Rudolf Steiner

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Rudolf Steiner (February 27, 1861 – March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker. He is best known as the founder of anthroposophy and many of its practical applications, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, and new artistic impulses, especially eurythmy.

Steiner advocated an ethical individualism that evolved to include a strong spiritual component. In his epistemological works, he advocated the Goethean view that thinking itself is a perceptive instrument for ideas, just as the eye is a perceptive instrument for light.

He characterized anthroposophy as follows:

"Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe... Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst."

-Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (1924)

Contents 1 Goethean scholar, philosopher, phenomenologist of spirit and sense perception 1.1 Childhood and education 1.2 Writer and philosopher 1.3 Spiritual research 1.4 Separation from the Theosophical Society 1.5 Cultural activities 2 Practical initiatives 2.1 Education 2.2 Social activism 2.3 Architecture, eurythmy and free spiritual culture 2.4 Weleda and biodynamic farming 2.5 The renewal of religious life 3 Breadth of activity 4 Steiner criticism 4.1 Steiner and science 4.2 Steiner on a pedestal 4.3 Steiner and Christianity 5 Bibliography 5.1 Works by Steiner 5.2 Works about Steiner by other authors 6 External links

Goethean scholar, philosopher, phenomenologist of spirit and sense perception

Childhood and education

Steiner's father was a huntsman in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, and later became a telegraph operator and stationmaster on the Southern Austrian Railway. When Rudolf was born, his father was stationed in Murakirály in the Muraköz region, then part of Hungary (present-day Donji Kraljevec, Međimurje region, northernmost Croatia). When he was two years old, the family moved into Burgenland, Austria, in the foothills of the eastern Alps.

Steiner displayed a keen and early interest in mathematics and philosophy. From 1879-1883 he attended the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Vienna, where he concentrated on mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1891, with his thesis Truth and Knowledge, he earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock in Germany. Image:Rudolf Steiner 1889a.jpg

Writer and philosopher

In 1888, Steiner was invited by Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony to edit the complete edition of Goethe's scientific works in Weimar, where he worked until 1896. During this time he also collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work. Steiner also wrote numerous articles for various magazines, including a magazine devoted to combatting anti-semitism, during this time. Steiner was one of the early defenders (with Emile Zola) of Alfred Dreyfus, a Captain in the French army falsely accused of treason because he was Jewish.

Steiner wrote his seminal philosophical work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit (The Philosophy of Freedom) in 1894, which advocated the possibility that humans can become spiritually free beings through the conscious activity of thinking (see section on 'Philosophical Debate').

In 1896, Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Forster-Nietzsche, asked Steiner to set the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg in order. Her brother by that time was no longer compos mentis. Forster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher and Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom.

In 1897, Steiner left what was for him the somewhat sterile environment of the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin. He had purchased a literary journal, the Magazin für Literatur. Steiner had hoped to find here a readership sympathetic to his spiritual philosophy, but discovered that the artistic circles that were associated with the journal had little interest in what was increasingly becoming the center of his own existence. This was a crisis point in Steiner's life.

A turning point came when, in the August 28, 1899 issue of this magazine, he published an article entitled "Goethe's Secret Revelation" on the esoteric nature of Goethe's fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This article led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak to a gathering of theosophists on the subject of Nietzsche. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, eventually becoming the head of its German section. It was also within this society that Steiner met Marie von Sievers, who was to become his second wife. Image:Steiner Berlin 1900 big.jpg

Spiritual research

Beginning around this time, c. 1900, till his death in 1925, Steiner articulated an ongoing stream of "experiences of the spiritual world" — experiences he said had touched him from an early age on. Steiner sought to apply all his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy in order to produce rigorous, intersubjectively testable presentations of those experiences. He also sought to bring a consciousness of spiritual life and non-physical beings into many practical domains—medicine, education, science, architecture, special education, social reform, agriculture, drama, among others. Steiner held that non-physical beings were in everything, and that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience such beings, and thus be strengthened for creative and loving work in the world.

Steiner sought to be phenomenological. Like Edmund Husserl and Jose Ortega y Gasset, but preceding them, Steiner was intimately familiar with the philosophical work of Franz Brentano - with whom he had studied - and Wilhelm Dilthey, both central precursors of the phenomenological movement in European philosophy. Steiner was also deeply influenced by Goethe's phenomenological approach to science.

Separation from the Theosophical Society

Like the theosophists, Steiner encouraged the development of artistic efforts within the Society. Steiner, however, strongly objected when the leaders of the Theosophical Society declared that Krishnamurti was the new World Teacher (Krishnamurti himself later repudiated the attempt to make him into a messiah, shocking many Theosophists).

