The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Life in Art and Art in Life from a Humanistic Perspective

[ 1 ] Drawing on a consciousness shaped as much by rich life experience as by a deep appreciation of art, Goethe coined this eloquent phrase:

Those to whom nature begins to reveal its obvious secret feel an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter: art.

[ 2 ] It is precisely a true understanding of what such a word is meant to convey that makes it difficult to even attempt to speak about art. Goethe also said that art is the mediator of nature’s mysteries, but that one should not speak of them through words. On the other hand, one must speak about what can flow from the artistic. I do not wish to speak of it as official science does, but rather as one speaks of a cherished friend, when one feels the need to express what one has to say out of sympathy and love.

[ 3 ] The artist has an aversion to art history or even to art criticism. It must be said that when one tries to delve deeper, it becomes all too understandable that the artist is reluctant to let what he has experienced through art be burned away or scorched. If one assumes an original sin for moral life, then one must assume two original evils for art. One is the taste for creating art solely according to the senses. Whoever does this will reject the spiritual in art. The other consists in an equally unrefined taste that seeks to represent the abstract, the merely conceptual. This symbolic art is no more grounded in the artistic than is art dependent on the senses. Art based on ideas leads to a flimsy, paper-thin representation of the ideal. Both are deviations from true art. What leads to true art must be rooted in something within the human nature. It must also be something that arises from human freedom within the human will.

[ 4 ] Many people view art merely as a luxury, not as an essential part of daily life. I would like to recall what I said eight days ago about the life of dreams, specifically about its connection to the imagination. During sleep, the soul is separated from the body. Through spiritual science, the otherwise dormant consciousness can be strengthened to such an extent that a person perceives the spiritual world—that is, that they do not merely experience dull sensations in sleep, but undergo the most diverse beings and experiences. One can say that the dream life arises because the soul approaches waking life but does not absorb it.

[ 5 ] The polar opposite of the life of dreams is the soul’s inclination toward artistic imagination and artistic creation. It is incorrect to assume a direct connection between the two, but one can point from one to the other. In a dream, the soul is detached from the body; in artistic creation, the soul is within the body—that is, the opposite is true. Here the soul seeks a connection to the spiritual; it wants to reach out to the spiritual, to the eternal and imperishable, just as in a dream it reaches out to the physical and temporal. These are two polar opposites. Just as the soul awakens halfway to the physical body in a dream, so it awakens halfway to the spiritual in artistic imagination.

[ 6 ] Just as sleep can exist without dreams, so too can art be added to ordinary life out of a sense of freedom, but it can also be absent.

[ 7 ] There are certain moods in life. You visit a friend, are welcomed into a red room; he doesn’t come right away, and you’re expecting something; then he arrives, talks about all sorts of banal things, and you’re disappointed because you were expecting something solemn—that’s how it is in the subconscious. Or in a blue room, you’re disappointed in the deepest sense of the word because you feel he’s talking nonsense. In your subconscious, in a blue or purple room, you expected him to leave you alone. But he keeps talking. I’m deliberately choosing grotesque examples. Or at a banquet where the tableware has a reddish hue, you expect that when people eat, they’re not just hungry but also connoisseurs. With blue tableware, one expects them not only to eat but also to engage in pleasant conversation. Or one encounters a woman on the street with a frizzy head of hair and is disappointed to find that she isn’t snarky. From a woman in a lovely blue dress, one expects her to be reserved; if she isn’t, one feels deceived. These are inner, secret moods—undertones that permeate life. It is a sensual-supernatural element that, in emotional life, resembles a dream and remains hidden from consciousness, just as the imagination in the sleeper encompasses the element of will.

[ 8 ] A supersensible essence is incorporated there; it does not matter whether it is called the “binding body” or the “etheric body.”

[ 9 ] The individual organs differentiate the human being in such a way that the supersensory connecting element no longer resonates in such a unified manner. As a whole human being, one experiences what is merely seen through the eye. This does not come to light in ordinary consciousness. We can nourish it with what satisfies it, just as we do with the senses. This is particularly evident in music.

[ 10 ] I have shown that the life of imagination is linked to the nervous system, but the life of feeling is linked to the entire rhythmic experience. This is more closely related to the sense of hearing than to the other senses, than to the sense of feeling, and even than to imagination and thought. There is a tendency in human beings to focus again and again on the sense of hearing.

