Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist

I live at 5th Avenue and West 16th Street in New York City and I often walk over to 7th or 8th Avenue for errands or appointments in Chelsea.  Frequently my route there or back takes me along West 15th Street, in which case I pass by the Rudolf Steiner Bookstore at number 138 (a little east of 7th Avenue) and the New York branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America at the same address.  I guess they’ve been there for about 30 or 35 years (I’ve lived in this area of Manhattan for 45 years). 

I learned about Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist, when I did some research on theater figure Michael Chekhov for a grad school project in 1985.  Chekhov (1891-1955)—the nephew of the famous playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a student of renowned acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), and ultimately a respected actor, director, acting teacher, and theorist in his own right—had met Steiner in the 1920s and began to adopt some of his concepts.  They influenced him greatly, both in his art and in his life, and he incorporated them into his acting theories and training techniques. 

In order to understand this aspect of Chekhov’s Technique, I had to read up on Steiner.  As you’ll see shortly, Steiner’s beliefs are unusual, not to put too fine a point on it, so it should come as no surprise that his name stuck with me long after I finished that Michael Chekhov project (which was eventually published as “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism” in The Players’ Journal in 2008; I also posted it on Rick On Theater on 2 May 2011).  As it happens, I’ve been traveling pretty much weekly from my apartment over to Chelsea and often take a detour on the way back to stop at a store on 15th Street, so I’ve been seeing Steiner’s name frequently lately, so, always on the look-out for interesting topics for ROT, I decided to write a post on him while I’m between shows on which to report.

Steiner, of course, isn’t a renowned theater figure himself—but since Michael Chekhov was fairly prominent on the U.S. theater scene, I thought it would pass muster.  Chekhov isn’t very well known outside the worlds of theater and movies—and I daresay his name’s not all that familiar even to folks in the business—but he had some very prominent students and followers, including Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Dorothy Dandridge, Yul Brynner, Beatrice Straight, Patricia Neal, Sterling Hayden, Jack Palance, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Paula Strasberg, and Lloyd Bridges, and he received a 1946 Academy Award nomination for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).  With that (tenuous) connection, I figure Steiner fits my route-step criteria for the blog.

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was actually born in Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  (His birthplace is now in Croatia.)  Both his parents had been in service to an Austro-Hungarian count, but Johannes Steiner left the count’s household and went to work for the Southern Austrian Railway and the family moved around Austria, largely near Vienna, a lot.  Rudolf Steiner claimed to have had his first spiritual experience when he was nine: he believed that the spirit of an aunt came to him from a distant town asking him to help her.  Neither he nor his family knew at that time that the woman had already died, and Steiner wrote later that he became palpably aware of the existence of a spiritual world as real as the physical one.  In his autobiography, Steiner said that later 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.”

While he was still a youth, Steiner began studying philosophy on his own, reading Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854).  At 15, Steiner experienced another spiritual event.  He believed that he’d come to understand the concept of time, the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance in his view.  He went on to study mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy at the Technical University of Vienna starting in 1879, while auditing classes in  literature and philosophy, even attending lectures in philosophy at the University of Vienna.    All along, the young student was being deeply drawn to the questions of knowledge and self-awareness.  A scholarship student, Steiner left the institute in 1883 without graduating. 

When he was 21, he frequently met a man, Felix Kogutzki, on the train he took to and from his village and Vienna.  The man, an herbalist (someone who collects and prepares roots, plants, and minerals used to make natural remedies and medicines), told him about nature, plants, and the spiritual world “as one who had his own experience therein.”  Kogutzki introduced Steiner to a non-academic and spiritual understanding of nature.

In 1882, one of Steiner’s professors recommended him to the editor of a new edition of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and, despite his lack of academic credentials, the former student was hired as the natural science editor for the publication.  At the same time. from 1884 to 1890, the young scholar supported himself tutoring the children of a wealthy Viennese merchant and writing science articles for Pierer’s Encyclopedia.

Steiner eventually received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rostock in Germany (1891), based on his submission of a dissertation on German philosopher Fichte’s focal conception of self-consciousness (das Ich, the I, the ego).  The young scholar, however, had already begun a writing career, following his editorial work on the Goethe collection, with two books of his own about Goethe’s philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World-Conception (1886) and, after the awarding of his degree, Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897).  Both books concerned epistemology, the study of knowledge, and can be seen as the foundation of all Steiner’s later work. 

