Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 27, 2023 4:47 pm
Ashvin,
If we are free to abandon our will and carry out the divine will, are we really free?
Aren't we a stone that is thrown in one direction and thinks that it is itself responsible for the flight?
Suppose a person decides to become a Christian and study religion. Something in him urges him to do this and not lose his interest. That something is not under his conscious control.
Perhaps it is his destiny, his karma or something else that directs him to it. That's the way it is for me, various things made me come to this forum. At first I didn't understand anything at all, but a feeling within me pushed me to keep researching. These things were not under my conscious control.
Today I am at the point where I am trying to optimize my life to become God's worker.
Was this decision really my own?
Guney and others,
Here is another angle on this question.
On this forum, we have often referred to Kant's philosophy in a very critical way. Speaking for myself, I have often referenced it as a nihilistic epistemology that led Western civilization to forsake the power of human reason and therefore the active seeking of the Spirit that weaves through the World. That is a pretty undeniable thread of 'critical idealism' which is found in the "followers" of Kant, but what about Kant's 'transcendental idealism' itself? There is perhaps room to reevaluate my harsh criticism and see Kant's philosophy in a new constructive light. The purpose of this reevaluation is not so much to determine who is 'right' and who is 'wrong', or even to figure out exactly what Kant's philosophy was (although that is helpful), but to challenge us all to continually revisit our previously held ideas/views and try to see them in a new light, from different angles and perspectives, including angles which may seem diametrically opposite to previous angles.
It reminds me of law school, where we had to read case opinions from the high courts. After reading the majority opinion, I would feel that the legal arguments were air tight, rock solid, and the judge had reasoned through the issues exactly right. Then I would read the dissenting opinion and be amazed that the arguments for the other side were equally rock solid and persuasive. The intellect, with its logical reasoning, is structured so as to view the World from two sides - we could generally call them the empirical (natural) and transcendental (moral) sides - and kindle new constructive intuitions through their interplay. That is ultimately how the intellect grows and loosens its rigid constraints - by confronting a thesis with its antithesis and finding, or rather waiting patiently and
experiencing, the higher vantage from which they can be synthesized. This should be a ceaseless process in our spiritual striving.
What Kant discerned, and himself compared in the realm of the Spirit to the "discovery of Copernicus" in the realm of Nature, was that the human self could lift its consciousness beyond a mere
identification with its stream of thinking and begin contemplating that stream of thinking and the ways in which it orders the World of appearances. Many people today assume that is simply a way of developing a new intellectual theory about "thinking", but was that really the case for Kant? For him, it seems to have been more importantly a way in which we can begin
experiencing the 'transcendental self' (or individuality) who encompasses but is distinct from the 'empirical self' (or lower personality). Just as Copernicus reoriented our thinking about the Cosmos towards the perspective of the Sun, around which all other planets revolve, Kant reoriented our thinking about the empirical self towards the transcendental self, around which all forms - memories, habits, temperaments, desires, emotions, thoughts, etc. - of the lower personality revolve. There was great potential to be unleashed from such a reorientation, as Federica also pointed to
here in the context of Barfield's 'final participation'.
Federica wrote:In other words, in the heavily objectifying tendency of current thinking (alpha thinking) lies the seed of the next step in the evolution of consciousness. Because, when alpha thinking picks up just ‘thinking’ as object of inquiry (a special case of alpha thinking that Barfield calls beta thinking) all of a sudden appears the possibility of regaining a reflective quality in thinking. In this reflexivity, subject and object can be brought to a match, and thinking can switch from a knowing mode based on inference, to one based on creation, as the authors put it. So the entirely new state of consciousness that appears when thinking is brought to deploy its modern objectifying quality onto itself, is what Barfield calls Final Participation (as opposed to the instinctive Original Participation of ancient man).
This reorientation points us in the direction where humanity can gradually unveil greater and greater degrees of morally oriented freedom - first in the domain of thinking consciousness, then in the domain of the psyche, then in the domain of organic processes, and finally in the domain of the inorganic matter (that is resurrected back to the level of organic forms). There is no rigid separation between these levels of redemptive work, however, and they gradually need to harmonize and work in concert. We could say a morally oriented freedom is practically synonymous with the capacity to not only reflect on the
past ordering of thinking, as the latter is encoded in sensory perceptions and memories of the soul-life, but to start also working consciously and creatively on the
future ordering of the natural world that is still germinal within present thinking activity. In this way, the past ordering of thinking is fulfilled, i.e. the intended purposes of the sensory spectrum and soul-life are brought to realization through the Spirit. That can only be done once thinking makes itself the object of observation and knowledge.
