The soul-mood of the will: the inner tone in which a person lays hold of the world through willing, with Schopenhauer as Steiner's type-case.
Voluntarism is the soul-mood in which the will, rather than thought or perception, becomes the key a person turns on the world. In Human and Cosmic Thought Steiner lists it among seven moods that colour how any standpoint is held, and he names Schopenhauer the clearest case: a soul for whom the hardness of a stone and the forces of nature are, at root, will. The mood is a temperament of cognition, not a doctrine about matter.
Voluntarism in Anthroposophy is one of the seven soul-moods Rudolf Steiner set out in Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151, Berlin, 1914): the will-tone in which a person can hold any of the twelve world-outlooks. A voluntarist soul grasps reality first through willing rather than through thinking or sense. Steiner reads Schopenhauer as the type-case, the thinker for whom the forces of nature, the hardness of a stone, and the whole of existence are at bottom will. As a mood it differs from Logism, the tone of pure thought, and from Mysticism, the will-less inward search; Steiner gives it the planetary signature of Mars. Its modern application is a key to reading why two honest minds, looking at one world, build philosophies of will, idea, or appearance.
In Steiner's Own Words
There is a third mood of the soul, expressed in world-outlooks; we can study this in Schopenhauer, for example. Whereas the soul of Hegel when he looked out upon the world was so attuned that with him everything conceptual takes the form of Logicism, Schopenhauer lays hold of everything in the soul that pertains to the character of will. The forces of nature, the hardness of a stone, have this character for him; the whole of reality is a manifestation of will. This arises from the particular disposition of his soul. This outlook can once more be regarded as a planet which passes through all twelve zodiacal signs. I will call this world-outlook, Voluntarism.
What it Means Today
Read Schopenhauer with Steiner's distinction in hand and his system reorganises itself. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer argues that the thing behind every appearance, the inner side of body, stone and star alike, is a single blind striving he names Will. Steiner does not contest the system so much as locate its origin: this is what the world looks like to a soul tuned to the will-tone. The voluntarist does not reason his way to Will and then adopt it; he begins inside willing, and reality answers him in that key. That is why, for him, a falling weight feels more truthful than a syllogism.
The same lens sorts the thinkers around Schopenhauer. Steiner points to the Austrian poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling, whose Atomistics of the Will (Atomistik des Willens, 1891) scatters the one Will into countless will-beings, a voluntarism crossed with the constellation of monadism. Hold this beside Logism, the tone Steiner reads in Hegel, where the world arrives first as concept and thought feels like the realest thing there is, and the contrast is exact: same world, opposite organ. The practical use is a kind of philosophical hearing. When a modern writer insists that drive, desire or raw agency is the bedrock of mind, the question stops being "is this true?" and becomes "from which soul-mood is this being said?" Steiner's wager is that no single mood reaches the whole, and that the peace among worldviews begins when a reader can move, deliberately, from the will-tone of Mars into the thought-tone, the mystic's quiet, and back.
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