Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work

INTRODUCTION:

RUDOLF STEINER’S ROSE

I first became seriously interested in Rudolf Steiner’s ideas in the late 1980s. I was then finishing a degree in philosophy, and supporting myself by working at a well-known New Age bookshop in Los Angeles. I had heard of Steiner before, but in a different context. I had always been interested in German Expressionism, the art and literary movement that flourished in the years before World War I, and years earlier had come across a photograph of Steiner’s first Goetheanum in a book on Expressionist architecture. The flowing, organic forms, the strange curves and, to me, slightly eerie shadows caught my attention, and I noted that the man who had designed and built this remarkable structure was the founder of a spiritual movement, anthroposophy, which at the time I knew absolutely nothing about and even found difficult to pronounce; Goetheanum itself was something of a jawbreaker. But a few years later, in the midst of the various fads for crystals, past lives, and the Harmonic Convergence, I decided to investigate Steiner in earnest. At the bookshop there was a well-stocked Steiner section, and standing before it I had the experience that many who are interested in learning more about Steiner have: discouragement at the sheer number of volumes. An entire bookcase and part of another were given over either to Steiner’s own works or to books about him. Along with the number of books, the fact that nearly all of them were published by anthroposophical publishers also raised doubts. This suggested a cult of some kind. I thought that if his books were as important as they were said to be, surely a commercial publisher would issue them; although I am open to all sorts of ideas, I have an aversion to groups or teachings that form a kind of spiritual or cultural ghetto. They also seemed weighted with a great deal of theosophical matter; and although I had read about Madame Blavatsky and found her adventures fascinating, I was less enthused about the content of her teaching.

Nevertheless, as I paged through a few volumes, I saw references to names I was very familiar with. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche—Steiner had even written a book on Nietzsche. How, I wondered, could thinkers like these have anything to do with ideas about reincarnation or the astral plane? Nietzsche certainly had no patience with anything to do with higher or spiritual worlds. I also remembered that people like the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, credited with creating the first abstract painting, had been influenced by Steiner. I decided that I would have to put aside my reservations, take a deep breath, and dive in.

I tried one of Steiner’s own books first, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (since translated as How to Know Higher Worlds). Although I was studying Western philosophy, I was familiar with a great deal of occult and esoteric literature and, a few years earlier, had been involved in the Gurdjieff work. ¹ So the idea of higher consciousness wasn’t unfamiliar to me, although, sad to say, I knew more about it from reading than from actual experience.

Steiner’s prose had an effect on me similar to that reported by earlier writers, sympathetic but critical biographers like Colin Wilson, but also convinced devotees like Friedrich Rittelmeyer. Of one of Steiner’s most important books, Outline of Occult Science, Rittelmeyer, who became one of Steiner’s closest followers, complained that if I read for any length of time, a feeling of nausea came over me. I knew how Rittelmeyer felt. To put it bluntly, I found Steiner tough going. I had read difficult books before, but this wasn’t the problem. Hegel and Heidegger were notoriously difficult philosophers, but I had mastered large portions of them, and I had spent a great many months making my way through Gurdjieff’s willfully obscure epic Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. This was different. Hegel is difficult not—or not only—because he is a poor stylist; if that was the case, no one would bother reading him at all. He’s difficult because the thoughts he is trying to express are complex. But there was just something dull about Steiner. Nevertheless, I was bitten and was determined to assimilate at least the basics of Steiner’s thought.

In this I was assisted immeasurably by two books. I am a great fan of Colin Wilson’s work and his little book on Steiner introduced him to me in the context of Wilson’s own ideas about consciousness.² Steiner purists might find Wilson’s book flawed; a more recent study of Steiner refers to Wilson as someone who is sympathetic to Steiner, but unable to enter into the true meaning of his work. I can understand how a follower of Steiner might feel this, but Wilson writes as someone interested in alternative accounts of human consciousness and history, and his short study put Steiner into the context of other similar thinkers, and relates him to Wilson’s own work. This was important, as it gave me a means of placing Steiner in regard to my own concerns. The other invaluable work was Robert McDermott’s anthology The Essential Steiner. That McDermott was a philosophy professor suggested that thought and ideas, rather than well-meaning but fuzzy spirituality, common to new age literature, would be important to him. His insightful introductions and linking essays made Steiner’s vast and complex system available to me, and they showed how Steiner’s ideas—often weird, strange, and downright bizarre—grow out of the central themes of German Idealism and Romanticism, two areas of intellectual history I had some grounding in, not to mention much sympathy with.

