Steiner’s 1894 treatise on knowledge, freedom, and the life of the spirit
What the Work Is
The Philosophy of Freedom is a philosophical book by Rudolf Steiner, published in 1894 under its original German title Die Philosophie der Freiheit. Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and later founder of the esoteric movement known as anthroposophy, wrote the work during his early, more strictly philosophical period, before his public turn toward spiritual science. The book is an exploration of epistemology and ethics, and Steiner himself regarded it as the philosophical foundation for everything he developed afterward. He preferred the English title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which he felt better captured the book’s meaning.
What the Book Is About
At its core, The Philosophy of Freedom asks how human beings can become genuinely free, and it argues that freedom is possible through a particular understanding of thinking. Steiner’s central claim is that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is itself an experience of spirit. The book sets out to show that there are no fixed limits to human knowledge, and that the path to spiritual freedom lies through the disciplined activity of thought rather than through feeling, faith, or external authority. In Steiner’s own later account, the book contains implicitly, in philosophical form, the entire content that he would subsequently develop explicitly as anthroposophy.
Key Ideas and Themes
The book’s argument rests on an epistemological foundation. Steiner based his theory of knowledge on the worldview of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, holding that thinking is no less an organ of perception than the eye or the ear: just as the eye perceives colours and the ear perceives sounds, thinking perceives ideas. This Goethean starting point allowed Steiner to treat thought not as a merely subjective, internal process but as a means of genuinely encountering reality.
From this foundation, Steiner developed what has been described as ethical individualism. The free human being, on this account, is one whose actions are motivated by love and by a freely chosen ethical discipline rather than by external compulsion or unexamined habit. Steiner believed that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience the spiritual world, including the higher nature of oneself and others. Such training, he held, would help a person become more moral, creative, and free — free in the specific sense of being capable of actions motivated solely by love.
A consistent thread running through the book is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge. Steiner sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, intending to distinguish his approach from vaguer forms of mysticism. His philosophical ideas were shaped by Franz Brentano, with whom he had studied, as well as by Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Goethe’s phenomenological approach to science.
Structure and Approach
The work is a philosophical treatise rather than a work of narrative or instruction, and it proceeds by way of argument in the tradition of epistemology and ethics. Steiner wrote it as a contribution to philosophy in the academic sense, and he hoped it would earn him a professorship. Its method is reflective and conceptual: it examines the nature of thinking and knowledge as the ground for a theory of free action. The book’s closing discussion, titled “Consequences of Monism,” addresses the relationship between the experience of thinking and the experience of spirit, and Steiner later pointed to this section as the bridge between the book’s philosophical argument and his subsequent spiritual writings.
Significance and Influence
The Philosophy of Freedom was not well received on its publication, and Steiner’s hope that it would gain him an academic position was not fulfilled. Mainstream philosophy has largely continued to disregard it; as one commentator observed, mainstream philosophy has as much use for Steiner today as it did a century ago, though his work has been taken up by more alternative thinkers. One biographer, Gary Lachman, judged the book a work of genius and suggested that Steiner’s later occult reputation has prevented it from receiving the attention it deserves.
Within Steiner’s own development, however, the book holds a foundational place. He described it as the philosophical basis for his later writings, and he regarded it as showing that the experience of thinking is in fact an experience of spirit. For readers approaching anthroposophy, then, The Philosophy of Freedom stands as the philosophical groundwork on which Steiner’s later spiritual science was built — the point at which his epistemology and his ethics meet, and from which his account of human freedom proceeds.
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was born on 27 or 25 February 1861 and died on 30 March 1925. His father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper in the service of the House of Hoyos in Geras, Austria, to marry Franziska Blie (1834–1918), one of the Hoyos family’s housemaids — a marriage for which the count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf’s birth was stationed in what is now Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje (Muraköz) region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire. In the first two years of Rudolf’s life, the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through his father’s promotion to stationmaster, to Pottschach, in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.
