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WorkRudolf Steiner

The Philosophy of Freedom

The book Steiner expected to outlive all his others: an argument that a person becomes free through thinking.

by Rudolf Steiner382 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die Philosophie der Freiheit
First published
(aged 33)
Original language
German

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Overview

Eduard von Hartmann, the author of The Philosophy of the Unconscious and then one of the most widely read philosophers in Germany, received a copy of this book in November 1893 and returned it within two weeks with its margins full of objections. Rudolf Steiner, thirty-two and editing Goethe's scientific writings at the Goethe Archive in Weimar, had dedicated his previous book to Hartmann. Die Philosophie der Freiheit asks whether a human being can act freely or is driven by laws as fixed as those of nature, and it answers by looking first at thinking. Thinking, Steiner argues, is the one activity we bring about ourselves and can follow to its end, so it is the one place where we know the world from the inside. An action is free, on this account, when it grows out of an idea the person has grasped for themselves, not out of a command, a duty in Kant's sense, or a drive; Steiner called the result ethical individualism. Hartmann judged that an unbridgeable gulf ran between the book's parts. Robert von Zimmermann, the Viennese philosopher whose lectures Steiner had attended, charged him with a theoretical anarchism that outdid Nietzsche. The publisher printed a thousand copies, sold about four hundred by 1907, and got into financial trouble; Steiner and Marie von Sivers, later his wife, bought the rest. In 1918, by then the leader of the anthroposophical movement, Steiner brought out a revised edition with a new preface and long additions answering his critics. Scholars still disagree over whether the revision also removed the traces of an atheist, Stirner-like individualism from the first edition. Academic philosophy has largely ignored the book. English readers have met it under three titles, among them The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the one Steiner himself proposed.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by a percept?

Whatever appears to us before thinking has done any work on it: colours, sounds, warmth, feelings, even our own self as it first shows itself. A percept is not yet a mental picture, which is a concept already applied to a particular percept and kept. Taken alone, percepts are disconnected and incomplete; they become reality in the full sense only when thinking supplies the concepts that belong to them.

Why does the book reject both naive realism and critical idealism?

Because each takes one half of reality for the whole. Naive realism holds that things exist just as we perceive them; critical idealism, leaning on physiology, concludes that the world is only our representation. But the physiologist's argument needs eyes and nerves to be real as perceived, so it saws off its own branch. The book's answer is that percept and concept together make reality, joined in knowing.

Who is the free spirit?

The book's name for a person insofar as they act from moral intuition rather than from drives, custom or command. A free spirit does not flout laws and customs, but follows them only where it has grasped their idea for itself. No one is wholly free, the book concedes; its maxim for the free part of us is to live in love of action and let live in understanding of another's will.

What are moral intuition, moral imagination and moral technique?

Three capacities a free deed needs. Moral intuition grasps the idea of what ought to be done; moral imagination turns that general idea into a concrete picture fitted to this situation; moral technique is knowing the world well enough to change it without breaking its laws. Someone who has intuitions but no imagination ends up acting on other people's pictures instead of their own.

What kind of monism does the book defend?

A unity reached in knowing, not assumed in advance. The world appears split because our organisation receives it in two parts, percept and concept, and thinking joins them again. Monism in this sense denies any second world behind experience, whether Kant's thing in itself or an unconscious will, and so leaves a free person no higher authority to lean on than their own grasp of ideas.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Thinking Watched from Within

Is there anywhere a person knows the world from the inside rather than as a picture of it? The book finds that place in thinking, the one activity we produce ourselves and can follow through to the end.

Against the claim, from Schopenhauer to the critical idealists, that the world is only my representation, the first part argues that percept and concept are two halves of one reality, and that perception alone delivers only half. In ordinary life thinking is the exception, the one thing we do without observing it. Turn attention on it and, for once, the observer produces what is observed. Knowing then means joining to each percept, through thinking, the concept that belongs to it; the dualism lies in how we are organised, not in the world.

  • thinking
  • epistemology
  • perception
  • concepts
  • observation
  • knowledge
  • naive realism
  • representation
  • idealism
  • consciousness
  • self-consciousness
  • monism
  • experience
  • subjectivity
  • thought
  • metaphysics

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Acting from One's Own Idea

Can a person act freely at all, or only obey a drive, a command or a duty? The book's answer is that a deed is free when its reason is an idea the doer has grasped for themselves.

The second part refuses both answers its age offered. Spinoza and the natural scientists said every act is caused; Kant grounded morality in a duty that commands, and Steiner answers Kant's address to duty, that sublime and mighty name, with one to freedom, a friendly and human name. The free spirit acts from moral intuition, an idea drawn by its own thinking from the world of ideas all share, and moral imagination turns it into this concrete deed. He calls the result ethical individualism, and concedes that most human action falls short of it.

  • free will
  • freedom
  • ethics
  • motivation
  • individuality
  • ethical individualism
  • intuition
  • moral intuition
  • will
  • agency
  • causation

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Is Life Worth Its Pain?

Does a life hold more suffering than pleasure, and would that make it worthless? The book takes on Hartmann's pessimism and denies that the worth of a life is a sum of pleasures.

Eduard von Hartmann had reckoned that pain outweighs pleasure in every life, and concluded that people should work selflessly for the world's redemption from existence. Steiner accepts neither the arithmetic nor the conclusion. Pleasure, he argues, has to be measured against the strength of the desire it satisfies, not added up like coins, and a striving being will gladly take on pain for what it wants. A free person needs no surplus of pleasure to be bribed into living; the worth lies in realising aims of one's own.

  • pessimism
  • pleasure
  • desire

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Within this work

passages held
382
distinct concepts
305
by passages held, corpus-wide
#197

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologyperception44
conceptsperception26
epistemologythinking24
perceptionthinking20
conceptsthinking14
knowledgethinking13
epistemologymonism11
monismperception11
conceptsepistemology7
conceptsmonism7
knowledgeperception7
conceptsknowledge5
epistemologyknowledge4
freedommonism4
monismthinking4
free willmonism3
freedomknowledge3
conceptsfree will2
epistemologyfreedom2
free willfreedom2
free willthinking2
freedomperception2
free willknowledge1
knowledgemonism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit) you are here DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)

    Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.

     DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)

    The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.

     DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)

    The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.

     DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)

    The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.

     DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)

    Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.

     EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)

    Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.

     DEEN
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