The Philosophy of Freedom, Summarized

[AshvinP]

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

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.

[Anthony66]

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

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.

Ashvin,

Thanks for posting this, it was very helpful. I went on to read part 2 which contained the following:

In somewhat of a recapitulation of the prior section: Steiner’s epistemology might be described as something like the hermeneutics of the percept. Knowledge, for Steiner, is the fruit of interpreting what confronts us as raw sensory matter, uninterpreted given, or percept. Perception is achieving insight into the meaning towards which the percept gestures, as it were. For us, the world first presents itself as the conjunction of two aspects: the percept and the concept. Phenomenologically, the task of relating these two aspects contains two elements: (1) what is directly given and (2) what is the fruit of our own activity. The first is the object of observation and the second is the achievement of thinking. I said, “for us, the world presents itself in two aspects” because there is no need to imagine that percept and concept are separated in reality outside of our knowing of it. In other words, the division of percept and concept is an epistemological and not a metaphysical division. The division of given and not-given, similarly, is a phenomenological one and not one of the other kinds. In other words, the percept-concept division pertains to the process of knowledge and not the results of this process while the given-not-given division pertains to the experience of achieving this knowledge. If the division of percept and concept were more than an epistemological one, then conceptual insight into the perceptual given could not tell us anything except about our own minds. This may be familiar to someone who has studied Kant’s doctrines, but Steiner is careful to differentiate his view from that of his forebear. Specifically, Steiner disputes Kant’s claim that reality beyond appearances can never be an object of human knowledge. Steiner’s theory of knowledge affirms that reality is precisely what is to be achieved through cognition. Put another way, what immediately confronts us as given is not reality, but something like an abstraction of its sensible aspects, which appear to our senses, and its intelligible aspects, which our minds may grasp. Sensory perception begins by splitting reality into something it is not so that it may be recollected through cognition.

I've been grappling with the bolded text. It seems a significant statement. But on the other hand, the materialist might be able to affirm the same with the precept/concept living on the coattails of neural excitation.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Thanks for posting this, it was very helpful. I went on to read part 2 which contained the following:

In somewhat of a recapitulation of the prior section: Steiner’s epistemology might be described as something like the hermeneutics of the percept. Knowledge, for Steiner, is the fruit of interpreting what confronts us as raw sensory matter, uninterpreted given, or percept. Perception is achieving insight into the meaning towards which the percept gestures, as it were. For us, the world first presents itself as the conjunction of two aspects: the percept and the concept. Phenomenologically, the task of relating these two aspects contains two elements: (1) what is directly given and (2) what is the fruit of our own activity. The first is the object of observation and the second is the achievement of thinking. I said, “for us, the world presents itself in two aspects” because there is no need to imagine that percept and concept are separated in reality outside of our knowing of it. In other words, the division of percept and concept is an epistemological and not a metaphysical division. The division of given and not-given, similarly, is a phenomenological one and not one of the other kinds. In other words, the percept-concept division pertains to the process of knowledge and not the results of this process while the given-not-given division pertains to the experience of achieving this knowledge. If the division of percept and concept were more than an epistemological one, then conceptual insight into the perceptual given could not tell us anything except about our own minds. This may be familiar to someone who has studied Kant’s doctrines, but Steiner is careful to differentiate his view from that of his forebear. Specifically, Steiner disputes Kant’s claim that reality beyond appearances can never be an object of human knowledge. Steiner’s theory of knowledge affirms that reality is precisely what is to be achieved through cognition. Put another way, what immediately confronts us as given is not reality, but something like an abstraction of its sensible aspects, which appear to our senses, and its intelligible aspects, which our minds may grasp. Sensory perception begins by splitting reality into something it is not so that it may be recollected through cognition.

I've been grappling with the bolded text. It seems a significant statement. But on the other hand, the materialist might be able to affirm the same with the precept/concept living on the coattails of neural excitation.

Anthony, to be clear, he is speaking of the percept (not precept) and concept. These exist in a polar relation, not a duality (they are never actually divided from each other). The materialist has no problem imagining percepts existing independently of concepts - these are what the "neural excitations" are according to them. But, as we have seen on this forum, in PoF, and in this summary, there is no such independently existing percepts in reality. They only 'exist' in the abstract concepts of the materialist - the postulates which were theorized into existence despite the givens of experience. Unlike phenomenology, abstract metaphysics starts with a vague postulate about how reality is "in essence" and then tries to cram all given experience into the boundaries of that postulate (and this applies to analytic idealism just as much as materialism). Actually this 'mind-container' approach is the default for all modern thinking.

Further, perceptual processes abstracted from conceptual processes (which are what "physical" processes are according to the materialist), by their very nature, cannot evolve into something beyond themselves and take on the quality of 'aboutness'. How can we know this if they are always accompanied with concepts? We simply need to become more conscious of this inner experiential distinction to discern the underlying logic which is consistent across all polar relations of concept-percept which confront us. Max gives the following example:

For instance, we know that all of the relevant physical and physiological processes can transpire without resulting in a perception if attention is lacking. How many times have I stared at a paragraph only to realize that my eyes had been skirting over the words and my brain had been imitating them, and yet I remain entirely unaware of what I had read? Feigned attentiveness is as useless to perception as faux flowers are to real bees.

Moreover, reduction to physics and physiology only pretends to have explained something that it has in fact merely swept under the rug of brain processes: it remains just as unexplained how neurons could produce an experiential, conscious perception as how the tulip itself could. This is because, just like the tulip itself, the neurons are just what they are. They are not of or about anything. Physical processes are always identical with themselves at any moment in time, from which moment they evolve to the next in an orderly manner in a process that physicists can ostensibly calculate with an exceedingly high degree of accuracy. Nothing about either the physical processes themselves, nor their evolution, suggests in the slightest way how any of it can become a matter of experience.

[Federica]

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

I thought I would seize the opportunity of this three-part exploration of PoF by Max Leyf, as you suggested, to reinforce and clarify the ideas expressed in the book. I am unusually starting from part three titled “thinking, freedom, love”, because firstly I have newly finished reading PoF, and the last chapters are the freshest in my memory, and also, moral intuition and ethical individualism are the ideas I am now most curious to read about.


More than a literal summary, I found this exploration to be a PoF-inspired, broad, round reflection on the mutual saturation of thinking and love. Although I couldn’t find much about moral intuition - at least not in this third part - I surely appreciated the focus on love as thinking in spiritual form, which can manifest in other forms (soul and physical). For some reason, as relatively new to this phenomenology, one is biased - unless it’s only me - to direct primary attention to sensory perceptions, so as to ‘rewire' them from within the proper logic, easily overlooking the fact that feelings also are percepts, and their reality similarly emerges from the conjunction of that percept with a concept, officiated by thinking. So I liked to follow that line of exploration to its destination of love in spiritual form (thinking) where we overcome the ‘idolatry’ of considering the feeling of love (soul) or the act of love (physical) as love essence, instead of love expressions.


Then, on the journey towards that destination, some hesitations have emerged. I might have been tempted to nuance and soften such hesitations, by wrapping them in a rhetorical form, but I’m afraid to be interpreted literally and not understood, so I will clearly state them, hoping they will not come across as too blunt for this reason. Firstly, with reference to the thought experiment suggested in the paragraph “on thinking and thought”:

As noted in the prior section, the difference between thinking and thought is the difference between freedom and its lack. We are no more free in our thoughts than an apple is free to fall to the Earth after it has been loosed from its bough. Perhaps the reader will oblige me in thinking about the apple that I just mentioned. Next, ask yourself whether you are free not to have thought about it. Obviously, no. Clearly you would have been free to refrain from thinking about it this would have occurred to you before reading the first instruction. But after you have already thought of the apple, it is senseless to imagine that you could unthink the having thought of it, at least in the way that is relevant to this inquiry. (...) The purpose of the simple thought experiment above, which it shares with most of The Philosophy of Freedom, is not to argue anything, but to draw the reader’s attention to a feature of her own experience. Here, the observation can be made that there is no freedom in thought because it has already happened.”

