# 11. Essence and Evolution of Man _In man, the animal is raised to higher purposes and put in shadow for the eye as well as for the spirit._[^1] (Goethe) ## 11.1 Man in Space - the Upright Posture and the Autonomous Essence of the 'I' Humans differ from animals in their upright gait, language and thinking. Although there are many approaches to upright posture in the animal kingdom, and although animals communicate in a differentiated manner and also display impressive feats of memory and intelligence[^2], there is nevertheless an irreconcilable difference in the quality, flexibility and complexity of the three abilities mentioned. Above all, man has the ability to freely combine his thinking, feeling and willing, which gives him an imaginative, communicative and cooperative gift far beyond any animal ability. Like no other creature, he can conceive complex scenarios, communicate about them with others and realise them cooperatively.[^3] The human being must raise himself up by his own strength and actively maintain his balance in an unstable static. If the inner will activity slackens, the body sinks into itself or falls to earth. "_Always the upright posture is counter-direction to the downward pulling forces; they are always at work; without them the upright posture would not be what it is. It is an overcoming without end._"[^4] In the upright walk, man has the experience of being entirely active out of himself and at the same time - in balance - resting in himself.[^5] The upright posture depends on and expresses the autonomous nature and will of the 'I'. When a child stands up in its first year, it performs a feat that does not rise instinctively from its biological nature, but is worked into it, as it were, from the top down.[^6] Children who cannot stand up for medical reasons develop markedly different body forms than people who walk upright: The arch of the foot remains relatively flat, the heel does not strengthen so clearly, the slightly x-legged position of the knees does not develop, the angle between the thigh and the pelvis remains greater, the position of the pelvis relatively high, the spine does not form the typical double curve and does not sink as deeply as usual into the thorax, the cervical, thoracic and lumbar vertebrae do not differentiate so strongly from each other, etc. This remodelling of the body is only brought about by the active confrontation of the human being with the force of gravity[^7] ![[Fig. 51.png]] **Fig. 51.** Reconstruction of _Australopithecus afarensis_ (left) with human foot (right) but ape-like arms and skull. Middle: 3.6 million year old footprints from Laetoli. The tracks are from one adult and two children. One child walked in the footsteps of the adult, the other probably by hand alongside, as suggested by the slightly oblique footprints - the early image of a human community! The attempt to explain uprightness in terms of Darwinism reduces the grace and dignity of the upright posture, expression and image of the free human being, to a clumsy and supposed survival advantage. Such thoughts have contributed a lot to the desolation of culture, and sounded very different in the words of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803): "_Look up to heaven, O man, and rejoice, shuddering, in your immeasurable advantage, which the Creator of the world has attached to such a simple principle, your upright form. If thou wert stooping like an animal, if thy head were formed in just this voracious direction for mouth and nose, and if the structure of thy limbs were arranged accordingly: where would thy higher spiritual power, the image of the Godhead, remain invisibly lowered into thee?_"[^8] In palaeoanthropology, the early upright walking beings are not spoken of as humans, but as apes ('_Pithecus_'); the status of a human being is only conferred when the brain is of a particular size. By this attribution, one transfers the humane to consciousness and not to the activity of the will, which always precedes the reflective faculty. The essential difference between humans and animals, however, lies in the origin of will activity - in humans freely determined from within, in animals instinctively determined from the outside - and only secondarily in different cognitive abilities! Thinking is also based on an inner, intuitive will activity. Not only in erection and action, but also in cognition, _the will is always primary._ Only it is easily overlooked, for one lives _in_ one's own will activity; one simply carries it out without observing it. If one takes into account the will working in cognition, one is led to a new conception of evolution, indeed to a new and much more real knowledge of man and the world in general. In conscious activity one experiences the will as a self-supporting, spiritual reality. Materialism only survives because the autonomous will is so little activated and therefore remains unnoticed. When the autonomous will becomes inwardly conscious, self-consciousness arises. It is the conscious will that looks at itself - as a spiritual force in man - in true self-knowledge.