Introduction

Mankind’s fascination with what life is and how death can be overcome are questions that seem central to the riddle of man. This eternal question acquires an interesting and invigorating expression in Steiner’s original preface to The Philosophy of Freedom. This essay is an attempt to communicate how life is hiding in plain sight in that text

Lovers of literature will recall that Gilgamesh sought immortality and had it in his grasp until the snake caused him to drop it at the bottom of the ocean. Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ also endows the central character Dorian Gray with immortality within a portrait. Here to we find tragedy. Elsewhere, The Monkey King stole the peaches of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West giving him immunity to death from natural causes and aging. He then augments this immortality by convincing the Judges of Hell to remove his name from the ledgers of life and death. Finally at the end of his journey with Buddha he is granted the title of Victorious Fighting Buddha assuring him complete transcendence beyond all previous forms of immortality. Saint Paul, on the other hand, tells us that when “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20) then those individuals will know each other after death when they are raised again with new glorified bodies, (1 Corinthians 15). Steiner’s promise is that by giving life to knowledge we can experience a resolution to another eternal human question. Namely, Can the human being know freedom?

Method

Let me start with a few words about the methodology used in this essay. George O’Neil, Florin Lowndes and more recently Mark Riccio have developed some textual analysis tools that, when applied to the original preface, lead us into the deeper currents of this text. By applying their methods and integrating a few of my own idiosyncrasies I would like to present one example of how this text can be deepened for the reader. I have used the notation common to the method, whereby, for example, 10/3 signifies paragraph 10 of the preface and 3 is the third sentence. All the numberings given by me here are related to the German text, so there might be some discrepancies depending on the English translation that you read. One of Mark’s achievements is to have written translations into English that remain faithful to the original structure of the text in German.

Of leaves and lives

In 10/3 we are told that a Philosophy of Freedom is given on these sheets of paper. The German word used is “in diesen Blättern” which carries a double meaning as it can mean “on these sheets of paper”, but in other contexts can mean “in these leaves”. Whilst sheets of paper are made by mechanical processes, leaves most certainly are not. Leaves are the creation of invisible forces. We cannot point to the intelligence in the forces that gives the oak leaf its identifiable, yet never identical form. The forces that grow the leaf bud through every intermediate stage of becoming to its identifiable non-identical form also remain hidden, yet we know those forces must be there for to think otherwise would be a mockery of our own experience and reason. We reject the idea of randomness and instead, using reason, seek for causes and this hidden force, life-force, which also determines the colouring, chlorophyll composition and clustering of every leaf will present itself to our consciousness.

First some observations about the distribution of the Leben (life) in the text and its conceptual twin Organ (organ).

The first use occurs in 4/3 with durchleben (live through/experience), where we are told that we as human beings want to live through truth in our deepest inner sanctum. This Innenleben (inner life) of the personality is only satisfied by knowledge 4/4

In 7/3 it is used in the context of a direction for life and as such is less related to the theme to be developed here.

In 8/2, 8/3, 8/4 and 8/5  it is used to direct the attention of the reader to being lead from dry concepts to concrete life; wanting to live through (durchleben) being in all directions; missing out on the tasty morsels of life; the ascetic life and withdrawal from life as a pre-requisite for entering into the realm of pure thought.

In 9/1, 9/3 (twice), 9/4, 9/5,9/10, 9/14, 9/16 the use of the word becomes even more forceful. We are reminded that life has many realms; life is a unity and that focusing on the individual sciences distance us from the living whole (lebendigen Weltganzen); there must a knowing that can take the elements and guide them back to full life; science must again become organically-living; compositional theory serves life; abstract thinking gains concrete life; ideas become life forces …. we have made a self-determining organism.

One of the first observation that we can make from this overview is the preponderance of life in paragraphs 8 and 9. Using the seed-bud-leaf-flower-pistil/stamen-fruit-seed process as a guiding principle we can identify a significant transformation that begins to make its presence noticeable in the text specifically at 8/2 where Steiner makes clear that he is expressing an opinion when he says “I am thoroughly of the opinion that concepts must be raised to the etheric realm if one wishes to live through (experience) the manifold realms of existence. This overt opinion is curious because other statements that may initially also appear to be mere opinions (2/1,2/3, 6/3, 6/4,11/1,2,3,4) are not flagged with the word “opinion” (Ansicht).

After 8/2 we get a stream of sentences 8/3, 8/4, 8/5, 9/1, 9/3, 9/4, 9/5,9/10, 9/14, 9/16 in rapid succession. Looking at the data we might like to imagine, if such a thing were possible, that the author is injecting a life force into the dead and dry concepts of science. The idea of being able to inject life with a syringe requires, of course, a highly materialistic conception of what life is. When we looked at the oak leaf above, we saw that the living forces reveal themselves to us by reconfiguring matter, but in themselves these forces are masters of matter and not merely a substance to be added to other material substances and even less subject to material processes. Life is not dependent on matter, but our sense bound consciousness is totally dependent on these life forces taking hold of matter to form the natural world. When we begin to work imaginatively with how life makes use of dead matter to reveal aspects of its inner nature we can begin to feel how those forces surge, create and recede in our inner life.

