Anthroposophical View of The Human Being - Threefold and Fourfold View

Threefold and Fourfold View

Rudolf Steiner often described humans as consisting of an eternal spirit, an evolving soul and a temporal body, giving a detailed analysis of each of these three realms.

Spirit: anthroposophical teachings describe the human spirit as eternal yet becoming progressively more individualized and consciously experienced. Steiner believed that humans pass between stages of existence, incarnating into an earthly body, living a life, leaving the body behind and entering into the spiritual worlds before returning to be born again into a new life on earth. In earthly life, the individuality or ego awakens to self-consciousness through its experience of its reflection in the deeds and suffering of a physical body.

Soul: We also have a framework of consciousness that includes our set feelings, concepts and intentions. As each human soul evolves through its experiences, the earth itself and civilization as a whole also evolve; thus, new types of experience are available at each successive incarnation.

Body: Steiner uses the term body to describe the aspects of human existence that endure for a single lifetime. The physical body is the most obvious of these. Permeating our physical existence are forces of life, growth and metamorphosis that maintain and develop the physical body; as it is an aspect of a lifetime that falls away after death, Steiner called this the life or etheric body. Steiner called that which receives sensory impressions the body of consciousness or sentient body.

A fourfold articulation of the human body often applied to contexts such as medicine and education includes:

• the physical body as physical-material structure, held in common with the mineral world;
• the life or etheric body, the source of life and growth, held in common with the plant world;
• the consciousness or astral body, held in common with the animal world;
• the ego or "I" of the human being, the faculty of self-awareness unique to humanity