[^9] He who conceives of himself as 'I' finds a fact more true and irrefutable than any other in the world. With all other cognitions, empiricism and theory must first be put together. This always leaves a residual uncertainty about their actual fit. In self-knowledge, this uncertainty is completely overcome; in it, empiricism and theory are the same, they appear as one. The 'I' is the source of the will. It creates itself by knowing itself, and it knows itself by creating itself. "_The I cannot be shaken_."[^10] In order to avoid an obvious misunderstanding, it should be expressly pointed out that the 'I' does not mean the 'ego'-conception. This is only a bodily mirrored representation, not a reality. The real 'I' lives in activity, it is a being of will and as such is initially free from referring back to itself. It is active attention, attentive activity. Precisely because it lives before its reflection, it remains unnoticed as a spiritual being in ordinary consciousness, for "_active bringing forth and contemplative confrontation do not get along with each other" (Rudolf Steiner). He who discovers (awakens) himself as a spiritual 'I' can no longer think that he has arisen from a 'non-I', from matter or lower organisms. He must think the whole evolution anew. ## 11.2 The Effect of Uprightness The erection was accompanied by a reshaping of the skull from the apes through early man to present man. The facial skull became smaller, the cerebral skull grew (Fig. 52). The regression of the facial skull is already evident in the infantile and juvenile forms of the preceding evolutionary stages, which consistently have a more human-like shape than the adults. Thus, the child skull of a Neanderthal already has the proportions of an adult _Homo sapiens_, while the child skull of an _Australopithecus_ resembles an adult _Homo erectus_, and so on. The children already prophetically anticipate the adult forms of the following stage. - Moreover, the infant forms differ far less from each other than the adult ones. A young ape skull then soon grows into an animal shape, while the human skull remains much more similar to the common, approximately spherical embryonic form even as an adult. ![[Fig. 52.png]] **Fig. 52.** Hominid skulls. Foetal forms, infant forms; adult forms (l.t.r., not to scale; after Schindewolf[^11], Schultz[^12]). The numbers indicate the currently assumed times (in years before presence) of separation of the evolutionary lineages (after Robson and Wood[^13]; for the Neanderthal[^14], the chimpanzee and the orangutan, results from DNA comparisons with _Homo sapiens_ are given). In humans, the facial skull with the jaw region, which is specialised in animals, remains behind in growth, but the brain, as the organ of an unspecialised inner conscious life, is greatly enlarged. It remains longer in an embryonic state than the brain of the animals, for the strong growth and the ability to form of neurological interconnections, which are more or less completed in animals at birth, are preserved in man far beyond the embryonic period.[^15] This 'juvenilisation' applies to a variety of human characteristics.[^16] The Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk (1866-1930) summarised this phenomenon in his 'foetalisation theory'[^17]. However, Bolk's hypothesis that man is 'a monkey foetus that has reached sexual maturity' is wrong. Man is obviously not an ape; his head does _not_ look like that of a newborn chimpanzee. It is true that man is more juvenile than the ape, because more original features appear in the adult man than in the adult ape. On the contrary, one could say that the ape is a human being who has overshot the mark and developed too far. Due to the upright posture, the human upper limbs are not bound to a specific environment or function. They do not show any specialisations, as is the case in apes for swing shimmying and knuckle walking. The human arm and hand remain primitive. They therefore embody the archetype of the vertebrate limb, and this in a double sense. For on the one hand, the limbs are formed from an embryonic anlage that is similarly shaped in all quadrupedal vertebrates. While the animal limbs depart more or less from this common origin, the human hand remains most similar to the embryonic initial form. Because of this primitiveness, it is also universal; with its help, humans can achieve everything (and much more) that animals can do (using technical devices, which they in turn make with their hands). Precisely because it remains unspecialised, the hand becomes a culture-creating tool per se and serves man not only in action, in giving and receiving, but also in showing, in symbolism and gesture as an expression of his mental life. The hand is perhaps the organ in which the human 'I' is most strongly expressed. The human arm and hand also correspond to the archetype of the vertebrate limbs (cf. [[Fig. 1]]). If one looks for the common basic form, one arrives at a scheme like the one shown in the middle of Fig. 53. This abstract archetype appears in the human form! The human hand sums up everything, it is the common archetype that has flowed out in the limbs of the animals into specialised forms, adapted to the most diverse habitats. From the hand, one can derive the specialised animal limbs through adaptation to certain environments, but from the latter, human universality can only be derived through despecialisation. ![[Fig. 53.png]] **Fig.