Our physical body [Körper] resembles everything visible and formed. When viewed as a body of functions and processes [Leib], it emerges as a living whole. Anthroposophy can be understood as this kind of body, a body of spirit for the ‘I’. A meditation between Easter and Pentecost.
The physical body [Körper] refers to the material form of a human being. The Latin root corpus denotes a corpse, as well as things like a piece of furniture or a musical instrument, but also the Crucified One. It thus refers to the formed, the dead. The German language distinguishes between Körper and Leib. The word Leib comes from Leben, life. Formed matter is transitory. The formative force of life has a spiritual nature. Life is mirrored in the sensory, where it endlessly develops and transforms itself. Thus, there is a distinction between the sense-perceptible appearance of the physical body [Körper] and the inner, hidden life. In the material of a table, one single possibility is made manifest on behalf of the deeper, underlying reality. The real is the spiritual. The ideal concept of a table contains all possible individual tables. We human beings hold both in our consciousness as distinct entities: the individual sensory appearance and the suprasensible, all-encompassing origin. The sensory and bodily nature satisfies but does not solve the riddle of who we are as an ‘I’, and why we are as we are and not as we would like to be. For the sake of freedom, something remains in the dark for the time being.
For this reason, the method of knowledge in anthroposophy is entirely oriented toward the essence and becoming of life within the embodied form of human beings and the Earth. In Rudolf Steiner’s work, anthroposophy itself takes on visible embodiment. Through anthroposophy, we are given the possibility to fill our knowledge of self and world with life. What is unique to anthroposophy can be understood both individually and universally. It is comparable to the rhythmic relationship between the air we each breathe in and the atmosphere of the Earth, available to all. The need for individual inner activity contradicts the dogma of an alienating separation between subject and object. From the outside, however, anthroposophy may be misunderstood as a whimsical and tedious body of doctrine or as something merely for the head that denies the bodily aspects of existence.
A one-sided view that focuses primarily on external functions fragments the world—humanity is lost. As a counterpole to this, “Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that would guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe. It arises in the human being as a need of the heart and of the life of feeling.”1
First Love
Anthroposophy was made visible in the world through Steiner’s work. In its spirit, human action brings the inner and outer worlds into a healthy balance with one another. Its being as a whole can be regarded as a first love uniting ‘I’ and “You.” Steiner developed the ability to bear witness to this spiritual being in our time. His Philosophy of Freedom is like a light shining through the limiting worldview of modernity. An organic understanding of the world emerges when we know how the processes of perception and life within our very own thinking originate from one and the same source as world processes. The human, active ‘I’ and the world are not arbitrary fragments; they form an organic unity. The same forces awaken in the thinking human being that are also active in world processes. They act as forces of resurrection, participating in the formation of distinct and unified wholes of all living things in the world. These forces seek to correspond with one another in a healthy way.
In the context of humanity’s history of consciousness and culture, anthroposophy is relatively young. It exists precisely for the sake of our present time and has already continued to evolve in the short one hundred years since its birth. People on every continent and in many countries know its strength. Steiner’s works have been translated into 34 languages to date. Its spiritual-scientific method, founded upon a unique anthropology, aims at practical application in the spheres of life and work wherever there is need and wherever people require it for their ongoing development. Through the engagement of many people in all these spheres of life, an astonishing diversity, a mutually enriching vitality, and an ideal substance have become possible. The spiritual essence of anthroposophy takes on different forms in people’s lives through their practice because all human beings are spiritual and ‘I’-endowed beings, each with distinct cultural imprints. In this way, anthroposophy becomes visible and develops in the world. The microcosm and the macrocosm are an interdependent, mutually related whole. Individual human beings, united freely and invisibly, shape humanity as a whole, creating the manifold and multicolored ‘I’ of humanity. Steiner formulates this vision of the future in the aforementioned freedom philosophy: “To live in the love for the deed and to let live in an understanding of the foreign will is the fundamental maxim of the free human being.”2
Anthroposophy is still growing. It continues to develop through people actively learning from one another, and it is brought to life in practical terms. The challenges loom large in face of cold-hearted worldviews. An inward fire and a striving for knowledge are necessary to turn creative thinking, understanding feeling, and formative will toward the world’s needs with wakefulness and warm-heartedness. Unlike animals, who basically already possess all they need within themselves, human beings are unfinished. And yet every nut, within its hard shell, already contains the life to become a beautiful tree.
In Process of Becoming . . .
Anthroposophy lives in statu nascendi [a state of being born]. It develops freely and continuously through a loving and human “awakening to the soul and spirit of the other human being.”3 In the other, I awaken and bear witness to what is—and to what I, myself, am. There is no otherworldly outside. I live in the world and I am the one who perceives, observes, harbors doubts, judges or accepts, and loves what is. I am, I live, and I become through allowing myself to be touched by the other, who also wants to live. The ‘I’ and my active thinking live from the same forces as all that lives in the world. That which enlivens the effective world of things is the formative ether, is the all-life-bearing Risen One. The processual living force, set in motion in thinking, must be sought out and practiced by human beings through willed remembrance. “The spiritual is the eternal nourishment of the human being.”4 Without this, the human dies.
