About the Work
The Philosophy of Freedom — also rendered in English as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity — is a work of philosophy by Rudolf Steiner, written, by his own account in the preface to the revised edition, some twenty-five years before that preface was composed. It is not a treatise of spiritual revelation but a work of foundational philosophy: Steiner explicitly says that in writing it he did not want to give a description of the results of spiritual research, but wanted first to build the foundation upon which such results can rest. The book contains no specialized spiritual-scientific findings; what it does contain, he holds, is indispensable to anyone striving for certainty in such knowledge. It is addressed to two root questions of human soul life, and it proceeds by way of careful, unprejudiced examination of ordinary experience rather than by appeal to authority or to esoteric experience.
The work is written in the first person and in a deliberately plain register. Steiner notes that he did not use terms such as “I,” “spirit,” “world,” and “nature” in the precise psychological or philosophical sense, because everyday consciousness lacks the sharp distinctions of scholarship; his concern is how consciousness expresses itself in every moment, not how scholarship has interpreted it. He anticipates the objection that his expositions do not conform to “the present-day position of scholarship,” and replies that he has concerned himself not with scholarship but with a simple description of what everyone experiences in his own consciousness. The book is thus presented as a work of introspection and conceptual clarification, not of learned citation.
The 1918 preface records that the book had been out of print for many years, and that Steiner hesitated long before preparing a new edition, asking himself whether he had to come to terms with the numerous philosophical views that had come to light since the first edition. The demands of his purely spiritual-scientific research prevented him from doing this as fully as he would have wished. After the most thorough possible survey of current philosophical work, he convinced himself that such a task, tempting as it was, is not something to be taken up in the context of what is meant to be said through this book; what seemed necessary to say about more recent philosophical directions from the standpoint of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity may be found in the second volume of his Riddles of Philosophy. He republished the content in virtually unchanged form, making only some additions to a number of chapters and changing wording only where what he wanted to say a quarter of a century earlier seemed to him awkwardly expressed. He insists that only someone with ill will could be moved by these changes to say he has changed his basic conviction.
Steiner describes the book as occupying, on one hand, a position completely separate from his actual spiritual-scientific writings, and on the other hand, as most closely bound up with them. Its aim is to show how an unbiased consideration, extending solely to the two questions that lay the foundation for all knowing activity, leads to the view that the human being lives in the midst of a true spiritual world. It strives to justify a knowledge of the spiritual realm before entry into spiritual experience — undertaken so that one needs nowhere to cast a sidelong glance at the experiences put forward by him later. What is said can also be acceptable to those who want nothing to do with the results of his spiritual-scientific research, and it can be important for a person drawn to those results.
Context
The book arises from a specific intellectual situation, which its opening chapter describes with some vividness. The question of whether man is, in his thinking and doing, a spiritually free being, or whether he stands under the compulsion of an iron necessity of purely natural lawfulness, has attracted an extraordinary amount of keen thought. The idea of freedom of the human will has found warm adherents and stubborn opponents in great number. Some, in moral fervor, pronounce anyone narrow-minded who can deny so evident a fact as inner freedom; others see it as eminently unscientific to believe that the lawfulness of nature is interrupted in the sphere of human action and thinking. One and the same thing is pronounced just as often the most prized possession of mankind as the worst illusion. Endless ingenuity has been expended to explain how human freedom can be compatible with the working of nature, to which man also belongs; no less pains have been taken from another side to make comprehensible how such a delusion could have arisen.
Steiner’s preface frames the book’s two root questions as questions that come before the soul naturally, in a particular disposition, rather than being called forth by artificial spinning out of thoughts. The first is whether a possibility exists of viewing the being of man such that this view proves to be a support for everything else approaching him through experience and science — things he feels cannot support themselves and can be driven by doubt and critical judgment into uncertainty. The second is whether man, as a being who wants and wills, is justified in considering himself free, or whether this inner freedom is a mere illusion arising because he does not see the threads of necessity upon which his willing depends, just as any happening in nature does. Steiner says the soul would lack something of what it should be if it never once saw itself placed, with the greatest possible earnestness in questioning, before the two possibilities: freedom or necessity of the will.
The book’s argumentative context is the philosophical landscape of its time and of the preceding century. It engages with the naive standpoint of everyday consciousness, with the critical idealism that descends from Kant, with the transcendental realism of Eduard von Hartmann, with the illusionism that reduces the world to a dream, with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will, with Herbert Spencer’s account of explanation, with the physiological psychology of Ziehen and the specific sense energies of J. Müller, and with the older landmarks of Descartes, Schelling, and Hegel. It also takes up the popular scientific literature of the day — P. Ree’s The Illusion of Free Will, Du Bois-Reymond’s reflections on the incomprehensibility of consciousness arising from atoms, O. Liebmann’s analysis of reality, Volkelt’s book on Kant’s epistemology, and Weygandt’s study of how dreams arise. The book is thus a contribution to a live debate, and its author positions it as a way through that debate rather than as a survey of it.
Steiner also records a personal dimension of the context. He says that as he wrote the content twenty-five years earlier, he thought about it in a certain way, and that he must write such sentences today also. He notes that he was reproached by someone highly esteemed by him for remaining, in his consideration of thinking, at a naive realism of thinking — regarding the real world and the mentally pictured world as one. He believes he has shown that the validity of this “naive realism” for thinking necessarily follows from an unprejudiced observation of thinking, and that the naive realism otherwise not valid is overcome through knowledge of the true being of thinking. This exchange situates the book within a continuing conversation about its central claim.
Structure of the Book
The book opens with a preface to the revised edition, in which Steiner sets out the two root questions of human soul life that orient the whole work, explains his decision to republish the content virtually unchanged, and clarifies the relation of the book to his later spiritual-scientific writings. He states that the view presented can, once gained, become part of active soul life; no theoretical answer is given that merely carries a conviction preserved by memory, for the way of picturing things underlying the book would make such an answer only a seeming one. Instead, a region of experience of the soul is indicated in which, through the soul’s own inner activity, the question is answered anew in a living way at any moment the human being needs it.
The body of the work begins with the chapter “Conscious Human Action,” which poses the question of freedom and necessity and immediately complicates it. It examines the formulation that freedom means being able to do what one wants, and the rival formulation that one can do what one wants but cannot want what one wants, since wanting is determined by motives. It considers Robert Hamerling’s sharp statement of this thought in his Atomistic Theory of Will, and it interrogates the concept of motive, arguing that the concept of motive is inseparably linked to the concept of wanting, and that without a determining motive the will is an empty capability, becoming active and real only through motive. It is therefore correct that the human will is not “free” insofar as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive — yet it is absurd, given this “unfreedom,” to speak of a conceivable “freedom” that would amount to wanting what one does not want.
