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
patterns of particular actions handed down for the guidance of the
unfree spirit. A Christian models his conduct less on the teaching than
on the pattern of the Saviour. Rules have less value for telling men
positively what to do than for telling them what to leave undone. Laws
take on the form of universal concepts only when they forbid actions,
not when they prescribe actions. Laws concerning what we ought to
do must be given to the unfree spirit in wholly concrete form. Clean
the street in front of your door! Pay your taxes to such and such an
amount to the tax-collector! etc. Conceptual form belongs to laws
which inhibit actions. Thou shalt not steal! Thou shalt not commit
adultery! But these laws, too, influence the unfree spirit only by
means of a concrete idea, e.g., the idea of the punishments attached
by human authority, or of the pangs of conscience, or of eternal
damnation, etc.
Even when the motive to an action exists in universal conceptual form
(e.g., Thou shalt do good to thy fellow-men! Thou shalt live so that
thou promotest best thy welfare!), there still remains to be found,
in the particular case, the concrete idea of the action (the relation
of the concept to a content of perception). For a free spirit who
is not guided by any model nor by fear of punishment, etc., this
translation of the concept into an idea is always necessary.
Concrete ideas are formed by us on the basis of our concepts by
means of the imagination. Hence what the free spirit needs in order to
realise his concepts, in order to assert himself in the world, is moral
imagination. This is the source of the free spirit's action. Only those
men, therefore, who are endowed with moral imagination are, properly
speaking, morally productive. Those who merely preach morality,
i.e., those who merely excogitate moral rules without being able to
condense them into concrete ideas, are morally unproductive. They are
like those critics who can explain very competently how a work of art
ought to be made, but who are themselves incapable of the smallest
artistic production.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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