Steiner's account of how the inner experience of speaking changed across the epochs, from dreamlike images living inside the Sanskrit word to modern thought hovering above the word stream.
The Evolution of Word Experience in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of how the inner, felt side of speaking has changed from epoch to epoch, given in his lecture on anthroposophy and the science of speech at the Berlin college course of 11 March 1922, published as GA 81. Steiner's claim is that the object of linguistics is not the finished word but the soul process behind it, and that this process is not constant. In the Sanskrit period dreamlike imaginations still flowed into speech, so that whoever uttered manas felt a shell around the watery body and an air body carrying the rest, while aham named something surrounding and carrying the I. Greek speakers still felt the thought as soul and the streaming word as its body. Modern consciousness has separated the two: thought now floats above the stream of words. The consequence: dictionary equivalence between an ancient word and a modern one is never exact.
The Evolution of Word Experience names the metamorphosis Steiner traced in how human beings inhabit their own speech. He treated language as a living organism rather than a fixed set of signs, and read its history as a record of changing consciousness. What a Sanskrit speaker underwent while pronouncing a word is not what a modern German or English speaker undergoes, even when a dictionary offers a clean equivalent for it.
In Steiner's Own Words
And if I wanted to describe the whole word manas, I would have to say: in those ancient times, people lived with their dreamlike imaginations in language, just as we consciously experience language today. Today, we no longer live in dreamlike imaginings in relation to language, but our consciousness lies above language. The ancient dreamlike imaginations flowed continuously into language. And so, whoever uttered the word “manas” felt as if they were inside a kind of shell; they felt their physical human body, especially insofar as it is fluid and watery, as if in a kind of shell, and the rest of their body as if carried by a kind of air body. All this was experienced in a dreamlike way when the word “manas” was uttered in ancient times.
What it Means Today
Owen Barfield (1898 to 1997) carried this reading of language into English letters. An Inkling alongside C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and a member of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain from the 1920s, he built three books on the observation Steiner makes in GA 81. History in English Words (1926) traces the sediment of older consciousness left inside ordinary vocabulary. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928) argues that early speech was not literal language later decorated with metaphor, but a single undivided meaning that afterwards split into literal and figurative. Barfield gave the opposite assumption a name, logomorphism: the habit of projecting our own word experience backward onto people who never had it. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957) carries the case into perception, through his terms original participation and final participation.
Thalira synthesis: Barfield supplies the philological evidence for what Steiner reports as inner observation, which makes the evolution of word experience one of the few Anthroposophical claims testable against the printed record of a language rather than against a reader's willingness to meditate. When a scriptural or Sanskrit term resists translation, read the resistance as information about an earlier state of consciousness, not as a gap in the dictionary.
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