From this critique the chapter turns to what distinguishes man from all other organic beings: rational thinking. It argues that searching for analogies in the animal kingdom to elucidate human freedom is fruitless, and it examines P. Ree’s book The Illusion of Free Will as an example of the misunderstandings this produces. Ree’s illustration of the stone and the donkey — that the stone’s motion is by necessity but the donkey’s willing is not, because the causes moving the stone are external and visible while those by which the donkey wills are internal and invisible, with the donkey’s skull between us and their place of activity — is used to show that many fight against freedom without knowing what freedom is. The chapter insists that an action performed without knowing why cannot be free, and that the question about the nature of human action presupposes the question about the origin of thinking. It argues that the way to the heart is through the head: love, compassion, and patriotism are mainsprings not reducible to cold intellect concepts, but heart and Gemut do not create what moves us; they presuppose it and take it into their domain. Compassion appears in my heart when the mental picture of a person arousing compassion arises in consciousness. Even love, when not mere sex drive, is based on mental pictures of the loved one; the more idealistic these, the more blissful the love.
The next movement of the book takes up “The Fundamental Desire for Knowledge,” opening with a Goethe epigraph from Faust — “Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast” — and arguing that man is not whole in his nature, that he has torn himself from nature and must nevertheless have carried something of nature into his own being. Dualism fails here, because it treats man’s inner being as a spiritual entity wholly foreign to nature and tries to attach it onto nature, so it cannot find the connecting link. We can find nature outside us only when we first know it within us. The author rejects speculation about nature-spirit interaction, proposing instead to descend into our own being to find the elements rescued in our flight from nature.
The book then develops its central epistemological analysis under the heading “Thinking in the Service of Apprehending the World.” It examines the observation of a struck billiard ball communicating motion to another, distinguishing the mere observer, who remains without influence and can speak of the second ball’s motion only after it occurs, from the reflecting observer, who forms concepts and adds a second occurrence in the conceptual sphere, dependent on him. It establishes that for given objects we feel compelled to seek concepts standing in definite relationship to what is given, and that we know objects’ concepts are not given with the objects. It argues that observation and thinking are the two starting points for all man’s spiritual striving, and that common sense and intricate scientific research rest on these two pillars. It notes that philosophers started from polarities — idea and reality, subject and object, phenomenon and thing-in-itself, “I” and not-“I,” idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, conscious and unconscious — but that observation and thinking must precede all these.
A crucial turn in the book’s structure is the argument that thinking as an object of observation differs essentially from all else. Observing a table or tree occurs as soon as they arise on my horizon; my thinking about them I do not observe at the same time. I must transfer myself outside my own activity to observe my thinking about the table. Observing objects and thinking about them is commonplace; observation of thinking is an exceptional state. The book argues that observing thinking is the most important observation a person can make, available to every normally developed human being with good will. In observing thinking, one does not confront a foreign object but one’s own activity; one knows how it comes about and sees into its relationships and interconnections. This yields a firm point from which to seek explanation of other world phenomena.
The book then engages Descartes, Schelling, Pascal, and the objection that consciousness must precede thinking, and it develops the claim that thinking is beyond subject and object, forming these two concepts as much as all others. It argues that the human being is not the first member of creation but its last, and that the philosopher must regard the absolute last as first; this absolute last is thinking. It illustrates this with the example of geology, which gained firm ground only when it started from processes presently at work and drew conclusions about the past, whereas philosophy hovers in the air when assuming atoms, motion, matter, will, or the unconscious.
From thinking the book passes to concepts and ideas, arguing that concepts are not isolated but join into a lawful whole, that ideas are not qualitatively different from concepts but only fuller, more saturated, and wider in scope, and that the author takes thinking, not concepts and ideas, as his starting point, since concepts and ideas presuppose thinking. This is expressly stated as his difference with Hegel, who posits the concept as primary and original. The book examines Herbert Spencer’s account of explanation and argues that the concepts “cause” and “effect” can never be gained through mere observation, no matter how many instances; observation calls forth thinking, and thinking first shows the way to join one experience to another. It then passes from thinking to the being who thinks, characterizing human consciousness as the stage where concept and observation meet and become joined, and as the mediator between thinking and observation.
The book next takes up perception and the inner and outer distinction, examining the view that we perceive only our mental pictures and not objects. It contrasts Berkeley with Kant, noting that Berkeley maintains the subjective nature of the content of perception but does not say we can know only our mental pictures, since he holds there are no objects outside mental picturing, whereas the now-predominating Kantian view limits our knowledge to mental pictures not because it is convinced nothing exists apart from them, but because it believes we are so organized that we can experience only changes of our own self. It examines the thought-operation behind the claim that our knowledge extends to nothing beyond our mental pictures, and it presents the physiological and psychological considerations — the transformation of stimuli, the specific sense energies of J. Müller, the assembling of single sensations into physical objects by the soul — that seem to support it.
The book then argues that critical idealism is wholly unfit to grasp the relationship between perception and mental picture, and that it is impossible, by investigating the content of observation, to prove perceptions are mental pictures. It examines the relation of naive realism to critical idealism through the analogy of a house whose ground floor collapses when a second floor is added, and it considers the standpoints of absolute illusionism and transcendental realism, the latter associated with Eduard von Hartmann. It raises the question of how the “I” brings forth the world of mental pictures out of itself, and it compares the philosopher’s situation to that of a dreamer who wakes: the dream event ceases to interest me, and attention turns to the physiological and psychological processes underlying it.
The book then develops the argument that thinking alone provides world unity, refuting the notion that concepts are private creations. It identifies the difficult preconception that each person creates their own concepts, so that the concept of a triangle grasped by one head differs from that grasped by a neighbor, and it calls overcoming this preconception a fundamental requirement of philosophical thinking. It argues that in thinking we are given the element that fuses our particular individuality into one whole with the cosmos; insofar as we experience, feel, and perceive, we are separate beings; insofar as we think, we are the all-one being that permeates all. It argues that a perception is nothing finished or closed off, but one side of total reality; the other side is the concept. The act of knowledge is the synthesis of perception and concept, and perception and concept together first constitute the entire thing. It examines and criticizes Schopenhauer’s attempt to find the thing-in-itself in the will, and it argues that most deeply rooted in the naive consciousness of mankind is the opinion that thinking is abstract, without any concrete content — an opinion the book sets out to dismantle.
The book then returns to the naive standpoint and its undoing by self-reflection, describing how a person begins to tell himself that he can have no relationship to any thing or occurrence unless a mental picture arises in him, and how this leads to the opinion that he experiences only his mental pictures. It argues that one escapes this perplexity only by noticing that there is something within what a person can experience and perceive, inside and outside himself, that absolutely cannot suffer the fate of having the mental picture interpose itself between the occurrence and the contemplating human being — and this is thinking. It then takes up the human individuality, arguing that we are not the outer things but belong, with them, to one and the same world; the section of the world I perceive as my subject is swept through by the stream of general world happening. It addresses the so-called physiological proofs for the subjectivity of our perceptions, arguing that they show only that I perceive an electrical discharge or a pressure and then a certain quality of light, or a sound, perhaps a smell — not that the whole process would be absent without organs of perception.
