Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom was written around 1893 as part of his project to reconcile an innate and developing clairvoyant capacity with the Kantian philosophy dominating German thought of the time, particularly the claims on the limits to knowledge and the nature of moral action. Steiner sought to take issue with both Kantian positions, which on the one hand repudiated the human capacity to know things and facts falling outside the Western social idiom of rationality and reason, and on the other viewed morality as a product of the universalizing capacity of reason when applied to self-conscious actions.

Turning to Goethe both for inspiration and for technical guidance, Steiner repudiates and softens the Kantian dogmas, and later in his life is able to demonstrate quite materially that human knowledge can indeed extend beyond the categories of sense experience, and that human action can be justified on grounds that extend beyond the mere universalizability of an action or a thought. But for all that, Steiner's philosophy remains Kantian in its basic form and spirit, and it can only be properly understood against the background of Kantian idealism and the great German intellectual tradition that culminates in Hegel, and then leads to the political disasters of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Third Reich.

Fundamental to Steiner's philosophy is the notion of thought and thinking as a transcendental, sense-free activity which confers freedom on individual experience. Ultimately, Steiner would show that sense-free thinking is a function of something called the "astral body," a cosmic entity seated outside of ordinary space and time which embodies not just the impulses and the substance of thought and thinking, but simultaneously those of willing and the great rainbow of qualitiative feeling that our subjective experience enjoys or suffers. Human consciousness and human experience, on Steiner's theory, is actually a cosmic quantity of some sort, outside ordinary space and time, free of ordinary moral and social constraints, essentially immortal and the repository of a gigantic, recursive sojourn of life, death and rebirth subject to continual learning and improvement under the guidance of even higher cosmic beings, whose epitome entered Earth evolution through the life of Jesus of Nazareth.