The Philosophy of Freedom E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Are we free, whether we know it or not? Or is our sense of freedom merely an illusion? Rudolf Steiner tackles this age-old problem in a new way. He shows that by taking account of our own activity of thinking, we can know the reasons for our actions. And if these reasons are taken from our world of ideals, then our actions are free, because we alone determine them. But this freedom cannot be settled for us by philosophical argument. It is not simply granted to us. If we want to become free, we have to strive through our own inner activity to overcome our unconscious urges and habits of thought. In order to do this we must reach a point of view that recognises no limits to knowledge, sees through all illusions, and opens the door to an experience of the reality of the spiritual world. Then we can achieve the highest level of evolution. We can recognise ourselves as free spirits. This special reprint, featuring the acclaimed translation by Michael Wilson, is being made available in response to public demand.

Leseprobe

RUDOLF STEINER (1861-1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM

(The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)

THE BASIS FOR A MODERN WORLD CONCEPTION

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Translated by Michael Wilson. Re-edited by Rudolf Steiner Press for this special edition to mark the 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s birth.

Rudolf Steiner PressHillside House, The SquareForest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

Eighth English edition

First published in English in 1964

Originally published in German in 1894 under the title Die Philosophie der Freiheit(volume 4 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by RudolfSteiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized translation is published by kindpermission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

Translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of thepublishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978 1 85584 268 7

Cover design by Andrew Morgan DesignTypeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

Contents

Foreword by Matthew Barton

Notes on the Translation by Michael Wilson

Preface to the revised edition of 1918

Preface to the first edition, 1894

Knowledge of Freedom

1. Conscious Human Action

2. The Fundamental Desire for Knowledge

3. Thinking in the Service of Knowledge

4. The World as Percept

5. The Act of Knowing

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 (The Ordering of Mankind’s Destiny)

12. Moral Imagination (Darwinism and Morality)

13. The Value of Life (Optimism and Pessimism)

14. Individuality and Genus

Ultimate Questions

The Consequences of Monism

Appendix

Notes

Further Reading

Foreword

The Philosophy of Freedom was first published in 1894 when Steiner was 32, during the period of his editorship of Goethe’s scientific writings and collaboration on a complete edition of Schopenhauer’s work. Weimar was a thriving centre of European culture at the time, and Steiner was in the thick of it. There he met many prominent artists and cultural figures such as Hermann Grimm, Ernst Haeckel and the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, later published as Truth and Science. At this period of his life, Steiner was still highly regarded in academic and cultural circles and must have hoped that his ideas would enter the cultural mainstream and exert a major influence on contemporary thought. His thesis, which can be seen as a forerunner to The Philosophy of Freedom, refers particularly to the ideas of Kant and Fichte.

It is far beyond the scope of this introduction to outline the whole philosophical context of thought with which Steiner sought to engage. But very briefly he took issue with Kant’s idealistic dualism, which sees a gulf in our experience of the world between our fallible perceptions, the ‘phenomena’, on the one hand, and the things-in-themselves or ‘noumena’ on the other. In this view, reality exists but is ultimately inaccessible to us. Fichte took this unbridgeable division of world and human consciousness a step further by negating the noumena, insisting that everything in our consciousness is merely our own, self-defining representation. Schopenhauer, primarily concerned with the human will, believed that our human desires can never be fulfilled and the only sensible response to this situation is to suppress or deny desires and lead an ascetic life. The views of Eduard von Hartmann, a major figure in the world of philosophy at that time, with whom Steiner had previously corresponded, were informed by the prevailing tenets of Kantianism. But, drawing on Schopenhauer, von Hartmann combined this outlook with his own brand of alleviated pessimism: happiness is not possible but our moral action renders life ‘less unhappy’ than it would otherwise be.