The book then argues that any existence posited outside the region of perception and concept belongs to unjustified hypotheses, and that the “thing-in-itself” falls in this category. It cites Du Bois-Reymond on the incomprehensibility of how atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen could produce consciousness through their interaction, and it argues that this conclusion typifies the trend of isolating position and motion from the rich world of perceptions, carrying them over to an imagined world of atoms, and then being astonished that concrete life cannot be unfolded from a self-made principle borrowed from perception. It argues that the dualist feels compelled to set insurmountable barriers before our ability to know, while the monist knows everything needed to explain a phenomenon lies within the sphere of that phenomenon. It argues that from the concept of the activity of knowing, limits to knowledge cannot be spoken of; knowing is not a general world concern but a business the human being settles with himself. It argues that dualism mistakenly transfers the object-subject antithesis — valid only within perception — onto imaginary entities beyond perception, dividing perception and concept into four: the object-in-itself, the subject’s perception of objects, the subject, and the concept relating perception to the object-in-itself.
Inside the Book
The Two Root Questions of the Soul
Steiner opens the 1918 preface by framing the whole book around two questions that arise naturally in the life of the soul rather than from artificial speculation. The first asks whether we can so view the being of man that this view becomes a support for everything else that comes to us through experience and science—things that cannot sustain themselves and can be driven into doubt. The second asks whether man, as a being who wills, is justified in considering himself free, or whether this inner freedom is merely an illusion born of not seeing the threads of necessity on which his willing depends. The soul, Steiner says, would lack something of what it should be if it never once stood with full earnestness before the alternatives of freedom or necessity. His aim is to show that the second question depends on the standpoint one can take toward the first, and that the idea of freedom is fully justified once the region of soul is found in which free willing can unfold.
The answer offered is not a fixed theoretical formula to be preserved by memory, which for this way of picturing things would be only a seeming answer. Instead, a region of soul experience is indicated in which the question is answered anew, in living fashion, whenever the human being needs it. Steiner notes that he thought and wrote this way twenty-five years earlier and would write the same sentences today. He deliberately confined himself then to what connects most closely with the two root questions, and did not describe results of spiritual research; the book builds the foundation on which such results can rest, and should be acceptable even to those who reject his later spiritual-scientific findings. After twenty-five years he republished the content virtually unchanged, adding amplifications only where misconceptions made them necessary and revising only awkward phrasing—no one with good will could claim he altered his basic conviction. He long hesitated over a new edition, wondering whether he must reckon with philosophical views that had appeared since, but concluded that such a reckoning did not belong here; what he had to say about more recent directions appears in the second volume of Riddles of Philosophy. The preface is dated April 1918.
Conscious Human Action
The chapter proper begins with its central question: is man, in thinking and doing, a spiritually free being, or does he stand under the compulsion of an iron necessity of purely natural lawfulness? Few questions have drawn so much keen thought. The idea of freedom has had warm adherents and stubborn opponents alike: some pronounce anyone narrow-minded who denies so evident a fact as inner freedom, while others find it eminently unscientific to believe that natural lawfulness is interrupted in human action. The same thing is called mankind’s most prized possession and its worst illusion. Endless ingenuity has gone into showing how freedom can be compatible with nature, and equal pains into explaining how the delusion could arise.
The Meaning of Freedom and the Motive-Determinism Critique
A second formulation of the question holds that being free means not being able to want what one wants, but being able to do what one wants. Robert Hamerling, in his Atomistic Theory of Will, sharply characterizes this: man can do what he wants but cannot want what he wants, since his wanting is determined by motives. The text interrogates this: freedom of will would then mean wanting something without reason or motive—but wanting without reason would be wanting without wanting it. Motive is inseparably linked to willing; without a determining motive the will is an empty capability, becoming real only through motive. It is therefore correct that the will is not free insofar as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive—yet it is absurd, given this unfreedom, to speak of a conceivable freedom amounting to wanting what one does not want.
Only motives in general are discussed here, without distinguishing unconscious from conscious ones. If a motive compels me because it proves strongest, thinking about inner freedom ceases to make sense. The point is not whether, once a motive has worked upon me, I can do something, but whether there are only such motives working with compelling necessity. If a motive forced upon me by character and environment shows itself to my thinking as irrational, I would even have to be glad if I could not do what I want. The main point is not whether I can carry out a decision, but how the decision arises in me.
Thinking as What Distinguishes Man
What distinguishes man from all other organic beings is rational thinking; activity he shares with other organisms. Searching the animal kingdom for analogies to human freedom is fruitless, though modern natural science loves such analogies. P. Ree’s The Illusion of Free Will (1885) illustrates the misunderstanding: the stone’s motion seems necessary but the donkey’s willing does not, because the causes moving the stone are external and visible while those by which the donkey wills are hidden behind its skull. Ree has no inkling that there are human actions for which the conscious motive lies between us and the action. Many fight against freedom without knowing what freedom is.
An action performed without knowing why cannot be free—but how does it stand with action whose reasons are known? This leads to the question of the origin and significance of thinking, without which no concept of knowing anything, including an action, is possible. Hegel rightly says that only with thinking does the soul first become spirit. This does not assert that all action flows from sober intellect; the moment action lifts itself out of purely animal desire-satisfaction, what moves us is always intermixed with thoughts. Love, compassion, patriotism are not reducible to cold intellect concepts—heart and Gemut take such content into their domain, but they do not create it. Compassion arises when the mental picture of a person arousing it appears in consciousness: the way to the heart is through the head. Even love, when not mere sex drive, rests on mental pictures of the loved one; the more idealistic these, the more blissful the love. Love is said to blind us to weaknesses, but it can be grasped the other way—love opens the eye to the loved one’s good qualities, which many pass by unnoticed. The question about the nature of human action presupposes the question about the origin of thinking, to which the author turns first.
The Fundamental Desire for Knowledge
A Goethe epigraph from Faust—”Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast”—expresses something deeply founded in human nature. Man is not whole in his nature; he has torn himself from nature, yet must have carried something of nature into his own being. Dualism fails here, treating man’s inner being as a spiritual entity wholly foreign to nature and unable to find the connecting link. We can find nature outside us only when we first know it within us. The author rejects speculation about nature-spirit interaction, proposing instead to descend into our own being to find the elements rescued in our flight from nature—an exploration that should bring us to say: here we are no longer merely “I,” here lies something more than “I.”
Anticipating the objection that his expositions do not conform to present-day scholarship, he replies that he has concerned himself not with scholarship but with simple description of what everyone experiences in consciousness. He did not use terms like “I,” “spirit,” “world,” “nature” in the precise psychological or philosophical sense, since everyday consciousness lacks scholarship’s sharp distinctions; his concern is how consciousness expresses itself in every moment.
Thinking in the Service of Apprehending the World
Observing a struck billiard ball communicating motion to another, the mere observer remains without influence; the second ball’s direction and velocity are determined by the first’s.
Concepts, Ideas, and the Starting Point of Thinking
Thinking gives rise to concepts and ideas, though a concept itself can never be captured in words — words merely make us aware that we hold a concept. When we observe a tree, thinking reacts to the observation and an ideal counterpart joins the object; when the object vanishes from sight, that counterpart remains as its concept. As experience widens, concepts accumulate and are not isolated but join into a lawful whole: the concept “organism” links itself to “lawful development” and “growth,” and all concepts of lions merge into the overall concept “lion,” each finding its place in a united system. Ideas differ from concepts only in being fuller and wider in scope. Steiner insists he takes thinking, not concepts and ideas, as his starting point, since these presuppose thinking — and so the self-sustaining nature of thinking cannot simply be transferred to concepts. This is expressly his difference with Hegel, who posits the concept as primary and original. That concepts cannot be gained from observation is evident because the maturing human being forms them only slowly and gradually; they are added to observation.
