The Overcoming of Monistic and Dualistic Philosophies Through Steiner’s Threefold Image of the Human Being

Unlike in the pre-Christian times when communities were based on blood and tribal connections, modern communities are formed wherever people work together or strive for common goals or ideals: religious, educational or professional. This innate striving for inclusiveness is at odds with the prevailing materialistic monism by which human beings, earth, and the universe can be reduced to smallest (hypothetical) material particles. Consciousness and mental states moreover are confined to physical processes in the brain. This view contrasts with the Cartesian or substance dualism which maintains that mental phenomena belong to a different non-material category than the physical, material processes. It is argued that both views are irreconcilable and fail to capture what is essentially human in the human being and what humans experience in dimensions of life, soul and spirit. Steiner’s discovery of the threefold human being is presented by which the basic soul functions, thinking, feeling and willing find their anatomical correlates in the nerve-sense, rhythmical and metabolic processes, respectively. The agent of transformation by which these processes arise is the human Self or the I.