Riddle of Humanity is a cycle of fifteen lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered in Dornach between 29 July and 3 September 1916, gathered as Volume 170 of his collected works (the Gesamtausgabe). Speaking at the unfinished first Goetheanum during the strain of the First World War, Steiner takes up a single question and turns it slowly in the light: how does the whole cosmos, the great world or macrocosm, live again inside the human being, the small world or microcosm. From that question he unfolds one of his most precise pictures of human nature, the doctrine of the twelve senses and the seven life-processes, and shows how the riddle each person carries is woven from the meeting of the heavens and the body.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1916 Steiner had been lecturing within the anthroposophical movement for more than a decade, and the foundations laid in books such as Theosophy and Occult Science were now being deepened in cycles given to a working community at Dornach. The years 1915 to 1917 form a dense, inward-turning stretch of his teaching, shadowed by the war and devoted to the finer anatomy of soul and spirit. Riddle of Humanity belongs to this middle period, sitting close to the lectures on the riddle of the human being, on the senses, and on the relation of the living to the dead. Where the earlier writings sketch the broad evolution of cosmos and consciousness, this cycle works at close range on the inner instruments through which a person perceives, lives, and knows.
The setting matters to the content. Steiner spoke these lectures in the half-built first Goetheanum, the wooden double-domed building rising on the hill at Dornach, and he opens by thanking the friends whose hands had raised it through the months of separation. That sense of a spiritual work being formed in difficult times runs under the whole cycle. He returns again and again to the conviction that the truths of spiritual science are not given to satisfy curiosity but to help human beings meet an age in which the soul is becoming harder to understand. Read alongside the later educational and medical lectures, this volume supplies much of the sense-theory that anthroposophy would carry into Waldorf pedagogy and into the threefold picture of the human organism, where thinking, feeling, and willing are seen to live in distinct regions of the body.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens, surprisingly, with a case study. Steiner examines the Viennese writer Otto Weininger as a type of the modern soul whose intuitions of the future press too early and too violently into the present body, producing brilliance laced with derangement. From this living example he draws his governing theme: everything spread out in the great world of nature is gathered and condensed within the human being, and the disturbances of the soul are disturbances in how the cosmos and the body are tuned to one another.
The heart of the cycle is its account of the senses. Against the common belief in five senses, Steiner distinguishes twelve. The first group turns inward, reporting on our own bodily state: the sense of touch, the sense of life, the sense of self-movement, and the sense of balance. A middle group opens us to the outer world by degrees, from the faint reach of smell through taste, sight, warmth, and hearing. The highest group carries us into the inner being of what stands before us: the sense of word, by which we perceive meaning rather than mere sound; the sense of thought, by which we enter the concepts another forms; and the sense of ego, the direct and immediate perception of another person as an I. Steiner arranges these twelve as static zones around a circle, a kind of human zodiac mirroring the twelve constellations of the heavens.
Through these fixed zones a second, moving stream flows: the seven life-processes. These are breathing, warming, nourishing, secretion, maintenance, growth, and reproduction, the activities by which life is sustained and renewed. If the twelve senses correspond to the zodiac, the seven processes answer to the planets, wandering through the sense-zones and quickening each in turn. In one image Steiner offers the formula plainly:
The zones of the twelve senses can be seen as a kind of human zodiac.
Steiner is careful to separate senses that are easily confused. Touch tells us whether a thing is hard or soft and reaches no further than our own skin, while warmth lets us share in the very condition of the object, feeling its heat or cold as our own. Hearing reports the inner structure of a thing, as a struck metal reveals what sight can never show of its surface. The sense of word is not the sense of sound, for a phonograph can carry words cut off from any thinker, and the sense of ego is no inference drawn from gestures and expressions but a direct perception, as immediate as the seeing of a colour. These distinctions, drawn with patience across several lectures, are the cycle's lasting contribution.
From this scaffolding the later lectures range widely. Steiner traces the senses back through the ancient phases of cosmic evolution, the conditions he names Saturn, Sun, and Moon, showing how organs that were once living and dreamlike grew quieter and more fixed so that waking, free consciousness could arise. He notes that on the old Moon a rise or fall of warmth was felt so intensely that the whole sense of life changed with it, where today we merely observe that it is warm or cold. He turns to art, describing how painting allows the separate sense-zones of sight, warmth, taste, and smell to flow together and interpenetrate in a way ordinary perception keeps apart. Throughout, the moral note sounds: in an age when self-knowledge grows harder and the soul more entangled with itself, a true science of the human being is offered as a way to meet confusion with understanding rather than judgement.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following Thalira glossary entries draw on Riddle of Humanity as their primary source. Each one takes up a single thread of the cycle, the senses and the life-processes, and unfolds it in detail. Together they make this study guide the hub for the volume's vocabulary.
- Twelve Senses
- The Sense of Touch
- The Sense of Life
- The Sense of Self-Movement
- The Sense of Balance
- The Sense of Smell
- The Sense of Taste
- The Sense of Sight
- The Sense of Warmth
- The Sense of Hearing
- The Sense of Word
- The Sense of Thought
- The Sense of Ego
- The Seven Life-Processes
- The Breathing Process
- The Warming Process
- The Nourishing Process
Where to Read It
Thalira offers this page as a study guide, an orientation to the volume and a map of its ideas. The lectures themselves belong to their sources. You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, the open library of Steiner's work, at rsarchive.org, where the complete cycle is available in English translation. For the published edition and related titles, search the catalogue at SteinerBooks. We summarise and interpret; the primary text lives with these publishers and stewards of the original work.
Continue Your Study
The riddle of the human being opens onto many neighbouring paths. You might follow any of these as your interest leads:
- The twelve senses arrange themselves as a human zodiac, so the next natural step is the cosmos itself. Explore the planetary and zodiacal entries through the Thalira glossary.
- The life-processes carry this sense-theory toward growth and education, where it became part of Waldorf pedagogy and the study of the developing child.
- The macrocosm and microcosm theme, the great world living within the small, runs through Steiner's wider cosmology and his reading of Goethe's Faust.
- For the ground beneath all of this, the nature of thinking and the perceiving self, turn to his foundational work on freedom and cognition.