The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic

[ 1 ] This lecture, now appearing in its second edition, was delivered more than twenty years ago at the Vienna Goethe Society. On the occasion of this new edition of one of my earlier writings, perhaps the following may be said. It has happened that people have detected changes in my views over the course of my writing career. What right is there to do so, when a text of mine that is more than twenty years old can appear today in such a way that not a single sentence needs to be changed? And if one has sought to find a shift in my ideas, particularly in my work in the field of Spiritual Science (anthroposophy), one might reply that, upon rereading this lecture, the ideas developed therein now appear to me as a sound foundation of anthroposophy. Indeed, it even seems to me that the anthroposophical way of thinking is precisely what is called for to understand these ideas. With any other school of thought, one would hardly be able to truly take the most important points of what is said to heart. What lay behind my world of ideas twenty years ago has since been elaborated by me in a wide variety of directions; that is the fact at hand, not a change in worldview.

[ 2 ] A few remarks appended at the end for clarification could just as well have been written twenty years ago. Now, one might ask whether what was said in the lecture still holds true today with regard to aesthetics. After all, a great deal of work has been done in this field over the past two decades. It seems to me that it is even more relevant today than it was twenty years ago. With regard to the development of aesthetics, one might venture the following grotesque statement: the ideas in this lecture have become even truer since their first publication, even though they have not changed at all.

Second Edition
Basel, September 15, 1909.

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[ 3 ] The number of works and treatises published in our time with the aim of defining Goethe’s relationship to the most diverse branches of modern science and modern intellectual life in general is overwhelming. Merely listing the titles would likely fill a sizeable little volume. Underlying this phenomenon is the fact that we are becoming increasingly aware that, in Goethe, we are faced with a cultural force that anyone wishing to participate in contemporary intellectual life must necessarily grapple with. To pass this by in this case would mean renouncing the very foundation of our culture, floundering in the depths without the will to rise to the luminous heights from which all the light of our education emanates. Only those who are able to connect with Goethe and his era in some way can gain clarity about the path our culture is taking; only they can become aware of the goals that modern humanity must pursue; those who fail to find this connection to the greatest mind of the modern age will simply be swept along by their fellow human beings and led like the blind. All things appear to us in a new context when we view them with the gaze that has been sharpened by this wellspring of culture.

[ 4 ] As gratifying as the aforementioned effort by our contemporaries to build on Goethe’s work may be, it cannot by any means be conceded that the manner in which this is done is entirely successful. All too often, there is a lack of the impartiality that is so necessary here—an impartiality that first immerses itself in the full depth of Goethe’s genius before taking a seat in the critic’s chair. In many respects, Goethe is considered outdated simply because his full significance is not recognized. People believe they have moved far beyond Goethe, whereas the correct approach would usually be to apply his comprehensive principles—his magnificent way of viewing things—to our now more advanced scientific tools and facts. With Goethe, it never matters whether the results of his investigations more or less correspond to those of modern science; what matters is always only how he approached the subject. The results bear the stamp of his time—that is, they extend only as far as the scientific tools and experience of his era allowed; his way of thinking, however, his way of posing problems, is a lasting achievement, which is done the greatest injustice when treated with condescension. But our age is characterized by the fact that the productive intellectual power of genius seems almost meaningless to it. How could it be otherwise in an age in which any departure from physical experience—in science as in art—is frowned upon? For mere sensory observation, one needs nothing more than healthy senses, and genius is for that purpose quite dispensable.

[ 5 ] But true progress in science, as in art, has never been achieved through such observation or slavish imitation of nature. For while thousands upon thousands pass by an observation, one person comes along and, based on that very same observation, makes the discovery of a magnificent scientific law. Many before Galileo must have seen a swaying church lamp; yet it took this brilliant mind to discover in it the laws of pendulum motion, so significant for physics. “Were the eye not sun-like, how could we behold the light?” exclaims Goethe; by this he means that only those who possess the necessary disposition and the creative power to see more in reality than mere outward facts are capable of looking into the depths of nature. People refuse to acknowledge this. One should not confuse the tremendous achievements we owe to Goethe’s genius with the shortcomings inherent in his research due to the limited state of knowledge at the time. Goethe himself characterized the relationship between his scientific results and the progress of research in an excellent metaphor; he describes the latter as stones with which he may have ventured too far on the board, but from which one should be able to discern the player’s strategy. If we take these words to heart, then the following lofty task arises for us in the field of Goethe research: it must always trace back to the tendencies that Goethe himself held. What he himself presents as results should serve only as examples of how he attempted to solve his great problems with limited means. We must seek to solve them in his spirit, but with our greater resources and on the basis of our richer experiences. In this way, all branches of research to which Goethe turned his attention will be enriched and, more than that: they will bear a unified character, being thoroughly part of a unified, grand worldview. Purely philological and critical research—the validity of which to deny would indeed be folly—must find its complement from this perspective. We must take hold of the wealth of thoughts and ideas contained in Goethe and, building upon them, continue our scholarly work.

