Freedom

Odysseus and the Sirens. Painting by John William Waterhouse (1891)

The ancient Greek word for freedom - "Éleutheria" - originally meant something like: "to set out on a journey and overcome all difficulties in order to reach a beloved goal", as Homer describes it in his Odyssey.

Man is created free, is free, And if he were born in chains. Friedrich Schiller: Worte des Glaubens (German)

Only in limitation the master shows himself, And only the law can give us freedom. Johann von Wolfgang Goethe: Natur und Kunst ... (German)

The Panther His gaze has, from the passing of the bars, grown so weary that it cannot hold. To him, there seem to be thousand bars and behind those thousand bars no world. The smooth pace, the strong and supple stride, that circles in the smallest space, is like a dance of force around a middle, in which a strong will’s paralysed. Only at times the pupil’s veil lifts without a sound –. An image enters, moving through the body's rigid hush- and in the heart ceases to be. Rainer Maria Rilke: Neue Gedichte, p. 37 English translation by A.F.

Freedom (Latin: libertas; Greek: ἐλευθερία éleutheria) of man lies, according to Rudolf Steiner, in the fact that he can recognise the laws of his actions and base his decisions on them. The starting point of freedom is therefore not freedom of will, but freedom of thought, which man can attain in pure, sensuality-free thinking through moral intuition - not out of blind instincts, drives or desires, nor in the mere observance of external norms, but knowing out of fully conscious love for what he does. Only in this way can he shape his actions self-determinedly, autonomously, in defiance of all external constraints. If he lacks inner freedom, he cannot make use of outer freedom, no matter how generously it is granted to him.

„Read in my "Philosophy of Freedom" what great importance I have attached to not asking about the freedom of the will. It sits below, deep down in the unconscious, and it is nonsense to ask about the freedom of the will; one can only speak of the freedom of thought. I have kept this apart in my "Philosophy of Freedom". The free thoughts must then impulse the will, then man is free.“ (Lit.:GA 235, p. 46ff)

That this is a distant ideal, rarely achieved, can hardly be doubted. Only rarely does man act truly free out of fully conscious insight into the true reasons for his actions. Often he is the slave of his own egoisms or at best follows the external rules that he has been brought up with. But in his I lies the power to approach this ideal step by step in the course of a long development and finally to become a true Spirit of Freedom. That this goal is not attainable in a single earthly life, but requires many repeated earthly lives and the healing power of karma, does not seem implausible when viewed in this light.

According to Rudolf Steiner's ideas on social threefolding, a free spiritual life, based on the individual abilities of man, is to develop today as an independent member of the social organism alongside economic and legal life.

„The spiritual member in the threefold social organism comprises science, art, religion, the entire educational system and the judicial administration of justice. All these spiritual-cultural factors can only fulfil their task and fertilise social life in the right way in complete freedom from state intervention. Spiritual life, culture, must develop out of the free co-operation of all spiritual-creative individual personalities and give itself its own administrative bodies.“ (Lit.:GA 24, p. 473)

Eleutheria

The Greek term Éleutheria (Greek: ἐλευθερία) probably derives from Greek ἐλευ éleu, which roughly means: "to reach a beloved goal" (to be able to), quite in the sense of an external (sea) journey that one must accomplish and thereby develop one's powers and abilities in order to reach the desired, beloved goal, as classically described by Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey. Éleutheria was also an epithet of the goddess Artemis, who was worshipped in this form especially in the city of Myra in Lycia in Asia Minor. In Roman mythology, the goddess Libertas corresponds to her, for whom the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) in New York City also stands.

