The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Monism

[ 1 ] The naive person, who accepts as real only what he can see with his eyes and touch with his hands, demands motives for his moral life that are perceptible to the senses. He demands a being that communicates these motives to him in a way his senses can understand. He allows these motivations to be dictated to him as commandments by a person whom he considers wiser and more powerful than himself, or whom he recognizes for some other reason as a power standing above him. In this way, the moral principles of family, state, social, ecclesiastical, and divine authority—mentioned earlier—emerge. The most credulous person still believes a single other person; the somewhat more advanced person allows his moral conduct to be dictated by a majority (state, society). It is always perceptible powers upon which he relies. Whoever finally comes to the realization that these are, after all, just as weak human beings as he is, seeks guidance from a higher power, from a divine being, whom he, however, endows with sensually perceptible attributes. He allows this being to convey the conceptual content of his moral life to him in a perceptible manner, whether the God appears in the burning bush or walks among humans in a physical, human form and tells them audibly what they should and should not do.

[ 2 ] The highest stage of development of naive realism in the realm of morality is that in which the moral commandment (moral idea) is separated from any external entity and hypothetically conceived as an absolute power within oneself. What man first perceived as the external voice of God, he now perceives as an independent power within himself and speaks of this inner voice in such a way that he equates it with conscience.

[ 3 ] With this, however, we have already left the stage of naive consciousness behind and have entered the realm where moral laws become autonomous norms. They no longer have a bearer but become metaphysical entities that exist through themselves. They are analogous to the invisible-visible forces of metaphysical realism, which does not seek reality through the part that the human being plays in thinking about this reality, but rather hypothetically adds it to what is experienced. Extra-human moral norms also always appear as a concomitant of this metaphysical realism. This metaphysical realism must also seek the origin of morality in the realm of the extra-human real. There are various possibilities here. If the presupposed being is conceived as thoughtless in itself, acting according to purely mechanical laws—as materialism posits—then it will also bring forth the human individual from itself through purely mechanical necessity, along with everything that pertains to it. The consciousness of freedom can then be nothing but an illusion. For while I consider myself the creator of my actions, the matter of which I am composed and its processes of motion are at work within me. I believe myself to be free; yet all my actions are in fact merely the results of the material processes underlying my physical and mental organism. It is only because we do not know the compelling motives that drive us that we have the feeling of freedom, this view holds. “We must emphasize here once again that this feeling of freedom is based on the absence of external compelling motives...” “Our actions are necessitated just as our thoughts are.” (Ziehen, Guide to Physiological Psychology, p. 207 ff.) ^{1Regarding the way “materialism” is discussed here and the justification for speaking of it in this way, see the “Addendum” to this chapter at the end thereof.}

[ 4 ] Another possibility is that someone perceives a spiritual being as the non-human Absolute lying behind phenomena. In that case, they will also seek the impetus for action in such a spiritual power. He will regard the moral principles found in his reason as an emanation of this Being itself, which has specific intentions for humanity. To the dualist of this school, moral laws appear to be dictated by the Absolute, and it is simply up to humanity, through its reason, to explore and carry out these decrees of the Absolute Being. The moral world order appears to the dualist as a perceptible reflection of a higher order lying behind it. Earthly morality is the manifestation of the extra-human world order. It is not man who matters in this moral order, but the Being in itself, the extra-human Being. Man is to do what this Being wills. Eduard von Hartmann, who has a mental image of the essence in itself as a deity for whom its own existence is suffering, believes that this divine essence created the world so that it might be redeemed from its infinitely great suffering through it. This philosopher therefore regards the moral development of humanity as a process intended to redeem the deity. “Only through the establishment of a moral world order by rational, self-conscious individuals can the world process be guided toward its goal... ” “Real existence is the incarnation of the deity, the world process the Passion of God made flesh, and at the same time the path to the redemption of the One crucified in the flesh; but morality is the cooperation in shortening this suffering and the path to redemption.” (Hartmann, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness 5. 871). Here, man does not act because he wills to, but he must act because God wills to be redeemed. Just as the materialistic dualist reduces man to an automaton whose actions are merely the result of purely mechanical laws, so the spiritualistic dualist (that is, the one who sees the Absolute, the essence in itself, in a spiritual realm in which man has no part through his conscious experience) makes him a slave to the will of that Absolute. Freedom is excluded within materialism as well as within one-sided spiritualism—indeed, within any metaphysical realism that concludes that the non-human is true reality without experiencing it.

