Рудольф Штайнердің «Еркіндік философиясы» туралы зерттеу

Philosophical treatise by Rudolf Steiner

The Philosophy of Freedom is the fundamental philosophical work of philosopher, Goethe scholar and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). with a second edition published in 1918, the work has appeared under a number of English titles, including The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (the title Steiner proposed for the English language translation), The Philosophy of Freedom, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. Part One of The Philosophy of Freedom examines the basis of freedom in human thinking, gives an account of the relationship between knowledge and perception, and explores the role and reliability of thinking in the formation of knowledge. In Part Two Steiner analyzes the conditions necessary for human beings to be free, and develops a moral philosophy that he labels "ethical individualism". The book's subtitle, Some results of introspective observation following the methods of natural science, indicates the philosophical approach Steiner intends to take. Steiner hoped that the book "would gain him a professorship", but the book "did not receive the attention he had hoped for." In fact, the book was reasonably favourably received in English, with reviews in Mind, the leading journal of philosophy in England, the Philosophical Review, and the Monist, and in German publications.

Steiner had wanted to write a philosophy of freedom since at least 1880. The appearance of The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894 was preceded by his publications on Goethe, focusing on epistemology and the philosophy of science, particularly Goethe the Scientist (1883) and The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (1886). In 1891, Steiner presented his doctoral dissertation, an epistemological study that includes discussion of Kant's and Fichte's theories of knowledge. A revised version of the thesis was published a year later in book form as Truth and Knowledge: Introduction to a Philosophy of Freedom, dedicated to Eduard von Hartmann. In the Preface to The Philosophy of Freedom itself, Steiner described the aim of the book: knowledge should become "organically alive". "All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts. For them, human ideas were their artists' materials and scientific method their artistic technique." While a student in Vienna, Steiner attended some of the lectures of Franz Brentano, an important precursor of the phenomenological movement in philosophy (see School of Brentano). Like the later phenomenologists, Steiner was seeking a way to solve the subject–object problem. Steiner's approach to freedom was also in part inspired by Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man and a response to the scientific works of Goethe, whom Steiner believed had not focused sufficiently on the role of thinking in developing inner freedom. Steiner was also deeply affected as a young man by Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason that we cannot know things as they are in themselves, and he devotes a long chapter of The Philosophy of Freedom, "Are there Limits to Knowledge? ", to a refutation of this view, arguing that there are in principle no limits to knowledge. This claim is important to freedom, because for Steiner freedom involves knowing the real basis of our actions. If this basis cannot be known, then freedom is not possible. Steiner's argument in favour of freedom also responds to determinists such as Spinoza, for whom human action is just as much determined as anything else in the necessity that governs nature as a whole.

The Philosophy of Freedom is divided into three parts. The first part "Knowledge of Freedom" is epistemological and in a broad sense metaphysical (the nature of reality). The second part "The Reality of Freedom" is about freewill and ethics. The title of the third part "Ultimate Questions" or, in German, 'die letzten Fragen', deals with the nature and consequences of the completely monistic though not materialist view of the world presented in the book. In his epistemology Steiner seeks to show that we can achieve a true picture of reality only by uniting perception, which reflects only the outer appearance of the world, and conception, which together give us access to the world's inner nature. In his account of freedom this idea is applied to the question what freedom is. From another epistemological angle, Steiner's account of thinking in Part One becomes his concept of thinking in Part Two. We act freely when we act through the thinking activity of our being. Ethics finds its place as the actions of the free being. The very short Part Three places this activity and the cognitive activity of man in the context of the world considered as an epistemological whole.

Steiner begins the second part of the book by emphasizing the role of self awareness in objective thinking. Here he modifies the usual description of inner and outer experience by pointing out that our feelings, for example, are given to us as naively as outer perceptions. Both of these, feelings and perceptions, tell about objects we are interested in: the one about ourselves, the other about the world. Both require the help of thinking to penetrate the reasons that they arise, to comprehend their inner message. The same is true of our will. Whereas our feelings tell how the world affects us, our will tells how we would affect the world. Neither attains to true objectivity, for both mix the world's existence and our inner life in an unclear way. Steiner emphasizes that we experience our feelings and will and our perceptions as well – as being more essentially part of us than our thinking; the former are more basic, more natural. He celebrates this gift of natural, direct experience, but points out that this experience is still dualistic in the sense that it only encompasses one side of the world. With regard to freedom of the will, Steiner observes that a key question is how the will to action arises in the first place. Steiner describes to begin with two sources for human action: on the one hand, the driving forces springing from our natural being, from our instincts, feelings, and thoughts insofar as these are determined by our character and on the other hand, various kinds of external motives we may adopt, including the dictates of abstract ethical or moral codes. In this way, both nature and culture bring forces to bear on our will and soul life. Overcoming these two elements, neither of which is individualized, we can achieve genuinely individualized intuitions that speak to the particular situation at hand. By overcoming a slavish or automatic response to the dictates of both our 'lower' drives and conventional morality, and by orchestrating a meeting place of objective and subjective elements of experience, we find the freedom to choose how to think and act (Steiner [Wilson translation] Ch. 9). Freedom for Steiner does not consist in acting out everything subjective within us, but in acting out of love, thoughtfully and creatively. In this way we can love our own actions, which are unique and individual to us, rather than stemming from obedience to external moral codes or compulsive physical drives. Both of the latter constitute limitations on freedom:
Whether his unfreedom is forced on him by physical means or by moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual desire or because he is bound by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by a force other than himself. Freedom arises most clearly at the moment when a human being becomes active in pure, individualized thinking; this is, for Steiner, spiritual activity.

The third part of Steiner's book is the shortest, consisting of one Chapter, "The Consequences of Monism", nine pages in the original German of the 1894 edition, and ten pages in Michael Wilson's 1964 translation.

The first edition of Die Philosophie der Freiheit was published in 1894. A second revised edition appeared in 1918. Further German editions reprinted the 1918 text until 1973, when a revised edition was produced based on Steiner's corrections of the galley proofs of the 1918 edition. Minor changes, including corrections to some of Steiner's citations, were made in the 1987 German edition. The first edition included the following passage Steiner removed from later editions: “We no longer believe that there is a norm to which we must all strive to conform. Nothing is accepted as valid, unless it springs from the roots of individuality. The saying Each one of us must choose his hero in whose footsteps he toils up to Olympus no longer holds for us. If only we probe deep enough into the very heart of our being, there dwells something noble, something worthy of development.”

In the appendix added to the 1918 edition, Steiner stated emphatically that the monism "of thought" proposed in his book was quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others called "epistemological" monism.

Though The Philosophy of Freedom is a literal translation of the original German title (Die Philosophie der Freiheit), Steiner suggested at the time of the first English edition in 1916 that the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity should be used in the English translation, as it would represent the book's theme of freedom as a dynamic process of development more accurately, as opposed to the fixed state perhaps suggested by the etymology of "freedom" (dom=a state or condition). English readers, Steiner believed, might easily believe that freedom is something already in their possession, and needed to be shaken out of their complacence