Consciousness Soul

What it Means Today

Steiner's threefold soul (sentient, intellectual, consciousness) is a phased description of how the inner life thickens over the long arc of cultural epochs. The sentient soul was the soul-member of the Egypto-Chaldean age. The intellectual soul (Verstandes- und Gemütsseele) was awakened in the Greco-Roman age, roughly 747 BC to 1413 AD, when the polis cultivated reasoning that still felt itself supported by tradition. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch, our own, opens around 1413 and assigns the Consciousness Soul as its working organ. The mark of the age is that a person can no longer borrow conviction from inherited custom. Truth must be reached through one's own grasp, or it does not carry weight in the inner life.

Practically this means the Consciousness Soul age sets a high cost on every shortcut. Cultural authorities have less binding force than they did in 1300; an inherited dogma, a borrowed political slogan, a received aesthetic taste, none of them stick to the soul of a modern human until that soul has grasped them and chosen them. Steiner held that this is why the period after 1413 is also the period of natural science, of free political conscience, of reformations and revolutions, and of the modern crisis of meaning. The same soul-member that enables independent cognition also exposes the soul to the experience of nihilism when no inner grasp is yet present. The Consciousness Soul is the gate, and also the threshold, of what Steiner called Spirit-Self: the next member of the human being, where the I begins to refashion its astral body from above. The consciousness-soul stage of the soul's development is the working ground for biographical work, where individuals turn their life-story into conscious self-knowledge across 7-year rhythms. The consciousness soul works through the sense of thought, by which we grasp another's concept directly. The consciousness soul lives most awake in thinking, the first of the three activities of thinking, feeling, and willing. The age of the consciousness soul requires that society be grasped consciously as the social organism. The consciousness soul shapes a whole reading of the modern era; see history and the consciousness soul. The Beatitudes announce this very transition; see the Sermon on the Mount. The thinking this age inherits is a corpse that can be revived; see dead thinking.