THE DYNAMIST
By listing the thinking and acting characteristics of the Dynamism worldview in The Philosophy Of Freedom, a personality type unfolds. The dynamist characteristics are those of the one who stands out as the dynamic free spirit in the group. They include acting on emotions and heart-felt sensibility, seeking something more than themselves, standing on their own thoughts, projecting their own soul characteristics into what they perceive, relying on intuition for knowledge, intense feelings, considers the "will" as the most important factor of life. They seek harmony in working with others and value amusement by striving for intense pleasures.
Dynamism: Looks for “forces” behind phenomena.
Dynamism worldview in Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy Of Freedom
1.10 Dynamist force in action: Emotions
“Love, pity, and patriotism are motives of action which cannot be analysed away into cold concepts of the understanding. It is said that here the heart, the soul, hold sway.”
2.10 Dynamist force in the pursuit of knowledge: Non-“I”
“The solution to the problem of the separation of the world and “I” is to find something within where we can say, This is something that is more than ' I.'”
3.10 Dynamist force in thinking: Self-supporting, self-subsisting thought
“Archimedes thought he could lift the whole cosmos out of its hinges, if only he could find a point of support for his instrument. He needed a point which was self-supporting. In thought we have a principle which is self-subsisting.'
4.10 Dynamist force in perception: Soul
“What the naive man regards as existing outside of him, is really a product of my soul.”
5.10 Dynamist force in knowing: Intuition
“The form in which thought first appears in consciousness we will call Intuition. An external object remains unintelligible to us, until the corresponding intuition arises within us which adds to the reality those sides of it which are lacking in the percept.”
6.10 Dynamist force in individual representation of reality: Intensity Of Feelings
“Each of us combines special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of intensity, with his percepts.”
7.10 Dynamist force in cognition: Subject
“Monism holds that percepts are determined by the subject. But in thought the subject has, at the same time, the instrument for transcending this determination of which it is itself the author.”
8.10 Dynamist force as factor of life: Will
“He sees in the will an element in which he is immediately aware of an activity, a causation. The will within himself becomes for him the fundamental reality of the universe.”
9.10 Dynamist force in idea to act: Harmony Of Intentions
“If we both draw our intuitions really from the world of ideas, and do not obey mere external impulses (physical or moral), then we can not but meet one another in striving for the same aims, in having the same intentions.”
10.10 Dynamist force in moral authority: Find Self
“Monism knows that Nature does not send forth man ready-made as a free spirit, but that she leads him up to a certain stage, from which he continues to develop still as an unfree being, until he reaches the point where he finds his own self.”
11.10 Dynamist force in world purpose: Teleology
“Teleology maintains only that, in spite of the thousand misfits and miseries of this natural life, there is a high degree of adaptation to purpose and plan unmistakable in the formations and developments of Nature.”
12.10 Dynamist force in moral idea: Freedom
“Observation yields freedom as the characteristic quality of the perfect form of human action.”
13.10 Dynamist force in the value of life: Magnitude Of Pleasure (intensity and duration)
If it is only a question whether, after the day's work, I am to amuse myself by a game or by light conversation, and if I am totally indifferent to what I do as long as it serves the purpose, then I simply ask myself: What gives me the greatest surplus of pleasure?
14.10 Dynamist force in individuality: Free Spirit
“Only to the extent that a man has emancipated himself in this way from all that is generic, does he count as a free spirit within a human community.
