What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum? is Volume 84 of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, a gathering of twelve public lectures given between April 1923 and May 1924 in Basel, Dornach, Prague, Vienna and Paris. These are not lectures for members of an esoteric school. They were given to general audiences in rented halls, in the months after the first Goetheanum burned to the ground on New Year's Eve of 1922, and their governing question is stated plainly in the title: what was that building for, and what is anthroposophy actually asking of the person who takes it seriously? The answer Steiner develops across the volume is a description of a path of knowledge, laid out in stages, from ordinary thinking to what he calls Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 84 belongs to the final period of Steiner's life, and the circumstances press on every page. The fire had destroyed fourteen years of work and had also loosed a wave of rumour: that the Goetheanum had housed seances, that something anti-religious was being practised in Dornach, that the whole enterprise was a fog of nebulous mysticism. The opening Basel lecture of 9 April 1923 takes those accusations as its occasion rather than its subject. Steiner uses them to ask why a movement dedicated to a way of knowing had built a building at all, and why that building bore Goethe's name.
Read against the rest of the collected works, this volume functions as a late public summary. The exercises and stages it sketches were set out at length nearly twenty years earlier in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science, and the epistemological groundwork lies further back still in The Philosophy of Freedom. What is new here is the compression and the tone of address. Steiner is speaking to listeners in Prague, Vienna and Paris who may have read nothing of his at all, and he is speaking in a year when the anthroposophical movement was being reconstituted around the Christmas Conference at the end of 1923. The lectures therefore carry a double load: they introduce, and they defend.
That defensive edge produces one of the volume's most quoted passages, the section in which Steiner answers an academic critic who had reviewed Occult Science by observing that a human being can be divided into four parts much as a chair divides into legs, seat and back. Steiner's reply runs through chemistry. Water divides into hydrogen and oxygen, but hydrogen freed from water enters hydrochloric acid and oxygen enters lime, so the parts are not pieces of furniture but members belonging to different orders of existence. The physical body belongs to the earth, the etheric body to the ether, the astral body and the I to worlds of their own. The criticism, he suggests, never got past the chair.
Themes and Structure
The volume is best understood as several short arcs rather than one continuous cycle. The Basel and early Dornach lectures of April 1923 present anthroposophy as a discipline of cognition, arguing that the soul forces available in ordinary life, thinking, memory, attention, are capable of being strengthened in the way a muscle is strengthened, and that this strengthening is what the traditional words Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition actually name.
The three Dornach lectures of 20 to 22 April 1923, published in English as The Spiritual Development of Man, form the volume's technical core. Steiner describes a sequence of inner experiences and gives each a homely name. The first is living thinking, thinking that is no longer set going by outer impressions but is carried entirely by one's own activity. Through it a second member of the human being becomes noticeable, and Steiner insists it is not a body in space but a body in time, in which the whole of one's past life is present at once. The second stage is reached when the inner activity that would ordinarily flow out through the larynx into speech is held back and stilled. He calls the resulting condition the deep silence of the soul, and describes something sounding into it from the opposite direction. The third stage takes the will as its object. Every act of will, even the decision to lift a hand, rests on a physical process he compares to the burning of a candle, a destruction of substance that ordinary consciousness sleeps straight through. Behind that inner combustion he places a creative power carried over from earlier earthly lives.
These three stages are summarised in the lectures themselves with a formula worth keeping in view while reading: in the etheric world, through living thinking, touch; in the astral world, through the deep silence of the soul, speech; in the spiritual world, through recognition, memory. The sensory words are borrowed deliberately and do not keep their ordinary meanings.
A second arc runs through the Prague lectures of late April 1923 and the Dornach and Vienna lectures of September that year. Here the questions are immortality, education and moral life. Steiner describes memory changing its character around the seventh year, when the child loses the milk teeth, and argues that education is answerable not only to the child in front of the teacher but to the old person that child will become. The example he gives is a small one and it carries the argument: the hands folded in reverence in early childhood become, decades later, hands that can be opened in blessing.
The September and Vienna lectures add a claim that is easy to miss and hard to forget. In supersensible perception, Steiner says, the categories of true and false lose their usefulness and are replaced by something closer to healthy and ill. What is perceived is not weighed as a proposition but felt as it affects the life of the perceiver, either strengthening it or making it sick. The change of category is meant to mark the difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge that a person is inside of.
Running through all of this is Steiner's account of the encounter with the true I. On first meeting, he says, one's own higher self does not present itself as familiar. It appears as another being altogether, and only a developed capacity for love allows it to be recognised as oneself.
"One must lose one's earthly self in order to perceive one's real true self."
The closing lecture, given in Paris on 26 May 1924, returns to the beginner's question of how such knowledge is to be sought at all, which makes the volume end roughly where it began.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Nine entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 84. Each takes up one of the images or distinctions described above and treats it on its own terms.
Where to Read It
English translations of the lectures in this volume are available to read free of charge at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the collected works online at rsarchive.org. The archive's holdings for GA 84 are drawn from several translators and publication dates, so wording differs from lecture to lecture. Where two versions of the same lecture exist, comparing them is often the fastest way to see which phrases are Steiner's emphasis and which belong to the translator.
For printed editions and for related titles in English, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Individual lectures from this period also appear inside thematic anthologies rather than under the GA number, so it is worth searching by lecture title as well as by volume.
Continue Your Study
- Work through the nine linked entries above in the order the lectures present them, thinking first, then silence, then will, using the Thalira glossary to follow each term into its neighbours.
- Place this volume in the wider structure of Steiner's cognitive path with Paths to Knowledge, which sets Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition alongside the other routes described in the collected works.
- Browse the GA Work Library for the neighbouring volumes of 1923 and 1924, the period in which these public lectures were given.