In Steiner's anthropology, the will is the deepest of the three soul-activities, asleep within the limbs and metabolism even while we are awake.
The Will in Anthroposophy is the deepest and most unconscious of the three soul-activities Rudolf Steiner distinguishes as thinking, feeling, and willing. Thinking is fully awake, feeling dreams, and willing sleeps even while the person is awake. In The Foundations of Human Experience (Study of Man, GA 293, 1919) Steiner shows that we are conscious only of the mental picture of an intended deed, never of the bodily processes that carry it out. The will lives in the limbs and the metabolic system, below the threshold of ordinary awareness, the way dreamless sleep lives below waking. It is the soul-power through which the human being acts into the world, and it is awakened to consciousness only in the deed and through long inner schooling.
The will is the soul-force through which a human being acts, and in Steiner's account it is the least conscious of the three soul-activities. We know the thought that precedes a movement, yet the deed itself unfolds in the muscles and metabolism beyond awareness. Steiner places willing in the rhythm of waking, dreaming, and sleeping: thinking wakes, feeling dreams, and willing sleeps in the depths of the body.
In Steiner's Own Words
You know that when you perform the simplest kind of willing, for instance walking, you are only really fully conscious in your mental picture of the walking. You know nothing of what takes place in your muscles whilst one leg moves forward after the other; nothing of what takes place in the mechanism and organism of your body. Just think of what you would have to learn of the world if you had to perform consciously all the arrangements involved when you will to walk. You would have to know exactly how much of the activity produced by your food in the muscles of your legs and other parts of your body is used up in the effort of walking.
What it Means Today
This picture of a sleeping will is the working foundation of Waldorf pedagogy. When Steiner opened the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart in September 1919, the fourteen lectures of Study of Man were the teacher-training course he gave in the days just before the doors opened. His instruction to those first teachers followed directly from the idea in the passage above: because the will sleeps in the limbs and the metabolism, you cannot reach it by explanation, only by deed and movement. A child does not learn courage or persistence from being told about them. The will is schooled through what the body repeats.
That is why a Waldorf classroom looks the way it does. The school day opens with rhythmic movement and recitation, handwork and eurythmy stand beside arithmetic, and a lesson is often walked, clapped, or sung before it is written. Steiner gave the first teachers a concrete example in these same lectures: a child who seems dull is set to say a sentence while stepping it out, one pace to each word, so that the spoken thought and the moving limbs are woven together. The aim, in his phrase, is that the sleeping will be gradually wakened into thought. Anthroposophic educators in the lineage that runs from that 1919 course still describe their craft as the education of the will, and they mean it precisely: not motivation in the modern sense, but the slow awakening of a soul-force that, left to itself, would stay asleep.
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