Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom (Cw 4) by Rudolf Steiner

Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom (Cw 4) Reviews

• 
  Scot

  If I did not have a serious interest in philosophy (major in college and continued passion), I would have likely rated this with 3-stars and put down the book after finishing about half of it. The first 7 chapters are dense and worth slogging through if you want to watch Steiner eviscerate a multitude of philosophers including Kant, Descartes, Fichte, Schopenhauer and more which in and of itself is entertaining. The second half of the book is where the magic happens and the instruction manual is found. Each chapter in the second half answers the questions posed in the first half. Illuminating the way that he takes our power back rather than relying on the other (external forces, God, society, etc). We not only have the power to perceive/sense/experience but through our intuitive thinking in connection with these perceptions we have the ability to manifest our own destiny. This is the first work I have read by Steiner, but I am pretty sure I am hooked now. It combines some of the ideas of thinkers like Gurdjieff and Crowley and Leibniz in a way that in clear, actionable and empowering.
  
  Recommended for those who are either deeply interested in philosophy or who's intuition says that they have the power within themselves to create the world they want to live in.
  
  As a note, I found a cheat sheet/synopsis that helped me better understand the thoughts/ideas and follow the flow of the book here -
  http://steiner98.tripod.com/Steiner/P...
  
• 
  Jeffrey

  Observe your thinking!
• 
  Anima

  THE FACTORS OF LIFE
  "The world comes to meet me as a multiplicity, a sum of separate details. As a human being, I am
  myself one of these details, an entity among other entities. We call this form of the world simply the given and—insofar as we do not develop it through conscious activity but find it ready-made—we call it percept. Within the world of percepts, we perceive ourselves. .."
  
  THE IDEA OF FREEDOM
  
  "By identifying the elements that compose an individual life, we can discover the motive powers of morality.
  The first level of individual life is perceiving, particularly the perceiving of the senses. In this region of individual life, perceiving is immediately—without any intervening feeling
  or concept—transformed into willing. The motive power under consideration here is simply called drive....
  
  The second sphere of human life is feeling. Particular feelings accompany percepts of the external world. These feelings can become motive powers for action. If I see a hungry person, my compassion can form the motive power to act. Such feelings include shame, pride, sense of
  honor, humility, remorse, compassion, vengeance, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love, and duty.
  
  Finally, the third level of life is thinking and mental picturing. Through mere reflection, a mental picture or concept can become a motive for action. Mental pictures become motives because, in the course of life, we constantly link certain goals of our will to percepts that recur repeatedly in more or less modified form. Therefore people who are not without experience are always aware,
  along with certain percepts, of mental pictures of actions they themselves have performed or seen others perform in similar cases. These mental pictures float before them as defining patterns for all later decisions; they become part of their characterological disposition. ...
  
  The highest stage of individual life is conceptual thinking without reference to a specific perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept out of the conceptual sphere through pure intuition. Such a concept initially contains no reference to specific percepts. If we enter into willing under the influence of a concept referring to a percept—that is to say, a mental picture—then it is this percept that determines our willing through the detour of conceptual thinking. If we act under the influence of intuitions, then the motive power of our action is pure thinking. Since it is customary in philosophy to designate the capacity for pure thinking as “reason,” we are fully justified
  in calling the moral driving force characteristic of this stage practical reason. "
• 
  Elliott Bignell

  Reviewing in English for consistency with this site.
  
  Steiner has a reputation as a difficult read, not to mention being gullibly esoteric. I must say that I cannot confirm either judgement based on this book. His vocabulary is perhaps a little old-fashioned, but his prose is perfectly readable by the standards of modern German, and arguably more accessible than many Victorian authors writing in the English language. He does have that academic proclivity for long and deeply nested sentences, however, which can be tiresome.
  
  His account of the then state of the philosophy of the mind is perfectly workmanlike and quite unobjectionable. Somewhat to my surprise, he rejects dualism in favour of monism, leaving his conclusions quite reasonable even by today's standards. He delivers competent précises of naive idealism, idealism, realism and all the relevant positions and goes over their weaknesses. So far, so average.
  
