Steiner's teaching that real self-knowledge is reached not by brooding inward but by plunging into another being's self and bearing its suffering.
Self-Knowledge as Stepping Out of Oneself in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that genuine knowledge of the self is won by leaving the self, not by inspecting it. He set it out in the three Mystery Drama lectures gathered in GA 125, Paths and Goals of the Spiritual Human Being, opening at Basel on 17 September 1910, where he read aloud the self-knowledge scenes of Johannes Thomasius from the Rosicrucian drama The Portal of Initiation. Brooding in one's own inner life, Steiner says, makes a person proud and conceited. True self-knowledge first makes a nothing of him, because it proceeds by plunging into a strange self and into that self's suffering. What honest inward looking finds is not a unity but a crowd, a collection of lusts and passions unnoticed before because the eye had always been drawn outward. The Delphic maxim, know thyself, therefore begins as estrangement.
Self-knowledge as stepping out of oneself is the governing idea of Steiner's Mystery Drama lectures. Johannes Thomasius arrives at himself only by living inside Capesius, inside Strader, and inside the girl he abandoned, carrying her despair as his own. The self met at the end of that road feels like a stranger, and the meeting is painful long before it is clarifying.
In Steiner's Own Words
Why has it made a “nothing” of him? Because through self-knowledge he has plunged into these other persons. Brooding in your own inner self makes you proud, conceited. True self-knowledge leads, first of all, by having to plunge into a strange Self, into suffering. In Scene One Johannes follows each person so strongly that when he listens to Capesius he becomes aware of the words of Felicia within the other soul. He follows Strader into the loneliness of the cloister, but at first this has the character of something theoretical. He cannot reach as far as he is later led, in Scene Two, through pain. Self-knowledge is deepened by the meditation within his inner Self.
What it Means Today
Edith Stein defended her doctorate at Freiburg in 1916 under Edmund Husserl and published it in 1917 as Zum Problem der Einfühlung, translated as On the Problem of Empathy. Her question was the one Steiner had put to a Basel audience six years earlier: what actually happens when a person enters the experience of another. Stein's answer is that empathy, Einfühlung, is a distinct act of consciousness, neither inference nor emotional contagion. The other's experience is given to me as originary for them while remaining non-primordial for me, and I follow it from a standpoint that is not my own. Her decisive move is the one that matters here. She argues that empathy is a condition for knowing myself, because only by taking up the view another person has of me do I see the character my own inner glance had been flattering. Introspection alone, Stein observes, tends to confirm the picture it started with.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner and Stein describe one instrument from opposite ends, Stein as an epistemology of the other, Steiner as a discipline of the self, and both set the same price, that you accept the pain of another person's standpoint in exchange for an accurate view of your own. In practice, the testimony of someone you have injured counts as evidence about you, and the evening review of the day yields more rehearsed from their seat than from yours.
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