The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Spiritual Science and Language

[ 1 ] It is fascinating to examine the various manifestations of the human being from the perspective of spiritual science—as that term is used here. For by circling, as it were, around human life—as we have done in the course of these lectures—and viewing it from its various aspects, we can gain an overall impression of it. Today we shall discuss that universal expression of the human spirit which manifests itself in language, and next time, under the title “Laughter and Tears,” we shall examine, as it were, a variant of human expressiveness that, while connected to language, is nevertheless fundamentally different from it.

[ 2 ] When we speak of human language, we surely feel keenly how deeply the entire meaning, dignity, and very essence of the human being are connected to what we call language. Our innermost life—all our thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will—flow, as it were, outward toward our fellow human beings and connect us with them through language. In this way, we sense an infinite capacity for expansion within our being, a possibility of radiating this being into our surroundings through language. On the other hand, however, it is precisely those who are able to penetrate the inner life of a meaningful individuality who will be able to sense how human language is, in turn, a kind of tyrant—a power exerted upon our inner life. After all, if we only wish to, we can sense that what we have to say to ourselves about our feelings and thoughts—about what stirs within the soul with all its intimacy and uniqueness—can be expressed only sparsely and weakly through words and language. And we also sense how the language in which we are immersed even imposes a certain way of thinking upon us. Who, after all, is not aware of how much human thinking depends on language! Words are often the vehicles for our concepts, and at an imperfect stage of development, a person may even easily confuse the word—or what the word instills in them—with the concept itself. Hence the inability of some people to construct a conceptual world that extends beyond what is conveyed to them by the words commonly used in their environment. And we also know how the character of an entire people who speak a common language is, in a certain sense, dependent on that language. At the very least, anyone who examines national characters and linguistic characteristics more closely in their contexts must recognize how the manner in which a person is able to translate what lies within their soul into sounds, in turn, affects the strengths and weaknesses of their character, the expression of their temperament, and indeed their entire outlook on life. And the connoisseur will be able to glean much from the structure of a people’s language regarding the character of that people. But since language is shared by a people as a whole, the individual is dependent on a commonality—as it were, on an average standard—that prevails within the people. He is thereby, in a sense, subject to the tyranny, to the power, of this commonality. But when one senses that, on the one hand, our individual spiritual life and, on the other hand, the spiritual life of the collective are, so to speak, embodied in language, then what one might call the mystery of language appears to be something of particular significance. One can say that one can certainly learn a great deal about the inner life of the human being by observing the ways in which this human being expresses itself through language.

[ 3 ] The mystery of language—its origins and its evolution over time—has always been a puzzle for certain academic disciplines. But it cannot be said that these academic disciplines have been particularly successful in our time at unraveling the mystery of language. Therefore, today we shall shed some light—in an aphoristic, sketch-like manner, so to speak—on language, its development, and its connection to humanity from the perspective of the humanities, as we are accustomed to applying it to human beings and their development.

[ 4 ] That is precisely what seems so mysterious at first when we designate any object, thing, or process with a word. How does that peculiar combination of sounds—which forms the word or sentence—relate to what comes from within us and, as a word, signifies the thing? From the standpoint of external science, attempts have been made to synthesize the most diverse experiences into the widest variety of combinations. But people have also sensed the inadequacy of such an approach. The question is, after all, so simple and yet so difficult to answer: How did human beings come to produce—when confronted with something in the external world—precisely this or that particular sound from within themselves, as an echo of this or that object or event?

[ 5 ] From a certain point of view, the matter was conceived of as quite simple. For example, it was thought that language development was based on the idea of imitating, through the innate ability of our speech organs, sounds that we already hear externally—such as the sounds made by certain animals, or the sound of one object striking another—much like a child who, upon hearing a dog bark “woof-woof!”, imitates this sound and calls the dog “Woofwoof.” Such word formation could be called onomatopoeic—an imitation of sound. It has been claimed from certain perspectives that this kind of imitation underlies the original formation of sounds and words. Of course, the question remains entirely unanswered: How, then, does a person come to name those silent entities that make no sound? How does one progress from the vocal expression of an animal or a process that can be heard to one that cannot be heard? — The great linguist Max Müller, recognizing the unsatisfactory nature of such speculation, mocked this theory and called it the “woof-woof theory.” In its place, he proposed another theory, which his opponents, for their part—and here the word is used in a sense in which it should not be used—have called “mystical.” Max Müller believes, in fact, that every thing possesses, so to speak, something inherent within itself that is like sound. Everything has a sound in a certain sense—not just a glass that is dropped, not just a bell that is rung, but every single thing. And the human capacity to establish a connection between one’s soul and this sound—which, as it were, resides within the thing as its inner essence—gives rise in the soul to the possibility of expressing this inner sound essence of the thing, just as one might express the inner nature of a bell by sensing its tone as “bim-bam.” And Max Müller’s opponents returned his mockery by dubbing his theory the “Bim-bam theory.” If we were to continue listing further examples from these meticulously compiled compilations, we would see that something unsatisfactory would always remain if one were to attempt to characterize externally, in this way, that which human beings, as it were, let resound toward the essence of things like an echo of their soul. One must delve much deeper into the innermost being of the human person.

