Chapter Summary Of The Philosophy Of Freedom
Eric Cunningham
Chapter 11 World Purpose and Life Purpose (The Vocation of Man)
In this short, but interesting chapter Steiner discusses the issue of purpose and purposefulness. First, he destabilizes the idea of purpose as a matter of causality, arguing against the commonly held supposition that the purpose of outcome "X" is the thing that determines "X." He will argue, rather, that the outcome "X" (at least in human action) is the thing that determines that which appears to be the purpose.
In the realm of nature, no "purpose" exists, says Steiner, adding that only in the realm of human action do we find anything like purpose. Thus, the blossom of a flowering plant is not the purpose of the root--the flower is governed by the laws (not purposes) of nature. But, a concept formed by a human being indicating the texture of a potential future reality (not yet achieved) is the something, indeed the only thing that we can call purpose.
Based on the earlier section on Monism, we can quickly conclude that Steiner would see this human purpose as springing from the inner freedom of the person, and not imposed by any external power.
"My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders (174)."
Steiner then goes on to "bash" the poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling (1830-89) who argued that the great purpose and plan of nature is revealed in nature's laws. What Hamerling called "purpose," says Steiner, is merely a series of perceptions about nature "harmonized" into a whole by an observer of nature. The perceptions of the phenomena of nature have nothing to do with purposes, Steiner maintains, instead saying that the objects of nature are but "lawfully formed." There is no thing "out there" giving purpose to the objects of nature--they are merely doing what they are, in a sense, programmed to do.
Human actions are different, because their "causes" are the concepts of "effects," and, as suggested earlier, the purposefulness of human life can be seen as anti-causal.
"For monism," Steiner writes, "with the falling away of the absolute world being who cannot be experienced but is only hypothetically inferred, there also falls away any reason for ascribing purposes to the world and to nature (177)."
So what does this mean? Is Steiner arguing that we live in an orderless universe?" No--nature may be "purposeless" but it is not "orderless," and nature is not the absolute. In the addendum to this chapter, Steiner cautions (or reassures) his readers that the search for external purpose is yet another example of naive realism looking for a transcendent, non-real thing acting behind the material world. What really exists "out there" is far more complex than the transcendent thing our dualistic minds attempts to imagine, and it operates at a level even higher than human purposefulness.
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