Here I doubt that the appreciation of freedom in the act of thinking can emerge, as it is reasoned, from contrasting how thinking can move ahead, with what has been already thought and thus is sealed as thought-image in an unchangeable past. I mean: noticing that a past thought is thought, and we have no freedom left to unthink it, because it’s already out there, does not seem to me a proper avenue to demonstrate or even highlight the quality of freedom that pertains to thinking. It’s obvious that a thought belongs to the past and as such cannot be ‘free’. What is less obvious is how thinking - not a thought - can be approached either in an unfree way, by succumbing to a variety of things, or in a free manner, provided that it is inspired by spiritual intuitions. This connection would have been, in my perspective, a more appropriate axis for the exploration of freedom in thinking. Max Leyf prefaces his whole point on free thinking versus unfree thought in these terms:

It is evident that Steiner was forced to confront a great deal of this sort of criticism [PoF being excessively intellectual] during his lifetime, as can be seen by the subject matter of a 1918 addition to the eighth chapter of the work.

The reason why Steiner brings attention to the difference between thought and thinking in that later addition to the eight chapter, is not to guide the reader to the appreciation of the freedom of thinking. As I see it, the author’s intention there is, more trivially, to make people understand that it’s not that thinking is cold and dry, while feeling is warm and rich, but just the opposite, and that the reason we might feel that way is that we compare feeling not with thinking, but with the dead ejections of thinking, i.e. thoughts. The purpose there is to counter the tendency by critics to put feeling and thinking on an equal footing, showing that this equal comparison cannot even be started, and that we can only do justice to feeling and willing through thinking, and never the other way around.


Further, in the paragraph “love of the body” Max illustrates some expressions of love that refer back to the PoF discussion about desire, pleisure, and pain in connection with moral action, where ethical individualism is formed in contrast with the pessimistic approach to ethics of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and others:

The physical form of love, for instance, appears with the greatest intensity in motherhood or sexual love. In both of these cases, the reason for their intensity is precisely because they most perfectly express the essence of love, or “love in its spiritual form,” within the constraints of physical existence. In both of these examples, we see a couple of things which are ultimately the same thing (i.e. love) in different aspects. One is the impulse to will the good of the other. Sometimes this is difficult to perceive because “the good” is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure. The degree to which they are the same is the measure of the agent’s freedom. In other words, one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things instead of believing things are right insofar as they produce pleasure.

Provided that I’m not misinterpreting, I find this to be inaccurate. Steiner does not distinguish between 'arbitrary desires' that exert tyranny on us on one side, and appropriate pleasures for the ‘right things’ on the other side, that we need to come to aspire to. Here it is said that “the good is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure". Well, it seems to me that Steiner does not put good and pleasure on a common plane where it could be possible to say that they are not necessarily the same thing (although they could). In fact, they are never, and cannot be, the same thing.

No ethics can deprive man of the pleasure he experiences in the fulfillment of his desires.

We can have ethical (good) desires the fulfillment of which will give us pleasure, and/or non ethical ones, but in both cases, it’s in our inalienable human nature to strive for the fulfillment of our desires, so as to obtain pleasure. As Steiner puts it in one of my favorite moments of all PoF, for its meaning of course, but also for the spirit (in standard sense) that comes through it:

Man does not need to be turned inside out by philosophy [ ] he does not need to discard his human nature, before he can be moral.

So it’s not about preventing ruthless or "arbitrary desires" to take us over "in order to be pleased by the right things". It’s about letting one’s desires be inspired by moral intuitions. Such desires would then drive action taking, against all possible pain and misery along the way. So there would be no need to discard anything, and one can certainly enjoy the pleasure that comes from the anticipation and the fulfillment of those highly inspired, moral desires, and of all desires, for that matter, as long as they don’t work against moral imagination. For “a mature human being” ethics should result as a matter of fact emerging from within, from individual desires rather than be imposed from without, which is what this exploration also suggests, however, as it seems, under the preliminary necessity of steering clear from arbitrary desires, in order to allow the ‘good’ ones to shine through.

Anyone who would eradicate the pleasure brought by the fulfillment of human desires will first have to make man a slave who acts not because he wants to but only because he must. For the achievement of what one wanted to do gives pleasure. What we call good is not what a man must do but what he will want to do if he develops the true nature of man to the full.

As I am writing, all this seems very clear to me, and I am curious to know whether you think I am misreading Max Leyf, Steiner, none of them or maybe both.

[AshvinP]

I thought I would seize the opportunity of this three-part exploration of PoF by Max Leyf, as you suggested, to reinforce and clarify the ideas expressed in the book. I am unusually starting from part three titled “thinking, freedom, love”, because firstly I have newly finished reading PoF, and the last chapters are the freshest in my memory, and also, moral intuition and ethical individualism are the ideas I am now most curious to read about.


More than a literal summary, I found this exploration to be a PoF-inspired, broad, round reflection on the mutual saturation of thinking and love. Although I couldn’t find much about moral intuition - at least not in this third part - I surely appreciated the focus on love as thinking in spiritual form, which can manifest in other forms (soul and physical). For some reason, as relatively new to this phenomenology, one is biased - unless it’s only me - to direct primary attention to sensory perceptions, so as to ‘rewire' them from within the proper logic, easily overlooking the fact that feelings also are percepts, and their reality similarly emerges from the conjunction of that percept with a concept, officiated by thinking. So I liked to follow that line of exploration to its destination of love in spiritual form (thinking) where we overcome the ‘idolatry’ of considering the feeling of love (soul) or the act of love (physical) as love essence, instead of love expressions.


Then, on the journey towards that destination, some hesitations have emerged. I might have been tempted to nuance and soften such hesitations, by wrapping them in a rhetorical form, but I’m afraid to be interpreted literally and not understood, so I will clearly state them, hoping they will not come across as too blunt for this reason. Firstly, with reference to the thought experiment suggested in the paragraph “on thinking and thought”:

As noted in the prior section, the difference between thinking and thought is the difference between freedom and its lack. We are no more free in our thoughts than an apple is free to fall to the Earth after it has been loosed from its bough. Perhaps the reader will oblige me in thinking about the apple that I just mentioned. Next, ask yourself whether you are free not to have thought about it. Obviously, no. Clearly you would have been free to refrain from thinking about it this would have occurred to you before reading the first instruction. But after you have already thought of the apple, it is senseless to imagine that you could unthink the having thought of it, at least in the way that is relevant to this inquiry. (...) The purpose of the simple thought experiment above, which it shares with most of The Philosophy of Freedom, is not to argue anything, but to draw the reader’s attention to a feature of her own experience. Here, the observation can be made that there is no freedom in thought because it has already happened.”

Here I doubt that the appreciation of freedom in the act of thinking can emerge, as it is reasoned, from contrasting how thinking can move ahead, with what has been already thought and thus is sealed as thought-image in an unchangeable past. I mean: noticing that a past thought is thought, and we have no freedom left to unthink it, because it’s already out there, does not seem to me a proper avenue to demonstrate or even highlight the quality of freedom that pertains to thinking. It’s obvious that a thought belongs to the past and as such cannot be ‘free’. What is less obvious is how thinking - not a thought - can be approached either in an unfree way, by succumbing to a variety of things, or in a free manner, provided that it is inspired by spiritual intuitions. This connection would have been, in my perspective, a more appropriate axis for the exploration of freedom in thinking. Max Leyf prefaces his whole point on free thinking versus unfree thought in these terms:

It is evident that Steiner was forced to confront a great deal of this sort of criticism [PoF being excessively intellectual] during his lifetime, as can be seen by the subject matter of a 1918 addition to the eighth chapter of the work.

