The
Reality of Freedom
CHAPTER ELEVEN
World
Purpose and Life Purpose (The Ordering of Man's Destiny)
AMONG
the manifold currents in the spiritual life of
mankind, there is one to be followed up which can be
described as the overcoming of the concept of purpose
in spheres where it does not belong. Purposefulness is
a special kind of sequence of phenomena. True purposefulness
really exists only if, in contrast to the relationship
of cause and effect where the earlier event determines the
later, the reverse is the case and the later event influences
the earlier one. To begin with, this happens only in the case
of human actions. One performs an action of which one has
previously made a mental picture, and one allows this mental
picture to determine one's action. Thus the later (the deed)
influences the earlier (the doer) with the help of the mental
picture. For there to be a purposeful connection, this detour
through the mental picture is absolutely necessary.
In a process which breaks down into cause and effect, we
must distinguish percept from concept. The percept of the
cause precedes the percept of the effect; cause and effect
would simply remain side by side in our consciousness, if
we were not able to connect them with one another through
their corresponding concepts. The percept of the effect
must always follow upon the percept of the cause. If the
effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, it can do so
only by means of the conceptual factor. For the perceptual
factor of the effect simply does not exist prior to the perceptual
factor of the cause. Anyone who declares that the
blossom is the purpose of the root, that is, that the former
influences the latter, can do so only with regard to that
factor in the blossom which is established in it by his thinking.
The perceptual factor of the blossom is not yet in
existence at the time when the root originates.
For a purposeful connection to exist, it is not only
necessary to have an ideal, law-determined connection
between the later and the earlier, but the concept (law) of the
effect must really influence the cause, that is, by means of a
perceptible process. A perceptible influence of a concept upon
something else, however, is to be observed only in human
actions. Hence this is the only sphere in which the concept of
purpose is applicable.
The naïve consciousness, which regards as real only what
is perceptible, attempts — as we have repeatedly pointed out —
to introduce perceptible elements where only ideal elements
are to be found. In the perceptible course of events it looks
for perceptible connections, or, failing to find them, it
simply invents them. The concept of purpose, valid for
subjective actions, is an element well suited for such invented
connections. The naïve man knows how he brings an event
about and from this he concludes that nature will do it in the
same way. In the connections of nature which are purely
ideal he finds not only invisible forces but also invisible real
purposes. Man makes his tools according to his purposes;
the naïve realist would have the Creator build organisms on
the same formula. Only very gradually is this mistaken
concept of purpose disappearing from the sciences. In
philosophy, even today, it still does a good deal of mischief.
Here people still ask after the extra-mundane purpose of
the world, the extra-human ordering of man's destiny (and
consequently also his purpose), and so on.
Monism
rejects the concept of purpose in every sphere,
with the sole exception of human action. It looks for laws of
nature, but not for purposes of nature. Purposes of nature are
arbitrary assumptions no less than are imperceptible forces
(see Chapter 7).
But even purposes of life not set by man
himself are unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of
monism. Nothing is purposeful except what man has first
made so, for purposefulness arises only through the realization
of an idea. In a realistic sense, an idea can become
effective only in man. Therefore human life can only have
the purpose and the ordering of destiny that man gives it. To
the question: What is man's task in life? there can be for
monism but one answer: The task he sets himself. My
mission in the world is not predetermined, but is at every
moment the one I choose for myself. I do not set out upon
my journey through life with fixed marching orders.
Ideas are realized purposefully only by human beings.
Consequently it is not permissible to speak of the embodiment
of ideas by history. All such phrases as “history is the
evolution of mankind towards freedom,” or “... the
realization of the moral world order,” and so on, are, from a
monistic point of view, untenable.
The supporters of the concept of purpose believe that, by
surrendering it, they would also have to surrender all order
and uniformity in the world. Listen, for example, to
Robert Hamerling:
As long as there are instincts in nature, it is folly to deny
purposes therein.
