The World of Reason is Steiner's Rosicrucian name for arupa Devachan, the highest spiritual region touching earth existence, reached through Intuition.
The World Of Reason in Anthroposophy is the Rosicrucian name for arupa Devachan, the highest spiritual region that still touches earth existence. Rudolf Steiner introduced it in the second lecture of Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (GA 99), given in Munich on 25 May 1907, where he called it the world of true Intuition and gave its German name, Vernunftwelt. It stands above the astral or Imaginative world and above Rupa Devachan, the world of Inspiration. Three things belong to it in Steiner's account: the forces that hold the physical body together have their true form here, the ego consciousness of the mineral kingdom resides here, and the Akasha Chronicle arises here before extending downward into the astral world. Intellectual concepts, Steiner said, are faint shadow images of the living Beings who act in this region, knowable only through Intuition, a merging into other beings, a claim Owen Barfield carried into his 1957 study Saving the Appearances.
The World of Reason is the region Rudolf Steiner placed at the top of the three supersensible worlds that border earth existence, above the astral world of Imagination and the Rupa Devachan of Inspiration. Rosicrucian teaching named it Vernunftwelt. Steiner described it as the dwelling place of the Beings whose activity our sharpest concepts only shadow, and as the source of the forces that keep the physical body from dissolving.
In Steiner's Own Words
Still another world, revealed by even higher senses, is known in Rosicrucianism as the world of true Intuition, but “Intuition” here has a much higher reality than is contained in the word as used in everyday life. True Intuition is a “merging into” other beings, so that they are known from within themselves. In the movement that has linked itself with Rosicrucianism, this world of Intuition has been called the “world of Reason” (Vernunftwelt); it is so far above the ordinary world that it casts a shadow-image only into the world of men. Intellectual concepts are faint and feeble shadow-images of the realities in this higher world. In addition to the physical world, therefore, there are three other worlds. Behind the forces which hold the physical world together there are forces which are to be found in the highest world, the world of Intuition.
What it Means Today
Owen Barfield, the British philosopher who translated Rudolf Steiner into English and who sat with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in the Inklings, built a working life on the claim Steiner makes in this lecture: a concept is not a neutral abstraction but the thinned residue of something living. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, published by Faber and Faber in 1957, Barfield named the failure. Idolatry, in his usage, is what a culture commits when it takes its collective representations, atom, gene, field, wave, for objects standing outside human consciousness rather than for the shared figuration of a shared thinking. His remedy was to know those concepts from within, a movement he called final participation, and it covers nearly the ground of Steiner's Intuition.
Thalira synthesis: the World of Reason is less a place the soul travels to than the condition in which a thought stops being about its object and becomes the object thinking itself. C.S. Lewis dedicated The Allegory of Love to Barfield in 1936 as the wisest and best of his unofficial teachers. The consequence for a reader now is small and exacting. Take one concept you lean on daily, gravity, immunity, inflation, and ask whether you hold a living activity or a shadow mistaken for a thing.
Where to Read More
- Theosophy of the Rosicrucian, GA 99
- Find Theosophy of the Rosicrucian at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]