The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we saw that we can only understand something like memory—the power of recollection—if we relate it to processes that are, I would say, more transparent to external observation: sleeping and waking. From this you will see that the pedagogical aim must be to bring the less familiar ever closer to the more familiar, even with regard to the formation of mental ideas.

[ 2 ] You might say: Yes, sleeping and waking are actually even more obscure than remembering and forgetting, and therefore one cannot gain much from sleeping and waking when it comes to understanding remembering and forgetting. — Nevertheless, anyone who carefully observes what a person loses through disturbed sleep will be able to gain insight into how disruptive it is to the entire life of the human soul when forgetting is not brought into the proper balance with remembering. We know from everyday life that a sufficiently long period of sleep is necessary if ego-consciousness is not to become increasingly weakened, if it is not to take on a character that could be described as being, due to a disturbed state of sleep, too strongly swayed by impressions from the external world—by everything that comes to the ego from the external world. Even with a relatively minor disturbance caused by sleep—or, rather, by insomnia—you can notice how this is the case. Let’s suppose you didn’t sleep well one night. I’m assuming that you didn’t sleep poorly because you were particularly diligent and spent the night working; in that case, the situation is somewhat different. But let’s assume you were disturbed in your sleep by some physical condition or by mosquitoes—in short, by factors more external to your psyche. Then you will see that perhaps as early as the next day, you are affected in a more unpleasant way by the things that make an impression on you than you normally would be. In a sense, this has made your “I” more sensitive.

[ 3 ] The same is true when we approach the human soul life in an incorrect way—through forgetting and remembering. But when does this happen? It happens when we cannot control our forgetting and remembering at will. There are, in fact, very many people—and this tendency is already evident in early childhood—who simply drift through life. External impressions affect them; they surrender to these impressions, but they do not follow them properly; instead, they let them flit by; in a sense, they do not connect properly with the impressions through their “I.” But then they also drift off again into freely arising mental images when they are not properly engaged with external life. They do not arbitrarily seek to draw upon the treasure of their mental images—which they need to understand this or that well—in response to any particular occasion, but rather they allow the mental images that seek to arise from within to rise of their own accord. Now this, now that mental image arises; the will has no particular influence on this. One can certainly say that, in many respects, this is the state of mind for many people, which is particularly evident in childhood.

[ 4 ] We will find a solution and place remembering and forgetting more and more within the realm of the will, once we realize that sleeping and waking also play a role in waking life when it comes to this remembering and forgetting. For we will then ask ourselves: Where does remembering come from? - It comes from the fact that the will, within which we sleep, seizes a mental image from the depths of the unconscious and brings it up into consciousness. Just as the human ego and the human astral body—when they are outside the physical body and the etheric body from the moment of falling asleep until waking—gather strength in the spiritual world to refresh the physical body and the etheric body, so too does the process of remembering arise from the power of the sleeping will. But the will is precisely in a state of sleep, and you cannot therefore directly cause the child to learn to use its will. For if you wanted to cause the child to use its will, it would be just as if you were to admonish a person to be very well-behaved while asleep, so that they might carry this good behavior into life when they wake up in the morning. So one cannot expect this dormant part—which lies dormant within the will—to rouse itself in a single, isolated act to regulate memory. What is to be done? Well, of course one cannot expect a person to rouse themselves in a single act to regulate memory, but one can educate the whole person in such a way that they develop psychological, physical, and spiritual habits of life that lead to such a rousing of the will in individual cases. Let us consider the matter in more detail once again.

[ 5 ] Let us suppose that, through specific teaching methods, we awaken in the child a lively interest in, for example, the animal world. Of course, we will not be able to develop this interest in the animal world in a single day. We will have to structure the entire lesson in such a way that, gradually, interest in the animal world takes hold and awakens more and more. Once a child has gone through such instruction, the more vivid the interests it awakens, the more this instruction influences the will; and this will then generally acquires the ability, when images of animals are needed for memory in an orderly life, to bring them up from the subconscious, from oblivion. Only by acting upon the habitual aspects of a person—upon what has become routine—can you bring their will, and thus also their power of memory, into order. In other words: You must come to understand in this way why everything that arouses intense interest in a child also contributes to actively strengthening their memory. For the power of memory must be developed through feeling and will, not through mere intellectual memory exercises.

