Steiner's name for the forces working below the threshold of sense perception, the exact counter-pole to the supersensible, governing the human being's first twenty-one years.
The Subsensible in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term (das Untersinnliche) for the region of forces that works beneath the threshold of sense perception, the exact counter-pole to the supersensible. Steiner set it out in the third lecture of Social Understanding from a Spiritual-Scientific Perspective (GA 191), Dornach, 5 October 1919. There he assigns the first three seven-year periods of life to subsensible forces: from birth to the seventh year the child is formed by forces anchored in the interior of the earth planet, from the seventh to the fourteenth by the forces of the air circle entering through breathing, and from the fourteenth by planetary forces reaching the human being indirectly through the earth. The Moon concentrates the subsensible as the Sun concentrates the supersensible, and the subsensible feeds willing while the supersensible feeds thinking. Waldorf education still builds its lower school on this rhythm.
The subsensible is where Steiner puts everything that works on a person from below the sense-threshold: the forces of the earth's interior, of the air circle, and of the Moon. Lower here means direction, not rank. The supersensible reaches down from above the senses, the subsensible works up from beneath them, and a human life is built in the narrow band between the two.
In Steiner's Own Words
In connection with this idea of the expansion of consciousness, I have said that in the first three epochs of his life, man is influenced by forces that we can actually call sub-sensible forces. From birth until the age of seven, the human being is connected with the forces of the earth planet itself. The formative forces at work in the human organism are essentially those that are anchored in the earth planet itself, in the interior of this earth planet. And what then takes effect, organizing the human being, living through the human being from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life, these are the forces of the air circle, which then, namely through the detour of breathing, permeate the human being, and through which he lives through the formations and forms laid down in the first seven years of life.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave this lecture on 5 October 1919, four weeks after the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart on 7 September 1919, founded with Emil Molt of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. The timing matters, because the subsensible doctrine is the physiology that school was built on. If the forces shaping a child to the seventh year are anchored in the interior of the earth planet, the first years belong to the body, to imitation, to standing and walking, not to abstract instruction. If the seventh to fourteenth years are carried by the air circle reaching the child through breathing, the middle years belong to rhythm: to song, to recitation, to the cadence that Waldorf teachers still call the breathing of the lesson.
That original school runs today as the Freie Waldorfschule Uhlandshöhe in Stuttgart, and the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum in Dornach coordinates a movement of more than a thousand schools working from the same seven-year scheme. Read through GA 191, the twenty-one-year curriculum reads less as a philosophy of childhood than as a map of which subsensible forces are doing the forming, and when. Thalira synthesis: the subsensible is not the spirit's shadow but its floor, which is why Steiner's pedagogy builds downward first, securing the ground a person later needs in order to look up.
Where to Read More
- Social Understanding from a Spiritual-Scientific Perspective, GA 191
- Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, GA 26, the 1925 letters on sub-nature
- Find Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts at SteinerBooks
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