Rudy and Eddie sittin' in a tree...

A friend asked me about Rudolf Steiner. I obliged, and included my theory about Steiner and Edmund Husserl: they knew of one another (historical fact?), and knew one another (my theory) as fellow members of some occult school - Theosophy, The Rosy Cross, Anthroposophy, whatever. Steiner dedicated himself to teaching the world about the occult side of phenomenology. On the academic side, Husserl was to teach the way to and at the threshold - but not over it.

Of course they knew of one another - they were contemporaries, being born and living in roughly the same area of eastern Europe, both writing extensively on phenomenology, philosophy, consciousness. They both had a certain degree of public visibility - in academia, in politics, in literary and philosophical society. How could they not have known one another, and not have at least become acquainted at some school or lecture or institute?

What difference does this make? Well, I read Truth and Knowledge very differently, when I keep this in mind. This is one of those times when the translation of Steiner worries and frustrates me: am I reading a beginning German student's rendering of a highly technical and culturally and poetically rich lecture, rendered as stenographic record before actually being translated into piecemeal, blockish abstractions? Or is Steiner deliberately obfuscating the subject of his lecture? Just like when I realized that his 'spiritual exercises' were meditation, so his Imagination is phenomenology.