The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Anthroposophy and Art

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! In the latter half of the 19th century, there was a famous aesthetician in Germany, and I believe I may say that he was rightly famous. He wrote books about which one can probably say, with some justification, that they were extraordinarily stimulating—books on aesthetic subjects, books on the development of human culture—and he gave lectures at the University of Munich that aroused great interest in the widest circles. Now, as fate would have it, a few years ago I found myself sitting in the studio of a famous Munich artist—who was already an elderly gentleman at the time—and our conversation turned to this aesthetician, who had enjoyed his heyday when the artist with whom I was speaking was still an “art enthusiast,” just beginning to aspire to art and evidently associating with other ambitious artists—who were, after all, always to be found in Munich. For certain underlying reasons, I posed a question that essentially sought to find out how the artists themselves, back when that aesthetician was delivering his widely acclaimed lectures, felt inspired by his aesthetic views and his entire artistic outlook on life. And lo and behold, the artist—who had grown old in the meantime—seemed to recall many a mood from his youth and then summed up the answer to my question in these words: “Yes, we artists often listened to this aesthetician as well; we just called him the ‘aesthetic grunter of delight’!”

[ 2 ] One could really glean a great deal from this artist’s perspective on a famous aesthetician—much of what one might otherwise experience when artistic people are asked to offer their judgment on the possible insights they might gain from a scientific approach to art. And one must say that with a truly artistic sensibility, one understands such rejections—for rejections they usually are; one understands how the artist cannot derive much from aesthetics, which is conducted in the style of conventional—or rather, now conventionalized—science, for his own experience. And actually, I must say, I understood the “aesthetic grumbler” exceptionally well. It’s just that many other artistic judgments about the scientific aesthetics of our time came to mind.

[ 3 ] When the artist is confronted with what has been shaped in the realm of aesthetics by the scientific spirit of modern times, he feels downright paralyzed in the fresh originality and elemental nature of his artistic experience. He has the feeling that, as an artist, he must live in a realm that is completely inaccessible to those who approach art from the perspective of modern science.

[ 4 ] And for internal reasons as well, ladies and gentlemen, this may seem understandable. Science, as it has developed in recent times, has—from its own perspective—naturally and quite rightly tended toward the objective, toward establishing results into which nothing is mixed from the inner human realm, from what is—as one says—the subjective, from the human and personal. The more this science can disregard the human and personal—that which can be experienced inwardly in the phenomena of the external world—the more objective this science appears. But in doing so, this science effectively excludes the human being from its view of the world altogether, and in the relationship to the world that this science seeks to establish for the human being, there is nothing left of what can be experienced within the soul itself—nothing that can make a person warm and radiate from within. This science thereby, in a sense, excludes the direct experience of the external world from its practice. Human beings must exclude themselves, and they then live within the findings of this science as if in a world of ideas that can actually provide a true picture only of what lies beyond the human, that contain nothing of the human itself, and that are therefore far removed from the artistic experience, which must find its place in relation to the world and life through the whole, full human personality, with a rich inner life, with a primal, elemental inner life. Since the human being is excluded and the world of ideas extends only to the non-human, what appears in human consciousness as ideas themselves are merely a kind of “corpse of ideas.” A set of concepts—which are in fact “corpse-like concepts”—deals with a dead, mineral nature, and the more they are “corpse-like concepts,” the more perfect they are.

[ 5 ] Anyone who looks very deeply into what is actually at stake here will therefore find it understandable that I say: I fully understand why the artistic community has come to the conclusion regarding modern aesthetics that those people who understand the least about art are, as a rule, the ones who speak about art in this modern, aesthetic way. Yes, I must say, I understand every degree of rejection expressed by the artistic community toward aesthetic science. It even seems entirely understandable to me when an artist says: If someone is completely unsuited to understanding art, then that is the best preparation for making a name for oneself as an aesthetician.

[ 6 ] You see, my esteemed audience, it is not my intention to foist any commonplace aesthetic notions upon you as I speak about the essence of anthroposophy and art. It is, however, true that the judgment reached in recent times on the artistic side regarding the understanding of art—a judgment that is, quite rightly and in a way I fully understand, a negative one—is now being extended to include what has been established within anthroposophy. Artistic minds who initially allow anthroposophy to approach them from the outside harbor the suspicion—since anthroposophy is, after all, a form of knowledge—that they will encounter nothing there but something resembling the aesthetic notions derived from modern scientific thought. And in any case, it is precisely this prejudice—this superficial view of what actually lives within anthroposophy—that gives rise to the artists’ initial, now understandable, rejection of anthroposophy.

