The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Over the course of this winter, we have engaged in a whole series of reflections in the humanities, all of which were imbued with a specific intention: the intention of bringing us ever closer to the human being in his or her entirety. We have examined the great enigma of humanity from a wide variety of perspectives. Today, our task will be to speak about something quite ordinary. But perhaps precisely by taking as our starting point something quite ordinary, we will come to see how the mysteries of life can, in essence, meet us at every turn—and how we need only grasp them so that, by mastering them, we may glimpse into the depths of the world order. For the spiritual and the highest reality are not to be sought somewhere in an unknown distance, but rather reveal themselves to us in the most ordinary of things. In the smallest things we can seek the greatest, if only we understand them. And that is why today, as part of this year’s series of winter lectures, we will include a reflection on the everyday topic of laughter and tears from the perspective of spiritual science.

[ 2 ] Laughter and tears are certainly very common occurrences in human life. However, only spiritual science can provide a deeper understanding of these phenomena, for the reason that only spiritual science can lead us into the deepest essence of the human being—into that part of the human being through which he first clearly distinguishes himself from the other kingdoms that surround him on this Earth. It is precisely because human beings have attained the greatest and most intense share of divinity on this Earth that they rise above their earthly fellow creatures. Therefore, only knowledge and insight that ascend to the spiritual realm can truly fathom the human essence. Laughter and tears should be properly appreciated and observed, for they alone are capable of dispelling the prejudice that seeks to bring human beings, in their very nature, far too close to the animal realm. No matter how much that school of thought—which is so eager to bring human beings as close as possible to animality—may emphasize that we find a high level of intelligence in the various activities of animals, an intelligence that often far surpasses even the certainty that human beings produce through their intellect, This does not particularly surprise the spiritual scientist. For he knows that when an animal performs an intelligent act, it does not stem from the animal’s individual nature, but from the group soul. It is, of course, very difficult to make the concept of the group soul comprehensible to external observation—to convince others of it—though it is by no means impossible. But one thing should be noted, for it is accessible to any external observation, provided one is willing to make it thorough enough: Animals neither cry nor laugh. Certainly, there will again be people who claim that animals do laugh and do cry. But there is simply no helping such people, who simply refuse to grasp what laughter and crying actually are, and who, because they do not know what laughter and crying are, attribute them to animals as well. The true observer of the soul knows that an animal cannot be made to cry, but at most to howl; and it cannot be made to laugh, but only to grin. We must take this distinction into account—between howling and crying, and between grinning and laughing. We must go back to very significant events if we wish to shed light on what constitutes the true nature of laughter and crying.

[ 3 ] It is worth recalling from lectures given in various places, including Berlin—specifically from the lecture on the nature of the temperaments—that two distinct currents must be distinguished in human life: one current that encompasses all those human qualities and characteristics that are inherited from one’s parents and other ancestors and that can in turn be passed on to one’s descendants. The other current consists of the qualities and characteristics that a person possesses by virtue of entering existence as an individual. It surrounds itself with the inherited characteristics only as if with a shell; its qualities and characteristics originate from the person’s past lives, from previous incarnations.

[ 4 ] Human beings are thus essentially a duality: one aspect of their nature they inherit from their ancestors, while the other they bring with them from their previous incarnations. Thus, we distinguish between the actual core of a human being’s being—which passes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation—and everything that envelops the human being, that forms around the core of their being, and that consists of inherited characteristics. Now, although the actual individual core of being—which passes from incarnation to incarnation—is indeed already connected with the human being as a physical being even before birth, one must not believe that, once a person is born, their individuality could still be exchanged under normal circumstances. Individuality is already connected with the human body before birth.

[ 5 ] But it is a different matter when this core of being, this individuality of the human being, can begin to work on the person, to shape the person. So when the child is born, the individual core of being is already present within the child, as I said. But before birth, it cannot, as such, assert itself or bring into effect what it has acquired as abilities in its last life or in past lives in general; it must wait until after birth. So we can say: Before birth, the causes of all those traits and characteristics that belong to the inherited—those we can inherit from our father, mother, and other ancestors—are at work in the human being. - Although, as mentioned, the core of a human being’s essence is already present in all of this, it can only begin to influence the entire process once the child has been born.

