Scientific Disciplines and Anthroposophy

GA 73a — 2 September 1921, Stuttgart

21. Contribution to the public congress “Cultural Outlooks of the Anthroposophical Movement”

Preliminary remark: In connection with the significance of the individual senses, the participant in the discussion, Dr. Hehnel (?), had pointed out the impressive example of Helen Keller, who, despite her multiple disabilities, has undergone an amazing development.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Hehnel has just raised an extremely important problem of a physiological-epistemological nature, and you will not consider it immodesty on my part if I interject a few words here, since I have to leave shortly - I would otherwise have done so at the end of the discussion. What Dr. Hehnel has said is something of eminent significance, and until these matters that have been raised here are thoroughly addressed, the problems at hand cannot be solved.

Now I would just like to point out that it was precisely this problem, which has now been pointed out in a commendable way, that compelled me, many years ago in Berlin, in lectures that I virtually titled “Anthroposophy”, to initially

AIR Art Sense Doctrine. And at the time I was obliged to abandon the book [I wanted to write about the sense doctrine], which had already been partially printed, because the material required further work. But I can say that work in this direction is in full swing within the overall anthroposophical endeavour. At the time, it was a matter of showing the different evaluation of that which is given on the one hand, I would like to say at the one pole of the human sense life, for which the sense of sight is of course particularly decisive, and how on the other hand something completely different is present - also in the experience of the human being - at the other pole of the human sense life, which now completely pushes into the motor life.

That is why I was obliged at the time to set the total number of our senses — which initially seems paradoxical — at twelve and not at the usual number that we otherwise have. If we go to the motor pole of sensory life, then we are indeed obliged not to limit this motor pole of sensory life to the sense of touch alone, but to carefully distinguish and analyze how touch, but also the sense of balance and the sense of movement, and so on, are incorporated into this motor pole of experience. These matters are still in the stage of, I would say, unstable research activity, and basically they must first be clearly formulated.

You see, my dear audience, if we stick to the one pole for which the sense of sight is particularly characteristic, we always enter a world for which we actually have no criterion of existence in our ordinary consciousness – concepts are always somewhat inadequate if we want to define them precisely. On the other hand, if you go to the other pole, you always come across certain experiences that at the same time carry the experience of being in the most eminent sense and actually, from certain physiological-psychological backgrounds, of which I have often, even very often spoken in my lectures, through preconditions that lie in all human nature, actually guarantee being.

As for those experiences that would never actually carry existence within them, at least not in the ordinary consciousness, and that lie at the other pole, I have once pointed out – it is indeed, I would say, compendiously formulated, which should actually be the subject of a [comprehensive] book – I have pointed out that only with a certain experience, which then takes place in that realm which I have called the imaginative realm, one is justified in speaking of concepts of being, that this only shows itself from the moment when one is able, in subjective experience, let us say, for example, in subjective experience of color, to carry the sense of equilibrium and movement up into the visual field, at least in suggestion. And on the other hand, it is again possible in a certain way in human experience to carry the experiences of the sense of sight down, if only, I might say, in a shadowy way, into those sensory areas that one must supplement only — as has rightly been emphasized — with one more sense: the sense of touch with the sense of movement and balance. Thus, for example, in the case of Helen Keller, when analyzed from a psychological point of view, the sense of balance comes into consideration in an outstanding way.

If these experiences are carried down, then it is possible that a case like that of Helen Keller will arise, and we will not arrive at an exhaustive characteristic of the so-called higher senses – I call them the visual senses or perceptual senses – if we are not able to carry the constructive elements that we obtain for the sense of touch into this area in a certain way. On the other hand, we must regain the ability to bring into what we call the will senses — I have often used this expression, and those who have heard my lectures will remember how I tried to extract the concepts from the human being — we must, on the other hand, bring into these will senses certain, I would say side effects from the image senses. We must be clear about the fact that without working on this field, which has been addressed here in such a commendable way, we would actually gradually come to develop a theory that would only take the pictorial out of the whole range of what is to be experimented on, and that we have to listen very carefully to precisely such things.

It is extraordinarily interesting to look at other cultural phenomena from this point of view. Consider, for example, what we produce in our pictorial art. In this age, when perspective has taken hold, the picturesque has been projected more or less solely through the sense of sight – this point in time can be easily identified in cultural history, it is not so far in the past. It was roughly in the 11th, 12th, 13th century that this transition became clearly apparent, that the painterly was first incorporated into the perspective, that is, into the ocular. If we go back further, we find that something much more universal, a human experience, underlies [the picturesque], that perspective recedes and that what man experiences, so to speak, when he immerses himself in the world with his naked senses, that is actually found in pictures. That is again a brief suggestion, and it would take a thick book to fully elaborate.

But it is interesting that someone – I can't remember his name at the moment – said with great justification: If you look at Japanese painting, you get the feeling that the vanishing point of perspective is assumed not outside but inside the human being. – In a certain way, if you paint in a more 'primitive' way, you actually do paint from the center. But then, of course, one can simply paint purely with one's eyes, and this will appear before us in a completely different way [from Japanese painting]. So one can say - and this is the crucial point that I want to emphasize very strongly in my lectures - that this object-consciousness, which I certainly do not find mentioned here as something that would be, say, a profanation, but on the contrary that this object-consciousness, which we have now finally arrived at in the course of the development of scientific research, should be taken into account everywhere, so that anthroposophy is actually founded on the condition that everything that modern science can give is taken into account. Otherwise, anthroposophy will enter into the realm of nebulous mysticism, because, on the one hand, in the development of human knowledge, we run the risk of getting lost in the senses of will, growing more and more into existence, but losing the possibility of gaining imagery from existence. On the other hand, we run the risk of living ourselves into the pictorial senses and then experiencing what Dilthey described as what would happen if we only perceived things in a fashioned way through the sense of sight. We would then have to live in a world of mere images, and we must guard against this danger by having an anthroposophy that is firmly grounded in reality.

You will have sensed that one thing emerged sharply – and rightly so – from the extraordinarily interesting words of the previous speaker: namely, that Helen Keller was able to undergo a certain spiritual and psychological development despite the fact that she lacked the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, and that the other senses, such as the sense of smell and the sense of taste, I believe, were atrophied. Nevertheless, it was possible to enable her to have a very extensive spiritual and emotional experience with the help of her sense of balance, movement and touch. And it was said that one should imagine that a person had only developed the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, but not the sense of balance, the sense of touch and the sense of movement – what would happen then? It was rightly said that what happened to Helen Keller could not happen to these volitional senses: it would not be possible, if the volitional senses were then absent, to transfer the experiences to the sense of sight.

But there is something else to be said about this, which seems to me to be extremely important and significant. It is precisely at the point, which is, so to speak, a point at an abyss, where one must pass from the pictorial to the real, where one must also pass with one's comprehension from this pictorial to the real, [and it is precisely this point that matters], and that is: A person like Helen Keller, who lacks the senses of sight and hearing and has the other senses by virtue of his or her physical organization, can exist in this world of air and soil, and even develop to a certain extent. But a person who only has the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, cannot develop on this earth in the air and on the ground, and cannot even come into existence at all – such a person does not exist within our earthly existence, it is unthinkable. This sharply defines the relationship – initially only conceptually – between the visual senses and the will senses, based on reality.

Thus an important problem has been raised in the most eminent sense, and I see it as my sole task to point out in a few words that this problem is felt within anthroposophy, and that we do not want to fall back into a nebulous mysticism by merely adhering to the higher senses, but that we want to work in full harmony with the justified spirit of scientific research of modern times.