Steiner's wisdom of the spirit: the study of how spirit declares itself within the human soul and carries the self through repeated earth-lives.
Pneumatosophy in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's wisdom of the spirit, the third and final part of his three Berlin lecture cycles on the human being, given across four lectures in December 1911 and printed as GA 115. Where the earlier cycles treated the physical nature of man (Anthroposophy) and the soul (Psychosophy), pneumatosophy treats the spirit, the highest member of Steiner's threefold anthropology. Its subject is how the spirit declares itself within the soul. Steiner located the spirit at two thresholds: in judgment, where a truth holds good independently of the person who happens to think it, and in the correcting of error, which he argued is supersensible in origin. From these he drew the conclusion that the human spirit-element passes through repeated earth-lives, a step he developed against the soul-doctrine of Franz Brentano and the spirit-doctrine of Aristotle.
Pneumatosophy is Rudolf Steiner's science of the spirit, the closing cycle of the trilogy he gave in Berlin between 1909 and 1911. The word joins the Greek pneuma (spirit) with sophia (wisdom). Across four December 1911 lectures Steiner asked where, in ordinary thinking and feeling, the spirit makes itself known, and how that spirit endures from one earthly life to the next.
In Steiner's Own Words
Yesterday we made the acquaintance of an Aristotelian scholar of our time who turned his keen wits to an investigation of the subject known as the soul. Of Aristotle it can be said that there was no question of his denying the existence of the spirit, but we found that Brentano shrewdly halted before the spirit, so that we do, indeed, find there a standpoint concerned with pneumatosophy, or the science of the spirit, that denies not only this or that law but the subject itself, as such.
What it Means Today
Pneumatosophy begins from a confrontation that still defines philosophy of mind. Steiner builds his case against Franz Brentano, the Vienna psychologist whose 1874 book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint classified the soul into presentation, judgment, and the phenomena of love and hate. Brentano, Steiner says, halted exactly at the spirit. That same Brentano taught the young Edmund Husserl in Vienna in the 1880s, and the concept Husserl carried away from him, intentionality, became the seed of phenomenology, the movement Husserl launched with his Logical Investigations of 1900 and 1901. Phenomenology asks how consciousness reaches beyond itself toward an object it does not contain, which is the very threshold Steiner names when he says judgment forces the soul to step outside itself toward something it cannot find within. The two traditions branch from one root and read the same border differently. Husserl bracketed the question of a world behind appearances; Steiner crossed it, treating the validity of a true judgment as direct evidence of a spirit-world in which the human being already lives. Thalira synthesis: pneumatosophy is the point where the phenomenological question, how does the soul reach what is not itself, becomes the anthroposophical answer, that the spirit reaching through the soul is the same spirit that returns through repeated earth-lives.
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