Rudolf Steiner

What it Means Today

Steiner's biography reads as a seven-year unfolding rather than a career. The first stage (1861 to 1882) is the Lower Austrian railway-station childhood, the geometry textbook that gave him language for an "inner space" of spiritual reality, and the village priest whose Latin liturgy taught him that the supersensible could be touched through form. The second stage (1882 to 1897) is Weimar: editing Goethe's scientific writings for the Kürschner edition, then for the Weimar Goethe Archive, and writing his own Philosophy of Freedom (1894) as the epistemological floor under everything that followed.

The third stage (1897 to 1912) ran through Berlin, the German Section of the Theosophical Society, and a hundred lecture cycles that built what would become Anthroposophy. In 1913 he founded the Anthroposophical Society. From there the practical movements followed in close sequence: the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919; clinical anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman in 1920; The Christian Community with Friedrich Rittelmeyer in 1922; the agriculture course at Koberwitz that seeded biodynamics in 1924. He delivered roughly 6,000 lectures across his working life, archived as the Gesamtausgabe (GA 1 to 354). To read Steiner is to read across that arc, not to mine quotations from any single volume. The reader who wants the man himself starts where he started his autobiography: with his own account of why his life and his work are continuous. See Threefolding for Steiner's post-1917 articulation of a society in which spiritual life, rights life, and economic life govern themselves through separate, cooperating laws rather than collapsing into one another. Rudolf Steiner set out a renewal of the arts from spiritual perception, the theme of the arts and their mission. Rudolf Steiner sketched the social future in his Zurich lectures of 1919. Rudolf Steiner gave the first teachers their ground in the study of man, the 1919 course on the developing child. The society within which his early teaching unfolded is treated in the Theosophical Society. A neighbouring term from the same lectures is Friedrich Nietzsche.