Steiner quickly denied Krishnamurti could be a reincarnation or second coming of the Christ, and held that Christ's earthly incarnation in Jesus was a unique event. Steiner held that what trained spiritual vision could discover about most of the rest of humanity — namely that the human being goes through a series of repeated earth lives — did not apply to the spiritual being Christ. Christ, he said, would reappear in the etheric — the realm that lives between people and in community life — not in a single individual. This and other doctrinal differences fuelled a confrontation between Steiner and the Theosophical leader Annie Besant which eventually led Steiner and most of the German branch of theosophists to separate from the main body of this group, and found the Anthroposophical Society in 1912.

Cultural activities

The society grew rapidly. Fueled by a need to find a home for their yearly conferences, which regularly included performances of plays written by Eduard Schuré and Steiner himself, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center. In 1913, construction began on the first Goetheanum building, in Dornach, Switzerland. The building, designed by Steiner, was built to significant part by volunteers who offered craftsmanship or simply a will to learn new skills. Once World War I started in 1914, the Goetheanum volunteers could hear the sound of cannon fire beyond the Swiss border, but despite the war, people from all over Europe worked peaceably side by side on the building's construction. In 1919, the Goetheanum staged the world premiere of a complete production of Goethe's Faust. In this same year, the first Waldorf school was founded in Stuttgart, Germany.

The Goetheanum developed as a wide-ranging cultural centre. On New Year's Eve, 1922, the first Goetheanum building was burned down by arsonists. Unwavering, Steiner began work on a second Goetheanum building — this was to be finished in 1928, three years after Steiner's death.

During the Anthroposophical Society's Christmas conference in 1923, he founded the School of Spiritual Science, intended as an open university for research and study. This university, which has various sections or faculties, has grown steadily; it is particularly active today in the fields of education, medicine, agriculture, art, natural science, literature, philosophy, and economics.

Practical initiatives

Education

As a young man, Steiner already supported the independence of educational institutions from governmental control. In 1907, he wrote a long essay, titled Education in the Light of Spiritual Science, in which he described the major phases of child development and suggested that these would be the basis of a healthy approach to education.

In 1919, Emil Molt invited him to lecture on the topic of education to the workers at Molt's factory in Stuttgart. Out of this came a new school, the Waldorf school, and Waldorf Education — sometimes known as Steiner Education — which has grown to be one of the largest independent schooling systems in the world.

Social activism

For a period after World War I, Steiner was extremely active as a lecturer on social questions. A petition expressing his basic social ideas (signed by Herman Hesse, among others) was very widely circulated. His main book on social questions, Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage (available in English today as Toward Social Renewal) sold tens of thousands of copies. Today around the world there are a number of innovative banks, companies, charitable institutions, and schools for developing new cooperative forms of business, all working partly out of Steiner’s social ideas. One example is The Rudolf Steiner Foundation (RSF), incorporated in 1984, and as of 2004 with estmated assets of $70 million. RSF provides "charitable innovative financial services". According to the independent organizations Co-op America and the Social Investment Forum Foundation, RSF is "one of the top 10 best organizations exemplifying the building of economic opportunity and hope for individuals through community investing."

Steiner suggested that the cultural, political and economic spheres needed to develop independently and without mutual interference for each of them to thrive. He suggested that the resulting Threefold Social Order would dissipate tensions that otherwise would lead to serious conflicts in the years to come.

Architecture, eurythmy and free spiritual culture

Steiner designed some seventeen buildings, each unique in style. The most significant of these are the First and Second Goetheanums. These two structures, both built in Dornach, Switzerland, were intended to house a University for Spiritual Science. Steiner's architectural style has been variously associated with the organic style of architecture and expressionism

Within the Society, Steiner met his wife Marie von Sievers, with whom he developed a new artform (that also has therapeutic uses) known as Eurythmy (German: "Eurythmie") — sometimes referred to as "visible speech and visible song". Eurythmy is a work in progress; Steiner could only introduce foundational principles that continue to be developed today. The underlying idea is that there are archetypal movements or gestures that correspond to every aspect of speech - the sounds, or phonemes, the rhythms, the grammatical function, and so on - to every soul quality - laughing, despair, intimacy, etc. - and to every aspect of music - tones, intervals, rhythms, harmonies, etc. Image:Representative of humanity.gif Eurythmy performances are still held at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and at various theatres throughout the world. There are now a number of Eurythmy schools where a full four-year training is given.

As a playwright, Steiner wrote four "Mystery Dramas" between 1909 and 1913, including "The Portal of Initiation" and "The Soul's Awakening". They are still performed today.