The reason why Steiner brings attention to the difference between thought and thinking in that later addition to the eight chapter, is not to guide the reader to the appreciation of the freedom of thinking. As I see it, the author’s intention there is, more trivially, to make people understand that it’s not that thinking is cold and dry, while feeling is warm and rich, but just the opposite, and that the reason we might feel that way is that we compare feeling not with thinking, but with the dead ejections of thinking, i.e. thoughts. The purpose there is to counter the tendency by critics to put feeling and thinking on an equal footing, showing that this equal comparison cannot even be started, and that we can only do justice to feeling and willing through thinking, and never the other way around.


Further, in the paragraph “love of the body” Max illustrates some expressions of love that refer back to the PoF discussion about desire, pleisure, and pain in connection with moral action, where ethical individualism is formed in contrast with the pessimistic approach to ethics of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and others:

The physical form of love, for instance, appears with the greatest intensity in motherhood or sexual love. In both of these cases, the reason for their intensity is precisely because they most perfectly express the essence of love, or “love in its spiritual form,” within the constraints of physical existence. In both of these examples, we see a couple of things which are ultimately the same thing (i.e. love) in different aspects. One is the impulse to will the good of the other. Sometimes this is difficult to perceive because “the good” is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure. The degree to which they are the same is the measure of the agent’s freedom. In other words, one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things instead of believing things are right insofar as they produce pleasure.

Provided that I’m not misinterpreting, I find this to be inaccurate. Steiner does not distinguish between 'arbitrary desires' that exert tyranny on us on one side, and appropriate pleasures for the ‘right things’ on the other side, that we need to come to aspire to. Here it is said that “the good is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure". Well, it seems to me that Steiner does not put good and pleasure on a common plane where it could be possible to say that they are not necessarily the same thing (although they could). In fact, they are never, and cannot be, the same thing.

No ethics can deprive man of the pleasure he experiences in the fulfillment of his desires.

We can have ethical (good) desires the fulfillment of which will give us pleasure, and/or non ethical ones, but in both cases, it’s in our inalienable human nature to strive for the fulfillment of our desires, so as to obtain pleasure. As Steiner puts it in one of my favorite moments of all PoF, for its meaning of course, but also for the spirit (in standard sense) that comes through it:

Man does not need to be turned inside out by philosophy [ ] he does not need to discard his human nature, before he can be moral.

So it’s not about preventing ruthless or "arbitrary desires" to take us over "in order to be pleased by the right things". It’s about letting one’s desires be inspired by moral intuitions. Such desires would then drive action taking, against all possible pain and misery along the way. So there would be no need to discard anything, and one can certainly enjoy the pleasure that comes from the anticipation and the fulfillment of those highly inspired, moral desires, and of all desires, for that matter, as long as they don’t work against moral imagination. For “a mature human being” ethics should result as a matter of fact emerging from within, from individual desires rather than be imposed from without, which is what this exploration also suggests, however, as it seems, under the preliminary necessity of steering clear from arbitrary desires, in order to allow the ‘good’ ones to shine through.

Anyone who would eradicate the pleasure brought by the fulfillment of human desires will first have to make man a slave who acts not because he wants to but only because he must. For the achievement of what one wanted to do gives pleasure. What we call good is not what a man must do but what he will want to do if he develops the true nature of man to the full.

As I am writing, all this seems very clear to me, and I am curious to know whether you think I am misreading Max Leyf, Steiner, none of them or maybe both.

Federica,

The distinction Max is drawing attention to, as was Steiner, is between the activity of thinking, on the one hand, and thoughts as the very finished product of that activity, on the other. We are free in the former, but not in the latter. This becomes more clear when we understand, as you correctly point out, that our inner objects such as feelings and thoughts, are also perceptions just like colors, shapes, sounds, etc. Just as outer sensory perceptions will entrain our thinking into fixed channels, so will the inner perceptions of feelings/thoughts. That is the logical necessity by which outer/inner sensory impressions guide our spiritual activity. It is the current default state the normal waking intellect finds itself in.

Thinking, on the other hand, is that formless force which allows us to become more aware, self-conscious, of what I just wrote and the reasons why it is the case. Therein lies our freedom. Steiner draws attention to this when he discusses Spinoza in Chapter 1:

Because this view is so clearly and definitely expressed it is easy to detect the fundamental error that it contains. The same necessity by which a stone makes a definite movement as the result of an impact, is said to compel a man to carry out an action when impelled thereto by any reason. It is only because man is conscious of his action that he thinks himself to be its originator. But in doing so he overlooks the fact that he is driven by a cause which he cannot help obeying. The error in this train of thought is soon discovered. Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of the causes which guide him. Nobody will deny that the child is unfree when he desires milk, or the drunken man when he says things which he later regrets. Neither knows anything of the causes, working in the depths of their organisms, which exercise irresistible control 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 which cause him to act? Are the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated diplomatic negotiations, be placed scientifically on the same level with that of the child when it desires milk: It is no doubt true that it is best to seek the solution of a problem where the conditions are simplest. But inability to discriminate has before now caused endless confusion. There is, after all, a profound difference between knowing why I am acting and not knowing it. At first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And yet the opponents of freedom never ask themselves whether a motive of action which I recognize and see through, is to be regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as the organic process which causes the child to cry for milk.

It is only through the deepening of thinking, in this manner, by which we become free and creative beings. So much modern philosophy has gone astray by failing to notice this simple reality. The logical necessity of 'cold and dry' intellectual thinking is assumed to be the deepest mode of thinking possible, simply because most people never endeavor to deepen their own thinking further. Thinking at the very surface level of the intellect is indeed cold and dry - it had to 'cool off' from the fiery intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations if it was to ever become fully internalized to the human individual, so that we may actively will our thinking towards the ideas/ideals which we desire, independent of any external compulsion. That is the process of human individuals taking over creatively responsibility for the spiritual forces which guide its evolution and that of all life on Earth.

That is how the necessity of our logical thinking and the intuitive sense of moral ideals, which presuppose freedom, can be reconciled - there must be some way in which the very technique of evolving higher thinking, which is also the evolution of life itself, also coincides with the desire for what is 'right', for what is Good, Beautiful, and True. The desire for what is merely pleasurable but not 'right', in that sense, conversely, stymies our spiritual evolution. It is an active barrier to that evolution, as it leaves our ego-consciousness limited to a tiny sphere of personal interests rather than expanding it out to creatively encompass the interests of the Whole. If the currents of evolution move towards re-integration of the Whole, yet our desires only strive towards fulfillment of purely personal interests, sooner or later we won't be "human" anymore, but something less than human. We will lapse into ever-more discontinuous states of consciousness, i.e. more and more unconsciousness.

Where you are correct is that this desire for what is 'right' does not come from intellectual philosophy (ethics), philosophy, science, etc. It comes from our ego-consciousness resonating with higher inspirations and intuitions which act as purifiers - "I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see." Through these emanating from within, the physical pleasure we derive from lower interests, passions, desires, thoughts, etc. is transmuted into the joy and ecstasy of becoming creative, participatory spiritual beings in the Cosmic organism. It helps to remember all these things are still in the very early stages of development for humanity - within the current sensory spectrum, we can scarcely imagine what it means to have 'pleasure' at the more spiritualized states of our ancient past and our future. Fittingly enough, only through imagination and higher can we really imagine these more integrated states of Being. Nevertheless, we can still discern the logical threads which weave it all into a coherent Idea, just as we can with the physical chain of evolution.

