Which lenses were you given?

In part one I looked outwards: at the lenses humanity has ground over the centuries – using Steiner’s lens of twelve worldviews, seven soul moods and three life-attitudes – and at certainty as the ring that binds us to any one of them. Several readers turned the question inwards: which lenses was I given? That is the subject here.

A word first, as before. The twelve worldviews are one map among many. Theories, this one included, are like tools in a craftsperson’s toolbox. What matters most is the craftsperson: knowing which tool to choose for the job and how skilfully that tool is then used. You can think of this model as a meditative exercise, or a soul gym, and indeed a tool (among many others) – a lens – for inhabiting different perspectives and approaches to truth-finding. It is not the one ring that rules over the others, or the theory that incorporates everything – rather it is a lens that can be pointed at anything, and through learning its intricacies, one’s own organic personal view becomes enriched.

It can be used to check our understanding of philosophical perspectives, which is useful, but its deeper value lies in sitting with the different views and noticing how they manifest in our experience and in the world around us. That is how I have come to use it: less as a theory to believe than as a frame for inquiry into the different realms of human experience.

Born into a worldview

Growing up in a world shaped by Steiner’s ideas, I felt a lot of discomfort with many held beliefs attributed to him and ideals that were espoused yet also transgressed, and as an adolescent wanted to get as far away as possible from anything ‘Steiner’. But I’ve also always felt compelled to understand this world that I’ve come from, and I am deeply appreciative of all its amazing aspects, especially the biodynamic food. This tension – between a spirituality I can see the great value of and behaviours that ask difficult questions – is part of what fuels my interest in in Steiner’s ideas, and in particular this journey into worldview, truth and our rationale-for-action.

It was reading his own words after leaving school that gave me a crucial emphasis: ‘do not take a word I say as truth unless you can verify it with your experience and clear logical thinking’. This was a relief for my troubled young self. It meant I didn’t have to reject my experiences in favour of notions held by what I can now call groupthink. His ideas were hypotheses to test, not dictums.

We don’t choose our first lenses. We are born into a constellation – of family, culture and the worldviews that come with them – and we see through our given worldview(s) long before we can see their structures. The world I grew up in leaned heavily towards the spiritual part of the wheel, and so it feels natural that business, science and academic thinking were important areas for me to engage with in ‘balancing my wheel’. Organisations are no different: each has a founding constellation, which its members absorb before they are able to examine it. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and these are better known, with their biases rebalanced, than left as unseen driving forces or to instinct and circumstance.

Becoming culturally ‘homeless’ as a journey home

I have spent a lot of time working and travelling abroad and immersing myself in other cultures at home, especially through music. Often that has meant electronic music – precisely the sort of thing my inherited culture cautioned against as not ‘spiritual’. Music (of all kinds) is how other cultures found their way deep into my psyche, especially the cultures of Africa and her diaspora. It led me to seek to integrate disparate perspectives, and has brought me great healing.

In many ways I went on a journey out of my culture(s), becoming what Steiner calls ‘homeless’ in a soul sense – which he describes as ‘a détour or roundabout way’, so that the way may be found back to the ‘folk souls’ we grew up with.

This process probably started with me being half German. At school in Britain in the 80s/90s, there was still a fairly strong post-war anti-German sentiment, and I denied my German roots to myself for many years. But this tension also opened me up to seeing shadows early, because I could see the obvious shadows in the history of Great Britain, even in relation to World War II. This set me on that cultural journey. In later years, I have come to reclaim those parts of myself, and currently find myself very much at home in southern Germany.

I got away from my cultures, only to re-find them in a much deeper way, through becoming aware of their shadows. I first saw the shadows of my own culture, epitomised by our tendency to view ourselves as somehow superior, and to assume the truthfulness of another based on a view made from a distance. I was also seeing the hidden gems in other cultures – hospitality, community, joy in the now and a much stronger connection with the ancient and timeless. Eventually I came to see the hidden gems in my own cultures, coming out of witnessing the hidden shadows in others.

