Steiner's term for a body no longer opaque to the will: rendered, through willed exercise, into a single sense organ for Intuitive knowledge.
The Organism Made Transparent in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the condition in which the physical body stops obstructing the will and becomes a single sense organ for spiritual perception. Steiner set it out in the lecture The Nature of Anthroposophy, given at Elberfeld on 24 January 1922 and collected in GA 80a. His image is optical: an eye clouded by cataract cannot see, and a healthy eye serves sight precisely because it draws no attention to itself. In ordinary life, Steiner argues, the whole body behaves like a great opaque eye, its instincts, emotions and organic processes crowding in and putting the will to sleep. Three willed exercises clear the opacity: thinking a sequence backwards, judging one's own deeds with the detachment one grants a stranger, and taking self-education deliberately in hand. The result is Intuitive knowledge, the third stage of Steiner's path, in which the body has become transparent to the soul.
The Organism Made Transparent is the state Steiner describes at the threshold of Intuition, the third and last stage of supersensory knowledge. It is not a bodily change but a change in what the body does to the will. The instincts and organic processes that normally swallow every intention fall quiet, and the will can be followed where it goes.
In Steiner's Own Words
Although it will sound strange, you can make a comparison between an eye in which the vitreous body is obscured, or which has some kind of cataract so that through some opacity it cannot serve for vision, and an eye which is entirely healthy and transparent. The eye, which does not draw attention through its own bodily nature but takes a selfless part in our whole organism, through this very fact serves for our seeing. In ordinary life, our whole physical organism is comparable to a great opaque eye. Through such exercises of the will, our entire organism is made transparent. This is not done in any unhealthy way but in a way that is thoroughly healthy for ordinary life.
What it Means Today
The closest modern treatment of this idea is not in spiritual literature at all. In The Absent Body (University of Chicago Press, 1990), the philosopher and physician Drew Leder argues that the healthy body characteristically vanishes from experience: we do not perceive our own eyes while looking, our own legs while walking, our own stomach while digesting. Leder calls this ordinary recession disappearance, and he contrasts it with dys-appearance, the way a body forces itself back into awareness the moment something goes wrong, an ache, a limp, a clouded lens. Steiner's cataract image and Leder's dys-appearance describe the same event from two ends.
Where the two part company is instructive. Leder's body is already absent to perception, and that absence is simply health. Steiner grants the perceptual point, then says the body remains stubbornly opaque in a second respect: it swallows the will. Between the thought of raising an arm and the sight of the raised arm, Steiner locates a stretch of ordinary waking life that is effectively sleep. That gap, not the visual field, is what the exercises are aimed at. Thalira synthesis: Leder's body disappears to attention while Steiner's body has yet to become transparent to will, which is exactly why the practice runs backwards, reversing a play from the fifth act to the first, walking the day's staircase downward from the top step. Reversal is the one operation the body's own momentum will not perform on our behalf, so it is the operation that makes the organism transparent.
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