The Philosophy of Freedom
The Philosophy of Freedom and its circle of ideas: pure thinking, moral intuition, ethical individualism and the threefold social impulse. Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 943 terms, and companion to the in-depth guide Anthroposophy.
Ethical Individualism is the position Steiner argues for in The Philosophy of Freedom, in which the moral act proceeds from individual moral intuition rather than from external commandment, convention, or biological drive.
Steiner's name for modern souls whose karma turns them off inherited civilization, creed, and class to seek a spiritual path of their own.
Moral Intuition is the first moment of the free deed in Steiner's ethics; it is the act in which the I grasps a moral idea directly, without sense-mediation, prior to its application and execution.
Philosophy of Freedom is Rudolf Steiner's 1894 epistemological foundation, in which thinking grasps reality directly and the free deed proceeds from moral intuition rather than from rule or impulse.
Steiner's wisdom of the spirit: the study of how spirit declares itself within the human soul and carries the self through repeated earth-lives.
Freud's method of tracing soul disturbances to a repressed unconscious, which Steiner reads as a true discovery wrapped in a materialistic, sexualised frame.
Steiner's science of the soul considered between body and spirit, whose whole inner life reduces to two activities: reasoning and the love and hate fed by desire.
Pure Thinking (reines Denken) is the activity in which the I grasps concepts directly from the spiritual world rather than abstracting them from sense data; it is the bridge between ordinary thought and supersensible cognition.
Steiner's teaching that self-emancipated human intelligence, free since the fifteenth century, must be Christened or it inclines of itself toward the ahrimanic.
The real being of the I that persists between death and rebirth, present in every soul yet normally unconscious, revealed only in the super-spiritual world.
The healthy social body that arises when cultural-spiritual life, rights-political life, and economic life each follow their own organising principle of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Threefolding is Steiner's social proposal that human society organises itself through three semi-independent spheres of cultural life, rights life, and economic life.