I also went on a cross-cultural journey of integrating cultures as a parent. One of the resultant gems has stayed with me. On Pemba, an island in Zanzibar, standing rests heavily on the concept of heshima: honour and respect earned through a track record of humility and integrity, rather than through position or force. The historian Elisabeth McMahon suggests it helped bring former slaves into community life after emancipation, almost like a moral meritocracy. Like ubuntu, its premise is that a person is a person through people. Heshima arises from a different kind of rationale to what we are used to in the West. It can be felt and accessed, but not grasped, controlled or owned, and this suggested to me what my own culture’s habits of status and control prevent from being seen.

You only notice your lens when you try on another. For organisations, this is the value of people from other sectors, disciplines and cultures: they let a team see its own shadow. Cross-cultural meeting is, as Goethean theorist Brian Robbins puts it, a kind of cultural therapeutics. Binary certainties stand squarely in the way.

What those years showed me were not new ideas so much as forms of thinking I had been carrying without knowing it. The quiet superiority described above is one; the next section shows another: an anti-materialism that turned out to think in materialism’s own shape. Forms like these are invisible from inside and plain from outside, which is why it can take a long detour to see them. This is what learning the model’s intricacies means in practice: the model itself can be understood quite quickly, but seeing how these forms of thought – worldview and attitude to truth – are expressed in our own biography takes more meditative pondering, or self-study.

When a worldview runs the business

I have experienced situations where a bias towards spiritualism impacted the business directly. In one values-led organisation I helped build, the enterprise flourished with its customers and its team. Yet the knowledge it needed to run successfully as a business was set aside because it came from a worldview that didn’t acknowledge the spirit. Organisationally, there was a bias towards Steiner-based theories over any other, even where mainstream practice had workable answers that could actually help those spiritual ideals become manifest.

Reflecting on it later, what interested me was less the decisions themselves than the form of thinking behind them – and in this case what I came to call inverse materialism seemed to be a core aspect behind what happened. Those rightly aware of the limitations of materialism can enact an anti-materialism, visible as anti-intellectualism, that reproduces materialism’s core thought-form: making truth-claims from an abstract, separated, preconceived position – ‘those theories do not acknowledge the spirit’ (the unsaid part being ‘therefore we’re not really interested in using them’). The content is ‘spiritual’, but the form of thinking holds the same rigidity as the materialism it rejects. In terms of the twelve worldviews model, it is what happens when spiritualism becomes the one perspective allowed to rule the others, in place of the materialism that tends to rule the mainstream today – visible in the split between ‘spiritual’ and ‘unspiritual’. This reductive dichotomy is the ring from part one, operating inside an organisation.

The pattern is not unique to anthroposophical settings. I have found it again and again in organisations with a strong idealistic value-base that see themselves as ‘part of the solution’. Somehow the fact that they are trying to do good can become a subconscious excuse not to engage with all the ‘dirty’ self-interest, and all the thinking relating to it. As Steiner observed, it can become more important to people to feel themselves to be virtuous than to develop the actual virtues.

Moral licensing

Psychologists call part of this moral licensing: once we have established in our own minds that we are good, our ambiguous actions get read in that light. A spiritual view of the world can become the strongest credential of all. If I view myself as spiritual, and what I do as spiritual, then what lies outside that – the kitchen, the accounts, the people serving the food – becomes ‘unspiritual’, and somehow doesn’t count.

Bonhoeffer warned that those who love their dream of community more than the community itself become its destroyers – or, put more simply, the idea of community kills community. The same can happen in approaches to developing community, to creating regenerative organisations, to building organisations on strong ideals. More effort goes into keeping the process or ideology correct than into seeing what is actually going on. In a stage model of community building, for example, any objection to the process can be read as just another stage to move through. A model that cannot be wrong is no longer listening and becomes circular: the tool has become the ring.

For me, the test is awareness of the behaviour trail one leaves behind oneself. What is real is what we do in the world – a higher realism, if you like – as either individuals or representatives of organisations. I have witnessed groups gathered around high ideals of community, unable to look after the end of their own queue in terms of how much food they put on their plates.

Behaviour is a good place to assess espoused development. Bill Torbert offers a useful measure here: a sign of leadership development is how far someone seeks feedback on their actions, including from the people they manage. Jim Collins found the highest level of leadership to be a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. Development shows not in what we say, nor in our credentials, spiritual ones included, but in our willingness to see the effects of our actions through other people’s eyes – the behaviour trail left as we move through life.