** **53**. The arm and hand of man come closest to the ideal archetype of the vertebrate limb.[^18] In this sense Karl Snell, already quoted several times, wrote: "_In expounding the unity of the type, one generally starts from man, because one sees that light and order are most easily brought into this doctrine by placing man in the center and grouping the mammals around him, and now proving how the animal forms appear as modifications of the human form produced by manifold lengthenings, shortenings, displacements and adhesions. Thus the central position of man is implicitly presupposed and man is regarded and used as the giver of understanding, as the key of the creatures. ... What here presents itself in the spiritual sphere as a derivation, will have to be grasped in the physical sphere as descent_."[^19] The general type of the upper vertebrate limb appears in the human hand because it stops at an early stage of development. The connection between developmental delay and typological archetype is a basic motif of human development. Precisely because the hand of the upright human does not grow into specialised physical tasks, it can embody the archetypal form, which is not determined by external circumstances, but solely by inner principles of formation. These principles are inherent in evolution, but in animals they become overgrown, as it were, through entanglement with the physical environment - in man they come to appearance. The human gestalt is formed according to inner principles, not out of adaptation to external circumstances. The bodily entanglement with the physical environment is stagnated. Ernst-Michael Kranich formulated ingeniously: "_The body of animals is adapted to the environment, the body of man is adapted to the 'I'_."[^20] Man in his whole design remains closer to the common _archetypal form_. One may speak, like Richard Owen, of an incarnation of the type in the human form: Animals evolved, "_guided by the archetypal light, to the appearance of the [archetypal] idea in the glorious garb of human form_."[^21] The archetype is not an abstract scheme, but living, experiential reality.   Richard Owen sought the origin of the vertebrate type in the thoughts of an otherworldly creator (cf. [[2. The Transition from Idealistic to Materialistic Biology in the 19th Century#2.2 Relationship of Forms - Richard Owen and the Archetype|Chapter 2.2]]). This Platonising idealism takes man away from the earth and from himself. It makes one see, but what one sees is only an abstract illusion. Charles Darwin wanted to remain 'down to earth'. But he had lost the sense of the archetype of the human form. To him it was one among many, physically derived from a common ancestor like all others. He had completely forgotten himself as a spiritual being. The materialistic world view makes one blind. We, on the other hand, do not see the archetype and source point of evolution in a distant beyond, nor in blind chance, but in man himself, whose inner, autonomous being appears in his outer shape and its principles of formation. The head, the hand, indeed the whole human form are not an expression of external necessity, but of inner, self-setting freedom. Man is not the best adapted of all vertebrates, but the least. His archetype is freedom. Charles Darwin was right in thinking evolution, but wrong in overlooking man. ## 11.3 Man as a Polar Being The head, arms and hands of man remain closer to the common embryonic origin than that of animals; the evolution of skull forms from apes to man showes increasing juvenilisation ('paedomorphosis'[^22]). The lower limbs of humans, leg and feet, however, move further away from the common starting point than animal limbs do ('peramorphosis').[^23] While the head and arms/hands of man are less developed than those of the apes, his legs and feet are more differentiated and built for springy gait and balancing carrying of body weight. What in apes is still a ‘grasping hand’ due to the opposable big toe, in humans is shaped into a foot in a struggle with gravity. The differentiation of the upper and lower body-pole is caused by uprightness. The human being thereby places himself in a polarity of above and below, lightness and heaviness, consciousness and strength, intelligence and will, thereby developing a center that is freely movable between the two poles. It is precisely through the strong expression of this polarity that he differs from the animals (Fig. 54). ![[Fig. 54.png]] **Fig. 54.** Comparison between gorilla and human. The free connection of consciousness and willpower makes it possible, on the one hand, to think up something new through imagination, and on the other hand, to create something new in the world. All scientific cognition, all art and culture, all creative-practical action of man is based on the free combinability of thinking and willing (Fig. 55, left).