 What are our expectations of a fellow who strives to be an ethical individual in freedom? Monday is traditionally fireworks night as Britain tries to remember the historical terrorist, Guy Fawkes. |
What are our expectations of a fellow who strives to be an ethical individual in freedom?
Remember, rememberThe fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot…
Monday is traditionally fireworks night as Britain tries to remember the historical terrorist, Guy Fawkes. He claimed moral grounds for his plan to bring the house down. One of the gang got cold feet when it became clear that there would be innocent victims in the building so he tipped off the authorities. That seems to have been the action of a moral individual. They all died by the law of the land.
Ethical individuals are likely to become agitators among the ambiguities of life, and to raise their platforms inconveniently. This so easily sounds like a recipe for violent action. These days we might rather expect ethical individualism to engage with life through non-violent action. But there is no doubt that an ethical individual is likely to be inconvenient in circumstances that flout her or his moral insight. Inconvenience is often painful, although it may not set out to be so.
When a person practising ethical individualism causes us hurt, quite unintentionally, what do we expect from that person? Should the fact of the hurt elicit an immediate retraction or apology? If the inadvertent offender claims sound ethical grounds for her or his deed and finds no reason to offer more than explanation, is that the end of the matter? The workings of karma suggest probably not.
One of the defining features in my characterisations of ethical individualism is an abundance of creativity that increases the potential for everyone’s growth. There is a chance to be creative; take it or leave it. Perhaps the most opportune action to offer as learning is to withdraw in silence. I tend to offer an apology automatically and reflect later. That constitutes a code of conduct that helps me feel slightly more comfortable in the face of another’s pain. Yet moral intuition does not offer choice. All I can do is to try to enact the apology with love. As my constitution stands just now, any other action cannot be imbued with love.
What if the imaginary hurting person begins to make demands on our fictitious individual? The consequences of an action, being unforeseen, what is the free individual bound to do? I suggest – inconveniently - that a freedom striver is not bound to anything but her or his moral intuition in reconsidering how to act or not act in the face of unforeseen consequences. If that does not confer approval from the expectant claimant, does the individual’s faculty of moral intuition stand flawed? Is the expectation of redress no longer valid in our fanciful scenario?
I suggest that only love can be expected of an ethical individual. All else is uncertain.
“To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways; we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.” - Oswald Chambers
Person A and Person B
The only person who can tell whether an individual is free or not is the individual.
Suppose person A does something and person B doesn't like it.
Person B says, "what you did was very upsetting for me".
Person A says, "I did what I had to do according to my moral imagination."
Person B says, "but it was very upsetting."
Now person A makes the knock-out blow, by saying "Ah, but my act was a free deed and free deeds can not disagree with each other, therefore you must be unfree. Loosen up man."
What does person B say next?
The Instinct For The Beautiful
Yo Sebastian,
I don't think your premise that only the actor knows whether or not his (her) deed was free is true.
The crucial fact is that other people know this immediately, and often more accurately than the actor himself (herself). It's the instinct we each have for the Beautiful that allows us to know this.
I'll grant of course that it may be tricky to institute and use a social fact like that, but I do believe it is the only real option we have in anthroposophical conversation, and in anthroposophical social life generally.
Carl You Have Not Read PoF
Hi Carl,
Based on this comment I can only assume you have not read PoF. If you have I don't think you have understood it. What you have said is totally contrary to the conception of freedom put forward in that book.
The Right Way to Read PoF
Hi Tim!
Fantastic! A substantial philosophical challenge.
I have read PoF, and I think I do understand it.
My idea here is that to judge whether or not an action is free requires external eyes, a moral judgment by other people or beings. Did you see my post below? Tom found a passage from PoF, treating the method of the "evolutionist," that appears to substantiate what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that we can only be free, or ethically individual, if our actions are judged and accepted by a community apart from ourselves. That community might be supersensible Beings.
This is the right way to read PoF.