As a sculptor, his primary work was The Representative of Humanity (1922). This enormous work carved in wood is still on display at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Weleda and biodynamic farming

In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda, which now distributes natural medical products worldwide.

In 1924, a group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner's help; Steiner responded with a lecture series on agriculture. This was the origin of biodynamic agriculture, which is now practiced throughout much of Europe, North America, and Australasia. Biodynamic farming is not merely organic -- in addition it works with the movement patterns of the stars and the moon, and with the non-physical beings in nature, and seeks to do testable research on how agriculture can produce the best quality food.

The renewal of religious life

In the 1920s, Steiner was approached by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, an eminent Lutheran pastor with a congregation in Berlin. Rittelmeyer asked if it was possible to create a more modern form of Christianity. Soon others joined Rittelmeyer - mostly Protestant pastors, but including at least one Catholic priest. Steiner offered counsel on renewing the sacraments of their various services, combining Catholicism's emphasis on a sacred tradition with the Protestant emphasis on freedom of thought and a personal relationship to religious life. Steiner made it clear, however, that the resulting movement for the renewal of Christianity, which became known as The Christian Community, was a personal gesture of help to a deserving cause. It was not, he emphasized, founded by the movement known as "Spiritual Science" or "Anthroposophy," but by Rittelmeyer and the other founding personalities with Steiner's help and advice. The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality. For those who wished to find more traditional forms, however, a renewal of the traditional religions was also a vital need of the times.

Breadth of activity

Rudolf Steiner is certainly remarkable for the breadth of his achievements. The school movement he founded has become as successful as those of Maria Montessori. Biodynamic agriculture is one of the two pillars of the modern organic farming movement, and is easily as important today as the ideas of the other founder of modern organic agriculture, Albert Howard. Anthroposophic medicine has achieved as broad a range of medicinal remedies as Hahnemann's homeopathy; in addition, a broad range of supportive therapies - both artistic and biographical - have arisen out of Steiner's work. The homes for the handicapped based on his work are as successful as those of L'Arche. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and his pupils include Joseph Beuys and other significant modern artists. His two Goetheanum buildings are generally accepted to be amongst the masterpieces of organic architecture, and other anthroposophical architects have contributed thousands of innovative buildings to the modern scene. The first institution to practice social banking was an anthroposophical bank working out of Steiner's ideas (GMB-Bochum, Germany). This list could be extended considerably.

Image:Steiner drawing.jpg Steiner's literary estate is correspondingly broad. Steiner's writings are published in about forty volumes, including essays, plays ('mystery dramas'), mantric verse and an autobiography. His collected lectures make up another approximately 300 volumes, and nearly every imaginable theme is covered somewhere here. (Steiner's complete works in German are searchable at the Rudolf Steiner Archive). Steiner's drawings are collected in yet another, independent series of volumes. Many publications have covered his architectural legacy and sculptural work.

Steiner criticism

Steiner and science

There are scientists acquainted with the topics Steiner touched upon who regard his methodology as irreproducible and thus unscientific, and therefore completely disregard his works. However, a number of trained physicists, biologists, medical doctors, architects, philosophers, and other scholars claim to find creative genius in Steiner's comments on detailed aspects of each of their fields. Research centers staffed by trained professionals in various fields of study do research along lines suggested or inspired by Steiner's ideas. Some of the better known scientists and scholars who have been deeply influenced by Steiner are listed below. There are some scientists and intellectuals who admire Steiner's efforts to transform ordinary thinking gradually into a higher thinking that is at the same time a perceiving of the spiritual world. Examples of books and authors profoundly influenced by Steiner: physicist Henri Bortoft's The Wholeness of Nature, physicist Arthur Zajonc's Catching the Light, physicist Georg Unger's Forming Concepts in Physics, physicist Stephen Edelglass' The Marriage of Sense and Thought, biologist Craig Holdrege's Genetics and the Manipulation of Life, theoretical chemist Jos Verhulst's Developmental Dynamics in Humans and Other Primates, theoretical chemist Georg Kuehlewind's From Normal to Healthy, biologist Wolfgang Schad's Man and Mammals: Toward a Biology of Form, medical doctor Robert Zieve's Healthy Medicine, medical doctor Victor Bott's Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine, philosopher Owen Barfield's World's Apart, philosopher Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind, cultural critic Theodore Roszak's Unfinished Animal. See also computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's comments on Steiner, or those of Albert Schweitzer.

See also the collection of scientific articles edited by physicist Arthur Zajonc and architect David Seamon, Goethe's Way of Science, A Phenomenology of Nature.