[ 6 ] Then, once the child has, so to speak, come into the world, this individual core of the human being begins to reshape the organism; of course, this applies under general circumstances; in exceptional cases, things are different. It reshapes the brain and the other organs so that they can become instruments of this individual core. That is why we see how, at birth, the child possesses primarily those characteristics acquired through heredity, and how, thereafter, the individual characteristics gradually work their way into the general makeup of the organism. If we were to speak of the work of individuality on the organism before birth, that would belong to an entirely different chapter. We can, for example, also speak of the very act of selecting the parental couple as a work of individuality. But even this is, in essence, a work from the outside. All work prior to birth, from the perspective of the individual core of being, would be external work mediated, for example, by the mother and so on. But the actual work of the individual core of being on the organism itself begins only when the child has first seen the light of day. Because this is the case, this truly human, individual aspect can only gradually find expression in the human being after birth.

[ 7 ] The child therefore initially shares certain characteristics with the animal realm, and these are precisely the characteristics that find their expression in what we wish to discuss today: laughter and crying. In the very earliest period after birth, the child cannot, in the true sense of the word, laugh or cry. As a rule, it is not until the fortieth day after birth that the child begins to shed tears and then also to smile, because what has carried over from previous lives only begins to take effect at that point; only then does it sink into the innermost being of the physical body and, from that point on, make the physical body its means of expression. This is precisely what gives human beings their superiority over animals: we cannot say of animals that an individual soul passes from one incarnation to the next. What underlies the animal is the group soul, and we cannot say that what is individual in the animal reincarnates. It withdraws into the group soul and becomes something that lives on only within the animal’s group soul. In the case of human beings, however, only what they have developed in a single incarnation is preserved, and this then enters into a new incarnation once the person has passed through Devachan. In this new incarnation, it gradually transforms the organism so that it is not merely an expression of the characteristics of its physical ancestors, but becomes an expression of the individual aptitudes, talents, and so on.

[ 8 ] It is precisely the activity of the “I” within the organism that gives rise to laughter and tears in a being such as a human being. Laughter and crying are possible only in a being that possesses an inner “I”—that is, a being in whom the “I” is not a group “I,” as in animals, but is situated within the organism itself. For laughter and crying are nothing other than a subtle, intimate expression of the “I” within physicality. What happens, for example, when a person cries? Crying can arise only when the “I” feels weak in some respect in relation to what surrounds it in the external world. If the “I” is not within the organism—that is, if it is not individual—then this feeling of weakness in relation to the external world cannot occur. The human being, as the possessor of a sense of self, feels a certain discord, a certain disharmony in their relationship to the external world. And this feeling of disharmony is expressed by the fact that they resist it, that they seek, so to speak, to restore balance. How do they restore balance? By having their sense of self contract the astral body. We can say: In grief, which finds expression in weeping, the “I” feels a certain disharmony with the outside world, which it seeks to balance by contracting the astral body within itself, compressing its forces, as it were. — This is the spiritual process underlying weeping. Take, for example, weeping as an expression of grief. Grief must be examined closely in each individual case if one wishes to get to its root. Grief is, for example, the expression of having been abandoned by something with which one had previously been united. The harmonious relationship between the “I” and the outside world would still exist if what we have lost were still there. Disharmony arises when we have lost something and the “I” feels abandoned. Now the “I” gathers the forces of its astral body, compressing the astral body, as it were, in order to defend itself against this sense of abandonment. This is the expression of a grief that leads to crying: the “I,” the fourth member of the human being, contracts the forces of the astral body, the third member.

