A naïve notion of freedom might be something like “being able to do whatever I want in the total absence of constraints.” But this is hardly an adequate theory of freedom and it doesn’t escape its own contradictions. If I wished to produce a coherent defense of such a position and yet remain free, in this sense, from any grammatical or syntactical constraints outside of those one happened to desire, I will find that I am no longer free to produce the said defense.
I see the important point in the Creation story as occurring on the 6th day. This is where the animal kingdom is formed of the cold-blooded reptiles, and the warm-blooded mammals (beasts of burden). Then, God says something that only proves that Man is a divine, supersensible being, from the very beginning of its creation. You can throw out all notions of a Darwinian evolution of Man from lower animal forms with these words. Steiner was always saying that we humans were divine from the very beginning:
24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. 31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1
This point is being emphasized in lectures I am reading right now in the volume, GA 194, "The Mission of Michael", and wherein Lucifer and Ahriman are conspiring, as we speak, to advocate the solution to Darwinian evolution by supporting the creation of the Bionic Man, which will prove the divine creation. Yet, this is Lucifer and Ahriman talking. We can call it: The Transhumanist Objective.
Yet, do we need to be so intimate and arcane about it? As long as we know that we are not part of an animal evolution, although the animal kingdom did arise at the very point where the Lord God ,"formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into his nostrils and he became a living soul". This is when the animals first began to walk the earth. Humanity has always been above the animals as a divine creation from the beginning. All you have to do is read the scripture.
What people believe today is the product of a Luciferic creation in the human head, and wherein Lucifer got the notion to bring Ahriman up from the rest of the organism, which is still comprised of living substance. This is the present-day conspiracy. It can only be resolved through Michael thinking in this day and age. In other words, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Steiner as emissary of Michael. 400 volumes in order to try to make it plain to an audience that would rather find root formations of words.
Or alternately, feelings are our desire for motion towards participation in (x) thinking is the adjudication process between goods, and willing is the choosing of feelings either adjudicated or not to be moved towards.
It gets closer to how you are saying it if we see the end of desire (that which is moved towards) as always being a participation in an entity/identity, meaning that feelings are the reflection (shadow) of an external identity internally.
I would disagree with placing these layers as associated with sleep/dreams/conciousness, as it is their relationship to each other that shifts between states, not their existence, but I digress...
Yes, Steiner's interpretation is unique. He often referred to the threefold shadow existence of humanity as long as we live and are motivated by mere words and feelings in a rational universe. His explanations always carried the cosmic evolutionary perspective. We even continue sleeping and dreaming of a sort after waking up. Dreams carry over so that beauty can be perceived in this rather dull and prosaic world. Also, the moral imagination nudges the will to act upon deeds with force.
If he is correct in that, it is only as an effect of modernities effort to suppress fairyland until it is no more than a dream, not a result of a naturaly dull and prosaic world.
"Mere words and feelings" are no less real than a ham sandwich, and they are the bodies of many gods and principalities, which, by inhabiting us (and perhaps artifacts or other beings) gives these beings constructed of words and feelings flesh in the world.
If the complexity within biological life is an effect of evolution, why not apply this same emergence of phenomina to words and feelings as a meta material for evolution to use to produce entities with agency?
The magic surrounds us, dreams are real, and this is fairyland. The only self deception for the sake of comfort in humanity is the belief in a rational, dull and prozaic world.
I thought the comparisons in the lecture between microcosm and macrocosm were especially useful, as well as the polarities inherent in waking and sleeping, with the Feeling Soul in the middle range of the Dream life in what is called, "Lower Devachan". For a metaphysics junkie, this is a fix and a half :)
In the final analysis, it is the Fiery Prince of Thought who holds the key of the Cosmic Intelligence. Lucifer and Ahriman must be replaced in the true quest for what evolution intends. Replacing the shadow-images with real content. Physics exists because Metaphysics exists as the causal agent. And Real Beings are the only Reality. Lucifer and Ahriman would have you think something else. They would say that it is propaganda that God said: "Let Us make man in Our Image, according to Our Likeness." That is why they try to kill the Spirit every day of their life, but beg to be redeemed.