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 greater whole, the
body to which the limb belongs, so the formation of every
natural object, be it plant, animal or man, is not determined
and conditioned by an idea of it floating in the air, but by the
formative principle of the totality of nature which unfolds and
organizes itself in a purposeful manner.
(see fn 1)
And on page 191 of the same volume we read:
The theory of purpose maintains only that, in spite of the
thousand discomforts and distresses of this mortal life, there
is a high degree of purpose and plan unmistakably present in
the formations and developments of nature — a degree of plan
and purposefulness, however, which is realized only within
the limits of natural law, and which does not aim at a fool's
paradise where life faces no death, growth no decay, with all
their more or less unpleasant but quite unavoidable
intermediary stages.
When the opponents of the concept of purpose set a laboriously
collected rubbish-heap of partial or complete, imaginary or
real maladaptations against a whole world of miracles
of purposefulness, such as nature exhibits in all her domains,
then I consider this just as quaint ...
What is here meant by purposefulness? The coherence of
percepts to form a whole. But since underlying all percepts
there are laws (ideas) which we discover through our thinking,
it follows that the systematic coherence of the parts of a
perceptual whole is simply the ideal coherence of the parts of
an ideal whole contained in this perceptual whole. To say
that an animal or a man is not determined by an idea floating
in the air is a misleading way of putting it, and the point of
view he is disparaging automatically loses its absurdity as
soon as the expression is put right. An animal certainly is
not determined by an idea floating in the air, but it definitely
is determined by an idea inborn in it and constituting the
law of its being. It is just because the idea is not external to
the object, but works within it as its very essence, that we
cannot speak of purposefulness. It is just the person who
denies that natural beings are determined from without
(and it does not matter, in this context, whether it be by an
idea floating in the air or existing outside the creature in the
mind of a world creator) who must admit that such beings
are not determined by purpose and plan from without, but
by cause and law from within. I construct a machine purposefully
if I connect its parts together in a way that is not given
in nature. The purposefulness of the arrangement consists in
just this, that I embody the working principle of the machine,
as its idea, into the machine itself. The machine becomes
thereby an object of perception with the idea corresponding
to it. Natural objects are also entities of this kind. Whoever
calls a thing purposeful simply because it is formed according
to a law, may, if he wish, apply the same term to the objects
of nature. But he must not confuse this kind of lawfulness
with that of subjective human action. For purpose to exist, it
is absolutely necessary that the effective cause shall be a
concept, in fact the concept of the effect. But in nature we
can nowhere point to concepts acting as causes; the concept
invariably turns out to be nothing but the ideal link
connecting cause and effect. Causes are present in nature only
in the form of percepts.
Dualism may talk of world purposes and natural purposes.
Wherever there is a systematic linking of cause and effect for
our perception, the dualist may assume that we see only the
carbon copy of a connection in which the absolute cosmic
Being has realized its purposes. For monism, with the rejection
of an absolute cosmic Being — never experienced but
only hypothetically inferred — all ground for assuming
purposes in the world and in nature also falls away.
Author's addition, 1918
No one who has followed the preceding argument with
an open mind will be able to conclude that the author, in
rejecting the concept of purpose for extra-human facts, takes
the side of those thinkers who, by rejecting this concept,
enable themselves to regard everything outside human action
— and thence human action itself — as no more than a natural
process. He should be protected from this by the fact that in
this book the thinking process is presented as a purely
spiritual one. If here the concept of purpose is rejected even
for the spiritual world, lying outside human action, it is
because something is revealed in that world which is higher
than the kind of purpose realized in the human kingdom.
And when we say that the thought of a purposeful destiny for
the human race, modeled on human purposefulness, is
erroneous, we mean that the individual gives himself
purposes, and that the outcome of the working of mankind
as a whole is compounded of these. This outcome is then
something higher than its component parts, the purposes of
men.
Footnotes:
- Atomistik des Willens, vol ii, p. 201.
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