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
That absolutely new moral ideas should be developed by the moral
imagination is for the theory of evolution no more inexplicable than
the development of one animal species out of another, provided only
that this theory, as a Monistic world-view, rejects, in morality as
in science, every transcendent (metaphysical) influence. In doing
so, it follows the same principle by which it is guided in seeking
the causes of new organic forms in forms already existing, but not
in the interference of an extra-mundane God, who produces every new
species in accordance with a new creative idea through supernatural
interference. Just as Monism has no use for supernatural creative ideas
in explaining living organisms, so it is equally impossible for it
to derive the moral world-order from causes which do not lie within
the world. It cannot admit any continuous supernatural influence
upon moral life (divine government of the world from the outside),
nor an influence either through a particular act of revelation at
a particular moment in history (giving of the ten commandments), or
through God's appearance on the earth (Divinity of Christ [10]). Moral
processes are, for Monism, natural products like everything else that
exists, and their causes must be looked for in nature, i.e., in man,
because man is the bearer of morality.
Ethical Individualism, then, is the crown of the edifice that Darwin
and Haeckel have erected for Natural Science. It is the theory of
evolution applied to the moral life.
Anyone who restricts the concept of the natural from the outset to an
artificially limited and narrowed sphere, is easily tempted not to
allow any room within it for free individual action. The consistent
Evolutionist does not easily fall a prey to such a narrow-minded
view. He cannot let the process of evolution terminate with the ape,
and acknowledge for man a supernatural origin. Again, he cannot
stop short at the organic reactions of man and regard only these as
natural. He has to treat also the life of moral self-determination
as the continuation of organic life. The Evolutionist, then,
in accordance with his fundamental principles, can maintain only
that moral action evolves out of the less perfect forms of natural
processes. He must leave the characterisation of action, i.e.,
its determination as free action, to the immediate observation of
each agent. All that he maintains is only that men have developed
out of non-human ancestors. What the nature of men actually is must
be determined by observation of men themselves. The results of this
observation cannot possibly contradict the history of evolution. Only
the assertion that the results are such as to exclude their being due
to a natural world-order would contradict recent developments in the
Natural Sciences. [11]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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