If this last paragraph leaves the reader, as it does the writer, a little breathless, this may be at least partly due to the sense in all these philosophers of a suffocating incapacity to fully meet the world. Steiner reports the ‘chilling effect’ on him of von Hartmann’s denial that thinking can ever reach reality. By fully engaging with this philosophical tradition, by speaking its language and arguing in the most disciplined way with its tenets, yet also offering a radically different view, Steiner hoped to reach and convince thinkers such as von Hartmann. He was therefore profoundly disappointed when his philosophical project fell on deaf ears. No one, von Hartmann included, seemed to know what to make of it or to be willing to recognize the really new departure it offered for bridging the gulf between the world and human consciousness and, in consequence, for moral human action that can fully engage with, influence and be informed by reality. Steiner later said that his book was received with incomprehension, as though written in Chinese. It therefore became apparent to him that he was knocking at a closed door, and eventually he came to look for understanding outside of the mainstream, in the Theosophical Society.

Despite the apparent failure of this book to meet with rightful acknowledgement, it remained an absolutely key text for Steiner himself. In a conversation with Walter Johannes Stein, he said that it contained the essence of his subsequent teaching and was the key foundation for it. Despite being rooted in contemporary philosophical discourse, he says in The Boundaries of Natural Science1 that his primary intention in the book was ‘to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page’:

In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one’s own efforts, from one thought to the next... Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously, has not read The Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one’s usual thinking into one independent of the senses ... so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book.

Elsewhere,2 he compares the experience of reading this book with waking up in the morning, as a transition from passive thinking to full activity. The reader ‘should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them.”’

As Steiner says in his original preface to this book, philosophy is not, or need not be, a dry or merely logical pursuit, but an ‘art like music’. The philosopher can be a creative artist in the conceptual realm, rising beyond ‘mere passive reception of truths’ to find himself participating in more vivid and dynamic reality.

But to give full credence to this view we have to follow Steiner into the core insight upon which The Philosophy of Freedom is founded: that in essence thinking is, or can be, not a subjective mode, or even some kind of secretion of the brain, but an activity in which reality enters us, and the only way that it does so. Initially appearing to be bound up with our picture of oneself, our subjectivity, in fact it transcends this self in its capacity to kindle in us universally valid concepts that are a true response to all that we perceive in our inner and outer surroundings, including our own actions. The common experience that thoughts are somehow ‘drier’ and less alive than feeling or will impetus is, says Steiner, due to the fact that we cannot fully grasp thinking activity in the actual moment it arises, but only subsequently, by reflecting upon it. We cannot therefore really ‘see’ it in the same way we experience feelings or actions, but are usually only aware of the ‘shadow’ of thinking’s luminous nature, of its capacity to penetrate into the world’s phenomena. Much of The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to awaken our perception of this luminosity, and hence give us the experience of real participation in the world.

Steiner is therefore quite right in saying that it is not, or not only, a philosophical work in the usual sense, but also offers a transformative impetus that can change our lives. For of course if we follow his ideas through into their consequences for human life, we find that the self-sustaining activity of living thinking is both the tool with which to examine everything else and also the means for full, individual self-realization. If objective reality enters us in thinking and is individualized in our subjective relationship with the world, this subjectivity has a means to engage fully with reality and to do so in a wholly self-determining way. The gulf, in other words, is bridged. In thinking we can have an intuitive experience of the manifest core of our being, and act out of that core. No wonder this seemed such a radical and revolutionary idea to the academics and thinkers of Steiner’s day that they could not countenance it. As well as offering full human empowerment it also asks full human responsibility— of a kind not determined by any external or even inner commandments, laws or memories of what has been done in the past, but instead by a ‘moral imagination’ that is alive enough to every situation to seek the fitting response and action that accords with it. And that, of course, is the embodiment of what Steiner means by freedom. We are only fully human, he believes, in so far as we achieve this freedom—though he also acknowledges that it is something we only slowly work our way through to.

Steiner steers a clear-eyed and far-sighted course in this book between the Scylla of metaphysical dualism, which places reality beyond our experiential capacity, and the Charybdis of materialism, which would suck us down into being only physical and physically determined creatures. He refutes the denial of human freedom implicit in both. ‘The view which I have here developed,’ he says, ‘refers the human being back to himself’—and therefore to his own self-sustaining and liberating capacity to make and give meaning to his life.