[ 9 ] What is laughter? Laughter is something based on the opposite process. The ego seeks, in a certain way, to cause the astral body to become limp, to allow its forces to spread out more widely, to expand it. While the state of weeping is brought about by contraction, laughter is brought about by causing the astral body to relax and expand. This is the spiritual observation. Whenever weeping occurs, clairvoyant consciousness can observe a compression of the astral body by the “I.” Whenever laughter occurs, an expansion—a widening, a bulging out—of the astral body takes place through the ego. It is only because the ego is active within the human being—and not acting from the outside as a group ego—that laughter and crying occur. Since the “I” only gradually begins to be active in the child—since at birth the “I” is not yet truly active, has not yet, so to speak, taken hold of the threads that direct the organism from within—the child cannot laugh or cry in the first few days, but learns to do so only as the “I” gains mastery over the inner threads that are initially active in the astral body. And because, in turn, everything that is spiritual finds its expression in the human body—since the body is merely the physiognomy of the spiritual, the condensed spirit—these characteristics that have just been described are also expressed in physical processes. And we learn to understand these physical processes from a spiritual perspective when we grasp the following:

[ 10 ] The animal has a group soul; we might also call it a group “I.” Its form is imprinted upon it through this group “I.” Why, then, does the animal have such a specific, self-contained form? Because this form is imprinted upon it from the astral world, and because it must then essentially retain this form. In humans, there is a form which—as we have often emphasized—encompasses, as it were, all other animal forms within itself in harmonious self-containment. But this entire harmonious human form, the physical human body, must be more flexible in itself than the animal body. It must not be as rigidly fixed in form as the animal body. We can already see this in the flexible physiognomy of human beings. Look at the essentially immobile physiognomy of an animal, as it confronts you in all its rigidity. And in contrast, look at the flexible human form with its changes in gestures, facial expressions, and so on. From this you will be able to conclude that the human being, within the limits that are indeed imposed upon him, possesses a certain flexibility; that he has been granted, in a certain sense, the freedom to shape his own form through the fact that his “I” dwells within him. It would not easily occur to anyone to speak of this—except perhaps in comparative terms—as intelligence being expressed individually in the face of a dog or a parrot to the same extent as it is in humans. In general, yes, but not individually, because in dogs, parrots, lions, or elephants, it is precisely the general character that predominates. In human beings, we find the individual character written on their face. And we see how their particular individual soul takes on an increasingly vivid form in their physiognomy, especially in those features of their physiognomy that are mobile. Human beings have retained this mobility because they can shape their own form from within. It is the sublimity of human beings in relation to the other kingdoms that they are capable of shaping and forming themselves.

[ 11 ] The moment a person, through his “I,” alters the general balance of forces in his astral body, this also becomes physically evident in the expression of his physiognomy. The usual facial expression and the usual tension of the muscles that a person maintains from morning to evening must change when the “I” brings about a change in the forces of the astral body. If the “I,” instead of maintaining the astral body in its usual state of tension, allows it to become slack and expands it, then it will also act upon the etheric body and the physical body with less force; and the result is that certain muscles, which occupy one position or another under the usual balance of forces, assume a different position. Therefore, when the astral body is made more relaxed by the “I” in connection with a certain emotional expression, certain muscles must have a different tension than in the ordinary course of life. Thus, laughter is nothing other than the physical expression—the physiognomic expression—of that relaxation of the astral body which is brought about by the “I” itself. It is the astral body that, from within and under the influence of the ego, brings the human muscles into those positions that give rise to the everyday expression. When the astral body relaxes its tension, the muscles expand and the expression of laughter arises. Laughter is directly an expression of the inner workings of the ego upon the astral body. When the astral body is compressed by the “I” under the influence of grief, this compression extends into the physical body, and the result is nothing other than the secretion of tears, which, in a certain sense, are like a discharge of blood under the influence of the compressed astral body. Such are the processes. Therefore, only a being capable of incorporating the individual “I” into its essence and acting within itself through this individual “I” can laugh and weep. Thus, the individuality of the “I” begins where the being becomes capable of either tensing or relaxing the forces of the astral body from within. Every time we encounter a person who smiles at us or who is weeping, we are confronted with these facts—proof of the human being’s superiority over the animal. For in the animal’s astral body, the “I” acts from the outside. Consequently, all states of tension in the animal astral body can only be brought about from the outside, and the inner life in such an existence cannot manifest itself outwardly, as it does in laughter and tears.

