Biography: Freedom and Destiny: Enlightening the Path of Human Life

by Rudolf Steiner, Erhard Fucke (Editor), Pauline Wehrle (Translator)

The path of an individual human life, our biography, is a kind of mystery. Despite the abundance of published biographies and autobiographies of celebrities and historical figures, scientific study of human biography remains in its infancy, with little understanding of the inherent laws in the path of an individual's life. Yet as Rudolf Steiner shows here, every biography--regardless of one's place in life or a person's perceived importance or success--is ruled by archetypal influences, patterns and laws. This broad-ranging anthology addresses critical and still-unanswered What are the effects of education--especially contrasting educational methods--on later life? How are the stages of one's life interrelated? Do the effects of events on the individual become immediately evident, or is their true impact delayed, perhaps for decades? To what extent can we shape the stages of our individual biographies? How much freedom of choice do we have, and how much of life is predetermined? Drawing on his capacity for higher knowledge through spiritual research, Steiner describes the human individuality as a being with a continuing existence, both before birth and beyond death. Our eternal being experiences a myriad of conditions and situations, the effects of which may be observed in one's biography. This book addresses these and other issues such as freedom and destiny, the effects of heredity, illness, and the impact of education, offering answers based on a profound knowledge of the human being.

264 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


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.