This fits well with my own cogitations, and is very well presented.
As someone pointed out, freedom and love are related terms.
In my thoughts concerning free will, I determined that the will is incapable of self movement, but rather chooses between those beautiful things outside itsself to be drawn to.
If I had defined what attracts the will as "good" rather than "beautiful" it would have dead ended the study of what makes something attractive to the will, but defined as beautiful we can dive deeper into what it is that draws us.
Beauty seems to be participative, as in, a thing can be beautiful in itsself, and not be beautiful to me, because my participation in it does not add to this beauty, and therefore I cannot see the beauty it contains.
So we can define the beauty that draws will as (at least) that which has space for the wills participation in itsself.
This may seem like a silly way to define beauty, however it snaps into perspective when you see that a unity other than yourself having space for your participation is by deffinition an instantiation of love, in reflection of the trinity.
And by this we can clearly see that a choice towards pride, or, the will being drawn to participation in itsself, is at once a snake eating its own tail, and ultimately a choice of imobility, since it is the will destroying its capacity for love, which is its capacity to will.
Rudolf Steiner identified Thinking, Feeling, and Willing as three parameters of our conscious life, bearing three levels of actual power to engage cognate action and will. As such, we Think in waking consciousness, Feel in a less waking state, and Will unconsciously. This lecture describes it nicely. These processes are all shadow-images of what has its source in higher worlds when we sleep. Waking consciousness is only relative until we bring Cosmic Thoughts into the picture. This is how Hegel, for example, eventually put Ahriman under his feet. He brought the faculty of Will fully into consciousness.
"We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality."
Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking)
Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming)
Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping)
Here is something concerning Freedom and the Image of God that Steiner was compelled to say at a pivotal point in time. He had discerned the conspiracy of Lucifer and Ahriman to such a degree of precision that it became a warning for what was about to occur, and be maintained throughout the rest of the 20th century, and even these last 24 years of the 21st century.
Herein, Ahriman is described as a superhuman being working in the depths of the Will, and still bearing animalistic tendencies. Lucifer was cast out of the Eighth Sphere long ago, and now resides in the Human Head. Ahriman works from below into what is still largely unconscious. As such, he can diminish human consciousness to do his bidding.
“At the beginning of Earth becoming we have to do with a downfall of Luciferic beings; today we have a rise of Ahrimanic beings. The former beings influence the Luciferic power of thought, the latter the human power of will; we have to recognize the arrival of these latter beings within the evolution of mankind. We have to realize that these beings arrive and that we have to reckon with a conception of nature which, to be sure, for the time being only includes man; for the animal kingdom will only be included later on in the Earth period. Upon the animal these beings have no influences as yet. We shall not comprehend the human race without taking these beings into consideration. And these beings, who are, as it were, pushed from behind, for behind them there stands the Ahrimanic power which endows them with their strong will power, which pours into them their directive forces, — these beings who as such are sub-human beings are controlled in their totality by higher Ahrimanic spirits and thus contain something which far surpasses their own nature and being. Therefore they show something in their appearance which, if it takes the human being captive, acts much more strongly, very much more strongly than that which the weak human being can control today, if he does not strengthen it through the spirit. What is the aim of this host? Well, my dear friends, just as the hosts which Michael has pushed down have aimed at human illumination, at human permeation with reason, so these hosts aim at a certain permeation of human willing. And what do they want? They burrow, as it were, in the deepest stratum of consciousness in which the human being is still asleep today in his waking state. Man does not notice how these beings enter his soul and also his body. Here they suck in, with their power of attraction, everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christ-permeated. This they can reach: this they can take possession of.”
