To what extent can anthroposophy be identified with humane values? The ethical individualism on which anthroposophy is based does not endorse external moral norms, and yet it leads to the very core of human dignity. Nicolas Criblez examines the origin of moral values in the light of an anthroposophical philosophy of freedom, using the concepts coined by Rudolf Steiner in his philosophical works.
Rudolf Steiner’s social thought is predicated on his notion of ethical individualism and freedom. However, he is often interpreted as a thinker of prescriptive ethics—someone who advocates for specific moral systems. This obscures Steiner’s thought, which, at its core, emphasizes individual autonomy. This article is an attempt to characterise this radical individualism and show that Steiner’s ethical thought is not prescriptive. By making explicit something that remains implicit in his formulation of individualism—what I call the negativity of the I—my hope is that Steiner’s ethical individualism can be seen more clearly as essential to his social thought.
Negative Identity
Minimally stated, the I is the activity of negating any positively given determination of identity. By “determination” I mean any characteristic used to define human identity, such as ethnicity, gender, nationality, social class, sexual orientation, ancestry, family, religious creed, or even personal biography. Self-consciousness constitutes itself by negating all determinations alien to it—and everything is alien to it. No determination is intrinsic to the self; they are all external from the perspective of true self-consciousness. While some may be necessary material conditions for being human, they must be shed insofar as we say “I”. In this act, self-consciousness emerges as the awareness of its independence from determinations, affirming its identity precisely by asserting its difference from them. In this sense, the I is an activity of negation.
The I is not an entity about which we can properly predicate anything. A table, a tree, or any other object or psychological state can be defined and spoken about in substantial terms. The I, by contrast, eludes such predication. We can make statements such as “John is Swiss”, or “Martha is a female homo sapiens sapiens born in 1981”. Yet these statements do not address the I of such individuals—they describe determinations. The I does not exist as a thing. Propositional language—perhaps it is different in poetic or imaginative language—reveals this limitation: every predicate we attempt to ascribe to the I ultimately fails to capture its essence. Yet, we can affirm that the I exists, for it is the negative activity that constitutes self-consciousness and it posits itself through action.
Someone might say “I” while effectively meaning something else. Consider contemporary ideologies which, in their attempt to challenge societal conventions perceived as oppressive or to subvert cultural prejudices, reduce individual identity to general determinations. This is particularly evident in activist movements focused on sexual orientation, gender, and race, which paradoxically obscure the very individuality of those they seek to empower. In such views, individuals are predominantly defined and judged by their determinations. It is not “I am I” but rather, “I am [insert race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.]”; thus, personal identity claims take the form: “I am not-I”. But any claim of this type misinterprets the nature of the I. True self-consciousness expresses itself minimally as “I am not not-I”—I am not defined by my race, gender, nationality, or any other determination. My identity cannot be reduced to these determinations; rather, it is rooted in the freedom of the self to transcend and act beyond them.
It is clear to me that, for Steiner, the active negation of external identity is crucial to understand freedom, even if he does not express it in these terms. Max Stirner—the 19th century philosopher of “egoism”, who was influential on Steiner’s early philosophical thinking—overtly expressed the negativity of the I:
If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my ’emptiness’. I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing [schöpferische Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.1
The I as Autonomy
The I is not only a negative relation to determinations; it is also the ground of creative self-determination. Only in the free action does the I posit itself and become something positive while it acts. Such an action arises not from adherence to heteronomous norms or virtues, but from motives that are autonomous. (By heteronomous, I mean an action determined from without the I, and by autonomous, from the I.) The heteronomy of the will often masquerades as virtuousness, concealing the I’s true nature, which is why one often believes one is acting freely even when the action is heteronomous, and hence unfree. Good intentions pave the way to hell. Ethical principles or values we recognize in a truly free action are emergent properties of the I’s creative activity, not results of preordained ethical principles.
Virtues, in so far as they are to be found in autonomous actions, do not preexist as fixed ideals to be adhered to; they manifest out of the creative activity of the I and are conceptualized after the fact. Only then can they be used as practical principles, thus becoming motives of heteronomous actions. It is true that there is no external way of distinguishing between autonomous and heteronomous actions beyond very obvious cases. Nevertheless, one might recognize in an autonomous action something akin to justice, courage, or honesty. Such cases show that virtues are emergent concepts of human actions in the mind of the beholder, not determining ideas that shape or precede the action itself. Thus, virtues are phenomenologically emergent properties of human free action, not sets of practical principles the individual should apply.
Moral Intuitions and Love of the Action
Why does Steiner speak of “moral” intuitions? The term is misleading and superfluous. It might be taken to refer to intuitions whose content is moral as opposed to those that have no moral content. If “morality” were based on content, like generosity, responsibility for the environment and/or others, compassion, honesty, etc., then any action sharing that content, no matter its driving force, would have to be considered moral. But heteronomous actions cannot by their very nature be moral. A moral act can only be an act that springs from within, from the I—an autonomous and original act. The morality of an intuition doesn’t reside in its content but in its autonomous origin: it arises from the individual’s insight about the world.
Adding “moral” to “intuition” does not contribute anything essential to understanding free action. “Moral” simply refers to an intuition that the individual freely acts upon. Similarly, “ethical” individualism is just individualism, rightly understood.
