The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Monism

[ 1 ] The naïve person, who only accepts as real what he can see with his eyes and grasp with his hands, also demands motives for his moral life that are perceptible to his senses. He demands a being who communicates these motives to him in a way that his senses can understand. He will have these motives dictated to him as commandments by a person whom he considers to be wiser and more powerful than himself, or whom he recognizes for some other reason as a power above him. In this way, the moral principles that emerge are those of family, state, social, ecclesiastical and divine authority mentioned earlier. The most biased person still believes a single other person; the somewhat more advanced person has his moral behavior dictated to him by a majority (state, society). It is always perceptible powers on which he relies. If the conviction finally dawns on him that these are basically just as weak people as he is, he looks to a higher power for guidance, to a divine being, which he endows with sensually perceptible qualities. He allows this being to convey the conceptual content of his moral life to him again in a perceptible way, be it that God appears in the burning bush, be it that he walks among men in a bodily-human form and tells their ears audibly what they should and should not do.

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

[ 3 ] This, however, means that we have already left the stage of naive consciousness and have entered the region where moral laws become independent as norms. They then no longer have a carrier, 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 share that the human being has in this reality in thought, but which hypothetically adds them to what is experienced. The extra-human moral norms always appear as a concomitant of this metaphysical realism. This metaphysical realism must also seek the origin of morality in the field of the extra-human real. There are various possibilities. If the presupposed being is conceived as a being without thought in itself, acting according to purely mechanical laws, as it is supposed to be in materialism, then it will also bring forth the human individual from itself by purely mechanical necessity, together with everything about it. The consciousness of freedom can then only be an illusion. For while I believe myself to be the creator of my actions, the matter that composes me and its processes of movement are at work in me. I believe myself to be free, but all my actions are in fact only the results of the material processes underlying my physical and mental organism. Only because we do not know the motives that compel us do we have the feeling of freedom, according to this view. "We must again emphasize here that this feeling of freedom is based on the absence of external compelling motives... ..." "Our action is necessitated like our thought." (Ziehen, Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie page 207 f.) ^{1On the way in which "materialism" is spoken of here, and the justification for speaking of it in this way, cf. the "Supplement" to this chapter at the end of it.}

[ 4 ] Another possibility is that someone sees in a spiritual being the extra-human Absolute behind the phenomena. Then he will also seek the drive to act in such a spiritual force. He will regard the moral principles to be found in his reason as an emanation of this being in itself, which has its special intentions with man. The moral laws appear to the dualist of this school of thought as dictated by the Absolute, and man simply has to investigate and carry out these counsels of the Absolute Being through his reason. The moral world order appears to the dualist as a perceptible reflection of a higher order behind it. Earthly morality is the manifestation of the extra-human world order. It is not man who is important in this moral order, but the being itself, the extra-human being. Man should do what this being wants. Eduard von Hartmann, who conceives of the being in itself as a deity for which its own existence is suffering, believes that this divine being created the world so that it could be redeemed from its infinite suffering through it. This philosopher therefore sees the moral development of humanity as a process that is there to redeem the deity. "Only through the construction of a moral world order on the part of rational, self-conscious individuals can the world process be led towards its goal..." "Real existence is the incarnation of the Godhead, the world process is the passion history of the incarnate God, and at the same time the path to the redemption of the crucified in the flesh; morality, however, is the cooperation in shortening this suffering and path of redemption." (Hartmann, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness 5. 871). Here man does not act because he wants to, but he should act because God wants to be redeemed. Just as the materialistic dualist makes man an automaton whose actions are only the result of purely mechanical lawfulness, so the spiritualistic dualist (that is the one who sees the absolute, the being in itself, in a spiritual being in which man with his conscious experience has no part) makes him a slave to the will of that absolute. Freedom is excluded within materialism as well as one-sided spiritualism, in general within metaphysical realism, which concludes that the extra-human is a true reality and does not experience it.

[ 5 ] Both naïve and metaphysical realism must consequently deny freedom for one and the same reason, because they see in man only the executor or implementer of principles necessarily imposed on him. Naïve realism kills freedom by submitting to the authority of a perceptible being or a being conceived according to the analogy of perceptions or, finally, to the abstract inner voice that it interprets as "conscience"; the metaphysician, who merely opens up the extra-human, cannot recognize freedom because he allows man to be mechanically or morally determined by a "being in itself".

[ 6 ] Monism will have to recognize the partial justification of naive realism because it recognizes the justification of the perceptual world. Those who are incapable of producing moral ideas through intuition must receive them from others. Insofar as man receives his moral principles from outside, he is indeed unfree. But monism ascribes equal importance to the idea alongside perception. However, the idea can manifest itself in the human individual. Insofar as man follows the impulses from this side, he feels himself to be free. Monism, however, denies all justification to merely inferential metaphysics, and consequently also to the drives of action originating from so-called "beings in themselves". According to the monistic view, man can act unfree if he follows a perceptible external compulsion; he can act freely if he only obeys himself. Monism cannot recognize an unconscious compulsion behind perception and concept. If someone claims of an action of his fellow human being that it was performed unfree, he must prove within the perceptible world the thing, or the person, or the institution that caused someone to act; if the person making the claim invokes causes of action outside the sensually and spiritually real world, then monism cannot accept such an assertion.

[ 7 ] According to the monistic view, man acts partly unfree and partly free. He finds himself as unfree in the world of perceptions and realizes the free spirit in himself.

