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
Moral imagination, in order to realise its ideas, must enter into
a determinate sphere of percepts. Human action does not create
percepts, but transforms already existing percepts and gives them a
new character. In order to be able to transform a definite object of
perception, or a sum of such objects, in accordance with a moral idea,
it is necessary to understand the object's law (its mode of action
which one intends to transform, or to which one wants to give a new
direction). Further, it is necessary to discover the procedure by which
it is possible to change the given law into the new one. This part of
effective moral activity depends on knowledge of the particular world
of phenomena with which one has got to deal. We shall, therefore,
find it in some branch of scientific knowledge. Moral action, then,
presupposes, in addition to the faculty of moral concepts [8] and of
moral imagination, the ability to alter the world of percepts without
violating the natural laws by which they are connected. This ability
is moral technique. It may be learnt in the same sense in which science
in general may be learnt. For, in general, men are better able to find
concepts for the world as it is, than productively to originate out
of their imaginations future, and as yet non-existing, actions. Hence,
it is very well possible for men without moral imagination to receive
moral ideas from others, and to embody these skilfully in the actual
world. Vice versa, it may happen that men with moral imagination lack
technical skill, and are dependent on the service of other men for
the realisation of their ideas.
In so far as we require for moral action knowledge of the objects upon
which we are about to act, our action depends upon such knowledge. What
we need to know here are the laws of nature. These belong to the
Natural Sciences, not to Ethics.
Moral imagination and the faculty of moral concepts can become
objects of theory only after they have first been employed by the
individual. But, thus regarded, they no longer regulate life, but have
already regulated it. They must now be treated as efficient causes,
like all other causes (they are purposes only for the subject). The
study of them is, as it were, the Natural Science of moral ideas.
Ethics as a Normative Science, over and above this science, is
impossible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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