[ 7 ] But here one should consider something else. Here one should bear in mind that anthroposophy, although it maintains the full scientific rigor of the inner human realm, is thoroughly committed to elevating human cognitive life from the mere observation of the non-human to the observation of the human; that anthroposophy seeks to penetrate all that which is currently suppressed suppressed by that which is currently accepted as valid only within recognized science. It is precisely the human being in his essence who is to be restored to human cognition, and anthroposophy seeks to rise from lifeless concepts to living knowledge. In a sense, the concepts of the non-human world form merely a foundation. And built upon this objective knowledge—which is fully accepted as legitimate—is that which can only be attained through the development of certain powers of cognition and life that otherwise lie dormant within the human being, certain powers that, by their very nature, are intimately connected with the entire human being itself. And when, within anthroposophical knowledge, that which is called imaginative knowledge rises in a healthy way within the human soul, then precisely that which external science seeks to suppress and hold back rises from the depths of the soul into consciousness: the living human soul world itself rises into human consciousness. Rising into human consciousness from the depths of the human organism is the living sum of forces of all that, as the human etheric body, places the physical human body—the greatest work of art—into the world; and whoever advances toward true imagination encounters on their path precisely what artistic experience is. He penetrates into those very regions from which the artist receives his unconscious inspirations.

[ 8 ] Yes, my esteemed audience, the imaginative perceiver penetrates into those realms where the impulses lie—impulses that the artist is not initially aware of, but which are active and alive within him, guiding his artistic creation, guiding his hands, and making him a creator, an artist, so that he incorporates into the external material, the external substance, that which he receives from these realms as inspiration. That which the artist does not initially need to know—but which he incorporates, out of his unconscious intuition, into the material given to him from without—this is what appears before the conscious life of the soul of the imaginative knower. Thus, the imaginative thinker penetrates precisely those realms from which the life of the artist actually springs. And when one is truly moved by what is to be found in these realms, then artistic creativity—then productive power—is not stifled, as it is by the science of the dead; rather, what otherwise remains in darkness is first stirred to life by a bright light. And one cannot say that when a person in a dark room has formed impressions of what is in the room through one sense—the sense of touch—these impressions are stifled by the room suddenly being illuminated. Anyone who grasps the significance of this image will gradually come to acknowledge that anthroposophical spiritual knowledge does not kill artistry, but rather stimulates it in the most eminent sense. For how does this imaginative—and later, inspired and intuitive—knowledge work? It introduces the artist to that which he incorporates into his material, and he then stands before the aesthetics produced by the scientific spirit of the past centuries in such a way that he recognizes precisely how this scientific spirit, with all its aesthetics, is fundamentally suited only to scientifically exploring the external material into which the artist works.

[ 9 ] The external material that the artist uses can be the subject of conventional science. The spiritual-living element that he infuses into the material consciously appears before the human soul in imaginative cognition. And this need not only be emphasized for the artistic experience in general; one can certainly visualize it before the mind’s eye for the individual, concrete arts. There is an inner statics of the human organism for imaginative cognition. That which is otherwise entirely present in the depths of the subconscious—a certain inner statics, an experience of inner line, an experience of inner equilibrium—is raised up into consciousness. When imaginative cognition advances to a certain level, the human being experiences how he is an upright being, how a cosmic direction—which, for our earthly existence, coincides with the vertical—can not only be observed, not only verified with a plumb line, but can also be experienced inwardly. One experiences how the human organism can perceive other states of equilibrium, other powerful inner lines in their mutual relationships. One discovers how the inner statics of the entire cosmos come to life again imaginatively within the human being. One can immerse oneself in the way, for example, that people of the East have experienced their particular bodily postures in instinctive imagination. There is a difference in the experience of the inner statics and inner dynamics of the human organism depending on whether one stands upright on both feet or, for example, is in the posture of a yogi meditating in the Indian tradition. With every change in the posture of the human body, one experiences a different inner statics.