Spencer’s Partridge and the Concepts Cause and Effect
Herbert Spencer describes a mental process: walking through fields in September, hearing a rustle and seeing herbage agitated, one turns and a partridge flutters into the ditch — curiosity is satisfied, and this is called an explanation, since one has generalized from countless past experiences that disturbances among small stationary bodies accompany the movement of others. Closely viewed, the matter is entirely different. Hearing a sound, I first seek the concept corresponding to this observation, and only this concept takes me beyond the sound; whoever does not reflect further simply hears it and is content. Through reflection it becomes clear I must comprehend a sound as an effect, and only when I join the concept “effect” to the perception am I moved to seek the cause, found as the partridge. Concepts like cause and effect can never be gained through mere observation, no matter how many instances; observation calls forth thinking, and thinking first shows the way to join one experience to another. If a “strictly objective science” demands its content come only from observation, it must simultaneously renounce all thinking, because thinking by its very nature goes beyond what is observed.
Consciousness as the Meeting Place of Concept and Observation
This is the place to pass from thinking to the being who thinks, for through him thinking is joined with observation. Human consciousness is the stage where concept and observation meet and become joined, and is thereby characterized as the mediator between them. Insofar as the human being observes a thing, it appears as given; insofar as he thinks, he appears to himself as active — he considers the thing as object, himself as thinking subject. Focusing thinking on observation gives consciousness of objects; directing thinking upon himself gives self-consciousness, and human consciousness must necessarily be self-conscious because it is thinking consciousness. Yet only with the help of thinking can we designate ourselves as subject and set ourselves over against objects, so thinking must never be considered merely subjective activity. Thinking is beyond subject and object; it forms these two concepts as much as all others. The subject does not think by virtue of being subject, but appears to itself as subject because it is able to think. I must never say my individual subject thinks; rather my subject itself lives by the grace of thinking. This is the basis for the double nature of the human being: he thinks and thereby encompasses himself and the rest of the world, but must by means of thinking at the same time designate himself as an individual standing over and against things.
Pure Observation and the Refutation of Critical Idealism
To ask how the object of observation enters consciousness, we must exclude everything already brought in through thinking, picturing a being with fully developed human intelligence arising out of nothingness and approaching the world. What he would become aware of before bringing thinking into activity is the pure content of observation: the bare aggregate of colors, tones, sensations of pressure, warmth, taste, and smell, along with feelings of pleasure and displeasure. Over against this stands thinking, ready to unfold when a point of attack is found, and experience soon teaches that a point is found. The passage then argues that critical idealism refutes itself by inconsistently treating the perceiving organism as objectively real while reducing perceived objects to mere mental pictures. We perceive the mental picture connected to our self in the same sense as we perceive color or tone connected to other objects; the “outer world” is distinguished from the “inner world” of self-perception. Misconceptions about the relationship of mental picture and object caused the greatest misunderstandings in modern philosophy: the perception of a change in us was pushed forward while the object causing it was lost from view.
Berkeley, Kant, and the Thought-Operation Behind the Claim
This view must not be confused with Berkeley’s, who limits knowledge to mental pictures because he holds there are no objects outside mental picturing — for him the table is no longer present once I cease gazing, and perception arises directly through the power of God. Over against this stands the now-predominating Kantian view, which limits knowledge to mental pictures not because it is convinced nothing exists apart from them, but because it believes we are so organized that we can experience only changes of our own self. Volkelt is quoted declaring that our knowledge extends to nothing beyond our mental pictures, and that all knowledge going beyond them must be presented as doubtful. What is presented as immediate and obvious truth is actually the result of a thought-operation: the naive person believes perceived objects are present outside consciousness, while physics, physiology, and psychology seem to teach that our organization is necessary for perceptions. Eduard von Hartmann characterized this train of thought as the one that must convince us we have direct knowledge only of mental pictures.
Specific Sense Energies and the Transformation of Stimuli
The doctrine of J. Müller about specific sense energies complements these reflections: each sense organ responds to all outer stimuli in one specific way only, so that if the optic nerve is acted upon, a perception of light arises whether the stimulus is light, mechanical pressure, or electric current. Physiology shows that direct knowledge of what objects cause within sense organs is out of the question, since already in the sense organs the effects of outer motion are transformed manifoldly, most distinctly with eye and ear. From the peripheral nerve end the already changed stimulus is conducted to the brain, where central organs must first be stimulated again, so that what takes place in the brain is connected to the outer occurrence through so many intermediary occurrences that any similarity is inconceivable. What we finally have in consciousness are not brain processes at all but sensations; my sensation of red has absolutely no similarity to the brain process. Sensations are still far from being grouped into things, and this union must be accomplished by the soul itself, which assembles single sensations into physical objects — the brain transmits sight, touch, and hearing sensations individually, and the soul assembles them into the mental picture “trumpet.”
The Activity of Knowing the World
Critical idealism is wholly unfit to grasp the relationship between perception and mental picture, for it cannot distinguish what happens to a perception during the act of perceiving from what must already be present before it is perceived. The section titled “The Activity of Knowing the World” argues that it is impossible, by investigating the content of observation, to prove perceptions are mental pictures. The supposed proof ran: if perception occurs as pictured under naive-realistic assumptions, then we deal only with mental pictures; since consistently pursued naive realism leads to results opposite to its own presuppositions, those presuppositions must be dropped.
The Naive Standpoint and the Rift It Opens
The account begins with the ordinary person who takes himself to stand in direct contact with real things, forming mental pictures of objects and events as he goes. But the moment he reflects on this, his attention is drawn away from the outer world and inward, toward his own life of mental pictures. He begins to tell himself that he can have no relation to any thing or occurrence unless a picture of it arises within him, and from there it is a short step to the conclusion that he experiences only his own pictures, knowing an outer world solely insofar as it is pictured within him. With that step the naive standpoint collapses: the intervening world of images plants itself between his own being and a supposed reality, and he can no longer see through it. Hence the notion of a “thing-in-itself” forever inaccessible to knowledge. So long as one merely contemplates this picture-mediated relation to the world, there is no escape from the configuration — and one cannot simply stay at the naive standpoint without artificially stifling the very desire for knowledge that proves that standpoint untenable. Yet abandoning it while unconsciously keeping its habits of thought breeds a second error: one declares that only mental pictures are experienced and that true realities, the things-in-themselves, lie outside consciousness and somehow produce the pictures within it. Whoever thinks this has merely added another world in thought to the one before him, and would have to begin the whole labor of thinking over again, since this unknown “in-itself” is conceived as standing in exactly the same relation to man as the known thing of the naive standpoint.
Thinking as the Way Out
The perplexity dissolves only when one notices that something within everything a person can experience, inside and outside himself, simply cannot suffer the fate of having a mental picture interpose itself between the occurrence and the contemplating human being — and that something is thinking. With respect to thinking, the human being may remain at the naive standpoint toward reality; if he does not, it is only because he has noticed he must abandon that standpoint elsewhere without realizing that the insight gained there does not apply to thinking. Steiner notes that someone he deeply esteemed reproached him for remaining, in his treatment of thinking, at a naive realism of thinking — treating the real world and the mentally pictured world as one. He holds that the validity of this naive realism for thinking follows necessarily from unprejudiced observation of thinking, and that the naive realism invalid elsewhere is overcome precisely through knowledge of thinking’s true being.
