Steiner defined feeling as the place where the self you have already lived meets the self you have not yet lived, past as object, future as subject.
Feeling as the Meeting of Past and Future Self in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's definition of feeling as the point where two halves of a biography touch: the subject who feels is the life still to be lived, from this moment until death, while the object that is felt is the life already lived, from birth to this moment. Steiner presented this account in Zurich on 10 October 1918, in the psychology lecture published in GA 73, Anthroposophy Has Something to Add to Modern Sciences. Feeling seems confused, he argued, only because subject and object have not been separated, just as water must be split into hydrogen and oxygen before it can be studied. The feeling life belongs to the astral body, the member of Steiner's fourfold human that carries sympathy and antipathy. Contemporary memory science calls the same two-way traffic mental time travel.
Feeling as the Meeting of Past and Future Self names one of Rudolf Steiner's most surprising psychological claims: whenever you feel anything, the part of you doing the feeling is your unlived future, and the thing being felt is your already-lived past. He offered the 1790 Goethe as a test case, a man whose remaining forty-two years perceived, in one moment of feeling, everything since 1749.
In Steiner's Own Words
The life of feelings, the essential nature of feeling, will then not be the empty shell of words which we have in ordinary scientific psychology today. If you want to simply inwardly observe feeling in all its confusion, you cannot in fact observe anything. Just as you cannot scientifically observe water unless you separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, so you cannot observe the life of feelings in a scientific way unless you are able to separate it into what the human being was before he had the feeling and in what comes afterwards, unless you know the active principle which lies deep down in there like a seed, just as the seed is active in this year’s plant for the plant that will grow next year.
What it Means Today
In 1985 the Estonian-Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, working at the University of Toronto, described episodic memory as a capacity for mental time travel, and he tied that capacity to what he called autonoetic consciousness, the knowing that accompanies self-experience across time. Two decades later Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis of Harvard University showed with functional imaging that remembering past events and imagining future ones run on one shared core network in the brain. Their 2007 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, written with Randy Buckner and titled "Remembering the past to imagine the future: the prospective brain," argued that memory exists largely so that a person can simulate what is coming.
The result surprised cognitive science, yet it sits close to the structure Steiner laid out in Zurich in 1918. He also refused to treat the felt past and the feeling future as two separate faculties. He treated every feeling as the living interface where they meet, and he proposed a test anyone can run: read a sound biography of Goethe, stop at 1790, and ask what the Goethe of 1790 to 1832 perceived, in one moment of feeling, of the Goethe of 1749 to 1790. Thalira synthesis: what the prospective-brain literature measures as one shared neural network, Steiner describes as one continuous deed, the future self perceiving the past self, and he names the felt trace of that perception feeling itself. The seed of next year's plant is already working in this year's stem.
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