An Overview of Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy
The 'Good' and the 'Gone'
In the inner being of individual people truth speaks in different tongues and dialects; in every great person it speaks a particular language communicated to this one personality alone. But it is always the one truth that is speaking (Goethe’s Conception of the World).
There are some commentators on the process of life in relation to the human condition who encourage us to highlight their words line after line after line because of its sublime resonance. The early Rudolf Steiner was such a commentator. Not only was his commentary on the human condition sublime, but his practical innovations in agriculture, medicine, and education have gifted the modern world a series of multinational NGOs and Corporations (Demeter, Weleda, and Waldorf).
While it would be right to call him additionally architect, dramatist, and teacher, I think that if we were to ask Steiner himself what he was really up to on planet earth during his lifetime, he would tell us that he was a spiritual scientist. In this article, I’m going to do a macroscopic analysis of the works and writings of this modern european seer. In particular I focus on two aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s work, what I call the ‘Good’ and the ‘Gone’.
If you’re unfamiliar with the notion of ‘Spiritual Science’ check out my article delineating the subject (Notes on Spiritual Science).
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Now, without any further adieu, An Overview of Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy
We live in a truly marvelous moment spiritually. The reason for this is because a cultural and intellectual climate has developed (particularly in the liberal West) in which we individuals are allowed to think and behave in whatever way pleases us most. This isn’t to say that there have never been such liberal cultural climates in other pre-modern societies. It also isn’t to say that certain behaviors deviating from the norm don’t develop ostracization from the mainstream or reduce our potential for employment and political ability. What it is to say however, is that there is a high degree of security from persecution and punishment, and there is also a highly permeable climate of transculturalism and transreligiosity.
Moderns often say that there is no progression in religion, mysticism, or spirituality. They point their fingers to the ever faithful astrologists, dogmatists, and fundamentalists to indicate the unfounded nature of their claims - and I must admit that this judgment contains within it a fragment of truth. Oftentimes, the aforementioned parties are entirely unaware of the cosmic potency which a consilient comprehension of modern science contributes to the intelligibility of life.
While this may be the way things appear to the modern palette, I feel also forced to acknowledge that spiritual progress does exist, and modern science has been extremely helpful in making possible the evolution of the human spirit. This is because, the societal impact of modern science created a great clearing away of old entrenched power structures which had stifled the evolution of spirit.
One of the greatest strides in Spiritual Philosophy which has been made in the past century is the movement towards a nondenominational and perennial experience of spiritual truth. It can be seen in the syncretism of Santo Daime in the Amazon, Theosophy in the near orient, or the Christ Consciousness of the Kriya Yoga lineage. One can also see it in the demeanors of many pre-modern spiritual traditions opening up to outsiders (Bwiti, Shipibo-Conibo, Kogi, Yawanawa, Huni Kuin), the Catholic church accepting new societal stances, or the teachings of Zen, Tibet, and Bhakti which are now found worldwide.
While all of these transcultural and perennial stirrings are like antiquarians accepting that they live in a changing world, there is yet a stronger and bolder visionary movement which seems to depart from these historical grumblings, with the gaiety and vision of an embodied present spiritual awareness. Teachers such as Swami Vivekananda, Yogananda, Pattabhi Jois, Iyengar, Yogi Bhajan, Osho, Sri Aurobindo, Ram Dass, Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts have all demonstrated what the future of spirituality really looks like, and I would consider Rudolf Steiner to be one of the earliest progenitors of this movement towards a perennial spiritual evolution.
This perennial spiritual evolution recognizes that while every tradition has developed a palette of colors for reflecting experience, and a toolkit for developing both the individual and folk soul, their contributions in practice are as universal as the geography from which they originated. Today, we experience what the potential of humanity is like as these pieces begin to synthesize and unite creating a marvelous tapestry of the spirit. For me this has mostly appeared at the interstice between ayahuasca, yoga, and philosophy, but really the combinations are endless and without prescriptive form.
The ‘Good’ and the ‘Gone’
One of the keys to our current age’s question regarding the evolution of spirit is quite simply throwing any a priori conceptions of spiritual life out the window - even if it is only for the time being. We are being invited in the present moment to step out of the preconceived rationale our cultures gave us, in order to relive spiritual existence from the very same place from which the myths & legends originate.
In this light, and with this yearning, Rudolf Steiner is a joy to read (both his books and lectures) because you are offered the insights of somebody clearly steeped in the most riveting, existential, and conscious experience of life. While he is stimulated by classical German thinkers and poets (Goethe, Kant, Fichte, and Schiller), it is very clear that he judges his outcomes by his own real life experiences.
I break down the contributions of Steiner into the ‘Good’ and the ‘Gone’ due to a development of his own thought, and a certain reading between the lines of his own logic. This however will only make sense, once I explain the major themes the ‘Good Steiner’.