Freedom of thought and moral autonomy

„The point is that we have developed freedom firstly in thought. The source of freedom arises in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that in his thought he is a free being.“ (Lit.:GA 235, p. 54)

Consciousness of the regularities of one's own actions is a particular case of cognition in general, but when cognition is directed towards the conscious activity of the I, this regularity no longer lies outside the cognized object, but is content of the I itself, conceived in living activity, which brings forth these laws from itself and from insight into the circumstances. The perceiver and the perceived, subject and object, fall into one, become identical, and thus we are no longer governed by moral commandments and laws imposed from without, nor by instinctive modes of action imposed from within, but we absorb the former into our own being, or we clarify what the latter demand of us and only carry out that which we command ourselves, i.e. that which we ourselves have raised to conscious motives of action.

„Truly our actions are, after all, only those in which we completely set aside the concept of duty and solely allow individuality to rule.“ (Lit.:GA 38, p. 143)

„An action is felt to be free in so far as the reasons for it spring from the ideal part of my individual being; every other part of an action, whether it is carried out under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation of moral standard, is felt to be unfree.

Man is free in so far as he is able to obey himself in every moment of his life. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called a free one in this sense.“ (Lit.:GA 4, p. 164)

Thus, in Steiner's sense, moral autonomy, ethical individualism and a thoroughgoing tolerance in the interplay of man, society and the world are established. The prerequisite for this is to love what one does out of insight, i.e. to identify oneself in free devotion with what one is doing while respecting social and natural conditions. From this follows the fundamental maxim of free people, which Rudolf Steiner formulated in his “Philosophy of Freedom”:

„To live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other’s will, is the fundamental maxim of free men.“ (Lit.:GA 4, p. 166)

Rudolf Steiner offered an in-depth presentation of his thoughts on freedom in his fundamental philosophical writings at the beginning of his public literary activity in "The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception" (CW 2), "Truth and Knowledge" (CW 3), and in "The Philosophy of Freedom" (CW 4), and later -- after decades of experience gained through dealing with the path of knowledge conceived in his early works and after the realisation of the idea of freedom in regard to the forces of consciousness within the world-view systems and the increasing universality of individual thought in humanity had undergone a long development -- in his writing "The Riddles of Philosophy" (CW 18).

„Those who study my book, ‘Philosophy of Freedom’, will find, however, that I was compelled to speak not of a freedom of the will at first, but of the freedom which is experienced in thought, namely, in thought free from sensuality, in pure thought, in that thought which consciously emerges in the human soul as an ethical, as a moral ideal, and which attains that strength which can have a motivating effect on the will of man. We can speak of human freedom when we speak of those human actions which are shaped by man’s free thinking, when the human being, through a moral self-education, comes to the point at which instincts, drives, emotions, his temperament do not influence him to an action, but only the devoted love for an action. In this devoted love for an action can develop that which arises from the ideal strength of pure moral thought. This is a real free action.“ (Lit.:GA 79, p. 128)

In order to make it clear that human thinking is an outright pole of freedom, which Steiner already wrote in the “Philosophy of Freedom”, Joseph Beuys once put forward the following formula: Thinking = Knowledge = Freedom

Freedom and intellectualism

Through intellectualism our spiritual being is deadened; however, it is precisely through this that we are given the possibility of freedom. The intellect is not a reality but a mere image and therefore cannot compel us. By creatively transforming this image and shaping the moral impulses that guide our actions, in complete freedom in our thinking, we thereby realise our very own spiritual being.

„Man had to become intellectualistic so that he could become free. Man loses his spiritual being in intellectualism, for he can carry nothing from intellectualism through the gates of death. However, he acquires freedom through intellectualism, and what he thus acquires in freedom he can then carry through the gates of death.

