100 Introduction
Submitted by Mr. Test on Wed, 11/01/2006 - 4:58pm.
The Philosophy of Freedom
Study Course Article
100 Introduction
The Philosophy Of Freedom Study Course
The core book of Rudolf Steiner’s work is The Philosophy Of Freedom.
"Anyone interested in looking for them will find the basic principles of Anthroposophy already enunciated in this book." –Rudolf Steiner
The Philosophy Of Freedom Study Course is a free online distance education program and discussion emailed weekly throughout the year beginning Dec. 29, 2006. It will be sent to those who register as a member of this web site. The email contains an article on the weeks topic with a link to blog material derived from internet research.
Registration
All members of philosophyoffreedom dot com will receive the weekly study course material. If you would like to sign up register here. There is no cost for the study course or registration. You may unsubscribe at any time. Your email address is kept private.
This study material is presented in the new blog format as a conversation among historical and contemporary philosophers, scientists, artists, religious, and everyday people sharing their diverse views and art on specific passages from The Philosophy Of Freedom. The result is a comprehensive examination of the many aspects of human freedom which together form one whole, a free spirit. When completed there will be over 350 topics and 1500 art images.
The various approaches to freedom presented each speak for themselves in a way that leaves the reader free from being directed to any particular approach. The knowledge and practice described here will deepen self-awareness and inspire the quest for freedom; thinking, feeling, and action that arise from the individual human spirit.
Discussion
The purpose of the study material is to present a variety of views to stimulate individual thinking and discussion. It is not an attempt to present the "right" views, whatever that might mean. Readers are encouraged to add to the study material or present questions and comments by posting in the comment box on each study page.
Invite Others
Please email this information to friends and post in forums, newsletters, or on bulletin boards for others who may be interested in this important study.
If you would like to sign up register here.
Contact
Any questions contact Tom. |
The Philosophy of Freedom
Study Course Blog
100 Introduction
Contents Of Introduction
-- Article
A. Quotes
B. Philosophy of Freedom Study Course
C. Warning: Thinking Required
D. 4 Book reviews
E. Rudolf Steiner quotes about his Philosophy of Freedom
F. Links: Philosophy of Freedom On The Web - 4 Special Search Features
- 5 English translations online
- German and Spanish editions
- 12 Purchase sites world wide (Wilson translation)
Note: Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom can also be found under the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.
A. Quotes From The Philosophy of Freedom
Found in Chapter 9
“To live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will, is the fundamental maxim of free men.” “Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act.”
“And, in truth, only an act of will that springs from intuition can be an individual one.”
“When we act under the influence of intuitions, the driving force of our action is pure thinking…. practical reason….. that is, an impulse to action issuing directly from my intuition.”
“It is a moral advance when a person no longer simply accepts the commands of an outer or inner authority as the motive of his action, but tries to understand the reason why a particular maxim of behavior should act as a motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority to action out of moral insight.”
“A moral misunderstanding, a clash, is impossible between men who are morally free. Only the morally unfree who follow their natural instincts or the accepted commands of duty come into conflict with their neighbors if these do not obey the same instincts and the same commands as themselves.”
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B. The Philosophy Of Freedom Study Course
By Tom Last
The Philosophy Of Freedom Study Course
The core book of Rudolf Steiner’s work is The Philosophy Of Freedom.
"Anyone interested in looking for them will find the basic principles of Anthroposophy already enunciated in this book." –Rudolf Steiner
The Philosophy Of Freedom Study Course is a free online distance education program and discussion emailed weekly throughout the year. It will be sent to those who register as a member of this web site. The email contains an article on the weeks topic with a link to blog material derived from internet research.
Registration
All members of philosophyoffreedom dot com will receive the weekly study course material. If you would like to sign up register here. There is no cost for the study course or registration. You may unsubscribe at any time. Your email address is kept private.
This study material is presented in the new blog format as a conversation among historical and contemporary philosophers, scientists, artists, religious, and everyday people sharing their diverse views and art on specific passages from The Philosophy Of Freedom. The result is a comprehensive examination of the many aspects of human freedom which together form one whole, a free spirit. When completed there will be over 350 topics and 1500 art images.
