Rudolf Steiner as an Inheritor of German Idealism and Romanticism
An interview of me by Christopher Satoor on "The Young Idealist' YouTube Channel
Chris Satoor:
All right, welcome back to "The Young Idealist" and my ongoing series on classical German philosophy and German Romanticism. Today, I have a special treat for everyone. I’ve invited Dr. Matthew D. Segall to speak about Rudolf Steiner. Matt has been talking to me about Steiner and why Steiner is important in the history of German idealism for a while now. So, I thought I’d invite Dr. Segall here today to discuss Steiner’s life, philosophy, and the relationship between Steiner and anthroposophy with idealism and Romanticism.
Just for the viewers and for Matt: this series, my digital archive, is meant to harness the spirit of Bryan Magee’s old "Great Philosophers" series, where I sit down with a thinker, engage with them, and we hear about the philosopher's biography and philosophy. We create a conversation that’s both for enthusiasts, scholars, and of course, students.
Matthew D. Segall is an Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, and in the School of Consciousness and Transformation. His areas of specialization include process philosophy, German idealism, psychedelic studies, philosophy of mind, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of religion. Dr. Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher who teaches courses applying process-relational philosophy across various disciplines, including religious studies, philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, and social and political theory. He has published on these and a wide range of other topics, including German idealism, philosophy of time, psychedelics, theoretical biology, architecture, and media theory. He has also been on YouTube for almost 20 years. I can also say, from knowing Matt for quite a while now, that he engages in very interesting dialogues with scientists and biologists. I’ll link all of his work in the description under this episode. I’m struggling here; I’ve only had one coffee. So, without further ado, I’m welcoming Dr. Segall to "The Young Idealist." Thank you so much for being here.
Matt Segall:
So good to be in dialogue with you, Chris. Thanks for having me on. I’m really grateful to you for this "Young Idealist" channel and the interviews you’ve put online. For those of us who are scholars of German idealism, and I know for many students, it’s such an important resource. So yeah, happy to be here to continue. I just wish we were like in those Magee interviews, sitting on a couch together and chatting instead of on Zoom here, but we’ll make do.
Chris Satoor:
Yes, me too, me too. I wish I was in sunny California instead of rainy Toronto. Perhaps you could start us off by explaining: who was Rudolf Steiner, and why do you think his thought is important today?
Matt Segall:
Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861, the same year that one of my other philosophical heroes, Alfred North Whitehead, was born. Steiner was born in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Croatia. He grew up during the Industrial Revolution, which was just getting started in Central Europe. His father worked at the local railway station, which sparked Steiner’s early interest in science and technology. However, from a very young age, Steiner also had parapsychological experiences. He reports in his autobiography that when he was seven or eight years old, he saw an apparition of what turned out to be a family member, his aunt, who had just committed suicide. He continued throughout his life to have these strange clairvoyant experiences. So, Steiner had this spiritual side alongside his intellectual and scientifically grounded side.
He went on to study at a technical college and wrote his dissertation on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, being deeply influenced by Fichte’s idea of the intellectual intuition of the self or the "Ich." But at the same time, Steiner was a deep student of Goethe’s work, particularly Goethe’s scientific work, which Steiner edited in the 1880s and 90s for the official German edition. He edited and introduced five volumes, becoming enraptured by Goethe’s image of nature and his phenomenological, participatory method of engaging with nature. Steiner saw Goethe’s method as a new, non-dualistic way of coming to know the natural world while also being aware of the power of our own self-consciousness and freedom, which he took from Fichte.
By the end of the 19th century, Steiner was teaching as a private tutor in Vienna, then moved to Berlin, where he became active as an editor of various magazines, involved in political controversies of the day, and very interested in the arts. He frequented coffee houses, debating with major political and philosophical figures. From around 1900 to 1904, he taught at a workers' college in Berlin. Growing up in a working-class context, he knew the plight of the workers and tried to engage in enlivening the cultural life of the working class.
Around this time, Steiner joined the Theosophical Society due to his spiritual side, which he had kept relatively quiet about until then. He became the secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society and lectured for about 10 years. However, as the Theosophical Society increasingly turned to Indian thought, and especially after the leadership declared Jiddu Krishnamurti to be the second coming of Christ, Steiner left the society. Steiner, who was more aligned with the Western esoteric stream of Rosicrucianism, shifted his attention to Anthroposophy as communal initiative to generate a new approach to natural science and a new understanding of what he called spiritual science—the study of the way the human spirit resonates with the spirit of the cosmos.
