Anthroposophy is defined by its proponents as a spiritual and philosophical path, based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. It arises in people as a need of sentiment and finds justification as an attempt to satisfy a spiritual need. Therefore, anthroposophists are those who feel a basic need of life, and raise questions about human nature and the universe. (Cf. R. Steiner, "Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path", also published as the "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" and the "Philosophy of Freedom" -The Basis for a Modern World Conception (1894).
Steiner exposes, there, a concept of free will based on inner experience of pure thought, free from bodily senses, so that a proper reading of that text could be the same experience of that pure thinking. In other words, Steiner writes still in the book 'The Philosophy of Freedom: "Who among us can say to be in all his actions truly free? But in each of us dwells a deeper entity, in which the free man finds expression. "
Nature makes of man simply a ‘being of nature’; society makes him a being who acts according to given laws; he can become a free ‘being’ only by his own right. (Cf. R. Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, (1924) 1998).
Gertrude Reif Hughes in her Introduction to Steiner's 'Intuity thinking as a spiritual path' wrote: "his" philosophy "of freedom is actually a meditation on human capacities to know and on individuality as a basis for socially responsible action." And in the Preface to the Revised Edition, 1918 Steiner wrote: "Can we human beings, as willing entities, ascribe freedom to ourselves, or is this freedom a mere illusion that arises because we do not see the threads of necessity upon which our willing, like any other natural event, depends?”
Now, on the nature of ‘antroposophy’, Steiner proposes the investigation and description of spiritual phenomena through the scientific method, that is, through its expansion to objects not immediately sensitive. In fact, Steiner believed in the possibility of combining the clarity of modern scientific thought with the awareness of a spiritual world that is present in all religious and mystical experiences. Science limits merely to theories that can be checked and verified. Steiner tried to create an approach to what he called "inner life" that is based on the rigor of thought proper of modern science, addressing the study of the soul and spirit.
Actually, anthroposophy is considered a pseudoscience in academia for its intent to meet and study with a scientific method of entities that - according to almost all contemporary metaphysical systems - do not belong to the order of accessible realities by scientific knowledge.
At the age of just over twenty, Steiner was asked to edit Goethe's scientific writings for a major publisher which would bring together the complete works of the writer. While attending to the editorial work, Steiner began to publish various writings that anticipated his future ideas,
and were placeable within the scientific and philosophical climate of his time: especially Goethe's conception of the world.
As a synthesis, the first books of Steiner anticipated the gradual overcoming of the continental philosophy of the twentieth century of the Cartesian idealism and Kantian subjectivism, referring to the conception of the human being that Goethe had, as natural and supernatural entities.
As Edmund Husserl and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Steiner was deeply influenced by the works of Franz Brentano, whose lectures he had been able to attend while a student at the Technical University of Vienna; he read thoroughly Wilhelm Dilthey. Through his epistemological and philosophical work, Rudolf Steiner became one of the first European philosophers to overcome the subject-object split that Descartes, classical physics, and various complex historical forces had impressed upon Western thought for many centuries.
Dear coleague,
I would indeed say that the ambition of Antrophosophy is knowledge (wisdom) and can be seen as an effort to develop a scientific method in the tradition of Goethe. As Dilthey indicated - who in fact was the first to overcome the Cartesian subject-object distinction in his 'Ideas' and especially in his correspondence with Duke York von Wartenburg - there are two different scientific methods, one which is known as the natural scientific method and one that is known as the method of the Geisteswissenschaften. In this tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, and following the work of Goethe, Steiner tried to develop a 'natural' philosophy. Unfortunately, this rich tradition in continental philsophy disappeared completely in academic philosphy, but nowadays, it receives increasingly attention in the context of deep ecology and environmental philosophy. Steiner himself was however never accepted in academic philosophy, mainly because his work is seen as world view or world picture(as opposed to philosophy). A contemporary criticism of Steiner's anthroposophy in the context of global warming should start with a criticism of his antropocentrism I guess. But in this respects, Steiner's work is comparable with most environmental philosophies...
Dear Vincent,
thank you for your remarkable intervention.
In essence, I am of your same opinion, particularly with what you said in the last part of your contribution when you mentioned anthropocentrism.
In this respect, I have some comments to make.
It is customary to refer to the name of Copernicus (1473-1543) the beginning of the cosmological and philosophical decentralization of the human being, typical of the modern age. However, this decentralization has traits not univocal and the historical development is not linear. The gradual emancipation of man and nature from God was in fact a result, in part unwanted, of a process that had in the humanist anthropocentrism one of its main roots.
An author as Nicola Cusano (1401-1464) had no trouble maintaining a philosophical-cosmological position certainly not geocentric in the context of theology, while the same operation, probably beyond his own intentions, was unsuccessful in a thinker like Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). The protagonists of the Copernican cosmological revolution, from Copernicus to Galileo, from Kepler to Newton, were far from interpreting it in an anti-religious key.
For their part, even the Renaissance humanists wanted to intend in that sense their revaluation of the human world, although the thrust of much of the philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ended up to bracket the connection of man and his moral life with God (Machiavelli, Montaigne, Grotius, Hobbes). Author who symbolizes this dual soul, and therefore the genetic ambiguity of anthropocentrism of early modernity, was undoubtedly Descartes (1596-1650), whose epistemology wanted to be theist, but starting now from man laid the foundations for a future perception of the world without God.
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