This is a moderated discussion of the work group writing a Philosophy of Freedom text book.
Suggestions welcomed. Please post a new journal for other topics not involved with producing a text book.
After reviewing some modern text books I see they are very "doing" orientated. Today people want clear and simple understanding that can be put into action.
They have boxes that make clear the objectives or goals of learning. I went through chapter 1 and found these leading thoughts which could be listed as learning objectives. That would help guide the rest of the material put in the chapter to meet these learning objectives.
Leading Thoughts
- 1-0 The question of freedom is one of the most important questions for life, religion, conduct, and science.
- 1-3, 4 Now, please, suppose that this stone during its motion thinks and knows that it is striving to the best of its ability to continue in motion. This stone, which is conscious only of its striving and is by no means indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than its own will to continue. But this is just the human freedom that everybody claims to possess and which consists in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. To be only conscious of an action without being conscious of the causes which guide the action results in an illusion of freedom.
- 1-3, 5 A motive of action which I recognize and see through does not compel in the same sense as organic urges.
- 1-5 A conscious motive of action and an unconscious urge will result in an action which must be judged differently.
- 1-9 An action, of which the agent does not know why he performs it, cannot be free.
- 1-9 In addition to knowing the reasons for an action, having knowledge of an action involves knowing the origin and meaning of thinking.
- 1-10 As soon as our conduct rises above the sphere of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, our motives are always permeated by thoughts.
Correspondences
Hi Tom,
I just tried to simplify the language above a bit but found I needed to know which parts of Chapter 1 the above came from. Can you indicate the correspondences?
Tim, added reference
I am trying to select the key self-observations in a chapter. I need to go over it some more to see if we have them or not.
Alternative Learning Objectives
Thanks, I'll have a go... you could treat these as supplementary/alternative expressions, I think this is quite challenging and will benefit from further refinement and alternative points of view. I found it a very good exercise just to try and re-word the thoughts underlying these points:
text book question
Dear Tom,
This offering certainly seems to be a good step forward. At the same time, an odd question came to mind, when I read this material. I tried to think into the point of view of the reader, and before I could even proceed, I wondered "why should I care?"
To expand upon this...
I go to a book store and I pick up a book. From the cover something attracts my attention, and I feel that this book may be of value to me so that I will be encouraged to look further into its insides, in order to form a judgment about whether or not to spend my money on the text.
Let's assume something can be created that crosses that threshold of interest. At the same time it seems to me that the problem of why I should be interested remains at every level - at every chapter that I read: Why should I bother to read this book in the first place, and once I have begun, why should I continue?
Since I already believe I am free, what reason have I for considering this problem in a deeper fashion? As I read what you offered above, as someone familiar with the book I could see that you captured something, but then I am already in pursuit of the problem. What if I am not otherwise disposed to take an interest?
Lets look at this from another direction.
The way the material begins (as you laid it out) it basically tells me something is wrong with me, that I am not free and further that I am a bit silly to think I am free, for the text tells me that my sense of freedom is an illusion.
I don't see how this approach will encourage me to take up the book - for what reason will I, as a person who believes in such an illusion, be willing to give up that illusion and accept this approach? While it is technically true, and something we here on the PoF site have agreed to face because we are already on a spiritual path and trust Steiner because of other experiences, the problem (as I see it) is how do we "frame" the introduction of the reader to the book such that it connects to them in a way that does not require they start from a position of something being flawed within them, but rather from a position of there being something right. Further, that from this position of rightness, they can see that this book offers as a goal, something worth pursuing.
Again: why should I (as a naive reader) care?
When Steiner wrote this, he was writing into a tradition in which this question of philosophy was already present in the intellectual climate of the times. Serious thinkers took this question seriously. People today are not serious thinkers in this fashion. They have other concerns. Would it be possible to "frame" the essential rite of passage of the book in a way that it relates to where people are today who have no connection to the technical-philosophical question of freedom?
This is one of the reasons Steiner wanted the title of the book, for English speakers, to be The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. This allows the questions to be framed in a way that doesn't run against the naive assumption of freedom, common in Western Culture, where the technological-philosophical question of freedom has no meaning.
