Rudolf Steiner, Magazine for Literature, 66th year, No. 14, April 8, 1897
Google translate: German to English

GRAND DUCHESS SOPHIE OF SAXONY

In the history of German literary research, the Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony, who died on March 23, 1897, deserves a place of honor. Goethe's last grandson appointed her the heir to the entire manuscript estate of his grandfather. He could not have entrusted the precious treasures to any better care than theirs. In April 1888, the papers of Goethe passed into their possession. From that point on she considered the administration of the legacy a sacred and loving duty. She wanted to make it as fruitful as possible for science. She carefully discussed with men who were considered to be good Goethe connoisseurs, with Herman Grimm, Wilhelm Scherer, Gustav von Loeper and Erich Schmidt, how the good entrusted to her should be put to literary-historical research. She founded the "Goethe Archive" and hired Erich Schmidt as its director.

By publishing a Goethe edition corresponding to all the scientific requirements of the time, she believed she could best serve the knowledge of Goethe and his time. A large number of scholars were invited to participate in this issue. It was her heart's desire to experience the completion of the monumental work. Unfortunately, it has not come true. Only half of the envisaged number of volumes is still available today. The Grand Duchess took the most active part in the work of her archive. The current director of this institution, Bernhard Suphan, could only speak in terms of the highest enthusiasm when he spoke of this sympathy. She went into all the details of the work.

Goethe's estate was a magnet for the papers left behind by other German poets and writers. The descendants of Schiller in May 1889 made the manuscripts of their ancestor as a gift to the Grand Duchess. As a result, the "Goethe Archive" expanded into the "Goethe and Schiller Archive".

The plan was to gradually design this for the German literary archive. Much has already happened to the realization of this plan. The estates of Otto Ludwigs, Friedrich Hebbel, Eduard Mörikes u. a. are already in the Goethe and Schiller archives. In order to complete her creation, the Grand Duchess made the decision to construct her own building to house the treasures. On June 28, 1896, the magnificent building on the Um, near the Residenzschloss, was ready to be turned over to its purpose. Anyone who attended the opening ceremony of this literary archive was able to observe with what seriousness and with what love the Grand Duchess spoke of her creation. One saw how happy she felt to be able to serve science.

A clear view, a sure feeling for the great and the important were inherent to Grand Duchess Sophie. She had a keen judgment that made her do the right thing on the toughest questions. An indomitable energy and a rare prudence enabled her to devote her care to even the smallest trifles that were connected with their work. What she has done for the care of art, for the education of the youth in Weimar, for the material welfare of their country, can not be overlooked today. Setting beautiful tasks and performing them with strong will was in her nature. Great is the veneration that she enjoys in Weimar.

It is highly appreciated by the members of the Goethe Society, the Shakespeare Society, the Schiller Foundation, who were able to see at their meetings in Weimar, how great was the interest that brought this woman spiritual aspirations, and how great the understanding she had for cultural tasks. Her wish was that everyone in Weimar should spend beautiful days when they visit this place, in order to revive the memory of great times of the past. It has been said many times in recent times that one lives in Weimar from the past. That's right. The best way to understand this life is in great memories. And that there is such a place where people from time to time gather, who otherwise live only in the present, is hardly to be regretted. It's nice to see the past alive from time to time, as if in a dream. The fact that Weimar is today such a place that many people like to visit again and again, and that they take home good impressions of their visits, the recently deceased Grand Duchess has much, much contributed.

Alte und neue Moralbegriffe
Rudolf Steiner, The Future, II. Volume, No. 16, January 14, 1893
Google translate: German to English

OLD AND NEW MORAL CONCEPTS

The word "modern" is on everyone's lips today. Every moment an "all-newest" is discovered on this or that area of ​​human creativity, or at least a promising start to it is noticed. Most of these discoveries, however, do not lead the discerning mind to something really new, but simply the inadequate historical education of the discoverers. For those who are currently influencing public opinion through speech and writing, knowledge equates to the same degree of judgment as the assertions of hubris and audacity in ninety-eight out of a hundred cases. Where now the words "new" and "modern" must help out, they should set terms that have something to do with the thing itself.

I do not want to tune into the wild cries of the unthinking and immature banner bearers of the "modern age" when I speak here of a "new" morality in opposition to the old one. But I have the conviction that the imperative of our time demands of us an acceleration of the change in the views and ways of life that has been taking place very slowly for a long time. Many branches of culture are already saturated with the spirit that speaks out in this demand, but a clear awareness of the main characteristics of the change is not common.