[ 6 ] From the perspective of spiritual science, human beings are, at their core, very complex beings. As we see them, they first have their physical body, which is governed by the same laws and substances that we also find in the mineral world. Then, for spiritual science, human beings have, as a second, higher aspect of their being, the etheric body or life body. Next is the aspect we call the bearer of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, of instinct, desire, and passion—the astral body, which, for spiritual science, is just as real, indeed more real, a component of human nature than that which can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands. And we have called the fourth aspect of the human being the bearer of the “I.” We have further seen that human development at the present stage consists in the human being working, from the perspective of the “I,” to transform the other three components of his being. We have also indicated that in the distant future, the human “I” will have transformed these three components to such an extent that nothing will remain of what nature—or the spiritual forces inherent in nature—have made of these three human components.

[ 7 ] The astral body—the vessel of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of all the fluctuating thoughts, feelings, and perceptions—came into being initially without our intervention, that is, without the work of our “I.” Now, however, the “I” works upon it, and it works in such a way that it refines and purifies, bringing everything—the qualities and activities of the astral body—under its control. If the “I” has worked only a little on the astral body, the human being is a slave to his or her instincts and desires; but when it refines these drives and desires into virtues, when it has ordered what is erratic, will-o’-the-wisp-like thinking along the thread of logic, then a part of the astral body has been transformed; it has become, from a product on which the ego has not yet worked, a product of the ego. When the “I” consciously accomplishes this work—a process that has only just begun in human evolution today—we call this part of the astral body, consciously transformed by the “I,” the “spirit-self,” or, using a term from Eastern philosophy, “Manas.” When the “I” works in a different, more intense way not only into the astral body but also into the etheric body, we call the part of the etheric body transformed by the “I” the “life spirit,” or, to use a term from Eastern philosophy, “Buddhi.” And when the “I” has finally become so strong—though this belongs to a distant future—that it transforms the physical body and regulates its laws, so that the “I” is present everywhere and is the ruler of what lives in the physical body, then we call this part of the physical body—which has thus come under the rule of the “I”—the “spiritual human being”; or, because this work begins with the regulation of the respiratory process, we call it, using a term from Eastern philosophy, “Atman,” which is connected with breathing.

[ 8 ] Thus, we first have the human being as a fourfold entity: consisting of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. And just as we have three aspects of our being that originate in the past, so too—through the work of the I—can we speak of three aspects of the human being that are developing into the future. And we speak of a sevenfold nature of the human being by adding the Spiritual Self, the Life Spirit, and the Spiritual Human to the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I.” But when we look at these last three aspects as something distant, something in the future of human development, we must say that, in a certain sense, human beings today are already prepared for this development. It is only in the distant future that human beings will consciously work on these three aspects—the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body—from the perspective of their “I.” Subconsciously, however—that is, without their full awareness—the “I” has already transformed these three aspects of their being through a latent activity. This transformation already exists as a result. What we mentioned in previous lectures as the inner constituents of the human being could only come into being through the ego’s work on these three constituents. From what we call the astral body, the feeling soul has fashioned a reflection, as it were, of the feeling body. While the sensory body conveys to us what we call pleasure—the sensory body and the astral body are one and the same for human beings; without the sensory body, we could not experience any pleasures—this pleasure is reflected inwardly, in the soul, as desire, and we then attribute these desires to the soul. Thus, these two things—the astral body and the transformed astral body, or the sensory soul—belong together just as pleasure and desire belong together. Likewise, the “I” has already worked on the etheric body in the past. What it accomplished there leads, within the inner, soul-level aspect of the human being, to the fact that the human being carries within themselves the intellectual soul or emotional soul, so that the intellectual soul—which is also the bearer of memory—is connected to a subconscious transformation of the etheric body initiated by the “I.” And finally, in times past, in order to make the human being in its present form possible, the “I” has also already worked on the transformation of the physical body, and what has arisen through this we call the “consciousness soul,” through which the human being gains knowledge of the things of the external world. Thus, we can also speak in this way of a sevenfold human being by saying: Through a preparatory, subconscious activity of the “I,” the three soul elements—the feeling soul, the intellectual soul, and the conscious soul—have come into being. But all of this is an unconscious or subconscious work of the “I” upon its sheaths.