[ 6 ] My task here is to show to what extent the principles developed apply to one of the youngest and, at the same time, most controversial sciences: aesthetics.^{1I am referring here to aesthetics as an independent science. Of course, one can certainly find discussions of the arts among the leading minds of earlier times. However, a historian of aesthetics could treat all of this only in the same way that one properly treats all of humanity’s philosophical endeavors prior to the actual beginning of philosophy in Greece with Thales. Regarding pages 28 and 29. It may strike one that these remarks state: medieval thought found “nothing at all” in nature. One might counter by pointing to the great thinkers and mystics of the Middle Ages. However, such an objection is based on a complete misunderstanding. It is not stated here that medieval thought was incapable of forming concepts regarding the significance of perception and so on, but merely that the human spirit in that era was turned toward the spiritual as such, in its very essence, and felt no inclination to grapple with the individual facts of nature.} Aesthetics—the science that deals with art and its creations—is barely a hundred years old. It was not until 1750 that Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten stepped forward with the full awareness that he was opening up a new field of scholarship. The efforts of Winckelmann and Lessing to arrive at a thorough judgment on fundamental questions of art date from the same period. Nothing that had been attempted in this field prior to that can even be described as the most elementary approach to this science. Even the great Aristotle, that intellectual giant who exerted such a decisive influence on all branches of science, remained entirely unproductive in the realm of aesthetics. He excluded the visual arts entirely from the scope of his consideration, which shows that he had no concept of art at all; moreover, he knew of no principle other than the imitation of nature, which again demonstrates that he never understood the role of the human mind in its artistic creations.

[ 7 ] The fact that the science of beauty emerged so late is by no means a coincidence. It was simply not possible earlier, simply because the prerequisites for it were lacking. What, then, are these prerequisites? The need for art is as old as humanity itself, but the need to understand its purpose could not arise until much later. The Greek spirit, which, by virtue of its fortunate constitution, drew its satisfaction from the reality immediately surrounding us, gave rise to an artistic era that represents the pinnacle of achievement; but it did so with a primal naivety, without the need to create, through art, a world designed to offer a satisfaction that cannot be obtained from any other source. The Greek found in reality everything he sought; nature abundantly provided everything his heart desired and his spirit yearned for. He would never come to feel in his heart a longing for something that we seek in vain in the world around us. The Greeks did not grow apart from nature; therefore, all their needs are to be satisfied by it. Fused with nature in inseparable unity with their entire being, nature creates within them and knows full well what it may create for them in order to satisfy those needs once again. Thus, among this naive people, art was merely a continuation of life and activity within nature; it had grown directly out of it. It satisfied the same needs as its mother, only to a greater degree. This is why Aristotle knew of no higher principle of art than the imitation of nature. There was no need to reach beyond nature, because in nature itself lay the source of all satisfaction. What to us might seem empty and meaningless—the mere imitation of nature—was entirely sufficient here. We have forgotten how to see in nature alone the highest thing our spirit longs for; that is why us mere realism, which offers us the bare reality of that higher thing, could never satisfy us. This time had to come. It was a necessity for humanity, which was evolving toward ever higher stages of perfection. Human beings could remain entirely within nature only as long as they were unaware of it. The moment they recognized their own self with complete clarity, the moment they realized that within them lives a realm at least equal to that of the external world, they had to break free from the bonds of nature.