The various approaches to freedom presented each speak for themselves in a way that leaves the reader free from being directed to any particular approach. The knowledge and practice described here will deepen self-awareness and inspire the quest for freedom; thinking, feeling, and action that arise from the individual human spirit.
Discussion
The purpose of the study material is to present a variety of views to stimulate individual thinking and discussion. It is not an attempt to present the "right" views, whatever that might mean. Readers are encouraged to add to the study material or present questions and comments by posting in the comment box on each study page.
Invite Others
Please email this information to friends and post in forums, newsletters, or on bulletin boards for others who may be interested in this important study.
If you would like to sign up register here.
Contact
Any questions contact Tom. |
C. Warning: Thinking Required
By Tom Last
 The extent of your knowledge or intelligence is not relevant here, as the issue is whether we use what we do have. While reading The Philosophy of Freedom you can decide to read attentively and struggle to understand, judge, and apply the material or you can let your attention wander. You may half get some points, awaken again with effort, then lapse into partial focus. At each moment you are deciding whether to think or not.
The question of freedom can not be fully considered from a single view-point or a single type of thinking. So a variety of views and experience will be shared that point to a living intuition expressed through thinking, feeling, and deed. It is also very important to recognize what is not freedom. -Tom Last
The quote below is from the Preface to the revised edition of 1918. Of interest also is the Preface to the first edition, 1894 and the Introduction from translator Michael Wilson.
"An attempt is made to prove that there is a view of the nature of man's being which can support the rest of knowledge; and further, that this view completely justifies the idea of free will, provided only that we have first discovered that region of the soul in which free will can unfold itself.
The view to which we here refer is one which, once gained, is capable of becoming part and parcel of the very life of the soul itself. The answer given to the two problems will not be of the purely theoretical sort which, once mastered, may be carried about as a conviction preserved by memory. Such an answer would, for the whole manner of thinking on which this book is based, be no real answer at all.
The book will not give a ready-made self-contained answer of this sort, but will point to a field of experience in which man's inner soul activity supplies a living answer to these questions at every moment that he needs one."
-Rudolf Steiner |
D1. Philosophy Of Freedom
Michael Wilson translation
Are we free, whether we know it or not?
Is any sense of individual freedom merely an illusion?
 Rudolf Steiner tackles these age-old questions in a new and unique way. He shows that, by considering our own activity of thinking, we can realize the reasons for everything we do. And if these reasons are taken from the realm of our ideals, our actions are free, because only we determine them.
The question of freedom cannot be settled by philosophical argument. Nor is it simply granted to us. If we want to be free, we must work through our own inner activity to overcome unconscious urges and habitual thinking. To accomplish this, we must reach a point of view that recognizes no limits to knowledge, sees through all illusions, and opens the door to an experience of the reality of the spiritual world. Then we can achieve the highest level of evolution—we will recognize ourselves as free spirits.
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in Kraljevic, Austria, where he grew up the son of a railroad station chief. As a young man, he lived in Weimar and Berlin, where he became a respected and well-published scientific, literary, and philosophical scholar, known especially for his work on Goethe's scientific writings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he began to develop his earlier philosophical principles into an approach to methodical research of psychological and spiritual phenomena.
Steiner’s multifaceted genius has led to innovative and holistic approaches in medicine, philosophy, religion, education (Waldorf schools), special education (the Camphill movement), economics, agriculture (biodynamics), science, architecture, and the arts (drama, speech and eurythmy). |
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D2. Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
(originally, The Philosophy of Freedom)
Michael Lipson translation
Introduced By Gertrude Reif Hughes
 Of all of his works, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path is the one that Steiner himself believed would have the longest life and the greatest spiritual and cultural consequences. It was written as a phenomenological account of the “results of observing the human soul according to the methods of natural science.
This seminal work asserts that free spiritual activity - understood as the human ability to think and act independently of physical nature - is the suitable path for human beings today to gain true knowledge of themselves and of the universe. This is not merely a philosophical volume, but rather a warm, heart-oriented guide to the practice and experience of living thinking.
