THAT The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is so intensely focussed on the role of the individual means that Steiner must identity both who and what the individual actually is. This, he explains in a chapter under the heading ‘The Individual and the Genus’.

The term “individual” does not appear within the taxidomic hierarchy that biologists use to separate the categories of life, although “genus” appears above “species” and below “family”. The classification of “individual” – conspicuous by its absence – is presumably viewed by modern scientists as constituting something of a minor or intermediate ranking, although Steiner relates the term “genus” to a natural whole that includes race, tribe, nation, family and both sexes.

Whilst an individual bears the characteristics of his or her community and is expected to act in accordance with an actual place of residence, Steiner asks whether an individual that fits into a more general scheme may be viewed as something complete in itself. We are shaped, of course, by the genus and are therefore generic in the sense that we reflect the same attributes of those others who gravitate in the same existential denomination. Despite this, however, the human being

emancipates himself from these generic characteristics. He develops qualities and activities the reason for which we can seek only in himself. The generic factors serve him only as a means to develop his own individual nature. He uses the peculiarities with which nature has endowed him as material, and gives them a form which expresses his own individuality. We seek in vain for the reason of such an expression of a man’s individuality in the laws of the genus. We are dealing here with an individual who can be explained only through himself. If a man has reached the point of emancipation from what is generic in him, and we still attempt to explain all his qualities by reference to the character of the genus, then we lack the organ for apprehending what is individual. (p.123)

The manner in which men and women regard one another, for example, usually involves generalising to the extent that an individual is quickly reduced to a preconceived notion of what a man or woman represents in the eyes of the opposite sex. Steiner believes this tendency affects women far more than it does men, a view that would undoubtedly win the respect of a more rational and level-headed feminist:

The social position of women is, in most instances, so low because it is not determined by the individual characteristics of each woman herself, but by the general ideas which are current concerning the natural function and needs of woman. A man’s activity in life is determined by his individual capacity and inclination, whereas a woman’s activity is supposed to be determined solely by the fact that she is just a woman. Woman is to be the slave of the generic, of the general idea of womanhood. So long as men debate whether woman, from her “natural disposition,” is fitted for this, that, or the other profession, the so-called Woman’s Question will never advance beyond the most elementary stage. What it lies in woman’s nature to strive for had better be left to woman herself to decide. If it is true that women are fitted only for that profession which is theirs at present, then they will hardly have it in them to attain any other. But they must be allowed to decide for themselves what is conformable to their nature. To all who fear an upheaval of our social structure, should women be treated as individuals and not as specimens of their sex, we need only reply that a social structure in which the status of one-half of humanity is unworthy of a human being stands itself in great need of improvement. (pp.123-4)

Steiner is critical of the fact that the sciences do not take individuality into account and that Western academia’s broad categorical descriptions merely contain the individual within the confines of the genus, arguing that as soon as thinking and acting begins the individual attains his or her freedom.

It is active intuition which secures this individuality, not something which is merely passed down from one generation to another without recourse to human thought:

Anyone who wants to understand the single individual must penetrate to the innermost core of his being, and not stop short at those qualities which he shares with others. In this sense every single human being is a problem. And every science which deals only with abstract thoughts and generic concepts is but a preparation for the kind of knowledge which we gain when a human individual communicates to us his way of viewing the world, and for that other kind of knowledge which each of us gains from the content of his own will. Wherever we feel that here we are dealing with a man who has emancipated his thinking from all that is generic, and his will from the grooves typical of his kind, there we must cease to call in any concepts of our own making if we would understand his nature. Knowledge consists in the combination by thought of a concept and a percept. With all other objects the observer has to gain his concepts through his intuition. But if the problem is to understand a free individuality, we need only to take over into our own minds those concepts by which the individual determines himself, in their pure form (without admixture). (pp.124-5)

This also means that when our judgement of a fellow human being is clouded by the concepts that we have already formed in relation to ourselves, the individuality of another is suppressed. The process of freedom, therefore, is twofold and not only involves asserting our own independence from the genus but of ensuring that we do not classify other people – at least when it comes to their true character – in accordance with that which is purely generic:

A man counts as a free spirit in a human community only to the degree in which he has emancipated himself, in the way we have indicated, from all that is generic. No man is all genus, none is all individuality; but every man gradually emancipates a greater or lesser sphere of his being, both from the generic characteristics of animal life, and from the laws of human authorities which rule him despotically. (p.125)

We must accept that there is a part of our innate human nature that can never achieve full emancipation, simply because we are members of the same organism. On the other hand, true freedom is expressed by way of the moral conduct that develops within the faculty of intuition:

And whatever moral instincts man possesses through the inheritance of social instincts, acquire ethical value through being taken up into his intuitions. In such ethical intuitions all moral activity of men has its root. To put this differently: the moral life of humanity is the sum-total of the products of the moral imagination of free human individuals. (p.125)

This is a perfect expression of the Monist principle that the great is to be found in the small, and vice versa.