Philosophy of Freedom: Steiner's Answer to Descartes' Cogito

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The stove-room where modern philosophy began

In the winter of 1619, a young French soldier on campaign in Germany found himself snowbound in a single room with a stove. He was twenty-three. The campaign was boring. He had been thinking for some months about the foundations of knowledge, and in that stove-room, over several days, he did something that changed the shape of Western consciousness for four centuries.

He decided to doubt everything he could possibly doubt. Everything his senses told him. Everything his teachers had told him. The body he seemed to have. The world he seemed to be in. Even the mathematics he was fluent in, in case some powerful deceiver was arranging his thinking to produce expected answers.

What remained, he found, after the doubt had done its work, was the doubting itself. He could not doubt that there was doubting going on. And for there to be doubting, there had to be something doing it. A thinking something. A thinking thing.

I think, therefore I am.

His name was René Descartes, and the sentence he wrote in that stove-room is the opening sentence of modern philosophy. It was brilliant. It was also a mistake, and the mistake organised three centuries of Western thought, and the effects of the mistake are the water you are swimming in.

Descartes' brilliant mistake and the four centuries it shaped

The mistake was not in finding the thinking. The thinking is there, and what Descartes touched in that room was real. The mistake was in deciding that the thinking was a thing. A substance. An inner stuff, locked inside a skull, separated from the world by a kind of wall that the thinking had to somehow peer across or reach through.

From that moment on, the West had two realities instead of one. There was the thinking thing inside. There was the world of matter outside. And the entire subsequent philosophy of the West became an argument about whether those two could ever be bridged, and if so how, and at what cost.

Descartes was the first great modern thinker. He also stopped three steps too early. He could not see that thinking is not a thing. Thinking is an activity. And it is an activity already in the world, not locked away from it.

The stream continued past him. Spinoza tried to collapse the two substances back into one by calling them aspects of a single divine substance. Leibniz tried to multiply them into countless monads, each one a mind mirroring the whole universe from its own point of view. Locke and Berkeley and Hume, working in England, tried to dissolve the outer substance entirely, so that only minds and ideas remained. Kant, in Königsberg a hundred and fifty years after Descartes, tried to fix the situation by saying that we can know the world as it appears to us, structured by the inbuilt categories of our minds, but never the world as it is in itself; the thing in itself, the Ding an sich, lies forever beyond our reach. Hegel tried to fix Kant by swallowing the whole difference between the knower and the known into one great self-unfolding Spirit. Each of them saw one more step down the stream. None of them finished the walk.

The quarter turn that finishes the walk

The one who finished the walk, about a century ago, simply took Descartes' finding and turned it a quarter turn. Yes, in the act of thinking, you know something from the inside that you know in no other way. But what you know from the inside is not a locked-away substance. It is the activity of the world itself becoming knowable through you, an idea that connects directly to the threefold social order described in the prologue. Thinking is not the thing in the cabinet. Thinking is the window the cabinet was never.

His name was Rudolf Steiner. The book was Die Philosophie der Freiheit, published in 1894 in Berlin, when Steiner was thirty-three and still working as an editor of Goethe's scientific writings. The English title is The Philosophy of Freedom, sometimes The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, sometimes Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. The argument is one. It is the argument that finishes what Descartes began.

How thinking actually meets reality

Go back to your morning.

In the quarter hour between sleep and the day, before you became useful to anyone, a thought arose in you. You did not choose it. You did not assemble it from parts. You did not pay for it. It came.

Ask yourself now, as honestly as you can, what that thought was made of. It was not made of neurones, though neurones may have been involved. It was not made of previous thoughts you had been taught, though your previous thinking shaped what this one could be. It was not sold to you by an algorithm, though an algorithm may have tried to sell you other thoughts all day. It was not yours in the way your wallet is yours. You did not own it. You could not sell it. You could not copyright it.

The thought simply arose, from somewhere, and was thought, and passed.

Now notice something about the thought that Descartes' whole tradition could not see. When you thought it, two things came together, and the coming-together was the thinking.

One of them was whatever the thought was about. A situation. A person. A memory. A question. Something given to your awareness, something there for you to think about. Call this the percept.

The other was whatever let you understand what you were thinking about. The meaning. The concept. The grasping of what the thing is. Call this the concept.

In ordinary awareness, the percept and the concept arrive already fused. A tree stands there. You see the tree. You do not first see a confused mass of green and brown and then reason your way to the category tree. The seeing and the knowing come together. Thinking has already happened in the seeing.

When you think, the concept and the percept meet in a single act of grasping. Neither of them is complete without the other. The percept alone is formless. The concept alone is empty. Together they are reality.

This is what Kant could not see. He thought the categories of the mind were something the mind added to the percepts, so that we could never know whether the world as it really is matches the categories. But the categories are not something added. They are the other half of reality, coming to meet the first half in the activity of thinking. There is no Ding an sich hiding behind the percept. The thinking, when it happens honestly and patiently, reaches the thing itself, because the thing itself has two halves and thinking is how the two halves come together.

Thinking is not a private mental operation on pre-given sense-data. It is the part of reality we happen to experience from the inside. Everything else in the world we know only from outside, as appearance. Thinking we know from within, as activity. That is why thinking is the most privileged access we have to the nature of what is. When we think, we are not representing reality from a distance. We are inside reality, being the part of it that knows.

Free thinking and the ethical act

There is a second move, equally important, that completes what Descartes began and could not finish.

