The inner sense by which we perceive the overall state of our own body, the background feeling of being alive, comfortable, hungry, or unwell.
The sense of life is the faculty by which we feel our own vital state from within. While the eye looks outward at colour, the life-sense looks inward at the condition of the body itself, telling us whether we feel refreshed or depleted, comfortable or unwell. Steiner counted it among the twelve senses, a quiet sense most people notice only when it is disturbed, yet one that colours every waking hour.
The Sense of Life in Anthroposophy is the inner sense through which a person perceives the overall condition of their own living organism, the background feeling of bodily wellbeing or malaise that registers comfort, hunger, fatigue, thirst, and the quiet hum of being alive. Rudolf Steiner described it in The Riddle of Humanity (GA 170, 1916) as one of the twelve senses, grouping it with touch, movement, and balance among the lower senses that report on the body's own interior rather than the outer world. Its bearer is the etheric body, the realm of life forces that sustains the physical organism. Steiner placed its first seed in the ancient Saturn and Moon phases of cosmic evolution, when the organs that became today's senses were still organs of life. In contemporary terms the life-sense corresponds closely to what physiology names coenaesthesia, the diffuse sense of one's own vital state.
In Steiner's Own Words
This sense exists within us, but we are accustomed to ignore it, for the life sense manifests itself indistinctly from within the human organism. Nevertheless, throughout all our daily waking hours, the harmonious collaboration of all the bodily organs expresses itself through the life sense, through the state of life in us. We usually pay no attention to it because we expect it as our natural right. We expect to be filled with a certain feeling of well-being, with the feeling of being alive. If our feeling of alive-ness is diminished, we try to recover a little so that our feeling of life is refreshed again. This vital enlivening or damping down is something we are aware of, but generally we are too accustomed to the feeling of being alive to be constantly aware of it.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern bridge for the life-sense runs through anthroposophic medicine, the clinical tradition founded by Rudolf Steiner and the physician Ita Wegman in 1920. What Steiner called the sense of life, medicine names coenaesthesia: the diffuse, background feeling of bodily wellbeing or malaise that has no single organ but reports the whole. A patient who says only that they feel run down, off, or not themselves is speaking from the life-sense before any specific symptom can be named. Anthroposophic clinicians treat this report as diagnostic rather than vague. At the Filderklinik near Stuttgart, opened in 1975, and at the Ita Wegman Klinik in Arlesheim, practitioners read coenaesthetic tone as a window onto the etheric body, the layer of formative life forces Steiner held responsible for vitality. Rhythmical massage, warmth applications, and eurythmy therapy are prescribed to restore a disturbed feeling of being alive rather than to suppress a symptom. The synthesis Thalira draws here is that the life-sense is the body keeping its own minutes: a continuous self-report that materialistic physiology long dismissed as too dim to matter, and that Steiner recovered as a genuine sense in its own right, perceiving life exactly as the eye perceives light.
Where to Read More