[ 8 ] Now he could no longer surrender himself completely to her, so that she might do with him as she pleased, so that she might create and then satisfy his needs. Now he had to stand up to her, and in doing so he had effectively detached himself from her, had created a new world within himself, and from this his longing now flows; from this his desires arise. Whether these desires, now generated apart from Mother Nature, can also be satisfied by her remains, of course, a matter of chance. In any case, a sharp chasm now separates man from reality, and he must first restore the harmony that once existed in its original perfection. This gives rise to the conflicts between the ideal and reality, between what is intended and what is achieved—in short, everything that leads the human soul into a veritable spiritual labyrinth. Nature stands before us soulless, devoid of everything that our inner being perceives as divine. The immediate consequence is a turning away from all that is natural, a flight from the immediately real. This is the exact opposite of Hellenism. Just as the latter found everything in nature, so this worldview finds nothing in it. And it is in this light that the Christian Middle Ages must appear to us. Just as Greek civilization was unable to recognize the essence of art—because it could not comprehend art’s transcendence of nature, the creation of a higher nature in contrast to the immediate one— nor could medieval Christian scholarship lead to an understanding of art, since art could, after all, work only with the means of nature, and scholarship could not grasp how one could create works within godless reality that could satisfy the spirit striving toward the divine. Here, too, the helplessness of scholarship did not hinder the development of art. While the former did not know what to make of it, the most magnificent works of Christian art came into being. Philosophy, which at that time trailed in the wake of theology, was just as unable to grant art a place in cultural progress as the great Greek idealist, the “divine Plato,” had been. Plato, after all, simply declared the visual arts and drama to be harmful. He had so little concept of art’s independent purpose that he showed music leniency only because it promotes bravery in war.

[ 9 ] Art history could not have emerged during the period when mind and nature were so intimately connected, nor could it have emerged during the period when they stood in irreconcilable opposition to one another. The emergence of aesthetics required a time in which human beings, free and independent of the bonds of nature, could perceive the spirit in its unclouded clarity—yet a time in which a reunification with nature was once again possible. There is good reason why humanity has risen above the perspective of Greek civilization. For in the sum of coincidences from which the world is composed—into which we feel thrust—we can never find the divine or the necessary. After all, we see nothing around us but facts that could just as easily be different; we see nothing but individuals, and our spirit strives for the generic, the archetypal; we see nothing but the finite, the transitory, and our spirit strives for the infinite, the imperishable, the eternal. If, then, the human spirit—alienated from nature—were to return to nature, this return would have to be to something other than that sum of contingencies. And Goethe means this return to be a return to nature, but a return with the full richness of the developed spirit, with the cultural sophistication of the new age.

[ 10 ] Goethe’s views do not align with the fundamental separation of nature and spirit; he wishes to see in the world only a great whole, a unified chain of development of beings, within which human beings constitute a link, albeit the highest one. “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to step out of her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her. Uninvited and without warning, she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along until we are weary and slip from her arms.” (See Goethe’s Works. Scientific Writings, Vol. 2, ed. by Rudolf Steiner in Kürschner’s Deutsche Nat.-Lit., p. 5f.) And in the book on Winckelmann: “When the healthy nature of human beings functions as a whole, when they feel themselves to be in the world as part of a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment grants them pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could perceive itself, would exult at having reached its goal and admire the pinnacle of its own becoming and being.” Herein lies the truly Goethean broad transcendence of immediate nature, without distancing oneself in the slightest from what constitutes the essence of nature. Alien to him is what he himself finds in many particularly gifted people: “The tendency to feel a kind of shyness toward real life, to withdraw into oneself, to create a world of one’s own within oneself, and in this way to achieve the most excellent things inwardly.” Goethe does not flee reality in order to create an abstract world of thought that has nothing in common with it; no, he immerses himself in it in order to discover its immutable laws within its eternal change, its becoming and movement; he confronts the individual in order to in it perceive the archetype. Thus the primordial plant arose in his mind, as did the primordial animal—which are, after all, nothing other than the ideas of the animal and the plant. These are not empty general concepts belonging to a dry theory; they are the essential foundations of organisms, rich in concrete content, full of life, and vivid. Vivid, of course, not to the external senses, but only to that higher faculty of intuition which Goethe discusses in his essay on “Intuitive Judgment.” Ideas, in the Goethean sense, are just as objective as the colors and forms of things, but they are perceptible only to the whose faculty of comprehension is attuned to them, just as colors and forms exist only for the sighted and not for the blind. If we do not approach the objective with a receptive mind, it does not reveal itself to us. Without the instinctive ability to perceive ideas, they will always remain a closed realm to us. Schiller has looked deeper than anyone else into the fabric of Goethe’s genius.

