The Riddle of Man is a book Rudolf Steiner wrote and published in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, and issued in the collected edition as GA 20. Its German title, Vom Menschenrätsel, points to the question that holds the whole work together: what is the human being, and can thinking itself reach the part of us that is not merely a product of the body. Rather than a course of lectures, this is a sustained written argument in several movements. Steiner opens with a long essay he calls a forgotten stream in German spiritual life, portraits a series of nineteenth-century thinkers who came after Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, sketches the intellectual life of Austria that shaped his own youth, and closes with a chapter of new perspectives in which he sets out his own answer to the riddle. The core subject is the reach and the limit of human cognition: where ordinary thinking ends and where a higher, spiritually awake knowing can begin.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 20 belongs to a small group of philosophical books that frame Steiner's whole enterprise, standing in line with his earlier Philosophy of Freedom and Riddles of Philosophy. By 1916 he had already spent more than a decade building anthroposophy through hundreds of lectures, yet here he returns deliberately to the written, argued form, addressing readers trained in academic philosophy on their own ground. The book matters for one detail in particular that students often miss: it is here that Steiner traces the very word anthroposophy back into German thought, showing that the philosopher Ignaz Troxler had already used it to name a science of the human being that reaches above ordinary sense knowledge. In doing so Steiner presents his own path not as a break with German idealism but as the fulfillment of a promise those thinkers carried without quite redeeming it.
Written during the war years, the book also carries a cultural weight that Steiner felt keenly. He wanted to show that the German-language philosophical tradition held living seeds of a genuine spiritual science, and that these seeds had been overlooked, both by a materialist science that dismissed them and by an academic culture that had lost the thread. The tone is measured and scholarly rather than devotional, which makes GA 20 one of the better places to meet Steiner as a philosopher arguing a case.
The book is best read against its companions. Where The Philosophy of Freedom, written more than two decades earlier, worked out how thinking can become a free spiritual activity, GA 20 asks the further question of what that freed thinking then perceives about the being of the human person. It also looks back to Riddles of Philosophy, Steiner's history of Western thought, and narrows the lens onto a single national tradition and a single problem. Meeting the volume in this company keeps the reader from mistaking it for a set of assertions to accept or reject. Steiner intends it as the report of a path, and the value lies in following the direction of the path rather than in collecting its conclusions.
Themes and Structure
The book moves through four large sections, and it helps to read them as a single ascent. The first, the forgotten stream, gathers portraits of thinkers such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Ignaz Troxler, and Karl Christian Planck. Steiner reads each of them as a soul who sensed that thinking could open onto a supersensible reality, yet who stopped short of a method for entering it. What unites them, in his telling, is an inkling that behind the physical body stands a formative, living body that shapes it, and that the human self is more than the mirror the senses present.
The long middle study on Robert Hamerling extends this into the life of imagination. Steiner uses the Austrian poet to argue that a world picture built purely from idealism can still be full of blood and reality, against the charge that spiritual ideas make bloodless abstractions. Woven through these chapters is a recurring critique of natural science: Steiner grants that the scientific picture of a silent, colorless world of oscillations is correct on its own terms, then presses the point that such a world could never be perceived by any being at all. Light, sound, and warmth as we experience them already carry something the physicist's picture leaves out, and Goethe's quarrel with Newton over color becomes his chosen emblem of this gap.
The closing chapter, new perspectives, states Steiner's own position most plainly. Ordinary consciousness, he argues, is bound to the bodily instruments the way a reflection is bound to a mirror; what appears in it is real, but its dependence on the body is the dependence of an image, not of the thing imaged. The materialist error, in this reading, is to take the mirror image for the person and conclude that the soul is manufactured by the brain, when in truth only the everyday awareness of the soul is so conditioned. The task, then, is to develop a different consciousness, one able to experience the soul outside the frame the body supplies. That capacity, the seeing or beholding consciousness that gives one of the citing glossary entries its name, is the answer the whole book has been building toward. Steiner offers it not as speculation but as a discipline of thinking carried to the point where it becomes perception.
What ties the four sections into one argument is a single conviction that Steiner never lets go of: the human being cannot be read off from the body, because the body only mirrors a soul that has its own life. The nineteenth-century thinkers felt this and reached for it in feeling; the poet Hamerling embodied it in imaginative form; natural science, honestly understood, points to it by admitting that its own world picture is one no eye could ever see. Each section approaches the same threshold from a different side, and the closing chapter names the faculty that finally crosses it. For the modern reader the pull of the book is that it refuses the easy quarrel between science and spirit, granting science its full rigor and then asking what that rigor leaves out.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Two entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 20, and each serves as a hub for the ideas that thread through this volume:
The two terms mark the outer frame of the book. The forgotten stream names its long opening survey, the recovery of a German philosophical current that pointed toward spiritual knowledge without completing the passage, while the seeing consciousness names the faculty Steiner proposes in the final chapter as the way that passage is actually made. Read together, they carry you from the promise the nineteenth-century thinkers held to the method Steiner claims fulfills it, which is the arc of GA 20 in miniature.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete English translation of the volume alongside the original German. An English edition was published under the title The Riddle of Man, and printed copies can be found through the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because the argument builds cumulatively from the historical portraits toward the concluding chapter, reading the sections in order rewards the patient student far more than dipping in at the end.
Continue Your Study
If this volume speaks to you, a few directions will deepen the reading:
- Explore the full Thalira glossary to see how ideas such as the seeing consciousness and the formative life-body connect across many of Steiner's works.
- Follow the book's own arc through the Forgotten Stream in German Spiritual Life and Seeing Consciousness entries, which trace how the promise of German idealism opens into a method of spiritual knowing.
- Return to the GA Work Library to set this 1916 book within the wider arc of Steiner's collected work.