Readers will not find abstract philosophy here, but a step-by-step account of how a person may come to experience living, intuitive thinking - “the conscious experience of a purely spiritual content.”
During the past hundred years since it was written, many have tried to discover this “new thinking” that could help us understand the various spiritual, ecological, social, political, and philosophical issues facing us. But only Rudolf Steiner laid out a path that leads from ordinary thinking to the level of pure spiritual activity - intuitive thinking - in which we become co-creators and co-redeemers of the world.
“When, with the help of Steiner’s book, we recognize that thinking is an essentially spiritual activity, we discover that it can school us. In that sense - Steiner’s sense - thinking is a spiritual path”.
Steiner designed all his books to discourage passive collecting of information and to encourage instead conscious pondering and questioning, particularly of hitherto unexamined notions. Like Steiner’s other writings, Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path offers a mode of inquiry rather than a set of creeds, pieties, or doctrines.
His style makes us practice a more active thinking so that we can become aware of its power, vitality, and essentially spiritual nature. His work stimulates our soul’s own activity, stirring our latent powers and strengthening them so that we may eventually become able to think his insights ourselves. -Gertrude Reif Hughes |
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D3. Philosophy of Freedom
Introduction By Michael Wilson
Today we hear about the "free world" and the "value of the individual", and yet the current scientific view of man seems to lend little support to these concepts, but seems rather to lead to a kind of morality in which every type of behavior is excused on the plea that "I cannot help being what I am!"
If we would really value the individual, and support our feeling of freedom with knowledge, we must find a point of view which will lead the ego to help itself become what it wants to be -- a free being. This cannot mean that we must abandon the scientific path; only that the scope of science must be widened to take into account the ego that experiences itself as spirit, which it does in the act of thinking. Thus the Philosophy of Freedom takes its start by examining the process of thinking, and shows that there need be no fear of unknown causes in unknown worlds forever beyond the reach of our knowledge, since limits to knowledge exist only in so far as we fail to awaken our thinking to the point where it becomes an organ of direct perception.
Having established the possibility of knowing, the book goes on to show that we can also know the causes of our actions, and if our motive for acting comes from pure intuition, from thinking alone, without any promptings from the appearances and illusions of the sense-world, then we can indeed act in freedom, out of pure love for the deed. |
D4. Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path
(originally, The Philosophy of Freedom)
Book Review By Bobby Matherne
In this small volume Rudolf Steiner lays the epistemological basis for Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance that had been written some forty years earlier. This book, rightly known, provides a sound philosophical basis for the writings of Ayn Rand on capitalism and the teachings of Dr. Andrew Joseph Galambos on volitional science, and many other writings and teachings of our time. |
E. Rudolf Steiner Quotes
Rudolf Steiner on his book The Philosophy Of Freedom
By Otto Palmer
P14 Basic principles of Anthroposophy
"Anyone interested in looking for them will find the basic principles of Anthroposophy already enunciated in this book."
P43 Special way to read POF
“Now what kind of reader approach did The Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as they read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really like waking up out of sleep in the morning.”
P90 Inner activity
“That is the reason why it is not exactly popular with people who read a book for information only. It was intended to involve the reader, page by page, in the actual activity of thinking, to serve merely as a score read with inner thought activity as the reader advances on his own from thought to thought.”
P47 Inner conviction
“Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the stage one has oneself reached as a beginner.”
P84 Hard work
“The book is a living organism, and to work one’s way through the thoughts it contains is to undergo an inner training. A person to who this has not happened as a result of study need not conclude what I am saying is incorrect, but rather he has not read it correctly or worked hard and thoroughly enough.”
1)P5 Soul observation
“I was not setting forth a doctrine, but simply recording inner experiences through which I had actually passed. And I reported them just as I experienced them.”
2)P23 Cosmic mysteries
“Within this book thinking is experienced in a way that makes it impossible for a person involved in it to have any other impression, when he is living in thought, he is living in the cosmos. This relatedness to cosmic mysteries is the red thread running through the book.”
