The self-taught peasant philosopher of Goisern (1814-1884) whom Steiner presents as the Austrian soul that grasps the whole breadth of nature with the intellect, not inward mysticism.
Definition
Conrad Deubler in Anthroposophy is the peasant philosopher of Goisern (1814-1884), the miller and later innkeeper of the Upper Austrian Ischl region whom Rudolf Steiner presents in From Central European Intellectual Life (GA 65, Berlin lectures of 1915 and 1916) as the type of the genuinely Austrian soul of knowledge: one that grasps the whole breadth of nature with the intellect instead of turning inward like a mystic. Deubler never learned to write properly, yet taught himself from Graevell's Der Mensch, Sintenis's Der gestirnte Himmel, and Zschokke's Stunden der Andacht, then devoured Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ernst Haeckel, served four years in prison (1852 to 1856) for lending such books to his fellow villagers, and made his inn a resting place for the natural science of the materialistic epoch. Steiner asks that this striving be honoured and completed, not dismissed, and historians of self-education now study readers exactly like him.
Conrad Deubler was a miller and innkeeper in Goisern who corresponded with David Friedrich Strauss and hosted Ernst Haeckel for weeks at a time, without ever mastering written German. In two Berlin lectures of 1915 and 1916, Steiner holds him up as a genuinely Austrian figure: not a mystic contemplating the soul, but a farmer whose urge for knowledge reached out toward the whole picture of nature.
In Steiner's Own Words
He is a man of insight from the very beginning, even though he couldn't write properly. He is always going for books. In his youth, he starts with a good book, a book that aspires from the sensual to the spiritual: Grävell, “Der Mensch” (Man). Deubler reads this in 1830 (he was born in 1814), and Sintenis, “Der gestirnte Himmel” (The Starry Sky), Zschokke's “Stunden der Andacht” (Hours of Devotion). But he doesn't really feel at home with these things, he can't go along with these things. He is a contemplative by nature, and he is imbued with enthusiasm to find satisfaction for the soul not only for himself, but also for those who inhabit his village with him.
What it Means Today
Steiner asks his Berlin audience not to adopt Deubler's naturalism but to honour the striving inside it, and a century later that striving received its own historiography. Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University Press, 2001) reconstructed, from workers' memoirs and the borrowing records of the Welsh miners' institute libraries, how weavers, colliers, and shoemakers with almost no schooling built their own reading cultures and worked through Darwin, Carlyle, and Ruskin on their own time. Rose's autodidacts are Deubler's kin: the lending library Deubler founded for his fellow villagers, the four years in prison it cost him, and the inn where Haeckel stayed for weeks belong to the same history of self-education from below. What Rose measures through archives, Steiner reads as a gesture of soul. Deubler shows him the Austrian folk-character's specific way of knowing, outward into the whole breadth of nature rather than inward into the ego, which is why Austria produced peasant Darwinists and correspondents of Feuerbach, but no successors of Eckhart and Tauler.
Thalira synthesis: Deubler is the proof that the urge for knowledge is a force of soul before it is a product of schooling; where writing failed him, the deed itself became the organ of thought, a library founded, a sentence served, an inn kept open to science. On this reading, spiritual science does not correct such a man. It completes what his striving already wanted: the spiritualization of the very nature he could only grasp with the intellect.
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