In 1892, Steiner published an expanded version of his doctoral dissertation, Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom (all dates are those of the original German publication; I’m not giving the German titles of Steiner’s works unless there’s good reason to do so, but obviously his writings were first published in German before being released in translation) and in 1894, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or the Philosophy of Freedom (both English-language titles have been used, along with Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path).  The author was sorely disappointed in the book’s reception, feeling that it was badly misunderstood.  He was exploring epistemology as a route to spiritual freedom, the philosophical basis of Anthroposophy, Steiner’s proprietary philosophy (which I’ll be getting to shortly).

In the midst of his burgeoning career as a writer and philosopher, during which he’d become a part-owner, publisher, and editor in 1897 of Berlin’s Das Magazin für Litteratur, where he published articles in support of French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) in the infamous Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) and his correspondence with Scottish-born German anarchist John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), Steiner was introduced to the Theosophical Society.  The society, founded in New York City in 1875 by Russian  occultist Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), promotes the claim that insight into the nature of God and the world comes through direct knowledge, philosophical speculation, or a physical process and encourages the study of Asian philosophies and theologies, especially those of India.  Theosophy, from the Greek for ‘divine wisdom,’ is a philosophical system that stresses mysticism and esotericism (adherence to a philosophical doctrine that can only be understood by or is meant for a select few who have special knowledge or interest).

In 1899, Steiner published an article in Magazin für Litteratur entitled “Goethe’s Secret Revelation,” which discussed the esoteric nature of Goethe’s mysterious fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795). The publication led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Cay Lorenz von Brockdorff (1844-1921 and 1848-1906, respectively) to speak on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) at a meeting of Theosophists.  (In 1896, Nietzsche’s sister had asked Steiner to come to Naumburg to help organize the philosopher’s archive.  Nietzsche was already mentally incompetent, but Steiner had previously written Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom in 1895.)  Steiner became a favorite speaker at the Theosophist gatherings and this afforded him his first chance to speak openly and directly about his notions of spiritual perception, the concept on which he’d been working since his first spiritual experiences as a boy.

The attention Steiner began to get because of these appearances didn’t sit as well with his colleagues in conventional academia.  Some of his students rebelled and other scholars were bewildered to see the formerly respected, if sometimes radical, philosopher and writer, a student of science, turning into an occultist.  Only the Theosophists were receptive to his ideas. Though he had never formally joined the Theosophical Society, he was appointed leader of the German and Austrian branch of the group in 1904. 

Mainstream Theosophy was focused in drawing its methods and beliefs from Eastern philosophies, but Steiner looked to European culture, seeking a spirituality based on Western philosophical and esoteric traditions.  He referred to his endeavor as “spiritual science” and began to replace the terminology devised by Helena Blavatsky with one of his own.  Under Steiner’s leadership, the German-Austrian section of the Theosophical Society grew as he traveled extensively in Europe.  The further from the original Theosophy Steiner got, the more a rift between him and the mainstream society grew and finally, in 1912 or ’13, the head of the German-Austrian group formally split from the Theosophical Society and took a majority of the section’s members with him.  They formed a new organization, the Anthroposophical Society.

Anthroposophy, a name Steiner took from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert von Zimmermann (1824-98), Anthroposophy in Outline published in Vienna in 1882, comes from the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘man,’ and sophia, meaning ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning,’ thus ‘human knowledge.’  (Steiner adopted the name von Zimmerman coined but not the complete definition he crafted.)  Steiner said the term should be understood to mean “awareness of one’s humanity.”  The religio-philosophical teaching Steiner founded focuses on the spiritual aspect of life and human nature and his new society was aimed at founding “new methods of spiritual research on a scientific basis.” 

Commentary in a pamphlet on the movement’s founder published by the society states, “Anthroposophy is not a mere sum-total of ideas.  It is a living power, which appeals to the whole man, not only to his thinking.”  Steiner saw Anthroposophy as “the inwardly strengthened and practiced state of consciousness, by which man can experience himself as citizen of a spiritual world.”  He later capsulized this concept as “my consciousness of being Man.” 

