The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. True Knowledge of the Human Being as the Basis of the Medical Arts

[ 1 ] In this paper, new possibilities for medical knowledge and skill are pointed out. One will only be able to judge what is presented correctly if one is able to engage with the points of view that were guiding when the medical views spoken of here came about.

[ 2 ] This is not an opposition to medicine working with the recognized scientific methods of the present. We fully recognize its principles. And we are of the opinion that what we have given should only be used in the art of medicine by those who can be fully valid doctors in the sense of these principles.

[ 3 ] Only we add to what can be known about man with the scientific methods recognized today, further insights that are found by other methods, and therefore see ourselves compelled to work for an expansion of the medical art from this expanded knowledge of the world and man.

[ 4 ] An objection to recognized medicine cannot in principle be made against what we put forward, since we do not deny it. Only those who not only demand that we must affirm their knowledge, but who also claim that we may not put forward any knowledge that goes beyond their own, can reject our attempt from the outset.

[ 5 ] We see the expansion of knowledge of the world and the human being in the anthroposophy founded by Rudolf Steiner. It adds to the knowledge of the physical human being, which can only be gained through the scientific methods of the present, that of the spiritual human being. It does not pass from knowledge of the physical to knowledge of the spiritual through mere reflection. In this way, one is only faced with more or less well-conceived hypotheses, of which no one can prove that they correspond to anything in reality.

[ 6 ] Before anthroposophy makes statements about the spiritual, it develops the methods that entitle it to make such statements. To gain an insight into these methods, consider the following: All the results of currently recognized natural science are basically derived from the impressions of the human senses. For even if man expands what the senses can give him through experimentation or observation with tools, this does not add anything essentially new to the experiences about the world in which man lives through his senses.

[ 7 ] But also through thinking, insofar as it is active in the exploration of the physical world, nothing new is added to the sensory given. Thinking combines, analyzes, etc. the sensory impressions in order to arrive at laws (laws of nature); but the investigator of the sensory world must say to himself: this thinking that springs forth from me does not add anything real to what is real in the sensory world.

[ 8 ] But this immediately changes if one does not stop at the thinking to which man initially brings himself through life and education. You can reinforce and strengthen this way of thinking. One can place simple, easily comprehensible thoughts at the center of consciousness and then, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, keep all the soul's strength on such ideas. Just as a muscle strengthens when it is repeatedly tensed in the direction of the same force, so the power of the soul strengthens in relation to the area that otherwise governs the mind when it performs exercises in the manner indicated. It must be emphasized that these exercises must be based on simple, easily comprehensible thoughts. For the soul, while doing such exercises, must not be exposed to any influences of a half or completely unconscious mind. (We can only give the principle of such exercises here; a detailed description and instructions on how to do such exercises in detail can be found in Rudolf Steiner's "How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds", in his "Secret Science" and in other anthroposophical writings.)

[ 9 ] It is obvious to raise the objection that someone who devotes himself with all his strength to certain thoughts that have moved to the center of consciousness is exposed to all kinds of autosuggestions and the like, and that he simply enters the realm of imagination. Anthroposophy alone shows at the same time how the exercises must proceed so that this objection is completely unjustified. It shows how one progresses within the consciousness, in a fully prudent manner, while practicing, in the same way as when solving an arithmetical or geometrical problem. Just as the conscious mind cannot slip into the unconscious anywhere, neither can it do so during the indicated practice if the anthroposophical instructions are followed correctly.

[ 10 ] In the course of this practice, one comes to a strengthening of the thinking power of which one previously had no idea. One feels the active thinking power within oneself as a new content of the human being. And at the same time as this content of one's own human being, a world content is revealed that one may have previously suspected but not known through experience. If one looks at ordinary thinking in moments of introspection, one finds the thoughts shadowy, pale in comparison to the impressions given by the senses.

[ 11 ] What one now perceives in the intensified power of thought is by no means pale and shadowy; it is full of content, concrete-image-like; it is of a much more intense reality than the content of the sensory impressions. A new world opens up to man by expanding the power of his perceptive faculty in the manner described.

[ 12 ] When man learns to perceive in this world as he could previously only perceive within the sensory world, he realizes that all the laws of nature which he had previously known apply only in the physical world; and that the essence of the world which he has now entered consists in the fact that its laws are different, indeed the opposite of those of the physical world. In this world the law of attraction of the earth does not apply, but on the contrary, a force appears which does not work outwards from the center of the earth, but the other way round, so that its direction goes from the circumference of the universe to the center of the earth. And it is the same with the other forces of the physical world.

