The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] You will have seen the importance placed within anthroposophical pedagogy on what lies within the teacher’s consciousness: that a complete, self-contained understanding of the human being truly lives within the teacher’s consciousness. Now, as you have seen from various examples, today’s worldview is not exactly well-suited to penetrating deeply into the human being. You will understand what I mean when I elaborate on this in the following way.

[ 2 ] We must, of course, distinguish in the human being, first, the physical body—its physical organization—and then the finer body, the etheric or Life-Body, which contains the formative forces—the forces that are active in growth and in the processes of nutrition—and which then refine themselves in the first years of life and become the powers of memory. Furthermore, however, we must distinguish everything that the plant does not yet possess—even though the plant also has growth and nutrition and, in a certain sense, even lives in memory by repeatedly maintaining its form: this next member is, in humans and animals, the sensory body, the astral body, the bearer of sensations. And then we have the ego organization. We must distinguish these four constituent parts of the human being from one another. And by distinguishing them, we will gain a true insight into the human being, into its essence, and into its development.

[ 3 ] To put it this way, a human being first receives his or her initial physical body through heredity. It is prepared for him or her by the father and mother. This physical body is shed during the first seven years of life, and during this time it serves as a model for the etheric body to build the second body. People today tend to oversimplify the realities of the world. If a ten-year-old child has a nose similar to his father’s, people say it’s inherited. But things aren’t that simple; the nose is inherited only until the child’s teeth begin to fall out. For if the etheric body is strong enough to resist the model of the inherited nose, then the shape of the nose changes over the course of the first seven years. If, on the other hand, the etheric body is weak, it slavishly retains the shape of the nose, and the same shape still appears in the tenth year of life. Outwardly, it appears as if the concept of heredity still has the same significance in the second seven years of life as it did in the first seven; but people today love to say in such cases that the truth must be simple. In reality, things are very complicated. The views formed today are mostly born of a desire for convenience, not of a quest for truth.

[ 4 ] So it is truly a matter of our first learning to look into this body of formative forces, this etheric body, which gradually, over the first seven years, shapes the second physical body, which in turn remains for seven years. The etheric body is therefore a sculptor; it is a sculptor. And just as a true sculptor does not need a “model” but works independently, whereas a poor sculptor copies everything from a model, so too does the etheric body—or body of formative forces—work on the human being’s second physical body during the first period of life, leading up to the second period. We can approach the physical body with our present-day intellectual understanding; with it, we can comprehend the physical body quite magnificently. And those who lack intellectuality do not comprehend it. But that is where our university studies end. For the etheric body is not grasped through intellectuality, but through pictorial intuition. It would be extraordinarily necessary for the teacher to learn to grasp the etheric body. You cannot say: ‘We cannot train all our teachers to become clairvoyant and describe the etheric body!’ - But just once, let the teachers in the seminar, instead of the things they often learn there, try their hand at modeling; let them practice the art of sculpture. That is how a person becomes attuned to it—when they truly practice sculptural art drawn from the creative forces of nature—to the inner structure of forms, and specifically to those forms with which the human formative body works. For whoever has a healthy sense of plasticity perceives in sculpture only the animal and the human, not the plant. Just imagine a sculptor who were to depict plants in sculptures: people would knock him down in anger! The plant is finished with the physical body and the etheric body; it is truly finished with them. The animal, however, transcends the etheric body with the astral body. Human beings do so even more so. That is why we can grasp the etheric body in human beings when we work our way sculpturally into the inner structure of forms in nature. Therefore, modeling should above all be a seminar-based discipline; only then does one begin to grasp the body of formative forces. One should already hold to this principle: a teacher who has never learned to model actually understands nothing about a child’s development. The art of education that seeks to be grounded in an understanding of human nature must, if it is to be effective, be so rigorous as to draw attention to such matters; so rigorous because such things are required, but also so rigorous because one seemingly becomes a terribly critical opponent of everything that is being done today.