The lesson I drew is simple but hard-won: if the transactional aspects are not truly taken care of – clear contracting of mutual self-interests – one can forget the transformational. Healthy transactions are the antecedent of transformative ideals, not their opposite. Otherwise, the lofty ideals that can inspire become markers of distrust, disrupting the work that needs to be done, and tainting the ideals that the world needs.

It is tempting, in a values-led setting, to treat all of this – pay, contracts, conditions, the ‘dirty’ self-interest that business theory deals in – as unspiritual: something to step over on the way to the real work of transformation. My experience is that this is a fundamental mistake. Herzberg found long ago that these ‘hygiene factors’ don’t motivate anyone in themselves, but neglected, they drain the motivation that ideals inspire. Addressed candidly and up front, they stop being an obstacle to the ideals that drew people to the organisation in the first place.

The hero trap

I have been on the other side of this too. When I started out, I knew how to cook, but running a business was new. Integral theory had set me reading various organisational theories, which helped – but in the early days it was mostly will: being the role model, working hard, making it happen. Bernard Lievegoed describes exactly this as what the pioneer phase needs. What I didn’t see at first was that the same strength becomes a trap. Coming in to save the day makes you indispensable, and an organisation built around one person’s effort can’t grow past that person. The lens wasn’t wrong, just narrow: the will to manifest, without yet the perspective of someone handing over.

Lievegoed’s phase theory describes the way through. A young organisation lives on the pioneer’s personal will, relationships and judgement. As it grows, what the pioneer has been carrying personally needs to be handed over into the collective of the organisation: into roles, structures and processes in the phase of differentiation, and later into shared responsibility for the whole as it moves towards integration. The hero trap is staying a pioneer after the organisation has outgrown it. The way out is to become aware of this, and to become a leader who can comfortably delegate and hand things over, rather than the hero who burns out. And how that handing over is done goes a long way towards determining the quality of the culture that is built. This in turn is entirely dependent on the conceptualisation and thinking of those involved – and the perspectives they are able to see.

I have since seen the same pattern from the outside. The pioneering energy and the personalities that got a place going can become obstacles in their own right, especially when the leader, somewhere, likes being depended on. The form of working together that once served a group can later become the very thing that blocks its renewal. The shadow can’t be pushed aside; it has to be taken along, and met with gentleness, as Frodo meets Gollum. What helps, in terms of the model, is self-awareness, awareness of others, and knowing the worldviews and assumptions in play.

Learning from the ‘other’

If culture taught me to look for what the other side holds, ideas taught me the same through their polarities. The opposite sign on the wheel often holds something complementary that we have neglected. For me, that opposite was business and academia, which my upbringing so easily labelled ‘bad’ (in a similar way to electronic music). It fascinates me that this is where I found the knowledge I needed, and where I was nurtured and supported (as opposed to feeling taken advantage of). Without any espoused spirituality, I found it spiritually nourishing – and in large part because it taught me to look at thinking, assumptions and perspectives – always measured against what works, what doesn’t, and what happens in real-world application. This is as opposed to telling the world how much better the Steiner way is. Walk is the best talk. And what became apparent was that the insights of the leading edges of the fields of organisation studies were starting to appear ‘very Steiner’ to me – and this is where the interest in studying Steiner really started.

This took me on a journey applying the Goethean method that Steiner built on for my master’s thesis, and then exploring the application of Steiner’s ideas in The Philosophy of Freedom to leadership in a PhD scholarship. I left after the taught part because I realised I reside better in the world of application and practice, rather than in theory and academia. Today I work in the UK and Germany – cooking, facilitating, and exploring inspiring ideas and practices.

I could say I have found Steiner in the world, rather than fitting the world to Steiner, and have tested his truth-claims in my life over two decades. Organisational development helped because, at its best, it is action-oriented: it seeks to understand truth from what transpires, and tests truth-claims against reality. It was also where I was first handed the toolbox – and reminded that the most important tool in it is the practitioner. The journey towards mastery is inhabiting multiple perspectives, and starting to see the truths they are all suggesting or pointing towards. This is also when I came across this model, and I have been fascinated with it for the last 14 years.

