Before founding Waldorf schools, Rudolf Steiner edited Goethe's science and scorned religion
Rudolf Steiner is remembered for Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming and anthroposophy, much of it judged pseudoscience. Yet he started out as a freethinking young editor of Goethe's scientific writings, lecturing at an anti-religious society and writing a philosophy of freedom he hoped would win him a professorship. The turn was dramatic.
Steiner was born in 1861, the son of a gamekeeper turned railway telegraph operator in the Austrian Empire, and grew up in small stations in the eastern Alpine foothills. He studied mathematics, physics, chemistry and natural sciences at the Vienna Institute of Technology on a scholarship from 1879 to 1883. At just 21 and without credentials, he was asked to serve as natural science editor for a new edition of Goethe's works, a job, one writer notes, that nobody else wanted. It shaped him for life: he adopted Goethe's view that thinking perceives ideas the way the eye perceives colour.
His own account of childhood is otherworldly. He said that at nine he saw the spirit of a dead aunt before anyone knew she had died, and that geometry convinced him one could know an unseen world through the mind alone. As a young man, though, he presented as a positivist and individualist who cited Stirner, Nietzsche and Haeckel, held religion in contempt, and lectured workers and the rationalist Giordano Bruno Union on philosophy.
He worked at the Goethe archives in Weimar from 1888 to 1896, earned a philosophy doctorate at Rostock in 1891, and in 1894 published The Philosophy of Freedom. It was poorly received and no academic post followed. In Berlin he edited a literary magazine and lost subscribers by backing Zola in the Dreyfus Affair. Then a 1899 essay on Goethe's fairy tale of the green snake led to talks for Theosophists, and by 1902 he headed the society's new German section without ever formally joining.
From there he built anthroposophy, a spiritual movement he called spiritual science. After 1907 he turned to drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the Goetheanum, and after the First World War to Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophical medicine. Scholars note that nearly all his biographies are hagiography, and German academics dismissed him as a self-taught outsider.
Source: Rudolf Steiner