Man may therefore think as much as he likes in a purely intellectualistic way - none of it passes through the gate of death. Only when man uses his thinking in order to live it out in free actions, does so much, as it were, of the spiritual-soul substance which makes him a being and not mere knowledge pass with him, from his experiences of freedom, through the gate of death. In thinking, our human being is taken from us through intellectualism in order to let us attain freedom. What we experience in freedom is then given to us again as human being. Intellectualism kills us, but it also revives us. It resurrects us as a completely transformed being by making us free human beings.“ (Lit.:GA 207, p. 170)

„We can clearly point to the first third of the 15th century: that is when this intellectualism first emerged with all clarity. In former times, even when people were thinking so-called scientifically, they thought much more in images which contained the growth forces of things themselves, not in abstract concepts, as we must do today as a matter of course. Now, these abstract concepts which educate us inwardly to pure thinking, about which I have spoken in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom’, these abstract concepts, they make it possible for us to become free beings. When people could not yet think in abstractions, the entire state of their souls was determined, dependent. People can only develop freely after they are inwardly determined by nothing, after the moral impulses -- you can read about this in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ -- can be grasped in pure thought. Pure thoughts, however, are not reality, they are images. Images cannot compel us, we ourselves must determine our actions; images have nothing compelling about them. Mankind has developed towards abstract thought on the one hand and towards freedom on the other. I have often described this from other points of view.

How was it for mankind before he had advanced to grasp abstract thought in earthly life, to come to freedom in earthly life through the same faculty with which he can grasp abstract thought? Humanity did not grasp abstract thoughts in life on earth between birth and death; even in ancient Greece this was not yet possible, let alone in earlier times. Humanity thought in images and was not equipped with the inner consciousness of freedom that has arisen with the onset of pure, that is, abstract thought. Abstract thought leaves us cold. That which abstract thought gives us in the way of moral ability, that is what warms us in the most intensive sense, for that represents in the highest sense our human dignity.

What was it like before abstract thought with its accompaniment of freedom came over humanity? Well, as you know, when man passes through the gates of death, in the first days after he has left his physical body, he still has the etheric body with him, and he has spread out before him a comprehensive review, not in detailed paintings, but in harmonising universal images, the whole course of life he has gone through, as far back as he remembers. The newly deceased has his life tableau spread out before him for several days as a life-containing image. Yes, my dear friends, that is how it is today. In those times when people had picture consciousness here on earth, they had spread out before them after death what mankind of today experiences -- the rational, the logical comprehension of the world -- that which they did not have between birth and death. This is something that leads us in the most eminent sense into the understanding of the human being. That which the human being of an older historical epoch, not only of prehistoric times, had only after death: a brief retrospect in abstract concepts and the impulse of freedom which was left for him in life between death and a new birth, that has pressed itself into earthly life during the development of humanity. It belongs to one of the mysteries of existence that the supersensible continually presses its way into the sensible. What is extended throughout earthly life today, the ability of abstraction and freedom, was something that came into human possession for an older humanity only during this retrospective view after death, whereas today man has rationality, intellectuality and freedom during his earthly life between birth and death, and therefore a mere picture retrospective after death. This is how things pass into each other. The real concrete-supersensible continually pushes itself into the sensory.“ (Lit.:GA 257, p. 43f)

Appearance and reality

We can only attain freedom because during our life on earth we live with our daytime consciousness in a world of mere appearance.

„If we direct our senses out into our world environment between birth and death, then the world presents itself to us as appearance, as semblance [...]

In the present age, however, if, between birth and death, man did not perceive the world as appearance, if he could not experience appearance, he could not be free. The development of freedom is only possible in the world of appearance. I hinted at this in my book "On the Riddle of Man" by pointing out that the world we experience can actually be compared to the images that look back at us from a mirror. These images that look at us from a mirror cannot force anything upon us; for they are only images, they are appearances. And so, that which man has as a world of perception is also appearance.

Man is by no means completely caught up in the appearance of the world. He is only spun into an illusory world with his perception, which fills his waking consciousness. But when man looks at his instincts, at his passions, at his temperaments, at all that surges up out of the human being, without being able to bring it to clear conceptions, at least to alert conceptions, then all this is not illusion. It is indeed reality, but a reality that does not tread before man's present consciousness. Man lives between birth and death in a true world which he does not know, but one which is never predisposed to give him real freedom. Instincts that make him unfree can be implanted in him, inner necessities can be brought forth, but never ever can it let man experience freedom. Freedom can only be experienced within a world of images, of appearances. And we must, by waking up, enter into a life of illusory perception, so that freedom can develop there.“ (Lit.:GA 207, p. 172f)

It is initially different in the life between death and new birth. There man encounters the reality of the spiritual world and is thereby captured by its necessity. But the freedom he has acquired in earthly life he can carry as his own being through the gate of death and assert in the world beyond.

