Steiner's sixfold anatomy of the soul: three upper faculties, sense activity, intelligence and memory, face the past; three lower ones, feeling, desire and will, face the future.
The Upper and Lower Soul Faculties in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to his sixfold anatomy of the human soul, set out in two consecutive Dornach lectures of 13 and 14 February 1920, published as Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (GA 196). The three upper, or cognitive, faculties are sense activity, intelligence and memory, and Steiner traced each to an earlier planetary condition: sense activity to Old Saturn, intelligence to Old Sun, memory to Old Moon. The upper three therefore face the past, and they are the organs through which the Archai, Archangeloi and Angeloi work in us. The three lower faculties, feeling, desire and will, were formed on Earth and face the future, ripening into conscious Imagination on Jupiter, Inspiration on Venus and Intuition on Vulcan. Memory is the most tightly interwoven with the body, intelligence less so, sense activity least of all.
The upper and lower soul faculties are Steiner's two triads of inner capacity, sorted by how tightly each is bound to the physical body. The upper three, sense activity, intelligence and memory, carry a finished past into present consciousness. The lower three, feeling, desire and will, are still embryonic in earthly humanity. Steiner's point at Dornach in 1920 was that the two ranks constantly interpenetrate, and that prising them apart costs the thinker more than it gains.
In Steiner's Own Words
Those abilities that are called the lower abilities, because they are more closely connected with the body, always play a part in our higher soul abilities. Let us hold on to that for the time being. The lower soul faculties of will, desire and feeling shine through and glow in our higher soul faculties, which would place us in the world like dried-out intestines if they were only what they have become through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we become warm, feeling human beings, even when we think.
What it Means Today
Steiner closed that lecture with a portrait of the dry philistine, the man who has thrown feeling and desire out of his intellect and mistakes the residue for objectivity. Neurology arrived at the same finding from the opposite direction. In Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), Antonio Damasio, then at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, described a patient he called Elliot, whose ventromedial prefrontal cortex was damaged during surgery to remove a meningioma. Elliot's intelligence, language and memory still tested in the normal to superior range, so the upper faculties, in Steiner's terms, were intact. What had gone was feeling. He could reason about options for hours and could not choose between them, and his working life and marriage collapsed. Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis holds that bodily feeling states tag the possibilities so that reasoning has something to decide with.
Thalira synthesis: Damasio located surgically the deficit Steiner described developmentally, and the two accounts agree on the asymmetry, because a faculty still embryonic on Earth is the one most easily lost and the last one a materialistic psychology thinks to look for. The practical consequence is plain. When thinking about a problem has gone cold and circular, what is missing is rarely more analysis; it is the feeling, desire or willing that was excluded to keep the analysis clean.
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