Good Steiner
The Good Steiner is the general crystallization of his philosophy which emerged between the ages of 22-39 (1883-1900). In this eighteen year period, his work is marked by a sincere attempt to shed absolute clarity and intelligible meaning based upon a commonly accessible framework of discourse. To use technical terms, his syllogisms are tight. When he turns 40, there is a distinct shift in his work where he opens the floodgate to speak on seemingly any information which he receives from the Akashic Record. For those of you who enjoy the occult and esoteric, the Gone Steiner might interest you. At the end of this article I’ll highlight a few of the essential readings from both the Good and the Gone.
There are three thoroughly developed aspects of Steiner’s philosophy which I would consider the most valuable for philosophy:
The Idea of Reality (Spiritual Essence)
Ethical Individualism
Human Nature & Spiritual Anthropology
The Idea of Reality (Spiritual Essence)
A fundamental inspiration to all of Rudolf Steiner’s work was the “artist-philosopher of nature” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe is perhaps Germany’s most beloved historical figure and he is regarded as the German language’s finest writer to have lived, considered on par with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dante. In Steiner’s early 20s he was an editor of the Goethe archives, where he wrote numerous commentaries, introductions, and even his own books on the subject of Goethe’s worldview and conception of science. Through to his dying day, and embedded in Steiner’s global network of organizations (e.g. Waldorf), the influence of Goethe is felt.
What Steiner dearly appreciated in Goethe was his proposition of a spiritual engagement with nature, and this is indeed where Steiner’s own philosophy begins. One of Goethe’s most iconic contributions to philosophy was the development of a proposition for Holistic Science. As Goethe witnessed in the 18th century the birth of a mechanistic and objective scientific method be founded, he contrarily proposed that science could not be properly done without the conscious embedding of the Subject of Knowledge in the Object of Knowledge. He felt that without this intuitive and spiritual relationship being formed between the spirit and nature, we could only discover a crude part of nature, but not its essence.
Here we enter into the philosophy of Steiner whose foundation is shared with Goethe.
Man learns to know the external side of Nature through perception, her more deeply lying forces are revealed in his own inner being as subjective experiences. In philosophical observation of the world, and in artistic feeling and production, the subjective experiences permeate the objective perceptions. What had to divide into two in order to penetrate into the human spirit becomes again one whole. Man satisfies his highest spiritual needs when he incorporates into the objectively perceived world what the world reveals to him in his inner being as its deeper mysteries. Knowledge and the productions of art are nothing else than perceptions filled with man’s inner experiences.
The Idea of Reality is essential to understanding the core of Steiner’s lifelong position, and it goes as follows.
Our lives are divided by an inner and an outer experience. The outer experience, what is derived by perceptions, what is perceived, what is made of the stuff and matter of life, is our objective experience of life. It is what we find when we look outside of ourselves. This is also called, Nature. Our inner experience, what is arrived at by thinking, conception, and intuition, what is made of non-perceptual thoughts and feelings, is our subjective experience of life. It is a spiritual force which pervades our existence from an essential core.
For Steiner, thinking is a requirement to spiritual awakening and growth. To actually observe the world with an extreme degree of refinement and then to interpret this and create spiritual meaning. While it may seem paradoxical to us, he believed that once we have arrived at the foundation of thought, we are able to understand the world intuitively, seeing the world through the spiritual eye (what we might liken to the 3rd eye).
If we recognize what is present in thinking, we shall realize that in the percept we have only one part of the reality and that the other part which belongs to it, and which first allows the full reality to appear, is experienced by us in the permeation of the percept by thinking. We shall see in this element that appears in our consciousness as thinking, not a shadowy copy of some reality, but a self-containing spiritual essence. And of this we shall be able to say that it is brought into consciousness for us through intuition. Intuition is the conscious experience - in pure spirit - of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition cna the essence of thinking be grasped.
At the most basic level, Steiner is proposing that if we want to understand the essential matter of the world, we ought to see less with our actual (perceptual) eyes, and see with our spiritual intuitive eye which is an entire faculty of human capacity emergent from evolution. By uniting this spiritual sensitivity to nature, we uncover the essence of life in anything we investigate, observe or experience.
Ethical Individualism
The concept of Ethical Individualism emerges from Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, and it is grounded in a total understanding of spiritual essence. In the Philosophy of Freedom (also known as "Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path"), Steiner proposes that true freedom and authentic human maturation, is achieved through the development of inner spiritual activity and the exercise of pure thinking, untethered from sensory experience and external authority.
For Steiner it is very important that people are able to access essential truth by using their own intuition. Contrary to both modern governance and modern science, Steiner believed freedom cannot be derived from understandings of life which are drawn from external authority nor sensorial perception. This is because in both of these cases (external and sensorial), our conception of what to do comes from a source outside of ourselves, which is not our true spiritual nature.