[ 11 ] In every healthy, whole human nature there is a constant urge to bring forth, in a healthy way, that which leads to vision—not to physical vision. Vision seeks to rise; it appeals to free will; it exerts no coercion, yet it is there. The artist has a constant inclination toward the visionary, which seeks satisfaction. But it remains latent. What can satisfy it? It is always present, even when a person has only sensory perceptions. But it cannot be satisfied by those alone. When music strikes the ear, the entire supersensory being absorbs it, and through this, the visionary urge finds satisfaction.

[ 12 ] The same is true of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis; it can lead one into deep, natural mysteries: the green leaf that transforms into flower petals, and so on.

[ 13 ] When we look at a human being, we can break them down in various ways—for example, into the head and the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism can become the head. Just as Goethe sees the whole in a leaf, so too can we see the whole in every part of a human being; the whole can emerge from every part.

[ 14 ] The dynamic life of nature yearns to be captured by the power of vision.

[ 15 ] Music cannot evoke anything from external life; everything must be demystified through music. In the other arts, everything that pertains to the senses must be accounted for, but music does not need to do so.

[ 16 ] The whole human being must first be disenchanted. All artistic creation is like a process of disenchantment. One must [in sculpture] draw life out of the surface; one must bend once, twice, what would otherwise have died on the surface—what, like in life, merely sets itself apart—[in painting, the color], for example, red-yellow. A barbarian says: How does this remind one of what is, when the blue-violet merges into the line? — But through this one enters into form, through the reddish-yellow into movement, and also into the movement of the limbs. Red and blue are not merely colors; they express a desire. All barbaric taste asks: “What does this represent?” — But the artist reveals only what was in the soul. Everything artistic contains an expressionist element within it.

[ 17 ] We cannot achieve what stands before us as nature by imitating it; it stands before us only as a larva. Critics are, after all, everywhere like someone standing behind us while we eat, telling us how the food tastes.

[ 18 ] The “Group” in Dornach is the artistic expression of the doctrine of metamorphosis. There, an attempt was made to depict the representative of humanity asymmetrically, while at the same time portraying how the rest of the organism seeks to become entirely head. This cannot be achieved merely by caricaturing a head, but must come from within.

[ 19 ] The other approach has also been tried—how the head seeks to become the rest of the organism, how the head spreads throughout the entire organism, a dissolution, a harmonization. Such ideas evoke a faint sense of dread today, just as the Copernican worldview did among an influential authority until 1827. But that cannot halt the course of development.

[ 20 ] A shift has taken place with regard to art—for example, in terms of how we view the works of Raphael and Michelangelo. We no longer try to resonate with them on an inner level; we have come to realize that these works must be connected to a time long past and a different state of consciousness. There has been a shift in people’s souls regarding how they approach today’s artists. One wants to send Raphael and Michelangelo back to other times, when they were different as artists; one wants to accompany today’s artists directly. Such artists share a feeling, as Goethe did, that if one seeks truth, one must seek it in art. If one wants to paint a lady today as she is, she will look like a lady in a stiff spasm, just as every photograph does. One must destroy and then recreate—with what one might call humor—an inner drama; a pretty woman must not only be destroyed but even mistreated. Perhaps there is something inherent in the artistic nature that causes the pedant to be horrified and the philistine to condemn it as unnecessary. It sounds just as terrible as if it were said in a government office: that art should be placed in the service of life.

[ 21 ] However, the artistic aspect plays such a role in the education of life that art is not a servant of life, but is meant to beautify it; and since it is the path to the spiritual, it is also a permeation of life with reality.

[ 22 ] One is only capable of intervening properly in social life if one approaches it the way an artist approaches his material. New forces are constantly seeking to integrate themselves into life; an artistic element should live in everything. When shortcomings arise anywhere, it is because people have lost their sense of the artistic. People believe they have found programmatic goals and regard them as the most divine ideals. But all this social talk is useless; it has no foundation and cannot bear fruit. Today, people found an association, give it bylaws, include excellent program points, and believe they can master life with them. But all of that is abstract. It is much more important to put the right person in the right place—though one must not always assume that one’s nephew is the right person.

[ 23 ] What seeks to grow stronger in life is what lies beneath the surface; it seeks to be demystified. This cannot be done in the abstract. Art can only enrich life if one strives to find life within art.

[ 24 ] There is something both sensual and transcendent in art. — A person who does not dream is unaware of this connection. Thus, a life without art resembles pedantry and philistinism. Art must not conform to necessity, but to human freedom. People fail to recognize that human beings have a say in the matter, that freedom exists. Human beings must say: Nothing external can compel me toward art; rather, I myself declare that it is necessary.