Working with 8-13

Now that the groundwork has been accomplished in the text, the philosophical goal of the text, to make science (Wissenschaft) organically living (9/5) becomes the focus of attention.

Goethe’s archetypal plant and its phases of development was the fruit of Goethe repeatedly subjecting himself to his own individual observations of plants. [1] This was detailed in his studies. When we work with the O’Neil/Lowndes/Riccio method we are, in a similar fashion, repeatedly subjecting ourselves to a thought form. Despite initially being abstract concepts (8/1) as we continually remember them, we begin to experience[2] a flow, a natural progression from one idea to the next. The glue that holds together all the parts of the text begins to reveal itself to be more akin to a living force that has taken the ideas and worked with them in a scientific way in the same way that an artist works with materials and techniques (9/13). The concepts deepen in meaning, they become richer and capable of creative acts. Previously invisible polarities, syntheses, evolutions and parallels present themselves to this new active consciousness (tätiges Bewusstsein). We begin to experience the thought mood (Gedankenstimmung) that Steiner tells us lived in him whilst he was writing the Philosophy of Freedom 25 years prior.

As we deepen into the method we begin to experience how a new faculty is developing in us, a new organ[3] which is capable of receiving inspirations which take us into a deeper level of insight  of both the text and ourselves as thinking human beings.

An example of working with paragraphs 1-7

Later in life Steiner made several references to the idea that the sentences of the book could not have been put in any other order than the order given in the book. A significant example of this was in the final lecture of the Gospel of John series from 1908.[4][5]  Just like the fruit cannot precede the leaf. In the above we see how this also is true in relation to 10/3. The statement “A Philosophy of Freedom is given on these sheets of paper” was not possible in the text until the living forces had been identified and then shown to be the living thought mood out of which the book was written.

Also invisibly weaving in this thought form is a notion of substance that is tangential to Spinoza’s concept of one substance, the theological idea that hope is a substance, Dante Paradiso canto 24 and that joy is a substance that can live in me (first meditation in Road to Self-Knowledge). I hope to develop this more thoroughly when I look at how Wissen(knowledge), Wissenschaft (science / method of knowing)  and Erkenntnis (cognition) evolve in the structure of both the preface and the book.

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[1] This Goethean methodology as a reversal of will activity is developed in detail in the final chapter of GA 20 The Riddle of Man.

[2] late 14c., “observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected one,” from Old French esperience “experiment, proof, experience” (13c.), from Latin experientia “a trial, proof, experiment; knowledge gained by repeated trials,” from experientem (nominative experiens) “experienced, enterprising, active, industrious,” present participle of experiri “to try, test,” from ex “out of” (see ex-) + peritus “experienced, tested,” from PIE *per-yo-, suffixed form of root *per- (3) “to try, risk.” Meaning “state of having done something and gotten handy at it” is from late 15c.

[3] fusion of late Old English organe, and Old French orgene (12c.), both meaning “musical instrument,” both from Latin organa, plural of organum “a musical instrument,” from Greek organon “implement, tool for making or doing; musical instrument; organ of sense, organ of the body,” literally “that with which one works,” from PIE *werg-ano-, from root *werg- “to do.”

[4] The re-fashioning of the astral body indirectly through Meditation and Concentration, is called by an ancient name, “katharsis,” or purification. Katharsis or purification has as its purpose the discarding from the astral body all that hinders it from becoming harmoniously and regularly organized, thus enabling it to acquire higher organs. It is endowed with the germ of these higher organs; it is only necessary to bring forth the forces which are present in it. We have said that the most varied methods can be employed for bringing about this katharsis. A person can go very far in this matter of katharsis if, for example, he has gone through and inwardly experienced all that is in my book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and feels that this book was for him a stimulation and that now he has reached the point where he can himself actually reproduce the thoughts just as they are there presented. If a person holds the same relationship to this book that a virtuoso, in playing a selection on the piano, holds to the composer of the piece, that is, he reproduces the whole thing within himself—naturally according to his ability to do so—then through the strictly built up sequence of thought of this book—for it is written in this manner—katharsis will be developed to a high degree.

[5] For the important point in such things as this book is that the thoughts are all placed in such a way that they become active. In many other books of the present, just by changing the system a little, what has been said earlier in the book can just as well be said later. In The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity this is not possible. Page 150 can as little be placed fifty pages earlier in the subject matter as the hind legs of a dog can be exchanged with the forelegs, for the book is a logically arranged organism and the working out of the thoughts in it has an effect similar to an inner schooling. Hence there are various methods of bringing about katharsis. If a person has not been successful in doing this after having gone through this book, he should not think that what has been said is untrue, but rather that he has not studied it properly or with sufficient energy or thoroughness.