Moods: how we hold the lens

So far I have spoken mostly of worldviews. But the soul moods and life-attitudes shape a constellation just as much. If the worldview is the lens, you could say the soul mood is how we focus it.

Take the soul moods, our ways of coming to knowledge. What organisational development gave me was less a new worldview than a better understanding of my own thinking, including new moods of knowing – what I have come to call epistemological dispositions: the empiricist’s ‘test it and see what transpires’, or the hermeneutic habit of reading beneath the surface for hidden meanings and assumptions. In teams I often meet two people who share the same ideals yet cannot hear each other. One argues from a chain of reasoning – it follows, so we must – in the mood of logicism; the other from a felt inner sense – it doesn’t feel right – in the mood of mysticism. Perhaps even the same worldview, expressed in different moods, and a conflict neither can quite name. Then there is the founder who meets the world as will, for whom truth is what gets made to happen: voluntarism – who may clash with the logicist waiting for the plan, or the mystic waiting until it feels right.

I met this early, before I had the words for it. Cooking with young people at a specialist college, from a fully organic and biodynamic supply list, I was handed a nutritionist’s well-evidenced case for a strictly wholegrain vegetarian diet. He came at it from a scientific and spiritual understanding of the body, and his way of knowing was to reason from principle: the evidence, and a biodynamic view of nutrition, established what was good for growing bodies – and therefore what these young people should eat. That is the mood of logicism: it follows, so it must be. My way of knowing was different. I came to know these young people by feeling into them – the empathic side of what Steiner calls mysticism – and by reading what food meant in their lives, the hermeneutic habit of looking beneath the surface: they needed to be met where they were, with what they were used to, burgers included. Then I tested it the empiricist’s way: try it, and see what they actually eat. The case was sound; the question was whether it would ever reach their plates.

It was also the first time I used an integral model to real effect. Wilber’s four quadrants let me set the nutritional evidence, which the plan rightly held, alongside everything it left out: the young people’s own tastes, enthusiasm and sense of themselves, the food culture they came from, the relationships between us, and the setting we were cooking in. That gave me a sound rationale for what I already sensed: get to know them first, without too many preconceptions about who they were or what I was trying to do, and start from where they were. Young people have a keen sense for authenticity, and anything that feels like a ‘should’ handed down from above gets rejected. Once we started from what they knew and engaged their enthusiasm, within a short time they were coming back for seconds of dahl, rice and salad.

Choosing moral values from the inside

This is where Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom becomes practical. He distinguishes the motive of an action – the idea behind it – from the driving force: our dispositions, habits and inherited feelings. An act is free when it springs from an idea we have grasped ourselves. This is such an important point: understanding the assumptions and tendencies behind a given point of view underpins any notion of freedom.

‘To be free means to be able to determine by moral imagination out of oneself, those ideas (motives) which lie at the basis of action. Freedom is impossible if anything other than I myself (whether a mechanical process or God) determines my moral ideas.’

– Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom

I experience this most clearly in motivation. Engaging genuine enthusiasm is a far more effective way to motivate oneself or others than ‘shoulds’ administered from outside. Often there is too much focus on discipline and carrying out our promises, and too little on examining where the goal really comes from and the assumptions behind it. If the ideals are not examined, we whip ourselves, and others, with ideals that are not truly our own. I did that for years. And organisations that espouse high ideals can easily exploit the goodwill of people who are intrinsically motivated by them.

‘Why should my act serve the general good less well when I do it from pure love of it, than when I perform it because it is a duty to serve the general good? The concept of duty excludes freedom …’

– Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom

There is a quieter form of the same thing: fixing. If the starting assumption is that I can see a better path for someone than they can, then however good my intentions, what follows is easily, in essence, coercion. And of course, underneath the notion to fix another lies a collection of certainties. I have caught myself doing it, even with my own children. If one has to act (and sometimes it is a duty), then exploring as many perspectives as possible becomes all the more important.

Seen through the wheel, with an over-dominance of idealism, the ideal is held so high that it hardens into duty or a stencil, imposed from above, rather than something understood, loved and made one’s own. The ideal itself is not the problem; making it lord over everything else is.