Tomberg wrote:What had taken place in Kant was a "repositioning" of consciousness from identifying itself with the process of thinking to observing and evaluating that very process... Philosophy has Kant to thank, however, not only for having rebuked reason for its claim to sole validity... but also for a new experience that the transcendental method (the inner observation of the process of thinking from a higher vantage point) brings with it. This experience is that of the reality of the transcendental self, which is higher than the empirical self... From this, moreover, results the certainty of freedom, that is, the reality of morality as the capacity to bring about new causes within the realm of determined causal sequence (the chain of causes and effects in nature). That is what acting freely and morally means.
As a starting point for this consideration of morally oriented freedom, we can take Steiner's remarks on Kant and the concept of 'duty' in the Philosophy of Freedom.
Steiner wrote:Acting out of freedom does not exclude the moral laws; it includes them, but shows itself to be on a higher level than those actions which are merely dictated by such laws. Why should my action be of less service to the public good when I have done it out of love than when I have done it only because I consider serving the public good to be my duty? The mere concept of duty excludes freedom because it does not acknowledge the individual element but demands that this be subject to a general standard....When Kant says of duty: “Duty! Thou exalted and mighty name, thou that dost comprise nothing lovable, nothing ingratiating, but demandest submission,” thou that “settest up a law ... before which all inclinations are silent, even though they secretly work against it,” 5 then out of the consciousness of the free spirit, man replies: “Freedom! Thou kindly and human name, thou that dost comprise all that is morally most lovable, all that my manhood most prizes, and that makest me the servant of nobody, thou that settest up no mere law, but awaitest what my moral love itself will recognize as law because in the face of every merely imposed law it feels itself unfree.”
Upon initial considerations, the above will appear as quite critical of Kant's ethical philosophy. But that presupposes Kant's philosophy employed the idea-ideal of 'duty' as that of an externally 'imposed law' and, further, that he considered following this law an end in itself. Is that a fair way to understand Kant's ethical philosophy? Perhaps not. Another way is to discern how Kant perceived in the idea of duty a
starting point for a truly moral and free ethics, in so far as duty places itself in opposition to all that which arises from personal inclinations, wishes, desires, preferences, etc. Steiner himself emphasized in many places that, before we can harmonize our personal feelings and desires with our morally intuited ideals, we must be willing to unveil and sacrifice the personalized context of those desires (what he often referred to as
catharsis of the soul). In our normal experience, the idea of following a course of action out of duty is the most clear example where we work opposite to our immediate and automatic personal inclinations, which have been accreted through epochs of conditioning within the sensory spectrum. A person who goes to war for his/her country out of a sheer sense of duty, for ex., puts on pause all of their personal comforts, conveniences, hopes, and dreams to serve a greater cause (at least what is considered a 'greater cause' in the inner forum of their own consciousness, which is what really matters here).
Tomberg wrote:This brings us to the reason for Kant's insistence on the concept of duty as the highest concept of ethics. Kant wanted to place a concept of this kind in the foreground of ethics - a concept that expresses in the clearest and purest way possible the difference between the empirical subject and the transcendental subject - in order to intensify this difference until it appears to be an opposition. It was in the concept of duty that an opposition most clearly appeared for Kant between the empirical self with its inclinations and disinclinations, its wishes and hopes, on the one hand, and the pure ought of the transcendental self on the other, an ought that can be opposed to inclinations, wishes, and hopes of any kind.
As we can tell, all of this discussion relates to Guney's question about how uniting our personal will with the Divine Will, out of a freely adopted sense of duty, can lead to moral freedom. It can only progressively realize that freedom, however, if it resists making the concept of duty an end itself, but rather only the
initial means of deconditioning from its merely personal concerns, entangled with the sensory spectrum, in order to experience the transcendental self who only knows its own be-ing through the context of the Divine Will. Just as the lower personality or empirical self becomes conscious of itself through the dim reflections of the normal sensory and conceptual spectrum, we could say the higher transcendental self becomes conscious of itself through the Divine judgments pronounced on its experiences-deeds. These are judgments that reveal to it how harmoniously or disharmoniously its deeds fit into the whole functioning of the Cosmic organism. That is the same Cosmic organism by virtue of which it exists and remains healthy and evolving.
This only works if our inherited selfish tendencies can be put to work in service of spiritual ideals, i.e. we can 'selfishly' develop our spiritual capacities, with courage and ambition, which then allows us to expand our very inner understanding of 'self' to encompass broader and broader constellations of Be-ing. That is how selfishness gets spiraled into selflessness and how the intentions and goals of more expansive spheres of beings are harmonized. We all progressively awaken to our latent potential as DIvine co-creators and become who we really are, in essence.
PS - Guney, if you are interested in exploring one of Tomberg's works to a getter better sense of esoteric Christianity, I would recommend "Personal Certainty: On the Way, the Truth, and the Life", from which the above quotes were sourced. It is pretty short and easy to read through.