The Human Individuality Within the World Whole
Philosophers locate the chief difficulty of mental pictures in the fact that we are not the outer things, yet our pictures must somehow correspond to them. On closer inspection the difficulty vanishes: we are not the outer things, but we belong with them to one and the same world. The portion of the world I perceive as my subject is swept through by the stream of general world happening. To perception I seem enclosed within my skin, but what is present inside that boundary belongs to the cosmos as a whole. No part of an object need slip into me or stamp itself into my spirit like a seal in wax; the forces at work inside my skin are the same as those outside it. I am therefore really the things — not as perceiving subject, but as a part within the general happening. My perception of the tree exists within the same whole as my “I”; the one world happening calls forth the tree-perception there just as it calls forth the perception of my “I” here. Were I a world creator rather than a world knower, object and subject would originate in a single act, for they determine each other mutually. As knower, I can find what both share — two sides of one existence — only through thinking, which relates them through concepts.
The Physiological Objection to Perception
Hardest to dislodge are the so-called physiological proofs of the subjectivity of perception. Pressure on the skin yields a sensation of pressure; the same pressure can be perceived through the eye as light, through the ear as sound. An electrical discharge is seen as light, heard as sound, felt as impact, smelled as a phosphoric odor. What follows? Only that a certain event is perceived, and that a quality of light, or sound, or smell accompanies it. Without an eye, no light quality would accompany the mechanical concussion; without an organ of hearing, no sound. By what right, then, can one claim that without organs of perception the whole process would not be present?
Hypotheses Beyond Experience and the Dualist’s Barrier
Any existence posited outside the region of perception and concept belongs to unjustified hypotheses, and the “thing-in-itself” falls in this category. A dualistic thinker cannot connect his hypothetically assumed world principle with what is given in experience; such a principle gains content only by borrowing from experience while deceiving itself about doing so — otherwise it is a contentless non-concept wearing only the form of a concept. Du Bois-Reymond is cited: unperceivable atoms of matter, through position and motion, produce sensation and feeling, yet it remains forever incomprehensible how carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms could generate consciousness through their interaction. Position and motion are isolated from the rich world of perceptions, carried over to an imagined world of atoms, and then astonishment arises that concrete life cannot be unfolded from a self-made principle. The dualist feels compelled to set insurmountable barriers before knowledge, while the monist knows that everything needed to explain a phenomenon lies within the sphere of that phenomenon; any hindrance can only be a shortcoming of an individual organization due to time or place, not of the human organization in general. From the concept of the activity of knowing, limits to knowledge cannot be spoken of. Knowing is not a general world concern but a business the human being settles with himself. Things demand no explanation; they exist and affect each other according to laws discoverable through thinking, in inseparable oneness with those laws. The selfhood first grasps only perception, but within its inner being lies the power to find reality’s other part; when it unites both elements for itself, the satisfaction of knowledge is present — the “I” has attained reality again. The preconditions of knowing exist through and for the “I,” which poses its own questions, taking them from thinking, clear and transparent in itself. Unanswerable questions must lack clarity somewhere; it is not the world but we ourselves who pose them. What is unexplained today may be found tomorrow — such barriers are transitory, overcome by the progress of perception and thinking.
Dualism’s Fourfold Division and the Naive Realist
Dualism mistakenly transfers the object-subject antithesis — valid only within perception — onto imaginary entities beyond perception. It divides perception and concept into four: the object-in-itself; the subject’s perception of objects; the subject; and the concept relating perception to the object-in-itself. The object-subject relation is real, a dynamic influence; the real process allegedly falls outside consciousness yet evokes a counter-effect producing perception, which first enters consciousness. Thus the dualist believes his concepts yield only subjective representations, while the objectively real process and the interrelationships of things-in-themselves remain unknowable; the unity-bond among things lies beyond consciousness. Dualism fears reducing the world to an abstract conceptual pattern unless it affirms real relationships besides conceptual ones. The naive realist, by contrast, regards outer-experience objects as realities — grasping with hands and seeing with eyes proves reality. “Nothing exists one cannot perceive” is his first axiom, with its reverse, “Everything perceivable exists.”
The Mainsprings of Willing
The analysis of a willed act continues by distinguishing two elements within it. The mental picture or concept that is immediately present becomes the motive and sets the goal or purpose of the willing; the characterological disposition is what moves a person to direct activity toward that goal. The example is a simple one: the mental picture of taking a walk within the next half hour fixes the goal, but it only becomes a motive when it meets an appropriate disposition—when earlier life has formed pictures about the purposes of walking and the value of health, and when a feeling of pleasure unites with the picture of walking. Characterological disposition is thus determined above all by the life of feeling: whether one feels pleasure or pain regarding a definite mental picture decides whether it becomes a motive for action.
This yields a further distinction. There are possible subjective dispositions fitted to turn particular mental pictures into motives, and there are possible mental pictures capable of influencing the disposition so that willing results. The former are the mainsprings of morality, the latter its goals. To find the mainsprings, one examines the elements composing individual life, and these fall into three levels. The first is perceiving, especially sense perception, where perceiving passes directly into willing without feeling or concept intervening; here the mainspring is drive, as in hunger or sexual need, marked by the immediacy with which a perception activates the will. This can extend to higher senses: an outer happening is perceived and an action follows without reflection or particular feeling—tact or social propriety—and the more often this occurs, the more tact becomes part of one’s characterological disposition.
The second sphere is feeling. Specific feelings connect to perceptions of the outer world and can become mainsprings of action, as when pity arises at the sight of a starving person; shame, pride, sense of honor, modesty, remorse, vengefulness, gratitude, reverence, faithfulness, love, and duty all belong here. The third level is thinking and mental picturing, where mere reflection can make a mental picture or concept into a motive. In life we connect goals of will with recurring perceptions, and experienced people develop pictures of actions carried out in similar cases; these hover as determining models and become part of characterological disposition—practical experience. This passes gradually into purely tactful action when typical pictures unite so firmly with pictures of situations that reflection is skipped and one goes directly from perception into willing.
The highest level of individual life is conceptual thinking without regard to specific perceptual content, where content is determined through pure intuition out of the ideal sphere. Acting under intuitions makes pure thinking the mainspring, and since philosophy calls pure thinking reason, these mainsprings may be called practical reason. Kreyenbuhl is credited with the clearest account, describing them as practical a priori—an impulse to action flowing directly out of intuition. Such an impulse no longer belongs strictly to characterological disposition, since what works is the ideal, universal content of intuition rather than something individual. A real act of will occurs only when a momentary impulse of action, as concept or mental picture, works upon the characterological disposition and becomes the motive of willing.
