42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II
GA 246/1911-06-06/p009
·1911-06-06
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
If zoologists were to think about this fact, they would emphasize less that, for example, humans and animals have so and so many similar muscles and so on, because something like that is much less important than the fact that humans do not have their equilibrium position from the outset, because they first have to create it for themselves. It is tremendously significant that man must work on himself in order to transform himself from a creature that crawls on the ground into one that can walk upright. It is man himself who gives himself his vertical position, his equilibrium position in space, who brings himself into a relationship with gravity.
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