[ 11 ] On August 23, 1794, he explained to Goethe the essence underlying his spirit with the following words: “You take all of nature as a whole in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the basis for explaining the individual. From the simplest forms of organization, you ascend, step by step, to the more complex ones, in order to finally construct the most complex of all—human beings—genetically from the materials of the entire edifice of nature. By recreating them, as it were, in the image of nature, you seek to penetrate their hidden workings.” In this act of recreation lies a key to understanding Goethe’s worldview. If we truly wish to ascend to the archetypes of things, to the unchanging within eternal change, then we must not look at what has already been completed, for this no longer fully corresponds to the idea expressed within it; we must go back to the process of becoming; we must listen in on nature as it creates. This is the meaning of Goethe’s words in the essay “Contemplative Judgment”: “If, in the moral realm, we are to elevate ourselves to a higher realm through faith in God, virtue, and immortality and draw near to the First Being, then it may well be the same in the intellectual realm: that by contemplating a nature that is ever-creating, we render ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions. After all, I had already, unconsciously and driven by an inner impulse, relentlessly sought out that archetypal and typical.” (Goethe’s Works, as above. Vol. 1 of the Natural Science Writings, p. 115.) Goethe’s archetypes are thus not empty spectres, but rather the driving forces behind phenomena.

[ 12 ] This is the “higher nature” within nature that Goethe seeks to grasp. We can see from this that reality, as it lies spread out before our senses, is by no means something at which a human being who has reached a higher level of culture can come to a standstill. 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 satisfaction in individual natural phenomena, nor in natural laws alone; never in the individual, nor in generality alone. In Goethe, this fact appears in the most perfect form conceivable. What also remains unresolved in his work is the fact that, for the modern mind, reality—the individual—offers no satisfaction, because we do not yet find within it, but only when we go beyond it do we find that in which we recognize the highest, that which we revere as divine, that which we address as an “idea” in science. While mere experience cannot achieve the reconciliation of opposites—because it possesses reality but not yet the Idea—science cannot achieve this reconciliation either, because it possesses the Idea but no longer reality. Between the two, humanity requires a new realm—a realm in which the particular, and not merely the whole, already represents the Idea; a realm in which the individual already appears in such a way that the character of universality and necessity is inherent in it. Such a world, however, does not exist in reality; humanity must first create such a world for itself, and this world is the world of art: a necessary third realm alongside that of the senses and that of reason.

[ 13 ] And aesthetics must regard it as its task to understand art as this third realm. The divine element, which natural things lack, must be instilled in them by human beings themselves, and herein lies a lofty task that falls to the artists. They must, so to speak, bring the Kingdom of God to this earth. Goethe expresses this—one might well call it—religious mission of art in his book on Winckelmann with the following magnificent words:

[ 14 ] “Since man is placed at the pinnacle of nature, he sees himself once again as nature in its entirety, which must in turn bring forth another pinnacle within itself. To this end, he elevates himself by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony, and meaning, and finally rising to the creation of a work of art, which takes a prominent place alongside his other deeds and works. Once it has been brought forth, it stands before the world in its ideal reality, and thus it produces a lasting effect; it brings forth the highest; for as it develops spiritually from the totality of forces, it absorbs within itself all that is magnificent, worthy of veneration, and lovable, and—by animating the human form—elevates man above himself, brings his circle of life and deeds to a close, and deifies him for the present, in which the past and the future are encompassed. Such feelings seized those who beheld the Olympian Jupiter, as we can infer from the descriptions, accounts, and testimonies of the ancients. The god had become human in order to elevate man to the status of a god. People beheld the highest dignity and were inspired by the highest beauty.”