[ 13 ] In anthroposophy, the human being's ability to see this world, acquired through practice, is called the imaginative power of cognition. Imaginative not because we are dealing with "imaginations", but because the content of consciousness is not filled with shadows of thought, but with images. And just as one feels oneself in a reality through sensory perception in direct experience, so too in the soul activity of imaginative cognition. Anthroposophy calls the world to which this cognition relates the etheric world. This is not the hypothetical ether of contemporary physics, but something that is really spiritually seen. The name is given in harmony with older instinctive intuitions of this world. These no longer have any cognitive value compared to what can be clearly recognized at present; but if you want to describe something, you need names.

[ 14 ] Within this etheric world, an etheric corporeality is perceptible alongside the physical corporeality of the human being.

[ 15 ] This etheric corporeality is something that is also found in the plant world. Plants have an etheric body. The physical laws actually only apply to the world of lifeless minerals.

[ 16 ] The plant world is possible on earth because there are substances in the earthly world that do not remain determined within the physical laws, but that can discard all physical lawfulness and assume one that is contrary to it. The physical laws act as if emanating from the earth, the etheric laws act as if flowing towards the earth from all sides of the world's circumference. The development of the plant world can only be understood if one sees in it the interaction of the earthly physical and the cosmic etheric. And so it is with regard to the etheric body of man. Through it something happens in man which does not lie in the continuation of the lawful working of the forces of the physical body, but which has as its basis that the physical substances, by flowing into it, first get rid of their physical forces.

[ 17 ] These forces active in the etheric body were active at the beginning of human life on earth - most clearly during the embryonic period - as forces of formation and growth. In the course of life on earth, a part of these forces emancipates itself from the activity of formation and growth and becomes thinking forces, precisely those forces that produce the shadowy world of thoughts for the ordinary consciousness.

[ 18 ] It is of the utmost importance to know that man's ordinary powers of thought are the refined powers of formation and growth. In the shaping and growth of the human organism a spiritual is revealed. For this spiritual then appears in the course of life as the spiritual thinking power.

[ 19 ] And this thinking power is only a part of the human formative and growth power blowing in the etheric. The other part remains true to the task it had at the beginning of human life. Only because the human being, when his formation and growth are advanced, that is, completed to a certain degree, continues to develop, can the etheric-spiritual, which weaves and lives in the organism, appear in further life as thinking power.

[ 20 ] So the imaginative spiritual view reveals itself as an etheric-spiritual force from one side, which appears from the other side as the soul-content of thought. If one now follows the substantiality of the earth substances into the ether formation, one must say: these substances take on an essence wherever they enter this formation, through which they alienate themselves from physical nature. In this alienation they enter a world in which the spiritual meets them and transforms them into its own being.

[ 21 ] This ascent to the etheric-living essence of man, as described here, is something essentially different from the unscientific assertion of a "life force", which was still common until the middle of the nineteenth century to explain living bodies. Here we are dealing with the real contemplation - the spiritual perception - of a beingness that is just as present in man as in all living things as the physical body. And in order to bring about this contemplation, we do not continue to think in an indeterminate way with ordinary thinking; nor do we invent another world through the imagination; rather, human cognition is expanded in a very precise way, and this expansion also results in the experience of an expanded world.

[ 22 ] The exercises that bring about a higher perception can be continued. Just as one applies an increased power to concentrate on thoughts that one has brought to the center of consciousness, one can also apply such an increased power to suppress the acquired imaginations (images of a spiritual-etheric reality). Then one attains the state of completely empty consciousness. One is merely awake, without initially being awake having any content. (More details can be found in the books mentioned above.) But this wakefulness without content does not remain. Consciousness, which has become empty of all physical and etheric-visual impressions, is filled with a content that flows to it from a real spiritual world, just as impressions flow to the physical senses from the physical world.

[ 23 ] Through imaginative cognition one has come to know a second member of the human being; through the filling of the empty consciousness with spiritual content one comes to know a third member. Anthroposophy calls the cognition that comes about in this way that which comes about through inspiration. (One should not be misled by these expressions; they are taken from an instinctive way of seeing into spiritual worlds belonging to primitive times; but what is meant by them here is said exactly). And the world into which one gains entrance through inspiration is called the astral world. - When we speak of the "etheric world", as we have done here, we mean the effects that work from the world towards the earth. If, however, we speak of the "astral world", we pass, in accordance with what the inspired consciousness observes, from the effects from the world's circumference to certain spirit-entities which manifest themselves in these effects, just as the earthly substances manifest themselves in the forces emanating from the earth. One speaks of concrete spirit-entities working from the world's distances, just as one speaks of stars and constellations when looking at the night sky with the senses. Hence the expression "astral world". In this astral world, man carries the third member of his being: his astral body.