The first move showed that when we think, we reach reality. The second move shows what happens when we act out of our own thinking, rather than out of habit, or instinct, or external pressure, or social expectation, or inherited rule.

Most human action is not free. It is driven. By appetite, by custom, by commandment, by the expectation of reward or the fear of punishment, by the unexamined templates the culture has handed us. When we act from any of these, the action is not ours in the deepest sense, even if we performed it. Something else acted through us. We were a channel.

There is a different mode of action that most of us experience briefly, in a few moments scattered through our lives. In these moments, we face a concrete situation that calls for a response. We stop. We let the situation come fully into our thinking. We wait for what the situation itself is asking for. And when the answer becomes clear to us, not as a rule but as the specific right response to this particular moment, we act from it. The acting is not compelled by appetite or custom or rule. It is compelled only by our own inner clarity about what this situation needs.

An older tradition called this moral intuition. The tradition of the stream we are walking named it more precisely: the ethical act that arises from free individual recognition of what the concrete situation asks of us.

This is the mature form of freedom. Not the freedom to do whatever you want, which is usually just the freedom to be pushed around by the loudest appetite. Not the freedom to follow the correct rules, which is compliance dressed up. The freedom that arises when your own thinking has become clear enough, and honest enough, to perceive what a situation asks, and your own will has become integrated enough to act from what you perceived.

The ethical life, understood this way, is radically individual. No rule can replace the work. No authority can spare you the seeing. Every concrete situation is somewhat unlike every previous situation, and what is right here depends on what here actually is. You have to see it yourself. That is what it means to be morally adult.

Why every institution that rules thinking from outside breaks it

Notice what this means for every institution that tries to rule what you think from outside.

Anything that tries to rule what you think from outside is not making you think better. It is stopping you from thinking at all. It may be replacing your thinking with something that looks like thinking from the outside. But from the inside, where thinking actually happens, something else is going on.

Education that dictates what must be concluded is not education. It is compliance training that uses thinking-shaped material. The student who recites the expected answer has not thought. The student who works through the question and arrives at a conclusion, including one the teacher did not expect, has thought. A school can teach a subject honestly, can introduce the great questions, can model what careful thinking looks like, can correct specific errors of reasoning. It cannot make the student think. The student must do that alone.

Media that dictates what must be felt and believed is not journalism or commentary or art. It is thought-replacement. It gives you finished products that look like thoughts but were made by others, for others' purposes, and inserted into you where your own thinking should have been. A healthy culture produces material that helps you think. A sick culture produces material that thinks for you. The signature of the latter is that you can predict its conclusions from its opening paragraphs.

Science that dictates what must be concluded before the investigation is not science. Science is a form of thinking. The moment the conclusion is required before the thinking, the science has stopped and something else is using the word. Real science is the disciplined practice of letting the evidence modify the hypothesis, not the other way around.

Religion that dictates what must be believed on pain of exclusion is not religion. Religion is the soul's own relation to what is greater than it. The moment the relation is coerced from outside, the soul has been pushed out and a protocol has replaced it. Real religion may have a shared language, shared rituals, shared texts, shared sacraments, but what they are for is to open a space in which the individual soul can meet what is sacred.

Art that has been made to serve a message, a cause, a program, a political line, a market segment, a demographic target, is not art. Art is what emerges when a human being works something out in the medium that medium allows. The emergence cannot be predicted because the thinking happening in the maker is real thinking, reaching places it has not already been.

None of this is a moral judgment on institutions. Institutions are not evil for having incentives. They are simply in the wrong sphere when they try to rule thinking. A school is a structure in which free thinking should be cultivated. A newspaper is a structure in which free thinking should be offered. A laboratory is a structure in which free thinking should be tested against the resistant reality. A church is a structure in which free thinking should meet what is holy. When any of these structures decides instead to rule what thinking should conclude, the structure has tried to do the work of a different sphere.

The cultural sphere and its principle

The name of this sphere is freedom. Not freedom in the slogan sense. Freedom in the technical sense: the sphere of activity in which the activity can only happen if it is not coerced. Thought, art, education, science, religion, the inner life. These are not separate activities stacked on top of each other; they are all facets of the one activity of the human being freely relating to what is true, to what is beautiful, to what is holy. The sphere is one because the activity is one. The freedom is not a preference or a right bestowed by a state. It is the inner nature of the activity itself. You can no more have thought without freedom than you can have fire without heat.

When a society learns to leave this sphere free, the sphere flourishes. Real art appears. Genuine science happens. Actual education takes place. Religion becomes deep rather than defensive. The culture of the society becomes alive, because the activity at its heart is allowed to be the activity it is.

When a society tries to rule this sphere from the other two, something else happens. Under the rule of the state, you get socialist realism, compulsory ideology, approved biology, re-education programmes, a homogeneous religion or a homogeneous atheism. Under the rule of the market, you get attention economies, content farms, algorithmically shaped opinion, universities restructured as degree factories, religion as brand, art as product, science as whoever pays. The specifics differ. The effect is the same. The sphere has been colonised by the logic of another sphere, and the thinking it was supposed to host has thinned.

You are living in a time when this sphere has been colonised by both at once. The state apparatus and the market apparatus have each, by their own means, moved into the cultural-spiritual sphere and begun to try to run it. You feel it. The feeling you have had for years that something is slightly off about education, about media, about public thinking, is not imagination. It is your recognition that the sphere meant to host your thought has been turned into a managed space, and that the management is the wrong kind of activity for that space.

A first practice in noticing free thinking

Before the next chapter opens the second sphere of rights and equality, try this.

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