The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

immediate environment. We experience the complex co-ordination of muscles as almost
automatic in response to sense perceptions of which we are hardly aware. This is true
of most habitual movements and actions. I can think about the content of this sentence
without having to focus too much on the muscles involved in moving my fingers as I
write. That I can more or less spell correctly and even fill the page with parallel lines
of writing of similar size and shape (even on blank paper!) calls other sense and motor
processes into activity. Because I am an individual endowed with a unique biography
my handwriting has its own characteristics. At the level of style and thought content,
still other parts of my being are engaged, emotional and cognitive.
I labor the point (perhaps another characteristic …) in order to establish that a
polarity exists within myself between a willed activity where little consciousness is called
for and a cognitive activity highly dependent on consciousness. Between them mediates
a middle way, a point of reference and orientation. At one pole, in my limb activity, I
am, relatively speaking in a synthesizing relationship with the world outside me. I’m
engaging in it. At the other pole I have to withdraw and analyze. The one gesture is
sympathetic, more or less at one with the material of the world (paper, pen, desk, etc.);
the other is antipathetic.
To return to the polarity of core and flake tools one can see a parallel with the
two poles of human consciousness. In the development of the human being the state of
early childhood is one in which the child lives strongly in its bodily relationship to the
environment. It feels its own body as world and the distinction between self and world
as one without barriers most of the time. The child is not only a “wholly sense organ” it
lives strongly in its unconscious will forces. The adult on the other hand has developed
the mediating focus of “I”-consciousness and has developed a comprehensive cognitive
and reflective faculty. In the shift from core to flake technologies we see one symptom
of a emerging “I”-consciousness, directing as it were a more cognitive and analytical
quality into the will activity of the hands in the making of stone tools and no doubt much
besides.
Seen in this light, the activity of working in stone is at the same time an expression
of the inner state of consciousness and the schooling of those inner faculties. The major
revolution that occurred with the Upper Paleolithic, both in stone technology and in
many other respects, marked a profound awakening to the world and presumably a
profound loss of the radiance of the spiritual world. It really was like being cast out of
paradise, a loss of innocence. Not that living in the Middle Paleolithic was, in our terms,
like living in Paradise! Far from it. But in terms of awakening human consciousness, the
shock to the soul of early people must have been dramatic.
There is nothing really in our experience to compare the state of mind of a
Heidelberg human. Comparisons with animals are clearly not appropriate. These humans
were just that, namely human. The Heidelbergs may not have possessed much in the way
of self-consciousness but they were not animals. They possessed even then a spiritual
core which linked them to a spiritual world.
Consciousness without Full Language
This is an issue in which anthropology shows its limitations. It has certainly
recognized the humanness of Heidelberg behavior but cannot quite form a picture of
what kind of beings these people were, essentially because it has a very limited basis for
understanding what it is to be human in the first place. The brain capacity of Heidelberg
people was certainly great enough for the human mind to have evolved as an instrument
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