Steiner does emphasize that it is not only intuitions that give rise to a free action but love of the action as well. What does he mean?:
Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act. I act, at this level of morality, not because I acknowledge a lord over me, or an external authority, or a so-called inner voice; I acknowledge no external principle of my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, namely my love of the action. I do not work out mentally whether my action is good or bad; I carry it out because I love it.2
Steiner means what he says literally. For the free individual nothing can legitimately justify an action other than the love the I has for it, and conversely, only freely conceived actions can be loved by the I. The nuance lies in knowing the difference between (a) a genuine inclination to act out a certain intuition, and (b) a desire to act according to a representation or concept that gives me a positive emotion. According to Steiner, we are free only when we act in accordance with (a). Here, our intuitions—our direct intellectual insight into the world—and our love for our intended action—a genuine inclination to carry it out—are the motive and driving force of the action. It is crucial to not confuse this with (b), where concepts and representations are mistaken for actual intuitions, and any positive emotion attached to them is conflated with love of the action.
Individualism and Human Dignity
Conceiving the I and freedom in this way requires looking into an “abyss”—a state where there are no rules or guarantees, and no given sense of moral dignity or meaning. One must first say to oneself that one is nothing at all. This is a daunting prospect for the feeling soul, as it requires letting go of the security offered by moral and ideological systems, as well as the sense of dignity—or lack thereof—one can derive from belonging to a particularly determined identity. The soul is not likely to gravitate to the ice-cold nihilism of the self-conscious I by inertia. Rather, it will gravitate towards whatever gives it a sense of dignified existence, often acting as a parasite on hierarchies of socially perceived moral value.
It is precisely the radical negativity of the I and its autonomy that constitute the true source of human dignity. Being an individualist, therefore, means to be someone who understands where human dignity is found. The I is the creative nothingness that dignifies man. Only the individual can transcend the material (natural, social, psychological, etc.) causality that would otherwise reign supreme over all human life. Human dignity cannot issue from species membership because it is abstract and impersonal. Neither can it come from belonging to a particular group, predicated on the exclusion of other human beings. Human dignity must be universal. Universal human dignity lies exclusively in the potential of the I to posit itself, and therefore it is always future-oriented. You have human dignity not because of who you are in terms of your general determinations, but because at every moment you can create something ex nihilo. Human dignity displays itself in history but backwards, from the future toward the past.
Creative Nihilism
The most salient feature of contemporary spiritual life is arguably nihilism, by which I mean, the erosion of meaning in a world stripped of transcendent grounding. This nihilism can be found in two opposite reactions. On the one hand, there is relativism, where people find nothing fundamental in human life, neither spiritually, politically, socially, or scientifically—a form of cultural self-destruction. On the other hand, there is a conservative tendency that attempts to recover a past where cultural values were firmly rooted in religious faith, and life was imbued with purpose through a transcendent spiritual grounding. Both have one thing in common, namely, they conceive nihilism as the erosion of values in cultural life. In this sense, nihilism remains peripheral to the individual, who is conceived as a helpless token barely afloat as it is dragged hither and thither by the forces of culture. Nietzsche famously declared: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”3 This deed cannot be undone; attempts to recover traditional structures often amount to clinging to a corpse, while relativism flounders in a sea of meaninglessness in which the I is only illusion. Both responses fail to grapple successfully with the implications of the age we inhabit. The question we face is not whether to undo the death of God, but how to confront the consequences of the murder. Will we despair at the sight of blood on our hands? Or will we become the source of new meaning?
Nihilism finds its home in the very heart of human consciousness. The self is a negative activity, not an illusion. Accepting this is true nihilism, not the despair of relativistic postmodernity nor the justification for the reactionary anachronism of clinging to lost certainties, but a creative nihilism that recognizes the nothingness of the self as the foundation of freedom and the true source of human spirituality.
Can individualism thus conceived be the ground for a healthy society? Is it possible for individuals to desire outcomes fundamentally incompatible with one another? Does not individualism lead inexorably to relativism? For Steiner, this is not the case. Individuals who are free cannot fundamentally clash with one another, for their intuitions are insights into the same world.
Freedom, Virtues, and the Social Question
The emergent nature of virtues mentioned above connects directly to the broader implications of Steiner’s thought. Just as virtues emerge from the free activity of the I, healthy social and economic processes emerge from a society grounded in free individuals.
A society that fosters true freedom will naturally generate healthy social structures. The properties of a healthy social organism are analogous to human virtues in that they are emergent. Both are outcomes of autonomy, not of imposed principles, however desirable they might seem. This understanding challenges any attempt to conflate Steiner’s thought with, for example, social-democracy, which relies on collective moral ideals enforced by governments in economic and cultural spheres.
Social-democracy, by institutionalizing virtues or values, undermines the individual freedom Steiner saw as essential to cultural and spiritual life. Government-led efforts to define cultural norms or economic ethics often reduce individual autonomy to compliance with collective ideals. Steiner’s notion of freedom precludes such political interference. Culture cannot be shaped through imposed values, however well-intentioned, without compromising the spontaneous emergence of virtues that only free individuals can create. In this light, anyone who understands and agrees with Steiner’s notion of freedom cannot consistently align with social democracy’s principles.
It should go without saying that Steiner’s social ideas are fundamentally incompatible not only with social-democracy but also with socialism, nationalism, conservatism and any form of authoritarianism in general, regardless of its alleged moral grounding.
Freedom is not merely a personal ideal but a fundamental question of the individual and, by extension, of the cultural life of society. Only when individuals act autonomously out of the negativity of the I—creating meaning and virtues through truly free action—can society itself be spiritualized.
Illustration Graphics from the series Wie ein Dieb in der Nacht [Like a thief in the night] by Philipp Tok
