Steiner's insistence that thinking works through a living organism while the will works through a mechanism: two unlike bodily instruments, two unlike disorders.
The Organism of Thinking and the Mechanism of the Will in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's deliberate pairing of two unlike words for two unlike instruments of the soul. In the lecture Manifestations of the Unconscious, given in Berlin on 21 March 1918 and collected in The Eternal in the Human Soul (GA 67), Steiner breaks his own sentence to say that he means organism of thinking and not mechanism of thinking, then turns to the will and says that here he does mean mechanism. Thinking is carried by something living, something that grows with the child and lifts itself out of digestion and metabolism, and it must be rightly constituted if hallucination and vision are to stay out of cognition. The will is carried by something assembled, something that can be suppressed or paralysed, as in catalepsy, coma, somnambulism and mediumship. Today the distinction sorts the readiness-potential literature on volition from questions about judgment.
The distinction between the organism of thinking and the mechanism of the will is one of the few places where Steiner names the word he is refusing. He refuses mechanism for thinking, because thinking is grown rather than built. He grants it to the will, because the will reaches the sense world through parts that can be switched off, and sometimes are.
In Steiner's Own Words
Just as the organism of thinking can bring about hallucinations and visions as manifestations of abnormal soul-life, so the will can be undermined when its mechanism is disturbed, quashed or paralysed in catalepsy, coma, or mediumship. True, if the spirit is not working upon it, the body is not able directly to evoke the will, but it is able, when certain organs are put out of action, when the mechanism of the will is brought to a standstill, to enfeeble the will, whereas the spiritual investigator, as I said at the beginning, can stand firmly in the spiritual world because his will works in full consciousness upon his body.
What it Means Today
The will's mechanism is the half of Steiner's pairing that modern laboratories went looking for and found. Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke, working in the neurology department at the University of Freiburg, reported in 1965 a slow negative shift in the scalp EEG that begins roughly a second before a voluntary finger movement, and named it the Bereitschaftspotential, the readiness potential. Benjamin Libet built his 1983 paper in Brain on that finding. His subjects watched a spot revolving on an oscilloscope face and reported the moment they first felt the urge to move; the readiness potential was already climbing about 350 milliseconds before that reported moment. Libet read the gap as evidence that a voluntary act is prepared before it is consciously willed, and left consciousness the veto, later nicknamed free won't.
Notice what the argument assumes: that finding a mechanism under the will settles the question of freedom. Steiner had already granted that mechanism in 1918, for quite different reasons. The will reaches the sense world through organs that can be put out of action, and somnambulism, catalepsy and mediumship are what a stalled mechanism looks like from outside. What he withheld was the parallel case for thinking, and no readiness potential has been produced for an act of judgment, because judgment has no onset to time. Thalira synthesis: the volition literature is a careful study of the mechanism Steiner conceded, read by its own authors as a study of the organism he defended.
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