Carl, you say "to judge
Carl, you say "to judge whether or not an action is free requires external eyes, a moral judgment by other people or beings." You imply this is in POF? Could you show me where? The quote I gave you certainly doesn't "substantiate" this.
Chapter 14
I'll let Mr Steiner speak for himself here to start with... from Chapter 14 which is obviously an important chapter if we are looking for a summing up of Steiner's presentation:
Anyone who judges people according to generic characters gets only as far as the frontier where people begin to be beings whose activity is based on free self-determination. Whatever lies short of this frontier may naturally become matter for academic study. The characteristics of race, people, nation and sex are the subject matter of special branches of study. Only men who wish to live as nothing more than examples of the genus could possibly conform to a general picture such as arises from academic study of this kind. But none of these branches of study are able to advance as far as the unique content of the single individual. Determining the individual according to the laws of his genus ceases where the sphere of freedom (in thinking and acting) begins. The conceptual content which man has to connect with the percept by an act of thinking in order to have the full reality (see Chapter 5 ff.) cannot be fixed once and for all and bequeathed ready-made to mankind. The individual must get his concepts through his own intuition. How the individual has to think cannot possibly be deduced from any kind of generic concept. It depends simply and solely on the individual. Just as little is it possible to determine from the general characteristics of man what concrete aims the individual may choose to set himself. If we would understand the single individual we must find our way into his own particular being and not stop short at those characteristics that are typical. In this sense every single human being is a separate problem. And every kind of study that deals with abstract thoughts and generic concepts is but a preparation for the knowledge we get when a human individuality tells us his way of viewing the world, and on the other hand for the knowledge we get from the content of his acts of will. Whenever we feel that we are dealing with that element in a man which is free from stereotyped thinking and instinctive willing, then, if we would understand him in his essence, we must cease to call to our aid any concepts at all of our own making. The act of knowing consists in combining the concept with the percept by means of thinking. With all other objects the observer must get his concepts through his intuition; but if we are to understand a free individuality we must take over into our own spirit those concepts by which he determines himself, in their pure form (without mixing our own conceptual content with them). Those who immediately mix their own concepts into every judgment about another person, can never arrive at the understanding of an individuality. Just as the free individuality emancipates himself from the characteristics of the genus, so must the act of knowing emancipate itself from the way in which we understand what is generic.
How do you square this with your comments that "we can only be free, or ethically individual, if our actions are judged and accepted by a community apart from ourselves. That community might be supersensible Beings."?
Your sentence is a logical statement... "we can only be .... if ...." In my experience such statements about human beings should always be taken with a huge dose of salt, humans are prone to constantly surprise us if only we are on the lookout for it!
As far as I can understand what you are saying, you seem to be interposing logical criteria between yourself and the possibility of knowing the reality of (any) free individual. Obviously it is something you believe, but I don't understand how you can claim it agrees with what Steiner is saying here.
What are your thoughts on Steiner's insistence on the importance of performing deeds out of love rather than according to external or internal influences that compel us? In this context the question of whether the influence is spiritual or sense-perceptible, human, sub-human or superhuman is irrelevant.
Freedom and Beauty
Yo Tom,
Well, here's an example of what I mean that's fallen into our laps, courtesy of Tim. The text in bold can be read in the way I'm suggesting. The criteria for judging whether an action is free, in what Steiner says here, are not internal and first-person. Rather, they are objective and third person. The inference can be fairly made, I think, that judgments of freedom are third-person, esthetic judgments. You look at what somebody does, and if it sets your teeth on edge, you know it wasn't free. If your sense of Beauty and Goodness responds to what they present to the world, then you know it was free.
The segue into conversation is of course an obvious one.
Ho Tim,
I think the criteria of judging the action of another individual are basically esthetic, not logical. They are criteria that our higher faculties bring to bear on any situation in the world, that frequently get chased underground, and that respond instantly when something commensurate with their own origin and domain of reference appears in the world.
Hmm
Carl,
You make an interesting point about aesthetic judgement versus intellectual judgement. However I perceive we are rapidly slipping and sliding away from the original point, from my point of view I don't think I need to add any more to this thread of discussion.
true true
B: I am not unfree.
