Willing the Good
we are all carpenter’s sons
“Every way of knowing becomes a way of living, every epistemology becomes an ethic.”
—Parker Palmer, “Toward a Spirituality of Higher Education”
If I wish to know how I may become a better carpenter, the answer would be very straightforward: I must develop my skill in carpentry. The statement seems trivial but that is only because the question took its departure point downstream of where the crux of the issue really lies. To ask how I may become a better carpenter presupposes a will to do the same, without which the question could only remain as a mere hypothetical. Naturally, the will to improve, alone, is not enough to guarantee that improvement will follow. At the same time, however, this will is the sine qua non for anything of the sort. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” it has been said.
A realisation of this fact may provoke a further question: to wit, how then, when there is no will? More comprehensively, we may wonder where the will to undertake such development comes from. The answer is, of course, that the will in question comes from the individual qua individual and not from the individual qua carpenter. In other words, the initiative to develop as a carpenter is transcendental to the skill of carpentry. A question of carpentry has, in this way, transformed into a question of the individual moral and spiritual nature. This will be clear when it is considered that it is not always possible for every person to will all things. Instead, what we will is a function of who we are. To imagine that the first thing can be arbitrarily commanded except by way of the second is a superstition that it is possible to entertain only up to the point of actually attempting this feat, as many great thinkers throughout history have observed. Perhaps most memorable among these is found among Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where he concedes with exasperation that his will does not seem to be his own, “...for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”1 Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, elaborates on this theme with a still more evocative illustration of the perverted will:
Why should it be? The mind commands the body, and the body obeys. The mind commands itself and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to be moved and there is such readiness that the command is scarcely distinguished from the obedience in act. Yet the mind is mind, and the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will, and yet though it be itself it does not obey itself. Whence this strange anomaly and why should it be? I repeat: The will commands itself to will, and could not give the command unless it wills; yet what is commanded is not done…. For the will commands that there be an act of will—not another, but itself. But it does not command entirely. Therefore, what is commanded does not happen; for if the will were whole and entire, it would not even command it to be, because it would already be. It is, therefore, no strange anomaly partly to will and partly to be unwilling. This is actually an infirmity of mind, which cannot wholly rise, while pressed down by habit, even though it is supported by the truth.2
Augustine, like Paul, found himself confronted by an internal fragmentation that is liable to cripple the will in the moment of crisis. Still, it must be observed that in both cases, the spiritual and moral disposition of these thinkers kindled a will that was transcendental to the situation they described in that only one of such a disposition would be inclined to pose such questions to begin with, and furthermore to pit himself against misdirected impulses that emerge from within. Anyone lacking this disposition will simply not be bothered by the question.
In the first chapter of The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner paraphrases the insight of these early Christian thinkers when he quotes the philosopher Robert Hamerling to the effect that “Man can certainly do as he wills, but he cannot want as he wills, because his wanting is determined by motives.” From this, Hamerling concludes that freedom of the will is a contradiction in terms. Steiner finds Hamerling’s reasoning unconvincing, however, because it fails to take its departure from an adequate concept of freedom. “The primary question,” Steiner counters:
is not whether I can do a thing or not when a motive has worked upon me, but whether there are any motives except such as impel me with absolute necessity. If I am compelled to want something, then I may well be absolutely indifferent as to whether I can also do it. And if, through my character, or through circumstances prevailing in my environment, a motive is forced on me which to my thinking is unreasonable, then I should even have to be glad if I could not do what I want.
The question is not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how the decision comes about within me.The question is not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how the decision comes about within me.3
Indeed, the absurdity of a concept of freedom that does not differentiate itself from arbitrary exercise of power can be illustrated by imagining the scenario of casting one’s ballot amongst election candidates one had never heard of. Clearly, for an action to be truly free requires that (a) the power to discharge an impulse of will be coupled with (b) a knowledge of the end towards which that same impulse is ordered. In other words, free doing entails prior knowing, which must be conscious to be at all, and which can only be won by a thinking that is free. “Freedom,” to recapitulate, cannot possibly mean the same thing as “arbitrariness” or “caprice.” This lack of equation between “freedom” and “power” holds in respect to thinking just as in respect to willing. Instead, freedom in thinking means that one is free to inquire into the phenomena that confront our thinking and free from feelings of partiality and prejudice and foregone conclusions that would hinder this sort of inquiry. Freedom in the will follows from freedom in thinking. In fact, a free will that is supposed to follow from anything other than thinking is an incoherent prospect.
