By finding and learning to operate out of this “I,” a person can move beyond karmic influences, strong attachments to various ideas and beings, and even override the predetermined likes and dislikes we bring into the world and develop as we live.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants." In other words, you can choose to eat chocolate pie or not, but you cannot choose whether or not you actually want to eat chocolate pie in the first place. We can make choices, Schopenhauer implies, but we cannot choose what it is that we actually want to begin with.
This view creates a problem for human freedom. If we are born with a certain set of desires, and those desires fundamentally determine everything for us, is there such a thing as freedom at all? German spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner offered a solution to this Gordian knot. In his book, *The Philosophy of Freedom*, he wrote:
“In willing the situation is different. The percept is here the content of my existence as an individual, whereas the concept is the universal element in me. What is brought into ideal relation to the external world by means of the concept, is an immediate experience of my own, a percept of my Self.”
“More precisely, it is a percept of my Self as active, as producing effects on the external world. In apprehending my own acts of will, I connect a concept with a corresponding percept, viz., with the particular volition. In other words, by an act of thought I link up my individual faculty (my will) with the universal world-process.”
Steiner posits that true freedom can be found by becoming aware of the “I,” the absolute self at the core of our being, which alone constitutes free will. By finding and learning to operate out of this “I,” a person can move beyond karmic influences, strong attachments to various ideas and beings, and even override the predetermined likes and dislikes we bring into the world and develop as we live.
Freedom is the axis of spiritual growth or decline. It is odd that the spiritual realm works in this manner, because the freedom that is necessary is not simply freedom of thought or of the mind. The mind can resist or agree with an inner desire, but its consent alone does not determine freedom. What matters is whether we can step beyond the intellectual process and our own instinctual reactions. It is the consent or resistance of the inner man that matters in ultimate reality.
We consciously have little or no say in which ideas or ideals our own thoughts refuse or permit, unless we deliberately choose them from outside the influences of our circumstances and desires. This inner being, the “I,” as Steiner calls it, stands outside our temporal existence and aligns itself with the principles of Being that gave rise to creation in the first place. Then, as Steiner teaches, in a refutation of Schopenhauer's thesis, “That man alone is free who in every moment of his life is able to obey only himself.”
