There are few influential intellectual figures who remain more unknown to the broader public than Rudolf Steiner. Steiner remains a mystery in many ways. He is a recognised name, but the content of his work remains an obscurity for most people. It is a curious situation. The education system Steiner began in 1919 (referred to as either Steiner or Waldorf education) continues to spread globally as the world’s most prominent system of alternative independent school education. Steiner has had a similar influence in the fields of agriculture (biodynamics), medicine (anthroposophic medicine) and architecture and art. As such, the question needs to be asked, given his wide influence, why do so few people know anything about Steiner’s philosophy? Why have so few people read any of Steiner’s books? Why are none of Steiner’s texts included in the reading lists of education and philosophy courses? To put it simply, how is it that Rudolf Steiner has been so influential, and yet remains so unknown?

The purpose of this new book, The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction, is to provide new readers with a simple entry point into the complex, convoluted and often highly esoteric thought of Rudolf Steiner. It is written from a place of empathy for people who want to know more, but who find the difficulties and sheer strangeness of Steiner’s work a major barrier to engagement. Unlike most texts by or about Steiner, The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction attempts to situate Steiner’s thought in academically familiar terms, to provide new readers with a logical pathway through his philosophy, while also respecting the highly esoteric nature of his concepts.

The book first outlines many of the key reasons why Steiner has remained inaccessible to the broader public (including Steiner’s difficult style, the problems of translation, the unfamiliar cultural references and his deeply challenging esotericism). It then proposes a practical “route” through Steiner’s key texts, beginning with his fundamentally important early work The Philosophy of Freedom and then working through the conceptual connections with his later and more esoteric texts, especially Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Esoteric Science: An Outline.

One of the fundamental concerns of this book is to demonstrate how the key principles established in Steiner’s early work (before he embraced esotericism) inform the more esoteric and challenging ideas in his later work, including his philosophy of education. The book consistently maintains that, although the focus, style and appearance of Steiner’s philosophy changed radically over the years between 1894 and 1925, the core philosophical ideas informing his thinking remained consistent. The book does much to provide substantial explanations for why Steiner himself regarded his early The Philosophy of Freedom as the most important of his works, the one that would “outlive all of my other works”.[1] In The Philosophy of Freedom, we are given the philosophical seed, which Steiner would develop into the many branches of Anthroposophy.

At the root of all of Steiner’s work is his challenge to re-conceptualise and re-imagine modernity’s relationship to the act of thinking. This is the proposition he puts forward directly in 1894’s The Philosophy of Freedom. Steiner proposes that dominant rationalist epistemological models (especially Kant’s) have imposed false (and unfortunately influential) parameters on mental experience. Kantian epistemologies can assume validity in certain terms, but for Steiner they drastically misrepresent and limit the nature of the act of thinking. Conceptualising mental experience as a phenomenal category “unto itself”, Kantian epistemologies fail to recognise thinking as a phenomenological and, in Steiner’s terms, spiritual participation in the world. As an alternative, Steiner proposes thinking as a living and knowable process. The nature of thinking, he insists, is not as an enclosed and separate mental activity, but rather an interaction with the world: the meeting of the conceptual and the perceptual. Thinking is a process: it is an interaction and a relationship. Thinking can only be known through this relationship, not in terms of abstract operations. Unfortunately, prevailing influences in modernity prevent us from recognising and intuitively experiencing the nature of thinking as Steiner describes it.

Further to this, Steiner develops his challenge to Kantian epistemology into a direct challenge to each of us to develop our own thinking. Steiner calls this intuitive thinking or living thinking. He introduces us to intuitive thinking in The Philosophy of Freedom, but provides practical guidelines for this development most comprehensively in his later esoteric text Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Achieve It. In The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction, readers are introduced to the most elementary of Steiner’s meditative exercises to demonstrate how these practical meditative exercises develop the complex idea of intuitive thinking in remarkably simple and direct ways.