[ 10 ] Well, my esteemed audience, back when the art of architecture was still productive, when the architectural styles—which today are merely imitated—still sprang from human creative power, there was an imaginative, experienced inner statics that people carried forth from their inner experience; they, so to speak, transformed the inner experience—I must put it this way — and transformed it from a negative into a positive, making it the spirit of a temple or some other structure. An age that is incapable of such inner experience cannot create architectural styles. Anyone who seeks to understand ancient architectural styles based on what is built today through our science of mechanics, statics, and so on will not uncover the secrets of the older architectural styles—not even those of medieval Gothic architecture. Only those who know how—let us say—certain Oriental buildings, in their outward form, are imitations, or imprints, of what was imaginatively experienced inwardly in the Buddha posture, will understand this architecture. And likewise, those who can relive the inner experiences of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks in relation to inner bodily statics will understand Egyptian and Greek architecture in their respective styles. It was even said of medieval architecture that those who engaged with it preserved certain secrets, certain mysteries, which one could only acquire by entering certain secret orders and gradually rising through their ranks. This is not mere legend; it is reality. For in these secret orders—which later became the builders’ guilds and so on—the imaginative inner experiences of human knowledge were indeed preserved, and it was from these that the Gothic cathedral itself was built.

[ 11 ] It was not until the Renaissance that this principle of building, animated by the spirit, was lost. It must be regained by moving beyond today’s superficial, banal cliché that human beings are a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm—which is nothing more than an abstract, rigid concept—by moving beyond this abstraction to a realization such as this: that in our imagination we can, piece by piece, perceive the structure of the universe itself, the wondrous architecture of the universe in human inner statics, in human inner dynamics, in the dynamics to be experienced—and—in a sense, by translating the photographic negative into a positive—starting from this architecture in our inner experience, we can approach what today’s technology and science teach us, and once again engage in stylistic creation.

[ 12 ] In all the phrases commonly used today in our civilization—about renewal in this or that area—there is actually nothing but the shallowest superficiality; and advancing toward new creative forces today requires a concrete inner vision of the human being, requires a patient exploration of the innermost human experiences.

[ 13 ] And just as one can experience the inner statics and dynamics through imaginative perception, so too can one experience every surface of the human organism in its particular form through this imaginative perception. One can therefore experience—by entering into that which acts and creates in the human organism within the etheric body—how, with a certain progressive necessity, every single surface that delimits the human organism outwardly is formed from these inner forces. In the imagination, one can behold the form of the human being in creative motion.

[ 14 ] In this way, however, that which guides us is developed within us—not by imitating, not by adhering to a model, but by adhering to the creative forces in nature itself, to the spirit of nature itself, which conjures up the human form from any material according to the same principles by which nature itself conjures up this human form.

[ 15 ] A spiritual insight into that which acts and lives within the human form provides the true guidance for the sculptor, for the artist. An age that was purely scientific but lacking in artistry was compelled to adhere to the model. Anyone with even a modicum of sensitivity will understand—will see from Greek sculpture, from the truly great Greek sculpture—that there was no question of adhering to the model, that there existed a living inner experience of the form of the human arm, of the form of the human hand, and that naturalism emerged when human beings were no longer able to rise from the grasp of an elementary, human essence to the full sculptural rendering of the human form—whether at rest or in motion. One can truly speak of true imagination only in this way: that in walking the path toward imagination, one must inevitably encounter the artistic experience at the same time.

[ 16 ] Only those who wish to follow not the path to the spirit but merely the path to a refined form of matter—such as the spiritualists—have no inkling of the innermost connection between what is present in the artistic experience and what appears before the soul in anthroposophical imagination.

[ 17 ] Our soul, my esteemed audience, makes use of the physical senses to, shall we say, first of all perceive the world of color. At first, this soul is, after all, absorbed in the world of colors that appears in external objects. When the paths to imagination are taken, an inner world of color, an inner experience of color, arises in the soul; but it is only then, in essence, that the truly creative aspect of the soul comes to life. Only now, when one is able to grasp this intimate connection between inner soul life and color, does one begin to understand why, by using the human eyes, one perceives the colored surfaces of external objects. By no longer merely observing colors from the outside, one learns to live with colors. One learns to identify with color in one’s soul, to identify color in one’s soul with color; through the harmony of colors, one learns simultaneously to lose oneself in color and to find oneself in one’s true being. Because the soul finds itself experiencing color, it simultaneously experiences its inner kinship with external nature, which it also experiences as colored by making use of the external physical organism.