[ 6 ] From what I have just explained, you can see how, in the world—and especially in the human world—everything is, in a certain sense, separate, yet how these separate elements also interact with one another. We cannot understand human beings in terms of their soul life unless we separate the soul and divide it into thinking or cognitive thinking, feeling, and willing. But nowhere do thinking, feeling, and willing exist in a pure form; the three always interact within one another to form a unity, intertwining with one another. And this is true of the entire human being, right down to the physical body.

[ 7 ] I have suggested to you that the human being is primarily head in the head region, but that he is actually entirely head. He is primarily chest as a chest-human, but in reality he is entirely a chest-human, for even the head shares in the nature of the chest, and so does the limb-human. And the limb-human is also primarily a limb-human, but in reality the whole human being is a limb-human; yet the limbs also share in the nature of the head and likewise in the nature of the chest; for example, they also participate in skin respiration and so on.

[ 8 ] One might say: If one wishes to approach reality—especially the reality of human nature—one must be clear that all classification takes place within a unified whole; if one were to focus solely on the abstract unity, one would learn nothing at all. If one never classified, the world would always remain in a state of indeterminacy, just as all cats are gray in the dark. People who therefore seek to grasp everything in abstract units see the world as gray upon gray. And if one were to do nothing but categorize, separate, and distinguish everything, one would never arrive at true knowledge, for then one would grasp only diversity, and knowledge would elude us.

[ 9 ] Thus, everything within a human being is in part of a cognitive nature, in part of an emotional nature, and in part of a volitional nature. And what is cognitive is primarily cognitive, but also emotional and volitional; what is emotional is primarily emotional, but also cognitive and volitional; and the same is true of the volitional. We can now apply this to what we characterized yesterday as the sensory sphere. If you wish to understand a chapter such as the one I am about to present, you must truly—I would say—set aside all pedantry; otherwise, you may find the most glaring contradiction precisely in what I said in yesterday’s lecture. But reality consists of contradictions. We do not understand reality unless we see the contradictions in the world.

[ 10 ] Human beings have a total of twelve senses. The fact that conventional science distinguishes only five, six, or seven senses stems solely from the fact that these five, six, or seven senses are particularly noticeable, while the others—which make up the full twelve—are less so. I have mentioned these twelve human senses on several occasions; let us bring them to mind once again today. Usually, people speak of the sense of hearing, the sense of heat, the sense of sight, the sense of taste, the sense of smell, and the sense of touch—and it even happens that the sense of warmth and the sense of touch are lumped together into one, which would be roughly equivalent to counting “smoke” and “dust” as one and the same when observing things externally, simply because they look the same on the surface. It should go without saying that the sense of warmth and the sense of touch are two entirely different ways for humans to relate to the world. Modern psychologists distinguish between these senses and, at most, perhaps the sense of balance, as some suggest. Some add yet another sense to this list, but this does not lead to a complete physiology and psychology of the senses, because it simply fails to take into account that a person has a similar relationship to their environment when perceiving another person’s “I” as they do when perceiving a color through the sense of sight.

[ 11 ] People today are inclined to confuse everything. When someone thinks of the mental image of the “I,” they first think of their own spiritual being; then they are usually satisfied. Psychologists almost do the same. They do not even consider that it is something entirely different whether I, by bringing together what I experience in myself, ultimately designate the sum of this experience as “I,” or whether I encounter another person and, through the way I relate to them, also designate that person as an “I.” These are two entirely different spiritual-soul activities. In the first case, when I summarize my life activities in the comprehensive synthesis called “I,” I am dealing with something purely internal; in the second case, when I encounter another person and, through my relationship with them, express that they, too, are something like my “I,” I am engaged in an activity that unfolds in the interplay between myself and the other person. Therefore, I must say: The perception of my own “I” within myself is something different from recognizing another person as an “I.” The perception of the other “I” is based on the sense of the “I,” just as the perception of color is based on the sense of sight, and that of sound on the sense of hearing. Nature does not make it so easy for human beings to see the organ of perception so clearly in the case of “I-ness” as it does in the case of sight. But one could well use the word “I-perception” for the perception of other “I’s,” just as one uses the word “seeing” when perceiving color. The organ of color perception is located on the outside of a person; the organ of “I”-perception is spread throughout the entire person and consists of a very subtle substance, and that is why people do not speak of an “I”-perception organ. This “I”-perception organ is something other than what causes me to experience my own “I.” There is, in fact, a tremendous difference between the experience of one’s own “I” and the perception of the “I” in another. For the perception of the “I” in another is essentially a cognitive process—or at least a process similar to cognition—whereas the experience of one’s own “I” is a volitional process.