Steiner entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In 1869, when Steiner was eight years old, the family moved to the village of Neudörfl, and in October 1872 Steiner proceeded from the village school there to the realschule in Wiener Neustadt. In 1879, the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology, where he enrolled in courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy and audited courses in literature and philosophy, on an academic scholarship from 1879 to 1883. He completed his studies and the requirements of the Ghega scholarship satisfactorily. Before attending the Vienna Institute of Technology, Steiner had studied Immanuel Kant, Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling.
In 1882, one of Steiner’s teachers, Karl Julius Schröer, referred Steiner to Joseph Kürschner, chief editor of a new edition of Goethe’s works. Kürschner asked Steiner to become the edition’s natural science editor, a truly astonishing opportunity for a young student without any form of academic credentials or previous publications. According to Gary Lachman, “the general consensus on Goethe’s scientific musings as this point was that they were useless as science and dreary as literature; in truth, no one else wanted the job of editing them.”
Early Spiritual Experiences
When he was nine years old, Steiner believed that he saw the spirit of an aunt who had died in a far-off town, asking him to help her at a time when neither he nor his family knew of the woman’s death. Steiner later related that as a child, he felt “that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself after the fashion of geometry … [for here] one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences. In this feeling I found the justification for the spiritual world that I experienced … I confirmed for myself by means of geometry the feeling that I must speak of a world ‘which is not seen’.”
Steiner believed that at the age of 15 he had gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which he considered to be the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance. At 21, on the train between his home village and Vienna, Steiner met an herb gatherer, Felix Kogutzki, who spoke about the spiritual world “as one who had his own experience therein”.
Writer and Philosopher
The young Steiner emerged as an individualist, positivist, and freethinker who was not afraid to refer to scandalous philosophers such as Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Haeckel. His freethinking culminated in a contempt for religion and faith. He attributed almost pathological traits to Christianity. Steiner “was lecturing at many workers’ colleges, and at the Giordano Bruno Union (a rationalist, anti-religious organisation) on the history of philosophy.” Indeed, several authors see a change from the young this-worldly Steiner to the somewhat older other-worldly Steiner.
In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kürschner edition of Goethe’s works, Steiner was invited to work as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. Steiner remained with the archive until 1896. It was a low-paid and boring job. As well as the introductions for and commentaries to four volumes of Goethe’s scientific writings, Steiner wrote two books about Goethe’s philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World-Conception (1886), which Steiner regarded as the epistemological foundation and justification for his later work, and Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897). During this time he also collaborated in complete editions of the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and the writer Jean Paul and wrote numerous articles for various journals.
In 1891, Steiner received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock for his dissertation discussing Fichte’s concept of the ego, submitted to Heinrich von Stein, whose Seven Books of Platonism Steiner esteemed. Steiner’s dissertation was later published in expanded form as Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom, with a dedication to Eduard von Hartmann.
In 1896, Steiner declined an offer from Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to help organize the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg. Her brother, Friedrich Nietzsche, was by that time non compos mentis. “Hoping for a job (which, in fact, he did not get), Steiner accepted the invitation immediately.” Förster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher; Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. Steiner later related that his first acquaintance with Nietzsche’s writings belonged to the year 1889, and that previous to that he had never read a line of his. Upon the substance of his ideas as these find expression in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Nietzsche’s thought had not the least influence. Nietzsche’s ideas of the ‘eternal recurrence’ and of ‘Übermensch’ remained long in Steiner’s mind, for in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the 19th century. What attracted Steiner particularly was that one could read Nietzsche without coming upon anything which strove to make the reader a ‘dependent’ of Nietzsche’s.
In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin. He became part owner of, chief editor of, and an active contributor to the literary journal Magazin für Literatur, where he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy. Many subscribers were alienated by Steiner’s unpopular support of Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair and the journal lost more subscribers when Steiner published extracts from his correspondence with anarchist John Henry Mackay. Dissatisfaction with his editorial style eventually led to his departure from the magazine. In 1899, Steiner married Anna Eunicke; the couple separated several years later. Anna died in 1911. Steiner’s marriage to Anna “was clearly a marriage of convenience”.
