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Key Terms (will be on quiz) knowledge of the reason origin and meaning of thinking Hegel role of thinking in action action springs from reason action springs from the heart motive permeated with thought driving forces of love, compassion, and patriotism heart and mood of soul heart allows motives to enter compassion enters heart way to the heart idealistic mental pictures more blissful love father of feeling love opens the eyes to good qualities perception of good qualities love awakens form mental picture of good qualities lack of love origin of thinking The Philosophy of Freedom
Conscious Human Action 1.9 Knowledge Of The Motive [17] Obviously, my action cannot be free if I, as the actor, do not know why I carry it out. But what about an action for which the reasons are known? This leads us to ask: what is the origin and the significance of thinking? For without understanding the soul’s activity of thinking, no concept of the knowledge of anything, including an action, is possible. When we understand what thinking means in general, it will be easy to clarify the role that thinking plays in human action. As Hegel rightly says, "Thinking turns the soul, with which beasts too are gifted, into spirit."7 Therefore thinking will also give to human action its characteristic stamp. 1.10 Action Springs From Heart [18] This is by no means to claim that all our actions flow only from the sober deliberations of our reason. I am far from calling human, in the highest sense, only those actions that proceed from abstract judgment alone. But as soon as our actions lift themselves above the satisfaction of purely animal desires, our motives are always permeated by thoughts. Love, pity, patriotism are springs of action that cannot be reduced to cold rational concepts. People say that the heart, the sensibility (Gemüt*), comes into its own in such matters. No doubt. But heart and sensibility do not create the motives of action. They presuppose them and then receive them into their own realm. *Gemüt: has no direct equivalent in English. It points more to the totality od man's inner being than "heart" does. It refers to a blending of thinking, willing, and feeling that one can feel with one's whole body, but is centered in the region of one's heart. A poetic translation, "the mind warmed by a loving heart and stimulated by the soul's imaginative power" and this more intellectual one, "the soul in a state of unconscious intuition arising from the working together of heart and mind." 1.11 Compassion Pity appears in my heart when the mental image of a person who arouses pity in me enters my consciousness. The way to the heart goes through the head. Love is no exception here. If it is not a mere expression of the sexual drive, then love is based on mental pictures that we form of the beloved. And the more idealistic these mental pictures are, the more blessed is the love. Here, too, thought is the father of feeling. 1.12 Perception Of Good Qualities People say that love makes us blind to the beloved’s flaws. But we can also turn this around and claim that love opens our eyes to the beloved’s strengths. Many pass by these good qualities without noticing them. One person sees them and, just for this reason, love awakens in the soul. What else has this person done but make a mental picture of what a hundred others have ignored? Love is not theirs because they lack the mental picture. [19] We can approach the matter however we like: it only grows clearer that the question regarding the nature of human actions presupposes another, that of the origin of thinking. I shall therefore turn to this question next. 7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817, second edition 1827). The quotation is from the Preface. See also Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy. For instance, “[Hegel] wanted to express clearly and poignantly that he regarded thinking that is conscious of itself as the highest human activity, as the force through which alone a human being can gain a position with respect to ultimate questions. . . . Hegel is a personality who lives completely in the element of thought.” (p. 169). |
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