In this connection, we have hearkened back to Steiner’s statement that:
if, through my character, or through circumstances prevailing in my environment, a motive is forced on me which to my thinking is unreasonable, then I should even have to be glad if I could not do what I want.
Freedom is the inverse of the above—the inverse of being forced to perform an action which one’s thinking has determined to be unreasonable. In other words, freedom is to act for reasons that one has fostered and evaluated in the clarity of thought. A motive that is begotten in the clarity of thought will never see the light of day unless one has, through the same capacity of thinking, judged it to be good. As Steiner affirms: “The question is not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how the decision comes about within me.” If the decision comes about through knowledge and with consciousness, its volitional expression through deed and decision is also an expression of freedom. In other words, freedom is a state of coherence between my actions and what my thinking has perceived to be good. Insofar as the latter is mistaken or perverted, and I am unconscious of my error, I am unfree and as a result, will act in a manner that will be harmful to myself and to all Creation.
The notion that free action follows from the conscious perception of a thing’s goodness, together with the suggestion that an error in thinking or a lapse in consciousness will lead to a bad or evil deed, warrant further exploration, so I will take up each of them in turn. To begin with, it can be seen that to suppose that action could result from anything other than the perceived good of that action and the result that it is liable to incur makes little sense. This is obvious in respect to seeking water when one is thirsty, or watering a withering plant, or seeking to comprehend the laws and reasons that govern both the function of water and the moral principle of action. I cannot invoke my will to reject one of these things except insofar as I am able to discover, with my thinking, a good in such a rejection that was, to begin with, concealed to me. In other words, the will is a function of perceived good. As noted, this connection is obvious in some cases but it is perhaps less obvious in situations characterised by negative affect like pain, fear, or anger. something like withdrawing one’s foot from a sharp nail, or coming to fisticuffs over a political dispute. Do these not present examples of the will kindled by precisely the opposite of a perceived good? It is true, to a certain extent, that these cases seem to refute the postulate above, but each of them can be understood as a sort of double negative and so seen as a volitional manifestation of perceived goodness. Clearly, the kneejerk reaction to the physical stimulus of the nail is perceived to be better than the alternative. The immediacy of this perception is largely concealed because the thought process is somewhat vicarious. By this is meant that the perception of the goodness of such a reflex was inherited from thousands of generations of our ancestors to the effect that the order to withdraw to foot was made by nature in the imperfect past tense and hence continues to reverberate into the present moment. Reflexes and instincts could also be conceived as actions initiated by a decision on behalf of the species, or the folk soul, which only impinge on waking individual consciousness in the periphery, and in a dreamlike manner. The hypothetical scenario of reigning blows on one’s political opponent presents an example of what is likely to be a mistaken evaluation of the good of something, since it is hard to think of any good that could come of this. Still, it should be acknowledged that it is perhaps possible to invent a constellation of circumstances in which the described outcome would be warranted. But whether coming to blows over politics is actually good is not the point at issue. Instead, the observation that the perception of its good is necessary and sufficient to kindle the will to action is the key point on which the present argument hinges.