Despite his fame as a teacher of esotericism, Steiner was culturally and academically isolated. Lachman also wrote that mainstream philosophy has as much use for Steiner today as it did a century ago, but his work has been picked up by more alternative thinkers, like William Irwin Thompson and Richard Tarnas. Steiner’s credentials were not university-level professional work; German mainstream scholarship called him an ‘autodidact, with a poor teacher’ and ‘gypsy-intellectual.’ Not uncommon for practitioners at the fringes of society, he was accused of class treason. An Anthroposophist stated, “However, knowing that the academic establishment would shun him, he nevertheless decided in 1902 to begin speaking openly about his spiritual observations.”
Theosophical Society
In 1899, Steiner published an article, “Goethe’s Secret Revelation”, discussing the esoteric nature of Goethe’s fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This article led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak to a gathering of Theosophists on the subject of Nietzsche. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, becoming the head of its newly constituted German section in 1902 without ever formally joining the society. It was also in connection with this society that Steiner met and worked with Marie von Sivers, who became his second wife in 1914. By 1904, Steiner was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Theosophical Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. In 1904, Eliza, the wife of Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, became one of his favourite scholars. Through Eliza, Steiner met Helmuth, who served as the Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914.
Anna Eunicke was not pleased that her husband, having previously the reputation of a liberal academic, now joined the cult of a charlatan. In contrast to mainstream Theosophy, Steiner sought to build a Western approach to spirituality based on the philosophical and mystical traditions of European culture. The German Section of the Theosophical Society grew rapidly under Steiner’s leadership as he lectured throughout much of Europe on his spiritual science. During this period, Steiner maintained an original approach, replacing Madame Blavatsky’s terminology with his own, and basing his spiritual research and teachings upon the Western esoteric and philosophical tradition. This and other differences, in particular Steiner’s vocal rejection of Leadbeater and Besant’s claim that Jiddu Krishnamurti was the vehicle of a new Maitreya, or world teacher, led to a formal split in 1912–13, when Steiner and the majority of members of the German section of the Theosophical Society broke off to form a new group, the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner took the name “Anthroposophy” from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert von Zimmermann, published in Vienna in 1856. Despite his departure from the Theosophical Society, Steiner maintained his interest in Theosophy throughout his life. According to James Webb, “Steiner joined the Theosophical Society in order to take it over.”
According to Helmut Zander, Steiner’s clairvoyant insights always developed according to the same pattern. He took revised texts from theosophical literature and then passed them off as his own higher insights. Because he did not want to be an occult storyteller, but a (spiritual) scientist, he adapted his reading, which he had seen supernaturally in the world’s memory, to the current state of technology. When, for example, the Wright brothers began flying with gliders and eventually with motorized aircraft in 1903, Steiner transformed the ponderous gondola airships of his Atlantis story into airplanes with elevators and rudders in 1904. Mainstream historians have lambasted Steiner’s accounts about Lemuria and Atlantis as pseudohistory. Zaleski and Zaleski wrote: “Steiner rewrote the history of the world, describing lost ages and unknown civilizations….He filled in this historical framework with teachings about reincarnation, karma, the astral planes, the Akashic Record, and other familiar elements in the European occultist’s kit.”
Anthroposophical Society and Its Cultural Activities
The Anthroposophical Society grew rapidly. Fueled by a need to find an artistic home for their yearly conferences, which included performances of plays written by Edouard Schuré and Steiner, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center. In 1913, construction began on the first Goetheanum building, in Dornach, Switzerland. The building, designed by Steiner, was built to a significant part by volunteers. Steiner moved from Berlin to Dornach in 1913 and lived there to the end of his life.
Steiner’s lecture activity expanded enormously with the end of the war. Most importantly, from 1919 on Steiner began to work with other members of the society to found numerous practical institutions and activities, including the first Waldorf school, founded that year in Stuttgart, Germany. On New Year’s Eve, 1922–1923, the Goetheanum burned to the ground; contemporary police reports indicate arson as the probable cause. Steiner immediately began work designing a second Goetheanum building – this time made of concrete instead of wood – which was completed in 1928, three years after his death.
At a “Foundation Meeting” for members held at the Dornach center during Christmas 1923, Steiner founded the School of Spiritual Science. This school, which was led by Steiner, initially had sections for general anthroposophy, education, medicine, performing arts (eurythmy, speech, drama and music), the literary arts and humanities, mathematics, astronomy, science, and visual arts. Later sections were added for the social sciences, youth and agriculture. The School of Spiritual Science included meditative exercises given by Steiner.
