The Rudolf Steiner Archive

21. Cognition and Artistic Creation

[ 1 ] Our theory of knowledge has stripped cognition of the merely passive character that is often ascribed to it and conceived of it as an activity of the human mind. It is usually believed that the content of science is one that is taken in from outside; indeed, it is thought that science can retain its objectivity to an even greater degree if the mind refrains from adding anything of its own to the perceived material. Our explanations have shown that the true content of science is not the perceived external substance at all, but the idea grasped in the mind, which introduces us more deeply into the workings of the world than all dissection and observation of the external world as mere experience. The idea is the content of science. In contrast to passively received perception, science is thus a product of the activity of the human mind.

[ 2 ] Thus, we have brought cognition closer to artistic creation, which is also an active production of the human being. At the same time, however, we have also brought about the necessity of clarifying the mutual relationship between the two.

[ 3 ] Both cognitive and artistic activity are based on the fact that man rises from reality as a product to it as a producer; that he ascends from the created to creation, from contingency to necessity. In that external reality always shows us only a creature of creative nature, we rise in spirit to the unity of nature, which appears to us as the creator. Every object of reality represents to us one of the infinite possibilities that lie hidden in the bosom of creative nature. Our spirit rises to the contemplation of that source in which all these possibilities are contained. Science and art are now the objects on which man impresses what this contemplation offers him. In science, this occurs only in the form of the idea, that is, in the directly intellectual medium; in art, in a sensually or intellectually perceptible object. In science, nature appears purely ideal as "that which encompasses everything individual"; in art, an object of the external world appears representing this encompassing. The infinite, which science seeks in the finite and seeks to represent in the idea, is imprinted by art on a substance taken from the world of being. What appears as an idea in science is an image in art. It is the same infinite that is the object of science as of art, only that it appears differently there than here. The manner of representation is different. Goethe therefore rebuked the fact that one speaks of an idea of beauty, as if beauty were not simply the sensual reflection of the idea.

[ 4 ] This shows how the true artist must draw directly from the primal source of all being, how he imprints on his works that which is necessary, which we seek ideally in nature and spirit in science. Science eavesdrops on the laws of nature; art no less, except that it implants the latter into the raw material. A product of art is no less nature than a product of nature, except that the laws of nature have already been poured into it as they appeared to the human spirit. The great works of art that Goethe saw in Italy appeared to him as the direct imprint of the necessary that man perceives in nature. For him, art is therefore also a manifestation of secret natural laws.

[ 5 ] In a work of art, everything depends on the extent to which the artist has implanted the idea into the material. It is not what he treats, but how he treats it that matters. If in science the substance perceived from outside has to be completely submerged, so that only its essence, the idea remains, it must remain in the artistic product, except that its peculiarity, its contingency is to be completely overcome by the artistic treatment. The object must be lifted entirely out of the sphere of the accidental and placed in that of the necessary. Nothing must remain in the beauty of art on which the artist has not imprinted his spirit. The what must be conquered by the how.

[ 6 ] Overcoming sensuality through the spirit is the goal of art and science. The latter overcomes sensuality by dissolving it completely into spirit; the latter by implanting spirit into it. Science looks through the sensuality to the idea, art sees the idea in the sensuality. A sentence by Goethe that expresses these truths in a comprehensive manner may conclude our considerations: "I think science could be called the knowledge of the general, the deduced knowledge; 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."