[ 12 ] Now comes the part where a pedant might feel right at home. He might say: In your last lecture, you said that all sensory activity is primarily an act of the will; now you’re constructing the “I-sense” and saying it is mainly a cognitive sense. — But if you characterize the sense of the “I” as I have attempted to do in the new edition of my *Philosophy of Freedom*, you will come to realize that this sense of the “I” actually functions in a rather complicated way. On what, exactly, does the perception of another person’s “I” actually rest? Today’s abstract thinkers say some very strange things about this. They say: Essentially, one sees the outward form of another person, hears their sounds, and then knows that one oneself looks just as human as the other person, that one has within oneself a being that thinks, feels, and wills—that is, a being who is also a human being in a spiritual and psychological sense. — And so one concludes by analogy: Just as there is a thinking, feeling, and willing being within myself, so too is there one within the other. — An analogical inference is made from myself to the other. This analogical inference is nothing more than folly. The interrelationship between one person and another involves something entirely different. When you stand face to face with a person, it unfolds as follows: You perceive the person for a brief moment; in that moment, they make an impression on you. This impression disturbs you inwardly: You feel that the person, who is actually a being just like yourself, makes an impression on you that feels like an attack. The result is that you defend yourself internally, that you resist this attack, that you become internally aggressive toward them. Your aggression subsides; the aggression ceases again; therefore, they can now make an impression on you once more. This gives you time to build up your aggressive energy again, and you then carry out another act of aggression. You subside in that aggression again, the other person makes an impression on you once more, and so on. This is the relationship that exists when one person faces another, perceiving the “I”: devotion to the person—internal resistance; devotion to the other—internal resistance; sympathy—antipathy; sympathy—antipathy. I am not speaking here of emotional life, but only of the perceptual encounter. There the soul vibrates; what vibrates is: sympathy—antipathy, sympathy—antipathy, sympathy—antipathy. You can read about this in the new edition of *The Philosophy of Freedom*.

[ 13 ] But there is something else at work as well. As sympathy develops, you drift into a state of slumber within the other person; as antipathy develops, you awaken, and so on. This is a very brief alternation between waking and sleeping in vibrations when we are face to face with another person. We owe the ability to carry this out to the organ of the “I”-sense. This organ of the “I”-sense is thus organized in such a way that it explores the “I” of the other person not through its waking will, but through a sleeping will—and then rapidly transmits this exploration, which is carried out in a state of sleep, into consciousness, that is, into the nervous system. Thus, if one considers the matter correctly, the main factor in perceiving another person is indeed the will—but precisely the will as it develops not in a waking state, but in a sleeping one; for we continually weave sleeping moments into the act of perceiving the other “I.” And what lies in between is already cognition; this is quickly relegated to the realm where the nervous system resides, so that I can truly call the perception of the other a cognitive process, but must recognize that this cognitive process is merely a metamorphosis of a sleeping volitional process. Thus, this sensory process is also a volitional process; we simply do not recognize it as such. We do not consciously experience all the cognition that we undergo during sleep.