[^24]. One can extend this view of man imaginatively. The human form can be seen as an image of the polarity of consciousness and will, of light and matter, of 'heaven' and 'earth' (Fig. 55, right).The radiant legs and feet are formed in confrontation with the forces of the earth, while the spherical head shows an image of heaven. To the outer light of the sky corresponds the inner light of consciousness, thoughts move in relation to each other like stars according to their own unchanging laws. The human will, in turn, is formed and impulse by resistance to the earthly substances and forces. And in his midst man lives freely giving and receiving in his surrounding and fellow world. ![[Fig. 55.png]] **Fig. 55.** left: Man's cultural activities are made possible by the free combinability of thinking and willing. Right: Head, limbs and torso as images of the cosmos, earth forces and man's relationship to his environment. ## 11.4 The Opposite Directions of Evolution and Hominisation Man’s upright gait preceded the development of his flexible hand use and this in turn preceded the growth of the brain (Fig. 56). In an upright position, humans could observe the activity of their hands and thus gradually develop them from instinct-driven behaviour to consciously guided, learning work. Through the feedback between action and cognition, they visibly refined both abilities (as can be seen in the now beginning and soon differentiating use of tools and other cultural achievements), and in the same course the brain also grew. ![[Fig. 56.png]] **Fig. 56.** Evolutionary steps of becoming human (after Antón[^25]). The direction was from the feet to the head. Wolfgang Schad described the evolutionary sequence of uprightness, use of hands, development of language and thought as follows: "_From 7 million years before our time mankind had already possessed upright gait as its first characteristic. From 2.5 million, the first stone artefacts appear as the results of awakened manual dexterity. From about 350,000 years ago, early archaic sapiens humans show the high arched palate for the ability to speak (Steinheim man). But it is only with the development of the blade culture and the appearance of many interchangeable shafted tools that we encounter characteristics of increasingly combinatorial, thought-planning abilities in the end of the last Ice Age and in the subsequent Middle Stone Age. It is the time of small-scale art and cave painting: the production of symbolising carved figures and those representations of inner ideas, i.e. rock carvings and rock paintings. Then, with the onset of the post-glacial period, mankind settled down, first in the Near East and then gradually all over the world, with the help of the beginnings of agriculture. Everyone defends their habitat against the others. The first depictions of war appear (Spanish rock paintings). The separation of mine and thine, of I and the world has occurred. Self-consciousness awakens_."[^26] The direction of development from ape-like human ancestors to man (hominisation) thus proceeded in the reverse direction of evolution, for in phylogenesis head-like animals arose first, then fish with head and trunk, and finally land animals with head, trunk and limbs (cf. [[Fig. 38]] and [[Fig. 42]]). Interestingly, the individual development of the human body also proceeds in the same direction as evolution, namely from the head to the limbs (Fig. 57). The human being grows, as it were, from the head down to the earth. ![[Fig. 57.png]] **Fig.** **57**. Changes in the relative proportions of head, trunk and limbs during human ontogeny. We must therefore distinguish two 'modes of becoming human'. One, evolutionary and ontogenetic, leads - in the direction 'from top to bottom' - to the formation of the human body. The other, 'from bottom to top', is a consequence of the efficacy of an individual 'I', which, by its own inner strength, engages with the environment through this body, erects it against the effects of gravity, forms its organs of speech through imitation of the social environment and its brain through orientation in the world. One direction is embodiment, the other spiritualisation. ## 11.5 Man in Time - the Discovery of Slowness Of all primates, man develops _slowest_ and lives longest (Fig. 58). The same developmental steps take much longer in him than in apes and other animals. The greatly extended juvenile period makes it possible for the instinctive learning of animals to be replaced in man by social imitation and cultural learning - a fact now generally recognised by science, the fundamental importance of which was already pointed out in detail by Friedrich Kipp in 1980.[^27] Early forms of man (_Australopithecus_, _Homo erectus_, _Homo neanderthalensis_) also developed more rapidly than present-day humans.[^28] ![[Fig. 58.png]] **Fig.** **58**. Different durations of comparable developmental steps in macaque, chimpanzee, _Homo erectus_ and _H. sapiens_ (in years).[^29] The slower a primate develops, the longer it lives, and the more similar it is to present-day man. One can say: becoming human means slowing down, _extending time_. The 'juvenilisation' of cranial forms shown above ([[Fig. 52]]) is also an expression of this fact: morphological retardation due to slowed ontogenesis.