Steiner’s contributions extend to education through the Waldorf schools, biodynamic agriculture, medicine, the arts, and more. His headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland, featured the first Goetheanum, a cathedral-like structure built by people from all over Europe during World War I. Tragically, the Goetheanum was burned down on New Year’s Eve 1922, possibly due to arson. Shortly after, Steiner became ill—some suspect he was poisoned by early Nazis, with whom he had conflicts. Steiner died in March 1925, but the Anthroposophical movement continues today.
Steiner remains an influential yet controversial figure, making claims about natural sciences and a spiritual worldview that integrates Angelic hierarchies into an evolutionary cosmology. This approach, aiming to balance spirituality and natural science, continues to provoke debate.
Chris Satoor:
Just a follow-up, if you don’t mind. You brought up parapsychology. Could you define the it?
Matt Segall:
Parapsychology is the study of phenomena sometimes called Psi phenomena—things like clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis that don’t fit into the normal naturalistic paradigm. The Psychical Research Society, started in the 1880s, later including figures like William James, aimed to study these phenomena. There’s a large body of evidence and theoretical reflection over a century on these experiences, though they’re sometimes dismissed. Edward Kelly at the University of Virginia is one of the most prominent figures currently working in this area. As we move toward a less reductionistic, materialistic understanding of the human psyche and the universe, what is now considered parapsychological might eventually become part of normal psychology. But we’re not quite there yet.
Chris Satoor:
Thank you for answering that. Could you now talk about Steiner’s main philosophical influences and how you see these influences employed in his philosophical and spiritual work?
Matt Segall:
Steiner began reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when he was about 14 years old, and he struggled with Kant’s argument that there are limits to human knowledge, which didn’t sit well with him. Steiner continued his study of the post-Kantian idealists, eventually writing his dissertation on Fichte. He studied Schelling, Hegel, Goethe, and Novalis, with the entire Romantic movement being very important to him. I see him continuing the dialectic of German idealism into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, trying to bring these insights into practical life.
What’s remarkable about Steiner’s career is that he wasn’t just a thinker; he was constantly responding to requests from people in the Anthroposophical Society and elsewhere to provide indications about various problems, whether it was helping farmers with soil fertility or creating the Waldorf school movement in response to factory workers in Stuttgart. Steiner was always trying to show how seemingly abstract spiritual concepts could transform the world, and many of the movements he initiated continue to bear fruit today.
Owen Barfield, a 20th-century anthroposophist and philosopher, saw Steiner as allowing Romanticism to come of age and mature. While some criticize the original Romantics as being too withdrawn from the world, Steiner reversed that vector, bringing imagination and intuition to bear on real-world social, political, and cultural, material issues. He helped show how Romanticism remains relevant today as a check to the overly rationalistic approach of our current civilization, which is increasingly acknowledged as unsustainable.
If we don’t have a scientific method for exploring the power of imagination, we risk falling into conspiratorial thinking and cultural chaos. Steiner’s work provides a way of taking natural science seriously, in a more phenomenological Goethean way, and integrating it with a deeper spiritual longing to be part of a meaningful cosmic adventure, where our actions matter and have a real impact on the future.
Chris Satoor:
I really enjoyed your answer. Your passion is evident, and you have an ally in me—I'm not a materialist, as you know. When we first met, I was quite dismissive of Steiner, but I’m opening up more to him, especially with the work you’re doing recently with philosophers, psychologists, and physicists in this transdisciplinary approach, which I think is true to the heart of late Schelling’s speculative philosophy. I think you did a great job of bringing in very relevant themes affecting us right now, like conspiratorial theories and the culture war. Thank you so much for your answer. Could you explain for those unfamiliar with Steiner’s work: what is anthroposophy, and how does it differ from the traditional understanding of philosophy?
Matt Segall:
Philosophy is usually considered a more or less intellectual exercise, but Steiner was in no way inhibited in exploring the fruits of thinking activity. However, he was also a deep feeler and wanted to show how these ideas could be active in transforming the world. For Steiner and the anthroposophical perspective, the human being is not simply a thinking being, though thinking is very important. We are also feeling beings and willing beings. Philosophy, particularly in figures like Schelling or Schopenhauer, does concern itself with the will and feeling, but Steiner wanted to integrate these aspects, showing that the innate powers human beings are born with and naturally develop are not the end of human development. We can continue to grow and cultivate new organs of cognition, new soul powers, as it were.
We all naturally have thinking, feeling, and willing. Anthroposophy provides practices, meditation techniques, that Steiner believed would help us cultivate further powers, which he called imagination, inspiration, and intuition. To some degree, these are already seeded in each of us, but unless we, as adults, continue to engage life as a learning process to develop our faculties, they won’t flourish—they’ll remain in seed form.