Steiner found that if you became an essential thinker and uncovered the intuitive vision of life, you begin to foster a direct connection with your own spirit. He doesn’t for a single moment deny the value of being totally in tune with one’s personal environment, or understanding the traditions and customs of people in time, but he observes all of these inputs from the transcendental eye. He doesn’t believe that the phenomenal world and its influences doesn’t exist, but he does believe that if we make our individual decisions based upon either external authority or phenomenal perception, we are not making a decision which emerges authentically from our own essence, which is spiritual.
When we walk over soft ground, our feet leave impressions in the soil. We shall not be tempted to say that these footprints have been formed from below by the forces of the ground. We shall not attributed to these forces any share in the production of the footprints. Just as little, if we observe the essential nature of thinking without prejudice, shall we attribute any share in that nature to the traces in the physical organism which arise through the fact that the thinking prepares its manifestation by means of the body.
I’ve found in my process of reading Rudolf Steiner that his expression is like the inverse of a zen koan. A zen koan (e.g. the sound of one hand clapping), is the simple expression of absurdity, or meaninglessness, through which the interpreter can gain a glimpse of essential insight by transfixing their day-to-day ingrained rationale and wake up to the reality of life! Steiner I say is the inverse because he is similarly revealing this same essence, but attempting to do so entirely by a direct approach in a sequentially and methodically rational manner.
This is why he teaches us in the early stages of his work how to foster a direct, intuitive, and spiritual understanding of life. While it begins with a reading of nature in the way that Goethe portrayed it, it extends to our comprehension of philosophy, our comprehension of history, our comprehension of people, and of everything. In everything that we do, we ought to search for the very idea of our actions by use of our intuition, and in this process, develop an understanding of the world which we know to be true due to our own investigations. The more we find this in the outer world using the spiritual eye, the more our conscious soul is able to understand the idea of itself.
When we operate imbued by the totally liberated spirit within us, everything we have been learning, consuming, integrating, and experiencing, becomes one in the moment of direct perception. And this is freedom. It is like the synergy of everything that we are, which includes everything it subsumes, but yet is not the same as them.
For Steiner, this intuition is liberation, and a lifestyle which is developed around this core refinement, is what is meant to become a free person. The free person doesn’t live his life according to a set of laws, a canon, an ethical system or anything like this. The truly Free Person is Free, because they live their life according to their Spirit, this Spirit which in the moment of action is entirely undetermined by external authority or sensorial impression. This is what leads the individual to enter a state of total love, because by making every decision in a state of complete freedom, the individual must love every choice and action that they make.
Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act. I act, at this level of morality, not because I acknowledged a lord over me, or an external authority, or a so-called inner voice; I acknowledge no external principle for my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, namely, my love of the action. I do not work out mentally whether my action is good or bad, I carry it out because I love it. My action will be “good” if my intuition, steeped in love, finds its right place within the intuitively experiencable world continuum; it will be “bad” if this is not the case.
Ethical Individualism then emerges as a unique moral proposition, because it has no “legalist” patterning or laws. There is no set of rules or prescriptions. On the contrary, you could almost say that the only rule is that there are no rules. Except, that each person makes decisions essentially from their own spirit. Rather than creating a chaotic world of anarchy, it is Steiner’s intuition (hypothesis), that among Free People, there is usually no difference of opinion, because all serve the Spirit, and the Spirit is one and the same. He actually argues that if everybody lived according to their own ideal, or in pursuit of the ideal, there would be perfect harmony because the world of idea is a perfect unity.
There is one curious caveat to all this which is that for Steiner, there are sort of preconditions for somebody to enter Ethical Individualism. This is that they are profoundly steeped in an internal moral development. We can read into this as follows. Anybody who arrives at the point in their life that they want to live a truly ethical life, has already made the most important decision. They have come to the moral recognition that they want to apply their actions to what is good and true. This yearning, and this striving, is in fact the prerequisite to internal moral development, and with this, the journey becomes the destination - the means the ends - and one becomes an Ethical Individual, and a Free Being.
Spiritual Anthropology
Technically, Steiner’s works on Human Nature via Spiritual Anthropology should be included in the ‘Gone Steiner’ section. I however need to include them in the ‘Good’ because it provides for us a very interesting and useful conception of the potential hierarchy of human existence, a discourse which has been a part of the polycultural human tradition since the cognitive development of complex, abstract reasoning.
For Steiner, human existence (and potentially a wider non-anthropocentric ambit of existence) is a trinity of body, soul, and spirit. Each component of these three entities further subdivides into groups of three. Here’s a brief overview:
Body
Physical Body: The material aspect, similar to the physical form of animals and plants.
Etheric Body (or Life Body): The life force or vital energy that promotes growth and regeneration.