Accompanied by these two guides, I persevered. It wasn’t long before I recognized that I had made the right choice: Steiner was an important thinker, and it would have been a loss had I allowed my misgivings to deter me from coming to grips with him. It was clear that he had many important and fruitful insights about a wide range of subjects. To say Renaissance man sounds clichéd, but in this instance it’s appropriate. Like his hero and mentor Goethe, Steiner was a universal man, a creative thinker who was one of the last to apply his considerable mind and remarkable intuitive powers to the whole spectrum of human experience. This kind of all-round intellect is frowned upon today, and given our climate of specialization, it isn’t surprising that, even without his unusual ideas, Steiner’s polymath approach would have made him suspect. After finding my anthroposophical feet, I started on Steiner’s basic books, Theosophy, An Outline of Occult Science, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, which I went back to. Steiner certainly wasn’t a page-turner, but a window had been opened into his vision and the sheer vitality of his imagination was captivating. I also found that the difficulty in Steiner’s prose proved beneficial: I had to work at absorbing what he was saying, and the additional effort more often than not paid off. Soon I was collecting his lectures, reading at random almost, finding my way into some fascinating and admittedly strange waters: reincarnation, the life between death and rebirth, our four bodies, the occult history of the world, but also education, art, farming, architecture, social theory, and epistemology. The initial dissonance hadn’t disappeared, but now the contrast between, say, Steiner the philosopher and Steiner the occult seer, rather than putting me off, only added to the mystery.

I formulated the cognitive challenge I was presenting myself with in this way: How can I account for the fact that, on one page, Steiner can make a powerful and original critique of Kantian epistemology—basically, the idea that there are limits to knowledge—yet on another make, with all due respect, absolutely outlandish and, more to the point, seemingly unverifiable statements about life in ancient Atlantis? I found myself in the position that the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Maurice Maeterlinck had occupied some seventy years earlier. In 1922 he published a book about the occult called The Great Secret. Commenting on one of Steiner’s books, Maeterlinck remarks that having followed him with interest through preliminaries which denote an extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind, he suddenly comes across a passage that makes him ask whether Steiner has suddenly gone mad, or if we are dealing with a hoaxer or with a genuine clairvoyant.³ Colin Wilson himself, who is wholly sympathetic to Steiner, had many reservations about writing a book about him, and at one point had to admit defeat and inform his publisher that he couldn’t go through with it. Steiner’s claims, Wilson wrote, created such a sense of frustration that even the most open-minded reader would soon give up in disgust. I knew how Maeterlinck and Wilson felt. Steiner’s ideas about consciousness, the nature of thought, and the relationship between the mind and the external world were, quite literally, revolutionary, and they had me rethinking the history of Western philosophy. Yet I could turn to another lecture and there Steiner would tell me about reading to the dead, or about the work of the Buddha on Mars, and my response would be either patient acceptance, in which I gave him the benefit of the doubt, or a kind of Tilt sign would light up somewhere in my brain. What bothered me more than the truth or accuracy of what he said was how he could possibly verify it. How could he, or anyone, possibly know these things? Yet when the frustration became too much, I remembered what I found important in his other insights and I would try to find a way to have it all make sense. In many ways the situation resembled a dysfunctional relationship: I could put the lectures down and walk away, but sooner or later I would be back and the process would start again.

Yet there was something more than my growing acceptance of the essentials of Steiner’s philosophy of mind—what I would call, in a book I wrote years later, participatory epistemology—that kept me coming back to him, even with all the difficulties in making sense of some of his more unorthodox statements.⁴ I had begun to practice, in a desultory way, some of the exercises that Steiner provides in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. I can’t say that I pursued these with great diligence, but when I remembered and when an opportunity arose, I would sit quietly, try to cut out distractions, and, as he suggests, try to become aware of my interior world. Steiner’s basic insight, the one from which all his other work develops, is the autonomy of the mind, the recognition that consciousness and the I are irreducible realities, spiritual realities, and that our inner world has the power to grasp experience, as he says in one lecture, in the same way that we can grasp tables and chairs.⁵ Steiner calls this active thinking, and if there is one thing that he wanted to convey it’s the importance of making our thoughts and our thinking come alive.

