Steiner's name for the human will, borne by the metabolic-limb system, as a member inside the cosmic body of the Elohim, inhabited unconsciously.
The Will as a Limb of the Elohim in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's answer to a question he raised at Dornach on 11 March 1921, in the cycle published as The Responsibility of Man for World Evolution (GA 203). If the liver is a member inside the human organism, Steiner asks, what larger organism is the human will a member of? He places the bodily side of willing in the metabolic-limb system, the third division of his threefold bodily anthropology, and sets that system inside the cosmic life of the Elohim, the Spirits of Form named at the opening of Genesis. The consequence is exact. In the head system humanity was cut loose from the Elohim so that freedom could arise; in the will system no separation was ever made. Because willing is slept through, the human being inhabits that divine organism without once noticing it.
The will as a limb of the Elohim names the least visible half of Steiner's picture of the human being. Thinking stands out clear and separate, lit by full daylight consciousness. Willing does not. Its bodily carrier, the metabolic-limb system, works beneath any waking awareness, and Steiner holds that what works there is not private property: it is the continuing life of the Elohim, running through human limbs.
In Steiner's Own Words
Similarly, within a large organism, a world organism, which is represented here in white, we can consider the entire human metabolic-limb system, the will system, as a limb. And then the question arises: What is this large cosmic organism in which human will life and metabolic-limb life are, so to speak, embedded? You see, what man is embedded in with regard to his third limb is the cosmic life of those spiritual beings whom the Bible calls Elohim. In fact, just as we live in the outer nature that we see through our senses, so we live with this part of our being, which we actually sleep through in its activity, the life of the Elohim.
What it Means Today
Michael D. Gershon, chairman of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University, published The Second Brain with HarperCollins in 1998 and made one physiological fact famous: the enteric nervous system, on the order of a hundred million nerve cells lining the gut, runs its own program. It sequences digestion, times peristalsis, and keeps working through anaesthesia and sleep. No instruction comes down from the head. Nobody has ever willed a contraction of the small intestine, and nobody can feel one happening.
Steiner was not doing neurogastroenterology in 1921, and the two accounts should not be collapsed into one. They do describe the same territory from opposite ends. Gershon's finding is that the metabolic pole is not governed from the head. Steiner's question is the one that finding leaves open: if the head does not govern it, what does? His answer in GA 203 refuses the easy word autonomous. A liver is not autonomous, it is a member of a body, and so, he argues, is the human metabolic-limb system, whose body is the ongoing life of the Elohim.
Thalira synthesis: the unconsciousness of the will is normally read as a limit on self-knowledge, while Steiner reads it as an address, since the one region a person can never observe in himself is exactly the region he shares with beings whose life he is living inside.
Where to Read More
- The Responsibility of Man for World Evolution, GA 203
- Find at SteinerBooks
- Elohim on Wikidata (Q868915) [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]