The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. From a Notebook

[ 1 ] All thought seeks the spirit in nature; for science, the world of the real is something it cannot linger upon, a point of passage through which it must proceed to the essence of things, which can be grasped only as an idea. Only by transcending this reality, shattering the shell, and penetrating to the core does the human spirit come to understand what holds this world together at its very core. We can never find fulfillment in individual natural phenomena, but only in laws; never in the individual, but only in universality. Within himself, man builds a world that corresponds to his spiritual needs, a world characterized by the harmony his spirit craves and imbued with the rigorous logic he strives for. External nature, as it immediately presents itself to us, is never capable of fulfilling this. Only the penetrating gaze of the sun-like eye sees the spiritual sun that lives and reigns behind appearances. The immediate appearance seems deified to us. That is why eras dominated by a theological orientation were never able to establish an aesthetics.

[ 2 ] Aesthetics can only be the product of an age in which the cultivation of art appears to humanity as a lofty task, an age in which art becomes the noble daughter of heaven, destined to fulfill a divine mission. If the divine order already appears to us in all its intensity in every single manifestation of nature, what task can then fall to art? The divine must be recognized in its loftiest form, as an idea, in order to assign even the manifestation of the particular its proper place within the system of our worldview. The intuitive mind does indeed see the universal in the particular, and the idea in the individual, but only because, while its gaze remains entirely fixed on the real, it perceives more in it than the mere senses are capable of. It is in the individual phenomenon that the idea is revealed to him, because he does not stop at the individual as such.

[ 3 ] The artist transforms the individual; he imbues it with the character of the universal; he turns it from something merely accidental into something necessary, from something earthly into something divine. The artist’s task is not to give the idea a sensory form, but rather to allow the real to appear in an ideal light. The what is taken from reality, but that is not what matters; the how is the property of the creative power of genius, and that is what matters.

[ 4 ] Since the individual appears to be torn from the fabric of the whole world and can now unfold its free ideality, it appears to us as fundamentally different than it does in reality; and although it appears to us in its truth, this truth is nevertheless an illusion in the face of natural law. What is naturally necessary becomes ethical in drama, since the actions of humanity must be called not ethical, but historical. Beauty is not a microcosm, nor would such a microcosm be beautiful. For beauty lies precisely in the individual’s surpassing of itself in terms of qualities and magnitude. We perceive this as a perfection that cannot elevate us to the universe, because there it is simply taken for granted.