[Federica]

Federica,

The distinction Max is drawing attention to, as was Steiner, is between the activity of thinking, on the one hand, and thoughts as the very finished product of that activity, on the other. We are free in the former, but not in the latter. This becomes more clear when we understand, as you correctly point out, that our inner objects such as feelings and thoughts, are also perceptions just like colors, shapes, sounds, etc. Just as outer sensory perceptions will entrain our thinking into fixed channels, so will the inner perceptions of feelings/thoughts. That is the logical necessity by which outer/inner sensory impressions guide our spiritual activity. It is the current default state the normal waking intellect finds itself in.

Thinking, on the other hand, is that formless force which allows us to become more aware, self-conscious, of what I just wrote and the reasons why it is the case. Therein lies our freedom. Steiner draws attention to this when he discusses Spinoza in Chapter 1:

Because this view is so clearly and definitely expressed it is easy to detect the fundamental error that it contains. The same necessity by which a stone makes a definite movement as the result of an impact, is said to compel a man to carry out an action when impelled thereto by any reason. It is only because man is conscious of his action that he thinks himself to be its originator. But in doing so he overlooks the fact that he is driven by a cause which he cannot help obeying. The error in this train of thought is soon discovered. Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of the causes which guide him. Nobody will deny that the child is unfree when he desires milk, or the drunken man when he says things which he later regrets. Neither knows anything of the causes, working in the depths of their organisms, which exercise irresistible control 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 which cause him to act? Are the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated diplomatic negotiations, be placed scientifically on the same level with that of the child when it desires milk: It is no doubt true that it is best to seek the solution of a problem where the conditions are simplest. But inability to discriminate has before now caused endless confusion. There is, after all, a profound difference between knowing why I am acting and not knowing it. At first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And yet the opponents of freedom never ask themselves whether a motive of action which I recognize and see through, is to be regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as the organic process which causes the child to cry for milk.

It is only through the deepening of thinking, in this manner, by which we become free and creative beings. So much modern philosophy has gone astray by failing to notice this simple reality. The logical necessity of 'cold and dry' intellectual thinking is assumed to be the deepest mode of thinking possible, simply because most people never endeavor to deepen their own thinking further. Thinking at the very surface level of the intellect is indeed cold and dry - it had to 'cool off' from the fiery intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations if it was to ever become fully internalized to the human individual, so that we may actively will our thinking towards the ideas/ideals which we desire, independent of any external compulsion. That is the process of human individuals taking over creatively responsibility for the spiritual forces which guide its evolution and that of all life on Earth.

That is how the necessity of our logical thinking and the intuitive sense of moral ideals, which presuppose freedom, can be reconciled - there must be some way in which the very technique of evolving higher thinking, which is also the evolution of life itself, also coincides with the desire for what is 'right', for what is Good, Beautiful, and True. The desire for what is merely pleasurable but not 'right', in that sense, conversely, stymies our spiritual evolution. It is an active barrier to that evolution, as it leaves our ego-consciousness limited to a tiny sphere of personal interests rather than expanding it out to creatively encompass the interests of the Whole. If the currents of evolution move towards re-integration of the Whole, yet our desires only strive towards fulfillment of purely personal interests, sooner or later we won't be "human" anymore, but something less than human. We will lapse into ever-more discontinuous states of consciousness, i.e. more and more unconsciousness.

Where you are correct is that this desire for what is 'right' does not come from intellectual philosophy (ethics), philosophy, science, etc. It comes from our ego-consciousness resonating with higher inspirations and intuitions which act as purifiers - "I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see." Through these emanating from within, the physical pleasure we derive from lower interests, passions, desires, thoughts, etc. is transmuted into the joy and ecstasy of becoming creative, participatory spiritual beings in the Cosmic organism. It helps to remember all these things are still in the very early stages of development for humanity - within the current sensory spectrum, we can scarcely imagine what it means to have 'pleasure' at the more spiritualized states of our ancient past and our future. Fittingly enough, only through imagination and higher can we really imagine these more integrated states of Being. Nevertheless, we can still discern the logical threads which weave it all into a coherent Idea, just as we can with the physical chain of evolution.

Ashvin…

Maybe I’m wrong but I get the feeling that you have speed-read my post. I just want to reply ten times “of course” to all your first paragraph and quote. Why did you even write it? Yes, I know that Steiner draws attention to the importance of becoming aware of thinking as an activity, as opposed to its content, so as to realize the freedom that lies in it.

Of course, this is expressed in the passage you quote and in other passages, but, in my opinion, not primarily in the one referenced here - appendix to chapter VIII, have you checked it? That addition is specifically meant to counter the objection based on feelings, it’s to respond to those who want to put thinking and feeling on an equal footing.

Moreover the freedom of the act of thinking can hardly be appreciated, in my opinion, as a result of the thought experiment used here. We are invited to notice that we cannot unthink a thought of the past, and we are told: herein lies the difference between unfree thought (past) and free thinking activity (future). No - there is enough risk of remaining unfree in our future thinking alone, for it to not be so very useful to focus on unfree past thought-images as a means to understand that risk. Although of course, it is true that we cannot unthink a past thought, hence it is unfree. But is it useful, on top of being correct? Well, am I allowed to doubt it?
Furthermore, I have made a very specific comment on the statment: “the good is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure". Also skipped.

Then, to your last paragraphs again, I just want to say “of course” ten more times... You are vaguely touching on my points and prefer to use them to lecture me on PoF’s ABCs…

[AshvinP]

Federica,

The distinction Max is drawing attention to, as was Steiner, is between the activity of thinking, on the one hand, and thoughts as the very finished product of that activity, on the other. We are free in the former, but not in the latter. This becomes more clear when we understand, as you correctly point out, that our inner objects such as feelings and thoughts, are also perceptions just like colors, shapes, sounds, etc. Just as outer sensory perceptions will entrain our thinking into fixed channels, so will the inner perceptions of feelings/thoughts. That is the logical necessity by which outer/inner sensory impressions guide our spiritual activity. It is the current default state the normal waking intellect finds itself in.

Thinking, on the other hand, is that formless force which allows us to become more aware, self-conscious, of what I just wrote and the reasons why it is the case. Therein lies our freedom. Steiner draws attention to this when he discusses Spinoza in Chapter 1:

Because this view is so clearly and definitely expressed it is easy to detect the fundamental error that it contains. The same necessity by which a stone makes a definite movement as the result of an impact, is said to compel a man to carry out an action when impelled thereto by any reason. It is only because man is conscious of his action that he thinks himself to be its originator. But in doing so he overlooks the fact that he is driven by a cause which he cannot help obeying. The error in this train of thought is soon discovered. Spinoza, and all who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of the causes which guide him. Nobody will deny that the child is unfree when he desires milk, or the drunken man when he says things which he later regrets. Neither knows anything of the causes, working in the depths of their organisms, which exercise irresistible control 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 which cause him to act? Are the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated diplomatic negotiations, be placed scientifically on the same level with that of the child when it desires milk: It is no doubt true that it is best to seek the solution of a problem where the conditions are simplest. But inability to discriminate has before now caused endless confusion. There is, after all, a profound difference between knowing why I am acting and not knowing it. At first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And yet the opponents of freedom never ask themselves whether a motive of action which I recognize and see through, is to be regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as the organic process which causes the child to cry for milk.

It is only through the deepening of thinking, in this manner, by which we become free and creative beings. So much modern philosophy has gone astray by failing to notice this simple reality. The logical necessity of 'cold and dry' intellectual thinking is assumed to be the deepest mode of thinking possible, simply because most people never endeavor to deepen their own thinking further. Thinking at the very surface level of the intellect is indeed cold and dry - it had to 'cool off' from the fiery intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations if it was to ever become fully internalized to the human individual, so that we may actively will our thinking towards the ideas/ideals which we desire, independent of any external compulsion. That is the process of human individuals taking over creatively responsibility for the spiritual forces which guide its evolution and that of all life on Earth.