[ 9 ] Now let us ask ourselves: Are not the three bodies—the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body—complex entities? — Oh, what a marvel this human physical body is! And if we examine it more closely, we would find that this physical body is much more complex than just that part which the “I” has developed into the soul of consciousness—and which we might call the physical vehicle of the soul of consciousness. Likewise, the etheric body is much more complex than what one might call the vehicle of the soul of understanding or the soul of feeling. And the astral body, too, is more complex than what we might call the vehicle of the feeling soul. These parts are downright meager compared to what was already there before the human being had an “I.” That is why, in spiritual science, we speak of the human being having developed in such a way that, in a very distant past, the first rudiment of the physical body arose—specifically, out of spiritual beings. Then the etheric body was added, later still the astral body, and finally the “I.” Thus, the human physical body has undergone four stages of development. At first, the physical body was in direct correspondence with the spiritual world; then it was shaped out and interwoven with the etheric body, thereby becoming more complex. Then it was interwoven with the astral body, which made it even more complex. Then the “I” was added. And it was precisely what the “I” did to the physical body that shaped out a part of the physical body and made it the bearer of what is called human consciousness—the ability to acquire knowledge of the external world. But this physical body has far more to do than to provide us with knowledge of the external world through our senses and our brain; it has a number of activities to perform that are the foundation of consciousness, but which take place entirely outside the realm of the brain. The same is true of the etheric body and the astral body.

[ 10 ] Now that we are clear that everything we have in the external world around us is spirit—that spirit, as we have so often emphasized, underlies all that is material, all that is etheric, and all that is astral—we must tell ourselves: Just as the “I” itself works from within as a spiritual entity—through the development of the human being in its three constitutional members—so too must—whether we call them spiritual beings or spiritual activities, it does not matter—have worked upon our physical body, etheric body, and astral body before the “I” asserted itself and continued its work within what had already been shaped. We are thus looking back to times when, so to speak, an activity of the same kind took place on our astral body, etheric body, and physical body as the activity that takes place today from the “I” outward into these three members. This means we must speak of spiritual creation and spiritual activity having worked upon that which envelops us, and having given it form, movement, shape, and everything else before the “I” was able to establish itself within it. We must speak of the fact that there are spiritual activities within the human being that precede the activity of the “I,” and that we carry within us spiritual activities which are the prerequisite for the activity of the “I” and which were present before the “I” could intervene. If we therefore set aside for a moment everything that our “I” has worked out from the three members of our being—the feeling soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul—and consider the structure, the inner movement, and the activity of these three sheaths of the human being, we must say that a spiritual activity was exerted upon us prior to the activity of the “I.”

[ 11 ] Therefore, in spiritual science, we speak of the human being as he is today as having an individual soul—a soul interwoven with an “I”—through which every human being is a self-contained individuality. And we speak of the fact that, before human beings became such self-contained “I”-beings, they were the result of a group soul, a collective soul, just as we still speak of group souls in the animal world today. There we say: What we seek in each individual human being as an individual soul, we find in animals in that which underlies an entire species or genus in the animal kingdom. An entire animal genus has a common animal group soul. What is the individual soul in human beings is the generic soul in animals.

[ 12 ] Thus, before human beings became individual souls, another soul—of which we today learn only through spiritual science—was at work within their three constitutional elements; this soul was the predecessor of our own “I.” And this predecessor of our “I”—this group or species soul of humanity, which then handed over to the “I” the three constitutional elements it had shaped—the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body—so that the “I” could continue to shape them—shaped, worked upon, and adjusted the physical body, etheric body, and astral body from within, through its soul-like nature. And the final activity underlying the human being before it was endowed with an “I”—the final influences preceding the birth of the “I”—are preserved today in what we call human language. Therefore, when we start from our life of consciousness, from our intellectual and emotional life, and from our life of feeling, and look at what constitutes its prerequisites, we arrive at a soul process that was not yet permeated by our “I,” and whose result we find preserved in what is expressed today through language.

[ 13 ] What, then, is the external basis of what we call the four members of the human being? How is this expressed purely externally in the physical body? The physical body of a plant looks different from that of a human being. Why? Because in a plant only the physical body and the etheric body are present, whereas in the human physical body the astral body and the “I” are also at work. What is at work internally also shapes and forms the physical body accordingly. What, then, has worked into our physical body by permeating it with an etheric body or life body?

