Freeman Summary - Chapter 1

Chapter Summary Of The Philosophy Of Freedom
Arnold Freeman

CHAPTER 1 CONSCIOUS HUMAN ACTION
What a stone does is due to forces external to itself. Of this we are all of us completely certain.

If I am knocked down by a car in the street, what happens to me is the result, as things always are for the stone, of external forces. Here too we all of us feel completely certain of our argumentative ground.

In the routine of our lives; in our opinions and habits and behaviour; —if we are honest with ourselves, we are obliged to confess that here also our activity is quasi-mechanical. It may not be easy to elucidate them; they reach us by devious, underground, untraceable routes; —but it is influences outside ourselves that are the causes of most of the things we do. I am still a stone.

Luther is required by the Diet of Worms to declare finally where he stands. If he will recant, he has, as we say, everything to gain. If he refuses to recant, he faces the fate of Huss and Giordano Bruno. He passes a fearful night of struggle with himself, emerging with: —"Hier stehe ich! Ich kann nicht anders! So hilf mir Gott!" Was his decision "free"?

In cases such as this, —and in the corresponding situations that come to all of us,— when everything seems to be happening not outside ourselves but within; when there are these acute and prolonged self-communings; when if we are to achieve a victory, we feel we must supply from within ourselves the motive-forces, —are these actions also the actions of a stone?

With human behavior in general we are not in this book concerned. We are not asking the unaskable abstract question: —Is a human being free or unfree?" This opening chapter is entitled, by Dr. Steiner: —"Conscious Human Activity." We are concerned exclusively with human actions which seem —at any rate— to be the effect of causes contained within ourselves: with deeds of which the motive-forces seem to lie in our own consciousness.

What direction our investigations must take accordingly becomes plain to us. We turn to the study of human consciousness. What does it mean when we say: "I think"?

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