This extraordinarily hopeful insight into human potential is one that the general current of modern thought still largely overlooks—partly perhaps because it is more than just cerebral thought and also asks us to find our inmost source of moral action. To discover anything remotely resembling it, in fact, we must probably look not to philosophy but to a school of thought that arose in the midst of profound existential distress. During his incarceration in concentration camps during the Second World War, around 49 years after The Philosophy of Freedom was first published, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl first formulated his ‘logotherapy’, which is based on our capacity to choose our own attitude in any set of circumstances, even the harshest:

Our core drive is search for meaning. Meaning is what we ourselves find and give our lives. No one else can give us this meaning ... what matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment ... each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.3

In the actual practice of this outlook, as Frankl experienced it, we can find the rare capacity to be self-determining, to remain moral in the face of the crudest treatment, and thus free. This, it seems to me, is what The Philosophy of Freedom not only calls for but leads to.

Matthew BartonJanuary 2011

Notes on the Translation

This book was first translated into English by Professor and Mrs R.F. Alfred Hoernlé, in 1916, and was edited by Mr Harry Collison, who wrote that he was fortunate to have been able to secure them as translators, ‘their thorough knowledge of philosophy and their complete command of the German and English languages enabling them to overcome the difficulty of finding adequate English equivalents for the terms of German Philosophy’.

Following the publication of the revised German edition in 1918, Professor Hoernlé translated the new passages and other incidental changes that Dr Steiner had made. For this 1922 edition the title was changed at the author’s request, to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, with the added remark that ‘throughout the entire work “freedom” should be taken to mean “spiritual activity”’. The reasons for this change and also for the present decision to change back to the original title are given below.

The translation was revised in 1939 by Dr Hermann Poppelbaum, whose object was to ‘check certain words and phrases from the strictly Steiner point of view’. He wrote in his preface as follows:

The readers of the German original of this book will know that the author’s argument is largely based upon a distinction between the different elements making up the act of Knowledge. English philosophical terms are rarely exact equivalents of German philosophical terms, and the translator’s standing problem is to avoid, or at least to minimize, the ambiguities resulting therefrom. The aim of the present revision of the original translation has been to help the reader to understand the analysis of the act of Knowledge and to enable him to follow the subsequent chapters without being troubled by ambiguous terms.

In spite of Dr Poppelbaum’s removal of certain ambiguities, readers were still troubled by difficulties that did not derive from the original German. When I was asked by the publishers to prepare this new edition, it soon became clear to me that further alterations to words and phrases would not be sufficient to remove these difficulties. It may therefore be helpful to state briefly what my guiding principles have been in making this translation.

Steiner did not write his book as a thesis for students of philosophy, but in order to give a sound philosophical basis to the experience of oneself as a free spirit—an experience that is open to everybody. The book is written in such a way that the very reading of it is a help towards participating in this experience. For this reason all the terms used must convey a real meaning to the reader, and any explanations required must be in words that are self-evident. Indeed, Steiner states clearly that the terms he uses do not always have the precise meanings given in current scientific writings, but that his intention is to record the facts of everyday experience. I have tried throughout to convey the essential meaning of Steiner’s original words, and to follow closely his train of thought, so that the English reader may have as nearly as possible the same experience that a German reader has from the original text. Thus the structure of the original has been preserved, sentence by sentence. It might be argued that a ‘free’ translation, making full use of English idiom and style, would be far more appropriate for an English reader; this could cut out the wordy repetitions and lengthy phrases typical of German philosophical writing and make for a more readable text. But it would also have to be written out of the English philosophical tradition, and would require a complete reconstruction of Steiner’s arguments from the point of view of an Englishman’s philosophy. This might be an excellent thing to do, but would constitute a new work, not a translation. Even if it were attempted, there would still be the need for a close translation making Steiner’s path of knowledge available in detail for the English reader.

The method I have followed was to make a fresh translation of each passage and then compare it with the existing one, choosing the better version of the two. Where there was no advantage in making a change, I have left the earlier version, so that many passages appear unaltered from the previous edition. This is therefore a thoroughly revised rather than an entirely new translation. It is my hope that it will prove straightforward reading for anyone prepared to follow the author along the path of experience he has described. The following notes explaining certain of the terms used are intended for those who want to compare this edition with the German original, or who are making a special study of philosophy.

