In The Foundations of
Human Experience, formerly entitled The Study of
Man, Rudolf Steiner seeks to uncover the bases of human experience and
the manner of the development of the human soul.As an example, I have isolated his treatment of the issue of
free will.…your present life reflects your life between death and a new
birth, and this reflection is your pictorial thinking.RS in The Foundations of Human Experience(The Study of Man), Page 51.I
accept that it must follow from this that the life before birth is in
some way a substantially more varied, detailed, full and vivid one than
after birth. Steiner
implies this on page 54. We could
assume that the
time for really living is before birth.The problem I have is on
the question of Free Will, a major part of any undergraduate philosophy
course. The whole of Steiner's work implies and indicates that Free
Will exists. But if all our thoughts are reflections of that which has
gone before, then when do we exercise that free will. Is it only
exercised between death and a new birth? Is that sufficient? Does Time
matter in this regard? Am I getting all het up about nothing?What
is clear, even for a devotee of the beacon of free will like me, is
that we too often assume that we are exercising free will, when in fact
we are being pushed and pulled by the forces of the human world that We
have created. We daily submit unthinkingly to the preferences of
governments, corporations and others. As a lawyer I learned a little of
the art of knowing when to shut up. We have to learn when to speak, too.In
another of Steiner’s works, Theosophy, he makes the point that some of
the experiences that we have in this life, and I think by implication
all of the significant ones, are somehow related to or caused by
conditions that we ourselves have had a hand in creating in previous
lives. We can accept that easily enough when thinking about whole
peoples or civilisations, but not so easily in respect of our
individual soul’s journey.True devotion to the ideal of freedom
requires us to slow down and apply our minds to each of the activities
we engage in, to every preference we have, and to discover whether the
cause of our behaviour lies within or without us. It is not,
as many philosophers appear to think, merely a matter of argument and
semantics, but primarily a matter for investigation.A lifetime's journey; or more.The
book is heartily recommended, and my personal choice of the contents is
the very accessible and revealing discussion of the Senses (Steiner
says we have twelve of them) in chapter eight. There is enough there
alone to keep anyone busy for the rest of their lives.
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