[ 5 ] Both naive and metaphysical realism must, by necessity, deny freedom for one and the same reason: because they view human beings merely as the executors or agents of principles necessarily imposed upon them. Naive realism kills freedom through submission to the authority of a perceptible being or one conceived by analogy with perceptions, or ultimately to the abstract inner voice, which it interprets as “conscience”; the metaphysician, who explores only the non-human, cannot acknowledge freedom because he allows human beings to be mechanically or morally determined by a “thing-in-itself.”

[ 6 ] Monism will have to acknowledge the partial validity of naive realism, because it acknowledges the validity of the perceptual world. Whoever is incapable of producing moral ideas through intuition must receive them from others. To the extent that a person receives his moral principles from outside, he is in fact unfree. But monism attributes equal significance to the idea alongside perception. The idea, however, can manifest itself in the human individual. To the extent that a person follows the impulses from this side, he feels himself to be free. Monism, however, denies any validity to purely deductive metaphysics, and consequently also to the impulses for action arising from so-called “things-in-themselves.” According to the monistic view, a person can act unfreely if they follow a perceptible external compulsion; they can act freely if they obey only themselves. Monism cannot acknowledge an unconscious compulsion lying beyond perception and concept. If someone claims that an action of a fellow human being was performed unfreely, they must demonstrate, within the perceptible world, the thing, or the person, or the institution that caused someone to act; if the claimant invokes causes of the action outside the sensually and mentally real world, then monism cannot accept such a claim.

[ 7 ] According to the monistic view, human beings act partly unfree and partly free. They find themselves unfree in the world of perceptions and realize the free spirit within themselves.

[ 8 ] The moral precepts, which the purely speculative metaphysician must regard as emanations of a higher power, are, for the adherent of monism human thoughts; the moral world order is for him neither a mere imitation of a purely mechanical natural order nor of a world order outside of humanity, but rather a thoroughly free human creation. Man does not have to enforce the will of a being outside himself in the world, but his own; he does not realize the decisions and intentions of another being, but his own. Behind acting human beings, monism does not see the purposes of a world governance alien to it, which determines human beings according to its will; rather, insofar as they realize intuitive ideas, human beings pursue only their own, human purposes. And indeed, each individual pursues his or her own particular purposes. For the world of ideas does not find its fulfillment in a community of human beings, but only in human individuals. What emerges as the common goal of a human collective is merely the consequence of the individual acts of will of the individuals—and, for the most part, of a select few whom the others follow as their authorities. Each of us is called to be a free spirit, just as every rosebud is called to become a rose.

[ 9 ] Monism is thus, in the realm of truly moral action, a philosophy of freedom. Because it is a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical, unreal constraints on the free spirit just as much as it acknowledges the physical and historical (naively real) constraints of the naive human being. Because it does not regard human beings as finished products that unfold their full nature at every moment of their lives, the dispute over whether human beings as such are free or not seems futile to it. It sees human beings as developing beings and asks whether the stage of the free spirit can also be reached along this path of development.

[ 10 ] Monism recognizes that nature does not release human beings from its embrace as fully formed, free spirits, but rather guides them to a certain stage, from which they continue to develop as unfree beings until they reach the point where they find themselves.

