Freedom Through Love

By Nick Thomas: Freedom Through Love: The Search for Meaning in Life: Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom; Temple Lodge, 2014, 54 pages.

Review by Sara Ciborski

This short book is a personalized condensation of Steiner’s seminal work "The Philosophy of Freedom". One could say that it is a digest of that work’s main arguments, for Thomas has truly “digested” the Philosophy and made it his own.

It is not (nor is intended to be) a substitute for reading Steiner. Close study and activation of concentrated thinking are required for grasping—indeed are part of—the meaning of the Philosophy. Thomas’s book offers a different reading experience. Without quoting or even paraphrasing Steiner, he re-presents Steiner’s content in a refreshing, close-up, personal way, drawing his examples from today’s trends in thinking and contemporary situations. One of his Nick Thomas chapter-opening sentences, for example, is the question, “How many times have you heard of (or had!) a great idea that never gets off the launching pad?”

Although he opens with the same two questions that begin the Philosophy, about the possibilities for real knowledge and human freedom, Thomas states that he will explore them “from a different starting point to suit modern times, with liberal interpretations and additions, and (as he says later) in “common-sense fashion, and deliberately non-scientifically…not out of contempt for science, but because science sets its limits and agenda so as to exclude phenomena like love and inner experience.”

Thomas recasts Steiner’s demonstration of the possibility for free human deeds as something achievable through love in thinking, feeling, and willing. Covering similar ground in the second chapter, “Levels of Freedom,” he glosses Steiner’s detailed typology of motives and driving forces in two and a half pages. His summaries (in five more short chapters) of Steiner on sense perception, the objective reality of concepts, and their role in thinking are likewise succinct. Thomas provides an excellent discussion of “qualia,” the secondary qualities inhering in sense perception, and finishes with a discussion of what actually is meant by “spiritual activity.”

The brevity of Thomas’s book may raise eyebrows among readers who have diligently studied the Philosophy, with its lengthy build-up toward the fundamental insight that thinking itself is a secure, reliable starting point for knowing and Steiner’s point-by-point challenge to Kantian dualism, critical idealism, and other isms in order to demonstrate their epistemological unreliability.

Thomas is far less concerned with quashing the opposition. He does briefly respond to objections to human freedom that have been raised by positivists, skeptics, and scientific materialists (who say that feelings are “merely chemical processes in the body”). But more often, his approach is to appeal to common sense and ordinary human experience.

Common sense justifies our dismissing science for failing to “embrace inwardness in human experience” and dismissing also any mainstream philosophy that fails the test of relevance to our daily lives: “Surely the richness and problems of our relationships with other people are the most pressing and ‘real’ aspects of our life! No philosophical denial of their reality can remove them; for example, to point out that we do not know what reality is or that all our supposed knowledge is illusion does nothing to alleviate the problems we have to contend with every day.”

Thomas is an electrical engineer and former General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain. He has aimed in his writings and lectures to bridge the gap between conventional and spiritual science (according to the author blurb). Given its title and publisher, this book is not likely to attract mainstream scientists and philosophers. Nor, given its conversational style, will it pass scholarly muster.

Nevertheless, to open minds, Thomas’s presentation of the case for human freedom is cogent, convincing, and inspiring. It would be wonderful if the book reached an audience of non-anthroposophical general readers. It would be accessible and excellent reading for teenagers. Best of all, for anthroposophists it suggests an effective way of speaking (to non-anthroposophists or even to each other) about the relevance for our troubled times of Steiner’s views on of love, freedom, and the meaning of life.