Three preparatory steps, depths, heights and widths, that Steiner said a person must pass before earning the right to call himself a human being.
The Three Steps to the Word Human Being in Anthroposophy is a meditative exercise Rudolf Steiner gave to the priests of the Christian Community in Stuttgart on 13 July 1923, printed in Course for Priests of the Christian Community (GA 345). Steiner argued that ordinary speech uses the word Mensch, human being, without any right to it, and that the right has to be earned in three stages. The being named by that word has depths that must first be fathomed, heights that must first be climbed, and widths that must first be surveyed. In the same lecture he assigned each stage a member of the human constitution: the depths of the earth work in the physical body, the heavenly heights in the etheric, and the widths of the world in the astral. The meditant therefore sleeps toward the earth, dreams toward the heights, and stands awake in the widths.
The three steps to the word human being are Steiner's answer to a question most speakers never ask: by what right do I name myself? Before the priests of the newly gathered Christian Community, he proposed that silence comes first, then three tests, and only after them the word. Each step opens one dimension of the human being, and each is met by a different degree of waking consciousness.
In Steiner's Own Words
These things must firstly be experienced through the depths of our soul in a priestly way to really encounter the world. Outer gestures do not make a priest, because the priest expresses what comes out of the deepest depths within. When we designate the words “human-being” as such to ourselves, we should only be able to do so when we have gone through these three stages: The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being” has depths which I must first need to fathom; The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being” has heights to which I need to rise first; The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being” has widths which I first have to look at and grasp. These three sentences contain something meaningful: being a human-being.
What it Means Today
Owen Barfield, the London solicitor who joined the Anthroposophical Society in the 1920s and outlived every other member of the Inklings, spent decades on the problem Steiner set out in this lecture. In Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), Barfield argued that the oldest words are not vague metaphors that later sharpened into precision, but single meanings that have since split apart: the Latin spiritus once carried breath, wind and spirit in one utterance, and only later fractured into three ideas needing three words. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957) he named the two poles of that history, original participation, in which the speaker stands inside the thing he names, and final participation, in which that position has to be consciously re-earned. Barfield's final participation is the same demand Steiner puts to the priests at Stuttgart: the word is not handed back automatically, it is worked for.
Thalira synthesis: the three steps are not a theory about language, they are a licensing procedure, and the fee is paid in silence before it is paid in study. Test it on one word worn smooth by daily use: set it down for a week, refuse to say it, and watch what returns when the ban lifts. Barfield ran that experiment on idolatry, Steiner ran it on Mensch, and both warned that a word retrieved too quickly carries only fresh pride.
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