Text-critical editions

Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, the Complete Works, is conceived as a reading and study edition, which does not provide a completed documented scientific text structure. A transparent documentation of every available text variety (including manuscripts, proof sheets, etc) is assigned to historical-critical editions. Whereas in the text-critical or critical editions, the focus lies on philologically transparent text structure or text-genetical comparison of the manuscripts or different editions.
Rudolf Steiner himself, worked on the critical edition of Goethe’s works (referred to as the Weimar or Sophien edition), when he was in Weimar. In relation to his own work, Steiner once made reference to the complexity and growth of his own writings, and about the possibility to read them also under this special aspect:

«A person who makes the effort to study the succesive editions of my „Theosophy“, in order to follow up how I recast the chapter on the repeated lives on earth again and again, precisely to bring their truth to the ideas which the observation of  the sensible world evoked, will find how I strove to meet the requirements of the recognized scientific method » (The Story of my life, GA 28).