[ 15 ] This recognized art’s great significance for the cultural progress of humanity. And it is characteristic of the formidable ethos of the German people that they were the first to arrive at this realization; it is characteristic that, for a century, all German philosophers have been striving to find the most fitting scientific form for the unique way in which the spiritual and the natural, the ideal and the real, merge in a work of art. After all, the task of aesthetics is nothing other than to grasp the essence of this interpenetration and to work through it in the individual forms in which it manifests itself in the various fields of art. The credit for raising this problem—first in the manner we have indicated, thereby effectively setting all major aesthetic questions in motion—goes to Kant’s *Critique of Judgment*, published in 1790, whose arguments immediately struck a chord with Goethe. However, despite all the seriousness with which this work was approached, we must admit today that we do not have a universally satisfactory solution to the problems of aesthetics.

[ 16 ] The grand master of our aesthetics, the sharp-minded thinker and critic Friedrich Theodor Vischer, held fast to the conviction he had expressed until the end of his life: “Aesthetics is still in its infancy.” In saying this, he admitted that all endeavors in this field—including his own five-volume work on aesthetics—represent, to a greater or lesser extent, misguided paths. And so it is. This—if I may express my conviction here—is attributable solely to the fact that Goethe’s fruitful seeds in this field were disregarded, because he was not taken seriously as a scholar. Had they done so, they would simply have expanded upon Schiller’s ideas—ideas that dawned on him through his contemplation of Goethe’s genius and which he set forth in the *Letters on Aesthetic Education*. Even these letters are often not considered sufficiently scientific by systematizing aestheticians, and yet they rank among the most significant works that aesthetics has ever produced. Schiller takes his starting point from Kant. This philosopher defined the nature of the beautiful in several respects. First, he examines the basis of the pleasure we derive from beautiful works of art. He finds this sensation of pleasure to be entirely different from any other. Let us compare it with the pleasure we feel when dealing with an object to which we owe something useful. That pleasure is entirely different. It is intimately connected with the desire for the existence of that object. The pleasure derived from the useful disappears when the useful object itself ceases to exist. This is not the case with the pleasure we feel toward the beautiful. This pleasure has nothing to do with the possession or existence of the object. It is therefore not attached to the object at all, but only to the mental image of it. Whereas with the practical and the useful, the need immediately arises to translate the mental image into reality, with the beautiful we are satisfied with the mere image. That is why Kant calls the pleasure in the beautiful a pleasure unaffected by any real interest—a “disinterested pleasure.” However, it would be entirely wrong to assume that this excludes utility from the beautiful; this applies only to external utility. And from this follows the second explanation of the beautiful: “It is a form that is purposeful in itself, but without serving any external purpose.” When we perceive another object of nature or a product of human technology, our understanding steps in and asks about utility and purpose. And it is not satisfied until its question of “what for” is answered. In the case of beauty, the “what for” lies within the thing itself, and the intellect need not go beyond it. This is where Schiller begins. And he does so by weaving the idea of freedom into the train of thought in a way that does the greatest honor to human nature. First, Schiller contrasts two human drives that constantly assert themselves. The first is the so-called material drive, or the need to keep our senses open to the influx of the external world. A rich array of content floods in upon us, but without our being able to exert any decisive influence on its nature. Everything here happens with absolute necessity. What we perceive is determined from the outside; here we are unfree, subjugated—we must simply obey the dictates of natural necessity. The second is the drive toward form. This is nothing other than reason, which brings order and law to the chaotic jumble of perceptual content. Through its work, system is introduced into experience. But even here, Schiller finds, we are not free. For in this work of its own, reason is subject to the immutable laws of logic. Just as we are subject to the power of natural necessity there, so here we are subject to that of rational necessity. Freedom seeks a refuge from both. Schiller assigns it the realm of art by emphasizing the analogy between art and a child’s play. What is the essence of play? Things are taken from reality and their relationships are altered in any way one pleases. In this transformation of reality, no law of logical necessity governs the process—as is the case, for example, when we build a machine, where we must strictly submit to the laws of reason—but rather, it serves solely a subjective need. The player arranges things in a way that brings him joy; he imposes no constraints upon himself. He pays no heed to natural necessity, for he overcomes its constraints by using the things handed down to him entirely at will; nor does he feel dependent on rational necessity, for the order he brings to things is his own invention. Thus, the player imprints his subjectivity on reality, and in turn, he