The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific MethodsSteiner, Rudolf
Religion
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods
Steiner, Rudolf
Anthroposophy; Free will and determinism; Knowledge, Theory of; Life
Another possibility is that some one will find in a spiritual being
the Absolute lying behind all phenomena. If so, he will look for the
spring of action in some kind of spiritual power. He will regard the
moral principles which his reason contains as the manifestation of this
spiritual being, which pursues in men its own special purposes. Moral
laws appear to the Dualist, who holds this view, as dictated by the
Absolute, and man's only task is to discover, by means of his reason,
the decisions of the Absolute and to carry them out. For the Dualist,
the moral order of the world is the visible symbol of the higher order
that lies behind it. Our human morality is a revelation of the divine
world-order. It is not man who matters in this moral order but reality
in itself, that is, God. Man ought to do what God wills. Eduard von
Hartmann, who identifies reality, as such, with God, and who treats
God's existence as a life of suffering, believes that the Divine
Being has created the world in order to gain, by means of the world,
release from his infinite suffering. Hence this philosopher regards the
moral evolution of humanity as a process, the function of which is the
redemption of God. "Only through the building up of a moral world-order
on the part of rational, self-conscious individuals is it possible for
the world-process to approximate to its goal." "Real existence is the
incarnation of God. The world-process is the passion of God who has
become flesh, and at the same time the way of redemption for Him who
was crucified in the flesh; and morality is our co-operation in the
shortening of this process of suffering and redemption" (Hartmann,
Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, § 871). On this view,
man does not act because he wills, but he must act because it is
God's will to be redeemed. Whereas the Materialistic Dualist turns
man into an automaton, the action of which is nothing but the effect
of causality according to purely mechanical laws, the Spiritualistic
Dualist (i.e., he who treats the Absolute, the thing-in-itself, as
a spiritual something in which man with his conscious experience has
no share), makes man the slave of the will of the Absolute. Neither
Materialism, nor Spiritualism, nor in general Metaphysical Realism
which infers, as true reality, an extra-human something which it does
not experience, have any room for freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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