3)P82 Thought training
“The primary purpose of my book is to serve as thought training, training in the sense that the special way of both thinking and entertaining these thoughts is such as to bring the soul life of the reader into motion in somewhat the way that gymnastics exercise their limbs.”
4)P87 Evolution of thought
“A person desirous of entering the higher worlds must accustom himself to the kind of thinking in which each next thought grows out of the preceding one. This is the thinking in my Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Science. These books are not written in a way that allows arbitrary placement of thought. They developed as an organism grows, one thought evolving from another.”
5)P83 Thought organization
“For in the case of a book like this, the important thing is so to organize the thoughts it contains that they take effect. With many other books it doesn’t make a great deal of difference if one shifts the sequence, putting this thing first and that later. But in the case of The Philosophy of Freedom that is impossible. It would be just as unthinkable to put page 150 fifty pages earlier as it would be to put a dog’s hind legs where the front ones belong.”
6)P87 Guided by thought
“The thoughts were not influenced by the author’s personality. He let himself be guided by what the thoughts they contained produced as the fruit of their own activity and were structured accordingly.”
7)P78 Independent thinking
“The most important thing about this book is the fact that in its pages completely independent thinking appears for the first time. A person incapable of thinking freely cannot understand it. He must accustom himself to call upon his etheric body if he is to entertain such thoughts.”
8)P104 Resurrection of thought
“This book is a picturing of morality intended to serve as a manual for enlivening dead thoughts by making them moral impulses, for resurrecting them from the dead. In this sense there is an inner content of Christianity.”
9)P12 Philosophy as an art
“Music theory is a body of knowledge that one must have acquired before starting to compose, and in composing, the laws of composition are made to serve life, to create something absolutely real. Philosophy is an art in exactly the same sense. Real philosophers have always been conceptual artists. The ideas of humankind were the artistic medium in which they worked….How philosophy as an art is related to human freedom, what freedom is, and whether we do, or can, participate in it—this is the main theme of my book.”
10)P59 Love of ideals
“Ideals that are the result of practicing a spiritual scientific thinking method become something more than abstractions, they are loved, loved with all the strength of ones humanness.”
11)P83 Catharsis
“Catharsis is an ancient term for the purification of the astral body by means of meditation and concentration exercises. If a reader takes this book as it was meant and relates to it in the way a virtuoso playing a composition on the piano relates to its composer, reproducing the whole piece out of himself, the books organically evolved thought sequence will bring about a high degree of catharsis.”
12)P60 Clarion call to free thinking and social trust
“So I can say at the time –the beginning of the nineties—I very much wanted my Philosophy of Freedom to sound a clarion call for the exact opposite of what we see happening today…… Development of recent times brought about social conditions in which perverse human instinct pursued a direction completely counter to what a grasp of present-day humanity’s true and deeper goal required our taking. That is the terrible tragedy of modern times.
It makes it absolutely necessary, in our future efforts, to recognize that the social order must be built in a way that is made possible only by free thinking, by trust, by what Goethe had in mind when he was looking for a definition of duty and said, “Duty is loving what one orders oneself to undertake…..” count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as they read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really like waking up out of sleep in the morning.” |
F. Links: Philosophy Of Freedom On The Web
1. Links to 4 Special Search Features
2. Links to 5 Online English Translations
Note: Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom can also be found under the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.
I like to refer to all the translations side by side when having difficulty with a passage, including the William Lindeman version which is not online. If I were limited to two it would be the Wilson for the best combination of accuracy and ease of reading while referring to the Poppelbaum when concerned about accuracy. -TL - Michael Wilson (The Philosophy of Freedom)
Most popular classic English translation of original German. Best combination of accuracy and ease of reading.
- Hermann Poppelbaum (The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)
Awkward reading at times but captures more of the subtle world-view shifts with careful word selection.
- Michael Lipson (PDF) (Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path)
Widely distributed contemporary sounding translation though least accurate. Suitable for a beginner.
- Rita Stebbing (The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)
- G Metaxa (The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)
3. Links to 2 Online Non-English Versions
4. Online Purchase of Wilson English Translation
5. Amazon.com International (Wilson POF purchase)
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