One of the enormous barriers to a wider audience for Rudolf Steiner is, of course, his highly esoteric preoccupations and terminology—which became a major feature of his work when he first became associated with the Theosophical Society in 1899. There is no doubting Steiner’s commitment to esoteric knowledge and his commitment to making that knowledge public. However, the sheer strangeness of Steiner’s esotericism may give many new readers the impression that his work after 1900 is of a fundamentally different nature to his earlier work, especially The Philosophy of Freedom. The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction emphasises the fundamental continuity of Steiner’s early and later work and explains Steiner’s move into the esoteric world of Theosophy partly as a matter of necessity. I suggest that Steiner would likely have persisted with a more conventional academic role had The Philosophy of Freedom received more recognition from his academic peers. Unfortunately, the book was largely ignored and at best misunderstood by German academics, and thus Steiner concluded that he needed to develop his work and find a receptive audience outside of academia. He soon found a receptive audience in the Theosophical Society. Among other things, his role in Theosophy afforded Steiner the opportunity an audience and a cultural context to develop his philosophy and to publish. However, necessarily, it also meant the highly esoteric content of Theosophy became a major feature of Steiner’s work.

Am I suggesting that Steiner can be boiled down to a simple philosophy free of esotericism? No, I am certainly not. Regardless of his association with Theosophy, Steiner was always a thinker whose ideas and concepts would take us into the esoteric, the spiritual and, for many of us, the sheerly bizarre. Steiner does speak of spiritual worlds, of spiritual beings and of spiritual bodies in ways that can make us feel very uncomfortable. He does speak openly of clairvoyant knowledge and the experience of spiritual phenomena. He does present a narrative of the Cosmos and its evolution through stages of spiritual development. He does also present a narrative of human evolution, in particular the evolution of human consciousness, which presumes to describe the nature of consciousness in human societies thousands of years before recorded history. Read in context, a lot of what Steiner says on these esoteric matters is hard enough to comprehend, let alone accept. Read out of context, more often than not, it can sound like complete lunacy.

The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction takes the liberty of simplifying Steiner’s grand esoteric narratives as a way to understand their fundamental propositions and their connection with the key principle of intuitive thinking. At the heart of what Steiner developed as Anthroposophy (which he developed in the years after he separated from the Theosophical Society) is the centrality of the human being. Anthroposophy could be defined as the study and knowledge of the developing human being in their different aspects and relationships. This book attempts to relate Steiner’s wide-ranging esoteric narratives to his picture of the fourfold human being and its development through the stages of life.

I acknowledge that many details of Steiner’s esoteric worldview are ignored in this book, in favour of presenting a more simple, coherent picture. I also take issue with a prevailing attitude upheld among many Anthroposophists, that Steiner was in some way “above” serious mistakes; especially, that those highly problematic aspects of Steiner’s legacy are considered by some to be somehow by intelligent design. I argue it is not by intelligent design, but rather by mistake that Steiner’s vast and disordered library of writings and lectures makes accessing and fathoming the scope of his work an almost impossible challenge for newcomers. I argue that Steiner’s often irresponsible and obscurantist use of archaic esoteric language has resulted in many students misconstruing the essential modernity of Steiner’s philosophy, instead pursuing its meaning in reference to ancient knowledge systems. Most of all, I argue that the walls of separatism that have so long defined the esoteric culture of Anthroposophy are no longer helpful or useful. In the 21^st century, the value of Steiner’s philosophy should be measured in its engagements and integration with other classical, traditional and progressive knowledge systems. This, at its heart, is the motivation for The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction: to make Steiner more accessible and coherent, and to provide some foundation for his further study as a truly influential, unique and fascinating modern European philosopher.

[1] Steiner, R. in Allen, P., “Foreword” in Stebbing, R. (trans) The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: The Basis for a Modern World Conception (New York: The Rudolf Steiner Publications, Inc., 1963) p. i

Dr Thomas Redwood is an Australian writer and educator. He is the author of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema and over 30 publications for Australian Teachers of Media. He has lectured in Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne and European Studies at the University of Adelaide. He has also worked as a secondary teacher at a number of Steiner schools. This is his second book.

The Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction is available now in Hardback at a 25% discount. Enter code PROMO25 at checkout to redeem.

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