WHY "PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM"
BY RUDOLF STEINER IS THE ANARCHIST BIBLE
The definition
of anarchosophy that I have posted
on my website, namely that it is a philosophy that ideally views
PoF as the Bible of anarchism, has been subject to criticism
arising from misunderstandings.
In this article I will endeavor to demonstrate
how one is led to this conclusion by focusing on one particular
chapter from the book. It is Chapter
Ten, entitled "Philosophy and Monism":
"The naïve man,
who acknowledges as real only what he can see with his eyes and
grasp with his hands, requires for his moral life, also, a basis
for action that shall be perceptible to the senses. He requires
someone or something to impart the basis for his action to him
in a way that his senses can understand. He is ready to allow
this basis for action to be dictated to him as commandments by
any man whom he considers wiser or more powerful than himself,
or whom he acknowledges for some other reason to be a power over
him. In this way there arise, as moral principles, the authority
of family, state, society, church and God, as previously described.
A man who is very narrow minded still puts his faith in some
one person; the more advanced man allows his moral conduct to
be dictated by a majority (state, society). It is always on perceptible
powers that he builds."
At this stage, Steiner is pointing to authority
arising from sense-perceptible illusion. Now he proceeds to grab
the fundamentalist by the tail, tearing down the authority of
the church and the tyranny of "the Lord" or "Almighty
God":
"The man who awakens
at last to the conviction that basically these powers are human
beings as weak as himself, seeks guidance from a higher power,
from a Divine Being, whom he endows, however, with sense perceptible
features. He conceives this Being as communicating to him the
conceptual content of his moral life, again in a perceptible
way -- whether it be, for example, that God appears in the burning
bush, or that He moves about among men in manifest human shape,
and that their ears can hear Him telling them what to do and
what not to do."
What Rudolf Steiner is telling us is that
the more a man matures spiritually, the more will he detect hidden
tyrants and conquer them. There is another factor involved here
of course, described by Erich Fromm in "Fear of Freedom."
The will to freedom must be the driving power.
Steiner continues:
"The highest stage of
development of naïve realism in the sphere of morality is
that where the moral commandment (moral idea) is separated from
every being other than oneself and is thought of, hypothetically,
as being an absolute power in one's own inner life. What man
first took to be the external voice of God, he now takes as an
independent power within him, and speaks of this inner voice
in such a way as to identify it with conscience."
Yes, fasten your seatbelts. Conscience is
one of the hidden tyrants that have to be conquered! When the
mature man who has truly liberated himself performs a moral act,
he is not motivated by the compulsion of conscience, or the police,
or his employer, or by any law whatsoever. He is only motivated
by love of the action. This is something extremely difficult
to grasp for a lot of people, because they are convinced that
unfettered freedom leads to license and selfishness. A conviction
of this kind inevitably hinders a true grasp or cognition of
the very nature of spiritual freedom.
Steiner continues where we left off, namely
discussing the man who obeys his conscience as authority:
"But in doing this he
has already gone beyond the stage of naïve consciousness
into the sphere where the moral laws have become independently
existing standards. There they are no longer carried by real
bearers, but have become metaphysical entities existing in their
own right. They are analogous to the invisible "visible
forces" of metaphysical realism, which does not seek reality
through the part of it that man has in his thinking, but hypothetically
adds it on to actual experience. These extra-human moral standards
always occur as accompanying features of metaphysical realism.
For metaphysical realism is bound to seek the origin of morality
in the sphere of extra-human reality."
Exactly. When we are no longer primitive materialists,
or "naïve realists," conscience is recognized
as an external authority, imposed from outside, just like the
Department of Justice or the International Monetary Fund, or
the church pastor in suit and tie or the robed priest.
So much for the fundies and the metaphysical
philosophers. Steiner moves on to take the atheists, or secular
humanists, to task:
"Here there are several
possibilities. If the hypothetically assumed entity is conceived
as in itself unthinking, acting according to purely mechanical
laws, as materialism would have it, then it must also produce
out of itself, by purely mechanical necessity, the human individual
with all his characteristic features. The consciousness of freedom
can then be nothing more than an illusion. For though I consider
myself the author of my action, it is the matter of which I am
composed and the movements going on in it that are working in
me. I believe myself free; but in fact all my actions are nothing
but the result of the material processes which underlie my physical
and mental organization. It is said that we have the feeling
of freedom only because we do not know the motives compelling
us."