That is how the necessity of our logical thinking and the intuitive sense of moral ideals, which presuppose freedom, can be reconciled - there must be some way in which the very technique of evolving higher thinking, which is also the evolution of life itself, also coincides with the desire for what is 'right', for what is Good, Beautiful, and True. The desire for what is merely pleasurable but not 'right', in that sense, conversely, stymies our spiritual evolution. It is an active barrier to that evolution, as it leaves our ego-consciousness limited to a tiny sphere of personal interests rather than expanding it out to creatively encompass the interests of the Whole. If the currents of evolution move towards re-integration of the Whole, yet our desires only strive towards fulfillment of purely personal interests, sooner or later we won't be "human" anymore, but something less than human. We will lapse into ever-more discontinuous states of consciousness, i.e. more and more unconsciousness.

Where you are correct is that this desire for what is 'right' does not come from intellectual philosophy (ethics), philosophy, science, etc. It comes from our ego-consciousness resonating with higher inspirations and intuitions which act as purifiers - "I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see." Through these emanating from within, the physical pleasure we derive from lower interests, passions, desires, thoughts, etc. is transmuted into the joy and ecstasy of becoming creative, participatory spiritual beings in the Cosmic organism. It helps to remember all these things are still in the very early stages of development for humanity - within the current sensory spectrum, we can scarcely imagine what it means to have 'pleasure' at the more spiritualized states of our ancient past and our future. Fittingly enough, only through imagination and higher can we really imagine these more integrated states of Being. Nevertheless, we can still discern the logical threads which weave it all into a coherent Idea, just as we can with the physical chain of evolution.

Ashvin…

Maybe I’m wrong but I get the feeling that you have speed-read my post. I just want to reply ten times “of course” to all your first paragraph and quote. Why did you even write it? Yes, I know that Steiner draws attention to the importance of becoming aware of thinking as an activity, as opposed to its content, so as to realize the freedom that lies in it.

Of course, this is expressed in the passage you quote and in other passages, but, in my opinion, not primarily in the one referenced here - appendix to chapter VIII, have you checked it? That addition is specifically meant to counter the objection based on feelings, it’s to respond to those who want to put thinking and feeling on an equal footing.

Moreover the freedom of the act of thinking can hardly be appreciated, in my opinion, as a result of the thought experiment used here. We are invited to notice that we cannot unthink a thought of the past, and we are told: herein lies the difference between unfree thought (past) and free thinking activity (future). No - there is enough risk of remaining unfree in our future thinking alone, for it to not be so very useful to focus on unfree past thought-images as a means to understand that risk. Although of course, it is true that we cannot unthink a past thought, hence it is unfree. But is it useful, on top of being correct? Well, am I allowed to doubt it?
Furthermore, I have made a very specific comment on the statment: “the good is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure". Also skipped.

Then, to your last paragraphs again, I just want to say “of course” ten more times... You are vaguely touching on my points and prefer to use them to lecture me on PoF’s ABCs…

Perhaps I am mistaking your criticism of what Max wrote, but if it isn't the distinction between knowing oneself in one's living thinking (free) and knowing oneself in one's dead thoughts (unfree), then I'm not sure what it is. That is what he seemed to be highlighting in the post. Do you think he was pointing to something else?

Steiner writes in the appendix to Ch 8 - "The difficulty of grasping the essential nature of thinking by observation lies in this, that it has all too easily eluded the introspecting soul by the time the soul tries to bring it into the focus of attention. Nothing then remains to be inspected but the lifeless abstraction, the corpse of the living thinking."

This is the same principle I think Max was trying to illustrate. Perhaps the thought-experiment was not top-notch illustration of that, but if we agree on the principle at work - which is a critical one to be grasped for anyone pursuing their own living thinking - then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters.

Max also writes, "One is the impulse to will the good of the other. Sometimes this is difficult to perceive because “the good” is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure. The degree to which they are the same is the measure of the agent’s freedom. In other words, one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things instead of believing things are right insofar as they produce pleasure."

You seemed to take issue with this. The other portion of my post was elaborating on the spiraling together of 'the good' and 'pleasure', which could also be characterized as that of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). What you refer to as "inspired by moral intuitions" is what Max is calling 'the good' which needs to spiral together with individual agency and pleasure for freedom to result. Moral intuitions are the threads through which the trans-objectively Good is woven. A person who is not inspired by such intuitions will indeed believe more and more that, whatever produces pleasure is the best possible 'good' to strive for, failing to understand the higher pleasure which comes from freely striving for the Good, and I think we are seeing that happen almost everywhere we look now.

[Federica]

Perhaps I am mistaking your criticism of what Max wrote, but if it isn't the distinction between knowing oneself in one's living thinking (free) and knowing oneself in one's dead thoughts (unfree), then I'm not sure what it is. That is what he seemed to be highlighting in the post. Do you think he was pointing to something else?

Steiner writes in the appendix to Ch 8 - "The difficulty of grasping the essential nature of thinking by observation lies in this, that it has all too easily eluded the introspecting soul by the time the soul tries to bring it into the focus of attention. Nothing then remains to be inspected but the lifeless abstraction, the corpse of the living thinking."

This is the same principle I think Max was trying to illustrate. Perhaps the thought-experiment was not top-notch illustration of that, but if we agree on the principle at work - which is a critical one to be grasped for anyone pursuing their own living thinking - then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters.

Max also writes, "One is the impulse to will the good of the other. Sometimes this is difficult to perceive because “the good” is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure. The degree to which they are the same is the measure of the agent’s freedom. In other words, one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things instead of believing things are right insofar as they produce pleasure."

You seemed to take issue with this. The other portion of my post was elaborating on the spiraling together of 'the good' and 'pleasure', which could also be characterized as that of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). What you refer to as "inspired by moral intuitions" is what Max is calling 'the good' which needs to spiral together with individual agency and pleasure for freedom to result. Moral intuitions are the threads through which the trans-objectively Good is woven. A person who is not inspired by such intuitions will indeed believe more and more that, whatever produces pleasure is the best possible 'good' to strive for, failing to understand the higher pleasure which comes from freely striving for the Good, and I think we are seeing that happen almost everywhere we look now.

What's going on here, Ashvin - and it's certainly not the first time it happens - is that, when you notice that I "seem to take issue" with something, you don't think it's worth looking into the details of what I'm saying first. Because you know (biblically) that I'm wrong anyway, you think that what I need is simply to hear again the general logic and reasoning around the topic in question, to get a chance to refine my understanding, get back on track. So in the first round you ‘elaborate’. You give me the general refresher. Very patiently, you repeat. The thing is I am less patient, I read that and... OK. I reply. So you notice I keep on protesting and you go: "Oh, you seem to take issue? I’m not sure why. Yet I’ve given you the refresher." Great, now I have to go about it a third time, which is where I am now. It's not that difficult to imagine how this can come across as lecturing and patronizing. I'll call the approach I have characterized here ‘replying to Cinderella’ for future reference.


And you know what, I think it’s a pity that these Cinderella replies are happening about this summary, or essay, by Max Leyf, because I actually liked it, as pretty much everything I am seeing on his blog. There are indeed a couple of things I haven’t fully resonated with, that I have to signal, when you suggest that this summary “with its many examples, is for anyone who has found PoF too difficult to approach directly” and that “it should also help reinforce and clarify the ideas and reasoning for anyone who has already read it.” I have to signal this couple of things, because I think a newbie - like me, but another one - is at risk of getting confused by them. By the way, this hopefully answers your ‘question’ “if we agree on the principle at work, then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters”. Do you see why it matters?


