carlodicelico wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 3:52 am
Thank you, this is great food for thought! My own take on the Prize Essay was that Schopenhauer seems to have a very Industrial Revolution outlook on things—strictly binary, strictly deterministic, and strictly constrained—and because of his outlook, his definitions are extreme to the point of being ludicrous (imo). It also seemed to me that the essay had a circular fallacy (our actions can only be free if they come only from our will and our will can only be free if our actions come only from it) and an implicit infinite regress. Anyway, I can share my essay if you're interested, it's not very good, but at least the salient impressions I had are there.
Carlo,
I agree. Although I am not familiar with the essay, what you describe sounds very much like Cartesian and Kantian dualism of subject/object and noumenon/phenomenon, respectively. This naturally leads to thinking about thinking as intellectual abstractions which are rigid, i.e. one's own abstract thinking is projected onto Thinking as such. Since the latter is what actually expands our degrees of freedom, it is natural to conclude there is no human freedom if Thinking is imprisoned within mechanized abstract thinking. But there is no logical warrant for that, because the initial dualisms which were assumed are not faithful to Reality to begin with. It is precisely higher Thinking which can work to free the lower thinking, feeling, and willing activities of man, IF we allow it to.
Steiner wrote:Monism is therefore, in the sphere of truly moral action, a philosophy of inner freedom. Because monism is a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical, unreal restrictions upon the free spirit, just as much as it acknowledges the physical and historical (naive-real) restrictions of the naive person. Because monism does not regard man as a finished product which unfolds its full being at every moment of its life, for monism the dispute as to whether man as such is free or not amounts to nothing. Monism sees man as a self-developing being and asks whether, on this course of development, the stage of the free spirit can also be attained.
Monism knows that nature does not release man from her arms already complete as free spirit, but rather that she leads him to a certain stage from which, still as an unfree being, he develops himself further until he comes to the point where he finds himself.
Monism is clear about the fact that a being who acts out of physical or moral compulsion cannot be truly moral. It regards the transition through automatic behavior (according to natural drives and instincts) and through obedient behavior (according to moral norms) as necessary preliminary stages for morality, but sees the possibility of surmounting both transitional stages through the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral world view in general from the fetters, within the world, of the naive maxims of morality, and from the maxims of morality, outside the world, of the speculative metaphysicians. Monism cannot eliminate the former from the world, just as it cannot eliminate perception from the world, and it rejects the latter because monism seeks within the world all the principles of explanation which it needs to illumine the phenomena of the world, and seeks none outside it. Just as monism refuses even to think about principles of knowledge other than those that exist for men (see pages 113–114), so it also rejects decisively the thought of moral principles other than those that exist for men. Human morality, like human knowledge, is determined by human nature. And just as different beings would understand as knowledge something totally different than we, so different beings would also have a different morality. Morality, for the adherent of monism, is a specifically human characteristic, and spiritual [Thinking] activity (Freiheit) the human way to be moral.
Yes, please do share your essay!
