The water-element constitution in which the etheric or life-body predominates, producing the calm, steadily-digesting, inwardly-rhythmic child.
Phlegmatic Temperament in Anthroposophy is the constitutional type in which the etheric or life-body, the bearer of growth and metabolism, predominates over the physical body, the astral body, and the I. Rudolf Steiner systematized the four temperaments in the Berlin lecture of 4 March 1909 (GA 57, Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?) and refined the pedagogical application in the Stuttgart teacher training of 1919 (GA 293 and GA 295). The phlegmatic child belongs to the water element and lives most deeply in the steady rhythm of digestion, sleep, and life-forces, rather than in the passing impressions of sense or the surge of feeling. Build is often rounder, gait loose-jointed, voice even, thinking slow but thorough. The pedagogical task in Waldorf classrooms since 1919 has been to bring this child the dramatic and the changeable, gently, so that the etheric rhythm starts to take notice and respond.
The phlegmatic temperament is the third of Steiner's four constitutional types, the one in which the etheric body sets the tone for the whole human being. Where the choleric child is ruled by the I, the sanguine by the astral, and the melancholic by the physical, the phlegmatic child is ruled by the steady inward stream of life-forces. The result is a temperament of comfort, patience, and quiet persistence.
In Steiner's Own Words
The way the four members combine is determined by the flowing together of the two streams upon a person's entry into the physical world. In every case, one of the four members achieves predominance over the others, and gives them its own peculiar stamp. Where the bearer of the ego predominates, a choleric temperament results. Where the astral body predominates, we find a sanguine temperament. Where the etheric or life-body predominates, we speak of a phlegmatic temperament. And where the physical body predominates, we have to deal with a melancholic temperament. The specific way in which the eternal and the ephemeral combine determines what relationship the four members will enter into with one another.
What it Means Today
Waldorf classrooms have applied this fourfold typology since the first school opened in Stuttgart in September 1919, and the seating tradition that grew out of GA 295 is still in use a century later. The teacher sits the four temperaments together by group, phlegmatic with phlegmatic, choleric with choleric, so the child meets the caricature of their own constitution in the next chair, and the etheric inertia that no lecture could shift starts to dissolve under the simple friction of resemblance. Around the phlegmatic group the teacher then introduces the surprising, the rhythmically changing, the dramatic story arc, never as a frontal demand but as something the etheric body can absorb at its own tempo.
The synthesis Thalira draws from Steiner's framework, cross-lit with Jungian typology and the Goethean reading of the elements, is this: the phlegmatic child is not a slower version of the sanguine, and the educational task is never to speed the child up. It is to give the steady water of the life-body something worth carrying. A phlegmatic who finds a rhythm worth keeping (a craft, a meal made daily, a season-keeping discipline) becomes, in maturity, the patient continuity that holds a family, a farm, or a Waldorf class together for thirty years. Bernard Lievegoed worked this out in his biographical study of the seven-year life-phases: phlegmatic strength is the gift of late life made visible early.
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