Anyway, these are the thoughts that came to me when I tried to view what you wrote from the position of a naive reader.
joel
Joel, Original POF opening
Here is the opening of Chapter 1 in the original Philosophy of Freedom. The original chapter 1 later became the preface with this part removed. It may be the opening you are looking for.
The Goal of Knowledge
I believe I am indicating correctly one of the fundamental characteristics of our age when I say that, at the present day, all human interests tend to centre in the cult of human individuality. An energetic effort is being made to shake off every kind of authority. Nothing is accepted as valid, unless it springs from the roots of individuality. Everything which hinders the individual in the full development of his powers is thrust aside. The saying “Each one of us must choose his hero in whose footsteps he toils up to Olympus” no longer holds for us. We allow no ideals to be forced upon us. We are convinced that in each of us, if only we probe deep enough into the very heart of our being, there dwells something noble, something worthy of development. We no longer believe that there is a norm of human life to which we must all strive to conform. We regard the perfection of the whole depending on the unique perfection of each single individual. We do not want to do what anyone else can do equally well. No, our contribution to the development of the world, however trifling, must be something which, by reason of the uniqueness of our nature, we alone can offer. Never have artists been less concerned about rules and norms in art than to-day. Each of them asserts his right to express, in the creations of his art, what is unique in him. There are dramatists who write in dialect rather than conform to the standard diction which grammar demands.
No better expression for these phenomena can be found than this, that they result from the individual’s striving towards freedom, developed to its highest pitch. We do not want to be dependent in any respect, and where dependence must be, we tolerate it only on condition that it coincides with a vital interest of our individuality.
The above sentences were at the beginning of the original 1894 first edition of The Philosophy of Freedom. They were removed by Rudolf Steiner in the 1918 revised edition.
Drama of Knowledge
Hi Joel,
Having read your comments I would like to say that what grips me in Chapter 1 is the possibility of being able to refute all of those smarty-pants external voices who say that freedom cannot possibly exist because ... <insert reason>.
I experience Steiner lining them up like straw men or comic villains and demolishing their arguments showing that they have completely missed the essence of what freedom is. Experienced that way it is a journey of hope, a pilgrim's progress rather than an exercise in condemnation - we are encouraged to be on Steiner's side as he helps us towards knowing the reality of freedom in fulfillment of the instinctive feeling we have that freedom must exist within human action.
You are probably aware Plato uses a dramatic technique in his philosophical dialogues. Socrates demolishes the arguments of his opponents and leads his listeners to a point of enlightenment, hopefully, by the end of the dialogue.
Perhaps what is missing is a clear delineation between understanding the key errors or straw men that are encountered and then how to refute them. There is a danger that every thought presented, boiled down and identified only as a learning point, may be seen by the reader as equal and equally something that must be believed or learned by rote.
The journey of PoF for me is that we have to meet these erroneous points of view, understand them and overcome them through our own efforts. So perhaps we could present the progression of thoughts in a different way.
For example, there could be something like this:
Partial Truth/Assertion: Actions determined by external causes are not free
Observation: Human actions performed with consciousness of the action's underlying causes or motives cannot be placed on the same level as those clearly determined by external causes.
Conclusion: To understand freedom, it is important to understand the nature of human actions performed with consciousness of motives
It is interesting to me that at least in this case the partial truth can be expressed in a simple sentence, the progression in thought as Steiner gives it cannot so easily be boiled down, at least when I attempt it!
my preferred alternatives for a future PoF "preface"
When Tom presented the question to me, several weeks ago now, that PoF might need to be rewritten, a kind of light went off in my head, and certain ideas presented themselves.
Among these ideas where the following:
The language used for a revised PoF could best be of service to this time if it was drawn from the language being used by those of our contemporaries who are involved in instinctive consciousness soul gestures, such as greenpeace, the bioneers, doctors without borders and the kinds of folk described in Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest.
Further, that we needed to address contemporary "adversarial" gestures such as findings in neuro-science, evolutionary biology and psychology and such books as Dawkins The God Delusion etc.
In a way we would be changing the history-of-ideas context from the late 19th Century to the early 21st Century.