It might be objected that the examples were cherry-picked and that the negative examples were both more-or-less instinctive reactions while the positive ones stemmed from a more lucid state of consciousness. But that is perhaps no accident at all, and rather hints at what may become a transformational insight. In the lucid states, our actions stem from the perceived good of a thing, as has been established, and this connection is clear to us. In the negative cases, it can still be discerned how our actions spring from perceived good and yet often what is most present to our consciousness is just the opposite. Since knowledge and consciousness have been established as the sine quibus non of free action, it will be clear that the negative cases represent conditions of attenuated or diminished freedom relative to the positive ones. Insofar as my action follows from the conscious perception of the good, I am acting out of love. After all, what does “good” mean, as an adjective, except that the being or object of which it is predicated is worthy of love? Steiner indicates this much in The Philosophy of Freedom when he asserts that:
Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act. I act, at this level of morality, not because I acknowledge a lord over me, or an external authority, or a so-called inner voice; I acknowledge no external principle for my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, namely, my love of the action.4
In this assertion, Steiner enunciates the argument that lies at the very crux of The Philosophy of Freedom: to wit, that the spiritual evolution of the individual consists in bringing freedom from potency to act, and that love radiates from such freedom as light and warmth shine forth from the sun.
We have inquired, albeit briefly, into the conditions and essence of “freedom” but “love” is a term that has only recently appeared in the present argument. It is such a familiar word and is so closely-bound up in our network of associations with particular emotional experiences that one is likely to regard it as a known quantity. But this risks mistaking a feeling of familiarity with bona fide understanding, and being able to use the term in a sentence with being able to use the principle towards which the term gestures in real life. Naturally, there is no limit to what here could be set down about love, and “if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”5 To say too little on the subject is still better than to say nothing at all.6
It was indicated above that freedom, love, and goodness, though three different words, are not three different things. Instead, love can be seen as the power and principle that calls us towards the good and freedom can be seen as our capacity to respond to such a call. Love establishes a union between beings that does not abolish their differences. Instead, the union is spiritual in that it is established under a common ideal: namely, willing the good for the other being. It is possible to write “I love the turnip and, therefore, I will the worst for it” as a sentence but it is not possible to mean it. That is because the proposition is incoherent. It is also possible to state that “black is white” and that “triangles have seven sides.” Hence, writeability only demonstrates that words can rent from their concrete matrices of meaning and treated as discrete abstractions. Concretely conceived, to love a thing means to affirm that thing in its existence and fruition. In other words, to love a thing is to will the good of that thing. To will the good of another is to unite in spirit with her insofar as all beings also will the good for themselves and hence are existentially constituted by a sort of unconscious self-love, if this conceit will be permitted. But more significantly, all beings exist in virtue of God’s love. Hence, to love another is also “unite in spirit” with God and hence, to love God.7 In this way, God is love.
Love can also be understood as the principle of new Creation. What else could it mean to say that “God saw that it was good” other than that God recognized Creation to be a worthy object of love?8 Love can be seen, by extension, as the power that enthuses one to transform. What I do not love will not move me. On the contrary, my love for a thing or being fires my will to action.
One form this action may take is as the effort to understand. A thing or being that is beloved is a thing or being that is inherently interesting to me. Moreover, attention, together with a wish to learn of her, from her, follows spontaneously from love. Steiner elaborates on this relation in the sober tone that is characteristic of The Philosophy of Freedom:
Whenever it is not merely the expression of bare sexual instinct, it depends on the mental picture we form of the loved one. And the more idealistic these mental pictures are, just so much the more blessed is our love. Here too, thought is the father of feeling. It is said that love makes us blind to the failings of the loved one. But this can be expressed the other way round, namely, that it is just for the good qualities that love opens the eyes. Many pass by these good qualities without noticing them. One, however, perceives them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What else has he done but made a mental picture of what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because they lack the mental picture.9
In other words, love awakens attention and inspires the wish to perceive the good qualities of a thing just as the good qualities work back on the percipient to kindle love in him. In the same way, we wish to attend to and to learn about a beloved thing and to attend to and to learn about a thing increases our love for it. In this way, the often puzzling statement in the Gospel of Matthew will instead appear self-evident:
