About Love in Recognition

When we talk about love, we mean different experiences. The word love can refer to the physical desire of another person or have an intimate spiritual quality in which the physical is irrelevant. The love between parents and children, educators and their pupils, the affection between boyfriends and girlfriends, the spontaneous experience of deep kinship and intimacy – all these are forms of love to which sexuality is alien. The ancient Greeks called these different forms of love by different names – eros, philia, storge, the love between parents and their children, and agape. The Christians later called this unconditional divine love their ideal of Christian charity. They were also convinced that the creation of the world was an act of love by God, who gave himself so that water, earth, plants, animals and people could come into being.

Rudolf Steiner also believed that creation emerged from the fullness of divine love. He saw love as the creative force par excellence in the world and taught that the ability to love was the cosmic mission of our planet Earth, which we had to develop in all its different forms, from the lowest to the highest. His philosophy of love is linked to his theory of cognition in an original way: Because the divine spirit has poured itself into the world through creation, it lives in all its manifestations, it animates and sustains all being on earth. In recognizing, we connect with the divine being – because thinking, recognizing means grasping the spirit that is active in things in our own spirit. But because there is no separation in the spiritual, we become one with the spiritual in the act of cognition; we experience a kind of communion with the spirit at work in things, which is intuitively present to us as a living concept.

According to Steiner, the power that works in thinking and cognition is therefore a «power of love in a spiritual way». In times of digital revolution and AI, such a view may seem strange at first, as it runs completely counter to the common understanding of cognition as a mechanistic linking process of information units. Artificial intelligence is based on our intellectual powers of reason, it reproduces the ability to logically combine abstract concepts and is now far superior to us in this respect. But it always remains external, on the surface of things. It is denied a loving immersion in phenomena and a deep grasp of the inner core of things, an intimate encounter with the essence of the other. This is a form of thinking that transcends human intellectual reasoning, which – like AI – is bound to a physical carrier, the human brain.

Encountering the primal ground of being

Today we are not used to understanding thinking and cognition in a spiritual sense. In meditation courses, we are taught that we should let go of thinking, overcome it – or at least observe our thoughts, if we cannot switch them off completely. Only in this way, we are told, can we find our way back to inner peace, to the lost unity with being. On the contrary, the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner's main philosophical work, revolves around thinking as the central human ability that shows us the way to a more comprehensive consciousness. According to Steiner, «the all-one power that permeates everything» lives in thinking. In thinking, we can encounter the divine source of being, which poured itself into the world out of love during creation. In order to reach this experience, however, we have to make some effort. For we must observe ourselves in the process of living thought and the creation of ideas. However, we are more accustomed to attaching preconceived notions to things like templates than letting them speak to us, letting them tell us their secret for themselves. For adults, it takes an enormous effort of will to think a thought for the first time in a lively and fresh way like a child and then, in a second step, to look back at this unbiased, uninhibited thinking. And in the Philosophy of Freedom, not only thinking and cognition, but also moral action is based on the principle of love.

In contrast to Kant, who advocated a strict concept of duty in ethics and demanded the universal validity of moral maxims, Steiner advocates an individualistic ethics in which the love of action becomes the central touchstone. The impulse to act should not come from outside – from religious tradition or from a recognized authority – nor from within through conscience or an inner voice, but from the directly intuitive idea that is kindled in a particular individual at a particular time in the face of a concrete situation. And Steiner is convinced that actions always lead to good if they are motivated by love. But it leads to evil if they arise from an intellectual judgment. This is because intellectual thinking separates us from the world and is mechanistic, abstract and reproducible. Intuitive thinking, however, is based on the ability to surrender, to wait patiently, to listen into a situation from which the answer emerges. Morality is therefore not a matter of the head, but a matter of the heart. Just as the thinking that Steiner demands seems to be closely linked to the heart: warmth, devotion, harmony with the world, a peripheral rather than centrist consciousness are the characteristics of this way of thinking.

Steiner versus Kant

«Duty! you sublime great name, who do not embrace anything popular that involves ingratiation, but demand submission, who issue a law [...] before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it». The young Steiner sharply criticized these famous words from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and, in contrast to them, positioned freedom as a «friendly, human name». Freedom does not impose laws on us and does not demean us into servants, but waits patiently to see what law love establishes. A feeling – love – becomes the source of knowledge and the guarantor for good and humane coexistence. Furthermore, according to Steiner, moral laws cannot be universally valid, as they are a creative matter for the individual, who intuitively finds the individually valid maxim for action in every situation out of presence of mind.

According to Steiner, free action is characterized by two features that AI does not possess. Generally valid maxims for action can be reproduced mechanically, moral imperatives can be programmed, but only humans are capable of loving attention to a situation and the living beings involved and of creating a new moral idea that is appropriate to this particular situation. In this way, the old rational thinking on which the philosophers of the Enlightenment based their universal ethics continues to have an effect in artificial intelligence. The new intuitive thinking, however, which was founded by Goethe and the German idealists and further developed by Steiner, relies on the specifically human ability of love, which can only be given through freedom. This thinking, which is the «power of love in a spiritual way», points to the future and alone is capable of bringing something new into the world.