Had I written a general comment on this summary - as I did for the essay on the birth of the Self, for instance - I would have highlighted different things, and my appreciation would have certainly appeared more explicitly. But here, when you propose it as a way to catch up with PoF, or to consolidate its understanding for beginners, I have to single out the few things that in my opinion are not ideal in this specific perspective. Again, it’s a pity to end up making such a big fuss over it, while I consider this three-part series a great series. But if it has to be done, no problem I will do it. Here we go. These couple of things I noticed are: One. Freedom in thinking activity, and Two. The connection between pleasure, desire and moral action.


Let me start with Two. The issue is this. In PoF, strictly speaking, there is no possibility of spiraling together of pleasure and good/moral intuition (I do get that what I call the former, Max refers to as the latter. Actually it’s not me calling it moral intuition, it’s Steiner. I’ve freshly read PoF Part II). Strictyl speaking, in Steiner, desire (not pleasure) and good would spiral together. I understand of course the spiraling together of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). But saying that this is the same thing as the spiraling together of good and pleasure is inaccurate, as per how Steiner puts it in PoF.
I am not arguing that Max got it wrong, of course. But I am arguing that, once one has made the effort - as a beginner - to understand how Steiner elaborates his ethical individualism in PoF, reading what Max wrote is confusing. The beginner gets the impression that one has to first get rid of the tyranny of arbitrary desires (how? The beginner could understand: by complying to moral imperative) so that it later becomes possible to be “pleased by the right things” (who says they are the right things? Maybe the ten commandments say it, thinks the beginner). In Steiner, it’s actually the opposite: by leveraging the spiritual power of thinking, one has to first become mature enough, and able to have independent moral intuitions, not imposed from the outside. This will later dissipate any possible "arbitrary desires". So it’s not about adopting an imposed ethical standard to eradicate the tyranny of desires. It’s not as Max puts it that “one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things”. In my opinion, if we want to render Stainer’s ethics, this is much better said the other way around: One has to become pleased by the right things, in order to become free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires.
I am not going to quote the passages again, I mean… I cannot do it better than I did in my first post. If with this, I was still unable to get my point across, I will accept it. I would not go into a fourth try.


When it comes to point One, I could do a similar re-elaboration, but on second thought, I think I have made this post heavy enough, so I am not going to. I doubt I could turn it better than I did in my two preceding posts. The main idea being, I am not doubting that Max Leyf understands PoF, of course. I am simply indicating, as a beginner, two points where in my opinion the pedagogical value of this summary, for beginners, could be improved (admitting that pedagogical value was a goal with the author, which I have no idea if it was, but it's with this value that you proposed the read here on the forum).

[AshvinP]

Perhaps I am mistaking your criticism of what Max wrote, but if it isn't the distinction between knowing oneself in one's living thinking (free) and knowing oneself in one's dead thoughts (unfree), then I'm not sure what it is. That is what he seemed to be highlighting in the post. Do you think he was pointing to something else?

Steiner writes in the appendix to Ch 8 - "The difficulty of grasping the essential nature of thinking by observation lies in this, that it has all too easily eluded the introspecting soul by the time the soul tries to bring it into the focus of attention. Nothing then remains to be inspected but the lifeless abstraction, the corpse of the living thinking."

This is the same principle I think Max was trying to illustrate. Perhaps the thought-experiment was not top-notch illustration of that, but if we agree on the principle at work - which is a critical one to be grasped for anyone pursuing their own living thinking - then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters.

Max also writes, "One is the impulse to will the good of the other. Sometimes this is difficult to perceive because “the good” is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure. The degree to which they are the same is the measure of the agent’s freedom. In other words, one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things instead of believing things are right insofar as they produce pleasure."

You seemed to take issue with this. The other portion of my post was elaborating on the spiraling together of 'the good' and 'pleasure', which could also be characterized as that of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). What you refer to as "inspired by moral intuitions" is what Max is calling 'the good' which needs to spiral together with individual agency and pleasure for freedom to result. Moral intuitions are the threads through which the trans-objectively Good is woven. A person who is not inspired by such intuitions will indeed believe more and more that, whatever produces pleasure is the best possible 'good' to strive for, failing to understand the higher pleasure which comes from freely striving for the Good, and I think we are seeing that happen almost everywhere we look now.

What's going on here, Ashvin - and it's certainly not the first time it happens - is that, when you notice that I "seem to take issue" with something, you don't think it's worth looking into the details of what I'm saying first. Because you know (biblically) that I'm wrong anyway, you think that what I need is simply to hear again the general logic and reasoning around the topic in question, to get a chance to refine my understanding, get back on track. So in the first round you ‘elaborate’. You give me the general refresher. Very patiently, you repeat. The thing is I am less patient, I read that and... OK. I reply. So you notice I keep on protesting and you go: "Oh, you seem to take issue? I’m not sure why. Yet I’ve given you the refresher." Great, now I have to go about it a third time, which is where I am now. It's not that difficult to imagine how this can come across as lecturing and patronizing. I'll call the approach I have characterized here ‘replying to Cinderella’ for future reference.


And you know what, I think it’s a pity that these Cinderella replies are happening about this summary, or essay, by Max Leyf, because I actually liked it, as pretty much everything I am seeing on his blog. There are indeed a couple of things I haven’t fully resonated with, that I have to signal, when you suggest that this summary “with its many examples, is for anyone who has found PoF too difficult to approach directly” and that “it should also help reinforce and clarify the ideas and reasoning for anyone who has already read it.” I have to signal this couple of things, because I think a newbie - like me, but another one - is at risk of getting confused by them. By the way, this hopefully answers your ‘question’ “if we agree on the principle at work, then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters”. Do you see why it matters?


Had I written a general comment on this summary - as I did for the essay on the birth of the Self, for instance - I would have highlighted different things, and my appreciation would have certainly appeared more explicitly. But here, when you propose it as a way to catch up with PoF, or to consolidate its understanding for beginners, I have to single out the few things that in my opinion are not ideal in this specific perspective. Again, it’s a pity to end up making such a big fuss over it, while I consider this three-part series a great series. But if it has to be done, no problem I will do it. Here we go. These couple of things I noticed are: One. Freedom in thinking activity, and Two. The connection between pleasure, desire and moral action.

Federica,

Upon re-reading your original post, I see you were questioning the technique or quality of the illustration for thinking vs. thoughts. So I apologize for mistaking that earlier, but I must reiterate the question - why does this matter? Are we really discussing this so that other 'beginners' who may choose the Max summary over PoF don't get confused? If you want to discuss the principle at work, to get more deeply into it, then that's fine and that's where my original response was headed. I don't see why we need to make it about Max's illustration at all.

After that, you do question Max's understanding of PoF and the points he is making.

"The reason why Steiner brings attention to the difference between thought and thinking in that later addition to the eight chapter, is not to guide the reader to the appreciation of the freedom of thinking."
...
Provided that I’m not misinterpreting, I find this to be inaccurate. Steiner does not distinguish between 'arbitrary desires' that exert tyranny on us on one side, and appropriate pleasures for the ‘right things’ on the other side, that we need to come to aspire to.

These are all good points to raise and discuss, but we should be clear you are taking a position on Max's points and I am disagreeing with you, saying they are accurate and giving my reasons why. There is no 'replying to Cinderella' going on. Indeed, it is frustrating that we need to spend time simply clearing this up and I have had to do it a few times on a few different threads. You also accused me of not reading your post on another thread only to then realize that you were mistaken, and you were not following the points made in my response carefully enough to see how they were relevant.

