Steiner's teaching that the upright human being lifts itself out of the animal genera and becomes, by an act of its own lifetime, a genus and species in itself.
Man as His Own Genus in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that the human being is not one species within the animal kingdom but constitutes a genus and a species in himself. Steiner presents the idea in The Eternal in the Human Soul (GA 67, Berlin lectures of 1918). Its evidence is anatomical: in every animal the head hangs forward, over the centre-of-gravity line of the torso, while in the upright human being the head rests directly upon that line. Because a child wins this equilibrium by its own effort in its first years, each person repeats, in an individual biography, the act by which humanity lifted itself out of the forces that shape the animal genera. Steiner ties language and thinking to this self-won balance. The claim gives comparative anatomy and evolutionary biology a reading in which uprightness, not brain size, marks the human difference.
Man as His Own Genus names one of Steiner's sharpest replies to nineteenth-century evolutionism. He accepted the kinship of human and animal bodies, then pointed to what the theory overlooked: the human being alone creates its own equilibrium, learning in childhood to stand where no animal stands. In that self-won uprightness Steiner located the bodily ground of the I, of speech, and of thinking.
In Steiner's Own Words
This places humans in a completely different state of equilibrium in relation to the earth than animals; it places them in a state of equilibrium that they themselves create during their lifetime, for they are born in a similar state of equilibrium to animals. By rising above the equilibrium imposed on animals, humans rise above all the forces that underlie the various genera and species, and essentially become a “genus,” a “species.” He frees himself from precisely what is the basis of the manifold forms of other animals; he creates his own uniform form by freeing himself from this determining factor through his upright position. And everything that is expressed in human language and human thought is intimately connected with these states of equilibrium.
What it Means Today
Thirty-four years after these Berlin lectures, the phenomenologist and neurologist Erwin Straus published an essay that reads like an independent confirmation. In The Upright Posture (Psychiatric Quarterly, 1952), Straus, who had left Germany for the United States in 1938, argued that upright posture is not one anatomical trait among many but the precondition of the specifically human world. Standing up distances the eyes from the ground, frees the hands from locomotion, turns the mouth from a gripping organ into an organ of speech, and places every person in a posture that must be actively won and actively maintained: we are never simply upright, we hold ourselves upright.
Straus drew his conclusions from clinical neurology and phenomenological description, without reference to Steiner, yet the architecture of the argument is the same: a balance achieved by the individual, within an individual lifetime, grounds language, thought, and the felt distance between self and world. Readers of Steiner will also recognize why Waldorf teachers treat a child's learning to stand and walk in the first year as a biographical event of the first order rather than a motor milestone. Thalira synthesis: Man as His Own Genus is the claim that the human form is a deed and not an inheritance, which is why Steiner can accept every anatomical kinship with the animal and still say that the genus called human has exactly one member per person.
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