It is easy to feel powerless in the face of much of what happens in life, such as all the recent human and natural disasters.
Are we really powerless against what confronts us in life? Steiner asks this question in Lecture 3 of Man as a Being of Sense and Perception. He says life is a battle against natural necessity. Man is free in the life of ideas (which we have access to through the death forces working in us). He states that human becoming counteracts natural causality. What we make with our freedom, what we create with our ideas, expresses our power in the world. It is because of natural causality that we are free. With our freedom, we have the power to create a moral world.
Here’s a snippet from the end of the lecture:
But whence comes the impotence which results in such a tragic attitude to life! It comes from the fact that civilised humanity has for centuries allowed itself to become entangled in certain abstractions, in intellectualism. The most this intellectualism can say is that natural necessity deludes us by strange methods with a feeling of freedom, but that there is no freedom. It exists only in our ideas. We are powerless in the face of necessity. Then comes the important question ? is that truest? And now you see that the lectures I have been giving for weeks actually all lead up to the question: “Are we really powerless? Are we really so impotent in the face of this contradiction?” Remember how I said that we have in our lives not only an ascending development, but a declining one; that our intellectual life is not bound up with the forces of growth, but with the forces of death, the forces of decay; that in order to develop intelligence we need to die. You will remember how I showed here several weeks ago the significance of the fact that certain elements with specific affinities and valencies ? carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur ? combine to form protein. They do so not by ordinary chemical combination, but on the, contrary by becoming utterly chaotic. You will then see that all these studies are leading up to this ? to make it clear to you that what I have told you is not just a theoretical contradiction, but an actual process in human nature. We are not here merely in order, through living, to sense this contradiction, but our inner life is a continual process of destruction of what develops as causality in outer nature. We men really dissolve natural causality within ourselves. What outside is physical process, chemical process, is developed within us in a reverse direction, towards the other side. Of course we shall see this clearly only if we take into consideration the upper and the lower man, if we grasp by means of the upper man what emerges from metabolism by way of contra-mechanisation, contra-physicalisation, contra-chemicalisation. If we try to grasp the contra-materialisation in the human being, then we do not have merely a logical, theoretical contradiction in ourselves, but we have the real process ? we have the process of human development, of human becoming, as the thing in us that itself counteracts natural causality, and human life as consisting in a battle against it. And the expression of this struggle, which goes on all the while to dissolve the physical synthesis, the chemical synthesis, to analyse it again? The expression of this analytic life in us is summed up in the awareness: “I am free.” What I have just put before you in a few words ? the study of the human process of becoming as a process of combat against natural causality, as a reversal of natural causality ? we shall make the subject of forthcoming lectures.
–Rudolf Steiner, Man as a Being of Sense and Perception
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