FREEDOM is not an exact equivalent of the German word Freiheit, although among its wide spectrum of meanings there are some that do correspond. In certain circumstances, however, the differences are important. Steiner himself drew attention to this, for instance, in a lecture he gave at Oxford in 1922, where he said with reference to this book:

Therefore today we need above all a view of the world based on Freiheit (one can use this word in German, but here in England one must put it differently because the word ‘freedom’ has a different meaning), one must say a view of the world based on spiritual activity, on action, on thinking and feeling that arise from the individual human spirit.

(Translated from the German)

Steiner also drew attention to the different endings of the words; Freiheit could be rendered literally as ‘freehood’ if such a word existed. The German ending -heit implied an inner condition or degree, while -tum, corresponding to our ‘-dom’, implied something granted or imposed from outside. This is only partly true in English, as a consideration of the words ‘manhood’, ‘knighthood’, ‘serfdom’, ‘earldom’ and ‘wisdom’ will show. In any case, meanings change with time, and current usage rather than etymology is the best guide.

When describing any kind of creative activity we speak of a ‘freedom of style’ or ‘freedom of expression’ in a way that indicates an inner conquest of outer restraints. This inner conquest is the theme of the book, and it is in this sense that I believe the title The Philosophy of Freedom would be understood today. When Steiner questioned the aptness of this title, he expressed the view that English people believed that they already possessed freedom, and that they needed to be shocked out of their complacency and made to realize that the freedom he meant had to be attained by hard work. While this may still be true today, the alternative he suggested is now less likely to achieve this shock than is the original. I have not found that the title ‘The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity’ gives the newcomer any indication that the goal of the book is the attainment of inner freedom. Today it is just as likely to suggest a justification of religious practices. Throughout the book it has proved quite impossible to translate Freiheit as ‘spiritual activity’ wherever it occurs. The word appears in the titles of the parts of the book and of some of the chapters; the book opens with the question of freedom or necessity, and the final sentence is ‘He is free.’ Undoubtedly ‘freedom’ is the proper English word to express the main theme of the book, and should also appear in the book’s title. Times have changed, and what may well have been good reasons for changing the title in 1922 are not necessarily still valid. After much thought, and taking everything into account, I have decided that the content of the book is better represented today by the title The Philosophy of Freedom. Moreover, with this title the book may be instantly identified with Die Philosophie der Freiheit, and I have already remarked that this edition is intended as a close translation of the German, rather than a new book specially written for the English.

SPIRIT, SOUL and MIND are not precise equivalents in English of the German Geist and Seele. Perhaps because we use the concept of mind to include all our experiences through thinking, the concepts of spirit and soul have practically dropped out of everyday use, whereas in German there is no distinct equivalent for ‘mind’ and the concepts ‘spirit’ (Geist) and ‘soul’ (Seele) are consequently broader in scope. Any work describing Steiner’s point of view in terms of English philosophy would have to deal with the mind as a central theme,1 but here our task is to introduce readers to Steiner’s concepts of spirit and soul. For Steiner, the spirit is experienced directly in the act of intuitive thinking. The human spirit is that part of us that thinks, but the spiritual world is not limited to the personal field of the individual human being; it opens out to embrace the eternal truths of existence. The English word ‘spirit’ gives the sense of something more universal, less personal, than ‘mind’, and since Steiner’s philosophical path leads to an experience of the reality of the spiritual world, I have kept the word wherever possible, using ‘mind’ or ‘mental’ in a few places where it seemed more appropriate. The ‘spiritual activity’ here meant is thus more than mental activity, although it starts at a level we would call mental; it leads the human being, aware of himself as a spirit, into the ultimate experience of truth.

