Steiner's twelve senses fall into three groups: four upper senses that meet other beings, four middle senses, and four lower senses that report our own body.
The Upper And Lower Senses in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's division of the twelve human senses into three ranks according to how far each one carries us out of ourselves. He set it out in the lecture cycle Man as a Being of Sense and Perception (GA 206), given at Dornach on 22 July 1921. The four upper senses, the ego-sense, the sense of thought, the word-sense and the sense of hearing, deliver another being to us and leave almost nothing subjective behind. The four middle senses, warmth, sight, taste and smell, mix outer fact with inner reaction, which is why vinegar makes a face. The four lower senses, balance, movement, life and touch, report our own body, and here, Steiner says, a person in motion is no different to observe than a block of wood. Practically, the scheme tells a teacher or therapist which end of the sense organism a difficulty sits in.
The upper and lower senses are the two poles of Steiner's twelve-fold sense organism. Upward, through the ego-sense and the senses of thought, word and hearing, we live almost entirely in the being we are attending to. Downward, through balance, movement, life and touch, we perceive ourselves as one more object in space. The middle four hold both at once.
In Steiner's Own Words
If you think of all that you have through the ego-sense, the sense of thought, the word-sense, the sense of hearing, the sense of warmth and the sense of sight, you have practically the whole range of what we call soul-life. Something of the characteristics of the specifically outer senses still enters a little into the sense of warmth, upon which our soul-life is much more dependent than we usually think. And of course the sense of sight has a very wide significance for our whole soul-life. But with the senses of taste and smell we are already entering into the animal realm, and with the senses of balance, movement and life and so on, we plunge completely into our bodily nature.
What it Means Today
Half a century after Dornach, the American occupational therapist A. Jean Ayres (1920 to 1988) built a clinical model on the same asymmetry, without any reference to Steiner. In Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders (Western Psychological Services, 1972) Ayres argued that the vestibular, proprioceptive and tactile systems, the ones that tell a child where the body is rather than what the world contains, form the substrate on which language, attention and social reading are later built. Her Sensory Integration and the Child (1979) put the claim in plain terms for parents: a child who cannot organise balance and touch will struggle in the classroom long before anyone examines the eyes or the ears. Steiner's list of lower senses, balance, movement, life and touch, is Ayres's list with the sense of life added. The practical consequence runs the same way in both traditions: when a child does not seem to hear meaning in words, you do not begin with the word-sense, you begin underneath it, with swinging, climbing, rhythm, weight and warm firm contact.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner's ranking is not a ladder of worth but a ladder of exposure. The lower four report a body that behaves like any other object under physical law, which is exactly why they can be schooled by physical means. The upper four report beings, and beings cannot be schooled into us at all. They can only be met.
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