[ 5 ] Just as the etheric body works to emerge and become independent during the change of teeth, so too does the astral body work to become independent with the onset of sexual maturity. The etheric body is a sculptor; the astral body is a musician. It embodies within itself everything that is musical; it is formed entirely from musical structure. And what shoots forth from the astral body into form within the human being is entirely musically formed. Anyone who can understand this knows that further seminar training must aim to internalize the essence of the musical worldview in order to understand the human being. The non-musician, on the other hand, understands nothing at all of what is formed in the human being from the astral body; for that is musically formed. If we therefore look into ancient cultures that are still shaped by the musical—into the Eastern cultures, which even in their language still possess musical qualities—we find, right down to the architecture, that the building forms are shaped out of a musical worldview. This had already changed in Greece, and it changed particularly in the West, for there it shifted toward the mechanical and the mathematical. At the Goetheanum in Dornach, an attempt was made to return to this. Musicians have certainly perceived this Goetheanum in Dornach as musical. But in general, there is not much understanding of this today.

[ 6 ] The point is, then, to learn to perceive the human being concretely in this way and to be able to understand, musically, the anatomical and physiological aspects insofar as they originate from the astral body. Consider how intimately music is connected to the processes of breathing and circulation. The human being is entirely a musical instrument insofar as he breathes and has a circulatory process. And if you consider the ratio between breathing and blood circulation—18 breaths per minute, 72 heartbeats per minute—this yields a ratio of 4:1, which is individualized in the most manifold ways in the human being; then you will find that the human being has an inner musical structure. 4:1—this expresses something that is an inner rhythmic relationship, which, however, manifests itself throughout the entire human organism in the way the human being seeks to live through his or her very being. When recitation was practiced in ancient times, the line was structured according to the breath, and the individual meter according to circulation:

[ 7 ] Dactyl — Dactyl — Caesura — Dactyl — Dactyl: four in one. Man expresses himself.

[ 8 ] But what a person then expresses in language, he has already expressed beforehand in his form. Anyone who understands human beings musically knows that sound works within them. What lies at the back of the human body, where the shoulder blades meet—what begins there and takes shape from that point throughout the entire human being—these are the human forms that were constituted from the prime; as it proceeds to the upper arm, the form transitions to the second. And as it proceeds to the forearm, we enter the third. And because there is a major and a minor third—not a major and a minor second—we have one upper arm bone; but we have a major and a minor third, and therefore two forearm bones: the radius and the ulna. The musical scale is embedded in all of this; we are formed according to it. And anyone who studies the human being only externally does not know that the human form is shaped according to the tones. And when we come to the hand, we arrive at the fourth and then the fifth. And in this free mobility, we step completely out of ourselves; there we grasp the other nature. Hence the peculiar sensation one experiences with the sixths and sevenths, especially when, in eurythmy, one immerses oneself in the things being portrayed. Just consider how the style of the third—which appears relatively late in musical development—becomes such that the human being enters into their inner self, which lives in the third; whereas, when the human being lives in the seventh, the style becomes such that one best experiences a merging with the outer world. Self-sacrifice is particularly present in the seventh.

[ 9 ] And just as human beings experience music, so too are they themselves shaped in their very forms by music. If the teacher therefore wishes to be a good music teacher—and if, in particular, as must have been the case from the very beginning of the era of elementary schooling, he wishes to teach the child to sing as is necessary—then he must truly understand that singing emancipates itself; for the astral body sang in the past and brought about the forms of the human being. Now the astral body emancipates itself between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. And what emerges from the musical realm is what shapes the human being independently. It is no wonder that what thus permeates the human being is, quite naturally, incorporated into singing lessons by a music teacher who understands these things in this way, and is then incorporated again into instrumental music. Therefore, as early as possible—and provided the children have a talent for it—we try to introduce the child from an early age not only to singing but directly to playing a musical instrument, so that the child has the opportunity to truly grasp the musical element that lives in its form when it emancipates itself.

[ 10 ] But all these things will turn out right if the teacher possesses the right attitude toward them. If one is clear about the fact that, in essence, every seminar program should consist of proceeding, so to speak, in parallel with medical school—which should first lead to the intellectual understanding gained from the cadaver; then to the three-dimensional understanding, which, however, cannot be attained unless one later engages in modeling alongside one’s physical-anatomical understanding; and then it should lead to musical understanding. For one does not gain a true understanding of humanity unless one incorporates, alongside one’s earlier medical studies, a musical understanding of how it functions in the world; not only externally, but also internally, one must enter into this musical understanding during seminar training and apply it in order to see music everywhere. It is, after all, everywhere in the world, if one can only find it. But if one wishes to understand the organization of the “I,” one must absolutely carry within oneself the inner structure of some language.

