Steiner's name for a real being inside us that watches every decision of will without pause, unnoticed because ordinary attention follows the deed outward.
The Inner Observer in the Will in Anthroposophy is a real being, not a thought, that Rudolf Steiner said is discovered inside the human being once meditative work on the will is carried far enough. He described it in the Berlin lecture of 10 December 1915, printed in GA 65, From Central European Intellectual Life. Ordinary willing spends itself outward, so attention travels with the deed into the sense world and the willing itself is never observed. When attention is turned instead onto the inner side of a decision, a second presence shows itself, one that has been watching every resolve and every execution of will continuously. Steiner's comparison is exact: our decisions and our actions are the material of observation for this being, as colours and sounds are the material of observation for us. He calls it the inner observer, innerer Beobachter, and in the same hour the inner man, innerer Mensch.
The inner observer in the will belongs to the second of Steiner's two paths of soul development, the will path, which runs beside the thinking path of How to Know Higher Worlds. The thinking path leads down below thought to the process that prepares it. The will path leads to a witness already present in every act of willing, one that ordinary attention passes over because it is busy with the outer aim of the deed.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus one discovers an inner man in oneself, who continually looks at what is going on in our volitions, in our whole volition, an observer of whom one is unaware in ordinary life because one does not direct one's attention to him. Not a thought, but a real being is constantly watching us and is in our will. Just as we relate to the things of external perception with our thoughts, so something in us relates to our will. What color and sound are for the senses and for the consciousness that perceives the external world, that is our will for an inner observer. There is an inner observer in us, for whom we provide the material for observation in our decisions of will and in our executions of will, just as colors and sounds provide the material for observation for us in the outer world.
What it Means Today
The nearest thing modern laboratories have to this problem is the readiness potential, the slow electrical rise that Hans Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke measured at Freiburg and named the Bereitschaftspotential in 1965. Benjamin Libet built on it at the University of California, San Francisco, and reported in Brain in 1983 that the rise begins several hundred milliseconds before the moment at which a person says the urge to move was felt. Libet's subjects watched a spot travel round a clock face and reported, afterwards, where it stood when they first noticed the intention. That report is retrospective, made with attention borrowed from the act it is trying to catch. Steiner names the same difficulty from the inside: willing has a layer ordinary attention arrives too late to see, because attention is already out with the object of the deed.
Thalira synthesis: the laboratory can measure the width of the blind spot in willing but cannot enter it, since its instrument is retrospective report. Steiner's claim is that the same region is inhabited, and that his exercises turn attention round to meet the one already there. Nothing in the 1983 data settles that either way. Both accounts agree that a person does not, in ordinary consciousness, witness their own willing, and that the gap is structural rather than a lapse of care.
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