[ 14 ] What we call the vascular or glandular system within us is, in both humans and animals, the outer physical expression of the etheric or life body; that is to say, the etheric body is the architect or creator of what we call the glandular or vascular system. The astral body, in turn, is the shaper of what we call the nervous system. Therefore, we are justified in speaking of a nervous system only where an astral body is present in a being. What, then, is the expression of the “I” in human beings? It is the blood system—specifically, in human beings, what we might call blood under the influence of the inner life warmth. Everything that the “I” works on in a human being, when it is to be shaped within the physical body, takes a detour through the blood. That is why blood is such a “special fluid.” When the “I” develops the feeling soul, the intellectual soul, and the conscious soul, what the “I” is able to shape and configure penetrates into the physical body only because the “I” has the ability to intervene in the physical body by working indirectly through the blood. Our blood is the mediator between the astral body and the “I,” and all their activities.

[ 15 ] Who, even upon a superficial examination of human life, would doubt that human beings, just as they work from their “I” within the soul of consciousness, the soul of understanding, and the soul of feeling, also transform and reshape their physical bodies? Who would not see in a person’s facial expression a manifestation of what is active and alive within? And who would not admit that even the inner workings of thought, when they engage the whole soul, have a transformative effect on our brain over the course of a human life? Our brain adapts to our thinking; it is a tool that shapes itself according to the needs of our thinking. But when we look at what human beings today are already capable of shaping—as it were, artistically crafting—in their own outer being from the perspective of their “I,” it is very little. There is little that we are able to accomplish through our blood by setting it in motion from what we call our inner warmth.

[ 16 ] Those spiritual beings who preceded the work of our “I” were able to accomplish even more. For they were able, so to speak, to make use of a more effective medium, and thus, under their influence, the human form developed in such a way that, on the whole, it is an expression of what these spiritual beings—working prior to the human “I”—made of the human being. In what medium, then, did these beings work? They worked in no other medium than the air. Just as we work through our inner warmth, causing our blood to pulse and thereby bringing the blood to bear within our own form, so too did the beings working on us before our ego bring the air to bear. And from the work of these beings through the air upon ourselves, something emanated that actually gave us our form as human beings.

[ 17 ] It may seem strange to speak here of spiritual activities that worked through the air to influence human beings in the distant past. I have said before: We would fail to recognize what comes to life within us as our own spiritual and soul life if we regarded it as mere concepts and did not know that it is drawn from the entire external world. Anyone who would claim that concepts and ideas arise within us even if there were no ideas outside should just as well claim that they can scoop water from a glass in which there is no water. Our concepts would be mere illusions if they were anything other than what also lives in the things outside us and what exists in those things as their laws. We draw what we allow to come to life in our soul from our surroundings. That is why we can say: Everything that surrounds us materially is interwoven and permeated by spiritual beings.

[ 18 ] As strange as it may sound: What surrounds us as air is not merely the substance that chemistry reveals to us, but spiritual beings and spiritual activities are at work within it. — And just as we are able to shape our physical body ever so slightly through the warmth of the blood emanating from our “I”—for that is the essential point here—so, in a powerful way, these beings who preceded the “I” shaped the outer form of our physical human being through the air. That is the essential point for us. We are human beings through the structure of our larynx and everything connected with it. What is formed for us from the outside as this marvelous, artistic organ of the larynx, in connection with the other instruments of voice and speech, is fashioned out of the spiritual nature of air. Goethe so beautifully said of the eye: “The eye is formed in the light for the light!” — If, in the Schopenhauerian sense, one merely emphasizes that without a light-sensitive eye, the impression of light would not exist for us—one is stating only half the truth. The other half is that we would not have an eye if light had not, as it were, sculpted the eye out of us from indeterminate organs in the distant past. We must therefore see in light not merely that abstract essence which is described today in physics as light, but rather we must seek in light that hidden essence which is capable of creating an eye for itself.

[ 19 ] In another realm, this is the same as when we speak of the air being permeated and animated by a being that was able, over a certain period of time, to imprint upon humankind the intricate organ of the larynx and everything associated with it. And the rest of the human form—down to the smallest detail—has been shaped and sculpted in such a way that, at the present stage, the human being is, as it were, a further elaboration of his speech organs. The speech organs are what, first and foremost, actually determine the form of the human being. That is why speech, in particular, elevates the human being “beyond the animal realm,” because that spiritual being we call the Spirit of the Air has indeed also shaped and worked within the animal realm, but not to the extent that this activity could have reached the point where a speech organism such as that possessed by the human being could develop. Everything—with the exception of what the “I” has unconsciously developed, for example, as the brain, and what it has perfected in the senses—everything, with the exception of what constitutes “I”-activity, is an activity preceding this “I”-activity of the human being, which was directed toward shaping the human body so that it is a further expression of this speech organ. There is no time now to explain why, for example, birds—despite their perfect song—have remained at a stage where, in their form, they cannot be an expression of that organ which we, in the broadest sense, call the vocal organ.