[^30] Increased speed of development means that in animals (or in early humans) similar features follow(ed) each other at shorter intervals. For _Homo sapiens_, time is less filled with physical and organic contents and necessities, he has more time for inner experience, in which his creative activity can unfold. Out of the void of boredom, creativity is born. This is another reason why humans develop art and culture - unlike animals, they have the time to do so. Just as man, through his uprightness, frees himself from the entanglement with his physical surroundings and attains a spatial overview, so, through his slowed development, he rises spiritually out of the flowing time and attains a free overview of the past, present and future. It is, after all, characteristic of man that, in contrast to animals, he develops an awareness of his origin and tradition as well as of his death approaching him from the future.[^31] These relations can now once again be pictorially grasped in the TIME CROSS (Fig. 59): Both man and the apes originate from the living stream of inheritance. In the development of the animals, a soul ('astral force', cf. [[6. Animal Form as an Expression of the Soul#6.2 The Animal Form as an Expression of the Soul|Chapter 6.2]]) coming from the future pushes itself into this stream of life and embodies itself in the animal forms. In the human being _this_ embodiment is slowed down and thus partially restrained; the soul remains freely mobile and can enter the inner sphere of the 'I'. Rudolf Steiner wrote accordingly: "_In the astral the animal form arises outwardly as a whole form and inwardly as the form of the organs. ... If this formation is carried to its end, the animal is formed. In man it is not carried to its end. It is stopped at a certain point on its way, inhibited. ... it is drawn into the realm of the I-organisation_."[^32] Thus, on the one hand, man loses the wisdom of body-bound instinctual certainty, but on the other hand gains the a space for inner creativity. ![[Fig. 59.png]] **Fig. 59.** The evolution of animal and human forms in the TIME CROSS. Hermann Poppelbaum has described this free space of the I in wonderful words: "_Only in the sphere of man is the spell of an indispensable past and an unavoidable future broken. Only to the human being is the present really open. Between the past and the future a narrow space has become free, which the I has created for itself. Here it unfolds its activity. Animal wisdom is still laden with past group experience and overhung with urgent foresight. The animal acts out of inherited instinct, even where it makes provisions for the future. In humans, such instincts recede. The innate preparation fails. ... The animal fits its scene. In man, it is precisely the idea of not fitting in that is justified. ... For man, the discrepancy between the skills he has brought with him and the current requirements of the situation is essential. He is not attuned or equipped. He must spontaneously create the harmony and choose the direction himself. What is ruinous for the animal being, the inadequate, becomes for the human being precisely the element of increased life. The I needs this sphere for its development. The incongruence of I and life situation appeals to the source of strength in the human being that the animal lacks. The scene, for the animal only a complement to the organisation, ... acquires creative significance for the human being. It makes its moral demands on the developing human being, by virtue of the inadequacy that prevails in him. ... Here human triumphs, but also tragedies and comedies, are produced. ... It is precisely in human beings that the situation of life, unpremeditated and unique ... appeals to the true presence of mind. The moment takes on sole and supreme significance. Success is not predetermined, and failure must be dared. In the 'narrow' space between the two stretches the immeasurable realm of human freedom."[^33] The presence of the I in the body thus has a spatially uplifting, temporally slowing and morphologically 'juvenilising' effect. The evolution of the apes and early human forms prepared for and already heralded the entry of the I into the physical body. ## 11.6 Summary We have shown by many examples that evolution as a whole can be compared to the development and metamorphosis of a single organism. Like ontogenesis, we can therefore also understand the transforming movements in phylogenesis in our own living thought. We can describe the cognition of evolution with the same four stages as the cognition of the individual organism (cf. [[4. Goethe, Steiner and the Knowledge of Living Things#4.2 Form, Life, Consciousness, Being - Four Stages of Cognition|Charpter 4.2]]): 1. the physical-objective cognition of the individual forms (fossil or recent), 2. the inner metamorphic activity through which we bring them into a transformation context, 3. the superordinate knowledge of the whole evolutionary context to which this activity is oriented, 4. the idea of the whole, which permeates everything. For an individual living being, the superordinate idea is the species. It is present in all stages of development and appears most pronounced in the fully grown organism. But what is the overarching idea of evolution that pervades all individual forms? To answer this question of all questions, let us summarise all that we have worked out so far. We have shown that