[ 12 ] But we can see much more in the process of laughing and crying when we observe the breathing patterns of those who are laughing and those who are crying. This reveals to us in all its depth what is happening here. If you observe the breathing of someone who is crying, you will see that it consists essentially of a long exhalation and a short inhalation. With laughter, it is the opposite: a short exhalation is followed by a long inhalation. Thus, the breathing process is something that changes in human beings under the influence of the processes we have just described. And if you just use your imagination a little, the reasons why this must be so will easily become clear to you.

[ 13 ] During the process of crying, the astral body is contracted and compressed by the ego. The result is like squeezing out the air: a long exhalation. During the process of laughter, there is a relaxation of the astral body. It is just as if you were pumping the air out of a room, thinning the air, so that the air whistles in. This is what happens during the long inhalation under the influence of laughter. Here, as it were, we see the ego at work within the astral body through the change in the breathing process. What is external in animals—the group “I”—we can perceive at work in human beings by observing how the breathing process itself changes during this peculiar activity. Let us therefore consider this process in its universal significance.

[ 14 ] We can say that in animals, the respiratory process is, so to speak, strictly regulated from the outside and is not subject to the inner, individual “I” in the sense described today. That which sustains the respiratory process—that which actually regulates it—was called, for example, the “nephesh” in the esoteric teachings of the Old Testament. This is, in truth, what is called the “animal soul.” So what constitutes a group “I” in animals is the Nephesh. And the Bible states quite correctly: “And God breathed—or breathed into—man the Nephesh—the animal soul—and man became a living soul in himself.” - Of course, this is very often misunderstood because people today cannot read such profound writings; they read them one-sidedly. For example, when it says: “And God breathed the Nephesh—the animal soul—into man,” this does not mean that He created it at that moment, but rather that it was already there. It does not say that it was not there before. It existed, externally. And what God did was to transfer what had previously existed externally as a group soul into the inner being of humankind. This is the essential point: that one understands such an expression in its true depth. One might ask: What resulted from the nephesh being transferred into the human inner being? This made it possible for human beings to attain that sublimity over the animal that enabled them to actively develop their “I” inwardly, to laugh and to weep, and thereby to experience joy and pain in a way that works upon them.

[ 15 ] This brings us to the significant impact that pain and joy have on life. If human beings did not have their “I” within them, they would not be able to experience pain and joy inwardly; rather, these pains and joys would pass them by without leaving any trace. But since they have their “I” within them and can work on their astral body—and thus their entire physicality—from within, pain and joy become active forces within themselves. What we experience as pain and joy in one incarnation, we internalize; we carry it over into the next incarnation, where it acts upon and shapes us. Therefore, one could say: Pain and joy became creative cosmic forces at the very moment when human beings learned to weep and laugh—that is, at the moment when the human “I” was transferred into the inner self. - Here we have something everyday: crying and laughing. But we do not understand it unless we know how the actual spiritual part of the human being functions—what actually takes place between the “I” and the astral body when a person cries or laughs.

