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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
Anschauung und Denktätigkeit bewirken Erkenntnis. Der Weltinhalt wird von uns wahrgenommen, wird uns durch die Realität gegeben. Wahrnehmung allein reicht jedoch nicht aus, sie kann auch täuschen. Das Gegebene allein reicht nicht aus, es muss die Denktätigkeit hinzukommen, die das Gegebene ordnet und auf Ursachen hinterfragt. Die erste Gestalt der Wirklichkeit, die an das Ich herantritt ist nicht die wahre, sondern die letzte, die das Ich aus ihr macht. Das Weltbild muss durch unsere Wissenschaft und Erfahrung ergänzt werden. Nur durch das Ordnen des Weltbildes durch unsere Denktätigkeit kann Erkenntnis zustande kommen, so Steiner.