The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. Individuality and Genus

[ 1 ] The view that human beings are predisposed to a complete, self-contained, free individuality appears to be contradicted by the facts that they exist as members of a natural whole (race, tribe, nation, family, male and female genders) and that they act within a whole (state, church, and so on). They bear the general character traits of the community to which they belong and give their actions a content that is determined by the place they occupy within a majority.

[ 2 ] Is individuality even possible in this context? Can a person be viewed as a whole in and of themselves if they emerge from a whole and become part of a whole?

[ 3 ] The characteristics and functions of a part of a whole are determined by the whole. A tribe is a whole, and all the people belonging to it possess the characteristics that are inherent in the nature of the tribe. The nature of the individual and the way he acts are determined by the character of the tribe. As a result, the individual’s physiognomy and actions take on a generic quality. When we ask why this or that aspect of a person is the way it is, we are directed from the individual being to the genus. This explains to us why something in him appears in the form we observe.

[ 4 ] But human beings free themselves from this generic nature. For the generic nature of humanity, when properly experienced by human beings, is nothing that restricts their freedom, nor should it be so through artificial means. Human beings develop qualities and functions within themselves, the basis for which we can seek only within them. In doing so, the generic serves him only as a means to express his particular essence within himself. He uses the characteristics bestowed upon him by nature as a foundation and gives them the form appropriate to his own being. We now search in vain for the basis of an expression of this being in the laws of the genus. We are dealing with an individual who can be explained only by himself. If a human being has progressed to this detachment from the generic, and we still wish to explain everything about him in terms of the character of the genus, then we have no organ for the individual.

[ 5 ] It is impossible to fully understand a person if one bases one’s judgment on a generic concept. People are most stubborn in judging by general category when it comes to a person’s gender. Men see in women, and women in men, almost always too much of the general character of the opposite sex and too little of the individual. In practical life, this harms men less than it does women. The social position of women is usually so undignified because, in many respects where it ought to be, it is not determined by the individual characteristics of each woman, but by the general mental images people have about the natural role and needs of women. A man’s role in life is determined by his individual abilities and inclinations; a woman’s role is to be determined exclusively by the fact that she is a woman. Women are to be the slaves of the generic, of the universal feminine. As long as men debate whether women are “by their very nature” suited to this or that profession, the so-called women’s question cannot move beyond its most elementary stage. What a woman can desire by her very nature should be left to the woman herself to judge. If it is true that women are suited only to the profession that currently falls to them, then they will hardly achieve any other on their own; but they must be able to decide for themselves what is in accordance with their nature. To those who fear that treating women not as members of a gender but as individuals will disrupt our social order, it must be replied that social conditions in which half of humanity leads an inhuman existence are in dire need of improvement. ^{1Immediately upon the publication (1894) of this book, I was told in response to the above remarks that, within the framework of the collective, women can already express themselves individually as they please, far more freely than men, who are de-individualized by school and then by war and profession. I know that this objection will perhaps be raised even more strongly today. I must nevertheless leave these statements here and hope that there are also readers who understand how strongly such an objection violates the concept of freedom developed in this work, and who judge my statements above on grounds other than the de-individualization of men through school and career.}

[ 6 ] Anyone who judges people according to generic characteristics reaches precisely the boundary beyond which they begin to be beings whose actions are based on free self-determination. What lies below this boundary can, of course, be the subject of scientific inquiry. The characteristics of races, tribes, peoples, and genders are the subject matter of specific sciences. Only people who wished to live solely as specimens of the species could be satisfied with a general picture derived from such scientific observation. But none of these sciences can penetrate to the specific content of the individual. Where the realm of freedom (of thought and action) begins, the determination of the individual according to the laws of the species ceases. The conceptual content that human beings must connect through thought with perception in order to take possession of full reality (cf. p. 88ff.) cannot be fixed once and for all by anyone and left ready-made to humanity. The individual must gain his concepts through his own intuition. How the individual is to think cannot be derived from any generic concept. The individual alone is decisive in this regard. Nor can general human characteristics be used to determine which concrete goals the individual wishes to set for himself. Whoever wishes to understand the individual must penetrate to the core of their particular nature, and not stop at typical characteristics. In this sense, every single human being is a problem. And all science that deals with abstract thoughts and generic concepts is merely a preparation for the insight we gain when a human individuality communicates to us its way of viewing the world, and for the other insight we derive from the content of their will. Where we have the sense that we are dealing with that aspect of a human being which is free from typical modes of thought and generic volition, there we must cease to draw upon any concepts from our own mind if we wish to understand their essence. Cognition consists in the connection of the concept with perception through thinking. With all other objects, the observer must derive concepts through intuition; in understanding a free individuality, the task is simply to take over into our mind, in a pure form (without mixing them with our own conceptual content), those concepts by which the individuality defines itself. People who immediately interpose their own concepts into every judgment of another can never attain an understanding of an individuality. Just as free individuality frees itself from the peculiarities of the genus, so must cognition free itself from the manner in which the generic is understood

[ 7 ] Only to the extent that a person has freed himself from the generic in the manner described can he be considered a free spirit within a human community. No human being is entirely species-like, nor is any entirely individual. But every human being gradually detaches a greater or lesser sphere of his being, both from the species-like nature of animal life and from the imperatives of human authorities that dominate him.

[ 8 ] However, in the areas where human beings cannot attain such freedom, they form a link within the organism of nature and spirit. In this respect, they live as they observe others doing, or as others command them to. Only that part of his actions which springs from his intuitions has ethical value in the true sense. And whatever moral instincts he possesses through the inheritance of social instincts becomes ethical by virtue of his incorporating them into his intuitions. All moral activity of humanity springs from individual ethical intuitions and their incorporation into human communities. One could also say: the moral life of humanity is the sum total of the moral products of the imagination of free human individuals. This is the result of monism.