The threshold tone interval where a person stands at the border of the self, perceives the spiritual world, and beholds the self from outside without losing it.
The Interval of the Fourth in Anthroposophy is the boundary interval Rudolf Steiner described in The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone (GA 283, lectures of 7 and 8 March 1923, Stuttgart). The fourth sits between the experience of the fifth, in which the listener is carried out into the cosmos and forgets the self, and the experience of the third, in which feeling returns inward into the human house of organization. At the fourth, a person stands at the very border of the bodily self, senses not the outer world but the spiritual world, and beholds the self from outside while remaining among the gods. Steiner tied this experience to the etheric body and held that Ambrose and Augustine could still feel it. Today it is worked with chiefly through tone eurythmy, where the fourth calls for the smallest possible movement, a perceiving of the self from the other side.
The interval of the fourth in Anthroposophy is the threshold musical interval at which a person stands exactly on the border of the human organism, perceiving the spiritual world while still keeping hold of the self. Rudolf Steiner placed it between the outer experience of the fifth and the inner experience of the third, naming it the point where one beholds oneself from outside, among the gods, without losing oneself.
In Steiner's Own Words
The experience of the fourth lies right at the border, as it were, of the human organism. The human being, however, senses not the outer world but the spiritual world in the fourth. He beholds himself from outside, as it were. Though man is not conscious of it, the sensation he experiences with the fourth is based on feeling that man himself is among the gods. While he has forgotten his own self in the experience of the fifth in order to be among the gods, in the experience of the fourth he need not forget his own being in order to be among the gods. With the experience of the fourth, man moves about, as it were, in the divine world; he stands precisely at the border of his humanness, retaining it, yet viewing it from the other side.
What it Means Today
The clearest living continuation of Steiner's fourth is tone eurythmy, the art of visible music he began at Dornach and indicated in this very GA 283 cycle. In the lecture Steiner tells the eurythmists that the fourth asks for the smallest possible movement without standing still, because the fourth is a perceiving of the self from the other side, as though the eye turned to look back at itself. Lea van der Pals, who led tone eurythmy at the Goetheanum and founded the Eurythmeum in Dornach in 1949, codified these interval gestures for the training stage and set them down in her book The Human Being as Music (Eurythmeum, 1992). Her successors at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science still teach the fourth as the threshold gesture, held between the expansive fifth and the inward third. Thalira synthesis: the fourth is the one interval where music lets a person stand at the Guardian of the Threshold and look back at the self without crossing over and dissolving, which is why Steiner gave it the quietest gesture rather than the largest.
Where to Read More
- The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, GA 283
- Find at SteinerBooks
- Internal Family Systems Therapy: Complete IFS Guide
- Parts Work and Internal Family Systems: The Multiplicity of the Inner Self
- Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday: The Internal Obstacle, Shadow Work, and the Stoic Path to Humility