[ 11 ] So we perceive the physical body with the intellect, the etheric body with plastic understanding, the astral body with musical understanding, and the “I” organization, on the other hand, with a penetrating understanding of language. But things are particularly bad in this regard today. There is a great deal we simply do not know. For example, people today look up how, in a given language—say, German—this thing is called that sits quietly atop our body, this round thing that has eyes and a nose in the front. In German it is called Kopf; in Italian, testa. You consult a dictionary and know that the translation of Kopf is testa. But that is merely an outward appearance, a superficiality. For that is not the truth at all. The truth of the matter is that, from the sensation of the vowels and consonants in the word “Kopf,” for example, I perceive the “o” as taking on a certain form: it is—as eurythmists know—the rounding that expresses itself forward into the nose and mouth. Everything that is present in the form of the head is contained within the sound structure, if one is willing to experience it. So when someone wants to express the form of the head, they say, more or less, depending on the structure of their larynx or lungs, “K-o-pf.” But now we can say: It is in the head that resides what speaks from one person to another—through which one person communicates things to another, conveys the inner essence of a matter to another—that which, for example, you bequeath to someone in a will, proclaim, state, or establish. - If you want to refer to the head as the one who establishes or communicates—not as the round object, but as the source of speech—then you say *testa*. You are referring to the communicator when you say *testa*; you are referring to the round shape when you say *Kopf*. If an Italian wanted to refer to the round shape, he would also say “head,” and if a German wanted to say “communicator” or “declarer,” he would also say “testa.” But both have become accustomed to referring to something else in their language; for there is no way at all to express things in different ways. One therefore means something different when one says “testa” or “head.” Languages differ because they designate different meanings with their words.

[ 12 ] Now let us fully immerse ourselves in the way someone lives through language based on their national identity—how, for example, the German lives entirely through language by shaping it vividly. The German language is simply the language of plastic perception. This is expressed in the German language by the fact that, in its development, it made its way up through Greece and into Central Europe. If you study the Italian language, you will see that it is entirely geared toward developing out of the motor-psychic realm, as are the Romance languages in general. They do not look. The German language is one that has been formed out of visual perception; the Italian language has developed out of inner dancing, inner singing, and self-expression through organization. In this, one can see the way in which the “I” is embedded within the national substance; there, one learns from the structure of the language how the “I” actually functions.

[ 13 ] It is therefore essential that the teacher acquire not only a sense of music but also an inner sense of language—based on the fact that, in modern languages, we actually experience emotions and inner feelings only through exclamatory sounds. For example, when we say “etsch!” in German, it is something like when someone has slipped and fallen, and as if they wanted to express that fall, which we make fun of. In these sounds of sensation, we still have something of what is felt in language. Otherwise, language has become abstract, hovering above things, no longer living within them. But one must use language to re-enter into them. One must learn to wrestle with language; one must feel one’s self passing through the sounds. Then one will feel how different it is to say “Kopf”—which, when one feels it, makes one want to draw immediately—or to say “testa”—which, when one feels it, makes one want to dance immediately. This is precisely this empathizing with the activities of life, which must come to the fore especially in the teacher.

[ 14 ] If, then, the teacher can gradually and increasingly master this synthesis of the physical and the spiritual-psychic—which, as I have repeatedly emphasized, is one and the same—then, without being tempted to slip into abstractions or intellectualism, he will have sought to keep instruction and education between the loss of baby teeth and sexual maturity grounded in the concrete. For nothing is more off-putting than when one is accustomed to thinking about realities in images, and someone else comes along and talks to you in intellectualisms. One finds this terribly unpleasant. For example, if one is accustomed to seeing a scene from life as it unfolds—feeling only the urge to stand there and describe it, fully immersed in the scene—and then another person comes along; one wants to communicate with him, but he judges the matter solely by reason and immediately begins: “It was beautiful,” or: ‘It was ugly’ or ‘grand’ or ‘wonderful’—as all these things are—then emotionally you actually feel as if he were pulling your hair out. And it’s especially bad when you’d like to learn about something the other person has experienced, and they don’t describe to you how it actually was: ‘I met a person who lifts his knees high when he walks’—but instead they begin: “This person walks beautifully,” or: “He has a beautiful gait.”—But in saying that, he’s telling you nothing about the other person, only about his own ego. But that’s not what you want to know at all; you want a description of what actually happened. People today find it increasingly difficult to step outside themselves and describe what actually happened. That is why they do not describe things, but rather what they felt—whether it was beautiful or ugly. Even in language, this tendency gradually takes shape, and things are named accordingly. Instead of describing the features of a face, one says: “Yes, she gave me a terrible look”—or something like that.

