The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. The Pictorial Nature of Human Beings

[ 1 ] It is very important that anthroposophy helps us understand how the ideas that human beings gain from observing external nature must stop short of observing human beings. The way of thinking that has entered the human mind through the spiritual development of recent centuries sins against this requirement. Through it, one becomes accustomed to thinking in terms of natural laws; and through these natural laws, one explains the natural phenomena that one perceives with the senses. People now look at the human organism and consider it as if its structure could be understood by applying the laws of nature to it.

[ 2 ] This is just as if one were to look at a picture created by a painter in terms of the substance of the colors, the force with which the colors adhere to the canvas, the way in which these colors can be applied to the canvas, and similar points of view. But with all this, one does not grasp what is revealed in the picture. In this revelation, which is present in the picture, there are completely different laws than those that can be derived from the aspects mentioned.

[ 3 ] It is now important to realize that something is also revealed in the human being that cannot be grasped from the aspects from which the laws of external nature are derived. Once this idea has been properly internalized, one will be able to understand the human being as an image. In this sense, a mineral is not an image. It reveals only what can be perceived directly by the senses.

[ 4 ] In the case of an image, perception is directed, as it were, through what is seen by the senses to a content that is grasped in the mind. And so it is when we contemplate the human being. If we grasp this in the right way with the laws of nature, then in imagining these laws of nature we do not feel close to the real human being, but only to that through which the real human being reveals itself.

[ 5 ] One must experience in the mind that, with the laws of nature, one stands before human beings as one would stand before a picture, if one only knew that there is blue, there is red, and one were unable, in an inner soul activity, to relate the blue and red to something that reveals itself through these colors.

[ 6 ] One must have a different feeling when one stands before a mineral with the laws of nature, and a different one when one stands before a human being. With minerals, it is as if one were directly touching what one perceives; with human beings, it is as if one were as distant from them with the laws of nature as one is from a picture that one does not look at with the eyes of the soul, but only touches.

[ 7 ] Once one has understood in the contemplation of the human being that he is an image of something, then, in the right soul mood, one will also progress to what is represented in this image.

[ 8 ] And in humans, the nature of the image is not revealed in an unambiguous way. A sense organ is, in its essence, least an image and most a kind of revelation of itself, like a mineral. It is precisely through the sense organs that one can come closest to the laws of nature. Just consider the wonderful structure of the human eye. One can approximate this structure through the laws of nature. And it is similar with the other sensory organs, even if the matter is not as obvious as with the eye. This is because the sensory organs show a certain closedness in their formation. They are integrated into the organism as finished structures, and as such they convey perceptions of the outside world.

[ 9 ] However, this is not the case with the rhythmic processes that take place in the organism. They do not present themselves as something finished. In them, the organism is constantly coming into being and passing away. If the sense organs were like the rhythmic system, human beings would perceive the outside world as being in a state of constant becoming.

[ 10 ] The sense organs present themselves like a picture hanging on the wall. The rhythmic system stands before us like the events that unfold when we observe the canvas and the painter in the process of creating the picture. The picture is not yet there, but it is increasingly there. In this observation, we are only dealing with a process of becoming. What has come into being remains in place for the time being. In the observation of the human rhythmic system, passing away, decay, immediately follows emergence, emergence. A picture in the making reveals itself in the rhythmic system.

[ 11 ] The activity that the soul performs by perceptively devoting itself to its counterpart, which is the finished picture, can be described as imagination. The experience that must unfold in order to grasp an emerging image is, in contrast, inspiration.

[ 12 ] The situation is different when we consider the metabolic and muscular systems of the human organism. It is as if we were standing in front of a completely empty canvas, the paint pots, and the artist who has not yet begun to paint. If one wants to understand the metabolism and the limb system, one must develop a perception that has no more to do with the perception of what the senses grasp than the sight of paint pots, an empty canvas, and a painter has with what later appears before our eyes as the painter's picture. And the activity in which the soul experiences the human being purely spiritually out of the metabolism and its movements is like experiencing the picture later painted when looking at the painter, the empty canvas, and the paint pots. Intuition must prevail in the soul when it comes to understanding the metabolism and limb system.

[ 13 ] It is necessary for the active members of the Anthroposophical Society to point in this way to the essence that underlies anthroposophical observation. For it is not only necessary to understand what is gained in terms of knowledge through anthroposophy, but also how one arrives at the experience of this knowledge.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 14 ] 23. Passing through the gate of death, man goes out into the spiritual world, in that he feels falling away from him all the impressions and contents of soul which he received during earthly life through the bodily senses and the brain. His consciousness then has before it in an all-embracing picture-tableau the whole content of life which, during his earthly wanderings, entered as pictureless thoughts into his memory, or which—remaining unnoticed by the earthly consciousness—nevertheless made a subconscious impression on his soul. After a very few days these pictures grow faint and fade away. When they have altogether vanished, he knows that he has laid aside his etheric body too; for in the etheric body he can recognise the bearer of these pictures.

[ 15 ] 24. Having laid aside the etheric body, man has the astral body and the Ego as the members of his being still remaining to him. The astral body, so long as it is with him, brings to his consciousness all that during earthly life was the unconscious content of the soul when at rest in sleep. This content includes the judgements instilled into the astral body by Spirit-beings of a higher World during the periods of sleep—judgements which remain concealed from earthly consciousness. Man now lives through his earthly life a second time, yet so, that the content of his soul is now the judgement of his thought and action from the standpoint of the Spirit-world. He lives it through in backward order: first the last night, then the last but one, and so on.

[ 16 ] 25. This judgement of his life, which man experiences in the astral body after passing through the gate of death, lasts as long as the sum-total of the times he spent during his earthly life in sleep.