Two opposite soul activities: synthesis gathers what the outer world compels, analysis freely breaks a given whole into parts, and freedom lives in the second.
Analysis and Synthesis in the Soul in Anthroposophy is the paired rhythm of thinking that Rudolf Steiner set out in Lecture X of the Basel course of 5 May 1920, published in English as The Renewal of Education (GA 301). Synthesis is the summarising the outer world compels from us: many single animals are gathered into the one concept of the species, and the gathering follows a rule we did not set. Analysis is the deeper and half unconscious opposite, the free breaking of a given unity into parts, since ten can be resolved into three, five, and two, or into nine and one, or into five and five. Steiner locates human freedom in that second activity, because the parts a soul draws out of a whole are chosen, not dictated. He carries the pair into the Waldorf classroom: begin with the sentence and the sum, then analyse toward letters and addends.
Analysis and synthesis in the soul name the two directions thinking can move. Steiner taught that the outer world presses us constantly toward synthesis, the gathering of many into one, while analysis, the loosening of one into many, rises from a quieter place in us. He treated the second as the seat of freedom, and asked teachers to feed it early.
In Steiner's Own Words
But when we want to comprehend the life of the human soul, we find that the soul is continuously impelled to form syntheses. For example, we look at an individual animal out of a group of animals and we form a general concept, that of the species. In that case, we summarize, that is, we synthesize. Analysis is something that lies much deeper, almost in the unconscious. This is a desire to make multiplicity out of unity. Since this has been little taken into account, people have understood little of what human freedom represents in the soul.
What it Means Today
The Basel course of spring 1920 was delivered eight months after Emil Molt opened the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart on 7 September 1919 for the children of his Waldorf-Astoria factory workers, and Lecture X is where Steiner shows teachers how to put the analytic tendency to work. The instruction is concrete. Do not build words out of letters: write fish on the board, let the child copy the whole, then draw the f out of it. Do not lay the addends on the left and the sum on the right: put twelve on the left and let the class find seven and five, eight and four, six and six. A century on, this is still what separates a Waldorf first grade from most others, since the sum arrives first and the child breaks it, and the reading lesson moves from sentence to word to letter rather than the reverse.
Mainstream practice has drifted the same way without the anthropology, in the part-whole number bonds now standard in Singapore-method primary mathematics, where children meet ten as a whole with two hollows beneath it long before they meet a plus sign. Thalira synthesis: what the number bond treats as a diagram of arithmetic, Steiner treated as a breathing exercise for the will, which is why he warned that a schooling weighted entirely toward synthesis leaves adults who can only assemble the world out of atoms.
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