Motives of morality are mental pictures and concepts. Some ethicists treat feeling as the motive and claim the goal is the greatest pleasure, but pleasure itself cannot become a motive—only a mentally pictured pleasure can, since in the moment of action the feeling is not yet there. The mental picture of one’s own or another’s good is rightly regarded as a motive. Egoism, seeking individual happiness, takes either pure egoism, ruthlessly pursuing one’s own good at others’ cost, or the morality of prudence, promoting others’ good from anticipated indirect benefit or fear of endangering one’s own interests; its content depends on what picture one forms of happiness. A further motive is the purely conceptual content of an action, relating to a system of moral principles felt as moral necessity—submission left to a moral authority such as head of family, state, social custom, church, or divine revelation. Moral autonomy is when the commandment speaks through one’s own inner life, and its expression is conscience. Moral progress occurs when one no longer takes outer or inner authority’s commandment as motive but strives for insight into why a maxim should work—progress from authoritative morality to action out of moral insight. The needs of moral life then include the greatest possible good of all mankind purely for its own sake, cultural progress toward greater perfection, and the realization of individual goals grasped purely intuitively. The highest conceivable principle of morality contains no relation to specific experiences from the beginning, springing from pure intuition and only afterward seeking relation to perception; only when all other determining factors take second place does conceptual intuition come first.
Morality as Natural History, Not Norm
Morality should be understood not as a science of moral norms but as a natural history of morality. Laws discovered this way relate to human action as natural laws relate to phenomena, yet they are not identical with the impulses behind our actions. To grasp how action springs from willing, one must examine the relationship of willing to action, especially where that relationship is determining. Reflecting later, one can discover which maxims were involved; while acting, the maxim moves the agent insofar as it lives in him intuitively, bound up with his love for the object he wants to realize. The agent asks no person or rule whether he ought to carry out the action, but carries it out as soon as he has grasped its idea—only then is it truly his action. Someone acting only because he acknowledges moral norms is merely an executor, a higher kind of automaton: throw a stimulus into his consciousness and the cogwheels of his principles turn lawfully to produce a Christian, humane, selfless, or culturally progressive action. Only when following love for the object does the self act—not from a master, outer authority, or so-called inner voice, but from love for the action. One does not intellectually test whether the action is good or evil but carries it out because one loves it; it is good when intuition imbued with love stands rightly within the intuitively experienceable world configuration, evil when not. One does not ask how another would act but acts as this specific individuality sees itself moved to will.
Defenders of general moral norms object that if everyone lived out what is in him, good conduct and criminal behavior would be indistinguishable, and any knavery would have equal right to express itself. The reply is that whoever wants to know the nature of human willing must distinguish the path bringing willing up to a certain level of development from the particular nature it acquires nearing this goal. On the way, norms play their justified role; the goal consists in realizing moral goals grasped purely by intuition. A person attains such goals insofar as he can lift himself to the intuitive idea-content of the world. In individual cases other motives are usually mixed in, but what is intuitive can still be determining or codetermining. What one ought to do, one does; one provides the stage where ought becomes doing. Only an act of will springing from intuition can be individual. Calling the criminal’s evil act an expression of individuality in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition is possible only if blind drives count as part of human individuality. But the blind drive moving one to crime stems from nothing intuitive and belongs not to what is individual but to what is most common, prevailing in all individuals equally, from which a person extricates himself through what is individual. What is individual is not the organism with drives and feelings but the unified world of ideas lighting up within it. Drives and passions establish only that one belongs to the general species man; something ideal expressing itself particularly within them establishes individuality.
Ethical Individualism and Evolution
The apparent contradiction between ethical individualism and the modern doctrine of evolution dissolves once evolution is rightly understood. Evolution means that later forms really emerge from earlier ones according to natural laws; an observer with sufficiently long life could have watched reptiles emerge from proto-amniotes, or the solar system from the Kant-Laplace nebula. But no evolutionary theorist should claim that, without ever having seen a reptile, he could draw the reptile’s full concept from the concept of the proto-amniotes. Later phases result from earlier ones in a real way, and once we possess the concepts of less and more perfect we can see the connection—yet the earlier concept is never far-reaching enough to evolve the later out of itself.
For the philosopher of ethics this means he can gain insight into how later moral concepts connect with earlier ones, but he cannot draw a single new moral idea from an earlier one. As a moral being the individual produces his own content; this content is given to the philosopher of ethics just as reptiles are given to the researcher. The confusion arises because as scientific researchers we observe phenomena afterward, whereas in moral action we ourselves first create the phenomena we afterward know. In the moral world order we do what nature does on a lower level: we transform something perceptible. The ethical norm cannot first be known as a law of nature can; it must be created, and only once it exists can it become an object of knowing. Measuring a new moral creation against old teachings is as nonsensical as declaring reptiles invalid because they do not match proto-amniotes.
Ethical individualism therefore follows directly from a rightly understood theory of evolution. Haeckel’s genealogical tree from protozoa to man could be followed without any break in natural lawfulness, right up to the individual as a morally particular being—yet at no point could the nature of a later species be decided from an ancestral one. The individual is morally barren if he himself has no moral ideas. The emergence of totally new moral ideas out of moral imagination is no more wondrous than the emergence of a new animal species. But monism must reject any influence from the beyond, any metaphysical influence merely inferred and not experienced in idea. It cannot derive the moral world order from causes outside the experienceable world—not from divine world-rule from outside, not from a particular revelation in time, not from the appearance of God on earth. What occurs in the human being becomes moral only when it becomes individually his own. Ethical individualism is the crowning feature of the edifice Darwin and Haeckel strove to build: spiritualized evolutionary teaching carried into moral life. The consistent evolutionary theorist cannot terminate natural evolution at the ape and attribute to man a supernatural origin; he must regard man’s morally free life as a spiritual continuation of organic life, leaving the determination of whether an action is free to direct observation.
Hartmann’s Pessimism and the Life of God
Eduard von Hartmann does not deny the presence of the ideal in the world and grants it equal standing with blind urge. He can credit his primal Being with creating the world only by tracing the pain of God Himself, since the life of the world is identical with the life of God. An all-wise Being can see His goal only in release from suffering; since all existence is suffering, the purpose of creation is release. The world process is a continuous battle against God’s pain, finally leading to the eradication of all existence, and man’s moral life becomes participation in that eradication. God created the world so that through it He can free Himself from infinite pain; the world is an itching eruption upon the absolute Being, or a painful poultice the All-One applies to Himself to divert an inner pain outward and then cast it off. Human beings are parts of the world; within them God suffers, each person’s pain only a drop in the infinite ocean of God’s pain. Man must permeate himself with the knowledge that egoism is folly and let himself be guided solely by selfless devotion to the world process of God’s deliverance. Hartmann’s pessimism, unlike Schopenhauer’s, leads to devoted activity on behalf of a lofty task.
Pleasure, Pain, and the Nature of Striving
The question is whether all this is based on experience. Striving for gratification is a reaching out of one’s life activity beyond the present content of life. Success of striving creates pleasure; failure creates pain. Pleasure or pain depend only on success or failure; striving itself cannot be accounted as pain. If one striving is realized and another presents itself, one cannot say pleasure gave birth to pain merely because enjoyment creates desire for repetition. Only when this desire meets impossibility of satisfaction can one speak of pain. If striving itself called forth pain, removing striving would bring pleasure; the opposite is the case—lack of striving creates boredom, which brings pain. Since striving can last long before success and is content meanwhile with hope, pain has nothing to do with striving as such but depends on non-fulfillment alone. Schopenhauer is therefore wrong to consider desire and striving in themselves the source of pain.
