Steiner's name for the unconscious drives of peoples and classes that steer historical events until the consciousness soul lifts them into deliberate, examined judgment.
The Instincts of the Age in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the unconscious collective drives that push peoples, classes and institutions into historical events before any individual has consciously willed them. Steiner worked the idea out in From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (GA 185), a lecture course held at Dornach in October 1918, in the closing weeks of the First World War. He argued that until roughly the fifteenth century such instincts could safely steer social life, since human souls still received direction from forces working above personal awareness. With the arrival of the consciousness soul, the ruling faculty of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, that arrangement lapsed: what once flowed as healthy instinct must now be raised into deliberate planning, and whatever remains merely instinctive turns destructive. Historians meet a kindred idea today in the study of collective mentalities, the slow unconscious attitudes beneath recorded events.
In October 1918, with the war still burning, Rudolf Steiner told his Dornach audience that the catastrophe had not been planned by anyone so much as lived out from below. The instincts of the age are the drives through which peoples, classes and parties act before they understand their own motives, and Steiner's historical method measures an era by whether those drives get raised into wakeful judgment or left to run blind.
In Steiner's Own Words
Today we must have the courage to look facts squarely in the face, a courage of which earlier epochs had no need. We must have the courage to follow closely the course of events, for it is important that the Consciousness Soul can fulfil its development. In earlier epochs the development of the Consciousness Soul was not important. Because the Consciousness Soul is of paramount importance in the present epoch, everything that man creates in the social sphere must be consciously planned. Consequently his social life can no longer be determined by the old instinctive life; nor can he introduce solely the achievements of natural science into social life for these are forces of death and are unable to quicken life; they are simply dead-sea fruit and sow destruction such as we have seen in the last four years.
What it Means Today
Eleven years after these lectures, two historians at the University of Strasbourg, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, founded the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (1929) and built a school around an observation close to Steiner's: events ride on slow, collective, largely unconscious attitudes. Bloch's study The Royal Touch (1924) had already traced how whole populations believed for centuries that a king's hand could cure scrofula, a conviction nobody reasoned themselves into and few reasoned their way out of. The Annales historians named this substrate mentalités. Steiner, in 1918, called it the instinctive life that modern social existence can no longer safely run on.
The two projects should not be conflated, and the difference is instructive: the Annales school stayed methodically agnostic about causes, while Steiner held, as a claim of his spiritual science, that the old instincts were the residue of an earlier, guided phase of human evolution whose guidance had been withdrawn so that freedom could begin. What both traditions share is a working rule for readers of history: treaties, elections and battle dates are surfaces, and whoever stops there has not touched what moved the people involved. Steiner's practical demand goes one step further than the historians' method: notice where national, class or professional instinct speaks through you, and examine it before you act on it.
Where to Read More
- From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, GA 185
- Find From Symptom to Reality in Modern History at SteinerBooks
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