The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Over the course of this winter, we have engaged in a whole series of spiritual scientific considerations, all of which were imbued with a specific intention: to bring us ever closer to the human being in his or her entire being. We have examined the great mystery of the human being from a wide variety of angles. Today, our task is to talk about something quite ordinary. But perhaps it is precisely by taking up something quite ordinary that we will see how the mysteries of life can encounter us at every turn, how we can grasp them in order to look into the depths of the world order by overcoming them. For the spiritual and the highest in general are not to be sought somewhere in an unknown distance, but reveal themselves to us in the most everyday things. We can seek the greatest in the smallest things, if only we understand them. And that is why today's lecture in this year's winter lecture series includes a consideration of the everyday topics of laughter and tears from a spiritual scientific point of view.

[ 2 ] Laughter and tears are certainly everyday occurrences in human life. However, only spiritual science can provide a deeper understanding of these phenomena, because only spiritual science can lead us into the deepest essence of the human being, into that part of the human being through which he clearly distinguishes himself from the other realms that surround him on this earth. It is precisely because human beings have attained the greatest and most intense share of divinity on this earth that they rise above their earthly fellow creatures. Therefore, only knowledge and insight that rise to the spiritual can truly fathom the essence of human beings. Laughter and tears should be properly appreciated and observed, for they alone are capable of dispelling the prejudice that would have us believe that human beings are, in their essence, very close to animals. Those who like to bring humans as close as possible to animality may emphasize that we find a high intelligence in the various activities of animals, an intelligence that often far exceeds even the certainty that humans produce through their intellect. This does not particularly surprise the spiritual scientist. For he knows that when an animal performs an intelligent action, this does not originate from the individual animal, but from the group soul. It is, of course, very difficult to make the concept of the group soul comprehensible to external observation, to convince people of its existence, even if it is by no means impossible. But one thing should be observed, because it is accessible to any external observation, if one is willing to make it comprehensive enough: Animals do not cry or laugh. Certainly, there will always be people who claim that animals laugh and cry. But one cannot help such people who do not want to understand what laughter and crying actually are, and who, because they do not know what laughter and crying are, attribute them to animals. The true observer of the soul knows that animals cannot cry, but at most howl, and cannot laugh, but only grin. We must bear in mind this difference between howling and crying, and between grinning and laughing. We must go back to very significant events if we want to shed light on what constitutes the true nature of laughter and crying.

[ 3 ] From lectures given in various places, including Berlin, notably from the lecture on the nature of temperaments, it is memorable that two currents must be distinguished in human life: one current that encompasses all human characteristics and traits that are inherited from parents and other ancestors and that can in turn be passed on to descendants. The other current is composed of the qualities and characteristics that human beings have because they enter existence with an individuality. It surrounds the inherited characteristics only as if with a shell; its qualities and characteristics originate from the past lives of human beings, from previous incarnations.

[ 4 ] Human beings are therefore essentially dual: they inherit one nature from their fathers, and bring the other nature with them from their previous incarnations. We thus distinguish between the actual core of a human being, which passes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation, and everything that surrounds the human being, that forms around the core of their being and consists of inherited characteristics. Now, before a human being is born, the actual individual core of their being, which passes from incarnation to incarnation, is already connected with the human being as a physical being, so that one must not believe that, once a human being is born, their individuality can still be exchanged under normal circumstances. Individuality is already connected with the human body before birth.

[ 5 ] But it is something else when this core essence, this individuality of the human being, can begin to work on the human being, to shape the human being. So when the child is born, the individual core essence is already present in the child, as I have said. But before birth, it cannot assert itself as such, cannot bring into effect what it has acquired as abilities in its last life or in past lives; it must wait until after birth. So we can say that before birth, the causes of all those characteristics and qualities that belong to our inheritance, which we can inherit from our father, mother, and other ancestors, are active in the human being. Although, as we have said, the core of a person's being is already present in all of this, it cannot intervene in the whole mechanism until the child is born.

[ 6 ] Then, when the child has, so to speak, seen the light of day, this individual core of the person's being begins to transform the organism; this is, of course, under normal circumstances; in exceptional cases, it is different. It works on the brain and other organs so that they can become tools of this individual core essence. This is why we see that at birth, the child has more of the characteristics it has acquired through heredity, and then more and more of the individual characteristics work their way into the general nature of the organism. If we want to talk about the work of individuality on the organism before birth, that would belong in a completely different chapter. We could also say, for example, that even the selection of the parents is a work of individuality. But this, too, is basically a work from outside. All work before birth would be work from outside on the part of the individual core of being, through the mediation of the mother, for example, and so on. But the actual work of the individual core of being on the organism itself only begins when the child sees the light of day. Because this is so, it is only after birth that this truly human, individual aspect can gradually find expression in the human being.