„Life in appearance is really only granted to him between birth and death. Today, man does not come to live in appearance between death and a new birth. He is, as it were, captured by necessity when he passes through death [...].

This is the development into which man entered in the middle of the 15th century. For him, the divine-spiritual worlds have disappeared from appearance on earth. In the time between death and a new birth, however, these divine-spiritual worlds take him captive so much that he cannot preserve his independence in relation to them. Only, I said, when man really develops freedom here, that is, when he engages his whole being for the illusory life, is it possible for him to also carry his own being through the gate of death.“ (Lit.:GA 207, p. 174f)

If the experience of after-death necessity has too strong an effect on one’s next life on earth, a danger arises, one in which present humanity is actually suspended:

„It [humanity] cannot quite settle into the mere world of phenomena, into the world of appearances. Above all, it cannot settle into this world of appearances with its inner life. It wants to surrender itself to necessity, to inner necessity, to instincts, drives, passions. Today we see little realised of that which emerges from the free impulsiveness of pure thought. But as much as man lacks freedom here in life between birth and death, just as much unfreedom, necessity in perception, comes over him with hypnotising compulsion between death and new birth. So that man is threatened with the danger of not being able to take his own being with him when passing through the gates of death, but in the world of perception not living into something free, but rather into something which causes him to submerge himself in compulsory relations, which makes him as if frozen in the outer world.“ (Lit.:GA 207, p. 178)

Technology and freedom

„In the machine, man has surrounded himself with something transparent but alien to him. He has linked his life to this stranger. Cold stands the machine there and far from man, a triumph of ‘secured’ knowledge; next to it stands man himself, darkness before him, when he looks into himself with this knowledge.

And yet: humanity had to educate itself to look into the transparent dead if it was to become fully awake. It needs the pictorial knowledge of that which is alien to its own being in order to be awake. For all preceding knowledge is co-determined out of the darkness of man's own nature; it only becomes clear before the soul when the human soul becomes a mere mirror which only creates images of that which is alien to man. Previously, when man spoke of knowledge, he had in his soul instinct, the contents of his own nature, which as such could not be clear. His ideas were interspersed with being; but they were not clear. - The images of lifeless being are clear. Now, however, man has in these images not only the revelation of the inanimate, but also inner experiences. Images, by their own nature, cannot cause anything. They are powerless. If man experiences his moral impulses in the realm of the pictorial in the same way he has acquired them in lifeless nature, he then rises to freedom. For images cannot determine the will as drives, passions or instincts can. Only the age that has developed mathematic-like pictorial thinking through that which is dead can guide man to freedom.

Cold technology gives human thinking a character that leads to freedom. Between levers, wheels and motors lives only a dead spirit; but in this realm of the dead the free human soul awakens. It must awaken the spirit in itself which before was, more or less, only dreaming when it solely animated nature. Dreaming becomes conscious thinking in the coldness of the machine.“ (Lit.:GA 36, p. 84f)

The experience of freedom in the context of imagination, inspiration and intuition

