After the video from last time with the title “Independent Judgment,” I naturally received reactions. These are not only under the video, but I also receive emails with reactions from time to time. And one of those pointed out to me the fact that if you are somewhat older and you look back at your youth, you would actually have to say: in those days people were still much more dependent on the judgment in which they were brought up than in the present time. We have in fact become much freer to venture to think something that has, for example, a revolutionary character. And by that I do not mean revolution in the big sense. Rather, revolution in the sense that you really want something different from what is happening. To think that is something that in modern times actually becomes more and more possible, when you think of the 1950s of the last century.
Back then the churches were still quite influential, and you grew up as a child in an environment in which the parents still truly had the final say, and of course that also helped determine what opinions and judgments you formed. And also at school — that is of course still the case — but you cannot say that that has become worse, that the forming of one’s own judgment has become less in modern times than earlier. For it has actually, when you look at it like that, become more. And whenever I receive such a reaction, I always think again: yes, how beautiful it is that you actually always have to turn your words around again in order finally, by all sorts of paths, perhaps to have said what you really want to say.
For that is not, in fact, what I meant by the dependence on the judgment of the outer world. I look at something of which I see that it indeed becomes, yes let me say, worse and worse, where you cannot say, “well, we are becoming quite a bit more independent,” but where you must say, “well, we are becoming more and more dependent on that which the world dictates.” Only, in terms of content it is not so clear, but as a process it is so clear. And what do I actually mean? When you consider yourself in daily life, but also in the life of scientific thinking, then it is actually always the case that thinking, both in everyday life and in a more scientific sense, always proceeds on the basis of sense impressions.
Just have a look, and you will see it in yourself. When you think back on a day and then look specifically at your thought life, you see that this thought life is actually full of all possible content that has to do with the sensory reality. Also of course memories; one could say, yes, that is not directly from what I have seen, heard, smelled and tasted today. No, but those memories are full of such kinds of content which at the time, when you experienced them, really were sense impressions. And I have nothing against sense impressions; I only want to show that thinking, which in itself is not a sensory thing, leans entirely upon sensory perception, and that if you did not wake up in your thinking, you would spend your whole life as a kind of being dragged along by what the senses have to offer you.
Thus almost all people spend their lives; it is simply created in us that we unfold our thinking on the basis of sense impressions. That is what I meant, and that is becoming stronger because the impulse in the human being to come to truly free thinking is increasingly forgotten. That impulse is not important; it is not esteemed; there is no longing for it — at least not consciously. Actually, the greatest chance of becoming conscious of this longing comes when you are a human being who, as you grow older — and by that I actually mean in adulthood — notices that the enchantment of the sense impressions becomes less and less, and that you therefore feel yourself in an increasingly sober sensory existence, and that at a certain moment you develop a longing for that which you still have as memory, as reminiscence, of your childhood, when that was not the case. When the sensory existence could still be taken in with full wonder because it had something enchanting. That you lose completely in adulthood, and I believe that if you only become aware of that — and I think that very many people must become aware of that — then the question concerning thinking also arises. And you then also see that in modern times thinking is blamed. That the flattening of the sensory impressions is attributed to the fact that you constantly spoil the sensory impression, so to speak, with thoughts.
Either because you are in thoughts — for example in worries or memories — or because you have become such an abstract thinker that it cannot be otherwise than that you have completely lost the romance of the sensory world. That, I can imagine, would be the strongest driving force to look at thinking.
But soon there again comes from the outside world an impulse that very many people follow, namely, to begin a meditative life in which you switch off thinking as much as possible. Because thinking is given the blame. When you come to know anthroposophy, a completely different light falls on this development and this problem. And gradually you come to acknowledge that the fact that thinking is blamed relates to the fact that thinking never stands by itself. If you were to experience it as a self-contained whole, then you would indeed have the wonder, and from that wonder you would also rediscover wonder in everyday life. But thinking in itself is unknown. In anthroposophy, it is not. You only need to read the first books of Rudolf Steiner and you come to know his theory of knowledge, and then you come to know what thinking is when it stands by itself. That is something that essentially never occurs of itself.
