The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. From Art to Science

[ 1 ] Whoever sets himself the task of depicting the intellectual development of a thinker has to explain his particular direction psychologically from the facts given in his biography. In a portrayal of Goethe, the thinker, the task is not yet exhausted. Here we are not only looking for a justification and explanation of his particular scientific direction, but also, and above all, how this genius ever came to be active in the scientific field. Goethe suffered a great deal from the mistaken opinion of his contemporaries, who could not imagine that poetic creativity and scientific research could be united in one spirit. The main question to be answered here is: What are the motives that drove the great poet to science? Does the transition from art to science lie purely in his subjective inclination, in personal arbitrariness? Or was Goethe's artistic direction such that it had necessarily to drive him towards science?

[ 2 ] If the former were the case, then the simultaneous devotion to art and science would merely have the meaning of an accidental personal enthusiasm for both directions of human endeavor; we would be dealing with a poet who also happened to be a thinker, and it could well have been that in a somewhat different course of life Goethe would have taken the same paths in poetry without even caring about science. Both sides of this man would then have interested us separately as such, and both might well have contributed to the progress of mankind. But all this would also have been the case if the two schools of thought had been divided between two personalities. The poet Goethe would have had nothing to do with the thinker Goethe.

[ 3 ] If, however, the second is the case, then Goethe's artistic direction was such that it necessarily urged from within to be supplemented by scientific thought. Then it is absolutely inconceivable that the two directions could have been divided between two personalities. Then each of the two directions interests us not only for its own sake, but also because of its relationship to the other. Then there is an objective transition from art to science, a point where the two touch each other in such a way that perfection in one area demands perfection in the other. Goethe was not following a personal inclination, but the artistic direction to which he devoted himself awakened needs in him that could only be satisfied through scientific activity.

[ 4 ] Our age believes it is doing the right thing when it keeps art and science as far apart as possible. They are supposed to be two completely opposite poles in the cultural development of mankind. Science, it is thought, should present us with as objective a view of the world as possible, it should show us reality in a mirror, or in other words: it should adhere purely to the given, divesting itself of all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world is decisive for its laws and it must submit to it. It should take the standard of truth and falsity entirely from the objects of experience.

[ 5 ] The creations of art should be completely different. They are governed by the self-creative power of the human spirit. For science, any interference of human subjectivity would be a falsification of reality, a transgression of experience; art, on the other hand, grows in the field of ingenious subjectivity. Its creations are the product of human imagination, not reflections of the outside world. The origin of scientific laws lies outside us, in objective existence; that of aesthetic laws lies within us, in our individuality. Therefore, the latter have not the slightest cognitive value, they create illusions without the slightest reality factor.

[ 6 ] Those who understand the matter in this way will never gain clarity about the relationship between Goethean poetry and Goethean science. But this misunderstands both. The world-historical significance of Goethe lies precisely in the fact that his art flows directly from the original source of being, that it has nothing illusory, nothing subjective about it, but appears as the herald of that lawfulness which the poet has elicited from the world spirit in the depths of the workings of nature. At this stage, art becomes the interpreter of the secrets of the world, as science is in another sense.

[ 7 ] This is also how Goethe always understood art. It was for him one revelation of the primal law of the world, science was for him the other. For him, art and science sprang from one source. While the researcher immerses himself in the depths of reality in order to express its driving forces in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to imbue his material with the same driving forces. "I think science could be called knowledge of the general, knowledge extracted; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action; science would be reason, and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem." ^{87"Proverbs in Prose"; Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd ab., p. 535.} What science expresses as an idea (theorem), art should imprint on the material, that should become its problem. "In the works of man as in those of nature, the intentions are especially worthy of attention," says Goethe. ^{88Ebenda p. 378.} Everywhere he seeks not only that which is given to the senses in the external world, but the tendency through which it has become.

[ 8 ] To grasp this scientifically, to shape it artistically, that is his mission. In its own formations, nature "comes to specifications as if into a dead end"; one must go back to what should have become if the tendency could have unfolded unhindered, just as the mathematician never has this or that triangle in mind, but always that lawfulness which underlies every possible triangle. It is not what nature created, but according to which principle it created it, that matters. Then this principle is to be shaped as it is according to its own nature, not as it has happened in the individual structure of nature, which depends on a thousand coincidences. The artist must "develop the noble from the common, the beautiful from the unformed".

[ 9 ] Goethe and Schiller take art in its full depth. Beauty is "a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden from us forever without its appearance". A glance at the poet's "Italian Journey" is enough to realize that this is not just a phrase, but a deep conviction. When he says: "The high works of art, like the highest works of nature, were created by men according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary coincides; there is necessity, there is God", so it follows that nature and art are of the same origin for him. With regard to the art of the Greeks, he says the following in this direction: "I have the assumption that they proceeded according to the laws according to which nature itself proceeds and which I am on the trail of." And of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare joins the spirit of the world; he pervades the world like the latter, nothing is hidden from either; but if the business of the spirit of the world is to keep secrets before, and often after the act, the business of the poet is to conceal the secret."

[ 10 ] Here we should also recall the expression about the "joyful epoch of life", which the poet owed to Kant's "Critique of Judgment", and which he actually only owed to the fact that he saw "products of art and nature treated one like the other, that aesthetic and teleological powers of judgment alternately illuminated each other." "I was pleased," says the poet, "that poetry and comparative natural history are so closely related, in that both are subject to the same power of judgment." In the essay: "Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort" [Natw. Schr., 2nd vol., p. 31ff.], Goethe contrasts his representational thinking with his representational poetry with the same intention.

[ 11 ] So art appears to Goethe to be just as objective as science. Only the form of the two is different. Both appear as the outflow of one being, as necessary stages of a development. Any view that assigns art or beauty an isolated position outside the overall picture of human development is repugnant to him. Thus he says: "In aesthetics it is not good to say: the idea of beauty; thereby one isolates the beautiful, which cannot be thought of individually" ^{89"Proverbs in Prose", Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd Abt, p. 379.} or: "Style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, in so far as we are permitted to recognize it in visible and tangible forms. " ^{90Simple Imitation of Nature, Manicr, Style, in: Writings on Art 1788-1800.} Art is thus based on recognition. The latter has the task of recreating in thought the order according to which the world is structured; art has the task of forming in detail the idea of this order of the world as a whole. Everything that the artist can achieve in terms of the laws of the world, he puts into his work. This thus appears as a world in miniature. Herein lies the reason why Goethe's art must be complemented by science. As art, it is already cognition. Goethe wanted neither science nor art; he wanted the idea. And this he expresses or presents according to the side in which it presents itself to him. Goethe sought to ally himself with the spirit of the world and to reveal its workings to us; he did this through the medium of art or science, as required. It was not one-sided artistic or scientific striving that lay within Goethe, but rather the restless urge to see "all active power and seeds".

[ 12 ] However, Goethe is not a philosophical poet, for his poems do not take the detour through thought to sensuous creation; rather, they flow directly from the source of all becoming, just as his researches are not imbued with poetic fantasy, but are based directly on the realization of ideas. Without Goethe being a philosophical poet, his basic direction appears to the philosophical observer as a philosophical one.

[ 13 ] Thus the question of whether Goethe's scientific works have philosophical value or not takes on a completely new form. It is a question of inferring the principles from what is present. What must we presuppose in order for Goethe's scientific constellations to appear to us as a consequence of these presuppositions? We must express what Goethe left unspoken, but which alone makes his views comprehensible.