In the following sentence I find a simple expression for the basic feature of a truly future-oriented endeavor: Today, we seek to replace all otherworldly and extra-worldly motive forces with those that lie within the world. In the past people were looking for transcendent powers to explain the existence of phenomena. Revelation, mystical vision, or metaphysical speculation were supposed to lead to knowledge from higher beings. But at present, we seek to find the means to explain the world within ourselves.

One always needs to interpret these propositions in the right way, and one will find that they indicate the characteristic trait of a spiritual revolution that is in full swing. Science is turning more and more from the metaphysical point of view and seeks their explanatory principles within the realm of reality. Art strives to offer in its creations only that which is borrowed from nature and refrains from embodying supernatural ideas. With this endeavor, however, there is a danger of a departure in science as well as in art. Some of our contemporaries did not escape this danger. Instead of pursuing within themselves the traces of the spirit that one had erroneously sought outside of reality, they have lost sight of everything ideal; and we must see how science is content with mindless observing and registering facts, and art often with mere imitation of nature.

But these are abuses that must be overcome by recovering from what lies in the whole school of thought. The significance of the movement lies in the departure from that view of the world which regarded mind and nature as two completely separate entities, and in the recognition of the proposition that both are but two sides, two manifestations of one entity. Replacement of the two-world theory by the unitary world-view, that is the signature of the new time.

The area where this view appears to respond to the most severe prejudices is that of human action. While some naturalists already committed wholeheartedly to her, some aestheticians and art critics are  steeped in her, more or less, the ethicists want to know nothing about it. Here there is still the belief in norms that are supposed to dominate life like an otherworldly power, laws that are not created within human nature, but those that are finished

Guidelines are given to our actions. If one goes a long way, one admits that we owe these laws not to the revelation of a supernatural power, but that they are innate to our soul. They are not called divine commandments but categorical imperatives. But in any case, one thinks of the human personality as consisting of two independent entities: of the sensual nature with a sum of instincts and passions, and of the spiritual principle, which penetrates to the knowledge of the moral ideas, by which then the sensory element is controlled and restrained. The sharpest expression of this fundamental ethical view has been found in Kantian philosophy. Just think of the well-known apostrophe of duty! "Mandatory! you exalted great name, in whom you do not grasp anything beloved, what ingratiation with you, but demand submission, 'which you' establish as law, which finds its way into the mind itself, and yet acquires veneration against his own will, where all inclinations are silenced, yet in secret they counteract it." 

In these words an independence of the moral commandments lies in a special power, to which everything individual in man simply has to submit. If this power also announces itself within the human personality, then it has its origin outside. The commandments of this power are the moral ideals that can be codified as a system of duties. He is considered by the followers of this direction to be a good person who puts these ideals as motives for his actions. One can call this doctrine the ethics of motives. It has numerous followers among German philosophers.

In a very watered form, she meets us at the Americans Coit and Salt. Coit says ("The Ethical Movement in Religion", translated by G. von Gizycki, p. 7): "Every duty is to do with the fervor of enthusiasm, and with the feeling of its absolute and highest value"; and Salter ("The Religion of Morality", translated by G. von Gizycki, p. 79): "A moral act must be done on principle". In addition to this ethic, there is another that takes into account not so much the motives, but rather the results of our actions. Their followers ask for the greater or lesser benefit that an action brings, and thus designate it as a better or worse one.

In doing so, they either look at the benefit for the individual or for the social whole. Accordingly, a distinction is made between individualist or socialist utilitarians. If the former foresees setting up general principles whose observance is to make the individual happy, then they present themselves as one-sided representatives of individualistic ethics. They must be called one-sided because action for their own benefit is by no means the sole aim of human individuality. In their nature, they can also be quite selfless in their action. But if these individualistic or socialist utilitarians derive norms from the nature of the individual or a set of norms to be obeyed, they commit the same error as the professors of the concept of duty: they overlook that all general rules and laws immediately prove to be a worthless phantom when the human being is within the living reality.

Laws are abstractions, but actions always take place under very specific concrete conditions. Weighing the various options and choosing the most practical in the given case, this is befitting us when it comes to action. An individual personality is always faced with a very specific situation and will make a decision in accordance with the matter. In this case a selfish act, in that case a selfless act will prove to be the right one. Soon the interest of the individual, soon that of the whole, will have to be considered.