  Where he becomes weak, for my part, is in his yielding to a definition of freedom which resides in the will: Freedom is to act according to one's will. This strikes me as a tautology, if a useful one to appreciate. Moreover, he never really asks the decisive question: If one's will, as monism seems to make necessary and modern neuroscience confirms, emerges out of the deterministic behaviour of lower physics and brain systems, how can it be said to be in any meaning "free", even if "free" of external coercion? Hence the tautology. A stone may be "free" to fall to Earth, one might even imagine it retrospectively constructing some mental narrative that it willed this, as do we. One cannot speak of it as being "free" in the sense of making a choice, all the same. Steiner, in my opinion, does not resolve this problem and going by this work may not even have appreciated its existence.
  
  As a record of a philosophical movement that still exerts a powerful and worrying influence, this book is unique and useful. As a philosophical treatise it is competent but not in any way original.
• 
  Phillip

  Fun stuff. It tales a while to get rolling along but in the end it is fun stuff.
  
  I read this book because it is highly recommended by Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances.
  
  I read Barfield because he was a member of the Inklings and had a significant influence, particularly on C.S. Lewis, but also Tolkien and I suppose other Inklings. Barfield was highly regarded by the rest of the group.
  
  And Barfield loved the work of Steiner. In fact, many of Barfield's claims in his works seem telegraphed or elliptical. He doesn't follow through with a description of the claim, or a convincing argument, he doesn't flesh out the claim, anything.
  
  As I read The Philosophy of Freedom I kept thinking there was practically no reason for Barfield to have written at all. Barfield is often paraphrased Steiner. This is a harsh judgement of Barfield because he added the idea that the study of dead languages provides evidence of his claims about the evolution of human consciousness. And Barfield did provide the ideas of Steiner as a challenge to the assumptions of 20th century Western thought. And he carried the thoughts well into the 20th century. These things have value. But, a lot of Barfield is only a restatement of Steiner.
  
  In the end, I read Steiner because I am interested in understanding the work of Owen Barfield. I am interested in Barfield to get a sense of the intellectual climate of the Inklings. I am interested in the Inklings because I like C.S. Lewis and really like J.R.R. Tolkien.
  
  And yes, I would read this book again. And I will read more Steiner.
• 
  Coquille Fleur

  Another book I read in teacher training. I had to present on one of the chapters, 7 I think, anyway, all I remember now is that it was about faith and hope. What hope do you have? Whatever hope you THINK you have. Boiled down: if you believe it, it is true. Another must read for anyone seriously studying Steiner and Waldorf education.
• 
  քամի

  սրա տասներեքերորդ գլխի՝ լաւատեսութեան֊վատատեսութեան, տառապանքի եւ այլնի մասին հատուածները կարելի ա պարբերաբար կարդալ որպէս ձրի թերափիա։
• 
  Anna

  I am deeply confused about how this can be held in high regard by so many people. It's a weird book, filled to the brim with an easy arrogance not really substantiated by skill. Instead of making a concise argument, Rudolf Steiner leaps from one believe to the next, claiming to have proven things without actually doing so.
  
  Don't get me wrong: I am not opposed to the main idea, humans having absolute freedom. That would be awesome. But saying something I think to be a nice ideal doesn't a philosophy make.
  
  Steiners Argument suffers from his unwillingness to think about language or culture as well as his easy dismissal of hundreds of years of thinking. You don't need to agree with the old ones, but you should understand the scope of their problems. Steiner just decides to oversimplify and then discard them, claiming to have solved problems while simply not thinking about them.
  
  But it gets worse: Even if I were to buy into his theory, I can use his own incoherences to show flaws within his system. The most fundamental thing is that you need to believe in what he is saying to buy the argument he uses to show he's right - full circle right there. This is where it becomes a religious thing - if you believe in the "geistige Welt" most things work. If you don't, he has no real argument to make why it exists in the way he needs it to.
  
  Maybe the most annoying thing is that most of my criticisms clearly were leveled at him at the time - I read the critical edition which includes the changes made for the 1918 edition and a lot of interesting remarks. But instead of really thinking about them and finding good answers he just uses his before mentioned arrogance to swat them away without really addressing the problem.
  
