The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. World Purpose and Life Purpose

[ 1 ] Among the manifold currents in the spiritual life of mankind, there is one that can be called the overcoming of the concept of purpose in areas to which it does not belong. The purposefulness is a certain kind in the sequence of phenomena. Purposefulness is only truly real if, in contrast to the relationship between cause and effect, where the preceding event determines a later one, the subsequent event has a determining effect on the earlier one. This is initially only the case with human actions. Man performs an action which he imagines before and allows this imagination to determine the action. The later, the action, affects the earlier, the acting person, with the help of the imagination. However, this detour through the imagination is absolutely necessary for the purposeful connection.

[ 2 ] In the process that breaks down into cause and effect, perception must be distinguished from the concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply exist side by side in our consciousness if we could not connect them with each other through their corresponding concepts. The perception of the effect can only ever follow the perception of the cause. If the effect is to have a real influence on the cause, this can only be through the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect simply does not exist before that of the cause. Whoever claims that the blossom is the purpose of the root, that is, that the former has an influence on the latter, can only claim this of the factor in the blossom which he states by thinking about it. The perceptual factor of the flower has no existence at the time of the root's origin. For the purposeful connection, however, not only the ideal, lawful connection of the later with the earlier is necessary, but the concept (the law) of the effect must actually influence the cause through a perceptible process. However, we can only observe a perceptible influence of one concept on something else in human actions. Here, therefore, the concept of purpose alone is applicable. The naive consciousness, which only accepts the perceptible, seeks - as we have repeatedly noted - to transfer the perceptible to where only the ideal can be recognized. It seeks perceptible connections in the perceptible event or, if it does not find them, it dreams them into it. The concept of purpose in subjective action is a suitable element for such dreamed connections. The naive person knows how to bring about an event and concludes from this that nature will do the same. He sees not only invisible forces, but also imperceptible real purposes in the purely ideal connections of nature. Man makes his tools purposeful; the naive realist lets the Creator build organisms according to the same recipe. Only very gradually is this false concept of purpose disappearing from the sciences. In philosophy it is still quite rampant today. Questions are asked about the otherworldly purpose of the world, about the otherworldly purpose (and therefore also the purpose) of human beings and so on.

[ 3 ] Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It searches for natural laws, but not for natural purposes. Natural purposes are arbitrary assumptions such as imperceptible forces (5. 121 f.). But purposes of life which man does not set for himself are also unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of monism. Only that which man has made purposeful is purposeful, for only through the realization of an idea does purposefulness arise. However, the idea only becomes effective in the realistic sense in man. That is why human life only has the purpose and destiny that man gives it. To the question: what is man's task in life? monism can only answer: that which he sets for himself. My mission in the world is not a predetermined one, but the one I choose for myself. I do not embark on my life's journey with a fixed route.

[ 4 ] Ideas are only realized expediently through people. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of the embodiment of ideas through history. All such phrases as: "history is the development of human beings towards freedom", or the realization of the moral world order and so on are untenable from a monistic point of view.

[ 5 ] The supporters of the concept of purpose believe that all order and unity of the world must be abandoned along with it. Listen, for example, to Robert Hamerling (Atomistik des Willens, Volume II, p. 201): "As long as there are drives in nature, it is folly to deny purposes in it.

[ 6 ] Just as the formation of a limb of the human body is not determined and conditioned by an idea of this limb floating in the air, but by its connection with the larger whole, the body, to which the limb belongs, so the formation of every natural being, be it plant, animal, man, is not determined and conditioned by an idea of it floating in the air, but by the principle of form of the larger, purposefully living and shaping whole of nature. " And page 191 of the same volume: "The theory of purpose only asserts that despite the thousand inconveniences and torments of this creaturely life, a high purpose and planfulness is unmistakably present in the formations and developments of nature - a planfulness and purposefulness, however, which is only realized within the laws of nature, and which cannot aim at a world of creation, in which life would not be confronted with death, becoming with decay, with all the more or less unpleasant but inevitable intermediate stages.

[ 7 ] I find it equally droll when the opponents of the concept of purpose oppose a laboriously assembled heap of half or whole, supposed or real inexpediencies to a world of wonders of purposefulness, as nature exhibits them in all areas." -

[ 8 ] What is expediency called here? A coordination of perceptions into a whole. But since all perceptions are based on laws (ideas) that we find through our thinking, then the planned harmonization of the members of a perceptual whole is precisely the ideal harmonization of the members of an idea whole contained in this perceptual whole. If it is said that the animal or the human being is not determined by an idea floating in the air, this is wrongly expressed, and the condemned view loses its absurd character by itself when the expression is corrected. The animal, however, is not characterized by an idea floating in the air, but by an idea that is innate to it and constitutes its lawful essence. Precisely because the idea is not external to the thing, but acts within it as its essence, we cannot speak of purposefulness. Precisely the person who denies that the natural being is determined from outside (whether by an idea floating in the air or an idea existing outside the creature in the spirit of a world creator is quite indifferent in this respect) must admit that this being is not purposively and purposefully determined from outside, but causally and lawfully from within. I design a machine purposefully when I bring the parts into a connection that they do not have by nature. The purposefulness of the device then consists in the fact that I have based it on the machine's mode of operation as its idea. The machine has thereby become an object of perception with a corresponding idea. Such beings are also the beings of nature. Whoever calls a thing purposeful because it is formed according to law, may also assign this designation to natural beings. But this lawfulness must not be confused with that of subjective human action. For purpose it is absolutely necessary that the effective cause be a concept, namely that of effect. Nowhere in nature, however, can concepts be demonstrated as causes; the concept always proves to be only the ideal connection between cause and effect. Causes are only present in nature in the form of perceptions.

[ 9 ] Dualism can speak of the world and the purposes of nature. Where our perception perceives a lawful connection between cause and effect, the dualist can assume that we see only a copy of a connection in which the absolute world being realizes its purposes. For monism, the reason for assuming the world and the purposes of nature is eliminated with the absolute world being, which cannot be experienced but only hypothetically developed.

Addition to the new edition 1918

[ 10 ] If one thinks through what has been said here without prejudice, one cannot come to the conclusion that the author of this exposition, in rejecting the concept of purpose for non-human facts, was standing on the ground of those thinkers who, by rejecting this concept, create the possibility of understanding everything that lies outside of human action - and then this action itself - as only natural events. This should be guarded against by the fact that in this book the thinking process is presented as a purely spiritual one. If the idea of purpose is also rejected here for the spiritual world lying outside of human action, it is because in this world a higher purpose than that which is realized in humanity is revealed. And when we speak of a purposeful destiny of the human race, conceived according to the pattern of human expediency, as an erroneous thought, we mean that the individual sets himself purposes, from which the result of the overall effectiveness of humanity is composed. This result is then a higher than its members, the purposes of mankind.