[ 20 ] Thus we see how the human being was already internally organized within his speech organs before he developed his present thinking, his mind, and his will—that is, everything connected with the “I.” Now we will find it understandable that these spiritual activities could only shape the physical body in such a way that human beings ultimately became, as it were, an appendage to their speech organs, as these organs built up the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body through the influences and the configuration of the air. Once human beings had thus become capable of possessing within themselves an organ corresponding to what we call the spiritual essence of air—just as the eye corresponds to the spiritual essence of light—they were able to shape within it whatever their “I” imprinted upon itself as intellect, consciousness, sensation, and mood. Thus we must look for a threefold activity in the subconscious—an activity, as it were, lying before the “I,” working for the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. We find clues to this in the knowledge that this was the group soul, and that the group soul worked on the animal in an imperfect manner.

[ 21 ] We must consider this when we examine the work of this spiritual activity in the astral body that lies before the “I.” Here we must set aside the “I” entirely, while focusing on what the group “I” has worked out, as it were, from a dark, subterranean source. In the astral body, desire and pleasure stand opposite one another on an imperfect level. And desire could thereby be, as it were, spiritualized—transformed into an inner capacity—in that it already had a precursor in the human astral body.

[ 22 ] Just as desire and pleasure are found in the astral body, so too do imagery, symbolism, and external appeal stand in opposition to one another in the etheric body. The essential point is that we understand this activity of our etheric body—which lies prior to the ego—in such a way that it is distinct from the ego’s activity within the etheric body. When our ego is active as the intellectual soul or the emotional soul, it seeks—at the present stage of human development—a truth, so to speak, that is as faithful a representation of external things as possible. That which does not correspond exactly to external things is not called true. Those spiritual activities that precede the activity of our ego do not function in this way; they operate more symbolically, more pictorially, much as a dream does. A dream, for example, works in such a way that someone dreams a shot is fired, and when they wake up, they see that the chair next to their bed has fallen over. What is an external event and an external impression—the fallen chair—is transformed in the dream into a symbol, the fired shot. This is how the spiritual beings standing before the “I” worked symbolically—just as we, in turn, work when we strive toward a higher spiritual activity through initiation, where we again attempt—but now with full consciousness—to move from the mere abstract external world into symbolism and imagery.

[ 23 ] Then these spiritual beings worked on the human physical body by making human beings what might be called a reflection of external events, external facts, and imitation. Imitation is something we find, for example, in children, when the other soul elements are still underdeveloped. Imitation is part of the subconscious nature of human beings. Therefore, we should base early education on imitation, because in human beings—before the “I” begins to bring order to their inner activities—the impulse to imitate is present as a natural instinct.

[ 24 ] What has now been discussed: the impulse to imitate in the physical body in response to external activities, the process of symbolization in the etheric body in response to external stimuli, and what we might call the correspondence between desire and pleasure in the astral body—we imagine all of this to have been shaped with the aid of air and woven into us in such a way that, as it were, a plastic, artistic impression of it has arisen in our larynx and throughout our entire vocal apparatus. Then we will be able to say to ourselves: These beings standing before the “I” worked upon the human being in such a way that, through the air, they shaped and structured the human being so that the air within the human being could find expression in these threefold directions.

[ 25 ] For when we consider the faculty of speech in the true sense of the word, we must ask: Is it the sound that we produce? — No, it is not the sound. What we do is set in motion and shape, from our “I,” that which has been formed and structured within us by the air. Just as we set the eye in motion to take in what appears externally as light, while the eye itself exists for this reception of light, so we see how, within ourselves and from the “I,” those organs are set in motion that have been formed out of the spiritual essence of air. We set the organs in motion through the “I”; we intervene in the organs that correspond to the spirit of the air, and we must wait until the spirit of the air, from which the organs are formed, resonates the sound back to us—as an echo of our activity in the air. We do not produce the sound, just as the individual parts of a pipe do not produce the sound. We generate from within ourselves that which our “I” can unfold as activity through the use of those organs that have been formed from the spirit of air. Then we must leave it to the spirit of air to set the air in motion again through that activity by which the organs were produced, so that the word resounds.

[ 26 ] We do indeed see how human language must be based on this threefold correspondence that we have described. But what is to correspond? On what, specifically, should imitation in the physical body be based? Imitation in the physical body must be based on the fact that we imitate—through the movements of our vocal organs—what we perceive as external activities and external things, that which makes an impression on us; that we produce everything we initially hear as a resounding sound by being, through the principle of the physical body, imitators of that which makes an external impression on us, just as a painter imitates a scene that consists of elements entirely different from color and canvas, light and dark. Just as the painter imitates with light and dark, so do we imitate what approaches us from the outside by setting our organs in imitative motion—those organs that have been formed from the element of air. Therefore, what we produce in sound is a true imitation of the essence of things, and our consonants and vowels are nothing other than images and imitations of what makes an impression on us from the outside.

