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Foreward by Matthew Barton
The Philosophy of Freedom, 2011 republication of Wilson translation
The Philosophy of Freedom was first published in 1894 when Steiner was 32, during the period of his editorship of Goethe's scientific writings and collaboration on a complete edition of Schopenhauer's work. Weimar was a thriving centre of European culture at the time, and Steiner was in the thick of it. There he met many prominent artists and cultural figures such as Hermann Grimm, Ernst Haeckel and the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, later published as Truth and Science. At this period of his life, Steiner was still highly regarded in academic and cultural circles and must have hoped that his ideas would enter the cultural mainstream and exert a major influence on contemporary thought. His thesis, which can be seen as a forerunner to The Philosophy of Freedom, refers particularly to the ideas of Kant and Fichte.
It is far beyond the scope of this introduction to outline the whole philosophical context of thought with which Steiner sought to engage. But very briefly he took issue with Kant's idealistic dualism, which sees a gulf in our experience of the world between our fallible perceptions, the 'phenomena', on the one hand, and the things-in-themselves or'noumena' on the other. In this view, reality exists but is ultimately inaccessible to us. Fichte took this unbridgeable division of world and human consciousness a step further by negating the noumena, insisting that everything in our consciousness is merely our own, self-defining representation. Schopenhauer, primarily concerned with the human will, believed that our human desires can never be fulfilled and the only sensible response to this situation is to suppress or deny desires and lead an ascetic life. The views of Eduard von Hartmann, a major figure in the world of philosophy at that time, with whom Steiner had previously corresponded, were informed by the prevailing tenets of Kantianism. But, drawing on Schopenhauer, von Hartmann combined this outlook with his own brand of alleviated pessimism: happiness is not possible but our moral action renders life 'less unhappy' than it would otherwise be.
If this last paragraph leaves the reader, as it does the writer, a little breathless, this may be at least partly due to the sense in all these philosophers of a suffocating incapacity to fully meet the world. Steiner reports the 'chilling effect' on him of von Hartmann's denial that thinking can ever reach reality. By fully engaging with this philosophical tradition, by speaking its language and arguing in the most disciplined way with its tenets, yet also offering a radically different view, Steiner hoped to reach and convince thinkers such as von Hartmann. He was therefore profoundly disappointed when his philosophical project fell on deaf ears. No one, von Hartmann included, seemed to know what to make of it or to be willing to recognize the really new departure it offered for bridging the gulf between the world and human consciousness and, in consequence, for moral human action that can fully engage with, influence and be informed by reality. Steiner later said that his book was received with incomprehension, as though written in Chinese. It therefore became apparent to him that he was knocking at a closed door, and eventually he came to look for understanding outside of the mainstream, in the Theosophical Society.
Despite the apparent failure of this book to meet with rightful acknowledgement, it remained an absolutely key text for Steiner himself. In a conversation with Walter Johannes Stein, he said that it contained the essence of his subsequent teaching and was the key foundation for it. Despite being rooted in contemporary philosophical discourse, he says in The Boundarics of Natural Science¹ that his primary intention in the book was 'to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page':
In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one's own efforts, from one thought to the next . . . Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously, has not read The Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one's usual thinking into one independent of the senses . . . so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book.
Elsewhere,² he compares the experience of reading this book with waking up in the morning, as a transition from passive thinking to full activity. The reader 'should be able to say, "Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them." '
As Steiner says in his original preface to this book, philosophy is not, or need not be, a dry or merely logical pursuit, but an 'art like music'. The philosopher can be a creative artist in the conceptual realm, rising beyond 'mere passive reception of truths' to find himself participating in more vivid and dynamic reality. But to give full credence to this view we have to follow Steiner into the core insight upon which The Philosophy of Freedom is founded: that in essence thinking is, or can be, not a subjective mode, or even some kind of secretion of the brain, but an activity in which reality enters us, and the only way that it does so. Initially appearing to be bound up with our picture of oneself, our subjectivity, in fact it transcends this self in its capacity to kindle in us universally valid concepts that are a true response to all that we perceive in our inner and outer surroundings, including our own actions. The common experience that thoughts are somehow 'drier' and less alive than feeling or will impetus is, says Steiner, due to the fact that we cannot fully grasp thinking activity in the actual moment it arises, but only subsequently, by reflecting upon it. We cannot therefore really 'see' it in the same way we experience feelings or actions, but are usually only aware of the 'shadow' of thinking's luminous nature, of its capacity to penetrate into the world's phenomena. Much of The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to awaken our perception of this luminosity, and hence give us the experience of real participation in the world.
Steiner is therefore quite right in saying that it is not, or not only, a philosophical work in the usual sense, but also offers a transformative impetus that can change our lives. For of course if we follow his ideas through into their consequences for human life, we find that the self-sustaining activity of living thinking is both the tool with which to examine everything else and also the means for full, individual self-realization. If objective reality enters us in thinking and is individualized in our subjective relationship with the world, this subjectivity has a means to engage fully with reality and to do so in a wholly self-determining way. The gulf, in other words, is bridged. In thinking we can have an intuitive experience of the manifest core of our being, and act out of that core. No wonder this seemed such a radical and revolutionary idea to the academics and thinkers of Steiner's day that they could not countenance it. As well as offering full human empowerment it also asks full human responsibility—of a kind not determined by any external or even inner commandments, laws or memories of what has been done the past, but instead by a 'moral imagination' that is alive enough to every situation to seek the fitting response and action that accords with it. And that, of course, is the embodiment of what Steiner means by freedom. We are only fully human, he believes, in so far as we achieve this freedom—though he also acknowledges that it is something we only slowly work our way through to.
Steiner steers a clear-eyed and far-sighted course in this book between the Scylla of metaphysical dualism, which places reality beyond our experiential capacity, and the Charybdis of materialism, which would suck us down into being only physical and physically determined creatures. He refutes the denial of human freedom implicit in both. 'The view which I have here developed,' he says, 'refers the human being back to himself'—and therefore to his own self-sustaining and liberating capacity to make and give meaning to his life.
This extraordinarily hopeful insight into human potential is one that the general current of modem thought still largely overlooks—partly perhaps because it is more than just cerebral thought and also asks us to find our inmost source of moral action. To discover anything remotely resembling it, in fact, we must probably look not to philosophy but to a school of thought that arose in the midst of profound existential distress. During his incarceration in concentration camps during the Second World War, around 49 years after The Philosophy of Frcedom was first published, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl first formulated his 'logotherapy', which is based on our capacity to choose our own attitude in any set of circumstances, even the harshest:
Our core drive is search for meaning. Meaning is what we ourselves find and give our lives. No one else can give us this meaning . . . what matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment . . . each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.³
In the actual practice of this outlook, as Frankl experienced it, we can find the rare capacity to be self-determining, to remain moral in the face of the cruelest treatment, and thus free. This, it seems to me, is what The Philosophy of Freedom not only calls for but leads to.
Matthew Barton
January 2011
1. With an introduction by Saul Bellow, Anthroposophic Press, 1983.
2. In: Awakening to Community, Anthroposophic Press, 1974.
3. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, 2006.
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