The soul, too, is directly experienced; it is not a vague metaphysical entity, but is that region in us where we experience our likes and dislikes, our feelings of pleasure and pain. It contains those characteristics of thought and feeling that make us individual, different from each other. In many common phrases we use the word ‘mind’ where German has the word Seele, but since Steiner recognizes a distinction between soul and spirit it is important to keep these different words. Even in modern English usage something of this difference remains, and it is not too late to hope that Steiner’s exact observations in this realm may help to prevent the terms ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ becoming mere synonyms. Therefore I have kept these words wherever the distinction was important, though in a few places an alternative rendering seemed to fit better; for instance, the ‘introspective observation’ quoted in the motto on the title page could have been rendered literally as ‘observation of the soul'—this observation involves a critical examination of our habits of thought and feeling, not studied from outside in the manner of a psychological survey of human behaviour but from inside where each person meets himself face to face.

The whole book can be considered as a study of the mind, but using an exactness of observation and clarity of thinking never before achieved. Nevertheless, the stream of materialism still flows so strongly that there is a real danger that the mind, and indeed the whole realm of the soul and the spirit, will be dismissed as a metaphysical construction. Only by adopting a philosophy such as is developed in this book will it be possible to retain an experience of soul and of spirit that will be strong enough to stand up to the overwhelming desire to accept nothing as real unless it is supported by science. For in this philosophy Steiner opens the door to a science of the spirit every bit as exact and precise as our current science of nature would be.

CONCEPT and PERCEPT are the direct equivalents of Begriff and Wahrnehmung. The concept is something grasped by thinking, an element of the world of ideas. Steiner describes what it is at the beginning of Chapter 4.

In describing the percept, Steiner mentions the ambiguity of current speech. The German word Wahrnehmung, like the English ‘perception’, can mean either the process of perceiving or the object perceived as an element of observation. Steiner uses the word in the latter sense, and the word ‘percept’, though not perhaps in common use, does avoid the ambiguity. The word does not refer to an actual concrete object that is being observed, for this would only be recognized as such after the appropriate concept had been attached to it, but to the content of observation devoid of any conceptual element. This includes not only sensations of colour, sound, pressure, warmth, taste, smell, and so on, but feelings of pleasure and pain and even thoughts, once the thinking is done. Modern science has come to the conclusion that one cannot deal with a sensation devoid of any conceptual element and uses the term ‘perception’ to include the whole response to a stimulus, in other words, to mean the result of perceiving. But even if one cannot communicate the nature of an experience of pure percept to another person, one must still be able to deal with it as an essential part of the analysis of the process of knowledge. Using the word ‘percept’ for this element of the analysis, we are free to keep the word ‘perception’ for the process of perceiving.

IDEA and MENTAL PICTURE, as used here, correspond to the German words Idee and Vorstellung respectively. Normally these would both be rendered as ‘idea’, and this practice led to an ambiguity that obscured a distinction central to Steiner’s argument. This was the main cause of Dr Poppelbaum’s concern, and his solution was to render Vorstellung as ‘representation’ and Idee as ‘Idea’ with a capital ‘I’. Though this usage may have philosophical justification, it has been my experience in group studies of this book over many years that it has never been fully accepted in practice; ‘representation’ remains a specialist term with a sense rather different from its usual meaning in English, and it certainly does not have the same obvious meaning for the English reader that Vorstellung has for the German.

In explaining his use of the word ‘representation’, Dr Poppelbaum wrote in his preface as follows: ‘The mental picture which the thinker forms to represent the concept in an individual way is here called a “representation”...’ Since ‘mental picture’ is here used to explain the term ‘representation’, it seems simpler to use ‘mental picture’ throughout. It fits Steiner’s treatment very well, since it conveys to the reader both the sense of something conceptual, in that it is mental, and the sense of something perceptual, in that it is a picture. In fact, Steiner gives two definitions of the mental picture, one as a ‘percept in my self’ and another as an ‘individualized concept’, and it is this intermediate position between percept and concept that gives the mental picture its importance in the process of knowledge.

Another advantage of the term ‘mental picture’ is that the verb ‘to picture’ corresponds well with the German vorstellen, implying a mental creation of a scene rather than a physical representation with pencil, paints or camera, which would be ‘to depict’. Of course the visual term ‘picture’ must be understood to cover also the content of other senses, for instance, a remembered tune or a recollection of tranquillity, but this broadening of meaning through analogy is inherent in English usage.