A: Yes you are.
B: am not.
A: Are too!
B: wait....so you are disagreeing with me?
A: yes I am!
B: well. then according to your own logic you must not be doing so freely.....
A: It feels better when I'm right!
I like what Steiner says about two free people, but I think it gets quickly caught up in exactly the error you played out in your funny post. It's the same error that I'm also exploring in relation to the book PoF.
Gendlin says: two people can argue all day about what they say, but you simply can't argue about your experiencing. Steiner's "free man" lives consciously in his experiencing, not in propositions. That's why he can argue about various propositions but he does not experience it as an arguement within freedom.
If you say that it was good that you did X, and I say that you should have done Y instead, we can only argue about it. If you share your experieincing of needing to do X, all I can be is fascinated! Or I can judge your experiencing as wrong, but that means I'm not paying attention to what you are sharing.
It would be silly to think that two free people wouldn't argue. They sure might. But it will be a passionate display of love in action (not soppy love)...They will let each others words open up deeper and deeper layers of the experiential intriacy of what is happening. But it takes two to tango!
Thanks for the humor!
gulp
thanks john
you beautifully said:
I suggest that only love can be expected of an ethical individual. All else is uncertain.
I like that and would like to say it as:
an individual can only love
but those are my words......
I just wrote to a friend about a recent interaction I had that did not go quite so well. I was feeling hurt and upset to some degree. My friend thought that I was hurt and upset by the actions of the other person. I tried to explaine that 8 years ago I definately would have attributed my frustrations and pain to what the other person, but now I can only experience my feelings as functions of unmet needs in myself. The other person has absolutely no responsibility to know what I am needing and, therefore, has nothing to do with what feelings arise in me.....
When it comes to brainstorming and sharing the edge of my thinking, I don't mind getting way out there and confusing. But when it comes to personal needs and how they work in relationships, I trying more and more to really express my firm belief that other people can't control our feelings: But they can surely help us meet our needs IF we make specific requests that don't imply blame, shame, sin, guilt..........I have far from mastered this type of communication.
I love your quote. As I have come to believe less and less in the notion of "choice" (as I've absorbed it growing up) I've found it harder and harder to understand what "responsibility" must then mean: recently somebody on the site was puzzled that I could have anything to say about responsibility and I came back with:
Our only responsibility is to love.
I like how that one crouches next to yours. The thing I am shy to say is that my sense of this responsibility is that it simply can not be enacted by what we usually call the individual. It's more like an absolute release into the only Will there actually has ever been; but that gets too abstract. I'm still looking for words that carry forward the experience I'm trying to point towards.....
gulp
What is true love and ethical individualism?
Dear John,
Ethical Individualism, living out of one's own truth, one's own intuition, keeping in mind and heart what is needed for the earth and in the spiritual world, sometimes ethical individualism involves taking a stance and sticking to it. When Steiner tried to save the Anthroposophical Society through the Christmas Conference 1923/24, renaming the society the General Anthroposophcial Society, he was working out of his own ethical individualism and what he was able to garner from the spiritual world and through the help and support of the supersensible being Anthroposophia. So, true ethical individualism is not about some kind of sappy love (the kind of love most human beings are always extolling), but a real expression of individual courage in the face of adversity (and other dark forces). The Christ and his walk on Calvary, this is true love.
Love to all,
Patri
True love
Thanks all for reading behind the stumbling words.
Q: How do we recognise true love? Call it agape, freedom in spiritual activity, what you will...
Today's A: Only intuition can cognise this kind of love.
Writing that feels like lighting the blue ignition paper and retiring to a safe distance to see what lights up... Testing, testing...
trueing love
it's almost like: only love can true itself forward
or: only truth can love itself forward
or something much more complicated and smart...
or: God is Love and be still and know that I AM God...
or.......
comment for Expectations and Fireworks
First, who has seen the movie "V for Vengance"? The main character (a modern Guy Fawkes) commits several outright murders. Was he an ethical individual?