[ 15 ] These are things that should be woven into the very fabric of teacher training: learning to step back from oneself and focus on the subject at hand. If one focuses on the subject, one also connects with the child. For, as I have described, the child feels as though one is pulling out their hair when one speaks not of the matter at hand but of one’s own feelings; whereas the child responds immediately to everything when one simply presents the matter itself. Therefore, it is of great importance for the teacher not to think too much. I always find it a great difficulty when Waldorf school teachers think too much, whereas I always find it a great benefit when they develop the ability to observe even the smallest things, to see them, and to discover their unique characteristics. If someone tells me, “This morning I saw a lady wearing a purple dress that was somewhat low-cut; she was wearing high-heeled shoes”—and so on—I prefer that to someone coming up and saying: “The human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ‘I’”—for the former testifies that the person is fully engaged in life, that they have developed the etheric body within themselves, while the latter shows that they know intellectually that an etheric body exists. But that doesn’t accomplish much.

[ 16 ] I must express myself so forcefully in order for us to recognize the most important aspect of teacher training: that one does not learn to spin out many things, but rather learns to observe life. That one then applies this in life follows naturally. Just by thinking about how to apply these observations, they are already distorted. Therefore, anyone who wishes to describe things from the perspective of Spiritual Science must be particularly careful not to use abstract terms; for in doing so, they stray from what they actually want to say. And in particular, this leads to a peculiar tendency to “round off” things, to avoid describing them in sharp terms. — Here is a striking example of this. For me, for instance, it feels uncomfortable to say in certain contexts: “There stands a pale person.” That hurts. In contrast, it begins to breathe reality when I say: “There stands a person who is pale”—that is, when one characterizes the matter not with a rigid, simple concept, but with a concept that flows. And you’ll find that children have much more inner understanding for relative matters than for mere relations expressed in nouns or adjectives. Children are attuned to a gentle grasp of things. If I tell them, “There stands a pale person”—it’s as if I were striking them with a hammer; but if I say: “There stands a person who is pale”—it’s as if I were caressing them with my hand. Children are far better able to attune themselves to the world when things are taught to them in this second form—that is, not by hammering them home, but by developing this subtlety, using language to become a sculptor in the art of education. The art of education also lies in mastering language in school to such an extent that one can articulate clearly, emphasizing what is important and letting the unimportant fall by the wayside in class.

[ 17 ] It is precisely these things that are considered of great importance, and thus the intangible aspects of teaching are repeatedly emphasized in our faculty meetings. For if one truly observes a class, one notices all sorts of things that can be of great help in teaching. For example, suppose you have a class of 28 students. Now you want them to make something—such as a short or even a long poem—their own, both mentally and emotionally. You try to teach this poem to the class. You’ll notice the following: If you have all 28 students—or even a third or half of them—recite it in unison, everyone joins in and can do it; but if you then pick a single student to recite it alone, they can’t do it. It’s not that you’ve overlooked the one who remains silent; rather, when reciting in unison, they can do it and join in correctly. For there is a group spirit in the class at work here, one that can be harnessed. So when you truly work with the entire class—treating them as a chorus—the first thing that happens is that you can foster faster comprehension. But one day I had to point out the downside of this approach, for I want to confide in you the secret that there are also downsides to the Waldorf school. You gradually get into the rhythm of it and find that it works quite well to treat the class as a chorus working together. But if you rely on it too heavily—if you work with the class instead of with the individual—then in the end the individual no longer knows anything.

[ 18 ] All these things are such that one must take their difficulties into account and be clear about how far one can go—for example, with treating the class as a whole—and how much attention one must devote to the individual. Principles are of no use at all in this regard. To say, for example, that teaching a class as a group is good, or to lay down principles such as “one should do something this way or that way”—this is always useless, because whatever can be done one way in life’s complexities can also be done another way when the circumstances are different. The worst thing that can happen in the science of education—which is not a science at all, but an art—is precisely definitions and instructions of an abstract nature. Educational instructions should consist solely of introducing the teacher to the individual development of this or that specific person, that is, guiding the teacher into an understanding of human nature through the most vivid examples.