[ 16 ] But what constitutes the human being is in a state of constant development. The fact that human beings can laugh and cry in general stems from their ability to work on their astral body from within their “I.” That is certainly true. But on the other hand, the human being’s physical body and also the etheric body were already predisposed to the work of the “I” within them when the human being entered their first earthly incarnation. Human beings were capable of it. If one could force an individual “I” into a horse, it would feel extremely unhappy there, because it could do nothing at all—because it could find no outlet for the individual work of the “I.” Imagine an individual “I” inside a horse. The individual “I” would want to work on the horse’s astral body—contracting it or expand it, and so on. But when an astral body is connected to a physical body and an etheric body, the physical and etheric bodies—if they cannot adapt to the forms of the astral body—form a terrible obstacle. It is like struggling against a wall. The ‘I’ within the horse’s nature would want to contract the astral body, but the physical body and the etheric body would not go along with it, and the result would be that the horse would go mad because the physical body and the etheric body would not cooperate. Human beings had to be predisposed to such activity from the very beginning. This could only be achieved by their acquiring, from the outset, a physical body that could truly become an instrument for the “I” and could gradually be mastered by the “I.” Hence, the following can also occur: The physical body and the etheric body may be flexible in themselves—true “I-bearers,” so to speak—but the “I” may be very underdeveloped and may not yet be able to exercise proper control over the physical and etheric bodies. This can be recognized by the fact that the physical and etheric bodies appear as a shell for the “I,” yet they are not a complete expression of the “I.” This is the case with people whose laughter and tears occur involuntarily, who grumble at every opportunity, and who have no control over their facial muscles. Through this, they reveal their higher humanity in the physical and etheric bodies, but at the same time show that they have not yet brought their humanity under the control of the “I.” That is why this grumbling laughter seems so unpleasant. It shows that a person stands on a higher level through what is beyond their control than through what is within their control. It always has a particularly detrimental effect when a being fails to rise to the level of what has been bestowed upon them from the outside. In a certain sense, laughter and weeping are also expressions of human egotism, as is evident from the fact that they can arise only because the “I” dwells within the human being. Weeping can be an expression of the most terrible selfishness, for in a certain way, weeping is all too often a kind of inner indulgence. A person who feels abandoned contracts the astral body with his or her ego. He or she seeks to strengthen himself or herself inwardly because he or she feels weak outwardly. And he or she then feels this inner strength through the ability to do something—namely, to produce tears. And there is always a certain feeling of satisfaction—whether one admits it or not—associated with the production of tears. Just as, under certain other circumstances, a kind of satisfaction is evoked when someone smashes a chair, so too is there often nothing more to the act of shedding tears than the pleasure of inner production—the pleasure masked by tears—even if the person does not bring this to conscious awareness.

[ 17 ] The fact that laughter is, in a certain sense, an expression of egoity—of the sense of self—may be evident from the fact that, if you really examine it, laughter can always be traced back to a person feeling elevated above their surroundings and above what is happening in those surroundings. Why do people laugh? They laugh whenever they place themselves above what they are observing. You will always find this statement to be true. Whether you laugh at yourself or at someone else, fundamentally your “I” is such that it feels elevated above something. And in this feeling of elevation, it expands the powers of its astral body, broadens itself, and puffs itself up. That, strictly speaking, is what truly underlies laughter. That is why laughter can be so healthy, and one must not condemn all egotism—this puffing oneself up—in the abstract, for laughter can be very healthy when it strengthens a person’s sense of self, when it is justified, when it elevates a person beyond themselves. When you see something in your surroundings, in yourself, or in others that is actually nonsense, there is a sense of rising above the nonsense that is taking place, and that makes you laugh. It must happen that a person feels elevated above something in their surroundings, and the “I” expresses this by expanding the astral body.

[ 18 ] If, in the process of breathing, you understand what we were just trying to explain in the sentence: “And God breathed the nephesh into man, and man became a living soul”—then you will also sense the connection with what laughter and weeping are, for you know that during laughter and weeping, the very process of breathing within the human being changes. We have thus shown how even the most everyday things can truly be understood only when we start from the spiritual. It is only by understanding the connection between the four members of the human being that we can understand laughter and weeping. Just consider that in times when, in a certain sense, people still had clairvoyant traditions and, at the same time, the ability to depict the gods through fantasy and true imagination—that in those days the gods were portrayed as cheerful beings whose most prominent characteristic, in a certain sense, was cheerfulness and laughter. And it is not for nothing that wailing and gnashing of teeth have been attributed to those realms of world existence where something akin to an exaggerated sense of self predominates. Why? Because laughter, on the one hand, signifies a rising above, a transcending of the self beyond its surroundings—that is, the victory of the higher over the lower—while weeping signifies cowering, a retreat from the external world, a shrinking and a feeling of abandonment by the ego, a withdrawal into oneself. As poignant as grief is in human life—because we know that this grief will be and must be overcome—so much more different, not poignant but hopeless, do grief and weeping appear in that world where they can no longer be overcome. There they appear as the expression of damnation, of being cast into darkness.