[ 7 ] The child therefore initially shares certain characteristics with animals, and these are precisely the characteristics that find expression in what we want to discuss today: laughing and crying. In the very first period after birth, the child cannot laugh or cry in the true sense of the word. As a rule, it is only on the fortieth day after birth that the child begins to shed tears and then to smile, because what has been carried over from previous lives only begins to work at that point, only then does it sink into the inner body and from then on express itself through the body. This is precisely what gives humans their superiority over animals, that we cannot say of animals that an individual soul moves from incarnation to incarnation. What underlies the animal is the group soul, and we cannot say what is individual in the animal will reincarnate. It withdraws into the group soul and becomes something that lives on only in the group soul of the animal. In humans, only what they have worked out in one incarnation remains, and this then enters into a new incarnation when the human being has passed through the Devachan. In this new incarnation, it gradually transforms the organism so that it is not only an expression of the characteristics of its physical ancestors, but becomes an expression of the individual predispositions, talents, and so on.

[ 8 ] Now it is precisely the activity of the I in the organism that causes laughter and crying in a being such as the human being. Only in a being that has its I within itself, in which the I is not a group I as in animals, but is located within the organism, is laughter and crying possible. For laughter and crying are nothing other than a subtle, intimate expression of the ego in physicality. What happens, for example, when a person cries? Crying can only arise when the ego feels weak in some way in relation to what surrounds it in the external world. If the ego is not in the organism, that is, if it is not individual, then the feeling of weakness toward the outside world cannot arise. The human being, as the possessor of an ego, feels a certain discord, a certain disharmony in his relationship to the outside world. And this feeling of disharmony is expressed by his resistance to it, by his desire to compensate, so to speak. How does he compensate? By contracting his astral body. We can say that in grief, which is expressed in crying, the ego feels a certain disharmony with the outside world, which it seeks to compensate for by contracting the astral body within itself, pressing its forces together, as it were. This is the spiritual process underlying crying. Take crying as an expression of grief, for example. Grief must be examined closely in each individual case if we want to get to the bottom of it. Grief is, for example, the expression of being abandoned by something with which we have been together until now. The harmonious relationship between the ego and the outside world would exist if what we have lost were still there. Disharmony arises when we have lost something and the ego feels abandoned. Now the ego gathers the forces of its astral body, compresses the astral body, as it were, in order to defend itself against its abandonment. This is the expression of a grief that leads to crying, in which the ego, the fourth member of the human being, draws together the powers of the astral body, the third member.

[ 9 ] What is laughter? Laughter is something based on the opposite process. The ego seeks to make the astral body slack in a certain way, to let its forces spread out more, to expand it. While the state of crying is caused by contraction, laughter is brought about by allowing the astral body to relax and expand. This is the spiritual finding. Whenever crying occurs, clairvoyant consciousness can observe a compression of the astral body by the ego. Every time there is laughter, the astral body expands, becomes broader and more distended through the ego. It is only because the ego is active within the human being, and does not act from outside as a group ego, that laughter and crying occur. Because the ego only gradually begins to be active in the child, because at birth the ego is not yet active, has not yet, so to speak, taken hold of the threads that direct the organism from within, the child cannot laugh or cry in the first few days, but only learns to do so to the extent that the ego gains control over the inner threads that are initially active in the astral body. And because everything that is spiritual finds expression in the physical body, because the physical body is only the physiognomy of the spirit, the condensed spirit, these qualities that have now been described are also expressed in physical processes. And we learn to understand these physical processes from the spirit when we realize the following.

[ 10 ] Animals have a group soul, or we could also say a group ego. This group ego imprints its form upon them. Why do animals have such a definite, self-contained form? Because this form is imprinted upon them from the astral world and because they must essentially retain this form. In humans, there is a form which, as we have often emphasized, encompasses all other animal forms in harmonious wholeness. But this whole harmonious human form, the physical human body, must be more mobile than the animal body. It must not be frozen in form like the animal body. We can already see this in the mobile physiognomy of the human being. Look at the basically immobile physiognomy of the animal, how it confronts you in its rigidity. And contrast this with the mobile human form with its changes in gestures, physiognomy, and so on. You will be able to tell from this that human beings have a certain mobility within the limits that are, of course, imposed on them, that they have been left free in a certain way to shape themselves by means of the ego that dwells within them. It will not be easy for anyone to think of anything other than a comparative statement that intelligence is expressed individually in the face of a dog or a parrot to the same extent as in humans. In general, yes, but not individually, because in dogs, parrots, lions, or elephants, it is the general character that predominates. In humans, we find the individual character written on their faces. And we see how their particular individual soul becomes more and more plastic in their physiognomy, especially in what is mobile in their physiognomy. This mobility has remained with humans because humans can give themselves their form from within. It is the sublimity of humans over other realms that they can form and shape themselves.

