The genuinely new soul-content the human I creates from no prior cause, Steiner's third world-process beside evolution and involution.
Creation out of Nothingness in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the genuinely new soul-content the human I brings into the cosmos, the third world-process he sets beside evolution and involution. He states it in The Being of Man and His Future Evolution (GA 107), in the Berlin lecture of 17 June 1909. On Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon man received his physical, etheric and astral bodies as gifts from the gods; on Earth the I begins to make what no preceding cause produced. Every free experience, the joy or judgment a soul forms by relating circumstances the gods never linked, is added to the being and carried toward Future Venus, where the inherited vehicles are cast off and only self-made content remains. Unlike a plant, which merely repeats itself through involution and evolution, the human being raises each life to a higher rung. It answers cosmologies that reduce becoming to the mere recombination of what already exists.
Creation out of Nothingness is Steiner's term for the genuinely new the human I adds to the world, content produced by no earlier cause. A plant only repeats itself through involution and evolution. Man alone, on Earth, forms free experiences from the relationships his soul makes between things, and so raises each life to a higher level rather than repeating the last.
In Steiner's Own Words
During the Saturn period man received the rudiments of his physical body, on the Sun his etheric body, on the Moon his astral body and on the Earth his ego, and he has been gradually developing these principles. But within the ego he is increasingly bringing experiences of a new kind into being and stripping off what he inherited, what he was given on Saturn, Sun and Moon. [...] And at the end of his evolution he will bear within him only what he has gained through his own efforts, not what he was given, but what he has created out of nothingness. Here you have the third thing in addition to evolution and involution: creation out of nothingness.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim cuts against any cosmology that treats becoming as the reshuffling of fixed material. In The Being of Man and His Future Evolution he insists that the human I contributes something the universe did not already contain. The closest modern parallel comes from political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958) named this capacity natality. For Arendt, each human birth carries the power to begin, to start something whose outcome no prior chain of causes determines. Action, she wrote, is the exclusive prerogative of the human being, neither beast nor god is capable of it, and the faculty of action is ontologically rooted in the fact of birth. Steiner reached the same threshold from the side of spiritual science: the animal lives out an inherited nature, while man alone, from the twenty-first year when the I works free, adds experiences that answer to no preceding cause.
Thalira synthesis: read together, Arendt's natality and Steiner's creation out of nothingness describe one event from two windows, the moment a free deed enters the world owing nothing to its past, except that Steiner extends the human capacity Arendt locates in the public realm into the long arc from Earth to Future Venus, where what the I has made from nothing is all that finally remains. A reader can test the idea in the small case Steiner gives: the plain joy of seeing two people stand well together, a feeling caused by nothing in their histories, arising only from the relation the watching soul itself draws.
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