[ 14 ] Next, we must consider—separate from the “I” sense and from all other senses—the one I refer to as the “sense of thought.” The sense of thought is not the sense for perceiving one’s own thoughts, but for perceiving the thoughts of other people. Psychologists, too, develop some truly grotesque mental images about this. Above all, people are so strongly influenced by the connection between language and thought that they believe thought is always conveyed through language. That is nonsense. For you could perceive thoughts through your sense of thought just as readily in external spatial gestures as in spoken language. Spoken language merely conveys thoughts. You must perceive the thoughts for yourselves through your own sense. And once eurythmic signs have been developed for all sounds, a person need only perform a preliminary eurythmic demonstration, and you will be able to read the thoughts from their eurythmic movements just as you perceive them by hearing them in spoken language. In short, the sense of thought is something different from what operates in the sense of sound, in spoken language. — Then we have the actual sense of language.

[ 15 ] Then there is the sense of hearing, the sense of temperature, the sense of sight, the sense of taste, and the sense of smell. Then there is the sense of balance. We have a sensory awareness that we are in balance. We possess such an awareness. Through a certain inner sensory perception, we know how we are positioned in relation to right and left, forward and backward, and how we maintain our balance so that we do not fall over. And if the organ of our sense of balance is destroyed, we fall over; then we cannot maintain our balance, just as we cannot relate to colors if the eye is destroyed. And just as we have a sense for perceiving balance, we also have a sense of our own movement, through which we distinguish whether we are at rest or in motion, whether our muscles are contracted or not. So, in addition to the sense of balance, we have a sense of movement, and we also have the sense of life for perceiving the overall state of our body in the broadest sense. In fact, a great many people are highly dependent on this sense of life. They perceive whether they have eaten too much or too little, and as a result, they feel comfortable or uncomfortable; or they perceive whether they are tired or not, and as a result, they feel comfortable or uncomfortable. In short, the perception of the body’s states is reflected in the sense of life. This is how you arrive at the table of the senses as twelve senses. In fact, humans have twelve such senses.

[ 16 ] Now that we have ruled out the possibility of making pedantic objections to the cognitive nature of certain senses—since we have recognized that this cognitive nature is, after all, secretly based on the will—we can now further subdivide the senses. First, we have four senses: the sense of touch, the sense of life, the sense of movement, and the sense of balance. These senses are primarily permeated by the activity of the will. The will influences perception through these senses. Just feel how the will influences the perception of movements, even when you perform these movements while standing! The resting will also influences your perception of balance. It exerts a very strong influence on the sense of life, and it also influences the sense of touch: for when you touch something, it is essentially an interaction between your will and your surroundings. In short, you can say that the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life, and the sense of touch are senses of the will in the narrower sense. With the sense of touch, a person can see externally that, for example, they are moving their hand when they touch something; therefore, it is obvious to them that this sense is present. In the case of the sense of life, the sense of movement, and the sense of balance, it is not so obvious that these senses exist. But since they are, in a special sense, senses of the will, people remain unaware of these senses because they are, after all, asleep in their will. And in most psychological treatises, you will not find these senses mentioned at all, because science, with regard to many things, comfortably sleeps along with the outer human being.

[ 17 ] The next senses—smell, taste, sight, and the sense of warmth—are primarily sensory perceptions. Naive consciousness perceives a connection to sensation particularly strongly in the case of smell and taste. The fact that this is not perceived in the same way with sight and warmth has its own specific reasons. With regard to the sense of warmth, people do not recognize that it is very closely related to feeling, but instead lump it together with the sense of touch. They both confuse and distinguish incorrectly. The sense of touch is, in truth, much more volitional, whereas the sense of warmth is purely emotional. People fail to realize that the sense of sight is also a feeling sense because they do not engage in the kind of reflections found in Goethe’s Theory of Colors. There, he clearly articulated everything related to colors and feeling—which ultimately even leads to impulses of the will. But why, then, do people notice so little that the sense of sight actually involves, primarily, a feeling?

[ 18 ] Basically, we almost always perceive things in such a way that, by assigning colors to them, they also reveal the boundaries of those colors: lines, shapes. However, we usually do not pay attention to how we actually perceive things when we perceive both color and shape at the same time. When a person perceives a colored circle, they say, roughly: “I see the color; I also see the roundness of the circle, the circular shape.” But here, two entirely different things are being conflated. Through the actual activity of the eye—through the eye’s separate activity—you initially see nothing but the color. You perceive the circular shape by drawing upon your sense of movement in your subconscious and unconsciously tracing a circular motion in your etheric body and astral body, and then raising this into consciousness. And as the circle—which you have taken in through your sense of movement—rises into consciousness, the recognized circle only then connects with the perceived color. You thus draw the form out of your entire body by appealing to the sense of movement spread throughout the whole body. You clothe this in something I have already explained, when I said: “Human beings actually perform the forms of geometry in the cosmos and then elevate them into consciousness.”