Although mental pictures are commonly regarded as a special class of ideas, here the term ‘idea’ is used only for the German Idee, without ambiguity. Ideas are not individualized, but are ‘fuller, more saturated, more comprehensive concepts’. In the later part of the book, when discussing the nature of a conscious motive, Steiner uses the word to include all concepts in the most general way, individualized or not, which comes very close to the English use of the word idea.

IMAGINATION means the faculty and process of creating mental pictures. The word is the same as the German Imagination, but I have also used it for the German Phantasie, because the word ‘fantasy’ suggests something altogether too far from reality, whereas ‘imagination’ can mean something not only the product of our own consciousness but also a step towards the realization of something new. Thus the title given to Chapter 12, Moral Imagination (for Moralische Phantasie), seemed to me to be correct, and I have kept it. It describes the process of taking an abstract idea, or concept, and creating a vivid mental picture of how it can be applied in a particular circumstance, so that it may become the motive for a moral deed.

In later writings Steiner describes how this ordinary faculty of imagining, or making mental pictures, can be developed to the point where it becomes the faculty of actually perceiving the creative ideas behind the phenomena of nature. In these later writings ‘Imagination’ becomes a special term to indicate this level of perception, but in this book the meaning remains near to the ordinary usage. However, the gateway to such higher levels of perception is opened through the path of experience here set forth.

INTUITION is again the same as the German word, and means the faculty and process of grasping concepts, in particular the immediate apprehension of a thought without reasoning. This is the normal English usage, though Steiner uses the term in an exact way, as follows:

In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept.

Later in the book he gives another definition:

Intuition is the conscious experience—in pure spirit—of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the essence of thinking be grasped.

From this it is not difficult to see how again, in later writings, Steiner could describe a stage of perception still higher than that called ‘Imagination’, the stage of'Intuition’ in which one immediately apprehends the reality of other spiritual beings. Although this book deals only with the spiritual content of pure thinking, intuition at this level is also a step towards a higher level of perceiving reality.

EXPERIENCE has two meanings, which correspond to different words in German. ‘Actual observation of facts or events’ corresponds to the German Erlebnis and to the verb erleben, while ‘the knowledge resulting from this observation’ corresponds to Erfahrung. Thus the accumulation of knowledge can be described as ‘past experience’ or ‘total sum of experience’, if the single word is ambiguous (see, for instance). When speaking of human behaviour that is based on past experience, Steiner calls it praktische Erfahrung, which is rendered as ‘practical experience’.

On the other hand, having direct experience as an activity of observation is expressed by the verb erleben, which means literally ‘to live through’. Thus, in the latter part of the book, particularly in those passages which were added in 1918, Steiner speaks repeatedly of the ‘thinking which can be experienced’. This experience is to be understood as every bit as real and concrete as the ‘actual observation of facts and events’ described above.

MOTIVE and DRIVING FORCE are two elements in any act of will that have to be recognized as distinct. They correspond to the German words Motiv and Triebfeder respectively.

‘Motive’, as used by Steiner, corresponds exactly to the common English usage, meaning the reason that a person has for his action. It has to be a conscious motive, in the form of a concept or mental picture, or else we cannot speak of an act of will, let alone a moral deed. An ‘unconscious motive’ is really a contradiction in terms, and should properly be described as a driving force—it implies that some other person has been able to grasp the concept which was the reason for the action, though the person acting was not himself aware of it; he acted as an automaton, or, as we properly say, ‘without motive’. Nevertheless, modern psychology has contrived to define the ‘motive’ as something no different from the driving force, which precludes the recognition of a motive grasped out of pure intuition, and therefore of the essential difference between a moral deed where a man knows why he acts and an amoral one where his knowledge is a matter of indifference. By making the distinction between motive and driving force, Steiner has been able to characterize all possible levels of action from the purely instinctive to the completely free deed.