[ 24 ] Earthly materiality must also flow into this astral body. It thus alienates itself further from its physical essence. - Just as man shares his etheric body with the plant world, so he shares his astral body with the animal world.

[ 25 ] The actual human essence that lifts man above the animal world is recognized through an even higher form of cognition than inspiration. Anthroposophy speaks of intuition. In inspiration a world of spiritual beings is revealed; in intuition the relationship of the cognizing human being to this world becomes a closer one. One brings to full consciousness that which is purely spiritual, of which one experiences directly in the conscious experience that it has nothing to do with the experience through corporeality. Thereby one puts oneself into a life that is such as a human spirit among other spiritual beings. In inspiration, the spiritual entities of the world reveal themselves; through intuition, one lives with these entities.

[ 26 ] Through this, one arrives at the recognition of the fourth member of the human being, the actual "I". Again one becomes aware of how the earthly materiality, by integrating itself into the weaving and being of the "I", alienates itself even further from its physical being. The entity that takes on this materiality as an "I-organization" is initially the form of earth matter in which it is most alienated from its earthly-physical nature.

[ 27 ] What we come to know in this way as the "astral body" and "I" is not bound to the physical body in the human organization in the same way as the etheric body. Inspiration and intuition show how in sleep the "astral body" and "I" are separated from the physical and etheric body, and how only in the waking state is there a complete penetration of the four members of human nature into the human unified being. In sleep, the physical and etheric human bodies remain in the physical and etheric world. However, they are not in the position in which the physical and etheric bodies of a plant being are. They carry within them the after-effects of the astral and ego entities. And the moment they would no longer carry these after-effects within them, awakening must occur. A human physical body must never be subject to mere physical effects, a human etheric body never to mere etheric effects. They would disintegrate as a result.

[ 28 ] Now, however, inspiration and intuition reveal something else. Physical materiality undergoes a further development of its essence by transitioning to weaving and life in the etheric. And life depends on the organic body being torn from the essence of the earthly and built up from the extraterrestrial universe. But this alone does not lead to consciousness and not to self-consciousness. The astral body must build up its organization within the physical and the etheric; the ego must do the same in relation to the ego organization. But in this building up there is no conscious unfolding of the soul life. In order for this to come about, the building up must be contrasted with a breaking down. The astral body builds up its organs; it breaks them down again by allowing the activity of feeling to unfold in the consciousness of the soul; the ego builds up its "ego organization"; it breaks it down again by allowing the activity of will to become effective in self-consciousness.

[ 29 ] The spirit unfolds within the human being not on the basis of constructive material activity, but on that of degradative activity. Where spirit is to work in man, matter must withdraw from its activity.

[ 30 ] Even the emergence of thought within the etheric body is not based on a continuation of the etheric being, but on a degradation of it. The conscious thinking happens not in processes of forming and growth, but in those of de-forming and withering, dying, which are continuously incorporated into the etheric events.

[ 31 ] In conscious thinking, thoughts are detached from bodily formations and become human experiences as mental formations.

[ 32 ] If one now looks at the human being on the basis of such a knowledge of man, one realizes how one can only see through both the entire human being and an individual organ if one knows how the physical, the etheric, the astral body and the ego work in it. There are organs in which the ego is primarily active; there are others in which the ego is only slightly active, while the physical organization predominates.

[ 33 ] Just as one can only see through the healthy human being if one recognizes how the higher members of the human being take possession of the earthly substance in order to force it into their service, and if one also recognizes how the earthly substance changes by entering the sphere of activity of the higher members of the human nature; so one can only understand the sick human being if one recognizes the situation in which the whole organism or an organ or a series of organs find themselves when the functioning of the higher members becomes irregular And one will only be able to think of remedies if one develops a knowledge of how an earth substance or earth process relates to the etheric, to the astral, to the ego. For only then will it be possible, by inserting an earth substance into the human organism, or by treating it with an earth activity, to bring about that the higher members of the human being can unfold unhindered, or also that the earth materiality finds the necessary support in what has been added, in order to get on the path on which it becomes the basis for earthly work of the spiritual.

[ 34 ] Man is what he is through body, etheric body, soul (astral body) and I (spirit). He must be seen as a healthy person out of these members; he must be perceived as a sick person in the disturbed balance of these members; remedies must be found for his health that restore the disturbed balance.

[ 35 ] A medical view based on such foundations is indicated in this writing.