Steiner's name for ordinary logical thinking: inspiration already at work below consciousness, sourced in the life the soul led before conception.
Unconscious Inspiration in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for ordinary logical thinking, understood as the lowest and most everyday degree of Inspiration, the second stage of supersensible cognition. Steiner set it out in the lecture Free Will, Immortality, given at Stuttgart on 24 April 1918 and printed in Reincarnation and Immortality (GA 71). Its bearer is the head organism, the nerve and sense system, which Steiner described as undergoing a retrogressive evolution that empties room for soul life. The power by which a person calls one mental image right and another wrong does not, on this account, arise from the body at all. Trained Inspiration traces it back to the life the soul led before conception, so that everyday correctness of thought stands as a residue of pre-earthly existence. Contemporary metacognition research studies the same felt signal under the name feeling of rightness.
Unconscious Inspiration is the point where Steiner's theory of knowledge touches ordinary daily life. Every time a thought is followed through and one conclusion is felt to be sound while another is discarded, something is at work that the thinker did not put there. Steiner held that this quiet corrective is inspiration in its unnoticed form, and that following it back leads to the soul's existence before conception.
In Steiner's Own Words
The thinking part of us that takes up an independent position in the organism can be perceived, and we can see what it is and how it enters the human being when we say that one thing is right and another wrong, how it emerges out of our organism. And we have learned to recognize what sort of experience we have in imagination, inspiration and intuition. But now, in what way do we experience our thinking? We find that as it exists in everyday life, providing it is a real kind of thinking, it does not simply follow the haphazard way of our mental images, but evolves logically, rightly or wrongly, and that it is an unconscious form of inspiration to the human being. This is the great discovery that we make.
What it Means Today
Cognitive psychology reached Steiner's observation from the opposite direction. In 2011 Valerie Thompson at the University of Saskatchewan, working with Jamie Prowse Turner and Gordon Pennycook, published "Intuition, reason, and metacognition" in the journal Cognitive Psychology, naming the signal that decides whether a first answer is kept or reopened: the feeling of rightness. Their result is that deliberate reasoning does not begin with logic. It begins with a felt quality already attached to an answer, and the strength of that feeling predicts how long a person keeps thinking. Thompson's laboratory measures the event Steiner pointed at in Stuttgart in 1918, the moment when one mental image is called right and another wrong, without the reasoner being able to say who called it.
The two accounts part company on the source. Thompson treats the feeling as a by-product of processing fluency, how easily the answer arrived. Steiner treats fluency as the outer face of a content the soul brought with it, and sends the enquirer to trained Inspiration to read that content. Thalira synthesis: the disagreement is testable rather than decorative, because fluency predicts that familiar answers will feel right, while Steiner's account predicts the feeling will run strongest in exactly those judgments a person has no personal experience to ground.
The practical residue is small and exact. Watch the instant before the reason arrives, in which a thought is accepted or set aside: Steiner's claim is that attention paid there is attention paid to inspiration, at its most ordinary.
Where to Read More
- Reincarnation and Immortality, GA 71, in the Thalira GA library
- Find Reincarnation and Immortality at SteinerBooks
- Active Imagination: Jung's Method for Dialogue with the Unconscious
- Jungian Theory: The Collective Unconscious, Archetypes, and the Self
- The Collective Unconscious: Jung's Deepest Layer of Psyche