Political Engagement and Social Agenda
Steiner became a well-known and controversial public figure during and after World War I. In response to the catastrophic situation in post-war Germany, he proposed extensive social reforms through the establishment of a Threefold Social Order in which the cultural, political and economic realms would be largely independent. Steiner argued that a fusion of the three realms had created the inflexibility that had led to catastrophes such as World War I. In connection with this, he promoted a radical solution in the disputed area of Upper Silesia, claimed by both Poland and Germany. His suggestion that this area be granted at least provisional independence led through a misunderstanding to his being publicly accused of being a traitor to Germany. The attack was based upon the misunderstanding that Steiner would have stated that Germans have to abstain from the referendum deciding the fate of that piece of land. He promptly informed the newspaper that that was not his intention. He originally meant that independence allowed that region to remain under the German sphere of influence.
Steiner opposed Wilson’s proposal to create new European nations based around ethnic groups, which he saw as opening the door to rampant nationalism. Steiner proposed, as an alternative, ‘social territories’ with democratic institutions that were accessible to all inhabitants of a territory whatever their origin while the needs of the various ethnicities would be met by independent cultural institutions. Two Marxist–Leninist German politicians say Steiner was racist and reactionary.
Attacks, Illness, and Death
The National Socialist German Workers Party gained strength in Germany after the First World War. In 1919, a political theorist of this movement, Dietrich Eckart, attacked Steiner and suggested that he was a Jew. In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews. That same year, Steiner warned against the disastrous effects it would have for Central Europe if the National Socialists came to power. In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door. Unable to guarantee his safety, Steiner’s agents cancelled his next lecture tour. The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin, saying that if those responsible for the attempted coup (Hitler’s Nazi party) came to power in Germany, it would no longer be possible for him to enter the country. According to Lachman, “Practically everybody hated him: Catholics, Protestants, Marxists, proto-Nazis, not to mention other esotericists.”
From 1923 on, Steiner showed signs of increasing frailness and illness. He nonetheless continued to lecture widely, and even to travel; especially towards the end of this time, he was often giving two, three or even four lectures daily for courses taking place concurrently. Many of these lectures focused on practical areas of life such as education. Increasingly ill, he held his last lecture in late September 1924. He continued work on his autobiography during the last months of his life; he died at Dornach on 30 March 1925.
Spiritual Research
Steiner first began speaking publicly about spiritual experiences and phenomena in his 1899 lectures to the Theosophical Society. By 1901 he had begun to write about spiritual topics, initially in the form of discussions of historical figures such as the mystics of the Middle Ages. By 1904 he was expressing his own understanding of these themes in his essays and books, while continuing to refer to a wide variety of historical sources.
Steiner aimed to apply his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy to produce rigorous, verifiable presentations of those experiences. He used the word Geisteswissenschaft (from Geist = mind or spirit, Wissenschaft = science), a term originally coined by Wilhelm Dilthey as a descriptor of the humanities, in a novel way, to describe a systematic (“scientific”) approach to spirituality. Steiner used the term Geisteswissenschaft, generally translated into English as “spiritual science,” to describe a discipline treating the spirit as something actual and real, starting from the premise that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind what is sense-perceptible. He proposed that psychology, history, and the humanities generally were based on the direct grasp of an ideal reality, and required close attention to the particular period and culture which provided the distinctive character of religious qualities in the course of the evolution of consciousness. In contrast to William James’ pragmatic approach to religious and psychic experience, which emphasized its idiosyncratic character, Steiner focused on ways such experience can be rendered more intelligible and integrated into human life.
Steiner proposed that an understanding of reincarnation and karma was necessary to understand psychology and that the form of external nature would be more comprehensible as a result of insight into the course of karma in the evolution of humanity. Beginning in 1910, he described aspects of karma relating to health, natural phenomena and free will, taking the position that a person is not bound by his or her karma, but can transcend this through actively taking hold of one’s own nature and destiny. In an extensive series of lectures from February to September 1924, Steiner presented further research on successive reincarnations of various individuals and described the techniques he used for karma research.
