Anthroposophy is a spiritual philosophy that reflects and speaks to the basic deep spiritual questions of humanity, to our basic creative needs, to the need to relate to the world out of a scientific attitude of mind, and to the need to develop a relation to the world in complete freedom and based on completely individual judgments and decisions. One way of characterizing anthroposophy is to point to four basic aspects and levels:

1. Philosophy of Freedom
Anthroposophy is a spiritual philosophy, mainly developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It is born out of a philosophy of freedom, living at the core of anthroposophy.

2. Spiritual Science
From another perspective, anthroposophy can be called spiritual science. Anthroposophy as spiritual science seeks to attain in its investigations of the spiritual world the precision and clarity of natural science's investigations of the physical world. The central organization for the cultivation of this in connection with anthroposophy is a School of Spiritual Science, having a center at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.

3. Nurturing The Life Of The Soul
Anthroposophy also is an impulse to nurture the life of the soul in the individual and in human society, meaning among other things to nurture the respect for and interest in other people on a purely human basis independently of their origin and views. The main organization for this is the Anthroposophical Society, which exists in a world wide form, as national Anthroposophical Societies, and as groups formed on the basis of subject.

4. Applied Anthroposophy
While rooted in a philosophy of freedom, developed as a method of spiritual research and an impulse to nurture a purely human interest in other people, it also has possible practical implications and as such lives as applied or practical anthroposophy in various "daughter movements" of anthroposophy. The most developed of these daughter movements of anthroposophy are biodynamic farming, Waldorf schools, anthroposophical curative education and anthroposophical medicine.

What is Anthroposophy? in the words of Rudolf Steiner...

Anthroposophical ideas are vessels fashioned by love, and man's being is spiritually summoned by the spiritual world to partake of their content. Anthroposophy must bring the light of true humanness to shine out in thoughts that bear love's imprint; knowledge is only the form in which man reflects the possibility of receiving in his heart the light of the world spirit that has come to dwell there and from that heart illumine human thought. Since anthroposophy cannot really be grasped except by the power of love, it is love-engendering when human beings take it in a way true to its own nature. That is why a place where love reigned could be built in Dornach in the very midst of raging hatreds. Words expressing anthroposophical truths are not like words spoken elsewhere today; rightly conceived, they are all really reverential pleas that the spirit make itself known to men.
- from Awakening to Community, Lecture I, Stuttgart, January 23, 1923