I also thought (later in time to this original perception) that the process of updating might well need to be something of a group effort, that is something born out of the activity of several people who were consciously meeting with each other in the physical in order to practice the reverse cultus.
Of course, for Tom this doesn't really work in the same way as it seemed to me. His instinct is to create a "study course", and I trust this instinct of his, for after all it was his instinct to create this website which is a quite wonderful gesture on the internet.
Speaking of the internet, another idea that came along with the above, was that something could be done that connected the "study course" or the revised book, to such places as YouTube. I thought that somehow videos could be created that lent themselves to forming a bridge from one field of present day artistic consciousness to another.
Right now then, in spite of somewhat different ideas about this question than Tom's, I can at least here offer some alternative discussion and possibilities.
Rather then state my "suggested" revision as a study course with a kind of bullet point organization, let me be a creative in another direction...
--------- a possible back cover comment for a book --------------------------
The modern world calls out to us for sacrifice and moral action. Everywhere one can see pain and suffering, and our natural human impulse is to relieve this suffering. We have in this regard many choices. In general we can strive to provide immediate relief, so that we work at feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and healing the sick. We can also feel called to try to reform society such that the causes of hunger, homelessness and illness are abated.
This latter struggle is more difficult, for it requires a kind of deeper appreciation of how the world actually works, unless we are just living in an utopian fantasy. If we wish to go deeper, we might first need to recognize that the world is complicated in many ways, and that we will have to sort out these complications in order to discover how to apply our will, in the right places and at the right time and in the right way. In a sense, we need to recognize that if the world could easily be reformed, it would have been already reformed, such that we are now forced by the constant failures of the past to rethink those approaches, and to recognize that something else must be called upon - some other capacity discovered that might be of aid, but is presently overlooked.
If we think this through, we might discover that our time is bound up in a kind of war of ideas. This appears most plainly in the struggles between Religion and Science. Yet, that view is still a bit superficial, for the underlying matter at issue between these two is not even whether god exists or not, but what is in fact the truth about ourselves - who are we. Are we animals that have come to be through a process of mindless chance, such that every act is determined by what genetic evolution has hard-wired into our brains? Or, are we somehow divine in nature, living in a divinely created world and capable of being far more than a mere animal?
The real question is then not one of what is our belief or our point of view, but what is the truth of ourselves. On the one side many members of the scientific community require us to accept a world of blind chance and absent any spirit - a kind of physcial determinism. On the other side, members of the religious communities try to convince us that while we are divine in origin, we are sinful and fallen, and must (in order to be saved from our weaknesses) surrender in obedience to rules outside ourself - a kind of moral determinism.
If for any reason we are not quite comfortable with either such approach, is there a way through, which does not cause us to lose our slender sense of personal meaning and dignity? How do we come to know ourselves in a way consistent with the rigor and precision of science, yet not bound or limited by its spiritless views?
Do we not want to think it out for ourselves? Don't we realize that we have to overcome the limits of both a one-sided Religious doctrine, and a one-sided Scientific doctrine? Don't we say to ourselves: "I can think, I can decide. I can know."
If this is so, if this is something that you feel, you who are reading the back cover of this book, then perhaps inside this book is just what you most need as a help in order to navigate the rough seas of a time in which everyone else wants to tell you what to think, what to decide and what you can know.
---------------------------
joel
writing style
If we could integrate this kind of writing related to contemporary concerns and issues into the scientific accuracy of the book we would have a best seller among the people we want to reach.
The question would be how to do that. A modern text book has a main body of text supplemented by a lot of additional exercises, observations, images, main points ect. You could possibly write the main text in a looser way like a normal book and then add the science in boxes surrounding the main body.
This could be experimented with by creating samples for chapter 1 section 1 and 2 that have been posted.
Editing
Joel, my fingers are twitching wanting to edit that back cover comment... would you mind if I posted a "suggested edit"? :-)
weekly emailing
It will take a few years to develop a new Philosophy of Freedom study course. So I thought we could complete a section at a time and do a weekly emailing of a section per week to the website email list. That way we can provide a service now rather than waiting for two years and the completion of the whole course.
I will be able to work on this full time for several months starting next week.