When you read such a book by Steiner, then while you are reading, your thinking is torn away, as it were, from the senses, for there is nothing sensory in it, and thus you must live with your thinking for a time in contents that are not sensory. Very many people experience that as unpleasant, or strenuous, or boring. I once spoke with someone who said: “I feel like throwing the book into the fireplace, it is so boring.”
But that has to do with the fact that you do not persevere, and that you thus actually do not make that leap from sensorily penetrated thinking to sense-free thinking. If you were to do that — then you have really made a leap — then you would feel the liberation that arises when thinking frees itself from the outer world. And you must not think: yes, then you become a philosopher in a little room full of books and you lose the world. That is not the case at all, because that thinking that stands on its own has within it the tendency to want to return to the world, but then out of that purity of independence. When you come to know a book like The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner, you learn precisely that; you learn that thinking as such can be liberated because it learns for a time to maintain itself as thinking, separate from the sensory world.
That is a liberation; it is incredible. Only, if you do not get that far, if you get stuck in the struggle and thus in fact persist in the inclination of thinking toward the senses, and do not succeed in holding out longer that thinking is sense-free, then of course you will not discover what sort of liberation that is.
But this independence of thinking is what I have in mind, and you see that this independence is actually becoming less and less. One only must think of all our digital tools, which we have and which I myself also use. If you pay attention to yourself while you use them, then you come to say: my iPhone is in fact an extension of my brain; I put it there on the table, but in fact that is what my thinking still is. I myself am not that at all anymore. You see, in the time when that did not exist, it was at least still so that when you thought sensorially, you at least did it yourself. But that is no longer the case. You let your thinking be done by that which is available in terms of possibilities. And that in itself would not even be bad. If only you knew how to cultivate the counterbalance, then it would become possible to truly come to an independent judgment, because you would then have learned to think out of a thinking impulse that is free.
And then you may of course say: yes, but a book like The Philosophy of Freedom also comes from outside. That is also not your own. You did not invent that yourself. Those are Rudolf Steiner’s thoughts. And why then should that give you a feeling of freedom? That has to do with the fact that in that book there are thoughts that are universally human, and which every human being can think out of the certainty that they are his own thoughts. It naturally takes some time before you realize that. In the beginning you may think: well yes, it is Steiner who says all that; and I have sat in study groups in which people get bogged down in discussions about whether what he says is even true. Yes, that is how it goes of course.
But if you persevere in thinking along with what stands there, then in time you really will come to see that these are universally human thoughts that liberate you from the inclination toward the senses, simply because those sense impressions are not there and thinking stands entirely on its own.
Another possibility is still to use the sensory content while nevertheless thinking yourself, and that is the well-known first exercise of the six-fold path. These are exercises that contribute to the formation of the lotus flower of the heart. That first exercise is control of thinking. What you then do is take a sensory object. You do not take The Philosophy of Freedom or a book by Hegel or something like that; you take a simple sensory object, but then you proceed entirely on your own strength, let us say for five minutes, to think about that sensory object. You do not pick up your phone and look up what production process that sensory object has gone through or something like that. You do none of that. You imagine for yourself how, for example, the familiar pencil became a pencil, but also, for example, what one does with a pencil.
These are thoughts that are indeed fully sensory, but you think them yourself. And that is another possibility to come to the wondrous discovery that it is also possible to set thinking itself in motion and to carry it out step by step. That is independent thinking. And then you can — you can, as it were, still think all sorts of things that are in the direction of what one supposedly ought to think, but you can think about them yourself. You do not first need to see a program and then through that know what something is. You can indeed watch that program and thereby know what something is, but then you yourself proceed to think it.
You can do that with everything, and by doing that — by giving shape to a subject entirely yourself in thinking — you come to know what it is to come to independent thinking. A thinking that is not taken along by what is present in the outer world, not only in terms of content but also in terms of process. You find a thinking that — as the Germans say gestaltet — that shapes itself entirely out of your will-force. That would be independent thinking, even if from that independent thinking you had concluded: I vote for D66. (D66 became in the elections in October unexpected the winner)
