Jost Schieren (Ed.): Die philosophischen Quellen der Anthroposophie [Anthroposophy: The Philosophical Sources]

This publication presents revised manuscripts from “The Philosophical Sources of Anthroposophy” lecture series (hereafter: Sources), given at Alanus University near Bonn, Germany, in winter 2017–2018. It has not yet been translated for an English-language edition, and it would serve Anglophone readers tremendously if it were to be: nothing comparable exists in English. Containing the arguments of eleven lectures given by ten different scholars, the work elucidates Steiner’s responses, and suggests intellectual connections, to some of the most canonical protagonists in the history of western ideas. In so doing, the authors also integrate twenty-first century perspectives – by the German phenomenologist Iris Henningfeld and the Canadian Charles Taylor, for example – and by non-anthroposophical thinkers who impacted debates on philosophy and psychology in Steiner’s day, most notably Franz Brentano (1838–1917), Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938).

In his foreword, Jost Schieren candidly acknowledges that “Rudolf Steiner’s work and person are contested.” (7) Further, Schieren points out that “the seemingly self-contained cosmos of Steiner’s work turns it into an exclusive reference point for successors and critics alike,” (7) but also notes that this exclusivity often ignores the fact that “Rudolf Steiner himself established numerous connections and bridges between anthroposophy and primarily occidental traditions of thought.” (8) It is unmistakably within this “occidental” intellectual tradition that Schieren and the other contributors to the volume see “Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy” located: Schieren asserts that the publication shows anthroposophy not merely building on “the great thought traditions of occidental philosophy,” but as “deeply rooted” in the same. (8) Throughout, this is the prevailing understanding of the “philosophical sources of anthroposophy” that gives the book its title.

I would first like to provide a summary of the themes and philosophical arguments proposed by each contributor to the volume, whereby the brief space available here can hardly do justice to the authors’ informed, nuanced and yet accessible presentation of their subject matter. Following this, I will give some critical responses to the book, through looking at perspectives on the book’s ideas from outwith anthroposophical milieus.

Wolf-Ulrich Klünker contributes chapters on both the “Aristotelian Foundations of Science” and on “Psychology and Cosmology in the 13^th Century.” Identifying two Aristotelian principles as vital for anthroposophy – the causa finalis, or ultimate cause, and the axiom that anima forma corporis, the soul forms the body – Klünker argues that Steiner picks up on the latter, and “restitutes” it scientifically, in his Curative Education lecture series, held in 1924. (19) In a chapter exploring the resonance of Aristotles’ principal teacher, Salvatore Lavecchia sketches connections between Plato and anthroposophy. (33–49) Building from a characterization of “the essence of the good” as given by Plato in Timaeus (written c. 360 BCE), Lavecchia outlines how Plato’s concept of “the good” impacts Steiner’s understanding of – according to Lavecchia’s summary – “thinking as ethical action.” (43–45) Moreover, Lavecchia suggests that Steiner’s ontology and moral philosophy are generally aligned with Plato’s. “Expressed using Plato’s concepts: because the origin of being acts as the ‘highest good,’ it pours itself boundlessly into both the spiritual and the visible world. Thus, the true essence of being is ethical – or in Steiner’s words: the worlds’ order is moral”. (44) This conclusion raises questions that cannot be answered here, but which it would pay to tackle in the future. Steiner, in his media reception in recent decades, has been recurrently mischaracterized as an essentially transcendental thinker. If Steiner does indeed assent to Plato’s understanding of “the origin of being,” how can this be reconciled with readings of Steiner’s work as a monistic philosophy, a rejection of a privileging of either spirit or matter? Christian Clement for example, who is not represented in this volume, argues that Steiner’s thinking in the 1890s posits an epistemological and ontological monism, exemplified in the Philosophy of Freedom (first published 1893/1894).¹ However, Clement also acknowledges that Steiner’s later epistemology adopts “a decidedly Platonic character,” particularly through Steiner’s reworking of his concept of “intuition” to now mean “re-remembering” [Wiedererinnerung] – more commonly known under Plato’s term of anamnesis. Clement underlines that this shift is “in clear tension with the monism of the early writings.”²

