Steiner's reading of Clever Hans: the horse answered not by reading tiny cues but by taking up its master's thought through a bond of feeling.
The Calculating Horses in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the performing horses that stirred European public opinion after 1904, above all Kluge Hans, the horse of the retired Berlin schoolmaster Wilhelm von Osten, and the Elberfeld horses associated with Karl Krall. In the third lecture of Human Values in Education (GA 310, Arnheim, 19 July 1924), Steiner grants that the animals really did answer, then rejects the academic explanation that they were reading minute involuntary gestures. He had watched von Osten at close range, in his long coat, with lumps of sugar in his right-hand pocket. The sugar, Steiner argued, built a bond of feeling in which horse and man were merged, and along that bond the arithmetic passed by suggestion as thought, not as signal. The term belongs to Steiner's teaching on the animal's finer relationship to its surroundings, and it carries directly into his picture of the small child as an imitating, wholly given-over being.
The Calculating Horses were the trained animals of the Clever Hans and Elberfeld affairs, which Steiner used in his Arnheim teacher-training course to show how far an animal's soul reaches into its surroundings. He did not dispute the horses' answers. He disputed the channel: not eye-work on hidden twitches, but thought carried across a warmth of feeling that sugar had established between master and animal.
In Steiner's Own Words
From this the conclusion might be drawn that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established between Herr von Osten and the horse.
What it Means Today
The book Steiner brushed aside has outlived the horse. Oskar Pfungst, working under Carl Stumpf at the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin, published his study of von Osten's horse in 1907; the English edition, Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten), followed in 1911. Pfungst screened the questioner from the animal, varied who asked, and withheld the answer from the asker, and the stamping fell apart. Out of that came the phrase psychologists still use, the Clever Hans effect, and out of it in turn came Robert Rosenthal's work on experimenter expectancy, from the 1963 rat-maze study with Kermit Fode to Pygmalion in the Classroom with Lenore Jacobson in 1968. Every double-blind protocol run today descends from a horse in a Berlin courtyard.
Notice what Pfungst established and what he left open. He established that the answer travels from questioner to animal and never arises in the animal alone. The vehicle is the harder claim, and Steiner, reporting the book, seized on its admission that the gestures were too slight for a person to catch. Steiner accepted the first finding without argument and rejected the second inference. Thalira synthesis: Pfungst and Steiner agree that the horse is reading the human, and split only on whether reading requires an eye. For a Waldorf teacher this is not a curiosity but a working caution, since the child before the change of teeth stands in the same open relation to the adult's inner state, and takes up what the adult is holding as well as what the adult is doing.
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