Second, this item, seemingly based upon PoF: "Ah, but my act was a free deed and free deeds can not disagree with each other, therefore you must be unfree."
A long time I pondered this idea of Steiner's, for it was hard to observe life and see its realization. Then it began to dawn on me that each individual deed occurs in an individual context, such that in order for truly free deeds not to disagree with each other, the contexts for each deed would have to have an almost one to one correspondence, as should perhaps the nature of each individual.
For example, the conventional Christian moralist argues that all abortions are murder. In effect a rule is presupposed and then applied universally to all individual circumstances. Let us then just imagine one abortion, which because of its individual context, lies outside the rule, and can be a free deed by an ethical individualist. If one such abortion can be a free deed, that any number of abortions can also be free deeds. But where lies this freedom from the rule, and also outside the idea that free deeds can not disagree with each other? I can only reason that this freedom lies in the context, and not in the abstract nature of the ethical or moral dilemma. In this sense murder can also be a free deed, can it not, for the context and the individual nature combined make each such choice almost entirely unique.
When then is any ethical or moral choice not unique? At what point are there enough similarities of individual nature and context, such that the idea that free deeds can not disagree with each other applies?
joel
I undersand this to work
Thanks for that Joel, it feels like it unlocks the answer I was trying to find to my question.
I undersand this to work thanks to purpose. Once one has identified one's true purpose one can then act according to that purpose.
The discovery of purpose can not be imposed - each individual must find it for themselves.
The reason why disagreement does not arise between ethical individuals is because they share a common purpose, a purpose that they have all found individually, out of their individual striving.
In my view the following two passages explain how this happens:
POF MW p200 "He determines the value of life by measuring achievements against aims."
POF MW p215 "The unitary world of ideas expresses itself in them as in a multiplicity of individuals... Monism finds this divine life, common to all, in reality itself... But all these contents are within a self-contained whole, which embraces the thought contents of all men. Hence every man, in his thinking, lays hold of the universal primordial Being which pervades all men. To live in reality, filled with the content of thought, is at the same time to live in God."
In other words, we each have the task of finding our own way to grasping hold of the same thing.
****************************
How does this effect the question of murder and V for Vengance (which I have seen in the Great Cinema over the Atlantic)?
What is the ideal content of murder? I can only understand the actions portrayed in V for Victory as being to induce a chaos out of which a new paradigm can emerge - a re-orientation of the compounded purposes of everyone in the society.
POF MW p161 "we mean that the individual gives himself purposes, and that the .outcome of the working of mankind as a whole is compounded of these."
It seems that there are times when force has been used to overcome danger and out of this use of force a chaos comes, and out of the chaos a new sum of compounded purposes emerges that seems closer to the ideal of freedom than before and which seems closer to the ideals of those behind the defending force.
What deed is it to precipitate this chaos? Is this the role of Judas, without whom...?
But the perpetrator of violence is responsible for the consequences of the violence and experiences the consequences - aggressor or defender. In other words, V, in V for Vengance, is as tangled in the laws of karma as anyone else.
At other times force is used and out of the chaos emerges a compounded purpose that is against the purpose that lies behind the force.
I think that WWII fits the first scenario and the 2nd Iraq War fits the second. The compounded purpose of the individuals working in the aftermath of the force that overcame the German aggression was along the lines perviously held by the victors, but one of the consequences of the war was the subsequent significant transformation of the combined purpose. In Britain, we still don't really have a sense of our compounded purpose. Post the collapse of the USSR we even experienced the fear that we had lost all ideal content to our lives!
In the case of the current war in Iraq the USA as the instigator of the violence is experiencing from out of the chaos the war has created the emergence of a compounded purpose that is in opposition to the compounded purpose of the instigators of the violence.
The purpose of man is not given by God, but is found by man in the Ideal content of his thinking. God can not prevent man from turning away from love.
There are always consequences to violence. Perhaps when a path of violence is chosen in defence then the purpose of the defence will prevail. However if the path of violence is chosen in attack then the purpose of the violence will be thwarted. In either case the consequences are horrible for all involved.