Jost Schieren provides an account of Steiner’s philosophy in relation to Kant and Goethe. (71–103) In so doing, he foregrounds the concepts of “intellectual intuition [Anschauung]” and an “intuitive force of judgement.” (71). Anschauung is a key concept in different phases of Steiner’s philosophy; for the benefit of Anglophone readers, it’s worth sketching the strong argument for translating it consistently with “intuition” in English translations of both Steiner’s work and discussions of the same. This argument is provided by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, editors and translators of a recent and highly respected English edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While Steiner’s concept of intuition / Anschauung both builds on, and at points departs markedly from, Kant’s and Goethe’s uses of the term, Steiner is certainly responding to these two authors in his written publications and lectures: a sound reason for sticking with a consistent translation of Anschauung as “intuition.” Guyer and Wood’s arguments about Kant’s language can also be applied, by analogy, to Steiner: whichever connotations “intuition” and other terms used by Steiner have for Anglophone readers today, their meaning in Steiner’s arguments must be defined by what he says about them, and not by such antecedent associations.³ Schieren concludes with a call for humanity to free itself from the “materialistic reductionism” that its consciousness has been pressed down into. The methods proposed for this liberation are “new forms of intuition” in a Goethean sense, and human thought “beginning to comprehend itself” in a Steinerian sense. (101)

Marcelo da Veiga sets out to explore and champion philosophy generally, and anthroposophy specifically, as “an attitude to life,” (105) as “life-transforming and meditative” praxis (111) or “performance,” (107) rather than just as mere theory. He achieves this through a series of observations connecting Steiner’s way of thinking to that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s. Da Veiga underlines that despite “all [this] orientation towards Fichte’s thought,” Steiner’s is not primarily concerned with “Fichte’s philosophical teachings as such.” Instead, what Steiner attempts to capture, on da Veiga’s view, “is a new form of original, spiritual praxis, the application of which can lead to diverging viewpoints in terms of content.” (120)

Hartmut Traub’s chapter discusses “Steiner’s anthroposophy in the tradition of theological-philosophical experimental psychology.” (127) Traub opens with reviewing Steiner’s relevance in our “post-Nietzschean era” (127), before moving onto an understanding of “physical theology” and “psycho-theology” – as taught in Germanophone universities in the eighteenth century (138) – as a “monistic model of explaining the world.” (140) Attending specifically to the form of monism laid out by Spinoza, Traub recounts how both Steiner and German philosopher Lutz Geldsetzer (who died 2019) perceived this very form of monism as one deserving of being built on for our modern times, but one which has been largely ignored in the course of “European intellectual history” – something like a philosophical road not (or not yet) taken. (140–141)

Leonhard Weiss examines the significance of Hegel’s philosophy of the spirit for Steiner. This examination makes several references to Steiner’s engagement with Hegel in the history of philosophy, but asks principally – and provides initial answers to – the question of “what relevance Hegel had for Steiner’s own philosophical project of a ‘Philosophy of Freedom.’” (154) Weiss stresses that Steiner’s book of the same name is “essential,” for understanding both the manifold praxis that has emerged out of anthroposophy, including Waldorf education, but also for understanding anthroposophy itself. (154) In this contextualization, Weiss is right to point readers towards the “numerous appreciative and tribute-paying comments” about Hegel in Steiner’s work. (153) Some readers may complement these by examining points of Steiner’s oeuvre where he looks more critically at Hegel’s legacy. One such point occurs in Steiner’s Notebook 35 from 1900–1901, which has now been published digitally, alongside hundreds of other notebook and loose-leaf pages, by the Rudolf Steiner Archive, Dornach. Making notes on the polemical Theses that Karl Marx authored against the Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, Steiner asks whether “Marx’s philosophy sends us back into the era of metaphysics, with the role formerly played by the Absolute merely being played by [the] ‘economy’??? [sic.]”⁴ This terse comment reads as a critique of both the limitations of Marx’s thought, and of Hegel’s metaphysical view of God qua Absolute Spirit: no philosophy of “the Absolute” was more influential on Steiner than Hegel’s own.⁵ Two notebook pages later, Steiner’s copying down of a highly polemical passage against Hegel and the Young Hegelians, authored by Marx and Engels in The Holy Family (first published 1845), confirms that Steiner was certainly analyzing critical readings of Hegel at this stage of his development.⁶ For his part, Weiss’s valuable account retraces the motifs of thought as both a “leap” and as a “wound” in Hegel and Steiner’s writings, to propose an understanding of anthroposophy as an attempt to establish a “reunification” between thinking subjects and “the world” – a move aimed at realizing individual and collective freedom. (187)