Mercilessly, Rudolf Steiner eradicates the
final metaphysical vestiges of obedience and subservience in
the pious bourgeois soul. It is worth memorizing for next time
someone is trying to drag you into their church:
""We must emphasize
that the feeling of freedom is due to the absence of external
compelling motives, , . . Our action is necessitated as is our
thinking." (Ziehen, Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie,
1st edition, pp. 207 ff.)
"Another possibility
is that a man may picture the extra-human Absolute that lies
behind the world of appearances as a spiritual being. In this
case he will also seek the impulse for his actions in a corresponding
spiritual force. He will see the moral principles to be found
in his own reason as the expression of this being itself, which
has its own special intentions with regard to man. To this kind
of dualist the moral laws appear to be dictated by the Absolute,
and all that man has to do is to use his intelligence to find
out the decisions of the absolute being and then carry them out.
The moral world order appears to the dualist as the perceptible
reflection of a higher order standing behind it. Earthly morality
is the manifestation of the extra-human world order. It is not
man that matters in this moral order, but the being itself, that
is, the extra-human entity. Man shall do as this being wills.
Eduard von Hartmann, who imagines this being itself as a Godhead
whose very existence is a life of suffering, believes that this
Divine Being has created the world in order thereby to gain release
from His infinite suffering, Hence this philosopher regards the
moral evolution of humanity as a process which is there for the
redemption of God."
The most important battle is against dualism.
You know, the extraterrestials out there, God out there, all
that something out there, including the external Christ:
""Only through the
building up of a moral world order by intelligent self-conscious
individuals can the world process be led towards its goal. .
. , True existence is the incarnation of the Godhead; the world
process is the Passion of the incarnated Godhead and at the same
time the way of redemption for Him who was crucified in the flesh;
morality, however, is the collaboration in the shortening of
this path of suffering and redemption." (Hartmann, Phaenomenologie
des sittlichen Bewusstseins, p. 871.)
"Here man does not act
because he wants to, but he shall act, because it is God's will
to be redeemed. Whereas the materialistic dualist makes man an
automaton whose actions are only the result of a purely mechanical
system, the spiritualistic dualist (that is, one who sees the
Absolute, the Being-in-itself, as something spiritual in which
man has no share in his conscious experience) makes him a slave
to the will of the Absolute. As in materialism, so also in one-sided
spiritualism, in fact in any kind of metaphysical realism inferring
but not experiencing something extra-human as the true reality,
freedom is out of the question."
Pay careful attention to this:
"Metaphysical as well
as naïve realism, consistently followed out, must deny freedom
for one and the same reason: they both see man as doing no more
than putting into effect, or carrying out, principles forced
upon him by necessity."
It is quite obvious that a liberation from
hidden inner tyrants of the soul and spirit, and what Steiner
specifically refers to elsewhere as "the tyranny of the
senses," will entail a corresponding liberation from obedience
to external authority of every conceivable kind.
We are getting closer and closer to the anarchist
manifesto:
"Naive realism destroys
freedom by subjecting man to the authority of a perceptible being
or of one conceived on the analogy of a perceptible being, or
eventually to the authority of the abstract inner voice which
it interprets as "conscience"; the metaphysician, who
merely infers the extra-human reality, cannot acknowledge freedom
because he sees man as being determined, mechanically or morally,
by a "Being-in-itself"."
At this point I have to say that I do not
understand objections to, or criticism of, the statement that
PoF is the Anarchist Bible. I would challenge anyone to disprove
it in view of this very text.
"Monism will have to
recognize that naïve realism is partially justified because
it recognizes the justification of the world of percepts. Whoever
is incapable of producing moral ideas through intuition must
accept them from others. In so far as a man receives his moral
principles from without, he is in fact unfree. But monism attaches
as much significance to the idea as to the percept. The idea,
however, can come to manifestation in the human individual. In
so far as man follows the impulses coming from this side, he
feels himself to be free. But monism denies all justification
to metaphysics, which merely draws inferences, and consequently
also to the impulses of action which are derived from so-called
"Beings-in-themselves". According to the monistic view,
man may act unfreely-when he obeys some perceptible external
compulsion; he can act freely, when he obeys none but himself.
Monism cannot recognize any unconscious compulsion hidden behind
percept and concept. If anyone asserts that the action of a fellow
man is done unfreely, then he must identify the thing or the
person or the institution within the perceptible world, that
has caused the person to act; and if he bases his assertion upon
causes of action lying outside the world that is real to the
senses and the spirit, then monism can take no notice of it."
