he is driven by a cause which he has to obey unconditionally.
The error in this train of thought is easily found.
Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is aware of his action, but also of the causes by which one’s actions are guided.
No one will deny that a child is
unfree
when it desires milk, as is also the drunken man who says things he later regrets.
Both know nothing of the causes working in the depths of their organisms, that exercise irresistible power over them.
But is it justifiable to lump together actions of this kind with those in which a man is conscious, not only of his actions but also of the reasons that motivate him?
Are the actions of human
beings really
all of one kind?
Should the deed of a warrior on the battlefield, of a scientist in his laboratory, of the statesman in complex negotiations, be placed, scientifically, on the same level as that of the child when it desires milk?
It is indeed true that the solution to a problem is best sought where it is simplest. But inability to differentiate has caused endless confusion before now.
After all, there is a profound difference
between
knowing and not knowing why I do something, or not.
At first sight this seems self-evident..
And yet the opponents of freedom never ask whether a motive that I recognize , and see through, compels me in the same sense as does the organic process that causes a child to cry for milk.
Eduard von Hartmann, in his
Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness
, page … maintains that the human will depends on two main factors: motive and character.
If one considers all men as alike, or at
least the
differences between them as negligible, then their will appears as determined from without, namely by the circumstances
of the outside world.
B
ut if we consider
that different men let a representation become a motive for their deeds only if their character is such that the particular representation arouses a desire in them, then man appears as determined from
within
and not from
without
.
Man believes himself to be free, that is, independent of external motives, in fact a representation pressing in on him from without must first be adopted as a motive, in accordance with his character.
The
truth, according
to Eduard von Hartmann, is that “even though we ourselves first turn a representation into a motive, yet we do so not arbitrarily, but according to the necessity of our characterological disposition
, that is, we are anything but free.”
(Rudolf Steiner inserts here the concept of "characterological disposition"which will resume in the ninth chapter..r.n.)
v.1- N.40
Here again, is absolutely ignored the difference between motives that I allow to influence me only after I have permeated them with my consciousness, and those that I follow without having any clear knowledge of them.
This leads directly to the standpoint from which the matter will be considered here.
The question of the freedom of our will, can be posed by itself in isolation?
And if not: With what other question must it necessarily be linked?
If there is a difference between a conscious motive and an unconscious impulse, then the conscious motive will result in an action that must be judged differently from one done out of blind impulse.
The first question must concern this difference, and upon the answer will depend the position we must take on freedom itself.
What does it mean to have
knowledge
of the motives for one’s action?
Unfortunately
we5 always tear in two the inseparable whole: man.
In fact, this issue hasn’t been considered enough.
v.n.2
v.n.3
v.n.4
Translation Italian graphic: the knower, the doer, the knowingdoer(Rudolf Steiner inserts here the concept of "man who acts according to knowledge". r.n.) N.49
We distinguish the doer from the knower,
but we have neglected
the one who matters most : the man who acts out of knowledge.
It is said: Man is free when he
obeys reason
alone, not his animal desires.
Or else: Freedom means being able to determine one’s life and action according to purposes and deliberate decisions.
Nothing is gained by such assertions.
For the question is just whether reason, purposes and decisions exercise control over men in the same way as animal desires.
If a reasonable decision arises in me, without my
doing, with
just the same necessity as hunger and thirst, then our want must obey it, and my freedom is an illusion.
Another phrase is: To be free means not being able to will what one wants, but being able to do what one wills.
In his
Atomistics of the Will
, the poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling
expresses
this idea with great clearness : Man can certainly do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wants, since his will is determined by
motives.
He cannot
want what
he wills?
Let us consider these words more closely. Have they any sense?
Should freedom of will consist in being able to will something without ground, without a motive?
But what does it mean to will something, other than
having grounds
to
do or to strive for this rather than that?
To will something without reason, without motive, would mean to will something
without willing it
.
The concept of will is inseparably connected to the concept of motivation.
Without a determining motive, the will is an empty ability; active and real should become only through the motive.
It Is therefore absolutely
right that
the humans will is not “free”, in as much as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive.
But in contrast to this
unfreedom,
it is absurd, to speak of a thinkable ‘freedom’ of the will, that would consist in being able to will
what one does not will.
Robert Hamerling
Atomistik des Willens
(Volume 2, p. 213 ff.)
Here again, without considering the difference between conscious and unconscious motives, are discussed only motives in general.
