The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Final Practical Reflections

[ 1 ] The relation of our knowing personality to the objective world being is what we wished to understand in the preceding study. What does it mean for us to possess knowledge and science? That was the question whose answer we sought.

[ 2 ] We have seen that within our knowing activity the innermost core of the world expresses itself. The lawful harmony by which the universe is governed comes to manifestation in human knowledge.

[ 3 ] The human being is therefore called upon to bring into the realm of manifest reality those fundamental laws of the world which otherwise do indeed govern all existence, but which themselves would never come into existence. That is the nature of knowing: that in it the ground of the world, which can never be discovered in objective reality, presents itself Our knowing activity — expressed pictorially — is a continuous living into the ground of the world.

[ 4 ] Such a conviction must also shed light on the way we take up practical life.

[ 5 ] The whole character of the way we lead our lives is determined by our moral ideals. These are the ideas we have of our tasks in life, or, expressed differently, the ideas we make of what we intend to accomplish by our actions.

[ 6 ] Our actions are part of the general working of the world. As such they also stand under the universal lawfulness of this working.

[ 7 ] Whenever anything occurs in the universe, two things must be distinguished about it: its outer course in space and time and its inner lawfulness.

[ 8 ] Knowledge of this lawfulness with reference to human action is only one particular case of knowing activity. The views at which we have arrived about the nature of knowledge must also be applicable here. To know oneself as an acting personality means therefore: knowingly to possess, for one's actions, the corresponding laws, i.e., the moral concepts and ideals. If we have once known this lawfulness, then our actions are also our creation. The lawfulness is then not given as something that lies outside the object in which the occurrence manifests, but rather as the content of the object itself that is engaged in living activity. The object in this case is our own “I.” If, in knowing, the “I” has really penetrated the essential being of its actions, it then feels itself at the same time to be the master of its actions. As long as this does not occur, the laws of the actions confront us as something foreign — they rule us; what we accomplish stands under the compulsion they exert on us. If, from being foreign entities of this sort, they are transformed into the innate activity of our “I,” then this compulsion ceases. That which compels has become our own being. The lawfulness no longer rules over us; it rules within us over the occurrence that issues from our “I.” To cause something to occur by virtue of a lawfulness lying outside the doer is an act of inner unfreedom; to do so out of the doer himself is an act of inner freedom (Freiheit). To know the laws of one's actions means to be conscious of one's inner freedom. The process of knowledge, according to our argument, is the process of developing toward inner freedom.

[ 9 ] Not all human actions bear this character. In many cases we do not possess the laws of our actions as knowledge. This part of our actions is the unfree part of what we do. Over against this part there stands that part where we live completely into these laws. That is the free realm. Only insofar as our life belongs to it can it be called a moral one. The transformation of the first region into one with the character of the second is the task of every individual's development, as also of the whole of mankind.

[ 10 ] The most important task of all human thinking is: to understand the human being as a free personality, founded upon himself.