Steiner on a pedestal

The high regard in which Steiner is held within the Anthroposopical movement, which sees his teaching as foundational, has prompted some critics to see Steiner as a founder of a religion, not as a philosopher in the usual sense of the word. The idea, if there is a degree of truth to it, evolves from overzealous students, not from Rudolf Steiner.

Steiner frequently asked his students to test everything he said, and not to take his statements on authority or faith. He also said that if it had been practicable, he would have changed the name of his teachings every day, to keep people from hanging on to the literal meaning of those teachings, and to stay true to their character as something intended to be alive and metamorphic. Nor was Steiner shy about saying that his works would gradually become obsolete, and that each generation should rewrite them. Individual freedom and spiritual independence are among the values Steiner most emphasized in his books and lectures.

Though the emphasis anthroposophists place on individual freedom and thought limits the tendency toward group-think and prevents anthroposophy from turning into a cult - if a cult is something that deprives its members of spiritual and intellectual freedom - a critical approach to the works of Steiner is not as common as some would like and not always welcomed within some Anthroposophic circles. Given Steiner's clear statements about political democracy being the proper kind of State for humanity, his consistent and emphatic support for liberty and pluralism in education, religion, scientific opinion, the arts, and in the press, not to mention his rejection of the idea that the State should take over economic life - one cannot justly link Steiner or his movement with a totalitarian intent; rather the reverse, for his whole philosophy is based upon individual freedom.

Steiner and Christianity

Steiner's views of Christianity have been criticized as heretical. Only a very simplified account of those views can be given here, because though they only amount to about 4% of his total works, that 4% still amounts to about 15 volumes of books and lectures -- and many of the other 335 or more volumes contain additional scattered comments on Christianity. Steiner said that anyone could develop disciplined spiritual vision and that such vision could see that there were two Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ (one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke— this might seem a bit less strange when one recalls that 'Jesus' was a common name in biblical times); that the divine "Christ Spirit", the Son-God of the Trinity, incarnated in the Nathan Jesus at the moment of the baptism by John; that up until the moment of the baptism by John in the Jordan, the Nathan Jesus was a very great holy man, but not yet the divine Son of God; that "the Christ Being" is not only the Redeemer of the Fall from Paradise, but also the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and of human history; that Yahveh (Jehovah) dwelt in the moon, but Elohim in the Sun; and that the second coming of the Christ meant the Christ would, for slowly increasing numbers of people, become manifest in the etheric realm beginning around the year 1933. (Steiner was not referring to the hypothetical ether of 19th century physicists, and on several occasions carefully distinguished his own use of the term from their use of it.)

Bibliography

Works by Steiner

The style and content of Steiner's works can vary greatly. Therefore, while it might be stimulating to read a single lecture or book by Steiner, it would probably be a mistake, having read even four or five of his books, to suppose one has a representative picture of the whole body of his work. Out of the 350 volumes of his collected works (including roughly forty written books, and over 6000 published lectures), some of the more significant works include

• Truth and Science (doctoral thesis)
• Philosophy of Freedom (1894)
• Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886)
• How to Know Higher Worlds (1904-5)
• Theosophy (1904)
• The Education of the Child (1907)
• An Outline of Esoteric Science (1913)
• Four Mystery Dramas - The Soul's Awakening (1913)
• Study of Man (1918)
• Practical Advice To Teachers (1919)
• Toward Social Renewal (1919)
• Man as Symphony of the Creative Word (1923)
• Anthroposophy and the Inner Life (1924)
• An Autobiography (1924-5)

Works about Steiner by other authors

• Davy, Adams and Merry, A Man Before Others: Rudolf Steiner Remembered. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993.
• Hemleben, Johannes and Twyman,Leo, Rudolf Steiner: An Illustrated Biography. Rudolf Steiner Press, 2001.
• Lissau, Rudi, Rudolf Steiner: Life, Work, Inner Path and Social Initiatives. Hawthorne Press, 2000.
• Seddon, Richard, Rudolf Steiner. North Atlantic Books, 2004.
• Shephard, A.P., Rudolf Steiner: Scientist of the Invisible. Inner Traditions, 1990.
• Shiller, Paul, Rudolf Steiner and Initiation. Steiner Books, 1990.
• Tummer, Lia and Lato, Horacio, Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy for Beginners. Writers & Readers Publishing, 2001.

External links

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• Goetheanum
• Rudolf Steiner Overview
• Rudolf Steiner and Criticism
• The Anthroposophy Network
• The Calendar of the Soul
• The Rudolf Steiner On-Line Archive
• Steiner Books
• Rudolf Steiner Foundation
• Camphill Association
• Weleda
• The Christian Community
• See photos from Motzstraße 30, Schöneberg, Berlin, where Rudolf Steiner lived from 1903 to 1923.

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