[ 11 ] The moment the human being changes the general relationship of forces in their astral body through their ego, this also becomes physically apparent in the expression of their physiognomy. The ordinary facial expression, the ordinary tension of the muscles that the human being has from morning to evening, must change when the ego brings about a change in the forces of the astral body. When the ego, instead of keeping the astral body in its usual tension, allows it to become slack and expands it, then it will also act with less force on the etheric body and the physical body, and the result is that certain muscles, which in the usual balance of forces have this or that position, take on a different position. Therefore, when the astral body is made more relaxed by the ego during a certain expression of the mood, certain muscles must have a different tension than in the normal course of life. Thus, laughter is nothing more than the physical expression, the physiognomic expression of this relaxation of the astral body, which is brought about by the ego itself. It is the astral body that, under the influence of the ego, brings the muscles of the human being into those positions from within that give them their daily expression. When the astral body relaxes its tension, the muscles expand and the expression of laughter appears. Laughter is directly an expression of the inner work of the ego on the astral body. When the astral body is compressed by the ego under the influence of grief, this compression continues into the physical body, and the result is nothing other than the secretion of tears, which in a certain sense are like a discharge of blood under the influence of the compressed astral body. Such are the processes. Therefore, only a being that is capable of taking the individual ego into its essence and acting within itself through this individual ego can laugh and cry. Thus, the individuality of the I begins where the being becomes capable of either tensing or relaxing the forces of the astral body from within. Every time we stand before a person who smiles at us or who is crying, we are confronted with these facts, which prove the superiority of humans over animals. For in the astral body of the animal, the I works from outside. Therefore, all tensions in the animal astral body can only be caused from outside, and what is inside such an existence cannot be expressed outwardly, as is the case with laughter and crying.

[ 12 ] But we see even more in the process of laughing and crying when we observe the breathing process of the person laughing and the person crying. There we see in all its depth what is going on here. If you observe the breathing of the person crying, you will see that it consists essentially of a long exhalation and a short inhalation. The opposite is true when laughing: a short exhalation corresponds to a long inhalation. So the breathing process is something that changes in humans under the influence of the processes we have just described. And you only need to think about it a little with your imagination, and the reasons why this must be so will easily become apparent to you.

[ 13 ] In the process of crying, the astral body is contracted and compressed by the ego. The result is like squeezing out the air: a long exhalation. In the process of laughing, there is a relaxation of the astral body. It is just as if you were pumping the air out of a room, thinning the air, and the air whistles in. This is what happens during the long inhalation under the influence of laughter. We see, as it were, the I working within the astral body in the change in the breathing process. What is outside in animals, the group I, we observe in its activity in humans by seeing how the breathing process also changes during this peculiar activity. Let us therefore consider this process in its universal significance.

[ 14 ] We can say that in animals there is a breathing process that is strictly regulated from outside, so to speak, and is not subject to the inner individual I in the relationship described today. What sustains the breathing process, what actually regulates it, was called, for example, the “nephesh” in the secret teachings of the Old Testament. This is in truth what is called the “animal soul.” So what is a group ego in animals is the nephesh. And the Bible says quite correctly: And God breathed—or breathed into—the nephesh—the animal soul—into man, and man became a living soul in himself. This is, of course, very often misunderstood because in our time we are unable to read such profound writings, for we read in a one-sided manner. When it says, for example, “And God breathed into the man the nephesh, the animal soul,” this does not mean that He created it at that moment, but that it was already there. It does not say that it was not there before. It was present, externally. And what God did was to transfer what was previously present externally as a group soul into the inner being of man. It is essential to understand such an expression in its true depth. One might ask: What came into being as a result of the nephesh being transferred into the inner being of man? This made it possible for human beings to attain that superiority over animals which enabled them to develop their inner self, to laugh and cry, and thus to experience joy and pain in such a way that they work on them.