  Steiner in steiners mind is unquestionably right. He knows no self-doubt, he never steps back to ask himself if he might have overlooked a problem. That makes him attractive in the way all religious leaders are.
  It also makes him a bad philosopher at best.
• 
  Bohemian Bluestocking

  This is quite a lovely precursor to his more spiritual writings. He feels basically in this that thinking is a spiritual activity and he makes his way through responding to other epistemologies such as realism, idealism and transcendental realism and presents his own unique epistemology that is more complex and nuanced as it involves process and evolution. He says that we combine percept (experience) + concept (imagination/our mental images/thinking) to equate to a holistic reality, and that if we can experience through the material senses, why can we not, he asks in the last few pages, also experience the spiritual realm, also since we are already engaged in a spiritual activity, which is our true freedom (manifestation).
• 
  Marius

  Very analytical, great arguments. The freedom that Steiner talks about it's an internal freedom if you will.
  It does not get into the social, political, economical aspects of freedom.
  I read this episodically but I remember that he emphasised desire as a joy in itself, one enjoys to desire.It's not about the object of desire but as a pure, free-floating state of being that gives one freedom and pleasure in approaching life.
  I guess he may be the 1st to tell that "you can want anything you like but you can't want what to want".
  He does not get into his esoterism at all in this one. Steiner simply takes the discussion further from other philosophers (Kant, Hegel and others) and argues his position.
  I definetly need to read this book one more time.
• 
  Andrew

  [review for Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path]
  First off, this edition has a terrible title. The Philosophy of Freedom (or, even better, Freehood)(Die Philosophie der Freiheit) is the actual title; poor choice on SteinerBooks'/Anthroposophic Press' part.
  
  This is probably my favorite of Steiner's books. I found it the most accessible and rewarding to read and deal with. And there is a lot to deal with. His epistemology is nuts, but so is Kant's and Spinoza's and Hegel's, &c. I'm still reading up on the development of western philosophy, but I think Steiner does an adequate job of putting his arguments into the larger philosophical contexts leading right up to the twentieth century. I don't completely agree with everything he has to say here, but I find this explanation of thinking and its relation to free willing (ethical individualism) to be food for thought and so practical that I question its simplicity (think!).
• 
  Christian

  "[Intuition] is a perception in which the perceiver is himself active, and it is an activity of the self which is also perceived. In intuitively experienced thinking man is transferred into a spiritual world as perceiver. What comes to meet him as perceptions within this world in the same way as the spiritual world of his own thinking comes to meet him, man recognizes as a world of spiritual perception. This world of perception has the same relationship to thinking as the world of physical perception has on the physical side. When man experiences the world of spiritual perception it will not appear foreign to him, because in intuitive thinking he already has an experience which is of a purely spiritual character."
• 
  Angus

  I first read this book 25 years ago and have read/listened to it multiple times since. It ranks as one of the most important books I have ever encountered in my life and for many reasons.
  Possibly the most important is the central question of thinking as a fundamental human experience and it being a decisive factor in our well-being, search for meaning and ultimate happiness.
  
  This book is brain-food, a dish that can and should be enjoyed numerous times. However, it is also a very acquired taste. If you don't like practical philosophy then you are probably best off leaving it alone
• 
  Thai Son

  80% of the book is a lit review of all the comtemporary philosophy stuff related to his thesis.
  Heavy, but ultimately irrelevant to our time. We've moved far from proofs of concepts, and more on practicing/ making relevant these ideas.
  Still a useful read when one has to think about Steiner education and and agriculture, perhaps his two only important legacies. Context, and application.
  
  Read as part of my first serious inquiry into Steiner. This was the first book in the list.
• 
  Marco cuore_vivo

  
  The use of mind, of thoughts and of heart, celebrating the possibility to analize our mind and thoughts, as they born, they grow and make steps.
  
  
  The possibility to realize that thoughts themselves drive us to the discover and the analysis of our spiritual core.
  
  Have good reading!
  
  Marco
  
  
• 
  Andrea

  Thank you, Kristen, for encouraging me to read this book. It is challenging to follow in some parts but so worth sticking to it. A simple but powerful idea to look nowhere but within yourself to find spirituality and meaning in life.
• 
  Lord

  One of the essential books by Rudolf Steiner. Very difficult to read but very important for grasping the idea of freedom of the human soul and the basis of anthroposophy.
• 
  Claudia

  Science, humanity and the reason within a Spiritual path. Steiner will seek to enlighten us through the results of observing the human soul according to the methods of natural science.
• 
  Sarah

  i studied this book experientially for two weeks for summer teaching training intensive.
  thinking about thinking...
• 
  Aileen

  Not my favorite Steiner book.
  Still mind opening though.
• 
  Wendy 'windmill'

  Good
  
  A very interesting read. RS is an extraordinary thinker & great philosopher. This book has given me lots to think about.
• 
  Cory Alexander

  FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• 
  Justin

  Not for me