The opposite is true: striving in itself creates joy. The enjoyment hope brings of reaching a distant goal is the companion of work whose fruits come in the future, and this pleasure is independent of reaching the goal. When the goal is reached, the pleasure of fulfillment is added as something new. Fulfillment of desire calls forth pleasure and unfulfillment pain, but one may not infer that pleasure is the satisfying of desire and pain its non-satisfying. Illness is pain unpreceded by desire; receiving an inheritance from a relative of whose existence one had no inkling fills one with pleasure without any preceding desire. Whoever investigates whether pleasure or pain predominates must take into account pleasure in desiring, pleasure in fulfillment, and pleasure that comes unsought; on the debit side, pain of boredom, pain of unfulfilled striving, and pain that comes without desire. Eduard von Hartmann holds that reason, in its ability to weigh things up, determines the balance, saying that pain and pleasure exist only insofar as they are experienced, so there is no other yardstick than the subjective one of feeling.
The Failure of Pessimism to Overcome Egoism
A moral world view that hopes, through recognition of pessimism, to inspire devotion to unegoistical goals does not overcome egoism in the true sense. On this view, moral ideals become strong enough to master the will only once a person has recognized that selfish striving for pleasure cannot lead to satisfaction. The self-seeker who cannot reach the grapes of pleasure declares them sour and devotes himself to a selfless transformation of life. For pessimists, moral ideals are not themselves strong enough to overcome egoism; they establish their rule on ground already cleared by knowledge of the hopelessness of self-seeking. If men naturally strive after pleasure but cannot attain it, then annihilation of existence would be the only rational goal. If God is the actual bearer of the world’s pain, human beings would have to bring about God’s deliverance; individual suicide does not help this goal but harms it, since God is in every being as the bearer of his pain, and the suicide has imposed on God the new difficulty of creating a replacement.
The Calculus of Pleasure and Pain
All this presupposes pleasure as the yardstick for the value of life. Life manifests itself in a sum of drives. Hunger arises when our organs can no longer function properly without new substance; the enjoyment of eating enough consists first in removing the pain hunger causes.
The Free Spirit in the Human Community
The book turns at last to the question of how freedom lives among human beings. A person counts as a free spirit within a community only to the degree that he has freed himself from generic qualities. No one is entirely genus, and no one is wholly individuality; each gradually liberates a greater or lesser sphere of his being from both the generic qualities of animal life and the commandments of human authorities. Wherever a man cannot attain inner freedom, he remains incorporated into the organism of nature and of the spirit, living as others live or as they command. Only actions springing from intuitions carry ethical value in the true sense. Moral instincts inherited from social life become ethical only by being taken up into intuitions. All moral activity of mankind springs from individual ethical intuitions and their uptake into human communities; the moral life of mankind is the sum total of the creations of the moral imagination of free human individuals. These are the findings of monism.
The Consequences of Monism
Monism explains the world as a unity, drawing its principles from human experience and seeking the sources of man’s actions within the world of observation — within human nature accessible to self-knowledge, particularly moral imagination. It refuses to seek, outside this world through abstract inferences, the ultimate foundations of the world present to perception and thinking. The unity that experienceable thinking observation brings to the multiplicity of perceptions is the same unity our need for knowledge demands. Whoever seeks yet another unity behind this shows he does not recognize the harmony between what thinking finds and what our drive for knowledge demands. The single individual is not really separated from the world; he is a part of it, connected to the cosmos in a way broken only for our perception. We see this part as self-existent because we do not see the belts by which the fundamental powers of the cosmos turn the wheel of our life. Whoever remains at this standpoint treats a part of the whole as independently existing — as a monad receiving information from outside. Monism shows this independence can be believed only so long as what is perceived is not woven by thinking into the conceptual world; once done, this partial existence proves a mere illusion of perception. Man finds his self-contained total existence in the universe only through the intuitive experience of thinking, which destroys the illusion of perception and members our individual existence into the life of the cosmos.
Thinking, Perception, and Reality
The unity of the conceptual world containing our objective perceptions also takes up the content of our subjective personality. Thinking gives us reality in true form as self-contained unity, whereas the multiplicity of perceptions is an illusion due to our organization. Knowledge of what is real versus illusion has always been thinking’s goal. Science has tried to know perceptions as reality by discovering lawful relationships among them. Where the relationship ascertained by thinking was held to be merely subjective, one sought the true ground of unity in an object beyond experience — an inferred God, will, or absolute spirit — striving for a second knowledge beyond experience, a metaphysics attained through deduction rather than experience. From this standpoint, the graspability of world relationships through orderly thinking was explained by a primal being having built the world according to logical laws, and the reason we act by the willing of the primal being. But one did not recognize that thinking encompasses both subjective and objective, and that in the union of perception and concept total reality is conveyed. Only when we look at the lawfulness permeating our perceptions in the abstract form of the concept do we have something purely subjective; but the concept’s content gained through thinking is not subjective — it is taken from reality, that part perceiving cannot attain. It is experience, but not experience conveyed through perception. Whoever cannot picture the concept as something real thinks only of its abstract form; in such separation the concept is present only through our organization, as perception is. Even a perceived tree, isolated, has no existence; it is only a part within nature’s great mechanism. An abstract concept is no more real than a perception by itself. Perception is the part of reality given objectively; concept the part given subjectively, through intuition. Our spiritual organization tears reality into these two factors — one appearing to perception, the other to intuition. Only their union, the perception incorporating itself lawfully into the universe, is full reality. Mere perception alone yields no reality but a disconnected chaos; the lawfulness of perceptions alone yields only abstract concepts. The abstract concept does not contain reality, but thinking observation does, considering neither one-sidedly but their union.
Monism versus Dualism
Even the most orthodox subjective idealist will not deny that we live within reality; he disputes only that our knowing activity reaches ideally into what we really live through. Monism shows thinking is neither subjective nor objective but a principle encompassing both sides of reality. When we observe and think, we carry out a process belonging to real happening; through thinking, within experience itself, we overcome the one-sidedness of mere perceiving. We cannot figure out the real through abstract conceptual hypotheses, but in finding perceptions’ ideas we live within what is real. Monism seeks nothing unexperienceable beyond experience but sees in concept and perception what is real; it spins no metaphysics from mere abstract concepts. It refrains from seeking the absolutely real elsewhere than in experience, recognizing experience’s content as real, and is satisfied because thinking has power to guarantee it. What dualism seeks behind the world of observation, monism finds within it. In knowing activity we grasp reality in true form, not a subjective picture inserted between man and reality. The conceptual content of the world is the same for all individuals; one regards another as of his own kind because the same world content expresses itself in him. There are not as many concepts “lion” as people who think “lion,” but only one concept; the concept one person adds to his perception of the lion is the same as another’s, grasped by a different perceiving subject. Thinking leads all perceiving subjects into a common spiritual world.
