Steiner's name for four successive states of human consciousness: knowing by breathing, by rhythm and harmony, by the inwardly sounding word, and by intellect.
The Four Soul Constitutions in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's collective name for four successive conditions of human consciousness, each of which opened one kingdom of the world to objective knowledge. Steiner set them out in the lectures published as Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit (GA 206), given at Dornach in August 1921. The oldest constitution knew through the breathing process itself and grasped the human being; the second knew through rhythm, harmony, and theme and grasped the sentient, animal world; the third, typified by the Greeks, knew through the inwardly sounding word and grasped the living, plantlike world; the fourth, our own since the fifteenth century, knows through the intellect and grasps only the mineral and lifeless. Each constitution is borne by the soul working through the body in a different way. Anthroposophy studies this sequence today as the ground for a renewed, imaginative cognition.
The Four Soul Constitutions describe how human knowing has not always worked the way it works now. Steiner traced four historical conditions of soul, from an age that knew by breathing, through ages of rhythm and of the inner word, down to our intellectual age, and showed that each condition could reach a different kingdom of the world: the human, the animal, the plant, and finally the mineral.
In Steiner's Own Words
Those for whom these four types of human soul condition are now fully objective will be able to sense how the soul is viewed in a special way. First we have a state of soul that is actually no longer a state of soul at all, but a bodily state that lives in the breathing process; then there is the state that lives in the rhythmic-harmonic, in the imaginative-thematic process; then there is the state of the silent experience of the word, and finally that which lives in the intellectual process; and when one has all this in objective form, then one sees the soul in such a way that one must ascribe to it the most diverse possibilities for relating to the world.
What it Means Today
In 1949 the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser published Ursprung und Gegenwart, translated in 1985 as The Ever-Present Origin, which argues that humanity has lived through distinct structures of consciousness: archaic, magic, mythical, and mental, with an integral structure now trying to emerge. Gebser worked from art history, grammar, and the arrival of perspective in painting, independently of Steiner, yet his sequence runs strikingly parallel to the four soul constitutions of GA 206. His magic structure, bound up with breath, rite, and the body, answers to knowing by breathing. His mythical structure, at home in rhythm, image, and recited song, answers to knowing by harmony and theme. His mental structure, born among the Greeks and hardened after the fifteenth century, spans the word-constitution and our intellectual constitution. Both men drew the same conclusion: an earlier structure cannot simply be re-entered. Gebser called such attempts regression, and Steiner warned in this same 1921 cycle that modern Europeans who take up ancient yogic breathing to recover the old knowledge are on the wrong track, because body and soul are no longer constituted for it.
Thalira synthesis: the four constitutions form a narrowing staircase, from a knowing that embraced the whole human being down to an intellect that holds only the mineral, so the next step is not a further narrowing but a schooled widening, the imaginative cognition Steiner describes in How to Know Higher Worlds. A student can begin simply, by noticing which of the four modes an experience engages: breath, rhythm, word, or concept.
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