As an aside, I have had many discussions with Max and there is no doubt in my mind that he understands PoF and Anthroposophy much more deeply and livingly than I do, similar to Cleric. I am not saying that's a reason to simply accept whatever he writes about it, but I am mentioning it now because I feel, in all sincerity, that you have a tendency to overestimate your own understanding in the very early stages of approaching PoF, where you are also a "beginner". It was not too long ago you were questioning Steiner's characterization of these ideas in PoF. I think every modern person has this tendency and I surely did as well. In fact, many of my early essays and posts reflect a desire to help the 'beginners' out with these ideas before I myself understood what I was writing more deeply.

It is something to always keep in mind - we are not approaching 'normal' ideas here, but those which have been cultivated through many centuries of esoteric development. We don't need any esoteric knowledge to follow the PoF logic, but we can still notice that it's always there in the background or the depth structure. If we can penetrate more directly to that depth structure through spiritual ideas which then inform the PoF discussion, especially ones which we already agree on or could reach a shared understanding on, I don't see any problem in doing so. Ultimately PoF is a bridge for us to get into this spiritual depth structure.

Let me start with Two. The issue is this. In PoF, strictly speaking, there is no possibility of spiraling together of pleasure and good/moral intuition (I do get that what I call the former, Max refers to as the latter. Actually it’s not me calling it moral intuition, it’s Steiner. I’ve freshly read PoF Part II). Strictyl speaking, in Steiner, desire (not pleasure) and good would spiral together. I understand of course the spiraling together of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). But saying that this is the same thing as the spiraling together of good and pleasure is inaccurate, as per how Steiner puts it in PoF.
I am not arguing that Max got it wrong, of course. But I am arguing that, once one has made the effort - as a beginner - to understand how Steiner elaborates his ethical individualism in PoF, reading what Max wrote is confusing. The beginner gets the impression that one has to first get rid of the tyranny of arbitrary desires (how? The beginner could understand: by complying to moral imperative) so that it later becomes possible to be “pleased by the right things” (who says they are the right things? Maybe the ten commandments say it, thinks the beginner). In Steiner, it’s actually the opposite: by leveraging the spiritual power of thinking, one has to first become mature enough, and able to have independent moral intuitions, not imposed from the outside. This will later dissipate any possible "arbitrary desires". So it’s not about adopting an imposed ethical standard to eradicate the tyranny of desires. It’s not as Max puts it that “one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things”. In my opinion, if we want to render Stainer’s ethics, this is much better said the other way around: One has to become pleased by the right things, in order to become free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires.
I am not going to quote the passages again, I mean… I cannot do it better than I did in my first post. If with this, I was still unable to get my point across, I will accept it. I would not go into a fourth try.

I have no idea why you are differentiating 'desire' and 'pleasure' here, other than to question the quality of the illustration again so that 'beginners' aren't led astray. I don't see the same 'risk' of that as you seem to do in the slightest.

There is no suggestion by Max anywhere that one needs to comply to moral imperatives or an imposed ethical standard to free themselves from the 'tyranny of arbitrary desires'. We can do it in the same way we free ourselves from the tyranny of the sensory impressions (which are always mediated by those sensuous desires), through our free spiritual activity, i.e. sense-free thinking and exercises of will. And these are not hardly delineated categories - they can and must be undertaken simultaneously. Unless we work on strengthening our willpower towards the spiritual, i.e. reigning in our 'arbitrary desires', we will not make much progress with the sense-free thinking either. These things are always complementary, a rhythmic alternation which works to spiral the poles together. Working on freeing our activity from 'arbitrary desires' also opens the channels by which we can resonate with the higher intuitions. We could even say thinking which takes its course under the tyranny of sense impressions is an arbitrary desire - as mentioned on the other thread, all these habits can be located within the sphere of our interests/desires. There can be no sense-free thinking unless we also work on the latter. In short, I still disagree with you, and am still trying to explain why, that Max's characterization - "one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things" - is at odds with Steiner and PoF.

[Federica]

Perhaps I am mistaking your criticism of what Max wrote, but if it isn't the distinction between knowing oneself in one's living thinking (free) and knowing oneself in one's dead thoughts (unfree), then I'm not sure what it is. That is what he seemed to be highlighting in the post. Do you think he was pointing to something else?

Steiner writes in the appendix to Ch 8 - "The difficulty of grasping the essential nature of thinking by observation lies in this, that it has all too easily eluded the introspecting soul by the time the soul tries to bring it into the focus of attention. Nothing then remains to be inspected but the lifeless abstraction, the corpse of the living thinking."

This is the same principle I think Max was trying to illustrate. Perhaps the thought-experiment was not top-notch illustration of that, but if we agree on the principle at work - which is a critical one to be grasped for anyone pursuing their own living thinking - then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters.

Max also writes, "One is the impulse to will the good of the other. Sometimes this is difficult to perceive because “the good” is not necessarily the same thing as pleasure. The degree to which they are the same is the measure of the agent’s freedom. In other words, one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things instead of believing things are right insofar as they produce pleasure."

You seemed to take issue with this. The other portion of my post was elaborating on the spiraling together of 'the good' and 'pleasure', which could also be characterized as that of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). What you refer to as "inspired by moral intuitions" is what Max is calling 'the good' which needs to spiral together with individual agency and pleasure for freedom to result. Moral intuitions are the threads through which the trans-objectively Good is woven. A person who is not inspired by such intuitions will indeed believe more and more that, whatever produces pleasure is the best possible 'good' to strive for, failing to understand the higher pleasure which comes from freely striving for the Good, and I think we are seeing that happen almost everywhere we look now.

What's going on here, Ashvin - and it's certainly not the first time it happens - is that, when you notice that I "seem to take issue" with something, you don't think it's worth looking into the details of what I'm saying first. Because you know (biblically) that I'm wrong anyway, you think that what I need is simply to hear again the general logic and reasoning around the topic in question, to get a chance to refine my understanding, get back on track. So in the first round you ‘elaborate’. You give me the general refresher. Very patiently, you repeat. The thing is I am less patient, I read that and... OK. I reply. So you notice I keep on protesting and you go: "Oh, you seem to take issue? I’m not sure why. Yet I’ve given you the refresher." Great, now I have to go about it a third time, which is where I am now. It's not that difficult to imagine how this can come across as lecturing and patronizing. I'll call the approach I have characterized here ‘replying to Cinderella’ for future reference.


And you know what, I think it’s a pity that these Cinderella replies are happening about this summary, or essay, by Max Leyf, because I actually liked it, as pretty much everything I am seeing on his blog. There are indeed a couple of things I haven’t fully resonated with, that I have to signal, when you suggest that this summary “with its many examples, is for anyone who has found PoF too difficult to approach directly” and that “it should also help reinforce and clarify the ideas and reasoning for anyone who has already read it.” I have to signal this couple of things, because I think a newbie - like me, but another one - is at risk of getting confused by them. By the way, this hopefully answers your ‘question’ “if we agree on the principle at work, then I'm not sure why the quality of the illustration matters”. Do you see why it matters?


Had I written a general comment on this summary - as I did for the essay on the birth of the Self, for instance - I would have highlighted different things, and my appreciation would have certainly appeared more explicitly. But here, when you propose it as a way to catch up with PoF, or to consolidate its understanding for beginners, I have to single out the few things that in my opinion are not ideal in this specific perspective. Again, it’s a pity to end up making such a big fuss over it, while I consider this three-part series a great series. But if it has to be done, no problem I will do it. Here we go. These couple of things I noticed are: One. Freedom in thinking activity, and Two. The connection between pleasure, desire and moral action.