I saw the same thing for years in food. Cooking for health-conscious customers, I noticed that the people on a ‘perfect’ diet were not necessarily the healthiest, while those who allowed themselves some enjoyment often were. You could say it was a shadow of health consciousness: an empiricist’s rigour about nutrition, driven by an idealistic or spiritual picture of purity, hardening into a strictness with oneself that can become a kind of violence. What balanced it for me was a healthy attitude to enjoyment – paying attention to how food actually tasted and how I felt afterwards, rather than following rules handed down from outside. Years later, when I taught at Jamie’s Ministry of Food, I would suggest that healthier eating could be better achieved by focussing on getting good stuff in, rather than cutting bad stuff out.

To look at life through the lens of any paradigm or ideology, and the satisfying certainty it gives in judging the world, is to submit willingly to a kind of mental slavery. We inhabit ideological islands where ‘we are better’, whether fuelled by Anthroposophy, technocracy, socialism, or any idealised or singular view held as certainty. Concepts divorced from context become certainties that ‘the other’ is diagnosed with, leading to an enacted perversion of the original ideals.

Self-science

Seeing our own lens takes a particular kind of objectivity: reviewing our own behaviour and thinking, as Steiner puts it, with the inner tranquillity of a judge. Not the objectivity of the detached Cartesian observer, but of what transpires in the world, with ourselves as active participants in it. Coming to know the laws behind our own behaviour – who we are as a behaving personality – is, Steiner suggests, key in the process of development towards freedom. I came to think of this as a kind of ‘self-science’. It started with Steiner, but it applies to any thinker: their ideas become things to try out in our own lives, and our experience is the research data.

It isn’t a way of validating everything, and it can’t replace other kinds of inquiry. But where the subject is ourselves – in the development of our thinking, character and behaviour, in new faculties of perception such as meditative states or living thinking, and in things like health, diet and exercise – experience is primary data about ourselves; interpretation of that experience remains fallible.

Steiner acknowledged this partiality: ‘Each one of us has his own particular place from which he surveys the world. His concepts link themselves to his percepts.’ Thinking is where we take part in the universal; feeling is where we can ‘withdraw ourselves into the narrow confines of our own being’, and yet it is also ‘the means whereby, in the first instance, concepts gain concrete life’.

From my own self-science experiments I can suggest: thinking becomes reflective clarity, feelings become intuitive organs of perception, and willing – enactment – is where they integrate, and integrity is put to the test. Thinking, feeling and willing transform into clarity, humility and integrity. Congruence between what we espouse, what we do and the thinking behind it is where confidence comes from.

These insights and experiences led me to a central realisation: I have found a way to be in touch with myself, by bringing congruence between my experiences, emotions and ideas, and awareness of the impact of my actions. Rather than any theory or ideology holding the keys, it is an honest examination of my experiences, in relation to humanity and nature, that keeps me grounded. This grounding is where new faculties can grow from. Integrity is where I get my power from.

Holding meta-lenses lightly

Many systems offer to name our lens for us and the world: personality types, human design, AQAL Integral, Anthroposophy, astrosophy and the spiritual birth chart. They can be genuine mirrors, and I have found some of them illuminating. But they can also become a ring: a lens on yourself is not the whole of you, just as the map is not the territory. This model included.

The binding is stopping something that is in motion, or taking a singular perspective as the whole picture – forgetting the difference between the lens and what is being looked at – fuelled by the desire for the comfort of certainty.

Perhaps the answer lies in two movements that need to happen together. The first is towards ever greater self-awareness: coming to know oneself not simply as the person who has a worldview, but as a behaving personality through whom a particular way of seeing is continually being enacted. Only then can we begin to notice the laws that may be governing us – the assumptions, habits and attractions that quietly shape what we are able to see - and thus become free of unseen shackles.

The second movement is to expand the nature of our thinking itself. To move beyond thinking as a machine for arriving at conclusions, assembling dead concepts into a picture of reality, and towards a thinking that can remain alive to what it does not yet know. A thinking capable of moving between perspectives without becoming trapped in any of them; capable of asking rather than merely answering, and of holding the linear, the cyclical, the archetypal and the timeless without forcing them into a single ontological picture, or through a particular methodology.