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.10
The more that one attends to something, the more that thing discloses reasons to love it. Love naturally attracts attention and attention is the principle of knowledge. In this way, as the sun calls forth a flower from the dark earth with its light and warmth, so spiritual freedom fosters knowledge through attention and love. Moreover, if our attention is free from other attachments and we are therefore free to pay attention to love per se, our interest infinitely compounds and so too, then does our capacity for love. It was indicated above that love is the principle of creation and transformation. In this connection, it can be seen how, in cultivating love for other beings, we are ourselves transformed—“changed into the same image from glory to glory.”11
Clearly, the argument above makes little sense if “love” is limited in scope to a specific subjective emotion, but it is to be hoped that at this point, such a circumscription will strike the reader as a grave mistake. To understand love in itself and not merely in one of its particular subjective expressions, we should have to inquire what inspires the latter in us under the proper conditions. Otherwise, we would fall into the childish mistake of presuming the light of day to vanish every time we close our eyes. Obviously, it is our vision that departs and not the light. In the same way, my subjective emotional experience of love emerges in specific conditions and ceases in others. From the absence of such an experience, however, I can only infer that the eye of my heart has ceased to perceive love and not that love has ceased to exist. But, as has been suggested, a change in the condition of the heart is a change in the condition of the man. In this connection, we have returned to the question posed at the outset of this piece. Now it can be seen that the carpenter’s plight is also our own; we are all carpenter’s sons, as it were. My development in any office presupposes a will to do the same, and that will is fired as a spontaneous celebration of having perceived the goodness of that thing, which demands a fidelity of vision that only a heart that is pure can provide without distortion. Indeed, we have also hearkened back to the epigraph of this piece: namely, Parker Palmer’s assertion that “Every way of knowing becomes a way of living, every epistemology becomes an ethic.”
The connection of the foregoing to biodynamic agriculture may not be evident, but it is possible to overlook a thing because it is too near just as well as because it is too distant. The above, to me, seems to be an instance of the former. After all, biodynamics is not a doctrine but a way of seeing and a way of life. Steiner’s definition of Anthroposophy as “consciousness of one’s humanity”12 points to a state of being more than any specific teaching or factual content. Indeed, all biodynamic knowledge is derived from a state of attunement of the human soul to the world soul. The human being has traditionally been understood as the interface between heaven and earth, and a holographic compendium of the entire cosmos. Hence, “consciousness of one’s humanity” describes a state of correspondence of the microcosm with the entire universe in the manner that a drop of dew in the morning bears the image of all the heavens. Biodynamic farming is a way of fulfilling the end and function of the human being, which Heidegger has poetically described as “[serving as] the shepherd of being.”13 In the final year of his life, Steiner characterised Anthroposophy as “a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe.”14 Implied among all of the above suggestions is that the converse holds equally well: that the office of the human being is also to guide the spiritual in the universe back into the human being and in and through nature. This is, in a certain sense, a priestly task and it is not something that one can count upon simply to happen in a passive way. Instead, to fulfil this office requires the virtues of devotion and a dedication to a degree that is uncommon, but all the more extraordinary for it. In this manner, to answer the calling to garden on the earth demands that one also become a gardener of the soul. Let it be reflected on that Mary does not perceive the Risen Christ, to begin with, on Easter morning because “she thought he was the gardener.”15
The above is adapted from an essay that is forthcoming in the journal of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics
Romans 7:18-19.
Augustine, Confessions,VIII.8.
Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 1, https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/AP1986/GA004_c01.html.
Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 9, https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/AP1986/GA004_c09.html.
John 21:25.
I have explored the theme of love in relation the Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom in greater depth on another occasion, which has been published at: https://theoriapress.wordpress.com/2020/04/23/on-rudolf-steiners-the-philosophy-of-freedom-3-thinking-freedom-love/.
This point is belaboured in the First Epistle of John:
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. (1 John 4:7-12)
Genesis 1:9.
Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 1, https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/AP1986/GA004_c01.html.
Matthew 13:12.
2 Corinthians 3:18.
Steiner, Awakening to Community IV:
The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA257/English/AP1974/19230213p02.html
“Hirt des Seins,” from Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings.
Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, §1. https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA026/English/RSP1973/GA026_a01.html
John 20:15.