the four stages of cognition are characterised by four different subject-object relations. This closes the circle to Thomas Nagel’s quest that the knowing consciousness must be taken into account in a viable view of evolution. For the knowing consciousness is the human being and the knowing I (Fig. 60). It is we ourselves who, as human beings, have increasingly come to physical appearance in the course of evolution. The idea that permeates all evolutionary steps and that appears fully formed at the end is the human being. _Man is the alpha and omega of evolution, from the beginning its spiritual principle, appearing in the end in physical form. In the beginning this living idea spiritually encompassed everything else, in the end it appeared in bodily separation. In the future man will again unite spiritually with the world._ ![[Fig. 60.png]] **Fig. 60.** Four levels of evolutionary knowledge. Against such a comparison of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, the objection is obvious that in ontogenesis one knows from experience how development proceeds, but not in phylogenesis. One could never predict from the observation of a prehistoric fish that it represents a step on the way to man. But I cannot put myself in the place of a primeval fish without the at least implicit knowledge that it embodies such a step on the way to becoming human, _for it is me who is active here_. To say that one cannot predict man from the fish stage is, on the one hand, just as correct as it is, on the other hand, based on a misjudgement of the real events that underlie this thought. _When I think evolution, it is me who thinks it. As a knowing human being, I belong to evolution and can only ever look at it in retrospect, from the perspective of my own cognition and running towards it_. Natural science would again find a connection between nature and man (and be able to answer many of its puzzling questions) if it stopped ignoring its most essential asset: the knowing human being. If one takes into account the cognising 'I' as the subject of evolutionary knowledge and as a self-supporting spiritual reality, then the question of a goal direction for evolution appears in a new light. For then one need no longer seek the teleological principle of evolution outside the cognizing 'I' in any "_occult teleological forces_"[^34], but in it and in the consciousness of the world encompassed by it. In its perceptions, the I faces the outside of the world; in its concepts, it is united with its essential inside. Thus one recognises the human being as a microcosm and the evolution from the primordial cells to the human being as the ever clearer appearance of the spiritual human being in physical form under 'separation' of the world-being, which now appears physically. The animals then appear as premature separations from the evolution of the human being, because they are not yet fully spirit-penetrated and have become sensual-physical. Man is a result of evolution and at the same time its stage. He is co-creator of the world, and at the same time its image, point and circumference in one. Whoever grasps the human being grasps the inner principle of the world. In this sense Rudolf Steiner summed up his view of evolution at the end of his life: "_Imaginative contemplation brought me the realisation that in primeval times there was in spiritual reality a quite different beingness than the simplest organisms. That man as a spiritual being is older than all other living beings, and that in order to assume his present physical form he had to separate himself from a world-being which contained him and the other organisms. These are thus waste products of human evolution; not something from which he emerged, but something which he left behind, separated from himself, in order to assume his physical form as the image of his spiritual being. Man as a macrocosmic being, who carried all the rest of the earthly world within him, and who has come to the microcosm through the separation of the rest, that was for me a realisation which I ... attained in the first years of the new century_."[^35] A time may come when what is here at the end will be the beginning of every account of evolution. From here, from the true and spiritual reality of the human I, evolution is to be grasped anew. Everything that has been put forward here must be considered from the point of view of this spiritual self-knowledge. ## 11.7 Freedom and Responsibility Through the thoughts developed here, one could think that the future is predetermined. Such a view would relieve man of his responsibility for further development of himself and the world, and it is in no way advocated here! It also does not result from what has been presented. For seen from the current experience of the 'I', the future is (at least partially) open; our actions and omissions will decisively influence the world's progress. - Conversely, one could conclude from the fact of human freedom that 'degrees of freedom' must have already prevailed in evolution, that its course could not have been determined either. In my opinion, both views are based on an imprecise determination of the origin of freedom. In the developmental series of animals, the capacity