Man

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Leonardo da Vinci: The Vitruvian Man, Proportion Study after Vitruvius, 1492

Man (Sanskrit: मनुष Manushya; Hebrew: אֱנוֹשׁ Enosch; Greek: ἄνθρωπος anthropos, from anti and tropos, literally: "the one turned against"; German: Mensch) is, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, the general term for that cosmic stage of evolution on which a being develops its I and its self-awareness, and in doing so rises from being a mere creature to becoming a creator. We are now called on Earth to attain this level of development. Other beings have reached the stage of humanity before us, and others will follow after us. The term "man" thus goes far beyond what we generally understand by it today. From a spiritual-scientific point of view, the human kingdom is the seventh and last of those seven Conditions of Life that must be passed through on every planetary stage of world evolution, the first of which was Old Saturn. The Earth on which we live now is the fourth planetary stage of evolution. Today's humanity is only on the fourth life stage, the mineral kingdom. Our earthly human evolution is therefore far from being complete, but in the not so distant future it will no longer take place on the physical-mineral level, but on higher stages of life.

In the course of his evolution, the human being passes through repeated earth lives, between which he leads a purely soul-spiritual existence in the life between death and new birth. Mankind (Hebrew: אֱנוֹשׁוּת Enoschut) in the spiritual-scientific sense comprises all human beings incarnated on Earth and furthermore also all human beings in life between death and new birth.

Humans today lives on Earth as homo sapiens (Latin: the "clever, understanding, wise, sapient, gifted with sense"). They are considered evolutionarily and anatomical in biological systematics as the only living species of the genus homo of the family of hominids (Latin: hominidae), which belongs to the order of primates.

Goethe had already pointed out the morphological relationship between humans and the higher animals, which Charles Darwin, the founder of modern evolutionary theory, also appreciated. Unlike Darwin and his successors, however, Goethe also saw the fundamental difference between humans and animals, which for him, however, was not rooted in anatomical details but in the totality of the mental and spiritual abilities of humans.

Goethe's views were further deepened by Rudolf Steiner. From an anthroposophical point of view, the human being is not exhausted in the sensually visible material body, but also has higher, only super-sensually perceptible bodily, soul and spiritual members. What at first appears to the clairvoyant gaze as a multiplicity, however, forms a unity for higher cognition (Lit.:GA 7, p. 112), through which the I of man, i.e. his spiritual individuality, can unfold.

The threefold meaning of the word "man"

The noun "man", which is restricted to the German and Dutch language areas, is derived from the Indo-Germanic word root *manu- (man, man, Manu = "progenitor of mankind"), but is also related to the verbal root *men- ("to think, to consider, to admonish") and thus denotes the rational human being. In Latin, the word manus (the hand) corresponds to this. In summary, this characterises the human being as the one who acts rationally or intelligently - and who thereby prepares his own fate, his karma.

The legendary King Menes (around 3000 BC) is considered the founder of ancient Egyptian culture. Manu is the name given to those great initiates and leaders of humanity who, due to their high spiritual insight, are able to lead humanity from one age (→ world evolution) to the next (for example, from ancient Atlantis to our post-Atlantean age; the Indian Flood narratives in particular speak of this great Manu, who can be equated with the biblical Noah). Man in this sense is the one who has been given the Heavenly Feeding, the Heavenly Manna. In Germanic fairy tales and legends, the spirits of the deceased, who no longer belong to the earthly but to the spiritual realm of existence, are called Manen. This refers to the first spiritual element of the human being, to manas or the spirit self:

„The Egyptians called him who inaugurated the first "human" culture "Menes"; and at the same time they imply that man thereby also came into the possibility of error. For from then on he was dependent on the tool of his brain. That man could fall into error is symbolically indicated by the fact that the foundation of the labyrinth is placed in the time in which man was abandoned by the gods, which is an image of the windings of the brain as the tool for man's own thoughts, in which the bearer of these thoughts can lose himself. Manas is what the Orientals called man as a thinking being, and Manu is the name of the first main bearer of thought. Minos was the name given by the Greek peoples to the first formator of the human thought principle, and the legend of the labyrinth is also connected with Minos, because men felt how, since his time, they had gradually passed from the direct divine guidance into such a guidance through which the "I" experiences the influences of the higher spiritual world in a different way.“ (Lit.:GA 15, p. 41f)

The Greek noun "anthropos" (Greek: ἄνθρωπος) denotes the erect, the upright striding man, literally the one turned against (anti) (tropos). Man, who is most clearly distinguished from the animal precisely by his upright posture, thus spans, as it were, his being between earth and heaven and receives from both sides, from the sensual and from the spiritual world, the impulses which fill his intellectually gifted soul and which he must actively and independently combine with one another through the power of his individual I. The anthropos is the one who is most clearly distinguished from the animal by his upright posture. The anthropos detaches himself from nature, overcomes the natural instincts, and at the same time also confronts the world of the gods as an independent being, which creates its own firm standpoint in its soul, based on the intellect, from which it views and judges the world. This refers to the development of the intellectual soul, which flourished in Greco-Roman culture.

"Homo", human, means earthly, belonging to the earth, to the clan, and refers to the same Indo-Germanic root *ghdem-, *gh(d)om- as the word humus, the fertile arable soil. In Greek, it corresponds to the word chton = earth; the ancient name given to their land by the Egyptians, kemi or chemi (the root of our modern term "chemistry"), also derives from this and actually referred to the fertile mud regularly left behind by the Nile flood. The biblical naming of the first human being, Adam (Hebrew: אדם, derived from אֲדָמָה adamah "earth, dust, ground, soil"), also points in the same direction.

„Man - Manushya: in Sanskrit the word for human being. But with this word Manushya, the basic feeling that was associated with being human in a large part of the people is also indicated. Now, what does one refer to when one gives man the name Manushya, when one uses this root word to designate man, what does one refer to? One refers to the spiritual in man, one judges above all man as a spiritual being. If one wants to express: man is spirit, and the other is only the expression, the revelation of the spirit, - if one therefore primarily attaches importance to man as spirit, then one says "Manushya".

After what we have discussed in preparation, there can now be another view. One can, above all, direct one's attention, when speaking of the human being, to speak of the soul. And then one will, I would say, pay less attention to the fact that man is spirit. They will take into consideration that man is soul, and let the external, the physical, that which is also connected with the physical, recede more into the background in the designation of man. One will then take the designation of man above all from that which expresses that something soul-like lives in man, which expresses itself in the eye, which expresses itself in the fact that man's head lifts up to the heights. If one examines the origin of the Greek word anthropos, this is roughly what it expresses. If one could say that those who used the word manushya or a similar sounding structure to designate man looked above all to the spirit, to that which descends from the spiritual world, then one must say that those who designate man with a word that echoes the Greek word anthropos, above all the Greeks themselves, express the soul in man.

But a third thing is possible. It is possible to see above all that in man there is the external, the earth-born, the corporeal, that which is produced by physical means. Then man will be called by a word which is, as it were, the producer or the produced. That will be contained in the word. If one examines the word homo for its origin, then what has just been described lies within it.“ (Lit.:GA 175, p. 302f)

Literatur
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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