By 1913, Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society expanded so much that the organization decided to build a center for lectures, research, and performances—the Anthroposophical Society had begun to present plays written by Steiner and Edouard Schuré (1841-1929), French philosopher, poet, playwright, novelist, music critic, and publicist of esoteric literature—and Steiner began construction on his first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, where he’d moved that year and where he lived for the rest of his life.  Designed by Steiner himself, the First Goetheanum, built largely of timber, was destroyed in an arson fire on New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1922-1 January 1923.  Steiner had just delivered a lecture and opponents of the philosopher and his society, which included the Nazis, had threatened to burn the building, causing a three-man guard to stand duty for the previous 18 months.

Steiner set about designing the Second Goetheanum immediately, but it wasn’t completed until 1928, three years after architect’s death.  Steiner went on to design 17 buildings, both organizational and residential, in and around Dornach between 1908 and 1925.  There’s no record of Steiner ever having formally studied architecture, he was largely self-taught and was one the few important architects never to have studied with another major architect.

After World War I ended, Steiner began lecturing more widely and initiated a number of other activities, including founding the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919.  In 1923, Steiner also launched the School of Spiritual Science, a center for research into and study of esotericism as the core of the Anthroposophical Society.  Though Steiner only taught the first lesson of the School of Spiritual Science, the basic guide to esotericism, in his lifetime (recorded in Johannes Kiersch, A History of the School of Spiritual Science: The First Class [Forest Row, UK: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2006]), the school continues today.

Steiner had worked as a private tutor in Vienna and conducted a series of history and natural science lectures at the Arbeiterbildungsschule (Workers’ Training School) in Berlin, an educational program for working class adults sponsored by the trade unions and social democrats.  He began forming his own ideas about education and child development, which he eventually laid out in “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science,” a 1907 essay.  He wanted schools to train not just the mind and intellect, but make room to educate the will and the feelings.  The intent, according to Steiner, is to enable the children to become “free human beings” by developing their “spiritual identities”—that which Steiner claimed he began to discover from those early experiences when he was a boy. 

Though Anthroposophy was the principal philosophy behind Waldorf education, it isn’t taught as such in any of the Waldorf Schools, which now exist all over the world.  (As I understand this, it’s like a Christian school that teaches Christian principles and values, but doesn’t actually instruct it’s pupils in Christian doctrine.  For example, I went to a Quaker school and we were expected to behave according to Quaker principles and values—no violence; no intolerance; no rude language; courtesy to teachers, fellow students, and visitors; neatly cut and groomed hair; leather shoes with laces, shirts with collars, and no pants with “rivets”—jeans or corduroy jeans—but we never had classes in Quaker religious beliefs.) 

As you might imagine, however, there are tensions inherent in this system.  Though the schools don’t teach Anthroposophy as part of their curriculum, by their very nature, there’s a dissonance with some parents and teachers.  Since one of the fundamental Waldorf tenets is to provide a spiritual component to education, secular teachers and parents who’re committed to secular schooling can have a problem with this emphasis.  (Though Waldorf schools are non-sectarian, families with strong religious beliefs of any denomination may experience a conflict because they prefer to develop their children’s spiritual life in their own ways.)  The Waldorf educational approach, while it can serve as a shield against nonce concepts in pedagogy and educational fads, can also be an impediment to useful educational innovations, including new technologies (computers aren’t available to students until their early teens in order to promote human interaction) and advances in testing and reporting methods. 

There are three Waldorf Schools in New York City and more around the state, not to mention the country and abroad.  Many of the schools are strikingly designed and decorated, creating an exciting and stimulating environment.  Most evaluations indicate that Waldorf Schools, both here and abroad, measure up educationally and socially to standards of both private and public institutions.  (Many Waldorf Schools are constituted as charter schools.  Most are elementary or primary schools.)  Waldorf teachers undergo a separate training program taught by the Anthroposophical Society with teacher-training facilities around the world.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, considering that Steiner had opinions, ideas, and theories on just about everything (I’ve left out some, otherwise this post would be a book), that he had thoughts on politics as well.  Of all the topics in which he held forth, politics was arguably the most volatile and he became a controversial figure during and after World War I.  German civil society was in turmoil after the devastating defeat and then the burdensome terms of the surrender.  The Weimar Republic (1918-33), the short-lived experiment in German democracy, was weak and beset with troubles: the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941; reigned 1888-1918), hyperinflation, a Bolshevik-style revolution in 1918-19, the Spartacist (communist) Uprising of January 1919, a contentious relationship with the victorious allies, the rise of politically extremist factions from both right (National Socialists) and left (Spartacists).  Into this noxious mix, Steiner dared to venture with solutions no group liked—often because they were too radical or futuristic for the era.

