Steiner's principle that great tasks belong to the age, not the person: world events call forward whichever individuality is karmically fitted to carry them out.
World Events Summon Their Individuals in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's principle that the course of world history is one thing and the share any single person takes in it is another: a deed that evolution requires will call forward whichever individuality is karmically fitted to accomplish it. Steiner states the principle in The Karma of Vocation (GA 172), the Dornach lecture cycle of November 1916, and proves it with two test cases. America would have been discovered even if Columbus had never sailed, because modern humanity required the discovery; and Faust was a demand of its age, already attempted by Lessing, not a private product of Goethe's brain. The principle corrects biographical causality, the habit of explaining historic deeds by personal talent alone, and it gives vocation a karmic reading that anthroposophical biography workers still apply when they ask what task an era was asking of a life.
World Events Summon Their Individuals names the correction Steiner made to the great-man reading of history. The deed comes first: evolution requires a discovery, a poem, a founding, and the requirement then calls the person whose karma has prepared them for it. Far from diminishing the individual, the principle places them: vocation becomes the meeting point between personal karma and what the age demands.
In Steiner's Own Words
You will admit, it is well-nigh self-evident that America would still have been discovered even if Columbus had had a defect in his brain! And so you cannot doubt that the course of the World's events is one thing and the share of the individual human being in these events is quite another; nor can you doubt that the World-events themselves summon those human individuals whose karma specially adapts them to carry out what the World-events require. In the case of America it can very easily be seen; but to one who looks more deeply the case is just the same with the origin of Faust.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern relative of Steiner's principle sits in the sociology of science. In 1961 Robert K. Merton published Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery, a paper in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society arguing that the multiple, the same discovery made independently by different researchers, is the normal pattern in science, and the lone singleton the exception. Newton and Leibniz reached the calculus separately. Darwin and Wallace arrived at natural selection along independent paths. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed telephone papers at the patent office on the same day in February 1876. Merton read this as evidence that a discovery ripens in the accumulating cultural base until somebody brings it through, and if not that somebody, then another. This is Steiner's Columbus argument in statistical dress: America would have been discovered regardless, so the discovery cannot be explained by the biography of the discoverer. Thalira synthesis: Merton stops at the ripeness of the problem, while Steiner asks who has been ripened for it, reading the match between task and person as karma, so that a vocation is not a career chosen from inside a life but a summons answered from within the necessities of an age.
For biography work this reverses the usual question. Instead of asking only what a person wanted, the practitioner asks what the time wanted of the person: which unfinished demand of the age their preparation happened to fit. Steiner's Goethe lectures model the method, tracing Faust to the requirement Lessing had already felt.
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