Rudolf Steiner - genius or maniac?

[Batavia]

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 (or 25) February 1861 – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant.Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.

He was the founder of Anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy is a philosophy founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Followers of anthroposophy aim to engage in spiritual discovery through a mode of thought independent of sensory experience. They also aim to present their ideas in a manner verifiable by rational discourse and in studying the spiritual world seek comparable precision and clarity to that obtained by scientists investigating the physical world.

I´ve read a little about him and I even once used to go to a Waldorfschool for a short time and for me Steiner was a total maniac and cheater. He claimed to be in contact with higher powers and of course he was immune to criticism, people who criticized him weren't "ready for his works". Most teachers at my school were totally strange and criticism of steiner was not allowed - they spoke about him like he was a holier.
In addition, the schools are not as relaxed as, for example, the montessori schools, even if many believe that.
I learned crazy stuff about the power of various plants, reincarnation, karma and so on. He mixed european and asian philosophy.
Steiner's claim that his “humanities” is an exact science with empirically verifiable results, like the natural sciences, has been criticized from various quarters.

It is true that he was very productive and he wrote about many different topics, so for his follower, he is one of the greatest thinkers of all time.

[sean]

Rudolf Steiner can be really hit or miss. He was the same way with the Theosophists. He always insisted that everything should come from direct personal experience, i.e. "trust no one." I have already written about it.

One second he is rambling on about some fantastical mythology that almost certainly has very little relation to how reality actually functions and the next he is speaking accurately about very subtle metaphysical and transpersonal dynamics with a rare eloquence.

Some of Steiner's conceptions of the way in which reality operates have been obsoleted by progress in scientific fields. His conceptions are reaching out in an attempt to elucidate larger scale metaphysical dynamics that unfold and go unnoticed due to the comparable brevity of human life and the immediate focus on the sense-perceptible.

Most of anthroposophy is simply Steiner's declaration of what he discovered with clairvoyance of the other side of reality, and though he wanted and tried to be scientific about it it really does not appear to anyone else as a science for at least one reason: if such a science is even possible there are exceedingly few people who can even engage it as an accessible experiential domain, let alone make claims of that domain that people who can't experience it would recognise as being about the world we experience.

People don't understand anthroposophy because you actually need a bit of background on Kant/Goethe to get his philosophical points and how he thinks clairvoyant cognition relates to a transcending of Kant's limitations on knowledge of things in themselves.

Further, his out there stuff jumping off from his 'scientific' clairvoyance is something that does have some philosophical merit in connection to German idealism, but you would have to tease that out yourself since it isn't immediately clear.

Anyway, it seems strange now because empiricism is the only philosophy Westerners adhere to but there was a time when philosophy bisected mysticism and entered the realm of deep metaphysics - and its not hard to see why physicists would feel threatened by metaphysicists since meta is a root stem meaning "beyond".

Spoiler!

[renaissance12]

Italian Gustavo Rol believed that Steiner was not a cheater.

The list of Italians ( and not Italians) who were shocked by Gustavo Rol "powers" is very long..

http://www.gustavorol.org/index.php/en/

Rol also played simple card games .. but he didn't hold the cards in his hand .. The cards remained in the hands of others.
If a guest brought some cards still in the celophan and chose a card all the cards of the deck became equal to the chosen card.
And so for dozens of times .


Gustavo Rol and John Cage




PS don't forget Madame Helena Blavatsky

[Batavia]

As I said, I went to a Waldorf school and looking back i have to say it was like a sect.
Steiner had some interesting thoughts, but all in all, he was a con man.