Steiner's name for the dead, logical thinking that has ruled the soul since the fifteenth century, true in logic yet powerless in life, awaiting re-enlivening.
Intellectualism is Rudolf Steiner's term for a thinking that has grown logically sharp but inwardly lifeless, accurate as calculation yet unable to move the heart or steel the will. He places its rise in the fifteenth century and its culmination around 1900, when objective science had wrapped human knowing in a mantle of cold objectivity. The intellect is not condemned; it asks to be awakened.
In Steiner's Own Words
An awakening is at stake and it will simply not do to go any further with intellectualism. This objective science which goes about and has discarded all its old clothes because it fears that something genuinely human might be found in them, has surrounded itself with a thick fog, with the mantle of objectivity, and so nobody notices what is going about in this objectivity of science. People need something human again: human beings must be awakened. Yes, my dear friends, if an awakening is to take place, the Mystery of Golgotha must become a living experience again. In the Mystery of Golgotha a Spirit-Being came into the earth from realms beyond the earth.
What it Means Today
Intellectualism names a real historical shift, not a personal failing. Steiner dates the change to the fifteenth century, when the consciousness soul began to wake and concepts that the Greeks had received as a gift of spirit hardened into something cold, dry, and worked out by hand. By 1900 the process was complete: thought that was true in logic had become a corpse of the living spirit, powerless to pulse through heart and will. The Englishman Owen Barfield, an Inkling and lifelong student of Steiner, gave this diagnosis its clearest modern statement. In his 1957 book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Faber and Faber), Barfield traced what he called the evolution of consciousness: humanity's passage from an "original participation" in nature toward a detached "onlooker" stance that treats the world as a collection of dead objects. He named the late phase "idolatry," mistaking our own abstractions for the only reality. Thalira synthesis: Barfield's onlooker-consciousness is the outer biography of what Steiner called intellectualism, and both insist the cure is not less thinking but warmer thinking, a thought re-enlivened until it can participate again. This is why Waldorf classrooms since 1919 lead the child through art and living image before abstraction, so that intellect arrives awake rather than stillborn.
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