„In every experience of freedom three things are interwoven. They appear as a unity at the moment when the experience takes place, but the subsequent course of life makes one conscious of them separately. One experiences what one has to do as an inner image that rises before one in free moral imaginative activity. What one has decided to do appears as a true imagination for one must find it worth loving. The second element contained in the unified experience is the impulse that one is admonished by higher powers to follow what is germinating within. <Do it> say the inner voices, and the awareness of them is a true inspiration. But also a third element is interwoven into the unified experience. Through the deed, one places oneself in an external environment of destiny into which one would never have entered without the freedom experience. One now encounters different people, is led to different places, by the fact that the inner intuitively grasped now becomes the fateful environment approaching from the outside. The situation of a true intuition arises." "You see," Rudolf Steiner continued, "these three interwoven experiences have subsequently separated, --have become conscious in isolation, so that imagination and inspiration and intuition have become conscious acts of cognition.“ (Lit.: Contributions 49, p. 30)

Literature

• Jan-Christoph Heilinger: Naturgeschichte der Freiheit, Berlin 2007 academia.edu
• Geert Keil: Willensfreiheit, 3. Auflage, De Gruyter, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3110533453, ASIN B015N8BAAW
• Geert Keil: Willensfreiheit und Determinismus, zweite, überarb. Auflage, Reclam, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3150203293
• Anna Seemüller (Hrsg.), Tanja Gabriele Baudson (Hrsg.), Martin Dresler (Hrsg.): Freiheit. Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen, S. Hirzel Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-7776-2199-9
• Christoph J. Hueck: Evolution im Doppelstrom der Zeit, Vlg. am Goetheanum, Dornach 2012
• Clemens Horvat: Die Paulus-Briefe und Rudolf Steiners Philosophie der Freiheit, 2. Auflage, Books on Demand 2019, ISBN 978-3748141877, eBook ASIN B07W4LSC73
• Clemens Horvat: Die Wirklichkeit der Freiheit: Zu den erkenntniswissenschaftlichen und christologischen Grundlagen der Anthroposophie, 5. Auflage, Books on Demand 2017, ISBN 978-3743137776, eBook ASIN B06XPKVVXP
• Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, GA 1 (1987), ISBN 3-7274-0011-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Philosophie der Freiheit, GA 4 (1978) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Rätsel der Philosophie, GA 18 (1985) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Drei Schritte der Anthroposophie. Philosophie – Kosmologie – Religion, GA 25 (1999), ISBN 3-7274-0252-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26 (1998), ISBN 3-7274-0260-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Der Goetheanumgedanke inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart, GA 36 (1961), ISBN 3-7274-0360-8 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Briefe Band I: 1881 – 1890, GA 38 (1985), ISBN 3-7274-0380-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Wirklichkeit der höheren Welten, GA 79 (1988), ISBN 3-7274-0790-5 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Grundelemente der Esoterik, GA 93a (1987)
• Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Hierarchien und ihre Widerspiegelung in der physischen Welt, GA 110 (1991), ISBN 3-7274-1100-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Von Jesus zu Christus, GA 131 (1988), ISBN 3-7274-1310-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Welt des Geistes und ihr Hereinragen in das physische Dasein, GA 150 (1980), ISBN 3-7274-1500-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Verbindung zwischen Lebenden und Toten, GA 168, Dornach 1995
• Rudolf Steiner: Geschichtliche Notwendigkeit und Freiheit. Schicksalseinwirkungen aus der Welt der Toten, GA 179 (1977)
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Brücke zwischen der Weltgeistigkeit und dem Physischen des Menschen, GA 202 (1993), ISBN 3-7274-2020-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie – Erster Teil, GA 207 (1990), ISBN 3-7274-2070-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Philosophie, Kosmologie und Religion in der Anthroposophie, GA 215 (1980), ISBN 3-7274-2152-5 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Esoterische Betrachtungen karmischer Zusammenhänge. Erster Band, GA 235 (1994), ISBN 3-7274-2350-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Gemeinschaftsbildung, GA 257 (1989), ISBN 3-7274-2570-9 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Das Zusammenwirken von Ärzten und Seelsorgern, GA 318 (1994), ISBN 3-7274-3181-4 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Gedankenfreiheit und soziale Kräfte, GA 333 (1985), ISBN 3-7274-3330-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, Heft 49/50 Beiträge (Contributions) 49

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.