for freedom is indeed _dispositioned_, but the possibility of actual freedom only arises when man consciously confronts the world. One cannot say that a chimpanzee or a crow - however intelligently they may behave - are _free_. Only when consciousness falls out of the world-process does the separation of perception and concept, of will and imagination occur, which gives the possibility of their free and responsible reunion. In the light of inner experience, the animals appear as embodied life of the soul. In the human being, this embodiment is held back and drawn into the realm of his spirit-connected 'I'. The head becomes the organ of spiritual overview and knowledge, the limbs remain unspecialised and enable free choice of standpoint, walk, and action. In the tension between spirit and matter and in the awareness of the limits of his existence, the human being is embodied freedom. The life current from the past is transformed in him into the light of knowledge, the creative current from the future into the love of responsible and devoted action. Love understood in this sense can only arise from freedom. The world is the skull-site of man, in which he can only generate freely created new life because it has died to him completely. In separation and death, the ‘I’ awakens and, if it can overcome paralysis and pain, calls itself to a self-imposed new beginning, to revitalising action. ## 11.8 The Common Structure of Life and Consciousness Biologists are concerned with _life_. Every biologist knows the enthusiasm that seizes them when an insight into _life_ reveals itself to them. We then usually express it stammeringly with words like 'interconnectedness', 'system', 'complexity', 'evolution', but the language hardly suffices to grasp the inner movement. I have tried to show what underlies the understanding of life - it is the living in us. To gain insight into life is to become alive in ourselves. We feel numb when we get stuck on the dead details of reality, but invigorated and refreshed when the interconnections of life begin to pulsate within us. Today, in the age of intellectualism and materialism, dead thinking and the thinking of the dead have taken over to such an extent that more and more people are looking for ways out of the inner desolation that has come upon them as a result. This book is dedicated to them. The ways out can be found. But to do so, one must return to the phenomena, the external and the internal. As long as one interprets the world as mere matter, life as a genetic product and consciousness as the result of brain waves, one blocks one's own access to reality. Many then seek the way out in a nebulous way. Rudolf Steiner showed how access to the reality of the living spirit can be found in a prudent and systematic, i.e. _in a scientific_ way. In detail, one may argue about the points of view represented here. Some mistakes might be found, some things will have to be added, and many things can certainly be presented much more precisely. On the whole, however, the path described here can lead to a spiritualisation of scientific research. The spiritual connection of phenomena can be found if consciousness is taken into account. What appears externally as phenomena of life is grasped by the inner life. _In living knowing consciousness one can observe life from within_. We are not the spectators of a finished, mechanical and material cosmos, but co-creators in its living being and becoming. We carry out this creation in the sign of the cross, which, symbolising unity, is enclosed in a circle. Thus is fulfilled what Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) programmatically demanded: "_Nature should be the visible spirit, the spirit the invisible nature. Here, then, in the absolute identity of the spirit in us and nature outside us, the problem of how a nature outside us is possible must be resolved. The final goal of our further research into nature is therefore this idea of nature. The system of nature is at the same time the system of our spirit_."[^36] [^1]: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1795/1820): _Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ausgehend von der Osteologie. 1795 entstanden; Zur Morphologie, Band I Heft 2, 1820_. In: Siegfried Seidel (Hg.): _Goethe. Berliner Ausgabe Bd.1. Gedichte._ 1. Aufl. Berlin 2005, pp. 231–269. [^2]: Detailed in Streffer, Walther (2016): _Über die Art hinaus. Die Bedeutung intelligenter Individuen für die Evolution der Tiere._ 1. