AS we saw in the last part of this series, if man is to become a free spirit then he must work towards it gradually in the way that an apprentice worker might develop the skills he requires to succeed at a certain trade.

Continuing in a similar vein, Steiner now turns his mind to the matter of “adaptation of purpose” as it applies to the human condition:

Such adaptation is genuinely real only when, in contrast to the relation of cause and effect in which the antecedent event determines the subsequent, the subsequent event determines the antecedent. This is possible only in the sphere of human actions. Man performs actions which he first presents to himself in idea, and he allows himself to be determined to action by this idea. The consequent, i.e., the action, influences by means of the idea the antecedent, i.e., the human agent. If the sequence is to have purposive character, it is absolutely necessary to have this circuitous process through human ideas. (p.96)

Whilst the law of cause and effect determines that the percept of the cause must precede the percept of the effect, for an effect to influence the cause it must inevitably rely on conceptualisation. After all, the law states that the percept of the effect cannot arise prior to the percept of the cause simply because this would imply that the effect somehow determines the cause itself. The latter, therefore, only appears later.

The reason that Steiner is so keen to highlight the sequence of this relationship as it ordinarily appears within the law of cause and effect, is because within the sphere of human action things are somewhat different in that the effect is able to have a purposeful impact upon the cause:

The naïve consciousness, which regards as real only what is perceptible, attempts, as we have repeatedly pointed out, to introduce perceptible factors even where only ideal factors can actually be found. In sequences of perceptible events it looks for perceptible connections, or, failing to find them, it imports them by imagination. The concept of purpose, valid for subjective actions, is very convenient for inventing such imaginary connections. The naïve mind knows how it produces events itself, and consequently concludes that Nature proceeds likewise. In the connections of Nature which are purely ideal it finds, not only invisible forces, but also invisible real purposes. Man makes his tools to suit his purposes. On the same principle, so the Naïve Realist imagines, the Creator constructs all organisms. It is but slowly that this mistaken concept of purpose is being driven out of the sciences. (p.96)

Steiner completely rejects the idea that philosophy should focus on questions involving the purpose of existence or the role of man, agreeing with the Monists that purpose should only be discussed in relation to human action and not to any other sphere. Even when Monism seeks to establish laws of nature, he tells us, it is not for nature that this is done but for man. Humanity’s role in the world is approached purely on the basis of how man defines his own purpose through the realisation of ideas. In other words, an idea

a becomes effective, in the realistic sense, only in human actions. Hence life has no other purpose or function than the one which man gives to it. If the question be asked, What is man’s purpose in life? Monism has but one answer: The purpose which he gives to himself. I have no predestined mission in the world; my mission, at any one moment, is that which I choose for myself. I do not enter upon life’s voyage with a fixed route mapped out for me. (p.97)

Steiner’s interpretation of Monism depends entirely on ideas as they are expressed through human activity and excludes the notion that history – and one finds this in Hegel, particularly – is somehow unfolding its own destiny and that we are little more than a consequence of a preordained material process.

Here, we are reminded of our discussion on Hamerling’s Die Atomistik des Willens in Part Two, during which it was mentioned that Steiner’s fellow countryman advanced the erroneous concept that motive plays no part in human will and that everything must be reduced to the blind forces of nature. For Hamerling, therefore, nature – rather than man – exercises a “purposeful adaptation” in that ideas cannot be “found floating in mid-air” and must relate to nature as a whole. As Steiner explains, Hamerling’s belief is nothing other than

the consonance of percepts within a whole. But, since all percepts are based upon laws (ideas), which we discover by means of thinking, it follows that the orderly coherence of the members of a perceptual whole is nothing more than the ideal (logical) coherence of the members of the ideal whole which is contained in this perceptual whole. To say that an animal or a man is not determined by an idea floating in mid-air is a misleading way of putting it, and the view which the critic attacks loses its apparent absurdity as soon as the phrase is put right. An animal certainly is not determined by an idea floating in mid-air, but it is determined by an idea inborn in it and constituting the law of its nature. It is just because the idea is not external to the natural object, but is operative in it as its very essence, that we cannot speak here of adaptation to purpose. Those who deny that natural objects are determined from without (and it does not matter, in this context, whether it be by an idea floating in mid-air or existing in the mind of a creator of the world), are the very men who ought to admit that such an object is not determined by purpose and plan from without, but by cause and law from within. (pp.97-98)

According to Steiner, it is man who is responsible for creating relationships between percepts and thus the concepts and ideas resulting from this process come from within and cannot be attributed to the natural world that lies without.

Whilst he accepts that nature is purposeful in its own fashion, unlike the dynamic one finds operating within the sphere of human activity nature is unable to employ a concept as a cause and is limited to presenting causes in the form of percepts.