Rudolf Steiner's Nietzschean Phenomenology: Philosophy as the Art of Thinking

This paper contends that Rudolf Steiner’s philosophical writings offer, in response to the Marburg Neo-Kantian school then ascendant, a highly original synthesis of other nascent philosophical currents: a Nietzschean emphasis on philosophy as an art of self-overcoming, a development of Franz Brentano’s approach to phenomenology, and his own invention of a Goethean philosophy as a means to provide them an epistemological ground. I take a brief look at each branch in turn. The work of Nietzsche resonates most obviously in Philosophy of Freedom, in which Steiner defines the philosopher as an “artist in the realm of concepts.” I show how this view is central to his book, and how it had already been anticipated in Steiner’s book about Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. The second part of this paper shows how the Nietzschean emphasis on freedom as an artistic activity harmonizes with Steiner’s development of the phenomenology of Franz Brentano, some of whose lectures Steiner attended: though philosophy is an art form, it is a precise one. This section of the paper establishes that the primary significance of Brentano for Steiner is the former’s attempt to establish a rigorously scientific phenomenology of thinking itself, thereby paving the way to Steiner’s own concept of “spiritual science” as a phenomenology of spiritual experience. Much of anthroposophy is an expansion of the method established and practiced with too much self-limitation by Brentano. The paper’s final section takes up Steiner’s early book, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s Worldview. If Nietzsche showed that the philosopher is an artist of concepts and Brentano showed that that art is also a precise science, Goetheanism establishes what concepts are while navigating the pitfalls post-Kantian idealism. The book’s final section, on aesthetics, returns us to our beginning: the art of philosophy.