Those who pay homage to egoism are just as wrong as the eulogists of compassion. For what is higher than the perception of one's own or of the other's well-being is the consideration of whether one or the other is more important under given conditions. In the first place, action is not primarily about feelings, not selfish ones, not selfless ones, but the right judgment about what to do. It may happen that someone sees and acts on an action as correct, suppressing the strongest emotions of his compassion. But since there is no absolutely correct judgment, but all truth has only conditional validity, which depends on the standpoint of the one who expresses it, so too is the judgment of a personality about what it has to do in a certain case, according to their particular circumstances to the world. In exactly the same situation, two people will act differently because, depending on their character, experience and education, they make different notions of what their task is in the given case.

Anyone who sees that the judgment of a concrete case is the author of an action can only speak for an individualistic conception in ethics. The only way to form such a judgment is to have the right view in a given situation and not a fixed norm. General laws can only be deduced from the facts, but the actions of man first create facts. If we infer from the common and lawfulness of human action certain general characteristics in individuals, peoples, and ages, we obtain an ethics, but not as a science of moral norms, but as the natural doctrine of morality. The laws thus obtained are individual as well as the laws of nature. Human behavior, as well as the laws of nature, constitute a particular phenomenon in nature. Ethics as normative science bears witness to a complete misunderstanding of the character of a science. Science makes progress in overcoming the view that in the individual phenomena general norms, types, are realized according to the principle of expediency. Science investigating the real fundamentals of phenomena. Only when ethics does not ask for general moral ideals but for the actual facts of action which lie in the concrete individuality of man, only then may it be regarded as a science of ethics equal to natural science. 

After Rudolf Steiner published The Philosophy Of Freedom he wrote social and political essays to bring his ideas of freedom to the public. These essays have not been translated so they have remained hidden--until now! Included are his articles published in his Magazin für Literatur. They are important as they give us an example of how to represent The Philosophy Of Freedom to the world through social and political commentary.  I got a German copy of them (over 100) and am using Google translate, which is vastly improved, to put them in English. This translation is good enough to see how Steiner is commenting on the popular views of his day on ethics, freedom and the use of science to support freedom. Below are some examples done so far. Here is a link to the essays. I am working on part II.

"At the back of my mind there always lurked this question: how could the epoch be persuaded to accept the ideas of The Philosophy of Freedom? If you are prepared to take the trouble, you will find that everything I wrote for the Magazin für Literatur is imbued with the spirit of The Philosophy of Freedom." Rudolf Steiner 

Jonathan Westphal has been a student of Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy Of Freedom his whole life. This led him to develop ideas on neutral monism. (See correction in comment below) Below is an article and a review of his latest book.

Neutral Monism
Jonathan Westphal December 16, 2016 Consciousness / Jonathan Westphal: The Mind-Body Problem / metaphysics of mind

Neutral monism has a fascinating history, from Mach and Chancey Wright (b. 1830 in Northampton MA, where I happen to live) through William James, the American New Realists, including E.B. Holt and Ralph Barton Perry, many of them very much Harvard figures, Bertrand Russell, from 1919 to 1927, to Moritz Schlick and A.J. Ayer.

There is a slightly overlooked aspect to the view that fits in with the post-Hegelian preoccupations of the time. Here are a few lines from Chauncey Wright’s Philosophical Discussions:

Our own mind is not “first known as a phenomenon of the subject ego, or as an effect upon us of an hypothetical outward world, its first unattributed condition would be, by our view, one of neutrality between the two worlds.” Rather, “The distinction of subject and object becomes … a classification through observation and analysis, instead of the intuitive distinction it is supposed to be by most metaphysicians.”

The neutral monist wants us to start with neutral data, some of them having to do with the objects of sense, such as colors and sounds and so on. But also included by neutral monists such as Mach are times and pressures! This sounds odd, but it is really a testament to Mach’s powerful philosophical naiveté. The naive approach paid off well for him in science too, and he was sensitive to things that other researchers missed or did not notice. An example is Mach bands. Mach’s photography of the shock wave shows the same cheerful empirical spirit. Another fine example is the difference in appearance of shapes under rotation. An eighth rotation of a square makes the horizontal distance across the square narrower, so that what is a perceived is more of a diamond than a square.

