The two soul-forces Steiner named in his 1919 Waldorf course: antipathy cools experience into thought and memory, sympathy warms the seed of the will.
Antipathy and sympathy, in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, are the two fundamental forces of the soul. Antipathy reflects pre-natal experience back into thinking, memory, and concept, and lives physically in the nerve-sense system. Sympathy carries the seed of the will toward the future, and lives in the blood. Feeling rises in the rhythmic alternation between them, a constant systole and diastole of inner life.
In Steiner's Own Words
Because we can no longer remain in the spiritual world (and here we come back to what was said yesterday) we are brought down into the physical world. In being brought down into the physical world we develop an antipathy for everything spiritual so that we radiate back the spiritual, pre-natal reality in an antipathy of which we are unconscious. We bear the force of antipathy within us, and through it transform the pre-natal element into a mere mental picture or image. And we unite ourselves in sympathy with that which radiates out towards our later existence as the reality of will after death. We are not immediately conscious of these two, sympathy and antipathy, but they live unconsciously in us, and they signify our feeling, which consists continually of a rhythm, of an alternating between sympathy and antipathy.
What it Means Today
This polarity is not a theory Steiner left on the lecture hall wall. He spoke it on 22 August 1919 to the teachers who, two weeks later on 7 September, opened the first Waldorf school at the Waldorf-Astoria factory in Stuttgart. The whole course, published as The Study of Man, was meant to be carried into the classroom the following month, and the antipathy-sympathy distinction is its working psychology. A Waldorf teacher reads it as a practical instruction. Lessons built on abstract definition, fact and finished concept feed the antipathy pole, the nerve-sense activity that hardens, that points the child backward toward what is already complete. Lessons built on living image, story and movement feed the sympathy pole, the will-activity bound to the blood, the growth-force that points the child forward. Steiner warned in this same lecture that loading a young child with abstractions presses the body toward decay, while teaching in pictures plants seeds for continued growth.
The Thalira reading holds the two as one breath, not two boxes. Steiner's own image is the heartbeat, systole and diastole, sympathy and antipathy alternating without pause. A child who only memorises and a child who only dreams in pictures are both out of rhythm. The art the early Waldorf faculty practised, and the reason this course is still read at training seminars from the Goetheanum to the Waldorf-Astoria's descendants, is the timing of that alternation: when to cool a subject into clear thought, when to warm it back into living will. Feeling, for Steiner, is precisely that rhythm made conscious, the heart-region of the soul where thinking and willing meet.
Where to Read More