[ 27 ] What we then have in the etheric body is a pictorial structure. What we might call symbolism is woven into the etheric body. We must therefore understand that, while the earliest elements of our language did indeed arise initially through imitation, they were subsequently developed further by, as it were, breaking away from external impressions and being further processed. There, in the realm of symbolism—as in a dream—the etheric body processes what no longer resembles external impressions, and therein lies the enduring effect of sound. At first, the etheric body processes what is mere imitation; then what is mere imitation is transformed independently within the etheric body itself, so that it thereby becomes something independent. Thus, what we have processed internally corresponds to external impressions only symbolically, allegorically. We are no longer mere imitators.

[ 28 ] And finally, there is a third factor. Desire, emotion—everything that lives within—is expressed in the astral body, and this, in turn, further shapes the tone. In other words, inner experiences radiate, as it were, from within into the tone. Pain and joy, pleasure and suffering, desire, longing—all of this radiates into the sound, and through this the subjective element enters the sound. What is mere imitation—what has been further developed into a linguistic symbol in the sound image or word image that has become independent—is now further transformed by being permeated by what the human being experiences inwardly as pain and joy, pleasure and suffering, horror and fear, and so on. There must always be an external counterpart that breaks free from the soul in the sound. But when the soul expresses inwardly what it experiences—allowing it, as it were, to resonate out in sound—it must first seek the external experience that corresponds to it. Therefore, we must say: The third element, in which pleasure and suffering, pain and joy, horror, and so on are expressed inwardly, in a soulful way, through sound, must first seek what corresponds to it. In imitation, the external impression is imitated; the inner sound image—or that which has arisen as a symbol—is a further development. But that which a person would allow to resound solely out of inner joy, pain, and so on would be nothing more than a radiating force to which nothing could correspond. What constitutes the correspondence here between external reality and inner experience—that is, what happens here—we can observe continuously in our children as they learn to speak. There we can see how the child begins to translate whatever it feels into sound. When the child first cries out “Ma” and “Pa,” this is nothing other than an inner transformation of emotion into sound. It is merely the expression of an inner state. But when this child expresses itself in this way, the mother, for example, comes over, and the child then realizes that what is expressed inwardly as joy—by transforming itself into the sound “Ma”—corresponds to an external event. Of course, the child does not ask how it happens that, in this case, it corresponds to the mother’s rushing over. Here, the inner experience of joy or pain and the external impression come together, and what radiates from within connects with the external impression. This is a third way in which language functions. Therefore, we can say: Language arose just as much from the outside in through imitation as it did through what might be called the joining of external reality to what our inner self expresses. For what led to the formation of the words “Mama” and “Papa” from an inner utterance—“Ma,” “Pa”—because this utterance was satisfied by the arrival of the mother or father—this occurs in countless instances. Wherever a person sees that something follows an inner utterance, the expression of the inner being connects for them with something external.

[ 29 ] All of this happens without any intervention by the “I.” Only later does the “I” take over this activity. In this way, we see what lies before the “I” working on the configuration that underlies human linguistic expression. And because the “I” enters into this process after the foundation for language has already been laid, language is in turn structured in accordance with the nature of the “I.” As a result, the expressions corresponding to the sensory body are permeated by the sensory soul; the images and symbols corresponding to the etheric body are permeated by the intellectual soul. Human beings pour into sound what they experience in the intellectual soul, and they likewise pour into it what they experience in the conscious soul—which was initially mere imitation. In this way, the areas of our language that represent the inner experiences of the soul have gradually come into being.

