IN Part Three of this series we saw how Monism often adopts a materialistic guise and, thus, reduces everything to the level of a “material process”. Similarly, Part Eight examined the Monist tendency to combine Realism and Idealism, with Steiner portraying Metaphysical Realism as little more than a veiled Monist attempt to hide the inconsistencies inherent within each.

We will return to Monism shortly, and in a way that Steiner agrees with, but Part Eight also discussed Naïve Realism and its insistence that knowledge is merely the result of sense-perception leaving an impression on the mind. This erroneous line of thinking is directly connected to the way in which one’s moral authority is willingly handed-over to religious and governmental institutions as a result of believing that the majority is somehow more superior or in possession of a supreme form of knowledge. There is, however, a further stage in this fallacy:

When, at last, the conviction dawns on someone that his authorities are, at bottom, human beings just as weak as himself, then he seeks refuge with a higher power, with a Divine Being, whom, in turn, he endows with qualities perceptible to the senses. He conceives this Being as communicating to him the ideal content of his moral life by way of his senses — believing, for example, that God appears in the flaming bush, or that He moves about among men in manifest human shape, and that their ears can hear His voice telling them what they are to do and what not to do. (p.90)

Ultimately, the Naïve Realist will reject all notions of external power and view moral law as something which must be wholly attributed to one’s own consciousness in the form of the human conscience. Steiner compares this to the manner in which Metaphysical Realism perceives the mysterious forces operating between percepts to be the work of self-existent powers. These seek

reality, not in the part which human nature, through its thinking, plays in making reality what it is, but which hypothetically posits reality over and above the facts of experience. Hence these extra-human moral norms always appear as corollaries of Metaphysical Realism. For this theory is bound to look for the origin of morality likewise in the sphere of extra-human reality. There are different possible views of its origin. If the thing-in-itself is unthinking and acts according to purely mechanical laws, as modern Materialism conceives that it does, then it must also produce out of itself, by purely mechanical necessity, the human individual and all that belongs to him. On that view the consciousness of freedom can be nothing more than an illusion. (p.90)

This, as we saw in Part Ten, is nothing other than the “psycho-physical” faculty which reduces us to a mere cog in the metabolic process. We believe that we are free, but only because we fail to understand the motives which arouse such delusional feelings.

For the same reason, both Naïve Realism and Metaphysical Realism deny man his freedom on the basis that we are simply going through the motions and subject to matters over which we have little or no control.

Returning to Monism, its advocates have no choice but to accept the tenets of Naïve Realism on the basis that moral ideas come from without. However, for the Monist there is a subtle difference in that he

ascribes to the idea the same importance as to the percept. The idea can manifest itself only in human individuals. In so far as man obeys the impulses coming from this side he is free. But Monism denies all justification to Metaphysics, and consequently also to the impulses of action which are derived from so-called “things-in-themselves.” According to the Monistic view, man’s action is unfree when he obeys some perceptible external compulsion; it is free when he obeys none but himself. There is no room in Monism for any kind of unconscious compulsion hidden behind percept and concept. If anybody maintains of the action of a fellow-man that it has not been freely done, he is bound to produce within the visible world the thing or the person or the institution which has caused the agent to act. And if he supports his contention by an appeal to causes of action lying outside the real world of our percepts and thoughts, then Monism must decline to take account of such an assertion. (p.92)

This means that we only considered free to a certain extent. Our spirits may be free, but we remain non-free in relation to percepts. Moral power, for the Monist, is neither the result of divine governance nor the laws of nature, and has its source in humanity itself. This, for Steiner, is something that must always lead to a positive kind of selfishness and is looked upon very favourably:

Monism, then, is in the sphere of genuinely moral action the true philosophy of freedom. Being also a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical (unreal) restriction of the free spirit as emphatically as it acknowledges the physical and historical (naïvely real) restrictions of the naïve man. Inasmuch as it does not look upon man as a finished product, exhibiting in every moment of his life his full nature, it considers idle the dispute whether man, as such, is free or not. It looks upon man as a developing being, and asks whether, in the course of this development, he can reach the stage of the free spirit. (pp.92-93)

As the final sentence in this paragraph suggests, one is not born a free spirit and must therefore progress towards the attainment of self-hood very gradually.

To conclude, what Steiner calls “moral compulsion” prevents an individual from being truly moral in the sense that it is impossible to complete a moral action in the absence of freedom. Monism, so long as it avoids materialism and takes a wholly spiritual form, is thus perceived as an emancipatory necessity that transcends both the “naïve morality” and “self-imposed fetters” of metaphysics. Human morality is shaped by humans themselves, representing a fundamental imperative of spiritual activity.