Necessity and Freedom:

Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner #CW 166

by Rudolf Steiner

5 lectures, Berlin, January 25 – February 8, 1916 (CW 166) The age-old question of free will is still a mystery to most people today. Even religious and philosophical circles have difficulty reconciling the concepts of morality, destiny, karma, and necessity with true freedom. Steiner illuminates questions of freedom and necessity, and guilt and innocence, by discussing various aspects of evolution, history, and culture and showing that human beings carry the responsibility for these developments. He shows that the past represents necessity, whereas true freedom belongs to the future. Steiner states that, whereas the human I is revealed in acts of volition on the physical plane, ultimately we will find our true "I"-being only through the Christ impulse and the completely free act of the Mystery of Golgotha. German source Notwendigkeit und Freiheit im Weltengeschehen und im menschlichen Handeln (GA 166).

Paperback

First published April 1, 1988

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.