Steiner's name, given in Basel in 1920, for the narrow eighteenth-century temper of mind that takes the isolated, self-reasoning castaway as the model human being.
The Robinson Crusoe Attitude in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a temper of mind he wanted driven out of teaching: the hard-hearted, self-satisfied outlook of the eighteenth-century middle class, which takes Daniel Defoe's castaway of 1719 as its picture of what a human being is. Steiner named it in Basel on 11 May 1920, in the fourteenth lecture of The Renewal of Education (GA 301), the course he gave to Swiss teachers a year after the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart. In German he called it the Robinson-Gesinnung, a Gesinnung being a settled disposition rather than a held opinion. Its error, as he set it out, is that Crusoe is a person who is not actually a person: a man mechanically placed alone in need, reasoning his way piece by piece to everything he requires, with no living spirit working through history and no reach to the stars.
The Robinson Crusoe attitude is not a doctrine but a mood, and Steiner treated it as the hidden curriculum of modern schooling. Defoe's island story was copied into Czech, Polish, German, and Croatian versions until, as Steiner put it, there were Robinsons in every European language. What travelled with them was a taste for the average, and a distrust of anything that rises above it.
In Steiner's Own Words
We could go through page by page of the Robinson Crusoe story and show the narrow-mindedness that is expressed through his character. We could show the weakness of a rationalistic religious worldview, which says that God is a unity and that human beings are good only when they are not spoiled through one thing or another. This unimaginative view completely puts aside the fact that human beings need a living spirit, one that permeates their souls, one that can be found everywhere in history and which has an effect right up to the stars. This Robinson Crusoe view lives even where the book is not read as the general attitude.
What it Means Today
Literary history reached Steiner's verdict by another road. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) reads Defoe's castaway as the first fully drawn figure of economic individualism: a man whose island is really a ledger, who counts, stores, improves, and turns a shipwreck into an estate. Watt had already argued, in his essay "Robinson Crusoe as a Myth" (Essays in Criticism, 1951), that the book outgrew its author and became one of the few modern myths, a story Europe told itself about what a person fundamentally is. That is the observation Steiner had made in Basel thirty-one years earlier, from the teacher's side of the desk: the myth does its work on people who never open the novel.
The schoolroom line is direct. Rousseau gave Émile a single book in 1762, and Joachim Heinrich Campe's Robinson der Jüngere (1779) turned it into a German classroom text for the best part of a century. A child raised on that model is being told that need plus reason equals a whole human being.
Thalira synthesis: the Robinson Crusoe attitude is best read as a curriculum of self-sufficiency, and its cost is not loneliness but flatness, since a person assembled only from what necessity demanded will never want more than the average.
What a teacher does with this is small and concrete. Ask, of any lesson, whether it presents the world as raw material for a competent individual, or as something with a history and an inside that the child is joining.
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