An author stated that Steiner was a guru. A psychiatrist agrees. Other authors agree. Moffitt called Steiner a “great mitteleuropäische occultist guru”. Two authors stated “Rudolf Steiner—guru only insofar as that was one of the duties he imposed on himself as a universal genius and world redeemer”. While Colin Wilson dismissed Steiner as a “Charlatan Messiah/demented messiah”. Wilson stated “Steiner was one of the most successful ‘messiahs’ that Europe had seen since Sabbatai Zevi.” As of 2022, during the past 100 years, Anthroposophists constantly denied that Steiner is or was a guru.
Breadth of Activity
After the First World War, Steiner became active in a wide variety of cultural contexts. He founded a number of schools, the first of which was known as the Waldorf school, which later evolved into a worldwide school network. He also founded a system of organic agriculture, now known as biodynamic agriculture, which was one of the first forms of modern organic farming. His work in medicine is based in pseudoscience and occult ideas. Even though his medical ideas led to the development of a broad range of complementary medications and supportive artistic and biographic therapies, they are considered ineffective by the medical community. Numerous homes for children and adults with developmental disabilities based on his work (including those of the Camphill movement) are found in Africa, Europe, and North America. His paintings and drawings influenced Joseph Beuys and other modern artists. His two Goetheanum buildings are considered significant examples of modern architecture, and other anthroposophical architects have contributed thousands of buildings to the modern scene.
Steiner’s literary estate is broad. Steiner’s writings, published in about forty volumes, include books, essays, four plays (‘mystery dramas’), mantric verse, and an autobiography. His collected lectures, making up another approximately 300 volumes, discuss a wide range of themes. Steiner’s drawings, chiefly illustrations done on blackboards during his lectures, are collected in a separate series of 28 volumes. Many publications have covered his architectural legacy and sculptural work.
Steiner has speculated about creating artificial life (and maybe about artificial intelligence), but such speculations were by no means a novelty. Steiner’s approach to technology was similar to Martin Heidegger’s. Both were no Luddites. Steiner’s speculations about the collusion between electrical machinery and political control were daring.
Education
As a young man, Steiner was a private tutor and a lecturer on history for the Berlin Arbeiterbildungsschule, an educational initiative for working class adults. Soon thereafter, he began to articulate his ideas on education in public lectures, culminating in a 1907 essay on The Education of the Child in which he described the major phases of child development which formed the foundation of his approach to education. His conception of education was influenced by the Herbartian pedagogy prominent in Europe during the late nineteenth century, though Steiner criticized Herbart for not sufficiently recognizing the importance of educating the will and feelings as well as the intellect.
In 1919, Emil Molt invited him to lecture to his workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. Out of these lectures came the first Waldorf School. In 1922, Steiner presented these ideas at a conference called for this purpose in Oxford by Professor Millicent Mackenzie. He subsequently presented a teacher training course at Torquay in 1924 at an Anthroposophy Summer School organised by Eleanor Merry. The Oxford Conference and the Torquay teacher training led to the founding of the first Waldorf schools in Britain. During Steiner’s lifetime, schools based on his educational principles were also founded in Hamburg, Essen, The Hague and London; there are now more than 1000 Waldorf schools worldwide. Benjamin Lazier calls Steiner a “maverick educator”.
Biodynamic Agriculture
In 1924, a group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner’s help. Steiner responded with a lecture series on an ecological and sustainable approach to agriculture that increased soil fertility without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Steiner’s agricultural ideas promptly spread and were put into practice internationally and biodynamic agriculture is now practiced in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. “Steiner’s ‘biodynamic agriculture’ based on ‘restoring the quasi-mystical relationship between earth and the cosmos’ was widely accepted in the Third Reich.”
A central aspect of biodynamics is that the farm as a whole is seen as an organism, and therefore should be a largely self-sustaining system, producing its own manure and animal feed. Plant or animal disease is seen as a symptom of problems in the whole organism. Steiner also suggested timing such agricultural activities as sowing, weeding, and harvesting to utilize the influences on plant growth of the moon and planets; and the application of natural materials prepared in specific ways to the soil, compost, and crops.
