The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On the Guiding Principles of the Previous Section (On the pictorial nature of human beings)

[ 1 ] It is very important that anthroposophy helps us understand how the mental images that humans gain from observing the external natural world must stop short of considering the human being. The way of thinking that has entered the human mind through the spiritual development of the last 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. We 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 aspects. But none of this captures what is revealed in the picture. In this revelation, which is present in the picture, there are completely different laws at work than those that can be derived from the aspects mentioned above.

[ 3 ] It is now important to realize that something is also revealed in the human being that cannot be grasped from the points of view from which the laws of external nature are derived. Once this mental image 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 the senses can perceive directly.

[ 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 spirit. And so it is when we consider the human being. If one grasps this in the right way with the laws of nature, one does not feel close to the real human being in the mental image of these laws of nature, but only to that through which the real human being reveals itself.

[ 5 ] One must experience in the mind that one stands before human beings with the laws of nature 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 as one is from a picture that one does not see 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 images 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 we can come closest to the laws of nature. Just consider the wonderful structure of the human eye. One can approximately grasp this structure through the laws of nature. And it is similar with the other sense organs, even if the matter is not as obvious as with the eye. This is because the sensory organs show a certain degree of isolation in their formation. They are integrated into the organism as finished formations, 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 creation of the picture. The picture is not yet there, but it is increasingly there. In this observation, one is 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 coming into being, building up. A becoming picture reveals itself in the rhythmic system.

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

[ 12 ] The situation is different when we consider the metabolic and motor 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 metabolic and limb systems, one must develop a perception that has no more to do with what the senses perceive than the sight of paint pots, an empty canvas, and a painter has to do 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 from the metabolism and its movements is like experiencing the picture that is later painted when looking at the painter, the empty canvas, and the paint pots. In order to understand the metabolic and limb systems, intuition must prevail in the soul.

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

[ 14 ] The path of contemplation described here will lead to the following guiding principles.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 15 ] 38. We have shown how man is to be regarded in his picture-nature and in the spirituality which thereby reveals itself. Once this perception is attained, then, in the spiritual world where we see man living and moving as a Spirit-being, we are also on the point of seeing the reality of the moral laws of the soul. For the moral world-order is then revealed as the earthly image of an order belonging to the spiritual world. The physical world-order and the moral are welded together now, in undivided unity.

[ 16 ] 39. From out of man, there works the human Will. This Will confronts the ‘Laws of Nature’ which we derive from the external world, as something altogether foreign to their essence. The nature of the sense-organs can still be scientifically understood by virtue of their likeness to the objects of external Nature. In the activity of these organs, the Will, however, is not yet able to unfold itself. The nature that manifests itself in the human rhythmic system is already far less like any external thing. Into this system the Will can already work to some extent. But the rhythmic system is in constant process of coming-into-being and passing-away, and in these processes the Will is not yet free.

[ 17 ] 40. In the system of metabolism and the limbs we have a nature which manifests itself in material substances and in the processes they undergo; yet are the substances and processes in reality no nearer to this nature than are the artist and his materials to the finished picture. Here, therefore, the Will is able to enter in and work directly. Behind the human Organisation living in ‘Natural Laws,’ we must grasp that inner human nature which lives and moves and has its being in the Spiritual. Here is the realm in which we can become aware of the real working of the Will. For the realm of sense, the human Will remains a mere word, empty of all content, and the scientist or thinker who claims to take hold of it within this realm, leaves the real nature of the Will behind him and replaces it in theory by something else.