Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Art

Rudolf Steiner is often seen by those who lack a genuine familiarity with his work as a cultural anomaly or as an outsider to the mainstream European tradition. However, as Owen Barfield (the foremost British exponent of anthroposophy) and Steiner himself sought to illustrate in various lectures and books (including The Riddles of Philosophy and The Riddle of Man), he is in fact a successor of German idealism and romanticism. It is, moreover, only by situating Steiner’s thought in connection to these broader traditions that his originality and relevance can be justly appraised. Beginning with a consideration of Steiner’s early lecture “Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics” (1888), this paper will specifically show how Steiner developed his philosophy of art, which is a key to much of his thinking, through drawing on the aesthetics of both Schiller and Goethe, and distinguishing his own position from that of Schelling and Hegel.
“Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics” contains the seed of Steiner’s later ideas about art and his practice as an artist in various disciplines (including architecture, drama and eurythmy). Moreover, the ideas in this early lecture played a vital role in the development of Steiner’s theory of knowledge and ethics in his most important philosophical work, The Philosophy of Freedom (1893). As Steiner writes in his autobiography, at the time of his contemplation of a Goethean aesthetics: “true knowledge, the manifestation of the spiritual in art, and the moral will in man became in my thought the members which unite to form a single whole.” This paper will elucidate how Steiner’s philosophy of art responds to German idealism, provides the stepping stone to his Philosophy of Freedom, and plants the seed for his theory and practice as an artist in his theosophical and anthroposophical periods.