Freedom

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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)

Literature
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.
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