The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence
19 The high priest then questioned Jesus about His disciples, and about His teaching. 20 Jesus answered him, “I have spoken openly to the world; I always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together; and I spoke nothing in secret. 21 Why do you question Me? Question those who have heard what I spoke to them; they know what I said.” 22 When He had said this, one of the officers standing nearby struck Jesus, saying, “Is that the way You answer the high priest?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike Me?” 24 So Annas sent Him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. John 18
I see the important point in the Creation story as occurring on the 6th day. This is where the animal kingdom is formed of the cold-blooded reptiles, and the warm-blooded mammals (beasts of burden). Then, God says something that only proves that Man is a divine, supersensible being, from the very beginning of its creation. You can throw out all notions of a Darwinian evolution of Man from lower animal forms with these words. Steiner was always saying that we humans were divine from the very beginning:
24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. 31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1
This point is being emphasized in lectures I am reading right now in the volume, GA 194, "The Mission of Michael", and wherein Lucifer and Ahriman are conspiring, as we speak, to advocate the solution to Darwinian evolution by supporting the creation of the Bionic Man, which will prove the divine creation. Yet, this is Lucifer and Ahriman talking. We can call it: The Transhumanist Objective.
Note the intimate relation between freedom and love. Note a root of the word free is the word love.
can you say more? do you mean in relation to the German cognates Frieden (peace), Freude (joy), and Freiheit (freedom)?
Yes. I take it from here:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/free?utm_source=app
Yet, do we need to be so intimate and arcane about it? As long as we know that we are not part of an animal evolution, although the animal kingdom did arise at the very point where the Lord God ,"formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into his nostrils and he became a living soul". This is when the animals first began to walk the earth. Humanity has always been above the animals as a divine creation from the beginning. All you have to do is read the scripture.
What people believe today is the product of a Luciferic creation in the human head, and wherein Lucifer got the notion to bring Ahriman up from the rest of the organism, which is still comprised of living substance. This is the present-day conspiracy. It can only be resolved through Michael thinking in this day and age. In other words, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Steiner as emissary of Michael. 400 volumes in order to try to make it plain to an audience that would rather find root formations of words.
Or alternately, feelings are our desire for motion towards participation in (x) thinking is the adjudication process between goods, and willing is the choosing of feelings either adjudicated or not to be moved towards.
It gets closer to how you are saying it if we see the end of desire (that which is moved towards) as always being a participation in an entity/identity, meaning that feelings are the reflection (shadow) of an external identity internally.
I would disagree with placing these layers as associated with sleep/dreams/conciousness, as it is their relationship to each other that shifts between states, not their existence, but I digress...
Yes, Steiner's interpretation is unique. He often referred to the threefold shadow existence of humanity as long as we live and are motivated by mere words and feelings in a rational universe. His explanations always carried the cosmic evolutionary perspective. We even continue sleeping and dreaming of a sort after waking up. Dreams carry over so that beauty can be perceived in this rather dull and prosaic world. Also, the moral imagination nudges the will to act upon deeds with force.
If he is correct in that, it is only as an effect of modernities effort to suppress fairyland until it is no more than a dream, not a result of a naturaly dull and prosaic world.
"Mere words and feelings" are no less real than a ham sandwich, and they are the bodies of many gods and principalities, which, by inhabiting us (and perhaps artifacts or other beings) gives these beings constructed of words and feelings flesh in the world.
If the complexity within biological life is an effect of evolution, why not apply this same emergence of phenomina to words and feelings as a meta material for evolution to use to produce entities with agency?
The magic surrounds us, dreams are real, and this is fairyland. The only self deception for the sake of comfort in humanity is the belief in a rational, dull and prozaic world.
I thought the comparisons in the lecture between microcosm and macrocosm were especially useful, as well as the polarities inherent in waking and sleeping, with the Feeling Soul in the middle range of the Dream life in what is called, "Lower Devachan". For a metaphysics junkie, this is a fix and a half :)
In the final analysis, it is the Fiery Prince of Thought who holds the key of the Cosmic Intelligence. Lucifer and Ahriman must be replaced in the true quest for what evolution intends. Replacing the shadow-images with real content. Physics exists because Metaphysics exists as the causal agent. And Real Beings are the only Reality. Lucifer and Ahriman would have you think something else. They would say that it is propaganda that God said: "Let Us make man in Our Image, according to Our Likeness." That is why they try to kill the Spirit every day of their life, but beg to be redeemed.
This fits well with my own cogitations, and is very well presented.
As someone pointed out, freedom and love are related terms.