[ 30 ] To understand the nature of language, we must realize that there is, so to speak, something living within us that was active before the “I” and before any activity of the “I,” and that it is into this that the “I” has poured what it is capable of developing. But then we must also not claim that language corresponds exactly to what originates from the “I,” or that language corresponds precisely to our spiritual nature—to the most intimate aspects of our individual being—but rather we must realize that we can never see language as the direct expression of the “I.” Symbolically, for example, the spirit of language works in the etheric body and imitates in the physical body; all of this, together with what the spirit of language draws out of the feeling soul by pressing the inner experiences out of it, so that we have a radiating expression of inner life in the sound. All of this taken together should justify us when we say: Language is not formed in the manner of the “I” as we consciously understand it today; rather, if we wish to compare the formation of language to anything, we can only compare it to artistic work. Just as we cannot demand that the artist’s imitation correspond to reality, neither can we demand that language replicate what it is meant to represent. — In language, we have something that merely reproduces what is outside, just as a painting—or the artist in general—reproduces what is outside. And we may say: Before human beings were self-conscious spirits in the modern sense, an artist was at work within them, acting as a spirit of language. — We have placed our “I” in a place where an artist previously exercised his activity. This, too, is expressed in figurative terms, but it reflects the truth in this realm. We look into a subconscious activity and sense that we have something there that has, from within ourselves, made the speaking human being an artistic work. And we must therefore conceive of language by analogy with a work of art. In doing so, we must not forget that we can only understand any work of art to the extent that the means of the art in question permit. Therefore, language, too, will have to impose certain limitations on us. If one took this into account, it would be ruled out from the outset that a work born of a pedantic impulse—such as Fritz Mauthner’s *Critique of Language*—could ever come into being. In that work, the critique of language proceeds from entirely false premises, namely that, if one surveys human languages, they do not in any way accurately convey objective reality. Are they supposed to convey it? Is there any possibility that they do? There is just as little possibility that language reflects reality as there is for a painting—when it is meant to depict external reality on the canvas using colors, light, and shadow—to do so. What underlies human activity as the “spirit of language” must be understood with artistic sensibility.

[ 31 ] All of this could only be outlined in broad strokes. But if one knows that there is an artist at work within humanity who shapes language, then one will understand—no matter how different the individual languages may appear—that even within the individual languages of humanity, the artistic spirit has been at work in the most diverse ways. Then we will understand how this “spirit of language”—let us now call this entity, which acts through the air, the “spirit of language”—when it manifested itself at a relatively lower level in human beings, worked in the same way as the atomistic spirit, which seeks to compose everything from its individual parts. Thus we have the possibility that a language is structured in such a way that the entire sentence is composed of individual sound patterns.

[ 32 ] For example, in Chinese, when we have the sounds “schi” and “king,” we have two building blocks of language formation. One syllable, “schi,” means “song”; the other would mean “book.” If we were to combine these two sound units—schi-king—it would be similar to how we combine “Lied” (song) and “Buch” (book) in German; through this “atomization,” something would emerge that—when taken as a whole—becomes “Lieder-Buch” (songbook). This would serve as a small example of how the Chinese language forms its concepts and ideas.

[ 33 ] If we reflect on what we have considered today, we can now also understand how a language as wonderfully structured as a Semitic language, for example, should be viewed in its essence. In Semitic languages, we have as a foundation certain sound patterns that actually consist only of consonants. And now the human being inserts vowels into these sound patterns. So if, just to explain this with an example, we take the consonants \(g\), \(t\), \(l\), and insert an \(a\) and then another \(a\), then—while the word formed solely from the consonants is merely an imitation of an external sound impression—the insertion of the vowels results in: qatal = to kill.

[ 34 ] Here, then, we have a curious interpenetration, in which “killing” as a sound image has come into being simply because the external process has been imitated by the speech organs; this is, at first, the original sound image. Then, what the soul must further develop—and which can only be experienced inwardly—is further shaped by adding something from within. The sound image is further developed so that the act of killing can be traced back to a subject. In this way, the entire Semitic language is essentially composed, and it expresses what we have described as the interplay of the various elements of language formation throughout the entire structure of language. In the symbolism that is particularly active in the Semitic language—that is, what we have found active in the etheric body as the spirit of language—the entire distinctive character of the Semitic language reveals itself to us; it further develops all the imitated individual sound images and transforms them into symbols through the insertion of vowels.

[ 35 ] Therefore, essentially all words in the Semitic language are formed in such a way that they refer, like symbols, to what surrounds us in the external world. In contrast, everything that appears in the Indo-European languages is inspired more by what we have called the inner expression of the astral body, the inner being. The astral body is, after all, something connected to consciousness. When one confronts the external world, one distinguishes oneself from it. When one confronts the external world solely from the perspective of the etheric body, one merges with it; one is one with it. Only when things are reflected in consciousness do we distinguish ourselves from them. This functioning of the astral body, with all its inner experiences, is wonderfully expressed in the Indo-European languages—in contrast to the Semitic languages—by the verb “to be,” which affirms that which exists independently of our intervention. This is possible because one distinguishes oneself with one’s consciousness from that which makes an external impression. If, therefore, one were to express in a Semitic language, for example, “God is good,” one would not be able to do so directly, for one cannot render the word :st, which expresses being, because it already arises from the opposition between the astral body and the external world. The etheric body simply presents things as they are. Therefore, in a Semitic language one would have to say: “God, the Good.”—The juxtaposition of subject and object is not characterized. These languages, which are distinct from the external world and whose essential feature is that a tapestry of perceptions is spread over the external world, are primarily the Indo-European languages. These, in turn, influence human beings in such a way that they support inner life—that is, everything that can be called the predisposition to develop a strong individuality, a strong “I.” This is already expressed in the language itself.