[ 8 ] The moral commandments, which the merely deductive metaphysician must regard as emanations of a higher power, are thoughts of men to the confessor of monism; the moral world order is for him neither the imitation of a purely mechanical natural order, nor of an extra-human world order, but entirely the free work of man. Man does not have to enforce the will of an external being in the world, but his own; he does not realize the counsels and intentions of another being, but his own. Monism does not see behind the acting human beings the purposes of a world control that is alien to it, which determines people according to its will, but people pursue, insofar as they realize intuitive ideas, only their own, human purposes. And each individual pursues his own particular purposes. For the world of ideas does not live itself out in a community of human beings, but only in human individuals. What emerges as the common goal of a human totality is only the consequence of the individual acts of will of the individuals, usually of a select few, whom the others follow as their authorities. Each of us is called to a free spirit, just as every rose germ is called to become a rose.

[ 9 ] Monism is therefore philosophy of freedom in the realm of truly moral action. Because it is a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical, unreal limitations of the free spirit just as well as it recognizes the physical and historical (naive-real) limitations of naive man. Because he does not regard man as a finished product that unfolds its full nature at every moment of its life, the dispute as to whether man as such is free or not seems to him to be null and void. He sees in man an evolving being and asks whether the stage of the free spirit can also be reached on this path of development.

[ 10 ] Monism knows that nature does not release man from its arms as a free spirit ready-made, but that it leads him to a certain stage, from which he continues to develop as an unfree being until he reaches the point where he finds himself.

[ 11 ] Monism is clear that a being acting under a physical or moral compulsion cannot be truly moral. It regards the passage through automatic action (according to natural drives and instincts) and the passage through obedient action (according to moral norms) as necessary preliminary stages of morality, but it recognizes the possibility of overcoming both stages through the free spirit. Monism generally liberates the truly moral worldview from the inner-worldly fetters of naive moral maxims and from the extra-worldly moral maxims of speculative metaphysicians. He cannot eliminate the latter from the world, just as he cannot eliminate perception from the world; he rejects the latter because he seeks all explanatory principles for elucidating world phenomena within the world and none outside it. Just as monism rejects even thinking of principles of cognition other than those for human beings (cf. pp. 124f.), it also decisively rejects the idea of moral maxims other than those for human beings. Human morality, like human cognition, is conditioned by human nature. And just as other beings will understand cognition to mean something quite different from us, other beings will also have a different morality. For the supporter of monism, morality is a specifically human characteristic, and freedom is the human form of being moral.

Additions to the new edition (1918)

[ 12 ] 1. A difficulty in the assessment of what is presented in the two preceding sections can arise from the fact that one believes oneself to be confronted with a contradiction. On the one hand, we speak of the experience of thinking, which is felt to be of general significance, equally valid for every human consciousness; on the other hand, it is pointed out here that the ideas which are realized in the moral life, and which are of the same kind as the ideas worked out in thinking, are lived out in an individual way in every human consciousness. He who feels compelled to remain with this opposition as a "contradiction", and who does not recognize that it is precisely in the living view of this actually existing opposition that a part of the essence of man is revealed, will be unable to see either the idea of knowledge or that of freedom in the right light. For that view which thinks of its concepts merely as abstracted from the sense world and which does not allow intuition to come into its own, the thought here claimed for a reality remains as a "mere contradiction". For an insight that sees through how ideas are intuitively experienced as a beingness based on itself, it becomes clear that man, in the sphere of the world of ideas, when cognizing, lives himself into something that is uniform for all men, but that when he borrows the intuitions for his acts of will from this world of ideas, he individualizes a member of this world of ideas through the same activity that he develops in the spiritual-ideal process of cognition as a general-human one. What appears to be a logical contradiction, the general nature of cognitive ideas and the individual nature of moral ideas, becomes a living concept when it is viewed in its reality. Therein lies a characteristic of human nature, that what is to be intuitively grasped in man moves back and forth between the generally valid cognition and the individual experience of this general. For those who cannot see the reality of one swing of the pendulum, thinking remains only a subjective human activity; for those who cannot grasp the other, all individual life seems lost with the activity of man in thinking. For a thinker of the first kind, cognition, for the other, moral life, is an inscrutable fact. Both will contribute all kinds of ideas to the explanation of the one or the other, all of which are inaccurate, because both either do not actually grasp the tangibility of thinking or misjudge it as a merely abstracting activity.

[ 13] 2. On p. 175f. materialism is mentioned. I am well aware that there are thinkers - such as Th. Ziehen just mentioned - who do not call themselves materialists at all, but who must nevertheless be designated by this term from the point of view asserted in this book. It does not matter whether someone says that for him the world is not resolved in mere material existence; he is therefore not a materialist. Rather, it depends on whether he develops concepts that are only applicable to a material being. He who says: "Our action is necessitated like our thinking", has put forward a concept that is applicable only to material processes, but neither to action nor to being; and if he thought his concept through to the end, he would have to think materialistically. That he does not do so is only the result of that inconsistency which is so often the consequence of not thinking to the end. - We now often hear that the materialism of the 19th century has been scientifically dismissed. In truth, however, it is not at all. In the present day people often fail to realize that they have no other ideas than those with which they can only approach material things. Thus materialism now conceals itself, whereas in the second half of the 19th century it was openly displayed. The veiled materialism of the present is no less intolerant of a spiritual view of the world than the admitted materialism of the previous century. It only deceives many who believe that they are allowed to reject a spiritual view of the world because the natural sciences have "long since abandoned materialism".