Steiner laid out his social-reform theories principally in 1919’s Toward Social Renewal.  For one thing, he proposed a “Threefold Social Order,” which the cultural, political, and economic segments of German society would be independent of one another, arguing that an integrated social system was unwieldy and inflexible, leading to disasters like the Great War.  He also opposed U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s idea of redrawing the map of Europe along ethnic lines rather than the traditional and historical national boundaries.  The first idea was greeted as crackpot, but the second got Steiner publicly branded a traitor to Germany. 

In 1919, Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923), then a founder of the German Workers’ Party, precursor of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis, attacked Steiner as a Jew (which he wasn’t), and in 1921, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Führer of the Nazi Party, which was growing in strength since its founding the year before, attacked him as a “friend” of the Jews.  As they grew in strength, the Nazis and other German nationalist parties went to war against Steiner and the Anthroposophists. 

Indeed, Steiner had published essays and articles even in his early career denouncing anti-Semitism in all its manifestations.  (Note the pieces he ran in Das Magazin für Litteratur in 1897 and ’98 in support of Zola’s criticism of the Dreyfus Affair, the notorious anti-Semitic prosecution of a French army officer.)  But he also called for the total assimilation of Jews into the larger cultures in which they lived, a position regarded by some as anti-Jewish.  To be fair, however, Steiner generally believed that all racial, ethnic, nationalist, and religious distinctions that divide society should be obsolete by the dawn of the 20th century (thus liberating “free” humans from what we now call “identity politics”).  The Anthroposophist leader therefore opposed the Zionism of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)—on the same basis by which he disapproved of Wilson’s scheme of creating a Europe based on ethnically homogenous nations.

Nonetheless, Steiner did sometimes fall into non- or quasi-scientific racial assumptions based on historical (mostly 19th-century)  tropes, and these usages often got him labeled a racist.  At times he touted the superiority of the White European (or Germanic) culture, but at other times he wrote of race as merely a physical manifestation that was inconsequential to a people’s intellect or morality.  Just as Anthroposophy is aimed at developing each person’s individuality, he posited that physical attributes such as race or ethnicity are simply part of that individuality, along with their experiences and development.  Through his whole career, Steiner promoted the notion that people’s fundamental spirituality is at the core of their common humanity and that all forms of racism are anathema. 

A fundamental tenet of Steiner’s Anthroposophy is to use the methodology of science, meaning principally natural science (the social sciences weren’t formally recognized as academic subjects until the end of the 19th century), to the study and analysis of humankind’s spiritual life.  Hence Steiner applied the term “spiritual science” (Geisteswissenschaft) to Anthroposophy.  Of course, detractors of Steiner and his philosophy didn’t (and don’t) accept that spiritualism and occultism, which is how they view Anthroposophy, even in Steiner’s hands, are science at all. 

Drawing on his early focus on epistemology, the study of knowledge, Steiner concluded “that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is in fact an experience of spirit.”  His intention was to use his training and experience in math, science, and philosophy to develop disciplined and precise arguments for his theories regarding spiritual experiences and, thus, make them acceptable as true research analogous to the hard sciences and mainstream philosophy.  For him, the human spirit was a real, concrete entity that can be studied and analyzed like the circulatory system or the mind, elevating spiritual science to the same level as biology and the newly emerging field of psychology. 

What Steiner was aiming for in the end is the revelation that the spiritual world and the natural world are two views of a single unit.  Our consciousness perceives them as separate, but as we develop our thinking through both about the natural world (that is, through natural science) and about the spiritual world (through spiritual science), we come to see the hidden unity of our experiences.  Gaining knowledge will make us truly free to think not just received thoughts, thoughts generated by our bodies or passed on to us by society, but our own original and creative thoughts generated by our individuality.

I said earlier that Steiner isn’t a major theater figure, and he isn’t.  You won’t find his name listed in theater reference books like the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre or in theater history texts.  But the founder of Anthroposophy did have a connection to theater; indeed, the First Goetheanum was built largely to provide a stage and auditorium for theatrical productions.  (The present Goetheanum has a 1000-seat theater for performances.)

Among his many interests and talents, Steiner worked in the visual arts.  I’ve spoken of his architecture, but he also created a 30-foot wooden sculpture with English sculptor  Edith Maryon (1872-1924), The Representative of Humanity (1922) that was meant to be displayed in the First Goetheanum.  It hadn’t been installed at the time of the fire, so it is the only object left of that building and now sits in the Second Goetheanum.