[ 11 ] Monism clearly recognizes that a being who acts under physical or moral compulsion cannot truly be moral. It regards the transition through automatic action (according to natural drives and instincts) and that through obedient action (according to moral norms) as necessary preliminary stages of morality, but it recognizes the possibility of overcoming both transitional stages through the free spirit. Monism generally liberates the truly moral worldview from the immanent bonds of naive moral maxims and from the transcendental moral maxims of speculative metaphysicians. It cannot do away with the former, just as it cannot do away with perception; it rejects the latter because it seeks all explanatory principles for elucidating worldly phenomena within the world and none outside of it. Just as monism refuses even to consider principles of knowledge other than those proper to human beings (see p. 124ff.), so too does it decisively reject the idea of moral maxims other than those proper to human beings. Human morality, like human cognition, is conditioned by human nature. And just as other beings will understand something entirely different by cognition than we do, so too will other beings have a different morality. For the adherent of monism, morality is a specifically human characteristic, and freedom is the human form of being moral.

Addendum to the new edition (1918)

[ 12 ] 1. A difficulty in assessing what has been presented in the two preceding sections may arise from the feeling that one is faced with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is mention of the experience of thinking, which is perceived as having a general significance that applies equally to every human consciousness; on the other hand, it is pointed out here that the ideas realized in moral life—which are of the same nature as those developed in thinking—are lived out in an individual manner within each human consciousness. Whoever feels compelled to regard this juxtaposition as a “contradiction,” and whoever fails to recognize that it is precisely in the vivid perception of this actually existing contrast that a part of the essence of the human being is revealed, to such a person neither the idea of knowledge nor that of freedom will be able to appear in the proper light. For the view that conceives its concepts merely as abstracted from the sensory world and that does not allow intuition to have its due, the thought claimed here as a reality remains a “mere contradiction.” For an insight that perceives how ideas are intuitively experienced as an essential reality grounded in itself, it becomes clear that, within the realm of the world of ideas in the act of cognition, human beings immerse themselves in a reality that is uniform for all people; yet when they borrow intuitions from this world of ideas for their acts of will, individualizes a member of this world of ideas through the very activity that he unfolds as a universal human one in the spiritual-ideal process of cognition. What appears as a logical contradiction—the general nature of the ideas of cognition and the individual nature of the ideas of morality—becomes, precisely by being viewed in its reality , a living concept. Herein lies a characteristic of human nature: that which is to be grasped intuitively in human beings moves back and forth, like the swing of a pendulum, between universally valid knowledge and the individual experience of this universal. For those who cannot perceive one swing of the pendulum in its reality, thinking remains merely a subjective human activity; for those who cannot grasp the other, all individual life seems lost with the exercise of human thought. For a thinker of the first kind, cognition is an inscrutable fact; for the other, moral life is. Both will offer all manner of mental images to explain one or the other, all of which are inaccurate because, in reality, neither of them grasps the experiential nature of thinking at all, or misconstrues it as merely an abstract activity.

[ 13 ] 2. On pp. 175ff., the term “materialism” is used. I am well aware that there are thinkers—such as Th. Ziehen, whom I just mentioned—who by no means describe themselves as materialists, but who, from the perspective put forward in this book, must nevertheless be designated by this term. It does not matter whether someone says that, for him, the world is not confined to mere material existence; that he is therefore not a materialist. Rather, what matters is whether he develops concepts that only apply to material existence. Whoever states: “Our actions are as necessary as our thoughts,” has put forward a concept that is applicable only to material processes, but neither to action nor to being; and if he were to think his concept through to its conclusion, he would indeed have to think materialistically. That he does not do so results solely from the inconsistency that is so often the consequence of thinking that has not been carried through to its end. — One often hears today that 19th-century materialism has been scientifically dismissed. In truth, however, this is by no means the case. People today simply fail to notice that they have no ideas other than those that allow them to approach only the material. Thus materialism now conceals itself, whereas in the second half of the 19th century it openly displayed itself. The veiled materialism of the present is no less intolerant toward a worldview that grasps the world spiritually than the avowed materialism of the previous century. It merely deceives many who believe they may reject a worldview oriented toward the spiritual, since, after all, the natural sciences have “long since abandoned materialism.”