THE fusion of knowledge and science in the quest to establish our relation to the objective world lies at the very core of Steiner’s philosophy and the human capacity to think allows the world and its laws to reveal itself to us, something that epitomises our vital role in the grand scheme of existence and facilitates a deeply interdependent relationship between man and his environment.

As this statement suggests, the role we perform through cognition is something fundamentally practical and determines the moral parameters of our lives. Although we are subject to universal law, our participation with the external world is a free act that provides us with a lasting identity:

The apprehension of this conformity of human conduct to law is but a special case of knowledge. Hence, the conclusions at which we have arrived concerning the nature of knowledge must apply to this sort of knowledge, too. To apprehend oneself as a person who acts is to possess the relevant laws of conduct, i.e., the moral concepts and ideals, in the form of knowledge. It is this knowledge of the conformity of our conduct to law which makes our conduct truly ours. For, in that case, the conformity is given, not as external to the object in which the action appears, but as the very substance of the object engaged in living activity. The “object,” here, is our own Ego. If the Ego has with its knowledge really penetrated the essential nature of conduct, then it feels that it is thereby master of its conduct. Short of this, the laws of conduct confront us as something external. They master us. What we achieve, we achieve under the compulsion which they wield over us. But this compulsion ceases, as soon as their alien character has been transformed into the Ego’s very own activity. Thereafter, the law no longer rules over us, but rules in us over the actions which issue from our Ego. To perform an act in obedience to a law which is external to the agent is to be unfree. To perform it in obedience to the agent’s own law is to be free. To gain knowledge of the laws of one’s own conduct is to become conscious of one’s freedom. The process of cognition is, thus, according to our arguments, the process of the development of freedom. (pp.169-70)

It is only when we have no understanding whatsoever of the laws behind human conduct that we may be considered “unfree,” simply because we have not made them our own. Managing to overcome this obstacle, by way of self-development, is a fulfilment of personal morality. This, the reader will recall, is the basis of an “ethical individualism”.

The free spirit, alive and unbound, is for Steiner a personality that is “grounded upon itself” to the extent that one is completely autonomous.