[ 19 ] Official science today does not even attempt such a subtle form of observation—one that distinguishes between color vision and the perception of form with the aid of the sense of movement—but instead lumps everything together. Yet in the future, it will not be possible to educate through such a jumble. For how can one educate others to see if one does not know that the whole human being, with his entire being, pours into the act of seeing via the detour through the sense of movement? But now something else comes to light. You observe the act of seeing as you perceive colored forms. This act of seeing—the perception of colored forms—is a complex process. But because you are a unified human being, you can reunite within yourself what you perceive through these two different pathways—the path through the eye and the path through the sense of movement. You would look blankly at a red circle if you did not perceive the redness in one way and the circular shape in another. But you do not look at it blankly, because you perceive from two sides—the color through the eye, the shape with the help of the sense of movement—and in life you are inwardly compelled to bring these two things together. That is when you judge. And now you understand judging as a living process within your own body, which comes about because the senses present the world to you, analyzed into its constituent parts. The world presents to you what you experience in twelve different segments, and in your judgment you bring these things together, because the individual element refuses to exist as an isolated entity. The circular shape, for one thing, will not tolerate being merely a circular shape in the way it has entered the sense of movement; the color will not tolerate being merely a color as it is perceived by the eye. Things compel you inwardly to connect them, and you inwardly consent to connect them. Thus, the function of judgment becomes an expression of your whole being.

[ 20 ] You are now gaining insight into the deeper meaning of our relationship to the world. If we did not have twelve senses, we would view our surroundings like the senseless, and would be unable to experience inner judgment. But since we have twelve senses, we have a fairly large number of possibilities for connecting what is separate. What the “I” sense experiences, we can connect with the eleven other senses, and this applies to every sense. This gives us a large number of permutations for the interrelationships of the senses. But in addition, we also gain a great number of possibilities in this regard by, for example, connecting the “I” sense with the sense of thought and the sense of language, and so on. Here we see the mysterious way in which human beings are connected to the world. Through their twelve senses, things are broken down into their constituent parts, and human beings must be able to reassemble things from these parts. In this way, they participate in the inner life of things. You will therefore understand how infinitely important it is that human beings be educated in such a way that each sense is developed with equal care, for then the relationships between the senses and perceptions are sought out quite consciously and systematically.

[ 21 ] I must add that the sense of the “I,” the sense of thought, the sense of hearing, and the sense of speech are all cognitive senses, because the will present in them is precisely the sleeping will—the truly sleeping will—which, in its expressions, resonates with a cognitive activity. Thus, will, feeling, and cognition already live within the human ego-zone, and they exist through the alternation of waking and sleeping.

[ 22 ] So be clear that you can only understand a person by always viewing them from three perspectives—by observing their spirit. But it is not enough to simply keep saying: Spirit! Spirit! Spirit! Most people are always talking about the spirit but do not know how to deal with what the spirit provides. One can only deal with it properly by working with states of consciousness. The spirit must be grasped through states of consciousness such as waking, sleeping, and dreaming. The soul is grasped through sympathy and antipathy—that is, through states of life; indeed, the soul does this continuously in the subconscious. We actually have the soul in the astral body, life in the etheric body, and between the two there is a constant inner correspondence, so that the soul naturally expresses itself in the states of life of the etheric body. And the body is perceived through states of form. Yesterday I applied the spherical form to the head, the lunar form to the chest, and the linear form to the limbs, and we will yet have to speak of the actual morphology of the human body. But we are not speaking correctly of the spirit unless we describe how it expresses itself in states of consciousness; we are not speaking correctly of the soul unless we show how it expresses itself through sympathy and antipathy; and we are not speaking correctly of the body unless we grasp it in true forms. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.