The literal meaning of Triebfeder is the mainspring that drives a piece of clockwork. In previous editions, this was rendered as ‘spring of action’. While this is legitimate philosophical usage, I found that it was often misunderstood by the ordinary reader, being taken to mean a spring like a fountain or river-source, as in the phrase ‘springs of life’. This immediately causes confusion with the origin or source of the action, which is the motive. Of course, at the higher levels of action there is no other driving force than the idea which stands as the motive, but in order to follow the development from lower levels one must distinguish the idea, which is the motive, from whatever it is in us that throws us into action whenever a suitable motive presents itself. ‘Mainspring’ does not always fit well in the text, and after trying various words and phrases I have chosen ‘driving force’ as best expressing the dynamic nature of this part of our constitution. The driving force differs from the motive in that we may well remain unconscious of it. But if we are not conscious of the driving force behind our actions, we cannot be acting in freedom, even though we are aware of our motives. Only if we make our own ideals the driving force of our will can we act in freedom, because then nothing apart from ourselves determines our action. Thus the final triumph of Steiner’s path of development depends on making this clear distinction between motive and driving force. A view that treats all motives as driving forces will not be able to recognize the possibility of freedom, while a view that regards all driving forces as ideal elements will not see the need for overcoming our unconscious urges and habits if freedom is to be attained.

WILL and WANT are two distinct words in English where the German has only one verb wollen and its derivatives. Here the task of translating runs into considerable difficulty, for in any discussion of free will it is important to be clear what willing is. The noun forms are fairly straightforward: ein Wollen means ‘an act of will’, das Wollen means ‘willing’ in general, and der Wille means ‘the will’. But the English verb ‘to will’ has a restricted range of meaning, and to use it all the time to render the German wollen can be quite misleading. An example is the quotation from Hamerling in the first chapter:

Der Mensch kann allerdings tun, was er will—aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will, well sein Wille durch Motive bestimmt ist.

The previous edition rendered this:

Man can, it is true, do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills, because his will is determined by motives.

If this means anything at all in English, it means that man cannot direct his will as he chooses. The archaic sense of ‘willing’ as ‘desiring’ is kept in the phrase ‘what he wills’, in keeping with current usage, for instance, in the remark ‘Come when you will.’ But the active sense of ‘willing’ as contrasted with ‘doing’ implies a metaphysical power of compulsion quite out of keeping with Steiner’s whole method of treating the subject. This metaphysical attitude to the will is clearly expressed in a sentence such as ‘I willed him to go’, which implies something more than mere desire but less than overt action. It is less obvious when dealing with the genesis of one’s own actions, but the tendency to attribute a metaphysical quality to the will is developed in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and this may well be a tendency inherent in the German language. Steiner has no such intention, and he leaves us in no doubt that his use of wollen implies a definite element of desire; indeed, the highest expression of man’s will is when it becomes the faculty of spiritual desire or craving (geistige Begehrungsvermögen). Therefore, whenever the archaic sense of the verb ‘to will’ is not appropriate, I have decided that it is better to render the German verb wollen with the English ‘want’ and its variants, ‘wanting’, ‘to want to ...’ and so on. This makes immediate good sense of many passages, and moreover if one would translate this back into German one would have to use the word wollen. Hamerling’s sentence now becomes:

Man can certainly do as he wills, but he cannot want as he wills, because his wanting is determined by motives.

Although Steiner has to show that this view is mistaken, one can at least understand how it could come to be written. That it can be a genuine human experience is shown by the similar remark attributed to T.E. Lawrence, ‘I can do what I want, but I cannot want what I want.’ In other words, ‘I can carry out any desires for action that I may have, but I cannot choose how these desires come to me.’ Both Lawrence and Hamerling leave out of account just those cases where man can want as he wills, because he has freely chosen his own motive. Steiner’s treatment of the will overcomes any necessity for metaphysical thinking; for instance, it now makes sense to say that to want without motive would make the will an ‘empty faculty’, because to want without wanting something would be meaningless.

I have dealt with this at some length because it has been my experience that the message of the entire book springs to life in a new and vivid way when it is realized that the original motive power of the will is in fact desire, and that desire can be transformed by knowledge into its most noble form, which is love.

*        *        *

It was the late Friedrich Geuter who showed me, together with many others, the importance of this book as a basis for the social as well as the intellectual life of today. My debt to the previous translators and editors will already be clear. I also owe much to the many friends who have taken part in joint studies of this book over the past 30 years and to those who have helped and advised me with suggestions for the translation, especially the late George Adams, Owen Barfield, and Rita Stebbing. Finally I must mention my colleague Ralph Brocklebank, who has shared much of the work, and, with Dorothy Osmond, prepared it for the press.