Like many writers and, for sake of a better word, intellectuals, I am often a dull, left-brain type, not frequently given to anything like mystical experience. Yet on at least one occasion I did experience something along the lines of what Steiner is talking about. I found myself with some free time one day, and taking a walk in the warm California sun—a distant memory now from gray London—I wound up in a garden, looking at a rosebush. What made me linger I no longer remember; perhaps at the time I didn’t even know. But I found myself looking at a rose and thinking of how the poet Rilke once described a peculiar meditative state that came over him as being silent, like the interior of a rose. I looked at the rose and thought of Rilke’s words, and of Steiner’s suggestion that in order to make our thoughts more mobile, we should meditate on processes of becoming, like that of a plant going through its life cycle, from seed to flower. Not much time passed, but at some point I felt that my perception of the rose had shifted from simply seeing it to somehow holding it with my mind. It was an unusual sensation, as if my thoughts, my consciousness, cradled the rose, rather than merely reflected it. Since Descartes and the rise of modern science, our consciousness has generally been thought of as a kind of mirror, reflecting the images of the external world. Essentially passive, our minds are blank slates, waiting for experience to make an impression. But in this moment, it was as though my consciousness reached out and held the rose, as if I were touching it just as I would with my fingers. The sensation was delicate, the experience fleeting. But it was sufficiently real to convince me of its significance. Steiner himself was born with this capacity, although, unlike many natural seers, he trained and disciplined his powers and did not rely on their unconscious, involuntary appearance. It is to his realization that in our segment of history, human beings must learn to develop their active thinking through their own efforts, that I, and I suspect others like me, owe our brief experience of this other way of being in the world. This passing moment in which my outer and inner worlds participated in each other convinced me that, for all the strangeness, Steiner was really onto something, and my interest in him deepened. And when I went on to write and publish articles on the Western esoteric tradition, one of the first was on Steiner.⁶ It is with this in mind that I invite the reader to engage in a little active thinking of his or her own, and discover the life and work of Rudolf Steiner.

1. THE DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD

Our main source of information about Rudolf Steiner’s life (until his early forties, when he became a public figure and others wrote about him) is his Autobiography, written in his last years at the request of his followers and published in serial form in the house periodical of the General Anthroposophical Society, Das Goetheanum. Unlike his other books, the autobiography (whose original title, The Course of My Life, is still used in one translation) has an ease and gentle rambling flow that suggests that, contrary to what he may have said, Steiner enjoyed writing it and appreciated the chance to reminisce about his past, his friendships, and other relations. Indeed, the book was left unfinished at the time of Steiner’s death, and the more than four hundred pages that he did complete only deal with his life up to 1907.

At the outset, Steiner states that he is little inclined¹ to write the book, but the chapters that follow tell us otherwise. The last chapters, written in his sickbed while Steiner was suffering from the ailment that would kill him—its exact nature still remains unclear—are rushed and abbreviated compared to the first part, and it’s a shame that Steiner wasn’t allowed to complete the book at the pace he started it (although, if the first part is any indication, the completed tome may have been twice the size of the book we now have). Part of the training involved in Steiner’s spiritual science is a kind of life review, a looking back over your past with an eye to locating significant moments when your karma or fate set your life on a particular course. Karma, the Eastern idea that the actions of a past life affect the conditions of a future one, was a central concern of Steiner’s throughout his career, but especially in the last years of his life; one of his most important lecture cycles, transcribed and published as the eight volumes making up Karmic Relationships, focuses on the strange and, to the uninitiated, often baffling ways in which different individualities reincarnate as different historical figures. In these lectures, given in Prague, Breslau, London, and other European cities in 1924, Steiner speaks of the karmic relationships involving significant figures like Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits; the philosopher Nietzsche; the playwright August Strindberg; the poet Novalis; the spiritual thinker Emanuel Swedenborg; and many others, including people who played an important role in Steiner’s own life. Given Steiner’s own belief in the centrality of karma and in his destiny as an agent of spiritual renewal in the West, we can assume that, in reviewing his own life, he was also examining the ways in which his own karma manifested.

Generally, most books about Steiner portray him as someone who, from an early age, was aware of his mission and who accepted his calling without hesitation, striking out toward his goal with unswerving directness. That Steiner recognized he was unlike other people early on is clear, as is his commitment to his destiny. But Steiner’s path, like that of most of us, had its detours, dead ends, and wrong turnings and in many ways, the first two thirds of his life were occupied with the need to find himself. Steiner was, as one writer put it, a very slow developer.² The poet William Blake once remarked that while improvement makes straight roads, the path of genius is crooked. Steiner’s life is a good example of how genius won’t be rushed and how it takes its time getting to where it has to go.

It’s curious that Steiner’s own reason for writing his life story, one he gives in the opening pages of the autobiography, is that the need to answer allegations of inconsistency against him became clear. Others, as we’ve seen, recognized the crooked character of his life, even if they were less understanding about it than they might have been. Although to Steiner the manifold activities and pursuits, the seemingly contradictory positions that were required of him by his fate, were all connected and flowed from one to the other almost seamlessly, to others this was not so clear. Steiner hoped that by spelling out the contours of his path, the notion that he had at different times and for less than noble reasons changed horses in midstream, might be laid to rest. It has to be admitted that Steiner did often find himself in the company of people with whom he basically had little in common, and that even to the sympathetic reader, his frequent turnarounds seem puzzling. Steiner may even have felt this himself, and in his last days, made an enormous effort to see his life as a whole.