Through building the ability to move fluidly between perspectives, without reducing many to one or extrapolating from one perspective onto the whole of reality, we can begin to peek beyond any single point of view into a more fluid realm of thought. Perhaps we can even begin to experience what all these worldviews are pointing towards: something that both integrates and lies beyond any single disposition towards truth or stance towards life. It is Steiner’s tree again: each picture true from where it was taken, and only many pictures, from many sides, beginning to show the whole, though only ever in snapshots.

And perhaps this is where thinking becomes something other than a way of securing ourselves against uncertainty. Freed, at least partly, from the constraints of linear time and from segmented or totalising pictures of reality, it can become more connected to what is cyclical and archetypal, while remaining rooted in the ever-present origin of actual experience: presence, and full engagement with life.

This realisation asks something uncomfortable of us: to live with the un-satisfaction of not having a conclusion, not even a paradox – suspending our knowing a little longer, to find the space where real creativity can begin. Letting go of holding theories, of clasping the ideas we hold on to – and just being creative.

Your turn

I’d love to hear from you:

• Which worldviews or dispositions were you born into – and which does your organisation run on?

• Which did you run from, and did you ever find your way back to it differently?

• Where is the gap between the lens you espouse and the one you act from?

• Whose ideals are you whipping yourself, or your team, with?

Next

Knowing our own lenses is where the practice begins: you can’t see past a lens until you know you’re looking through one. Part three turns to that practice – the soul gym – and ends with what it makes possible: truth in context.

Appendices

"If man's action is to be nothing other than the realization of his own content of ideas, then naturally such a content must lie within him. His spirit must work productively. For, what is supposed to fill him with the urge to accomplish something if not an idea working its way up in his spirit? This idea will prove to be all the more fruitful the more it arises in his spirit in definite outlines and with a clear content. For only that, in fact, can move us with full force to realize something, which is completely definite in its entire “what.” An ideal that is only dimly pictured to oneself, that is left in an indefinite state, is unsuitable as an impulse to action.

What is there about it to fire us with enthusiasm if its content does not lie clear and open to the day? The impulses for our action must therefore always arise in the form of individual intentions. Everything fruitful that the human being accomplishes owes its existence to such individual impulses. General moral laws, ethical norms, etc., that are supposed to be valid for all human beings prove to be entirely worthless."

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"The explaining of a process in nature is a going back to its determining factors: a seeking out of the producer in addition to the product that is given. When I perceive an effect and then seek its cause, these two perceptions do not by any means satisfy my need for explanation. I must go back to the laws by which this cause brings forth this effect.

It is different with human action. Here the lawfulness that determines a phenomenon itself enters into action; that which makes a product itself appears upon the scene of activity.

We have to do with a manifesting existence at which we can remain, for which we do not need to ask about deeper-lying determining factors. We have comprehended a work of art when we know the idea embodied in it; we do not need to ask about any further lawful relationship between idea (cause) and creation (effect). We comprehend the actions of a statesman when we know his intentions (ideas); we do not need to go any further beyond what comes to appearance.

This is therefore what distinguishes the processes of nature from the actions of human beings: with nature processes the law is to be regarded as the determining background for what comes into manifest existence, whereas with human actions the existence is itself the law and manifests as determined by nothing other than itself.

Thus every process of nature breaks down into something determining and something determined, and the latter follows necessarily from the former, whereas human action determines only itself. This, however, is action out of inner freedom (Freiheit).

When the intentions of nature, which stand behind its manifestations and determine them, enter into the human being, they themselves become manifestation; but now they are, as it were, free from any attachment behind them (rückenfrei). If all nature processes are only manifestations of the idea, then human doing is the idea itself in action.

Since our epistemology has arrived at the conclusion that the content of our consciousness is not merely a means of making a copy of the world ground. but rather that this world ground itself, in its most primal state comes to light within our thinking, we can do nothing other than to recognize directly in human action also the undetermined action of that primal ground.

We recognize no world director outside ourselves who sets goals and directions for our actions. The world director has given up his power, has given everything over to man, abolishing his own separate existence, and set man the task: Work on.

The human being finds himself in the world, sees nature, and within it, the indication of something deeper, a determining element, an intention. His thinking enables him to know this intention. It becomes his spiritual possession. He has penetrated the world; he comes forth, acting, to carry on those intentions.