Federica,

Upon re-reading your original post, I see you were questioning the technique or quality of the illustration for thinking vs. thoughts. So I apologize for mistaking that earlier, there is no need but I must reiterate the question - why does this matter? Are we really discussing this so that other 'beginners' who may choose the Max summary over PoF don't get confused?
I'm a beginner, you shared the summary for the use of beginners, I am saying what I think about that experience. There was two things that I found more confusing than facilitating. I think they could confuse other beginners as well, or more. If this is not interesting, OK, nobody is forced to discuss it.
If you want to discuss the principle at work, to get more deeply into it, then that's fine and that's where my original response was headed. I don't see why we need to make it about Max's illustration at all.
I agree. As I wrote, I think it's a pity that this is becoming such a big thing. It doesn't reflect my overall appreciation. I have felt compelled to continue by the dynamic of this exchange. But I have to make clear that it's inevitable that I would form an opinion on a writing you share, and that I would contrast that with the rest of my understanding. You don't have to engage with it, but I would form one.

After that, you do question Max's understanding of PoF and the points he is making.
Yes, 'question' is the right word. It's true, I do question. It goes without saying that I might not be seeing the deeper reasons why things are put as they are. Again, I am sharing my viewpoint from where I am. Not casually, but after thorough consideration and explaining my reasons accurately. Why should I not raise the points? For me, by opening this thread and by addressing it explicitely to beginners, you have encouraged that. Either I stay silent, or if I share my comments, it's a matter of being honest. If after careful consideration I feel that something doesn't sound right, not vaguely, but for precise reasons, I have to say it. I will not skip it.

"The reason why Steiner brings attention to the difference between thought and thinking in that later addition to the eight chapter, is not to guide the reader to the appreciation of the freedom of thinking."
...
Provided that I’m not misinterpreting, I find this to be inaccurate. Steiner does not distinguish between 'arbitrary desires' that exert tyranny on us on one side, and appropriate pleasures for the ‘right things’ on the other side, that we need to come to aspire to.

These are all good points to raise and discuss, but we should be clear you are taking a position on Max's points and I am disagreeing with you, saying they are accurate and giving my reasons why. There is no 'replying to Cinderella' going on.
Now this is true, I agree. But in your first reply, admittedly, you missed some details of what I was saying. This has happened before more than once (that you admitted that). So there were indeed, at the beginning, some Cinderella replies.
Indeed, it is frustrating that we need to spend time simply clearing this up and I have had to do it a few times on a few different threads. Yes, I am sorry for that. I understand you are. Needless to say, you don't have to spend the time.
You also accused me of not reading your post on another thread only to then realize that you were mistaken, and you were not following the points made in my response carefully enough to see how they were relevant. True, I made a mistake then, by unduly amplifying my general dislike of Cinderella replies, supposing that was the reason we were disagreeing, while the real reason was that I was wrong.

As an aside, I have had many discussions with Max and there is no doubt in my mind that he understands PoF and Anthroposophy much more deeply and livingly than I do, similar to Cleric. I am not surprised. I don't doubt that.
I am not saying that's a reason to simply accept whatever he writes about it, but I am mentioning it now because I feel, in all sincerity, that you have a tendency to overestimate your own understanding in the very early stages of approaching PoF, where you are also a "beginner". I have to agree here.
It was not too long ago you were questioning Steiner's characterization of these ideas in PoF. I think every modern person has this tendency and I surely did as well. In fact, many of my early essays and posts reflect a desire to help the 'beginners' out with these ideas before I myself understood what I was writing more deeply. It could very well be that I am making the same mistake. Actually I know this is right. But what can I do more than doing the best I can (and it's not lightly said) in every moment? I will try to integrate that, maybe I should remain more silent? I am not sure. I tend to think that even if I am not completely right, or even wrong, the intention is more important and will be of help.

It is something to always keep in mind - we are not approaching 'normal' ideas here, but those which have been cultivated through many centuries of esoteric development. We don't need any esoteric knowledge to follow the PoF logic, but we can still notice that it's always there in the background or the depth structure. If we can penetrate more directly to that depth structure through spiritual ideas which then inform the PoF discussion, especially ones which we already agree on or could reach a shared understanding on, I don't see any problem in doing so. Ultimately PoF is a bridge for us to get into this spiritual depth structure. Right.

Let me start with Two. The issue is this. In PoF, strictly speaking, there is no possibility of spiraling together of pleasure and good/moral intuition (I do get that what I call the former, Max refers to as the latter. Actually it’s not me calling it moral intuition, it’s Steiner. I’ve freshly read PoF Part II). Strictyl speaking, in Steiner, desire (not pleasure) and good would spiral together. I understand of course the spiraling together of spiritual thinking and willing (sensory existence). But saying that this is the same thing as the spiraling together of good and pleasure is inaccurate, as per how Steiner puts it in PoF.
I am not arguing that Max got it wrong, of course. But I am arguing that, once one has made the effort - as a beginner - to understand how Steiner elaborates his ethical individualism in PoF, reading what Max wrote is confusing. The beginner gets the impression that one has to first get rid of the tyranny of arbitrary desires (how? The beginner could understand: by complying to moral imperative) so that it later becomes possible to be “pleased by the right things” (who says they are the right things? Maybe the ten commandments say it, thinks the beginner). In Steiner, it’s actually the opposite: by leveraging the spiritual power of thinking, one has to first become mature enough, and able to have independent moral intuitions, not imposed from the outside. This will later dissipate any possible "arbitrary desires". So it’s not about adopting an imposed ethical standard to eradicate the tyranny of desires. It’s not as Max puts it that “one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things”. In my opinion, if we want to render Stainer’s ethics, this is much better said the other way around: One has to become pleased by the right things, in order to become free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires.
I am not going to quote the passages again, I mean… I cannot do it better than I did in my first post. If with this, I was still unable to get my point across, I will accept it. I would not go into a fourth try.

I have no idea why you are differentiating 'desire' and 'pleasure' here,
Because they are treated as different in PoF! Desire is what counts, what drives our (moral) action. Pleasure is a consequence of desire, but also of other things. Desire is the mesure. Steiner wrote: “desires supply the measure; pleasure is what is measured” “pleasure has value for us only so long as we have desires by which to measure it”.
Steiner also wrote: “Philosophy would have to convince man that striving is rational only when pleasure outweighs pain (...). Such a philosophy, however, would be mistaken, because it would make the human will dependent on a factor (the surplus of pleasure over pain) which, at first, is wholly foreign to man's point of view. The original measure of his will is his desire, and desire asserts itself as long as it can.”
other than to question the quality of the illustration again so that 'beginners' aren't led astray. I don't see the same 'risk' of that as you seem to do in the slightest.

There is no suggestion by Max anywhere that one needs to comply to moral imperatives or an imposed ethical standard to free themselves from the 'tyranny of arbitrary desires'. I haven't said there is. I said beginners could misinterpret it that way.
We can do it in the same way we free ourselves from the tyranny of the sensory impressions (which are always mediated by those sensuous desires), through our free spiritual activity, i.e. sense-free thinking and exercises of will. And these are not hardly delineated categories - they can and must be undertaken simultaneously. But the summary says 'in order to', creating a direction cause-to-effect, which is what I am questioning.
Unless we work on strengthening our willpower towards the spiritual, i.e. reigning in our 'arbitrary desires', we will not make much progress with the sense-free thinking either. I understand that, in fact I was expecting this reply.
These things are always complementary, a rhythmic alternation which works to spiral the poles together. Working on freeing our activity from 'arbitrary desires' also opens the channels by which we can resonate with the higher intuitions. We could even say thinking which takes its course under the tyranny of sense impressions is an arbitrary desire - as mentioned on the other thread, all these habits can be located within the sphere of our interests/desires. There can be no sense-free thinking unless we also work on the latter. In short, I still disagree with you, and am still trying to explain why, that Max's characterization - "one has to be free from the tyranny of arbitrary desires in order to be pleased by the right things" - is at odds with Steiner and PoF. OK, the only thing I can add here is that I will consider it further. I will see how it unfolds in real life. Actually I am already seeing it, clearly, but it's not a work. It's coming by itself for me.