Thinkers, Mystics & Historical Figures
Steiner's spiritual-scientific reading of philosophers, mystics and historical figures: Nietzsche and the German idealists, the Christian mystics, and the modern minds who shaped the age. Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 673 terms, and companion to the in-depth guide Anthroposophy.
The doctrine that the world is only my mental picture, which Steiner refutes in The Philosophy of Freedom as a half-finished thought that contradicts itself.
The philosopher Steiner read, met, and served at the Nietzsche Archive, calling him a fighter against his time and a tragic soul of the scientific age.
The German poet whom Steiner read as a forerunner of spiritual science, his Aesthetic Letters charting beauty as the realm where the human being becomes free.
The Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stream of thought that Steiner read as the German folk spirit reaching the spirit through pure thinking, the germ of anthroposophy.
For Steiner, Hegel is the supreme school of disciplined thinking, the training a student of spiritual science needs so that untrained thought does no harm.
The German Idealist philosopher Steiner reads as a pre-stage of spiritual science, whose ego-philosophy grasped the self-positing I before clairvoyance could verify it.
Steiner's reading of the Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg as a poet-seer and herald of the Christ-impulse, whose grief became spiritual sight.
Schiller's account of an aesthetic middle state between sense and reason where the human being first becomes free, which Steiner reads as a doorway to spiritual knowledge.
Steiner's name for the lost lineage of post-idealist thinkers who reached toward knowledge of a supersensible human being and so anticipated anthroposophy.
Steiner's reading of Nietzsche's superman: the self-determined, life-affirming human who finds a higher existence in reality, not in any world beyond.