Customer Reviews

Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life: 1861-1907 (Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are wondering how to approach the work of Rudolf Steiner, this autobiography is a great place to start. It gives an excellent presentation of the development of Steiner's ideas, including how he was influenced and who he worked with and why. The extensively researched endnotes lead to an endless array of avenues for further study of people and ideas associated with Steiner. Steiner's methodology for his own studies serves as inspiration for anyone who wants to delve more deeply into his work.

As long as this book is, it does get boring at times.

The whole autobiography is described in purely external events, and done in the most detatched and objective way imaginable. That's why I think that it's stale in the beginning and middle sections.

It all starts to get interesting (for me) around 1900 when he gets involved with the Theosophical Society, then the occult action and drama picks up and doesn't let up. And right when you least expect, it abruptly ends, in 1907.

This is very intriguing because you think that he will talk about his spiritual experiences throughout but he doesn't. He just keeps it on the physical all the way, and it's like he does it on purpose. He only rarely mentions anything spiritual, but when he does, he does in an almost "intellectual" way, it's very strange!

I give it 3 stars because as much as I love Steiner, it still is too long of a book and somewhat tiresome. A lot of the what he talks about really doesn't means mean much to me in the long run, Eg: going to this place and hearing about the personality of this guy etc. I don't understand why he includes such random details? (as interesting as some of them are).

I would recommend reading others' reminiscinces and recollections of Steiner rather than his own autobiography.

But it is a necessary read for any Steinerite at least once. His language demands that you take leaps and bounds within your own thinking to meet him on "his" level.

The enigmatic Steiner was no doubt one of the important figures of the 20th century. On the one hand a highly prolific writer of rather obscure and weird books, filled with references to Atlantis, elemental spirits, karma and reinkarnation. All based on what he himself considered `objective' insights into deeper laws of the universe. But to the uninitiated seemingly highly subjective efforts, not least his interpretations of the gospels and other biblical texts, which seems without any foundation in the originals.

And on the other hand producing valuable and viable insights into f.ex. the education of children, organic farming, nutrition, the medicianl use of herbs and the life of bees.

Here is a chance to get a closer look at the man. Like his contemporary Jung - another academic with deep roots in the mystic side of life - Steiner really becomes a lot more accesible in his autobiography. Originally published as a series of articles in the magazine "Das Goetheanum" in the years 1924-25, it covers his life from his early childhood up to the start of his anthroposophic movement in 1914.

In the first parts he comes across like a surprisingly sympathetic human being, devoted to his friends and seeking a broad basis in the contemporary life, both in science, arts and politics. But also a inner loner, unable to share his visions with others. And we follow his academic career, publishing the scientific papers of Goethe and dealing with how to best understand the natural world around us. The narrative interspersed with theoretical passages casting light on his worldview.

The last third of the book seems more apologetic and construed, dealing with his time in the theosophic movement and as leader of a freemasonry like order. Where he goes to great lenght to explain why he was a theosophist and a freemason and yet wasn't at all. And how he didn't learn anything from anyone else but solely relied on the visions of his own inner spiritual eye (`geistesauge'). And how Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant had a certain genuine knowledge, but of course not as penetrating as Steiner's own. The main difference perhaps his insistence of the primacy of Christ and `the Golgatha event' and his dismissal of Eastern spirituality, despite many of his key concepts being taking from Indian philosophy and Buddhism. The split happening when Besant would pronounce J. Krishnamurti (`a hindu kid' as Steiner calls him) as the new world teacher. A role Steiner perhaps wanted to save for himself!

All in all an interesting autobiography for anyone interested in contemporary Western mysticism. On par with Jung's forementioned "Dreams, reflections, Memories" and Gurdijeff's "Meetings With Remarkable Men".

Some reviewers (on Amazon.com) have suggested this book is hard going. And I found it so, but then I felt that in this book, actually written as seventy consecutive short articles in a newspaper, he was striving to emphasize the philosophical basis to his teaching, to emphasize in which respects Anthroposophy differed from scientific materialism on the one hand and Theosophy on the other.

The book is largely taken up with carefully drawn accounts of his meeting with innumerable poets, philosophers, musicians and thinkers, mostly German, whom Steiner met and worked with.

Steiner was writing this book shortly before his death in 1925, and the book only extends up to 1907, around the time he was starting to split off from the Theosophists.

Therefore this book is a mixture of carefully argued philosophical points and statements about how his views came to be formulated, with anecdotal stories about his many friends and associates.

I read this book once many years ago but got far more out of it on this occasion, having recently made a careful study of `The Philosophy of Freedom'. The middle part of `Autobiography' refers to the arguments in this book over and over again. This might seem boring, but Steiner's ideas about philosophy were the basis for all his teaching, and because they are so different from the generally accepted views in religion and philosophy, then as now, it is hard to grasp them.

The early part of the book has a particular charm in which Steiner describes his upbringing in a remote village on the Austro-Hungarian border. Certain figures like the village schoolmaster and the local priest appear like giants in his landscape, and he also describes listening to endless debates his father, who worked on the railway, had with a colleague, sitting in the evenings in the open air. Steiner was fascinated not so much with the content of their argument, as with the pattern and energy of the discussion.

The last part of the book draws into some relief his differences with Theosophy. I felt that perhaps because of various controversies which clearly were part of his motivation for writing this book in the first place, he made more of his differences than of his similarities, but the Theosophical Society brought him into an arena which provided him with audiences some of whom at least could really hear what he had to say.

In my view this book would be indispensable to understanding Steiner, but unlike one reviewer I would not suggest it as a starting place to studying his work, owing to the difficulty of the philosophical arguments involved, which are stated in a more systematic way in `The Philosophy of Freedom'.

Steiner's autobiography is a real classic, telling of his childhood in central Austria, his antics as a schoolboy, and his youth in thriving Vienna. It is an inner narrative about the events and impressions that shaped him, written in the last two years of his life. This Complete Works edition is copiously annotated by Paul Marshall Allen, who explains many references that, while understandable to German speakers in 1925, have since become obscure.