Steiner was also a playwright, however, having composed four modern mystery plays that follow the journeys of a group of characters through a series of lives (Steiner believed in reincarnation, which I haven’t addressed): The Portal of Initiation (1910), The Trial of the Soul (1911), The Guardian of the Threshold (1912), and The Soul’s Awakening (1913).  (Mystery plays, a medieval theatrical event, were enactments of Bible stories.)  The plays reveal how spiritual development becomes evident in karmically-connected people.  (Karma’s another of Steiner’s beliefs.)  He had also previously directed plays by French dramatist Édouard Schuré (The Sacred Drama of Eleusis, 1907 at the Munich Theosophical Congress; The Children of Lucifer, 1909).  Steiner’s plays are still performed around the world by Anthroposophical organizations.

The area in which Steiner so strongly influenced Michael Chekhov, acting and actor-training, the founder of Anthroposophy developed with his second wife, Marie von Sivers (1864-1948).  The two also devised new methods of storytelling and poetry recitation.  (The last public lecture Steiner gave before his death was on acting and speech.)  According to a brochure for the Chekhov Theatre Studio, Steinerian speech training “aims at awakening and freeing living forces of speech and of developing its plastic movement and musical element.”

Steiner and von Sivers also developed Eurythmy, “the science of visible speech,” which makes perceptible what Steiner asserted were the internal expressions and gestures of language and music, generated when the spiritual world penetrates the soul.  The Chekhov Studio described Eurythmy as “based on the laws of movement which underlie man’s capacity for speech and for movement, and linking them together.”  According to Steiner,

Eurythmy is neither dance nor mime, but a new form of art, which brings to appearance in coordinated movements the sound-quality of music and speech,  When the human being speaks or sings he forms with his breath the air around him.  Unseen gestures and movements accompany in us each sound and note.  These hidden movements are the source of the art of eurythmy.  Thus it can be called “visible speech” and “visible song.”

By 1923, Steiner had become increasingly frail and weak.  He continued to lecture widely and work on his autobiography, Mein Lebensgang [My life’s path] (published uncompleted posthumously in 1925), and tour.  He delivered his last lecture in September 1924 and died on 30 March 1925 in Dornach at the age of 64.  The nature of his final illness has never been reported.

[I can’t tell if Rudolf Steiner was in the same league as L. Ron Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon and if Anthroposophy was akin to Scientology or the Unification Church—or if he was a charlatan and his philosophy was cult-like.  He had plenty of detractors (aside, I mean, from Hitler and the Nazis) but he seems to have been greatly respected by many, many people.  (Among the prominent Anthroposophists are writer Saul Bellow; painter Joseph Beuys; actor, director, teacher Michael Chekhov; sculptor Edith Maryon; playwright Édouard Schuré; conductor, composer, pianist Bruno Walter.) 

[It seems clear that Steiner was very smart—he mastered a large number of subjects, both academic and esoteric, and was accomplished in several arts as well—and had a large ego.  From my reading, Steiner doesn’t seem to have set out to bamboozle anyone, even if you consider his ideas specious.  He seems to have been entirely sincere in his beliefs and many of his ideas were more impractical than crackpot. 

[As I said above, I have left out some of the topics that are part of Anthroposophy (I didn’t even attempt to go into Steiner’s relation to Christianity and Christian beliefs—it’s not only very esoteric, but Christianity isn’t in my wheelhouse), and even those that I have tried to cover are over-simplified.  Anthroposophy is very complex and expansive, as I’m sure readers have seen, and I can’t say that I have understood even most of it.  The language is often dense and hard to unpack, and like most philosophies, it’s hard to pin down in digestible terms.  I’ve tried to give an overview of the philosophy, simplistic and superficial though it may be, and trust that ROTters who are interested in learning more will go out and find more detailed sources to satisfy their curiosity.

[I plan to write a profile of Michael Chekhov for a future post on Rick On Theater.  I don’t have a specific date selected for publication, but I hope it will be soon, perhaps in February.  (I have two posts, “Psychological Gesture & Leading Center,” 27 October 2009, and “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” 2 May 2011, which deal with aspects of Chekhov’s acting theories, but neither article has much biographical detail.  My new post will focus on the life of the actor, director, acting teacher, and acting theorist.)]