In Steiner's account, laughter and tears are the I expanding or contracting the astral body, the two soul-gestures that reveal the human ego at work.
Laughing and Weeping in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's physiology of soul-expression, set out in his lecture of 3 February 1910 in Berlin (published in GA 59, Metamorphoses of the Soul). Steiner holds that both gestures are the work of the I, the human ego, on the astral body, the sheath that bears pleasure and pain. When the I rises above something it declines to understand, it loosens and expands the astral body, and that expansion shows in the physical body as laughter or a smile. When the I suffers a loss, it presses the astral body together, and that contraction shows as a flow of tears. Because only a being with an individual ego can seek harmony with the world and react to its loss, laughing and weeping belong to the human being alone. They are, for Steiner, the most inward revelation of the I working into its bodily sheaths.
Laughing and weeping, in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, are not mere reflexes but the visible signatures of the I. In laughter the ego loosens and expands the astral body to lift itself above what it will not engage; in weeping the ego contracts that body to strengthen itself after a loss. Tears mark our bond with the world, the smile our freedom from what would bind us.
In Steiner's Own Words
Just as the expanded astral body loses tension and creates in the physical body the gesture of laughing or smiling, so a contracted astral body penetrates more deeply into all the forces of the physical body and contracts it along with itself. The bodily expression of this contraction is a flow of tears. The astral body, having been left with gaps as it were, wants to fill them by contracting, while making use of substances from its environment. In so doing, it also contracts the physical body and squeezes out the latter's substances in the form of tears.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim that weeping belongs to the human being alone finds a precise modern echo in Ad Vingerhoets, professor of clinical psychology at Tilburg University, whose 2013 Oxford University Press study Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears argues that emotional crying, as distinct from reflex tearing from onions or wind, has no clear analogue in other animals. Where Steiner located the cause in the I pressing the astral body together after a loss, Vingerhoets traces emotional tears to attachment, helplessness, and the signalling of a broken bond, the same severed connection Steiner described. On the other pole, the neuroscientist Robert Provine of the University of Maryland, in Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Viking, 2000), found laughter to be a pre-linguistic social vocalisation built on a chopped, staccato exhalation, which sits oddly close to Steiner's note that laughter draws a long in-breath while weeping draws a long out-breath. Thalira synthesis: read together, these two researchers map onto Steiner's single insight from opposite ends, that laughter and tears are the breath registering whether the I has expanded toward the world in freedom or contracted toward itself in loss.
Where to Read More