Quotes from: "Rudolf Steiner on his book The Philosophy Of Freedom" by Otto Palmer
P14 Basic principles of Anthroposophy
"Anyone interested in looking for them will find the basic principles of Anthroposophy already enunciated in this book."
P43 Special way to read POF
“Now what kind of reader approach did The Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as they read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really like waking up out of sleep in the morning.”
P61 Science Of Freedom
"The Philosophy Of Freedom is the foundation of a new branch of science—the science of freedom. Its method is philosophic based on psychological observation. Its style is the way cognitive theory was expressed in that time... If this science of freedom does not receive the same intensive cultivation accorded other sciences, freedom will be irretrievably lost both by society and by the individual." Otto Palmer
P90 Inner activity
“That is the reason why it is not exactly popular with people who read a book for information only. It was intended to involve the reader, page by page, in the actual activity of thinking, to serve merely as a score read with inner thought activity as the reader advances on his own from thought to thought.”
P47 Inner conviction
“Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the stage one has oneself reached as a beginner.”
P84 Hard work
“The book is a living organism, and to work one’s way through the thoughts it contains is to undergo an inner training. A person to who this has not happened as a result of study need not conclude what I am saying is incorrect, but rather he has not read it correctly or worked hard and thoroughly enough.”
1)P5 Soul observation
“I was not setting forth a doctrine, but simply recording inner experiences through which I had actually passed. And I reported them just as I experienced them.”
2)P23 Cosmic mysteries
“Within this book thinking is experienced in a way that makes it impossible for a person involved in it to have any other impression, when he is living in thought, he is living in the cosmos. This relatedness to cosmic mysteries is the red thread running through the book.”
3)P82 Thought training
“The primary purpose of my book is to serve as thought training, training in the sense that the special way of both thinking and entertaining these thoughts is such as to bring the soul life of the reader into motion in somewhat the way that gymnastics exercise their limbs.”
4)P87 Evolution of thought
“A person desirous of entering the higher worlds must accustom himself to the kind of thinking in which each next thought grows out of the preceding one. This is the thinking in my Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Science. These books are not written in a way that allows arbitrary placement of thought. They developed as an organism grows, one thought evolving from another.”
5)P83 Thought organization
“For in the case of a book like this, the important thing is so to organize the thoughts it contains that they take effect. With many other books it doesn’t make a great deal of difference if one shifts the sequence, putting this thing first and that later. But in the case of The Philosophy of Freedom that is impossible. It would be just as unthinkable to put page 150 fifty pages earlier as it would be to put a dog’s hind legs where the front ones belong.”
6)P87 Guided by thought
“The thoughts were not influenced by the author’s personality. He let himself be guided by what the thoughts they contained produced as the fruit of their own activity and were structured accordingly.”
7)P78 Independent thinking
“The most important thing about this book is the fact that in its pages completely independent thinking appears for the first time. A person incapable of thinking freely cannot understand it. He must accustom himself to call upon his etheric body if he is to entertain such thoughts.”
8)P104 Resurrection of thought
“This book is a picturing of morality intended to serve as a manual for enlivening dead thoughts by making them moral impulses, for resurrecting them from the dead. In this sense there is an inner content of Christianity.”
9)P12 Philosophy as an art
“Music theory is a body of knowledge that one must have acquired before starting to compose, and in composing, the laws of composition are made to serve life, to create something absolutely real. Philosophy is an art in exactly the same sense. Real philosophers have always been conceptual artists. The ideas of humankind were the artistic medium in which they worked….How philosophy as an art is related to human freedom, what freedom is, and whether we do, or can, participate in it—this is the main theme of my book.”
10)P59 Love of ideals
“Ideals that are the result of practicing a spiritual scientific thinking method become something more than abstractions, they are loved, loved with all the strength of ones humanness.”
11)P83 Catharsis
“Catharsis is an ancient term for the purification of the astral body by means of meditation and concentration exercises. If a reader takes this book as it was meant and relates to it in the way a virtuoso playing a composition on the piano relates to its composer, reproducing the whole piece out of himself, the books organically evolved thought sequence will bring about a high degree of catharsis.”
12)P60 Clarion call to free thinking and social trust
“So I can say at the time –the beginning of the nineties—I very much wanted my Philosophy of Freedom to sound a clarion call for the exact opposite of what we see happening today…… Development of recent times brought about social conditions in which perverse human instinct pursued a direction completely counter to what a grasp of present-day humanity’s true and deeper goal required our taking. That is the terrible tragedy of modern times. It makes it absolutely necessary, in our future efforts, to recognize that the social order must be built in a way that is made possible only by free thinking, by trust, by what Goethe had in mind when he was looking for a definition of duty and said, “Duty is loving what one orders oneself to undertake…..”