[ 36 ] Everything I have been able to offer you may be regarded by some as merely unsatisfactory hints, for the simple reason that it would take fourteen days to present everything in this field in greater detail. However, anyone who has frequently attended these lectures here and has grasped the spirit of the matter will see that a suggestion such as the one offered today is not without merit. It is intended only to show how a spiritual-scientific approach to language can be stimulated—an approach that ultimately leads to the conclusion that language cannot be understood in any other way than by attempting to grasp it with an artistic sensibility that one must have made one’s own. Therefore, all scholarship will fail if it is not willing to recreate what the linguistic artist has done within the human being before the “I” could begin to act within us. An artistic sensibility alone can grasp the mysteries of language, just as an artistic sensibility is the only means by which one can recreate them at all. Scholarly abstractions can never make a work of art comprehensible. Only those ideas shed light on works of art that, as ideas, are capable of fruitfully recreating what the artist has expressed through other means—such as color, sound, and so on. Artistic sensibility alone comprehends the artist, and masters of language alone comprehend the creative-spiritual aspect in the genesis of language. This is the one thing that spiritual science has to accomplish with regard to language.

[ 37 ] The other point is something that has practical significance. If we understand how language arose from an inner, pre-human artist, we will also be able to rise to the level where, whenever we want to say something or express something through language that claims to be valid, we must also allow this artistic sense to take effect. However, in our present age—where people have not progressed very far in terms of a living sense of language—there is little appreciation for this. Today, everyone believes that as long as they can speak at all, they are entitled to express anything. But we must be clear that we need to reestablish within our souls a direct connection between what we wish to express through language and how we express it. We must reawaken the linguistic artist within us in all fields. Today, people are satisfied when what they want to say is expressed in any form whatsoever. And how many people have any concept of what is absolutely necessary in the field of spiritual science—namely, that a sense of linguistic artistry is essential for any presentation! Try examining genuine presentations of spiritual scientific material. There you will find that whoever, as a true, genuine spiritual scientist, has written such things has also truly worked to shape every sentence artistically, and that a verb is not placed at the end or beginning in just any way. You will find that each such sentence is a creation, because it is meant to be experienced inwardly, spiritually—not merely as a thought, but as an immediate form. And if you follow the flow of the presentation, you will see that in a sequence of three consecutive sentences, the middle one is not merely appended to the first and the third to the preceding one; rather, you will find that the one who presents spiritual-scientific ideas has not only the first sentence but also the third sentence already fully formed in his mind before he formulates the middle one, because the effect of the middle sentence is to depend on what remains as the effect of the first sentence and can in turn pass on to the next sentence.

[ 38 ] In the humanities, it is impossible to create without an artistic sense of language. Anything else is a mistake. The point is that we must free ourselves from our slavish bondage to words. But we cannot do this if we think that any word could express the thought we have, for then we are already mistaken in our use of language. From words that are entirely shaped by the sensory world, we can never derive what is meant to be an expression of supersensory realities. Anyone who asks, “How is one supposed to express the etheric body or the astral body in reality, in concrete terms, through a single word?”—has not yet understood anything about it. Only the person who proceeds in this way has understood something: they say to themselves, “I will come to know what the etheric body is if I first allow myself to be told about it from one perspective, while being aware that these are artistically formed reflections; and then I will have the same thing presented to me from three other perspectives.” — There we have depicted the same thing from four different angles, so that in the descriptions we convey through language—by, as it were, circling around the subject—we present artistic reflections of the subject. If one is not aware of this, one will produce nothing but abstractions and a rigid reproduction of what one already knows. Therefore, development in spiritual science will always be connected with what we might call the further development of the inner meaning and the inner creative power of our language.

[ 39 ] In this sense, the humanities will have a stimulating effect on today’s style of language; they will transform our current appalling style of language, which has absolutely no idea what artistic linguistic ability is. Otherwise, so many people who can barely speak or write would not be starting to work as writers. The awareness that, for example, writing prose is something far loftier than writing verse has long since been lost; yet the prose written today is, of course, a much lower form of prose. But spiritual science is there to provide inspiration in those areas connected to the deepest realms of humanity. For spiritual science will work in these areas in such a way that it fulfills what the greatest personalities may have dreamed of. Spiritual science will be able to conquer the supersensible worlds through thought; it will become capable of casting thought into sound forms in such a way that our language, too, can once again become a means of communicating what the soul beholds in the supersensible. Then spiritual science will be the force that brings to truth, on a vast scale, what the saying expresses regarding one of the most important realms of the human inner life:

The thought is immeasurably deep,
And its winged instrument is the word!