David Marc Hoffmann writes on Steiner’s intellectual engagement with Nietzsche and the philosopher-of-the-‘I’ Max Stirner (1806–1856), and the significance of this philosophical struggle for the emergence of anthroposophy. (191–223). The centrality of both these thinkers to Europe-wide debates on the nature of philosophical and political anarchism, in which Steiner participated actively, provides a further reason for cultural historians, and all other interested readers, to study this fascinating account. Importantly, Hoffmann explains how the anthroposophical movement has been “lastingly effected” (217) by a fundamental misreading of Steiner’s intellectual relationships with the work of both Nietzsche and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1913), a significant popularizer of Darwin’s thinking in the Germanophone world. Arguing against perceiving these two individuals as “enemies” who Steiner had to feign proximity and sympathy with in order to “battle against” on a deeper level (216–217) – an interpretation, as the author stresses, for which there is no evidence in Steiner’s own writings – Hoffmann seeks instead to comprehend the encounters with the works and persons of Nietzsche, Haeckel and Stirner as they actually happened: and not bend these encounters to fit a teleological perspective imposed with hindsight. (218)

Axel Föller-Mancini retraces Steiner’s readings of the theory of intentionality forwarded by Franz Brentano. (225–260) Steiner attended some lectures by Brentano on moral philosophy in Vienna in 1879,⁷ and articulated several responses to Brentano’s publications. Elucidating Brentano’s contrasting use of the concepts of perception [Wahrnehmung] and observation [Beobachtung], Föller-Mancini lays out how Steiner draws on Brentano to tackle the “methodological problem of the soul’s awareness of itself.” (225)

Jaap G. Sijmons breaks consciously from the model of “philosophical sources of anthroposophy,” to offer a hermeneutical and dialogical comparison of Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Steiner. Sijmons notes how, in an article from 1910, Husserl distances his own philosophical imperative from those philosophies that propagate a “worldview.” It is into this category, as Husserl writes in a letter to his friend T. Masaryk in March 1922, that Husserl places Steiner’s anthroposophy. (263) Sijmons uses this as a prompt to revisit Steiner’s theory of “twelve worldviews” in western philosophy. Sijmons emphasizes that, on his and Steiner’s views, these perspectives do not “arbitrarily” urge “philosophizing humans” towards different positions. (267) Rather, these perspectives are themselves inherent to “the life of spirit,” and constitute “an inner, foundational structure” pertaining to “the world of spiritual beings.” (268) Through Sijmon’s diagram, we see “spiritualism” placed opposite “materialism,” and “idealism” on the other side of the compass of worldviews to “realism”: whereby Sijmon stresses that these juxtapositions signify both opposition and complementarity. (275–276)

To wrap up the volume, Johannes Wagemann writes on the path taken to the philosophical sources of anthroposophy by anthroposophical thinker and scholar Herbert Witzenmann (1905–1988). To date, Witzenmann is barely known out with anthroposophical milieus, but Wagemann’s intervention may contribute to altering this status. The author wishes to broaden our application of “the metaphor of sources,” so that we don’t merely pose questions about “sources in the sense of the external ‘origins’ of anthroposophy in particular philosophers or currents of thought,” but rather also raise questions about anthroposophy itself as a “place of source,” in order to grasp the “forms of philosophical expression and development” that proceed from it. (303) In so doing, Wagemann concurs with an argument flowing throughout the book, which depicts anthroposophy as living meditative and intellectual praxis – and everything but a scholastic curation of contents fixed in stone on Steiner’s death in 1925.