Again, I dare you to deny that this is pure
anarchism though and through. This is where we arrive:
"According to the monistic
view, then, man's action is partly unfree, partly free. He finds
himself to be unfree in the world of percepts, and he realizes
within himself the free spirit."
Compare this to the title of Harry Brown's
exoteric anarchist book, "How I found freedom in an unfree
world."
And here it is folks - Rudolf Steiner's Declaration
of the Sovereign, Inviolable Human Individual, obeying neither
gods nor men:
"The moral laws which
the metaphysician who works by mere inference must regard as
issuing from a higher power, are, for the adherent of monism,
thoughts of men; for him the moral world order is neither the
imprint of a purely mechanical natural order, nor that of an
extra-human world order, but through and through the free creation
of men. It is not the will of some being outside him in the world
that man has to carry out, but his own; he puts into effect his
own resolves and intentions, not those of another being. Monism
does not see, behind man's actions, the purposes of a supreme
directorate, foreign to him and determining him according to
its will, but rather sees that men, in so far as they realize
their intuitive ideas, pursue only their own human ends. Moreover,
each individual pursues his own particular ends. For the world
of ideas comes to expression, not in a community of men, but
only in human individuals. What appears as the common goal of
a whole group of people is only the result of the separate acts
of will of its individual members, and in fact, usually of a
few outstanding ones who, as their authorities, are followed
by the others. Each one of us has it in him to be a free spirit,
just as every rose bud has in it a rose."
"Jeder von uns ist
berufen zum freien Geiste, wie jeder Rosenkeim berufen ist, Rose
zu werden."
(Each of us has the calling
{potential} to become a free spirit, just as each rosebud has
the calling to become a rose.)
This last sentence deserves to be repeated
in capital letters. For a more lyrical translation, we would
write:
"Each one of us is destined
to be a free spirit, just like every rosebud is destined to be
a rose,"
but that would remove the element of freedom
and voluntarism in the given translation:
"EACH ONE OF US HAS
IT IN HIM TO BE A FREE SPIRIT, JUST LIKE EVERY ROSE BUD HAS IN
IT A ROSE."
The key to true freedom, and to anarchism
in its pristine form, is monism. What is monism?
"Monism, then, in the
sphere of true moral action, is a freedom philosophy. Since it
is a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical, unreal
restrictions of the free spirit as completely as it accepts the
physical and historical (naïvely real) restrictions of the
naïve man. Since it does not consider man as a finished
product, disclosing his full nature in every moment of his life,
it regards the dispute as to whether man as such is free or not,
to be of no consequence. It sees in man a developing being, and
asks whether, in the course of this development, the stage of
the free spirit can be reached."
In my article in Norwegian about Anthroposophy
and anarchism (http://www.uncletaz.com/antroposanark.html), I
stated my own conclusions from all of this: The Gods are anarchists,
and the crown of creation, the goal of evolution on Earth, is
the divine anarchist, the free human being. That is why the Gods
have withdrawn their authority so that man can stand self-dependently
on his own feet and make his own decisions.
Rudolf Steiner concludes this extraordinary
chapter:
"Monism knows that Nature
does not send man forth from her arms ready made as a free spirit,
but that she leads him up to a certain stage from which he continues
to develop still as an unfree being until he comes to the point
where he finds his own self.
"Monism is quite clear
that a being acting under physical or moral compulsion cannot
be a truly moral being. It regards the phases of automatic behavior
(following natural urges and instincts) and of obedient behavior
(following moral standards) as necessary preparatory stages of
morality, but it also sees that both these transitory stages
can be overcome by the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral
world conception both from the mundane fetters of naïve
moral maxims and from the transcendental moral maxims of the
speculative metaphysician. Monism can no more eliminate the former
from the world than it can eliminate percepts; it rejects the
latter because it seeks all the principles for the elucidation
of the world phenomena within that world, and none outside it.
"Just as monism refuses
even to think of principles of knowledge other than those that
apply to men (see Chapter 7), so it emphatically rejects even
the thought of moral maxims other than those that apply to men.
Human morality, like human knowledge, is conditioned by human
nature. And just as beings of a different order will understand
knowledge to mean something very different from what it means
to us, so will other beings have a different morality from ours.
Morality is for the monist a specifically human quality, and
spiritual freedom the human way of being moral."
Tarjei Straume
Click to subscribe to anthroposophy_tomorrow
Anarchosophy
Anthroposophy
and Anarchism
Anthroposophy,
Critics, and Controversy
Uncle Taz
Home Page 2