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016. [^3]: Suddendorf, Thomas (2014): _Der Unterschied. Was den Mensch zum Menschen macht._ 2. Aufl. Berlin 2014. [^4]: Straus, Erwin (1960): _Die aufrechte Haltung_. In: Erwin Straus (Hg.): _Psychologie der Menschlichen Welt. Gesammelte Schriften_. Berlin, Heidelberg 1960, pp. 224–235. [^5]: Kranich, Ernst-Michael (2003): _Der innere Mensch und sein Leib. Eine Anthropologie._ 1. Aufl. Stuttgart 2003. [^6]: Kranich (2003), pp. 19-70. [^7]: Holdrege, Craig (1999): _Der vergessene Kontext. Entwurf einer ganzheitlichen Genetik._ 1. Aufl. Stuttgart 1999. [^8]: Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1784): _»Der Mensch ist der erste Freigelassene der Schöpfung«. Aus den ersten fünf Büchern der ›Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit‹._ Stuttgart 1989, p. 56. [^9]: Steiner, Rudolf (1910): _Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss_. GA 013, Dornach 1989, p. 66. [^10]: Steiner, Rudolf (1923-1925): _Mein Lebensgang - eine nicht vollendete Autobiographie_. GA 028, Dornach 1982, p. 85. [^11]: Schindewolf, Otto Heinrich (1972): _Phylogenie und Anthropologie aus paläontologischer Sicht_. In: Hans G. Gadamer und Paul Vogler (Hg.): _Biologische Anthropologie._ Bd. 1. Stuttgart 1972. [^12]: Schultz, Adolph H. (1940): _Growth and development of the chimpanzee_. In: _Contributions to Embryology_ 28/1940, pp. 1–63; Schultz, Adolph H. (1941): _Growth and development of the orang-utan_. In: _Contributions to Embryology_ 29/1941, pp. 57–110. [^13]: Robson, Shannen L.; Wood, Bernard (2008): _Hominin life history: reconstruction and evolution_. In: _Journal of Anatomy_ 212, 4/2008, pp. 394–425. [^14]: Green, Richard E.; Krause, Johannes; Briggs, Adrian W.; Maricic, Tomislav; Stenzel, Udo; Kircher, Martin et al. (2010): _A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome_. In: _Science_ 328, 5979/2010, pp. 710–722. [^15]: Liu, Xiling; Somel, Mehmet; Tang, Lin; Yan, Zheng; Jiang, Xi; Guo, Song et al. (2012): _Extension of cortical synaptic development distinguishes humans from chimpanzees and macaques_. In: _Genome research_ 22, 4/2012, pp. 611–622; Somel, Mehmet; Franz, Henriette; Yan, Zheng; Lorenc, Anna; Guo, Song; Giger, Thomas et al. (2009): _Transcriptional neoteny in the human brain_. In: _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America_ 106, 14/2009, pp. 5743–5748. [^16]: Verhulst, Jos (1999): _Der Erstgeborene. Mensch und höhere Tiere in der Evolution._ 1. Aufl. Stuttgart 1999. [^17]: Bolk, Louis (1926): _Das Problem der Menschwerdung._ Vortrag auf der XXV. Versammlung der Anatomischen Gesellschaft zu Freiburg, 15.04.1926. [^18]: »_There is no more beautiful symbol of human freedom than human arms and hands_.« Steiner, Rudolf (1919): _Erziehungskunst_. GA 294, Dornach 1990, p. 104, 28.08.1919 Vgl. auch Poppelbaum, Hermann (1928): _Mensch und Tier. Fünf Einblicke in ihren Wesensunterschied._ Frankfurt (Main) 1981. [^19]: Snell, Karl (1887): _Vorlesung über die Abstammung des Menschen_. In: Friedrich A. Kipp (Hg.): _Karl Snell: Schöpfung des Menschen. Die Schöpfung des Menschen; Vorlesungen über die Abstammung des Menschen_. Stuttgart 1981, pp. 101–210. [^20]: Kranich, Ernst-Michael (1999): _Anthropologische Grundlagen der Waldorfpädagogik_. 1. Aufl. Stuttgart 1999, p. 84. [^21]: Owen, Richard (1849): _On the nature of limbs. A discourse._ Chicago 2008, p. 86. [^22]: McKinney, Michael L.; McNamara, Kenneth J. (1991): _Heterochrony. The Evolution of Ontogeny._ New York 1991. [^23]: This fact corresponds to the restraint of development (juvenilisation, paedomorphosis) of the head described by Wolfgang Schad with simultaneous further development (peramorphosis) of the limb system in the course of evolution, especially during evolutionary transitions between the classes of vertebrates and during hominisation. Schad, Wolfgang (1992): _Der Heterochronie-Modus in der Evolution der Wirbeltierklassen und Hominiden. Dissertation._ Witten-Herdecke 1992, p. 95. [^24]: Suddendorf (2014). [^25]: Antón, Susan C.; Potts, Richard; Aiello, Leslie C. (2014): _Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective_. In: _Science_ 345, 6192/2014, 1236828/1-1236828/13. [^26]: Schad, Wolfgang (2009): _Die Evolution der Menschheit. Menschenkundlich, naturwissenschaftlich und christologisch betrachtet_. In: _Die Drei_, 10/2009, pp. 27–38. [^27]: Kipp, Friedrich A. (1980): _Die Evolution des Menschen im Hinblick auf seine lange Jugendzeit_. 2. überarb. und erg. Aufl. Stuttgart 1991. [^28]: Cf. Appendix [[13. Appendix#13.9 Life Histories of Humans and Apes|13.9 Life Histories of Humans and Apes]]. [^29]: Cf. Robson und Wood (2008). The life expectancy of wild chimpanzees is only 15 years! Hill, Kim.; Boesch, Christophe.; Goodall, Jane.; Pusey, Anne.; Williams, Jennifer; Wrangham, Richard (2001): _Mortality rates among wild chimpanzees_. In: _Journal of human evolution_ 40, 5/2001, pp. 437–450. [^30]: Gould, Stephen Jay (1977): _Ontogeny and phylogeny_. Cambridge, MA 1977. [^31]: In the course of human evolution, burial rites that point to an expectation of a future after death are known for the first time among Neanderthals and Homo sapiens - probably 120,000 years ago at the earliest. Apparently, the still relatively rapidly developing _Homo erectus_ was not able to develop a conscious expectation of the future. [^32]: Steiner, Rudolf; Wegman, Ita (1925): _Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst nach geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen_. GA 027, Dornach 1991, pp. 35-36. [^33]: Poppelbaum, Hermann (1937): _Tier-Wesenskunde_. 2. Auflage Dornach 1982, pp. 24-26. [^34]: Mayr, Ernst (2002): _Die Autonomie der Biologie_. In: _Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau_, I/2002, pp. 23–29. [^35]: Steiner (1923-1925), p. 403. [^36]: Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1797): _Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur_. München 1927, p. 706.