[ 19 ] The methodology then emerges naturally from something like this. Take, for example, the methodology of history instruction. Attempting to teach history to a child before the age of 9 or 10 is a completely nonsensical endeavor; for the child does not yet have the capacity to grasp historical development. It is only around the ages of 9 or 10—just observe them—that they begin to take an interest in individual people. If you present figures like Caesar, Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, or Alcibiades as fully formed personalities, and allow the rest of the historical context to serve merely as a backdrop—by portraying the whole picture in this way—then the child will take the greatest interest in it. Even the urge to know more and more in this way makes itself felt. The child feels the urge to immerse themselves in the biographical details of historical figures when you describe them in this way. Complete portraits of personalities; complete depictions of what a meal looked like in a particular century and how it looked in another; vividly depict how people ate when there were no forks yet; vividly depict how people ate in ancient Rome; vividly depict how a Greek walked, who was conscious with every step of the leg’s form, who felt that form; describe how the people of the Old Testament—the Hebrew people—walked, who had no sense of form at all but simply let their arms and legs swing; evoke feelings for these details that can be brought into the picture: this is what history instruction for 10- to 12-year-olds should be.

[ 20 ] Then we move on to the historical context; for only then does the child become receptive to the concept of cause and effect. Only then can we present a coherent history. But everything that lives in history must be worked out from the process of becoming. They come into being. Imagine this: We are now living in the year 1924; Charlemagne lived from 760 to 814, so when we say “around 800,” he lived about 1,120 years before us. Now, when we enter the world as children, we develop, and we can calculate that over the course of a century we might have: a son or daughter, a father or mother, a grandfather, and perhaps even a great-grandfather—that is, three to four generations in succession within a single century. You can create a mental image of these 3 to 4 generations like this: the son or daughter stands there, the father or mother places their arms on the child’s shoulders, the grandfather in turn places his arms on the father’s shoulders, and likewise the great-grandfather places his arms on the grandfather’s shoulders. But by then you’ve already gone back a century. Now, if you have in your mental image the son, father, and grandfather—that is, people of the present—lining up one after another, and behind them the people of 10 more centuries in the generational sequence, you end up with a total of 11 times 3 or 4 generations—let’s say 44 generations. If you line up 44 people in a row like this, with each person placing their hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them, the person at the very front could be someone from the present, and the person at the very back could be Charlemagne. By lining up these people in a row, you get a sense of just how long that is, and you’ll say: that spans 11 centuries. If we go back just three centuries, we don’t need 44 people—just 10 or 11 standing in a line. In this way, you can transform something that’s so difficult to visualize—namely, the temporal relationships in history—into purely spatial relationships. Imagine this: you have one person here speaking with another; that person turns around and can speak with the next one, who in turn speaks with the next, and so on, until you reach the point where Peter spoke with Christ; then you see the entire development of the Christian Church in the conversation among these people standing in a line. The entire apostolic succession is laid out before you, made vividly clear.

[ 21 ] The point, then, is that one will use every means possible to gain a visual image, a concrete perception. This is also necessary because, in doing so, one learns to enter into reality and, through that, in turn, learns to shape everything in accordance with reality. After all, it is actually arbitrary if I place 3 beans in front of the child, then another 3 beans, then 3 more, or now even 4, and then use that to teach addition: 3+3+4=10. That is quite arbitrary. But it is an entirely different matter if I have a small pile of beans, the exact number of which I do not yet know. That’s how things actually exist in the world. Now I divide the pile. The child understands this immediately. I give one part to one child, another to a second, and a third to a third. So I divide the pile, teaching the child how much the pile as a whole contains—the total first, then the parts afterward. I can let the child count, because this happens sequentially: 1, 2, 3, and so on up to 12. So now I have divided the beans into 4, another 4, and yet another 4; this will be easy for the child to grasp if the total comes first and the addends follow. This is true to reality. The other approach is abstract; there, one summarizes, and one becomes overly intellectual. — One is also more grounded in reality when one gets the child to answer the question: If I have 12 apples, someone takes them, walks down a path, loses some along the way, and brings back only 7; how many did he lose? 5. In this process, one proceeds from the minuend through the remainder to the subtrahend; one does not subtract, but rather moves from the remainder—that is, from what remains after the actual process—to what has been taken away.

[ 22 ] Thus, everywhere, the aim is not to move toward abstraction but toward reality; to connect with life, to seek to engage with it. This is what brings the child to life again, whereas in arithmetic class, in particular, the child usually remains completely unresponsive. The children remain quite unengaged, and that is precisely what has led to the need for the calculator. The very fact that the calculator was invented proves that math instruction is difficult to make concrete. But it is not enough to simply make it concrete; it must be drawn from life.