Another curious aspect of Steiner’s autobiography is that, at the point where it leaves off, there’s good reason to argue that Steiner’s life as a separate individual had indeed ended. Although nearly twenty years is missing from the story, there’s a good argument that, at that point in his life, Steiner the man had more or less disappeared, and Steiner the leader of an international spiritual movement had taken his place. At that point Steiner’s story, and the story of anthroposophy, become more or less indistinguishable. The man and his work became one. The words that begin the last chapter of the book say as much. In what follows, Steiner tells us, it will be difficult to separate this account of my life from the history of the Anthroposophical Movement.³ As one of his biographers remarks, When he had finished writing this chapter, indeed, he knew that he had reached the end of his life also. The same writer suggests that the unfinished autobiography in fact did not need to be finished; the purpose for which it had been started had now been fulfilled, and quite possibly nothing could have been added that would have been significant for posterity.⁴ This may be a case of making a virtue of necessity, but in many ways these remarks have a ring of truth.

Given this, a reader unfamiliar with Steiner’s autobiography might be excused for thinking that prior to his emergence as one of the most significant spiritual leaders of the early twentieth century, his life story would contain at least some insight into his personal life and feelings. This isn’t the case; where the issue is his personal life, Steiner’s autobiography is frustratingly reticent. Steiner tells us that his aim in writing the book was to set the record about him straight, and to trace the course of his thought and to show how it evolved over time. The book does this, to be sure. Like the story of most philosophers’ lives, it’s about ideas and intuitions, thoughts and concepts. But along with fulfilling Steiner’s aim, in the story of his life, Steiner the man and human being does make a few appearances.

Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861, in Kraljevec, in a part of Eastern Europe that has changed hands frequently in the last century and a half. When Rudolf was born, the town was in Hungary. Later it became part of Yugoslavia, and with the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1989, it became part of Croatia. Even in Steiner’s own life, the notion that his home was in different lands was central. His parents both came from what was known as the Forest District, the towns of Geras and Horn in Lower Austria, and the fact that they were both German-speaking later caused young Rudolf some difficulties with his Hungarian peers. Steiner always spoke German with an Austrian accent, and throughout his life his roots in Austria were clear in his sociability, what used to be known as Gemutlichkeit, a kind of personal warmth, what we today might even call, in the popular sense, soul. But in his early days this quality worked against him, and the quiet, dreamy boy was often considered an outsider.

The Europe that Steiner was born into and in which he grew up is now a kind of fairyland. When he was born, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was just beginning; although still powerful, the old Austrian empire was starting to deteriorate, caught between pressure from Germany and Bismarck from without, and nationalist sentiment from within. It would end, along with much else, in 1918, when the close of World War I left the once long and glorious reign of Emperor Franz Joseph in ruins. The world that Steiner was born into was what we would call today a multicultural society, made up of a rich mix of different ethnic groups that were held together in what seems to us like a remarkable stability. Nationalism and the urge for self-determination by one of these groups, the Serbs, led to the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. This set in motion the series of events that would start the First World War and change the face of Europe. Some, like the writer and journalist Joseph Roth, whose novel The Radetzky March is a marvelous re-creation of this lost age, regretted the passing, and looked back to the old regime with nostalgia. Others documented the era’s contradictions. Robert Musil’s unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities is an almost clinical dissection of the absurdities which led to the collapse of the Hapsburgs. The world that both write about is the world of Steiner’s childhood, youth, and early manhood and those interested in a broader background to Steiner’s life would profit by reading them. Although decidedly Germanic, Steiner later believed that the mix of cultures and nationalities that surrounded his early life primed him for part of his spiritual mission: to act as a kind of meeting ground between the mysticism of the East and the materialism of the West.

Steiner’s parents had met while working on the estate of a Count Hoyos; his father was a gamekeeper, his mother in domestic service. Prior to this, Steiner’s father had spent his early years working for and being educated by the monks of a monastery in Geras. Steiner tells us that his father often spoke with great warmth of his years with the monks, and although his father displayed little religious zeal, his stories of life in the monastery may have made a strong impression on Rudolf; Steiner’s own vision of Christ was highly unorthodox, but of his commitment to the spiritual life there is no doubt.

When Steiner’s parents told the count of their desire to marry, he rejected it—employers had an astonishing authority in those days—and so Johann Steiner and Franziska Blie left the count’s employ in order to start a family. Steiner’s father took a job as a telegraph operator with the Southern Austrian Railway. He was first assigned to a post in South Styria; later he was moved to Kraljevec. Although determined to make the best of their new life, Steiner recalls that throughout their lives both his parents remained nostalgic for the forests of Lower Austria, and later, when his father retired, they returned there to live.

The picture Steiner gives us of