Steiner's name for ordinary waking awareness, which lives only in the present instant while one's own past stands outside it as an object.
Momentary Consciousness in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for ordinary waking awareness, the consciousness that experiences only the present point of time. Steiner named and analysed it in the fifth lecture of Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life (GA 78), given at Stuttgart on 2 September 1921. Its defining feature is asymmetry: the present moment is lived subjectively, from inside, while everything a person has experienced since birth stands over against that moment as an object, reached only through the faint images of memory. Steiner treats this narrowness not as a defect but as the healthy starting point for schooling. The first stage toward Imagination, the initial supersensible cognition, is the willed intensification of the I until momentary consciousness widens into a consciousness flowing in the whole stream of time, in which the ego lives through its entire earthly biography as if present. The expansion must be begun and ended at will.
Momentary consciousness is the awareness you are using to read this sentence: bound to the present instant, aware of the senses, the mind, and the stirrings of will active right now. Steiner's interest in it is comparative. He asks readers to hold this present-tense experience beside a memory from ten years ago and notice how differently the self is involved in each.
In Steiner's Own Words
In ordinary life, and also in ordinary science, there is something I would like to call momentary consciousness. One only has to be clear about what this momentary consciousness actually is. It becomes clear when one distinguishes between how one experiences an event in which one is immediately present, which one perceives with the senses, which one grasps with the mind, about which one forms ideas in the present, and with which one is perhaps also connected in the present through the stirrings of the will. Take a close look at your inner life when it is in the situation described, and then compare it with what your inner life is like when you indulge in a complex of memories; look at what the images of your memories represent.
What it Means Today
The closest modern counterpart to what Steiner described in 1921 comes from memory science rather than philosophy of mind. Endel Tulving, the Estonian-Canadian psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Toronto, drew the same distinction in his 1985 paper Memory and consciousness in Canadian Psychology. Tulving separated noetic consciousness, which simply knows that something is the case, from autonoetic consciousness, the capacity to place oneself inside a remembered episode and re-experience it as one's own. In 2002 he named the underlying faculty chronesthesia, the awareness of subjective time, in a chapter for Principles of Frontal Lobe Function. Tulving's experimental point matches Steiner's observational one: ordinary awareness sits at a single position on the time line, and reaching a past episode takes a separate act that recovers it only partially and briefly.
Thalira synthesis: where Tulving measured autonoetic recall as a spontaneous and fragile capacity, one that fails early in amnesia and in ageing, Steiner proposed that it could be trained into a sustained condition opened and closed at will, which turns a diagnostic category in cognitive psychology into a curriculum for schooling the I.
The practical consequence is small and testable. Anyone can run Steiner's comparison in a few minutes: recall an episode from a decade ago, then notice how thin your presence inside it is next to the present room. That felt thinness is the edge of momentary consciousness, and what Steiner's first exercises address.
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