. . . The Spirit Lives In the ‘I’
Thus, anthroposophy is not a closed structure, not a dead body, but is construed so as to foster an ever-renewing, living comprehension of that which is. This requires the individual determination of an ‘I’ and the practice of “love for the deed.” When this is good, human beings come together freely, breathing as individuals, hearing what is indispensably special in the other, yet also holding fast to the belief in the spiritual “I am” connected to the Earth and humanity. For me, this rhythm between the ‘I’ and the other is what stands behind anthroposophy. As Friedrich Schelling once wrote, “We all have a secret and wondrous capacity of withdrawing from temporal change into our innermost self, which we divest of every exterior accretion. There, in the form of immutability, we intuit the eternal in us. This intuition is the innermost and, in the strictest sense, our own experience, upon which depends everything we know and believe of a supersensuous world [. . .]. In this moment of intuition, time and duration vanish for us; it is not we who are in time, but time is in us; in fact, it is not time but rather pure absolute eternity that is in ourselves.”5
The separation of knowledge and belief has made it possible to develop knowledge about how things work, down to the smallest details. Since then, belief and knowledge have gone their separate ways. Knowledge of bodiliness has increasingly relegated the living process of perception and its processing in thought to the realm of “irrelevant” subjectivity. Belief, as the former of con-science [Lat. con- + scio, “with knowing”], is part of being human and requires persistent inner examination. However, when we forget the origin of our ‘I’ activity, which is present also in our own perception and thinking, then we are no longer aware of our own sensing and perceiving activity within the very process of thinking itself. The first awakening to oneself occurs through the sensory world of objects. “The second awakening,” as Steiner describes ”. . . is the awakening to the spirit and soul of other human beings.”6
As a postscript: On September 24, 1919, in the midst of the chaos following World War I, Steiner gave a public lecture wherein he spoke about the inner fire that education at the newly founded Waldorf School was intended to cultivate. Steiner did not initiate the school himself; it was the workers who longed for a different kind of education for their children and future generations. They knew very well that actions are prepared in thought. At the end of his lecture, Steiner included a verse, which includes the word “progress.” The German is quoted from the lecture’s first publication in 1936 in the monthly journal Die Menschenschule:
“Seek the truly practical material life,
but seek it such that it does not numb you
to the Spirit working in it.
Seek the Spirit,
but seek it not in supersensible lust,
out of supersensible egotism;
seek it because you want to become selfless in practical life,
selfless in the material world.Turn to the old maxim:
Spirit never without matter, matter never without Spirit!
Do this so that you can say,
’We want to perform all material deeds in the light of the Spirit,
and we want to seek the light of the Spirit in such a way
that it develops warmth within us for our practical deeds.’Spirit brought by us to matter,
Matter wrought by us to its revelation
Driving the Spirit out;
Matter receiving from us Spirit revealed,
Spirit forged by us back into matter—
These create that Living Being,
Bringing humanity to true progress,
Progress only longed-for
By the best desires in the depths of human souls.Suchet das wirklich praktische materielle Leben,
Aber suchet es so, dass es euch nicht betäubt
über den Geist, der in ihm wirksam ist.
Suchet den Geist,
Aber suchet ihn nicht in übersinnlicher Wollust,
aus übersinnlichem Egoismus,
sondern suchet ihn,
Weil ihr ihn selbstlos im praktischen Leben,
in der materiellen Welt anwenden wollt.Wendet an den alten Grundsatz:
‹Geist ist niemals ohne Materie, Materie niemals ohne Geist› In der Art, dass ihr sagt:
Wir wollen alles Materielle im Lichte des Geistes tun,
Und wir wollen das Licht des Geistes so suchen,
Dass es uns Wärme entwickele für unser praktisches Tun.Der Geist, der von uns in die Materie geführt wird,
Die Materie, die von uns bearbeitet wird bis zu ihrer Offenbarung,
Durch die sie den Geist aus sich selber heraustreibt;
Die Materie, die von uns den Geist offenbart erhält,
Der Geist, der von uns an die Materie herangetrieben wird:
Die bilden dasjenige lebendige Sein, Welches die Menschheit zum wirklichen Fortschritt bringen kann;
Zu demjenigen Fortschritt, der von den Besten
in den tiefsten Untergründen der Gegenwartsseelen nur ersehnt werden kann.7
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image West facade of the Goetheanum, Photo: Xue Li
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Leitsätze—Leading Thoughts. Bilingual Edition, CW 26, translated by George and Mary Adams, rev. Thomas O’Keefe (Arlesheim, Switzerland: Ita Wegman Institute, 2024), p. 81, Feb. 17, 1924.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: Fundamental Features of a Modern Worldview: Results of Soul Observation According to the Natural-scientific Method, CW 4 (Tiburon, CA: Chadwick Library Press, 2020), ch. IX.
- Rudolf Steiner, Awakening to Community, CW 257 (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1974), lecture in Dornach, Mar. 3, 1923.
- Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Suprasensory Knowledge of the World and the Vocation of Man, CW 9 (Tiburon, CA: Chadwick Library Edition, 2019), ch. 1.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, “Eighth Letter,” in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794–1796), translated by Fritz Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1980), 180–181; first published in German, 1795, 2nd edn., 1809.
- See footnote 3.
- Rudolf Steiner, “Übersinnliche Erkenntnis und sozial-pädagogische Lebenskraft,” Die Menschenschule 10 (Basel: Zbinden & Hügin, 1936); Rudolf Steiner, “Supersensible Knowledge and Social Pedagogical Life,” in The Spirit of the Waldorf School, CW 297, translated by Robert F. Lathe and Nancy Parsons Whittaker (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1995), 98, lecture in Stuttgart, Sept. 24, 1919.
