Two sense capacities Steiner called occult in 1907, a sense of space seated in the inner ear and a sense of time seated in the pupil of the eye.
The Hidden Senses Of Space And Time in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for two of the seven senses he set out on 26 September 1907 in Hannover, in the cycle published as Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy (GA 111). He counted seven senses rather than five, renamed touch a sense of warmth, and called the remaining two hidden. The sense of space (Raumsinn) he located in a small channel of the inner ear, in rods standing in three directions, and made it the organ of mathematical judgement; the geometer, he said, reasons through it rather than through the brain. The sense of time (Zeitsinn) he placed in the pupil, in the ring of muscle that contracts and expands. Both he traced to Old Saturn, the first planetary stage. Vestibular science since 1914 has confirmed the ear as an organ of spatial orientation.
The hidden senses of space and time are the two members of Steiner's 1907 sevenfold sense list that he described as withdrawn from ordinary awareness. Where sight, hearing, taste, smell, and warmth report on an outer world, these two report on the conditions under which any outer world can appear at all. Steiner treated them as shrunken remnants of once large organs.
In Steiner's Own Words
We actually have seven senses, two of which are hidden: a sense of time and a sense of space. We actually have to describe the sense of touch or feeling as a sense of warmth. The sense of space is now quite hidden; it is a small channel in the inner ear; rods that stand in three directions. In the past, these were large organs. The ability to acquire mathematical knowledge is based on the complete development of these organs. The geometer draws his logical conclusions and judgments not through the brain, but through the sense of space; through it we know the three dimensions of space. The sense of time is located in the eye. It is the small black point in the eye and has the ability to contract and expand the ring-shaped muscles of the pupil.
What it Means Today
Seven years after the Hannover lecture, the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Robert Bárány, a physician working in Vienna, for his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus. His caloric test, running warm or cool water into the ear canal to provoke eye movement, made the inner ear measurable as an organ of orientation and not only of hearing. What he probed are the three semicircular canals, set at roughly right angles and filled with fluid that shifts when the head turns. Steiner, lecturing in 1907 without a laboratory, had already pointed to a small channel in the inner ear holding rods that stand in three directions, and had called it the sense of space.
The second half of his claim finds no such support. Physiology does not seat the perception of time in the pupil, whose ring muscles answer to light and arousal, and the rigid pupil he alluded to, described in the mid 1860s by the Scottish ophthalmologist Douglas Argyll Robertson, marks neurosyphilis rather than a lost sense. Thalira synthesis: the space sense survives translation into anatomy because Steiner was describing an organ, while the time sense reads better as a gesture, the rhythmic opening and closing by which a living body meets duration, and a gesture keeps no address.
Where to Read More
- Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy, GA 111
- Steiner on the senses at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]