The new balance a person takes up in the cosmos by raising the spine into the vertical during the first years of life.
The Human Position of Equilibrium in Anthroposophy is the altered relationship to the cosmos a person establishes by bringing the spinal axis out of the horizontal and into the vertical during the first years of life. Rudolf Steiner set it out in Berlin on 6 March 1922, in the second lecture of the course published as The Impulse for Renewal in Culture and Science (GA 81). His argument is negative before it is positive: counting bones and muscles yields no difference between the human being and the higher animals, so the distinction cannot be morphological. It is positional. The animal keeps its backbone parallel to the earth's surface and stays inside what Steiner called the bondage of the earth organisation; the child lifts itself out. Steiner traced the consequences into matter: ribs, skull bones and limbs are metamorphosed by the changed equilibrium, certain organs are reshaped into speech organs, and the upright human gains an organ for abstract thinking.
The human position of equilibrium is Steiner's name for what a small child accomplishes in the passage from crawling to standing. The spine turns from horizontal to vertical, and the whole organism thereby takes a different place in the cosmos. Steiner treated this act, not the inventory of bones and muscles that comparative anatomy had already shown to be shared, as the real biological frontier between the human and the animal.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is correct to emphasize that by counting the bones of the higher animals, there's no differentiation to the number in humans. The same goes for the muscles. This gives no differentiation between human and animal organisations. If, however, we proceed biologically, we discover real differentiation. We find that we can attribute a special value to the essential way the human organism is placed differently in the cosmos to the animals. When we observe the higher animals, we have to admit that their essential aspect is that the axis of their backbone is parallel to the earth's surface while by contrast, humans in the course of their life make their horizontal spinal axis vertical, which means an important function in the life of humans are to stand upright.
What it Means Today
Thirty years after that Berlin lecture, the neurologist and phenomenologist Erwin Straus published The Upright Posture in the Psychiatric Quarterly (1952, volume 26, pages 529 to 561), later collected in Phenomenological Psychology. Straus made the same refusal Steiner had made: he declined to treat standing as a mechanical accident of skeleton and musculature, and asked instead what the world becomes for a creature that has stood up. His answers run close to GA 81. Uprightness is never finished, since it must be held against gravity in every waking moment, and it is won by the infant rather than issued at birth. It sets distance between the face and the ground, releases the hand from locomotion, and turns the mouth from a grasping organ into a speaking one.
Thalira synthesis: Straus described the achievement and stopped at the skin, while Steiner read it as a re-siting of the human being within the cosmos, so the two accounts are less rivals than the outside and inside of one observation.
Verticality is therefore a deed, not a fitting. Emmi Pikler founded her infant home on Lóczy Lajos utca in Budapest in 1946 on that premise: adults do not prop a baby upright or hurry the stages, because the child's own passage from crawling to standing is the work by which this equilibrium is taken hold of.
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