This is because the compounded purpose is made up of what individuals think, feel and will. In other words, war - all violence - effects individuals.
******************************************
I sometimes wonder if the consequence of a truly free deed is that it does not generate karma. By this explanation no violent deed can be truly free.
******************************************
If we were capable of being free we would not need the 3-fold social organisation to support us.
******************************************
I am dubious about anyone's claim to have acted freely. Who can judge? Christ, Lord of Karma? Our I AM? Although I am confident that we can make great strides towards freedom and that it is always worth trying, my response to A would be peaceful silence because to laugh would be violent. (I might send a guy called Jeff I used to know (or should that be a buy I know who used to be called ....????) an email though, to let off steam a bit. Would that matter?!)) ;-)
S.
Social Judgment, Individual Judgment
Yo Sebastian,
I think a lot of what you say here is right. I've responded to this intelligent post by Joel above on my thread on Steiner's philosophy, because I think the discussion he broaches is particularly important. I hope you and others will post there as well.
Although knowing whether a deed was free is really a question of social judgment and ordinary morality, knowing what to make one's purpose always is a question of individual judgment. This sort of judgment, having to do with purpose, may be what ethical individualism really amounts to.
Sorting out our purposes vis-a-vis one another constitutes a great deal of the problematic of working together coherently.
I also think it is going to be right that a truly free deed generates no karma.
Is an action free?
Here is what The Philosophy of Freedom says about determining whether a deed is free or not:
POF12-9 If he is to keep to his fundamental principles, the evolutionist can state only that the present form of moral action evolves from other forms of activity in the world; the characterizing of an action (see footnote), that is, whether it is a free one, he must leave to the immediate observation of the action. In fact, he maintains only that men have developed out of ancestors that were not yet human. What men are actually like must be determined by observation of men themselves. The results of this observation cannot contradict the properly understood history of evolution. Only the assertion that the results are such as to exclude a natural ordering of the world would contradict recent trends in the natural sciences.
Footnote: That we speak of thoughts (ethical ideas) as objects of observation is fully justified. For, although during the activity of thinking the products of thinking do not appear at the same time in the field of observation, they can nevertheless become objects of observation afterwards. And it is in this way that we have arrived at our characterization of action.
Hey, this is good. It is
Hey, this is good. It is consistent, at least, with my social interpretation of action observation.
What the social theory of action observation seems to imply is a species of neutral monism. That's a form of pragmatism developed mostly in America by James and Dewey, but also influenced by Mach in Europe. Russell took it seriously, and Wittgenstein seems to have based his Tractatus on it.
What neutral monism says is that there really is no distinction between inner and outer, that the self as entity and even matter per se should be eliminated, and that there are no private objects. All is one, but things tend to bunch up around our consciousness because of the ways in which we are adapted to the world and its conditions.
We are clear that Steiner is a monist, right?
From neutral monism, it seems clear to me at least that conversation theory is the way to go, if what we are really interested in is freedom.
Karma
This is version 2. The first attempt disappeared into the internet untraceably. Warning my friends - Ahriman is acting as a super-editor!
I am concerned that the sentences from Sebastian and Carl on karma give an incomplete representation of the matter.
A free deed may incur no burden of personal karma on the enactor. The same deed may graciously bless the karma of others involved.
A free deed works within the karma of humanity. The karma of humanity is everyone's business. Karma may be strengthened, by love through free deeds, for humanity's further evolving and becoming more free.
This may be obvious to the above writers. It is worth considering the working of love in the world. Would someone love to open a new journal on this?
This is a development in
This is a development in understanding for me. Thanks John.
S-)
There is a critical
There is a critical distinction in here and I don't have time to root it out before going to work. Gulp, what an inner tearing.
p171 POF MW "If a man finds that an action is the image of such an ideal intuition, then he feels it to be free. In this characteristic of an action lies its freedom".
How can anyone but oneself know the ideal intuition part of this equation?
Work in progress, please feel free to pick up ... :-)