Thinking as Entry into the Spiritual World
The book closes its main text by arguing that thinking is the element through which the human being enters spiritually into reality. This worldview, built upon experienced thinking, should not be confused with mere rationalism. The perceptual element can only be considered reality for human knowledge when grasped in thinking; characterizing something as reality cannot lie outside thinking. One should not imagine that the senses’ kind of perception establishes the only reality. The human being must await what will arise as perception along life’s path. The question is whether, from the standpoint of intuitively experienced thinking, one can justifiably expect man to perceive spiritual as well as sense-perceptible content. This can be expected: intuitively experienced thinking is both an active process within the human spirit and a spiritual perception grasped without any physical organ — a perception in which the perceiver is active, and an activity of the self which is also perceived. In intuitively experienced thinking, man is transferred into a spiritual world as perceiver. Whatever meets him there as perception, as the spiritual world of his own thinking does, he recognizes as the world of spiritual perception. This world would relate to thinking as the physical perceptual world does on the side of the senses. It cannot be foreign to him because in intuitive thinking he already has a purely spiritual experience. The author’s later books speak of this world of spiritual perception; this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity lays the philosophical groundwork for them, showing that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is already the experiencing of spirit. The later books’ content cannot be logically deduced from this book, but from a living grasp of intuitive thinking there naturally results the further living entry into the world of spiritual perception.
Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918
Objections raised from philosophical quarters after the book’s appearance prompt brief comments.
Main Arguments
The book’s central argument is that the question of human freedom cannot be settled without first settling the question of the nature and origin of thinking. It argues that an action performed without knowing why cannot be free, and that the question about the nature of human action therefore presupposes the question about the origin of thinking. This is not a detour but the necessary path: without knowledge of the thinking activity of the soul, a concept of knowing anything — including an action — is impossible.
The book argues that the concept of motive is inseparably linked to the concept of wanting. Without a determining motive the will is an empty capability, becoming active and real only through motive. It is therefore correct that the human will is not “free” insofar as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive — yet it is absurd, given this “unfreedom,” to speak of a conceivable “freedom” that would amount to wanting what one does not want. The main point is not whether I can carry out a decision, but how the decision arises in me. The book notes that here only motives in general are discussed, without distinguishing unconscious from conscious ones, and that if a motive works upon me and compels me to follow it because it proves “strongest,” thinking about inner freedom ceases to make sense. The point is not whether, once a motive has worked upon me, I can do something, but whether there are only such motives that work with compelling necessity.
The book argues that what distinguishes man from all other organic beings is rational thinking, and that activity he shares with other organisms. Searching for analogies in the animal kingdom to elucidate human freedom is therefore fruitless. Modern natural science loves such analogies and believes it has touched the most important question of knowledge when it finds animal behavior similar to human. This leads to misunderstandings, as shown in P. Ree’s book The Illusion of Free Will, which says that the stone’s motion is by necessity but the donkey’s willing is not, because the causes moving the stone are external and visible while those by which the donkey wills are internal and invisible — between us and their place of activity is the donkey’s skull. The book argues that Ree has no inkling that there are actions — not of the donkey but of people — for which the conscious motive lies between us and the action.
The book argues that the way to the heart is through the head. Love, compassion, and patriotism are mainsprings not reducible to cold intellect concepts; one says the heart, the Gemut, come into their own here — without doubt. But heart and Gemut do not create what moves us; they presuppose it and take it into their domain. Compassion appears in my heart when the mental picture of a person arousing compassion arises in consciousness. Even love is no exception: when not mere sex drive, it is based on mental pictures of the loved one; the more idealistic these, the more blissful the love. Thought is father to the feeling. Love is said to blind us to the loved one’s weaknesses; but it can be grasped the other way — love opens the eye precisely to the loved one’s good qualities. Many pass these by without noticing; one person sees them, and just because he does, love awakens. He has made a mental picture of something a hundred others lack; they lack the love because they lack the mental picture.
The book argues that observation and thinking are the two starting points for all man’s spiritual striving, and that common sense and intricate scientific research rest on these two pillars. Philosophers started from polarities — idea and reality, subject and object, phenomenon and thing-in-itself, “I” and not-“I,” idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, conscious and unconscious — but observation and thinking must precede all these. Any principle must be observed or expressed as clear thought thinkable by everyone. Every philosopher speaking of ultimate principles uses conceptual form, thus presupposing thinking. Whether thinking is the main element of world evolution is not determined here; but without thinking the philosopher gains no knowledge of world evolution. Thinking may play a secondary role in world phenomena’s coming-to-be, but certainly a main role in a view about them.
The book argues that thinking as an object of observation differs essentially from all else. Observing a table or tree occurs as soon as they arise on my horizon; my thinking about them I do not observe at the same time. I must transfer myself outside my own activity to observe my thinking about the table. Observing objects and thinking about them is commonplace; observation of thinking is an exceptional state. This must be considered when determining thinking’s relationship to other contents of observation: in observing thinking one applies a way of doing things that is normal for all other world content but does not normally take place with respect to thinking itself. The book argues that observing thinking is the most important observation a person can make, available to every normally developed human being with good will. In observing thinking, one does not confront a foreign object but one’s own activity; one knows how it comes about and sees into its relationships and interconnections. This yields a firm point from which to seek explanation of other world phenomena.
The book argues that thinking is beyond subject and object; it forms these two concepts as much as all others. When we as thinking subject relate the concept to an object, we must not consider this relationship merely subjective. It is not the subject that brings about the relationship, but thinking. The subject does not think by virtue of being subject, but appears to itself as subject because it is able to think. The activity the human being as thinking entity exercises is therefore no merely subjective one, but one neither subjective nor objective, going beyond these two concepts. I must never say my individual subject thinks; rather my subject itself lives by the grace of thinking. Thinking is an element that leads me out of and above my self and joins me with objects, but separates me from them at the same time, inasmuch as it places me over against them as subject. This is the basis for the double nature of the human being: he thinks and thereby encompasses himself and the rest of the world; but he must, by means of thinking, at the same time designate himself as an individual standing over and against things.
The book argues that the human being is not the first member of creation but its last. One cannot start with what are temporally first elements but with what is most immediately given. Geology gained firm ground only when it started from processes presently at work and drew conclusions about the past. Philosophy hovers in the air when assuming atoms, motion, matter, will, or the unconscious. The philosopher must regard the absolute last as first; this absolute last is thinking. Some say we cannot determine whether our thinking is in itself correct. This makes as much sense as doubting whether a tree is in itself correct. Thinking is a fact; speaking of a fact’s correctness or incorrectness makes no sense.
The book argues that concepts are not isolated; they join into a lawful whole. For example, the concept “organism” joins itself to “lawful development” and “growth.” Concepts formed from single things merge: all concepts of lions merge into the overall concept “lion.” Individual concepts thus join into a united system of concepts, each with its particular place. Ideas are not qualitatively different from concepts — only fuller, more saturated, wider in scope. The author stresses that he takes thinking, not concepts and ideas, as his starting point, since concepts and ideas presuppose thinking. Therefore what was said about the self-sustaining, self-determined nature of thinking cannot simply be transferred to concepts. This is expressly stated as the author’s difference with Hegel, who posits the concept as primary and original.
The book argues that the concept cannot be gained from observation — evident because the maturing human being forms concepts for surrounding objects only slowly and gradually. Concepts are added to observation.
