Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre
Abstract
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) did not put himself
forward as the teacher of any new religion or sect. His ‘Anthroposophy’ which forms the\ud
basis, e.g. of the Waldorf Education for which he is increasingly well-known, is not, in the
strict sense a religious teaching, although it aims to affirm the cognitive value and even, as
one might say, evolutionary significance of humanity’s religious experience. He began his
life’s work as an academic philosopher, with a thesis on Fichte, a connection with Nietzsche,
and a fundamental book on the relationship between issues of freedom and issues of
knowledge.Like the emerging school of Phenomenologists, whose mentor Franz Brentano he had heard
lecturing when he was a student in Vienna, he was moving out of the idea of philosophy as
an attempt to define the necessary foundations of all knowledge and toward a fresh look at
the way the world shows itself to us. Turning away from nineteenth-century objectivism, his
was an attempt rather to explore the human perspective as such – hence that difficult and,
in English at least, rather awkward term Anthroposophy (Gk. ‘wisdom of man’). In some
respects, moreover, his ideas reach right forward here to what are now called ‘anthropic
ideas’ in modern science. The world we encounter, many scientists now tend to
acknowledge, cannot be thought of as just happening to be there before our eyes, nor is it
just a random part of the world that we encounter. For what we know first of all about it is
that the world (or our bit of it) is such that it has produced us, with our living senses and the
consciousness with which to become aware of it. We are therefore in a quite concrete and
specific way ourselves a key to the nature of that world
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