The world-outlook that treats spirit as the sole reality and matter as its mere outer appearance, standing opposite materialism in Steiner's twelvefold scheme.
Spiritualism, in Rudolf Steiner's sense, is one of the twelve world-outlooks set out in his 1914 Berlin lectures, the standpoint of a person disposed to see in every material thing only the revelation of an underlying spirit. For such a thinker matter is illusion and the spirit alone has reality. It is the exact counter-pole of materialism, and just as defensible within its own field.
Spiritualism in Anthroposophy is the world-outlook that grants reality only to spirit and treats sense-perceptible matter as its outer manifestation, a phantasmagoria with no being of its own. Rudolf Steiner placed it in Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151, Berlin, January 1914) as the standpoint diametrically opposite materialism within his zodiac of twelve world-outlooks. The spiritualist recognises what is most real, the spirit, yet grows one-sided by denying the significance of the material world and its laws. In its fullest form Steiner distinguishes this from monadism, which he calls abstract spiritualism, and from pneumatism, which speaks of spirit in general; true spiritualism reaches the concrete spirit-beings of the hierarchies. As a tool of cognition it asks the reader to study any subject from the side that takes spirit, not matter, as the ground of the world.
In Steiner's Own Words
By stirring up within themselves everything that can give them ideas about the spiritual, they may go through life with the conviction that the true, the high, that which one should concern oneself with, that which really has reality, is only the spirit; matter is only illusion, only an external phantasmagoria. This would be an extreme point of view, but it can exist, and it can lead to a complete denial of material life. We would have to say of such people: they fully recognize what is indeed the most real, the spirit; but they are one-sided, they deny the significance of the material and its laws. Much acumen can be brought to bear in order to defend the worldview of such people. Let us call the worldview of such people spiritualism.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern home for this standpoint is idealist metaphysics, and its sharpest single voice is George Berkeley. In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge of 1710 the Irish bishop argued that to be is to be perceived, that what we call matter is a cluster of ideas held in a perceiving mind, and that nothing exists outside spirit and its perceptions. Where the materialist grants reality only to extended stuff, Berkeley grants it only to minds and what minds contain, which is the exact gesture Steiner described two centuries later under the name spiritualism. Reading the two together clarifies what Steiner was after. Berkeley fixed the standpoint as a finished doctrine, a claim that the world simply is mental and that matter is a misreading. Steiner declines to freeze it that way. For him spiritualism is not the only truth but one of twelve viewing-points the thinker learns to occupy in turn, true for the field where spirit is the question and one-sided the moment it denies the laws of matter. A Berkeleyan idealist says the material world is unreal; the Steiner spiritualist says it is the outer face of a spirit that, followed far enough, opens into the concrete beings of the hierarchies rather than into a single perceiving God. Held this way, the standpoint becomes an instrument of cognition. The practical move is to take any subject, a plant, a moral act, a stretch of history, and ask what it looks like when spirit, not matter, is assumed to be the ground, then to set that reading beside its opposite rather than mistake it for the whole.
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