Therefore, the philosophy presented here is the true philosophy of inner freedom (Freiheitsphilosophie). In the realm of human actions it acknowledges neither natural necessity nor the influence of some creator or world director outside the world. In either case, the human being would be unfree.

If natural necessity worked in him in the same way as in other entities, then he would perform his actions out of compulsion, then it would also be necessary in his case to go back to determining factors that underlie manifest existence, and then inner freedom is out of the question.

It is of course not impossible that there are innumerable human functions that can only be seen in this light; but these do not come into consideration here.

The human being, insofar as he is a being of nature, is also to be understood according to the laws that apply to nature's working. But neither as a knowing nor as a truly ethical being can he, in his behavior, be understood according to merely natural laws. There, in fact, he steps outside the sphere of natural realities. And it is with respect to this, his existence's highest potency, which is more an ideal than reality, that what we have established here holds good.

Man's path in life consists in his developing himself from a being of nature into a being such as we have learned to know here; he should make himself free of all laws of nature and become his own law giver.

But we must also reject the influence of any director—outside the world—of human destiny. Also where such a director is assumed, there can be no question of true inner freedom. There he determines the direction of human action and man has to carry out what this director sets him to do. He experiences the impulse to his actions not as an ideal that he sets himself, but rather as the commandment of that director; again his actions are not undetermined, but rather determined. The human being would not then, in fact, feel himself to be free of any attachment from behind him, but would feel dependent, like a mere intermediary for the intentions of a higher power.

We have seen that dogmatism consists in seeking the basis for the truth of anything in something beyond, and inaccessible to, our consciousness (transsubjective), in contrast to our view that declares a judgment to be true only because the reason for doing so lies in the concepts that are present in our consciousness and that flow into the judgment. Someone who conceives of a world ground outside of our world of ideas thinks that our ideal reason for recognizing something as true is a different reason than that as to why it is objectively true.

Thus truth is apprehended as dogma. And in the realm of ethics a commandment is what a dogma is in science.

When the human being seeks the impulse for his action in commandments, he acts then according to laws whose basis is independent of him; he conceives of a norm that is prescribed for his action from outside. He acts out of duty. To speak of duty makes sense only when looked at this way. We must feel the impulse from outside and acknowledge the necessity of responding to it; then we act out of duty.

Our epistemology cannot accept this kind of action as valid where the human being appears in his full ethical development. We know that the world of ideas is unending perfection itself; we know that with it the impulses of our action lie within us; and we must therefore only acknowledge an action as ethical in which the deed flows only out of the idea, lying within us, of the deed.

From this point of view, man performs an action only because its reality is a need for him. He acts because an inner (his own) urge, not an outer power, drives him. The object of his action, as soon as he makes himself a concept of it, fills him in such a way that he strives to realize it. The only impulse for our action should also lie in the need to realize an idea, in the urge to carry out an intention. Everything that urges us to a deed should live its life in the idea. Then we do not act out of duty; we do not act under the influence of a drive; we act out of love for the object to which our action is to be directed. The object, when we picture it, calls forth in us the urge to act in a way appropriate to it. Only such action is a free one.

For if, in addition to the interest we take in the object, there had yet to be a second motivation from another quarter, then we would not want this object for its own sake; we would want something else and would perform that, which we do not want we would carry out an action against our will.

That would be the case, for example, in action out of egoism. There we take no interest in the action itself; it is not a need for us; we do need the benefits, however, that it brings us. But then we also feel right away as compulsion the fact that we must perform the action for this reason only. The action itself is not a need for us; for we would leave it undone if no benefits followed from it.

An action, however, that we do not perform for its own sake is an unfree one. Egoism acts unfreely. Every person acts unfreely, in fact, who performs an action out of a motivation that does not follow from the objective content of the action itself.

To carry out an action for its own sake means to act out of love. Only someone who is guided by love in doing, by devotion to objectivity, acts truly freely.

Whoever is incapable of this selfless devotion will never be able to regard his activity as a free one."

From 'Goethean Science' by Rudolf Steiner (his first published book) where he discusses the nature of freedom in relation to ethics, in relation to how we approach coming to truth (Chapter X 'Knowing and human action in light of the Goethean way of knowing', sub section 5 'Ethical and Historical science' , pp150-155).

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The same elm and spruce trees from 3 perspectives

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