7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?
GA 68b/1907-01-21/p026
·1907-01-21
·
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: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
We start from the physical birth of the human being and realize what this represents. Before this birth, the human germ is closed off from the outside world. It rests in the mother's body; the physical human body is surrounded on all sides by another physical matter, and birth means that this enveloping matter is pushed back and that which has developed as organs in the human body is directly exposed to the external physical world. Thus, physical birth is a pushing back of the physical shell and a free emergence of the human body into the physical environment.
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