[ 18 ] And so, to immerse oneself in the inner world of color means to find the creative essence within the color itself; it means to learn to create from within the color; it means to uncover the secret of painting. Everywhere, what unconsciously guides the artist’s hand is found to be the goal of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive insight.

[ 19 ] And we can ascend into the world of sounds. This world of sounds appears to us, by its very nature, as something spiritual, because what expresses itself as truly artistic in sound cannot actually be an imitation of nature; for in the artistic experience of the world of sound, something is perceived from the very beginning that transcends nature. But if one immerses oneself in this world of sound, one becomes aware—and one can become fully aware of it through imaginative insight—that the sound, as we experience it, even in all its beauty in our musical creations, lives in the earthly, sensory world only as a banished being, like a being that has been pushed down from higher regions—where it has its true existence, where it is rooted and lives—into the denser air within which we perceive it through the human organism. The world of sound appears to us as if in exile when we perceive it with an external physical organ. And it is indeed in exile. For when one discovers the sounding, the lawfully sounding, through imagination, one enters into the ethereal world, into a world that grows ever more spiritual; one enters into a world in which the sounding is no longer in exile, a world in which the sounding is in its very own element.

[ 20 ] Yes, my esteemed audience, one can learn to recognize sound in two ways. One can learn to recognize it in its manifestation in the air with its vibrations, and one can learn to recognize it through the world of imaginations within its own realm. If one comes to know it in this way within its own spiritual realm, one sees at the same time how the human organism, with its internal organs, is spiritually built up out of this element of sound—out of this element of world harmonies and world melodies—and one gains an understanding of the innermost nature of the human organism. One learns to recognize how our organs—the lungs and so on—are formed out of the choirs of the worlds, how our entire organism is a result of the resounding of the worlds, and one now understands why musical art touches us so deeply within, why many associate musical art with the immediate inner life of the human being, while they associate the other arts more with external perception. That which has otherwise shaped our innermost humanity from the cosmos—we break it down in the reverberation of musical art. It is the human being himself, with the innermost mystery of his sustenance, that finds expression in the musical work of art. And one then learns to understand how sound, in its banishment, has a peculiar relationship to the human being. Just consider, my esteemed audience: the air set into vibration by the exiled sound—we breathe it in, we breathe it out again. Through this inhaling and exhaling, human beings are not now created in their physical organization; the human organs are not built from the cosmos—they are merely sustained. In our breathing process, we have a fading out, a reflection of that which is contained in the depths of worldly existence.

[ 21 ] Take that which, from the air, can only sustain our organs in life; take that from its very source, which lies precisely in the spiritual world—then you have not only that which can sustain these organs—like the breath—but you also have that which creates these organs. Just as our breath, in its sustaining power for our organs, relates to the supersensible world from which our organs are created, so does the banished tone of the world of sound relate to that world into which we ascend through imagination and through inspiration—which leads us to an understanding of breathing and of what I have just indicated, and of what lies behind breathing. And in this region, where the world of sound has its true essence, lies the musician’s initially unconscious inspiration. Imagination and inspiration penetrate those regions from which the forces operate that inspire the musician in the creation of his works. It is the world of the spiritual from which art is born. It is the world of the spiritual into which we enter through anthroposophical knowledge of the world.

[ 22 ] The situation is somewhat different, and yet similar, when it comes to the art of human language—to poetry. Unlike the musical element, poetry is not intrinsically connected to what one sees; yet, in a certain way, it is connected to what constitutes possible progress and development for human beings. And just as human beings grasp the soul in the world of experienced colors, so do they grasp the spiritual in human beings—the truly spiritual—in the imagined and inspired world of sound. And thus, through language, they experience how those forces that guide human progress and human evolution work down from that spiritual realm.

[ 23 ] And when one learns to recognize how the spiritual tone—which has been banished down into the earthly air—creates its instruments through the breath, one learns to recognize how the tone, which has developed into one-sidedness in a lower region, creates through the breath the ear, the auditory system as an accompanying system through the breath, then one also learns to recognize the anatomical-physiological connection between the respiratory system and the auditory system, which plays such a major role in biology.

