The Philosophy of Freedom
The Basis for a Modern World Conception
by Rudolf Steiner
(also published as Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path)

This earlier edition, translated by Michael Wilson, has been republished in response to public demand.

The Philosophy of Freedom, written by Rudolf Steiner in 1894, is offered as a catalyst to the development of human thought and self-awareness.  The reading of it and the effort dedicated to the comprehension of its precepts acts as an alchemical process which takes place by virtue of the soul's own heightened spiritual activity. Through negotiating the concepts, the soul becomes aware of it's own spiritual activity independent of bodily mediation or environmental influence.

The concepts involved are not derived from anything personal to Steiner or anything outside the soul's own immediate purview, if it is willing to make the effort - which it must do in order to adequately heighten its conceptual activity. Ultimately, said Steiner in a lecture many years later, the material in the book should be able to be written independently by any soul who has developed the strength and focus to do so.

What is little understood about this book is that it represents a particular stage in human consciousness - it is the unfolding in full consciousness, the ego's own activity in thought, i.e. the full flowering of the Consciousness Soul.  Earlier stages of consciousness development  (Sentient Soul Age and Intellectual Soul Age) did not have this unique feature. In this respect it is also the phase where, if the human being is willing to develop these forces, thought itself becomes transformed into the first shades of true spiritual perception (in the modern sense). Steiner states in Lecture 5 of the lecture series: The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution that what is described in this book is "the very first degree of the new clairvoyance. This is not recognized because people still think that clairvoyance means plunging into something obscure and unfamiliar. Here it is just the familiar that is sought; here one goes out with a thinking that has become independent of matter. It is a thinking that sustains itself, so that, through this self-sustaining thinking, the world is grasped for the first time purely spiritually. Indeed, the world is grasped through the very purest spirituality."

See also: The Redemption of Thinking

Trans: M. Wilson (Written 1894, GA4)
Rudolf Steiner Press
264pp; paperback
ISBN: 1 85584 082 0
 

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