For example, Steiner saw imagination as a power of cognition, not just make-believe or fantasy, but a way of knowing that allows us to perceive the etheric dimension of nature. He believed Goethe, in his study of plant metamorphosis and the archetypal plant, was actually studying this etheric dimension—the time-body or formative power underlying the visible plant. Steiner argued that to truly perceive this, we must engage at a deeper level, recreating the phases of the plant’s metamorphosis in our imagination. This is a bit like Aristotle’s contact epistemology, where knowing the form of a thing involves the same form manifesting in you as is in the thing. Steiner aimed to go beyond what the physical senses can provide, laying out a layered ontology where the physical is just the outer expression of deeper creative processes. Anthroposophy integrates everything we know from physics about the physical world with these other supersensible dimensions of the cosmos and shows how corresponding organs of perception—imagination, inspiration, and intuition—can be developed to perceive these dimensions.
For some, this may be several steps too far, but for those familiar with German idealism and Romanticism, Steiner’s suggestions are more understandable. He makes practical some of the insights of Romanticism that might otherwise remain in the realm of fantasy, applying them in ways that bear fruit.
Chris Satoor:
That was another fantastic answer. Romanticism does get a bit of a bad name, often linked to the creation of fascistic states, but not enough people recognize its revolutionary aspect in attacking the mechanistic Cartesianism that figures like Schelling and Hegel critique. Anthroposophy, as you describe it, is a speculative science but also a transdisciplinary science, bringing in ontology, phenomenology, and other disciplines to think through things, which is a fantastic philosophical endeavor.
Matt Segall:
On the question of Romanticism’s association with fascism, it’s worth noting that in the famous document written in Hegel’s handwriting but emerging from dialogues with Schelling and Hölderlin, called “the oldest system program of German idealism,” they state that the ideal would be to shrink the state and ultimately get rid of it. If we had truly free beings capable of mutual recognition, we wouldn’t need the state to enforce laws violently.
The story, of course, is that as many of the Romantics got older—this is true of the English Romantics too—they became more conservative. But Schelling, at least, seems to continue to hold even into his old age that the state is an imposition on human freedom and should ultimately wither away. Steiner was an anarchist, though not a tear-down-the-system type, but one who believed the state should protect individual rights and responsibilities while allowing the cultural sphere—education, science, art, media, sports—to be free from state control. The state shouldn’t control curricula or scientific research, and the economy should also be more or less free. Steiner agreed with Marx’s critique of capitalism and the exploitation of workers (individuals have a right not to be exploited as wage-slaves in a capitalist labor market), but he rejected historical materialism.
It’s worth mentioning that Hitler named Steiner in a newspaper article in 1922, attacking him and labeling his approach to social problems as a "uniquely Jewish method of distorting people’s natural state of mind," even though Steiner wasn’t Jewish. The Nazis were not fans of anthroposophy, and when they came to power, some anthroposophists adapted to the situation, but others were shot in the street, and many Waldorf schools had to close because they wouldn’t comply with Nazi requirements. So, it’s a complicated story, but we need to be careful about too easily associating Romanticism with fascism—it’s more complex than that.
Chris Satoor:
When we talked off-camera, you mentioned that we should discuss anthroposophy’s relation to German idealism and Romanticism as an extension. Could you elaborate on that connection, particularly how anthroposophy moves beyond idealism and Romanticism?
Matt Segall:
When Schelling articulates his positive philosophy, aiming to develop a metaphysical empiricism, he mentions that while Kant began this with his transcendental aesthetic, philosophy still needs a critique of feeling. In some ways, Steiner is pursuing this program that Schelling inaugurates. Schelling couldn’t fully take it up due to his age, but Steiner picks up where Schelling and Hegel left off. They pushed conceptual thinking as far as it could go, but Steiner shows how we can balance the powers of our soul—thinking, feeling, and willing—and push beyond merely conceptual thought.
Schelling, in his late philosophy, emphasized the importance of the sheer fact that anything exists and the wonder this provokes. Steiner wants us to return to that original feeling and cultivate organs of perception that allow us to penetrate that feeling, going beyond our sense-bound intellect and participating in the unfolding of the imagination as an organ of perception.
For Steiner, the act of self-positing that Fichte discovered is like a portal into the spiritual world. The "Ich" is the core of the human being and also a doorway into the spiritual world. However, Steiner warns that when we enter that realm, it’s challenging to distinguish between our projections and the real imaginal world. Initially, we create the objects of our perception, much like Kant’s archetypal intellect, and we need to develop greater sensitivity to our own activity to differentiate between what we’re creating and what we’re perceiving. This is true in normal perception but even more so in the spiritual realm.
