Steiner's account in which the past works in us as necessity while the present stays open to the free deed, so both meet in one act.
Necessity and Freedom in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's resolution of the old quarrel between determinism and free will. In the lecture cycle The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth (GA 166, Vienna, 1916), Steiner places the two in time: the past works in us as necessity, while the present remains open to the free deed. What earlier gods and earlier lives once enacted freely settles into the lawful nature we now meet as compulsion, so freedom and necessity are intermingled in one and the same act. Against this, the compelling proof that everything is determined comes from Ahriman, and the equally compelling proof of unconditioned freedom comes from Lucifer, with the human being holding the balance between them. The practical task is to add the spiritual aspect to the physical one before judging guilt, atonement, or causation.
In Steiner's Own Words
You can now say that everybody bears his past within him, and this means bearing a necessity within him. What belongs to the present does not yet work as necessity, otherwise there would be no free deed in the immediate present. But the past works into the present and combines with freedom. Because the past works on, freedom and necessity are intimately connected in one and the same deed. Thus if we really look into ourselves, we will see that necessity exists not only outside us in nature but also within ourselves. When we look at this latter kind of necessity, we have to look at our past.
What it Means Today
The same antinomy Steiner addressed in 1916 sits at the centre of academic philosophy. In An Essay on Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1983), Peter van Inwagen set out the Consequence Argument: if determinism is true, our acts follow from the laws of nature plus the distant past, and since we control neither the past nor the laws, we control nothing that follows. Van Inwagen's incompatibilism rejected the comfortable compatibilist truce that had held since David Hume, and it reopened, in formal terms, exactly the problem Steiner stated plainly: a deed seems both compelled and free. Where the Pittsburgh philosopher leaves the puzzle as a standing tension, accepting free will while granting the argument much of its force, Steiner dissolves it by splitting the deed across time rather than across logic.
Thalira synthesis: van Inwagen locates the unfreedom in the laws plus the past as a single block, but Steiner shows that the past was itself once a free deed of the gods and of earlier lives, so what the Consequence Argument treats as fixed law is congealed freedom, and the human being who adds that spiritual reading to the physical one stops being a node in a causal chain and becomes the point where the chain is daily re-begun. A reader can test this directly: trace any present compulsion back to a past choice, and watch it change from a wall into a door.
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