Michael WilsonClent 1964

Prefaces

Preface to the revised edition of 1918

There are two fundamental questions in the life of the human soul towards which everything to be discussed in this book is directed. One is: Is it possible to find a view of the essential nature of man such as will give us a foundation for everything else that comes to meet us—whether through life experience or through science—which we feel is otherwise not self-supporting and therefore liable to be driven by doubt and criticism into the realm of uncertainty? The other question is this: Is man entitled to claim for himself freedom of will, or is freedom a mere illusion begotten of his inability to recognize the threads of necessity on which his will, like any natural event, depends? It is no artificial tissue of theories that provokes this question. In a certain mood it presents itself quite naturally to the human soul. And one may well feel that if the soul has not at some time found itself faced in utmost seriousness by the problem of free will or necessity it will not have reached its full stature. This book is intended to show that the experiences which the second problem causes man’s soul to undergo depend upon the position he is able to take up towards the first problem. An attempt is made to prove that there is a view of the nature of man’s being which can support the rest of knowledge; and further, that this view completely justifies the idea of free will, provided only that we have first discovered that region of the soul in which free will can unfold itself.

The view to which we here refer is one which, once gained, is capable of becoming part and parcel of the very life of the soul itself The answer given to the two problems will not be of the purely theoretical sort which, once mastered, may be carried about as a conviction preserved by memory. Such an answer would, for the whole manner of thinking on which the book is based, be no real answer at all. The book will not give a ready-made self-contained answer of this sort, but will point to a field of experience in which man’s inner soul activity supplies a living answer to these questions at every moment that he needs one. Whoever has once discovered the region of the soul where these questions unfold will find that the very contemplation of this region gives him all that he needs for the solution of the two problems. With the knowledge thus acquired, he may then, as desire or destiny impels him, adventure further into the breadths and depths of this enigmatical life of ours. Thus it would appear that a kind of knowledge which proves its justification and validity by its own inner life as well as by the kinship of its own life with the whole life of the human soul does in fact exist.

This is how I thought about the content of this book when I first wrote it down 25 years ago. Today, once again, I have to set down similar sentences if I am to characterize the main ideas of the book. At the original writing I limited myself to saying no more than was in the strictest sense connected with the two fundamental questions which I have outlined. If anyone should be astonished at not finding in this book any reference to that region of the world of spiritual experience described in my later writings, I would ask him to bear in mind that it was not my purpose at that time to set down the results of spiritual research, but first to lay the foundations on which such results can rest.

The Philosophy of Freedom does not contain any results of this sort, any more than it contains special results of the natural sciences. But what it does contain is in my judgement absolutely necessary for anyone who seeks a secure foundation for such knowledge. What I have said in this book may be acceptable even to some who, for reasons of their own, refuse to have anything to do with the results of my researches into the spiritual realm. But anyone who feels drawn towards the results of these spiritual researches may well appreciate the importance of what I was here trying to do. It is this: to show that open-minded consideration simply of the two questions I have indicated, which are fundamental for every kind of knowledge, leads to the view that man lives in the midst of a genuine spiritual world.

In this book the attempt is made to show that a knowledge of the spirit realm before entering upon actual spiritual experience is fully justified. The course of this demonstration is so conducted that for anyone who is able and willing to enter into these arguments it is never necessary, in order to accept them, to cast furtive glances at the experiences which my later writings have shown to be relevant.

Thus it seems to me that in one sense this book occupies a position completely independent of my writings on actual spiritual-scientific matters. Yet in another sense it is most intimately connected with them. These considerations have moved me now, after a lapse of 25 years, to republish the contents of this book practically unaltered in all essentials. I have, however, made additions of some length to a number of chapters. The misunderstandings of my argument which I have met seemed to make these more detailed elaborations necessary. Changes of text have been made only where it appeared to me that I had said clumsily what I meant to say a quarter of a century ago. (Only ill will could find in these changes occasion to suggest that I have changed my fundamental conviction.)