In my thoughts concerning free will, I determined that the will is incapable of self movement, but rather chooses between those beautiful things outside itsself to be drawn to.
If I had defined what attracts the will as "good" rather than "beautiful" it would have dead ended the study of what makes something attractive to the will, but defined as beautiful we can dive deeper into what it is that draws us.
Beauty seems to be participative, as in, a thing can be beautiful in itsself, and not be beautiful to me, because my participation in it does not add to this beauty, and therefore I cannot see the beauty it contains.
So we can define the beauty that draws will as (at least) that which has space for the wills participation in itsself.
This may seem like a silly way to define beauty, however it snaps into perspective when you see that a unity other than yourself having space for your participation is by deffinition an instantiation of love, in reflection of the trinity.
And by this we can clearly see that a choice towards pride, or, the will being drawn to participation in itsself, is at once a snake eating its own tail, and ultimately a choice of imobility, since it is the will destroying its capacity for love, which is its capacity to will.
Rudolf Steiner identified Thinking, Feeling, and Willing as three parameters of our conscious life, bearing three levels of actual power to engage cognate action and will. As such, we Think in waking consciousness, Feel in a less waking state, and Will unconsciously. This lecture describes it nicely. These processes are all shadow-images of what has its source in higher worlds when we sleep. Waking consciousness is only relative until we bring Cosmic Thoughts into the picture. This is how Hegel, for example, eventually put Ahriman under his feet. He brought the faculty of Will fully into consciousness.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/ReapChrist/19111001p02.html
"We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality."
Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking)
Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming)
Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping)
Excellent- thanks for these insights, Max!
Here is something concerning Freedom and the Image of God that Steiner was compelled to say at a pivotal point in time. He had discerned the conspiracy of Lucifer and Ahriman to such a degree of precision that it became a warning for what was about to occur, and be maintained throughout the rest of the 20th century, and even these last 24 years of the 21st century.
Herein, Ahriman is described as a superhuman being working in the depths of the Will, and still bearing animalistic tendencies. Lucifer was cast out of the Eighth Sphere long ago, and now resides in the Human Head. Ahriman works from below into what is still largely unconscious. As such, he can diminish human consciousness to do his bidding.
“At the beginning of Earth becoming we have to do with a downfall of Luciferic beings; today we have a rise of Ahrimanic beings. The former beings influence the Luciferic power of thought, the latter the human power of will; we have to recognize the arrival of these latter beings within the evolution of mankind. We have to realize that these beings arrive and that we have to reckon with a conception of nature which, to be sure, for the time being only includes man; for the animal kingdom will only be included later on in the Earth period. Upon the animal these beings have no influences as yet. We shall not comprehend the human race without taking these beings into consideration. And these beings, who are, as it were, pushed from behind, for behind them there stands the Ahrimanic power which endows them with their strong will power, which pours into them their directive forces, — these beings who as such are sub-human beings are controlled in their totality by higher Ahrimanic spirits and thus contain something which far surpasses their own nature and being. Therefore they show something in their appearance which, if it takes the human being captive, acts much more strongly, very much more strongly than that which the weak human being can control today, if he does not strengthen it through the spirit. What is the aim of this host? Well, my dear friends, just as the hosts which Michael has pushed down have aimed at human illumination, at human permeation with reason, so these hosts aim at a certain permeation of human willing. And what do they want? They burrow, as it were, in the deepest stratum of consciousness in which the human being is still asleep today in his waking state. Man does not notice how these beings enter his soul and also his body. Here they suck in, with their power of attraction, everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christ-permeated. This they can reach: this they can take possession of.”
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/MissMich/1919112
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/MissMich/19191129p01.html
The Michael Deed and the Michael Influence as Counter-pole of the Ahrimanic Influence
19 The high priest then questioned Jesus about His disciples, and about His teaching. 20 Jesus answered him, “I have spoken openly to the world; I always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together; and I spoke nothing in secret. 21 Why do you question Me? Question those who have heard what I spoke to them; they know what I said.” 22 When He had said this, one of the officers standing nearby struck Jesus, saying, “Is that the way You answer the high priest?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike Me?” 24 So Annas sent Him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. John 18