[ 15 ] This brings us to the significant effect that pain and joy have in life. If human beings did not have their ego within themselves, they would not be able to experience pain and joy inwardly, but these pains and joys would pass by them without substance. But since they have their ego within themselves and can work on their astral body and thus their entire physicality from within, pain and joy become forces that act upon them. What we experience as pain and joy in one incarnation, we incorporate into ourselves, we carry over into the next incarnation, and it works and creates in us. Therefore, one could say that pain and joy became creative forces in the world at the moment when human beings learned to cry and laugh, that is, at the moment when the human ego was transferred into the inner being. Here we have something everyday: crying and laughing. But we do not understand it if we do not know how the actual spiritual part of the human being works, what actually happens between the I and the astral body when a person cries or laughs.

[ 16 ] Now, however, what constitutes the human being is in a state of continuous development. The fact that human beings can laugh and cry in general comes from the fact that they can work on their astral body from their ego. That is certainly true. But on the other hand, the physical body and also the etheric body of the human being were already predisposed to the work of the I within them when the human being entered the first earthly incarnation. The human being was capable of it. If one could press an individual I into a horse, it would feel extremely unhappy there because it could do nothing, because it could find no expression for the individual work of the I. Imagine an individual ego in a horse. The individual ego would want to work on the horse's astral body, contract it or expand it, and so on. But when an astral body is connected to a physical body and an etheric body, the physical and etheric bodies form a terrible obstacle if they cannot adapt to the forms of the astral body. It is like fighting against a wall. The self in the horse's nature would want to contract the astral body, but the physical body and etheric body would not go along with it, and the result would be that the horse would go mad because the physical body and etheric body would not go along with it. Human beings had to be predisposed to such activity from the outset. This could only be achieved by acquiring a physical body from the outset that could truly become an instrument for the ego and could gradually be controlled by the ego. Therefore, the following can also occur: The physical body and the etheric body can be mobile in themselves, so to speak, true carriers of the I, but the I can be very undeveloped, unable to exercise proper control over the physical body and the etheric body. This can be seen in the fact that the physical body and the etheric body appear as a shell for the I, but not in such a way that they are a complete expression of the I. This is the case with people whose laughter and crying occur involuntarily, who complain at every opportunity and have no control over their laughing muscles. In this way, they show their higher humanity in the physical body and etheric body, but at the same time they show that they have not yet brought their humanity under the control of the ego. This is why grumbling laughter is so unpleasant. It shows that a person is higher through what they cannot help than through what they can already do. It always seems particularly fatal when a being does not prove itself equal to what has been given to it from outside. Thus, laughter and crying are, in a certain sense, expressions of human egoism, which is already evident from the fact that they can only arise because the ego dwells in the human being. Crying can be an expression of the most terrible egoism, for crying is, in a certain sense, all too often a kind of inner lust. The person who feels abandoned draws his astral body together with his ego. He seeks to make himself strong inwardly because he feels weak outwardly. And he then feels this inner strength through the fact that he can do something, namely produce tears. And there is always a certain feeling of satisfaction—whether one admits it or not—associated with the production of tears. Just as under certain other circumstances a kind of satisfaction is produced when someone smashes a chair, so when tears are shed there is often nothing more than the lust of inner production, the lust masked by tears, even if the person is not aware of it.

[ 17 ] That laughter is in a certain way an expression of egoism, of selfhood, may be seen from the fact that, if you really follow it, laughter can always be traced back to the fact that a person feels superior to his surroundings and to what is happening in his surroundings. Why does a person laugh? He always laughs when he places himself above what he observes. You will always find this statement to be true. Whether you laugh at yourself or at someone else, your ego is basically such that it feels superior to something. And in this feeling of superiority, it expands the powers of its astral body, broadens itself, puffs itself up. That is, strictly speaking, what really underlies laughter. That is why laughter can be so healthy, and one must not condemn all egoism, this puffing oneself up, in the abstract, because laughter can be very healthy if it strengthens people's self-esteem, if it is justified, if it leads people beyond themselves. When you see something in your environment, in yourself or in others, that is actually nonsense, there is a sense of sublimity above the nonsense that is going on and makes you laugh. It must happen that the human being feels sublimated above something in his environment, and the ego expresses this by expanding the astral body.

