Steiner's contrast between the soul-bodily self that evolves in time and the soul-spiritual self that rests in eternity, where conditions stand side by side rather than following one another.
The Polarity of Duration and Change in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's distinction between the soul-bodily human being, who evolves successively in time, and the soul-spiritual human being, who lives in the sphere of eternity where states stand in juxtaposition. Duration is the non-successive ground beneath all change, as the spaceless is the ground beneath space. The two spheres ray into each other, and only initiation wisdom holds them apart so that each can be understood.
In Steiner's Own Words
In this respect our being is indeed split in two, and insofar as we do develop through our lives, we do so on the one hand, by waiting calmly and patiently until we are mature enough in soul and body to understand something, while on the other hand we remain without development in the sphere of eternity, where to a certain extent we gaze simultaneously at our childhood in one region, and at our dotage in another. Here on earth, mankind lives in such a way that what happens in the sphere of eternity rays down into what happens in the temporal sphere, and vice versa, both being mixed up with each other.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern echo of this polarity is the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose 1889 doctoral thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience drew the line between two ways of registering time. There is the homogeneous, spatialised time of the clock, where each moment lies outside the next like beads on a string, and there is la durée, lived duration, where past and present interpenetrate and nothing is set side by side as a fixed quantity. Bergson held that the intellect handles the first well and falsifies the second, much as Steiner held that the concept of evolution serves the soul-bodily and breaks down before the soul-spiritual. Both men, working within nine years of each other, insisted that ordinary measured time is a kind of useful illusion laid over a deeper non-successive reality. Where they part is instructive. Bergson located durée within the felt continuity of one consciousness; Steiner located his realm of duration in the spaceless, timeless interplay of the higher hierarchies, beheld not as flow but as juxtaposed picture. Thalira synthesis: Bergson rescued duration from the clock, but stopped at the threshold of the single self, whereas Steiner carried the same gesture across that threshold and asked what beholds the whole biography at once. A reader who has felt an afternoon dissolve while the watch kept ticking already knows the lower edge of what Steiner names; his claim is that the same difference, raised to the cosmic scale, decides how one crosses the gate of death and stands inside the social life of others.
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