Astral Body: The seat of emotions, sensations, and desires.
Soul
Sentient Soul: The part of the soul that allows individuals to experience sensations and emotions.
Intellectual Soul (or Mind Soul): This aspect is related to thought processes, reasoning, and the development of intellect.
Consciousness Soul: The part of the soul that seeks to understand the world and oneself, developing self-awareness and personal identity.
Spirit
Spirit Self (or Manas): The spiritualized aspect of the astral body, leading to higher consciousness and self-awareness.
Life Spirit (or Buddhi): A higher level of spiritual existence, associated with universal love and the ability to transcend personal ego.
Spirit Man (or Atman): The highest level of human spiritual development, representing the ultimate unity with the universal spirit.
In this structure, the threefold division of body, soul, and spirit reflects Steiner's view of the human being as a complex entity with various levels of development and consciousness. Each part has its function and contributes to the individual's overall experience and spiritual journey. The body provides the physical foundation, the soul mediates between the body and spirit with emotional and intellectual life, and the spirit represents the highest potential for human consciousness and unity with the cosmos.
Steiner's work suggests that the goal of spiritual development is to harmonize and evolve these aspects, leading to a fully integrated and spiritually free individual. This involves a path of inner development, ethical living, and the cultivation of higher knowledge and consciousness.
The ‘Gone’ Steiner
When Steiner reaches 40, as I mentioned, the floodgates of his intuition are totally removed, and he begins to pour out a wealth of occult and esoteric knowledge. The majority of this he claims to receive from totally objective spiritual visions of spiritual reality.
What Steiner’s philosophy ultimately accumulates to is a total uncoupling of spiritual and natural reality. In my opinion as well, he seems to become a bit of an intellectual bully, trying to push people into believing the supernatural even if they don’t find it intuitive or natural.
This uncoupling of Spirit and Nature intensifies and disassociates the duality inherent in Steiner’s philosophy which leads us into a domain of belief rather than witness. It really is the internal logic of Steiner’s philosophy which leads him to this point, yet I also think that it is the internal logic of Steiner’s philosophy which encourages us to ignore his spiritual realities, and furthermore, it is the internal logic of Steiner’s philosophy which teaches us how to incorporate his spiritual realities
First, Steiner is led to this point because he is seeking the essence of essences (quintessence). Because of the epistemological system he has setup, where essential truth is only available to the intuition, the foundation of thought, he must arrive at a knowledge base which has no parallels in the world of matter. In this sense, he must purely invent and create in order to receive the most essential truth. I think it’s for this reason that he begins to depart from a truly valuable philosophy, and becomes more of an artist, a joker, and a mythologist. These talents are valuable in their own right, like the role of Coyote in indigenous folklore or Loki from Scandinavia, but they are no longer the clear insight of wisdom - purely the production of the imagination.
Second, following Spiritual Essence and the Philosophy of Freedom, essential truth can only be found in the Spirit of the individual. That is to say, that every person who seeks to validate Steiner’s claims must experience precisely the same intuitions as he does. Otherwise, we are simply acting under external influence and not through spiritual insight. Ergo, if you haven’t experienced Steiner’s intuitions, you have no criteria upon which to affirm or deny his position, so delving into the Gone Steiner is reserved for the esoteric few. As the definition of esoteric indicates, if everybody had this knowledge it would no longer be esoteric. Esotericists need to maintain a knowledge set which departs from what can be commonly understood, they need to make themselves feel unique and special in order to be “esoteric”.
Third, in my studies of the ‘Gone’ Steiner, such as his Vision of History and Esoteric Christianity, the meaning of intuition is very important. Steiner has been called both a pseudohistorian and a pseudoscientist because many of his claims are simply not substantiated by what we find in the world. Naturally, the precision of his claims regarding Atlantean Society are historically unfounded outside of his vision. However, I don’t think it makes any sense to study Steiner in terms of historical or natural fact at this point in his career. You have to study his messages at the purely intuitive level. This means that in my opinion, he never intends for people to actually believe him on the material fact of his claims… he actually wants to be read at the purely spiritual level. To do this, you have to entirely disassociate yourself from material reality, or even socio-historical substance and read between the lines using your intuition to glean the essence hidden underneath.
Extracting the Good
Steiner’s contributions to the occult and the esoteric may be valuable, but when it comes to the perennial spiritual evolution, it’s his earlier works where I see real long term promise. This is because they are very clear and intentional based upon existential values which can be aligned with a common framework for human meaning and spiritual knowledge. His philosophy is very stimulating, and it provides an excellent contribution to the development of spiritual progress and evolution. Particularly his notions of Spiritual Essence and Ethical Individualism have much to contribute to the modern world where both individual agency and moral regeneration are key questions.
Further Readings
All of Steiner’s books and lectures are available for open access at the Rudolf Steiner Archive.