Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner 27 or 25 February [ 1 ] β 30 March was an Austrian occultist , [ 10 ] social reformer , architect , esotericist , [ 11 ] [ 12 ] and claimed clairvoyant.
His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism [ i ] or neognosticism. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality.
In a second phase, beginning around , 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. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism , to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe 's world view in which "thinkingβ¦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. Steiner's father, Johann es Steiner β , left a position as a gamekeeper [ 29 ] in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras , northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie Horn β , Horn , a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission.
Steiner entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In , the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology , [ 30 ] where he enrolled in courses in mathematics , physics , chemistry , botany , zoology , and mineralogy and audited courses in literature and philosophy , on an academic scholarship from to , where he completed his studies and the requirements of the Ghega scholarship satisfactorily.