One challenge with Steiner is that he seems to have had capacities far beyond what the average person can achieve, but he wanted others to test his claims about that world. He provides exercises that he says can help cultivate these experiences, such as memory exercises that build confidence in your willing capacity and strengthen your will. Another exercise involves recalling the events of your day backward before bed, which prepares your soul for death, strengthening your capacity to direct your imagination.
In a way, anthroposophy is what Schelling had in mind when he talked about positive philosophy. Schelling’s philosophy of mythology and revelation is the seed for what Steiner develops in works like Theosophy or Outline of Occult Science, where he engages in an anamnesis of the mythological process, exploring how human consciousness came to be over evolutionary history as a process involving divine powers alongside natural powers.
Steiner’s view of evolution, which integrates mind and nature, contrasts with the typical materialistic understanding. He sees the human being as integral to the cosmos, with an evolutionary history that’s deeply entwined with the cosmos. Steiner argues that the human being has always been present in some form and that we are now called to take conscious responsibility for the further evolution of our species and the universe.
Chris Satoor:
As you spoke about feeling and moving beyond the dualism of nature and mind, I kept thinking of Whitehead and his process philosophy. It’s interesting how you connect thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, Steiner, and Schelling. I see a really nice map of you as a philosopher in your answer. I have one last question, which is two parts, and then I’ll let you go.
First, how is Steiner’s concept of freedom different from that of the German idealists, particularly Schelling and Hegel? Second, for viewers interested in Steiner but unfamiliar with his work, what book would you recommend as a starting point?
Matt Segall:
There’s something deeply convergent in how Steiner thinks about freedom and how Schelling articulates it in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Both view freedom as involving a decision that occurs at a level prior to any empirical choice. It’s not the superficial freedom that most Americans imagine. In English, Steiner’s book is sometimes translated as Philosophy of Freedom, but Steiner didn’t think "freedom" resonated appropriately in English. He recommended the title Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path or Thinking as an Intuitive Activity because "freedom" in the American sense is often associated with trivial choices, like picking between 40 brands of cereal at the grocery store.
For Schelling and Steiner, freedom is more about our character and the deep decision that shapes who we are. This decision happens at a level deeper than our normal waking consciousness and involves a transformation of our character. It’s about how we create ourselves, a process that can be religious or spiritual in nature.
Steiner argues that we have freedom in our thinking more easily than in our feeling and willing. He describes thinking as our most consciously awake state, while we’re more or less dreaming in our feeling life and deeply asleep in our willing life. To achieve moral freedom, Steiner believes we must exercise moral imagination, which involves picturing the action we’d like to take, feeling love for that action, and then willing it into reality. By bringing freedom in thinking into our feeling and will, we can transform these aspects of our soul and integrate them.
Steiner offers a practical program with exercises that help achieve this transformation, something you don’t get as much from Schelling or Hegel. While Schelling and Hegel offer profound thoughts, Steiner provides a spiritual practice to accompany those thoughts.
Chris Satoor:
That was a wonderful answer. You’ve navigated us through Steiner’s philosophy with great passion and clarity. For those who are not well-versed in Steiner’s philosophy, where should they start reading?
Matt Segall:
For those with a background in German idealism, I would recommend starting with The Philosophy of Freedom. It leads you phenomenologically to the insight that in your thinking activity, you are already a spiritual being living in the spiritual world. Steiner almost surprises you by leading you to realize this through a series of logical steps.
For those less philosophically inclined, his early work on Goethe might be a good starting point. His introductions to Goethe’s scientific works are more accessible and less focused on idealist philosophy. Steiner explains his methodology in a way that’s engaging for those interested in natural sciences.
Finally, for those who want to go deeper, Steiner’s Riddles of Philosophy provides a history of philosophy as an evolution of consciousness. It covers everything from the pre-Socratics to early 20th-century thinkers like William James, showing how philosophy is about the emergence of the "I" as described by Fichte. This book offers a comprehensive view of Steiner’s approach to philosophy and its development over time.
Chris Satoor:
It’s been an hour, and it went by like this because this has been a real treat. You did such a great job passionately explaining and disclosing this complex thinker for all of us. You’ve kind of won me over on this one too, so maybe I’ll pick up some more Steiner and read him. Thank you so much for being here and participating in this series.
Matt Segall:
Thank you, Chris, for the opportunity and for all the great work you’re doing.
See also this Spiritual Scientist episode on Steiner’s relationship to German Idealism:
That was great, for once, to have Steiner contextualised like that for a philosophy audience. I just need to understand German idealism now! I ordered Terry Pinkard's German Philosophy 1760-1860 as a result
What a beautiful interview and great service to the popularization of Steiners thinking.
Thanks Matt. That was an hour of pure joy❤️