Sources does not seek to address all intersections between Steiner and philosophy that general readers and scholars wish to know more about. Identifying what the book doesn’t contain is thus not a criticism of the authors’ compelling contributions as such, but rather a voicing of issues that some potential reader groups will have, and which some scholars may wish to address in the future. The question raised by Israel Koren and a chorus of others, whether Steiner’s philosophy is racist “only in part, or in an inseparable manner?” answered affirmatively by Koren in a recent article,⁸ is not addressed in Sources – this publication gives no clues as to the authors’ almost certainly diverging positions on the matter.

Further, some potential readers will be surprised, and not a few put off, by the authors’ repeated affirmations that they are situating Steiner within the tradition of “occidental philosophy.” While this term is used by the authors as a broad synonym for what, in Anglophone discourse, is more commonly referred to as “western philosophy” or “Continental Philosophy,”⁹ they do not engage with the many critiques that have been leveled against the concept of “the Occident” in general, and “occidental philosophy”¹⁰ in particular – nor do they attempt to link these critiques to their research into the very peculiar case of Steiner’s thought. Wouter Hanegraaff is right to call the notion of “the ‘Christian Occident’” a “singularizing and hegemonizing discourse” that “marginalizes Judaism and Islam as somehow less ‘Western.’”¹¹ Although the authors of Sources do not label “occidental philosophy” a specifically Christian enterprise, they are hardly free to ignore the philosophical discourses that have defined the “Occident” as an inherently Christian quantity over the centuries. Moreover, the authors signalize, through their use of “occidental philosophy,” a wish to distance Steiner from the widely documented and strongly influential “occult” or “esoteric” sources of his philosophy – whereas for many readers, and since Steiner’s theosophical and anthroposophical publications began appearing from 1901, it is precisely this synthesis of esoteric and “occidental philosophy” sources that makes Steiner’s thought fascinating and unique in the history of ideas.

To touch on one such synthesis, not addressed in Sources, that future scholars might research further: to what extent did writings on freemasonry by “occidental” philosophers and thinkers who were of lasting importance to Steiner – principally by Fichte, Lessing, Herder and Christoph Wieland¹² – intersect with Steiner’s intense readings of so-called “esoteric” sources on freemasonry – for example by the English political radical Richard Carlile (1790–1893) – to collectively impact Steiner’s philosophical praxis of masonry within anthroposophy from circa 1905? Carlile’s Manual of Freemasonery: Part I, into which Steiner wrote marginalia, and dog-eared to mark sections important to him, was just one of half a dozen or so masonic texts he possessed, and which also informed his practice.¹³ Helmut Zander retraces Steiner’s gradual integration, from 1904 on, of Masonic thought and ritual into the spiritual and meditative praxis he was directing in this period. A number of individuals from groups he led in these years, including the Esoteric School, went on to perform leadership roles in the anthroposophical movement from 1913.¹⁴ But Zander also acknowledges that Steiner’s “masonic activities” is a “field of deficit,” regarding the depth of scholarship published on it.¹⁵

These caveats now raised, it must be reiterated that The Philosophical Sources is an invaluable book, deserving of being read, re-read, studied and responded to. As lived examples of anthroposophical practice – Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, curative education, to name some commonly encountered forms – have spread to over a hundred countries across the globe, we can only hope the contents addressed here reach, in time, out beyond Germanophone reading publics and to even wider audiences.