Representative Men: In the Light of Anthroposophy With a chapter on the Twelve Worldviews

Moses • Grünewald • Goethe • Nietzsche • Wilde • Kafka • Eckstein • Steiner

“Here I sat, waiting―not for anything―
Beyond Good and Evil, fancying
Now light, now shadows, all a game,
All lake, all noon, all time without all aim.
Then, suddenly, friend, one turned into two―
And Zarathustra walked into my view.” ― Nietzsche (The Gay Science)

Each individual portrayed in this book may, beyond his unique nature, be considered representative of one or several aspects of human nature and human striving, and for the obstacles such striving must encounter.

Goethe displays the struggle for universal moral, scientific, and artistic values throughout lifetimes, bridging and linking whole ages.

Nietzsche is perhaps the representative of the new faculty of inspiration and the challenge to complement it by intuition.

Oscar Wilde represents the stage of soul development at which insight into the worthlessness of vanity and ambition dawns with the power of a purifying tempest.

Kafka represents those millions of people who are drawn toward the threshold of the spiritual world but lack the courage to cross it.

Eckstein, the great friend of Steiner’s youth, is representative of the tendency to withhold esoteric knowledge from the majority of human beings and to keep it as a possession of ”the privileged few,” an attitude that still prevails in certain occult streams.

Rudolf Steiner worked to make esoteric truths public and showed ways toward a radically new knowledge of the spirit and a new mobility of thought.

T. H. Meyer was born in Switzerland in 1950. He is the founder of Perseus Verlag, Basel, and is editor of the monthly journal Der Europäer. He has written numerous articles and is the author of several books, including Reality, Truth, and Evil (2005) and major biographies of D.N. Dunlop and Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz. He also edited Light for the New Millennium (1997) describing Rudolf Steiner’s association with Helmuth and Eliza von Moltke.

Carla Vlad was born in 1980 into a family with a hybrid cultural background of German, Romanian, and Hungarian. She studied English language and literature and Romance philology at the University of Freiburg, with the main areas of research in psychoanalytic literary criticism and literary translation. After completing her Magister Artium degree, Carla decided to follow her vocation and pursue literary translation, the challenging art of rendering a literary text into another language, of sensing its subtleties and depths of meaning, of transfusing the lines with the translator’s own interpretation, of shaping the language anew―the "dress of thought," as Samuel Johnson put it―yet never dispossessing it of the author's own distinctive mark. Carla Vlad presently works as a proofreader at the University of Freiburg and as a freelance literary translator.