[ 24 ] But from there one can also ascend to the realization of how the active and passive elements of human language creatively participate in the development of humanity itself, and one learns to understand how the poet, who is truly artistic, seeks to rise from the prosaic nature of language—which is, after all, connected to the external world—to rhythm, meter, and to musical or pictorial form—in order to lead the prosaic element of language back to that which lies deeper than the word calculated for earthly life. Through his rhythms, his use of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, and through his thematic focus, the poet seeks to lead the word—which is calculated for earthly life—back to that which can correspond to the term “supersensory.” I would say that, in the realm of the soul, the poet grapples with the very problem that nature has solved in human beings by making the respiratory organism the vehicle for that which lives unconsciously within them as their constitution—a constitution formed from the creative tone of the world. The poet travels this path—I would say only more briefly—but he does travel it. He attempts to lead back that which is the word in exile to the word in the spirit. This can only happen through rhythm, through the treatment of language, and so on.

[ 25 ] And when one comes to know human organization and its relationship to the world in a wide variety of fields in this way, one gradually forms a view—an intuitive view—of the overall human organization, and then one attempts to penetrate down to that central power which underlies all human expression of life and also sensory expression. And this delving down to this central power, which is the

[ 26 ] * Will is what this descent seeks to achieve through the art of eurythmy—the art that aims to bring the whole human being, as a being of will, into direct sensory perception.

[ 27 ] What a person experiences inwardly can be expressed in their outward movements down to the smallest details. And if art must seek its ideal in beholding the spiritual at the very same moment as it contemplates the sensory—and in never viewing the spiritual as an abstraction, but always having it before itself as a sensory revelation—then this revelation is most intensely realized in the art of eurythmy. For what stands before us—the spiritual-soul human being—and everything that fills the spiritual-soul human being at the moment of his or her appearance as a eurythmist, everything that lives spiritually and soulfully within his or her soul—all of this is to be transformed into outward, sensually perceptible movement. The spiritual and soulful, the intangible, is to become fully tangible. Yet nothing tangible, nothing sensory, is present before us in such a person performing eurythmy that is not at the same time permeated and surging with spiritual-soulful experience. All sensory events are permeated by the spirit; everything that seeks to reveal itself spiritually does not remain in abstract form but finds its full expression in sensory revelation. One must first acquire a sense of the wholly living, of the immediately spiritual, which is the object of anthroposophical knowledge, then one will learn to think differently about the relationship between artistic experience and anthroposophy than one rightly thinks about the relationship between artistic experience and an aesthetic science that creates only from corpse-like ideas, from the ideas of the dead.

[ 28 ] Precisely while this science was experiencing its golden age, while this science was developing, art lost its inner sources; art has, to a greater or lesser extent, become something that must content itself with speaking of the unreal. And it is hardly understood anymore—I would say—tragic sighs of the world such as Goethe’s: “To whom nature begins to reveal her manifest secret, there is the deepest longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” — That art has a rightful place in the world of truth, in the world of reality—but a reality that cannot be reached by ordinary science, one that can be attained only through anthroposophically oriented science—this is what, hopefully, people will gradually come to sense. Then people will come to realize that precisely what art and artistic experience must yearn for today—because they have lost it in a scientific approach limited to the external—is that art and artistic experience can receive inspiration, living inspiration, from inner life, from creative life, from that which, in its own course, finds the experience of thought itself, and which is sought by anthroposophical spiritual science.

[ 29 ] Has art, in the face of a science that today itself requires a deepening in the spirit, had to perceive and experience that it cannot justify itself as a creation of the imagination in the face of what such a science recognizes as the truly real, then in the future one will once again understand what a true artist like Goethe—who was at the same time a true thinker—intended when he did not view art merely as something fantastical, but sought to see in the true work of art a genuine rendering of the world’s mysteries.

[ 30 ] And if one understands the relationship between art and anthroposophy in this way, one will also recognize how this relationship can rescue art from a certain tragic situation—a situation in which science essentially denies art its rightful place in reality, and in which, when science speaks of art, it can only do so in a way that compels the artist to reject it. Art and science will enter into a different relationship when there is a science that, by its very existence, will prove that art is a true citizen of the full reality of the world—that art is not merely a product of an unreal imagination, but that art is the great interpreter of the deepest mysteries of the world. The person who does not strive for revelatory knowledge, but rather for the attainment of the world’s mysteries through understanding, will, I believe, be joyfully moved from the depths of his or her being by this new relationship between science and art.