[ 18 ] If you understand in the breathing process what we have just tried to make clear in the sentence: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and the man became a living soul,” then you will also feel the connection with what laughter and crying are, because you know that laughter and crying change the breathing process itself in the human being. We have thus shown how even the most everyday things can only be understood when we start from the spiritual. Only by understanding the connection between the four members of the human being can we understand laughter and crying. Just think that in times when people still had certain clairvoyant traditions and at the same time the ability to visualize the gods out of their imagination, out of a true imagination, they depicted the gods as cheerful beings whose main characteristic was cheerfulness, laughter in a certain sense. And it is not without reason that howling and gnashing of teeth were attributed to those regions of the world where something like exaggerated egoism prevails. Why? Because laughter, on the one hand, means rising above oneself, lifting the ego above its surroundings, i.e., the victory of the higher over the lower, while crying means crouching down, withdrawing from the outside world, becoming small and feeling abandoned by the ego, withdrawing into oneself. As moving as grief is in human life, because we know that this grief will be overcome and must be overcome, grief and crying appear very different, not moving but hopeless, in a world where they can no longer be overcome. There they appear as the expression of damnation, of being cast into darkness.

[ 19 ] We must pay close attention to these feelings that can overcome us when we consider in a broader sense what emerges as the work of the ego on itself in human beings, and we must follow them into their most intimate forms. Then we will have understood many things that we encounter in the course of time. We must be aware that behind the physical world there is a spiritual world, and that what appears to us in human life as laughter and tears, when we encounter it separately, appears to us on the one hand as the bright cheerfulness of heaven and on the other as the dark, bitter sadness of hell. These two sides are absolutely fundamental to our middle world, and we must understand our middle world by recognizing that it derives its powers from these two realms.

[ 20 ] We will learn many more things about the nature of human beings. But I would like to say that one of the most intimate chapters on this human being is that of laughter and crying, even though laughter and crying are such everyday activities. Animals do not laugh or cry because they do not have the drop of divinity within them that human beings carry in their ego. And we can say that when a human being begins to smile and cry in the course of his life, this can be proof for those who know how to read the great script of nature that something divine truly lives within the human being, that when a human being laughs, the God within him is at work, trying to lift him above all that is base. For smiling and laughing are an elevation. And that when a person cries, it is God who admonishes them that this self could be lost if it does not strengthen itself against all weakness and feelings of abandonment. It is the God in man who gives the soul its admonitions in laughter and in tears. Hence, one might say, the bitter feeling that overwhelms those who understand life when they see unnecessary crying. For unnecessary crying betrays that, instead of living and feeling with the environment, the lust to be in one's own self is too great. But the feeling that can overcome someone who understands the world in this way is also harsh when they find the elevation of the ego above its surroundings, which is otherwise expressed in healthy laughter, as an end in itself, as laughter at everything possible, as malicious judgment of someone else. For then the person concerned says to himself: if the ego does not take everything it can extract from its surroundings, if it does not want to live with its surroundings but instead elevates its ego above them without justification, then this ego will not have the necessary weight, the upward weight that can only be sought by extracting everything from one's surroundings that can be extracted for the development of the ego. And then the ego will fall back, will not be able to rise. It is precisely this beautiful balance between pain and joy that can contribute so enormously to human development. When pain and joy have their justification in the environment and do not lie within oneself, when the ego continually seeks to establish the right relationship with the environment between pain and joy, then pain and joy can be right factors in human development.

[ 21 ] Great poets therefore often find such beautiful words for that pain and that joy which are not somehow rooted in arrogance or in the ego being compressed within itself, but which have their cause in the relationship between the ego and the environment, which has been thrown out of balance from outside and which alone explains why human beings laugh and why they cry. We can understand this because we know that it is in the external world, through the external world, that the relationship between the ego and the external world is disturbed. So humans must laugh or cry, whereas if it were only within humans, we would not be able to understand why humans laugh or cry, since it would then always be unfounded egoism. That is why it is so beautiful when Homer says of Andromache, when she is under the double impression of worry for her husband and worry for her infant: “She could laugh and cry!” This is a wonderful expression, one might say, for something normal in crying. She does not laugh for her own sake, she does not cry for her own sake. There is a proper relationship to the outside world when she has to worry about her husband on the one hand and her child on the other. And here we have the relationship between laughter and crying, which balance each other out: smiling while crying – crying while laughing. This is often also the expression of a naive child, whose ego is not yet as hardened as it later becomes in adults, so that they can still laugh while crying and cry while laughing. And it is again the case with the wise: those who have overcome their ego to such an extent that they do not seek the reasons for laughing and crying within themselves, but find them in the outside world, can also laugh while crying and cry while laughing. Yes, in what passes us by every day, if we understand it, we have the full expression of the spiritual. Laughter and crying are something that we can call, in the highest sense, the physiognomy of the divine in human beings.