The Supersensible Human Being is the study we give here to the material catalogued as GA 71 in the collected works of Rudolf Steiner. GA 71 is a volume of public lectures, addresses Steiner gave to general audiences rather than to members of his society, drawn from the years of the First World War and the period just after it. In the modern edition the number is split into two parts, GA 71a and GA 71b, and the English translations of these single evenings are gathered under the heading Reincarnation and Immortality. Across five representative lectures given between 1916 and 1922, in Basel, Stuttgart, Zurich, and Elberfeld, Steiner circles a single question: what is the human being when we look past the body to the spirit and soul that outlast it. His governing theme is the supersensible core of a person, approached through the twin riddles of free will and immortality.
Place in Steiner's Work
These are public lectures, and that setting shapes everything about them. Steiner drew a firm line between the lectures he gave to members of the Anthroposophical Society, where he could assume shared vocabulary and years of study, and the evenings like these, offered to whoever bought a ticket in a rented hall. In the public lectures he had to begin from nothing. He could not lean on prior terms; he had to earn every step in front of listeners who might be hearing him for the first time and who often arrived skeptical. GA 71 belongs to that second, outward-facing body of work, and it is one of the clearest windows into how Steiner tried to make his spiritual research answerable to a general, educated audience.
The dates matter too. The core lectures fall in 1916 and 1918, in the middle of the war, when questions of death and destiny were not academic for anyone in the room. Steiner returns again and again to what science can and cannot reach, and he does so with unusual care to sound reasonable rather than visionary. He praises the achievements of natural science warmly, then argues that its methods, however powerful, stop short of the very thing his listeners most want to know: the being of a person that is not born with the body and does not die with it. The volume sits close in spirit to his earlier philosophical book, The Philosophy of Freedom, which he cites directly, and it can be read as an attempt to carry that book's argument about freedom into the language of his later spiritual science.
Because these were single occasions in different cities, the lectures do not build a system. Each one starts over, re-introduces the method, and reaches the same country by a slightly different road. That repetition is part of their value. A reader who wants to understand how Steiner argued in the open, without insider shorthand, will find here five careful re-entries into the same set of ideas.
Themes and Structure
The opening lecture, given in Stuttgart in April 1918, takes free will and immortality as its double subject and insists the two cannot be studied apart. Steiner begins with an ordinary puzzle borrowed from a contemporary scientist: a man laughs at the sight of a book about mollusks and only later, with his eyes closed, notices a distant barrel organ playing a tune he once danced to. The point is that much of our inner life is stirred by causes we never register. From this small example Steiner builds toward a method of self-knowledge that does not simply catalogue such hidden promptings but asks where genuine judgment and genuine freedom come from at all.
His answer runs through three stages of knowing that he names imagination, inspiration, and intuition. These are not the everyday senses of those words. Imagination, in his usage, is a trained inner seeing of living pictures; inspiration is the further step of making those pictures transparent so that a spiritual world sounds through them; intuition is entering that world and knowing its beings from within. Steiner is careful to fence this off from dreaming, from vision, from hypnotic states, and from ordinary fantasy. Everything, he says, must be done in full waking clarity, with the same discipline a chemist brings to the laboratory. This methodological warning recurs in every lecture and is one of the volume's steadiest notes.
The most striking idea in the collection is a reading of the human body as threefold and, in two of its regions, as growing against the ordinary grain of nature. The head, Steiner argues, does not simply build up; it also breaks down, undernourishing itself so that room is made for thought. Every clear idea, he says, is a small condition of hunger in the head. The limbs, by contrast, are over-developed, carrying more than the body needs for its own preservation. From this polarity he draws his boldest claim: our thinking is an unconscious form of inspiration streaming in from the life we led before birth, while our limbs bear an unconscious imagination, the seed of what passes through death into the life to come. Freedom, on this account, is not a property of the mortal body at all. The truly free deed, the one done purely out of love and insight rather than instinct or advantage, is carried out by the immortal part of the person. As Steiner puts it in the Stuttgart lecture, the truly free action is the one performed out of love. He states the connection plainly:
Free will can only be the possession of an immortal being.
The other lectures widen the frame. The second Stuttgart evening turns to the historical life of humanity, asking what spiritual forces move behind the visible record of history. The Basel lecture of 1916, The Supersensible Being of Man, opens with the philosopher Fichte challenging his students first to think a wall and then to think the one who thought it, a device Steiner uses to show how thinking can turn back on itself and begin the path inward. The Elberfeld lecture defines the nature of anthroposophy itself, distinguishing it sharply from mysticism and from loose occult enthusiasm, and warning against the illusion by which a buried sense impression, resurfacing years later, is mistaken for a revelation of the eternal. The Zurich lecture takes up the mystery of the human being as a whole. Read together, the five give a rounded picture of a method that always begins from honest doubt, passes through disciplined inner work, and arrives at a view of the person as a spiritual being on the road from before birth toward what lies after death.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
One entry in the Thalira glossary draws its source material directly from GA 71. The term traces its idea back to the opening lecture on free will and immortality, where Steiner recasts the unconscious not as a dim cellar of the mind but as the working of inspiration that has not yet risen into daylight.
In the Stuttgart lecture Steiner takes the barrel-organ example and turns it around. Where the science of his day treated the unconscious as a store of half-noticed impressions pushing us about from below, he argues that our very thinking, when it judges one idea right and another wrong, is itself an unconscious form of inspiration reaching in from a life before birth. The unconscious, in this reading, is less a basement than a threshold, the edge across which the supersensible works into ordinary experience. The glossary entry above unfolds that redefinition in full.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of these public lectures under the collection titled Reincarnation and Immortality, lecture by lecture, often beside the original German. The Archive is the most convenient way to read each evening in sequence and to check the summaries offered here against Steiner's own words.
For a printed edition or related titles from the public-lecture years, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because GA 71 is split across the parts 71a and 71b in the modern German edition, and its individual lectures have appeared in English in several gatherings, a catalogue search is the surest way to find the specific volume or selection you want for close study.
Continue Your Study
GA 71 opens onto the wider body of Steiner's thought about the human being. To follow its threads further, these paths are a good place to begin:
- Read the full entry on The Unconscious to see how this volume reframes a familiar idea, then follow its links to neighbouring terms on thinking, inspiration, and the life between death and rebirth.
- Browse the complete Thalira glossary to trace how the concepts introduced in these lectures, imagination, inspiration, intuition, and the threefold human being, connect across the collected works.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place these public lectures beside Steiner's other volumes on freedom, self-knowledge, and the destiny of the soul.