Steiner's 1888 prose creed: the world of ideas is the source of all being, and selfhood is the part of us that must die.
Credo: The Individual and the All in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's short prose confession of 1888, collected in Truth-Wrought Words (GA 40), which lays the ground of his later spiritual science years before the word anthroposophy entered his vocabulary. It sets the world of ideas, the Ideenwelt, as the source and principle of all being: whatever does not draw its existence from the idea falls away, Steiner writes, like a dry leaf from the tree of creation. A human being wakes to full consciousness as a separate individual, and with that waking receives a longing for the idea that presses him to overcome separateness. What has to be given up is not the I but selfhood, Selbstheit, the appetite-bound part that darkens the light of the spirit. Steiner names four spheres where that surrender is actually carried out: knowledge, art, religion, and loving devotion to a personality in the spirit.
Credo: The Individual and the All is the title Steiner gave to a single page of prose written in 1888, six years before The Philosophy of Freedom. It reads as a creed in the strict sense, a statement of what he held to be true about being, freedom, and the fate of the separate self. None of its vocabulary is theosophical, because none had yet reached him.
In Steiner's Own Words
The world of ideas is the source and the principle of all being. In it there is infinite harmony and blissful peace. The being, which it did not illuminate with its light, would be a dead, unsubstantial one, which would have no part in the life of the world as a whole. Only what derives its existence from the idea, that means something in the creation tree of the universe. The idea is the spirit clear in itself, sufficient in itself and with itself. The individual must have the spirit in itself, otherwise it falls off, like a dry leaf from that tree, and was there in vain.
What it Means Today
The closest living counterpart to this page is Evan Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being (Columbia University Press, 2014), which argues that the self is not a thing but an ongoing process of I-making, assembled and reassembled out of memory, appetite, and bodily feeling. Thompson takes that position from Indian philosophy and tests it against sleep research and contemplative practice: the self can be watched forming, and can be watched loosening in deep sleep and in meditation without the person disappearing. Steiner in 1888 was making a moral claim where Thompson makes a descriptive one. He never says the self is unreal. He says the part of it built from instinct, desire, and passion is the mortal part, and that whatever we do out of the idea rather than out of appetite stands outside time.
Thalira synthesis: read side by side, Thompson supplies the mechanism that Steiner's creed assumes, since a self that is continuously manufactured is a self that can be manufactured differently, which turns the dying of selfhood into a question of what we keep feeding rather than an act of self-erasure. Steiner gives that work a practical shape in the list of four spheres. Knowledge, art, religion, and devoted love are each a place where thinking, feeling, and willing turn toward something that is not the self. Someone who takes the Credo as instruction does not try to have no self. They pick one of the four and give it an hour.
Where to Read More
- Truth-Wrought Words, GA 40
- Find Truth-Wrought Words at SteinerBooks
- Find The Philosophy of Freedom at SteinerBooks
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