In 1882 Joseph Kürschner, the editor of a large popular series of German classics, needed someone to edit Goethe's writings on natural science, and on the advice of Karl Julius Schröer, the professor of German literature at the Vienna Technische Hochschule, gave the job to a student of twenty-one. Rudolf Steiner, the son of a railway telegraphist, had come to Vienna on a scholarship to study mathematics and the sciences, and left in 1883 without a degree. The Goethe work held him for fifteen years, from 1890 inside the Goethe Archive at Weimar, and handed him his question. Goethe had looked for the idea inside the plant itself; when he sketched his archetypal plant for Schiller, Schiller told him it was an idea, not something he had seen. Steiner sided with Goethe, and the claim he spent his life defending grew from that choice: thinking, watched closely, is not a screen between us and the world but the place where we meet it.
The universities taught the opposite. Kant's followers held that the mind knows only its own representations, never the world behind them. Steiner answered them in his doctoral thesis, Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie, which passed at Rostock in 1891 with the lowest grade: in thinking we produce the content ourselves and can follow it to the end, so there at least we know something from the inside. The Philosophy of Freedom (1894) built an ethics on that ground. An act is free, it argues, when it grows out of an idea the person has grasped for themselves, not out of a command, a duty in Kant's sense, or a drive. Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, sent his copy back covered in objections, and Robert von Zimmermann, whose lectures Steiner had attended in Vienna, called it a theoretical anarchism outdoing Nietzsche. Of a thousand copies, about four hundred had sold by 1907.
Through the 1890s Steiner wrote as a freethinker, invoking Stirner, Nietzsche and the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. He published a book in Nietzsche's praise in 1895. In Berlin from 1897 he edited the Magazin für Literatur, which lost readers when he backed Zola in the Dreyfus affair, and from 1899 he taught at a workers' school run by the socialists.
The turn came in 1900, when Count and Countess von Brockdorff invited him to lecture at their Theosophical Library in Berlin, first on Nietzsche, then on the mystics. In 1902 he became General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. His autobiography, left unfinished at his death, calls the 1890s a testing of his soul and says his development around 1900 rested on an inward encounter with Christ's death and resurrection, which he called the Mystery of Golgotha. He now held that a trained mind could perceive a spiritual world as exactly as the senses perceive the physical one, and named the result spiritual science. Theosophy (1904) described the human being passing through repeated lives, How to Know Higher Worlds printed the exercises, and An Outline of Occult Science (1910) set out a history of the cosmos. Steiner called The Philosophy of Freedom the philosophical basis of all of it. Scholars still disagree whether the turn was a break or a continuation of his earlier thought; the historian of religion Helmut Zander stresses continuity. No scientific body has accepted the spiritual findings.
When Annie Besant, the Theosophical Society's president, promoted the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the vehicle of a coming world teacher, Steiner refused, and the society dissolved its German Section in March 1913. His followers had already founded the Anthroposophical Society, taking the word from a book by Zimmermann. At Dornach, near Basel, they built the first Goetheanum in wood.
After the war came the most durable work. In September 1919 a school opened in Stuttgart for the children of workers at Emil Molt's Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, and Steiner's lectures founded anthroposophical medicine and, in 1924, biodynamic farming. Adolf Hitler attacked him in print in 1921, and in 1922 people rushed the stage at his Munich lecture. On New Year's Eve 1922 the Goetheanum burned, and police reports pointed to arson. He died in Dornach on 30 March 1925, having given some six thousand lectures.
Those lectures carry his most contested legacy. They contain passages on race. In 2000 a commission set up by the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands reported that sixteen such passages, in some 89,000 printed pages, would be called discriminatory today, though it found no racial theory in the work. The historian Peter Staudenmaier, a critic of the movement, finds antisemitic and philosemitic views in Steiner side by side. Academic philosophers still rarely discuss The Philosophy of Freedom.