[ 19 ] We must pay close attention to these feelings that can overcome us when we contemplate, from a broad perspective, what manifests in human beings as the work of the “I” upon itself, and we must trace them down to their most intimate forms. Then we will have grasped many things that confront us in the course of time. We must be aware that behind the physical world lies a spiritual one, and that what appears to us in human life alternately as laughter and as weeping—when it confronts us apart from human life—then appears to us, on the one hand, as the radiant serenity of heaven and, on the other hand, as the dark, bitter sorrow of hell. These two aspects are the very foundation of our middle world, and we must understand our middle world by recognizing that it derives its powers from these two realms.

[ 20 ] We will learn many things yet about the nature of human beings. But I would like to say that one of the most intimate aspects of human nature is that of laughter and tears, even though laughter and tears are such everyday activities. Animals do not laugh or cry because they do not possess within themselves that drop of divinity that human beings carry within their sense of self. And we can say that when a human being begins to smile and weep in the course of their life, this can be proof—for those who know how to read the great scripture of nature—that something divine truly lives within the human being; that when a human being laughs, the God within them is at work, striving to elevate them above all that is base. For a smile and laughter are a form of elevation. And that, on the other hand, when a person weeps, it is again God who admonishes him that this “I” could be lost if it did not strengthen itself against all weakness and feelings of abandonment. It is the God within man who imparts His admonitions to the soul through laughter and through tears. Hence, one might say, the bitterly painful feeling that overtakes the one who understands life when he sees unnecessary weeping. For unnecessary weeping betrays that, instead of living and feeling in harmony with the world around him, the pleasure of being lost in one’s own self is too great. But just as bitter is the feeling that can overcome such a person who understands the world when he finds in someone else—the elevation of the self above its surroundings, which is otherwise expressed in healthy laughter—treated as an end in itself, as laughter at everything under the sun, or as malicious judgment. For then the person in question says to himself: If the self does not take in everything it can draw from its surroundings, if it does not wish to live in harmony with its surroundings but instead unjustifiably elevates its selfhood above them, then this selfhood will lack the necessary weight—a weight that pulls one upward—which can only be attained by drawing from one’s surroundings everything that can be drawn out for the development of the self. And then the ego will fall behind; it will be unable to rise. It is precisely this beautiful balance between pain and joy that can contribute so immensely to human development. When pain and joy find their justification in the environment—rather than lying within one’s own inner self—and when the ego continually seeks to establish the right relationship with the environment precisely between pain and joy, then pain and joy can become true factors in human development.

[ 21 ] Great poets therefore often find such beautiful words for that pain and that joy, which do not in any way stem from arrogance or from the ego being compressed within itself, but which have their cause in the relationship between the self and the environment—a relationship that has been thrown out of balance from the outside and which alone explains why people laugh and why people cry. We can understand it because we know that it is in the external world—through the external world—that the relationship between the self and the external world has been disrupted. So a person must laugh or cry, whereas—if it were solely a matter within the person—we could not understand why a person laughs or cries, since it would then always be unfounded egoism. That is why it is so beautiful when Homer says of Andromache, as she is under the dual influence of concern for her husband and concern for her infant: “She could weep while laughing!” That is a wonderful expression—one might say—for something normal in crying. She does not laugh for her own sake, nor does she cry for her own sake. The proper relationship to the outside world is present when she has to worry, on the one hand, about her husband and, on the other, about her child. And here we have the relationship between laughter and tears, in which they balance each other out: smiling while crying—crying while laughing. This is often also the expression seen in a naive child, whose sense of self has not yet hardened within them as strongly as it does later in adulthood, so that they can still laugh while crying and cry while laughing. And this is also true of the wise person: one who has overcome their ego to such an extent that they do not seek the reasons for laughter and tears within themselves, but find them in the outside world—so that they, too, can laugh while crying and cry while laughing. Indeed, in the things that pass us by day after day, we have—if we understand them—the full expression of the spiritual. Laughter and tears are something we can call, in the highest sense, the physiognomy of the divine in human beings.