(Chapter Nine - The Idea of Freedom)
I'm preoccupied by the 3 concepts used by Rudolf Steiner to explain action:
1.Mobile (or driving force - permanent determining factor of the individual)
2.Motive (or the temporary determinant of will)
3.Characterological disposition
1. Those can be the driving force of an action: lusts or desires /feelings / representations/ concepts/ pure concepts.
One question about the driving force is why are they the permanent determining factor of the individual? Is it because one lives for a long period of time (sometimes maybe a lifetime) with the same desires/lusts, he has the same feelings in certain situations and he always reacts in the same way to them, and the measure of one's experience is limited so one can have just a limited amount of representations of "what to do" in different situations - so he does just those actions about which he has a representations?
2. Motives, says Rudolf Steiner, can be either representations or thoughts. A representation or a thought is a motive, only if it made a human being make an action, otherwise is just a candidate for a motive.
The example in the book is: the representation of going for a walk in the next half an hour. This is the candidate for being the motive of an action.
Now, the characterological disposition (c.d.) enters the scene. From what I read, I understood that the c.d. is a group of mental objects of different types: representations, concepts, mental pictures and feelings. (Representation being a individualized notion or a mental picture).
Ok.
So when the candidate for being a motive enters one's consciousness, objects from one's c.d. come to validate or invalidate the candidate.
In the example from the book those objects that come to validate the candidate are: one's idea about the utility of walking, the value of one's health and in the end the feeling generated in me by the representation of taking a walk in the next half of hour.
*One thing that I forgot to say about c.d. is that is more or less permanent.
