The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. World Purpose and Life Purpose

[ 1 ] Among the manifold currents in the intellectual life of humanity, one can trace a trend that might be called the overcoming of the concept of purpose in areas where it does not belong. Expediency is a specific pattern in the sequence of phenomena. Expediency is truly real only when, in contrast to the relationship of cause and effect—where the preceding event determines a later one—the subsequent event conversely exerts a determining influence on the earlier one. This is initially the case only with human actions. A person performs an action that they imagine beforehand, and allows this mental image to determine the action. The later event, the action, influences the earlier one—the acting person—with the help of the mental image. This detour through the mental image, however, is absolutely necessary for a purposeful connection.

[ 2 ] In the process that breaks down into cause and effect, a distinction must be made between perception and concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply coexist side by side in our consciousness if we could not connect them 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 prior to that of the cause. Anyone who claims that the flower is the purpose of the root—that is, that the former has an influence on the latter—can only claim this based on the factor in the flower that they establish through their thinking about it. The perceptual factor of the flower does not yet exist at the time of the root’s formation. For a purposeful connection, however, it is not merely the ideal, lawful connection of the later with the earlier that is necessary; rather, the concept (the law) of the effect must actually influence the cause through a perceptible process. Yet we can observe a perceptible influence of a concept on something else only in human actions. Here, then, the concept of purpose alone is applicable. Naive consciousness, which accepts only the perceptible, seeks—as we have repeatedly noted—to transpose the perceptible even where only the ideal can be recognized. In perceptible events, it seeks perceptible connections or, if it finds none, dreams them in. The concept of purpose applicable in subjective action is a suitable element for such imagined connections. The naive person knows how to bring about an event and concludes from this that nature will do the same. In the purely ideal connections of nature, he sees not only invisible forces but also imperceptible real purposes. Man makes his tools fit for purpose; following the same formula, the naive realist has the Creator construct organisms. Only very gradually does this false concept of purpose disappear from the sciences. In philosophy, it still runs quite rampant today. There, questions are asked about the extra-worldly purpose of the world, about the extra-human destiny (and consequently also the purpose) of humanity, and so on.

[ 3 ] Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It seeks natural laws, but not natural purposes. Natural purposes are arbitrary assumptions, just like imperceptible forces (5. 121 f.). But even purposes in life that humans do not set for themselves are, from the standpoint of monism, unjustified assumptions. Only that which humans have first made into a purpose is purposeful, for only through the realization of an idea does something purposeful come into being. Yet the idea becomes effective in the realistic sense only in humans. Therefore, human life has only the purpose and destiny that humans give it. To the question: What is man’s task in life? monism can only answer: the one he sets for himself. My mission in the world is not a predetermined one, but rather the one I choose for myself in each instance. I do not set out on my life’s journey with a predetermined course.

[ 4 ] Ideas are realized effectively only by human beings. It is therefore inappropriate to speak of the embodiment of ideas through history. All such expressions as: “History is the development of humanity toward freedom,” or the realization of the moral world order, and so on, are untenable from a monistic point of view.

[ 5 ] Those who subscribe to the concept of purpose believe that, in doing so, they must simultaneously abandon all order and unity in the world. Consider, for example, Robert Hamerling (Atomistik des Willens, Vol. II, p. 201): “As long as there are instincts in nature, it is folly to deny purposes in it.

[ 6 ] —Just as the form of a limb of the human body is not determined or conditioned by some abstract idea of that limb floating in the air, but rather by its connection to the larger whole—the body to which the limb belongs—so too is the form of every natural being, be it plant, animal, or human, is not determined and conditioned by an idea of that being floating in the air, but by the formative principle of the larger whole of nature, which lives out and develops itself in a purposeful manner.” And on page 191 of the same volume: “The theory of purpose merely asserts that despite the thousand discomforts and torments of this creaturely life, a high purpose and systematic order are unmistakably present in the forms and developments of nature—a plan and purposefulness, however, that is realized only within the laws of nature, and which cannot aim at a land of milk and honey in which life would face no death, becoming no passing away, with all the more or less unpleasant but utterly inevitable intermediate stages.”

[ 7 ] “When opponents of the concept of purpose set against it a painstakingly assembled heap of half-truths and full-blown, supposed or actual instances of impracticality—drawn from a world of wonders of practicality, such as nature displays in all areas—I find that just as amusing.”—

[ 8 ] What is meant by “expediency” here? A harmonization of perceptions into a whole. But since all perceptions are based on laws (ideas) that we discover through our thinking, the systematic harmonization of the elements of a perceptual whole is precisely the ideal harmonization of the elements of an ideal whole contained within that perceptual whole. When it is said that the animal or the human is not determined by an idea floating in the air, this is a misstatement, and the condemned view loses its absurd character of its own accord once the expression is corrected. The animal is certainly not determined by an idea floating in the air, but rather by an idea innate to it and constituting its lawful essence. Precisely because the idea is not outside the thing, but acts within it as its essence, one cannot speak of expediency. Precisely the one who denies that the natural being is determined from the outside (whether by an idea floating in the air or a existing outside the creature in the mind of a world-creator is, in this respect, entirely irrelevant) must admit that this being is not determined purposefully and by design from the outside, but causally and lawfully from within. I design a machine to be purposeful when I bring the parts into a relationship that they do not naturally possess. The purposefulness of the design then consists in the fact that I have based the machine’s mode of operation on its idea. The machine has thereby become an object of perception with a corresponding idea. Natural beings are also such entities. Whoever calls a thing purposeful because it is formed according to law may well apply this designation to natural entities as well. However, this lawfulness must not be confused with that of subjective human action. For the purpose, it is indeed absolutely necessary that the active cause be a concept, namely that of the effect. In nature, however, concepts cannot be found anywhere as causes; the concept always proves to be merely the ideal connection between cause and effect. Causes exist in nature only in the form of perceptions.

[ 9 ] Dualism can speak of the purposes of the world and nature. Where our perception reveals a lawful connection between cause and effect, the dualist may assume that we are seeing only a reflection of a relationship in which the absolute world-being realized its purposes. For monism, the existence of a world entity that is absolutely inaccessible to experience—and can only be deduced hypothetically—also eliminates the basis for assuming the existence of world and natural purposes.

Addendum to the 1918 New Edition

[ 10 ] If one thinks through what is presented here without prejudice, one cannot come to the conclusion that the author of this exposition, in his rejection of the concept of purpose for non-human facts, stood on the same ground as those thinkers who, by rejecting this concept, create for themselves the possibility of to regard everything outside human action—and then human action itself—as merely a natural occurrence. The very fact that this book presents the thought process as a purely mental one should already serve as a safeguard against this. Even if the idea of purpose is rejected here for the spiritual world lying outside human action, this is done because in this world a higher purpose than that realized in humanity comes to revelation. And when a purposeful destiny of the human race, conceived according to the pattern of human expediency, is spoken of as an erroneous idea, what is meant is that the individual sets goals for himself, and from these the result of humanity’s collective activity is composed. This result is then a higher than its constituent parts, the human purposes.