What did this approach do for the mind-body problem? Take as an example a neutral item the color that I see, like the pale green (a very New England colour) of the door to my left. Is this color physical or psychological? It is hard to say. The natural thought is that the color is paint, so that what you buy at the paint shop are colours. On the other hand what color you see is determined by all sorts of things having to do with the psychology and physiology of the one who is looking at it. The answer of Mach and the other neutral monists was that pro tem a colour is neither physical nor psychological. Asking which it is is a bit like asking whether I am looking at the first, or second or third. An object becomes the first or second or third only by being put in some sort of order, and, according to the neutral monists, though the neutral data such as colours retain their neutral character come what may, in one series of things they can be regarded as physical (for example in connection with the action of light on the coloured surface) and in another they can be regarded as psychological (for example the saturation of colours is often different in the left and right eye).

So where does this get us? Russell, rather surprisingly, having said that physical and psychological items are distinguished “only by their causal laws” (this is in “On Propositions”) allows that unperceived material things obey only physical laws, images obey only psychological laws, and sensations obey or can obey both. So for Russell during this period sensations are the only genuinely neutral elements. His view then is a sort of sandwich, with the genuinely neutral elements only in the middle. Yet if thoughts do not obey physical laws and unperceived material things obey only physical laws, how is this a genuinely neutral monism?

I have tried to give an account in The Mind-Body Problem of the way in which the neutral monist deals with causal relations between mind and body. The neutral monists seem not to have been struck by this problem, contenting themselves with naturalistic dithyrambs about the oneness of things. But that does not tell you how a puncture in the stomach lining will give you the pain of the ulcer. What seems to me very significant is the overlap of two elements in the two different cases, here a searing. The pain is a searing one, but what the stomach acids do the lining of the stomach is searing too. Searing is something that can take a physical or psychological interpretation, and that is very interesting. The fiery aspect of searing can be seen physically on inspection of the ulcers. In connection with this sort of example I offer an account in the book of what causal relations must be for the neutral monist – I hope that readers will find it interesting.

I am also naturally very interested in the way in which images can turn into sensations. If we could get a grip on this, we would be able to understand the way in which a mental image could have an effect on the body. It is also very interesting that thoughts can become images, and the other way round, in hypnopompic and hypnogogic imagery at the borders of sleep.

A few words, as promised, about the difference between neutral monism and double aspect theories. Neutral monism has categorically physical things and categorically mental things in its ontology. If something is physical, and not psychological, it cannot be placed in a psychological series. With the double aspect theory, however, something can be viewed either as physical or as mental, either as extension or as consciousness, or whatever the “principle attributes” of matter and mind are. This difference between the two theories has an important corollary. With neutral monism there is psychophysical causation, as with interactionist dualism, but not so with with the dual aspect theory. True, we can look at a book under the aspect of economic position (it has a price of $15, say) or we can look at it under the aspect of subject matter (its subject is astronomy, say). But the economic object and the object of the subject matter do not interact. For they are the same thing, viewed under different and incompatible aspects. Double aspect theorists owe more to Spinoza, neutral monists to Leibniz and Hume.

To conclude, may I offer a big thank you to John Schwenkler and The Brains Blog for hosting a great discussion? I have had a lot of fun and learnt a lot. I hope that everyone has enjoyed it and benefited from it as much as I have. Cheers John!

Book Overview

Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is physical, we cannot see how. If we cannot see how the mind is physical, we cannot see how it can interact with the body. And if the mind is not physical, it cannot interact with the body. Or so it seems.

In this book the philosopher Jonathan Westphal examines the mind-body problem in detail, laying out the reasoning behind the solutions that have been offered in the past and presenting his own proposal. The sharp focus on the mind-body problem, a problem that is not about the self, or consciousness, or the soul, or anything other than the mind and the body, helps clarify both problem and solutions.

Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism, which claims that the mind and the body are two different and separate things, nonphysical and physical, and he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness.

Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.

WHAT ARE COGNITIVE RIGHTS?

Science Of Cognition: Cognition is how we acquire knowledge. The science of cognition can lead an individual to free thinking and self-determined action, or it can be misused by creating cognitive bias in the individual. Cognitive abuse has many names such as mind control, brainwashing, or marketing.

Cognitive Rights: Cognitive rights are an extension of the recognized human right of free thought to include free thinking. Free thought is the right of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint, or thought, independent of others' viewpoints. Free thinking includes the right of the individual to pursue and acquire knowledge in their own way. The right of free thinking is violated when someone seeks to exploit an individual by manipulating cognition to change a person’s beliefs, behaviors or identity.

Evaluation Of Cognitive Environment: Each day people try to influence our thinking. This can be helpful in our pursuit of truth or it can be cognitive abuse depending on the cognitive environment. The question is whether the environment and methods used are respectful of individual cognitive rights or exploit and manipulate to serve the agenda of another.