Toward the Spirit Self

Rudolf Steiner's Occult Philosophy

I thought I would take a very brief respite from the election to publish this essay, written for the latest issue of Purple, on Rudolf Steiner, one of my intellectual heroes. I hope you enjoy it!

One of my great intellectual heroes is the Austrian visionary philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1865 - 1925), who founded Waldorf Schools and Anthroposophy, an occult school, among other achievements. He is also responsible for biodynamic farming. I believe Steiner is one of the most important thinkers not only for his time but for our own time. The path to accessing what is incredibly valuable and crucial about his work is, for many of us, a circuitous and difficult one.

Steiner, himself, knew why this would be the case: Modern and postmodern civilization has suffered from the overwhelming dominance of scientific materialism, which argues that the world is physical, primarily, or made out of stuff. Human consciousness accidentally came out of physical processes and biological complexity, which increased through time due to evolutionary pressures. This leads to what is called “the hard problem” of consciousness, as philosophers and scientists have struggled, and failed, to find the locus of conscious experience in the physical brain.