The Philosophy of Freedom, Summarized
Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 7:14 pm
A friend, Max, has produced a great three-part series of articles on Steiner's PoF. For anyone who has found it too difficult to approach directly, for whatever reason, this summary with many examples may help. It should also help reinforce and clarify the ideas and reasoning for anyone who has already read it. Here is Part 1 with an excerpt.
https://theoriapress.substack.com/p/rud ... losophy-of
https://theoriapress.substack.com/p/rud ... losophy-of
Max Leyf wrote:introduction
IN 1894, some one hundred years after the publication of Goethe’s On the Metamorphosis of Plants and Kant’s The Critique of Judgement, the 33-year-old Rudolf Steiner published The Philosophy of Freedom. The purpose of the book was to shed light on the fundamental relation of the human being to the world in which he lives. Steiner’s academic career began as the editor of Goethe’s scientific writings, and to this day, Steiner’s exegeses of Goethe’s works on this subject remain some of the most insightful and exciting.1 But Steiner did not circumscribe the scope of his activity to the topics that Goethe chose to engage with in his own scientific studies, to say the least. Indeed, among the primary difficulties that a neophyte will encounter in any attempt to engage the anthroposophical corpus is its sheer breadth. The practical initiatives that stemmed from Steiner’s work only serve to extend the scope of territory which Steiner charted.
But Steiner never intended to repudiate or contradict Goethe’s approach. Instead, he sought to intensify the Goethean method to a pitch. Indeed, in The Philosophy of Freedom Steiner attempts to carry forward a project that he took Goethe to have initiated by employing a method of proto-phenomenology directed towards the process of cognition itself. To develop and bring to articulation the epistemological approach latent in Goethe’s scientific researches, Steiner finds it necessary to navigate between a number of contemporary schools of philosophy without falling into the specific distortions that they advocate in respect to the relation between the human being and world. Ultimately, all these philosophies end in a subversion of human freedom. Steiner presents freedom—or “spiritual activity”—as he would have preferred to see his choice German word Freiheit rendered in English—as the pith and essence of the human being itself. In the “Translator’s Appendix” to the 1986 translation of Steiner’s Die Philosophie der Freiheit, William Lindeman gives a concise summary of Steiner’s view of the situation when Lindeman defends his choice of departing from the standard English title of Steiner’s work and opting instead for the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity:
Something must still be said about the word Freiheit (literally, “freehood”). In a lecture in Dornach on January 5, 1922 (GA 303), Rudolf Steiner said of his book Die Philosophie der Freiheit that it should “never bear the title in English of ‘Philosophy of Freedom.’” In a lecture in Oxford on August 29, 1922 (GA 305), he again indicated that Freiheit has a different meaning than “freedom” does, and that in England one must speak of a “world view of spiritual activity (spirituelle Aktivität)”— a world view “of action, thinking, and feeling out of the spiritual individuality of man.” In the text, I have translated Freiheit as “inner freedom” (for Rudolf Steiner, Freiheit points more to man’s inner being than “freedom” does); or as “freedom,” in the case of freedom of the will, for example.
Steiner regards the potential for Freiheit or freedom as the heart of hearts of the human being and the realization of freedom as its highest calling— its formal as well as its final cause. In disputing the philosophies which seek to deny such freedom, Steiner is serving at once as a sort of spiritual anthropologist, or “anthroposopher” and an advocate for the human being.2
As indicated above, freedom is a term that acquires a very precise meaning as Steiner’s argument progresses. Suffice it here to note that Steiner has in mind neither the libertarian freedom of “alternative possibilities,” nor the liberalist “freedom” of “doing what I want,” nor the Spinozan “freedom” of “free necessity.” The first is understood as the ability to have chosen an alternative possibility to the one I did, the second in being able to act according to my desires, and the third in acting according to my nature. Libertarian freedom fails to differentiate freedom from arbitrariness or caprice. After all, if I chose something for a reason the first time around, then, ceteris paribus, I ought to choose the same thing a second time. If I chose that thing without reason, then it was hardly a choice in the first place but rather just a whim or an impulse that had its origin somewhere other than me. Hence, properly construed, this should not really be thought of as a free action at all. The liberal conception of freedom fails to distinguish freedom from hedonism, which philosophers since at least Plato’s day have all recognized as coercion of the most pernicious sort. After all, I did not choose my desires. By identifying my motives with them, I indenture my own will to their authority. The reason that this relation can be seen as “coercion of the most pernicious sort” is precisely because a person in this condition is inclined to imagine himself to be free, and is even likely to retaliate against someone who hinders the exercise of this illusory freedom. The person who thinks himself free remains the least inclined to win through to true freedom. Spinozan freedom, despite being, in many ways, more sophisticated than either of the varieties hitherto mentioned, is also rejected by Steiner. At the outset of The Philosophy of Freedom, he quotes a letter in which Spinoza outlines his view that only God is truly free because “he exists out of the necessity of his nature alone” while all created things are unfree by dint of the fact that they do not. The concept of freedom that emerges from Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy stands so contrary to the common meaning of that term that it can be difficult to understand why it should be considered a kind of freedom at all. Naturally, Spinoza amply defends the coherence of his view but a critique of Spinozan metaphysics is a topic other than the one that the present study has chosen to pursue. In brief, Steiner’s primary objection to Spinoza’s concept of freedom is that it seems to deprive the individual of all possibility for all creativity. Let it be enough to indicate that while libertarian freedom fails to differentiate freedom from arbitrariness and liberal freedom fails to differentiate it from acting on desire, Spinozan freedom fails to differentiate freedom from necessity. Steiner is adamant that freedom is synonymous, or “syngenous,”3 with creativity and also with love. Therefore, a conception of freedom that casts aspersions on the possibility for these things is a conception that must be disputed.
The Philosophy of Freedom is separated into fourteen chapters, but the most fundamental division comes between the first and second halves. In respect to their ideal content, they are reciprocal images, or inversions, of one another. If the first half concerns knowledge, the second action. If the first concerns the logic of science, the second concerns the logic of life and of art. The first addresses how to know empirical facts, the second how to create them. The first concerns how the human being comes to know the world and to understand its place in that world, the second how he lives in that world, and by living in it, shapes it. The first is centripetal, the second centrifugal. The first concerns the structure of reality and perception while the second concerns the manner in which the human will flows out and through that structure. Thus, the first may be likened to a consonant while the second may be likened to a vowel because, just as in the act of vocalization, the first provides the shape and the second the content. I hope to make the basis of these comparisons clear with a brief exploration of each of the two parts.