confers objective validity upon the latter. The separate operation of the two drives has ceased; they have merged into one and thereby become free: the natural is spiritual, and the spiritual is natural. Schiller, the poet of freedom, thus sees art as nothing more than a free play of man on a higher level and exclaims with enthusiasm: “Man is fully human only when he plays, … and he plays only when he is human in the full sense of the word.” Schiller calls the impulse underlying art the “play instinct.” This impulse produces works in the artist that, even in their sensory existence, satisfy our reason, and whose rational content is at the same time present as sensory existence. And at this level, the essence of man acts in such a way that his nature appears at once spiritual, and his spirit at once natural. Nature is elevated to spirit; spirit immerses itself in nature. The former is thereby ennobled; the latter is brought down from its abstract heights into the visible world. The works that arise from this are, of course, not entirely true to nature, because in reality spirit and nature never coincide; therefore, when we compare works of art with those of nature, they appear to us as mere appearances. But they must be illusion, for otherwise they would not be true works of art. With regard to the concept of illusion in this context, Schiller stands alone as an aesthetician—unsurpassed, unrivaled. Here, one should have built upon this further and developed the initially one-sided solution to the problem of beauty by drawing on Goethe’s conception of art. Instead, Schelling enters the scene with a fundamentally flawed basic view and inaugurates an error from which German aesthetics has never recovered. ^{2By Schelling’s “fundamentally flawed view,” we by no means mean the elevation of the spirit “to the heights where the divine reigns,” but rather the application Schelling makes of it to the contemplation of art. This should be particularly emphasized so that what is said here against Schelling is not confused with the criticisms currently circulating against this philosopher and against philosophical idealism in general. One can hold Schelling in very high regard, as the author of this treatise does, and yet have many objections to specific aspects of his work.} Like all of modern philosophy, Schelling also sees the task of the highest human aspiration in the comprehension of the eternal archetypes of things. The spirit transcends the real world and rises to the heights where the divine reigns. There, all truth and beauty are revealed to it. Only what is eternal is true and is also beautiful. According to Schelling, therefore, true beauty can be perceived only by those who rise to the highest truth, for they are, after all, one and the same. All sensory beauty is, after all, merely a faint reflection of that infinite beauty which we can never perceive with our senses. We see where this leads: the work of art is not beautiful for its own sake and by virtue of what it is, but because it represents the idea of beauty. It follows, then, from this view that the content of art is the same as that of science, since both are based on eternal truth, which is at the same time beauty. For Schelling, art is merely science made objective. What matters here, however, is what our pleasure in the work of art depends on. Here, it is solely the expressed idea. The sensory image is merely a means of expression, the form in which a supersensory content is expressed. And in this regard, all aestheticians of the idealist school follow Schelling. For I cannot agree with the view held by the most recent historian and systematizer of aesthetics, Eduard von Hartmann, that Hegel has essentially gone beyond Schelling on this point. I say “on this point,” for there are many other areas where Hegel towers far above Schelling. Hegel himself says: “The beautiful is the sensory appearance of the Idea.” In doing so, he, too, admits that he sees in the expressed Idea what is essential in art. This becomes even clearer from the following words: “The hard shell of nature and the ordinary world makes it more difficult for the spirit to penetrate to the Idea than do the works of art.” Well, this clearly states that the goal of art is the same as that of science, namely, to penetrate to the Idea.

[ 17 ] Art seeks only to illustrate what science directly expresses in the form of thought. Friedrich Theodor Vischer calls beauty “the manifestation of the idea” and thereby likewise equates the content of art with truth. One may object to this as one pleases; whoever sees the essence of beauty in the expressed idea can never separate it from truth. It is difficult to see what independent role art is supposed to play alongside science. After all, what art offers us, we experience through thought in a purer, more unclouded form, not first veiled by a sensory veil. Only through sophistry can one, from the standpoint of this aesthetic, get past the actual compromising consequence that allegory in the visual arts and didactic poetry in literature are the highest forms of art. This aesthetic cannot grasp the independent significance of art. It has therefore also proven to be fruitless. However, one must not go too far and, for that reason, abandon all pursuit of a consistent aesthetic. And those who wish to dissolve all aesthetics into art history go too far in this direction. Without being grounded in authentic principles, this discipline can be nothing more than a repository for collections of notes on artists and their works, followed by more or less witty remarks which, however, stem entirely from the arbitrariness of subjective reasoning and are therefore worthless. From the other side, one has tackled aesthetics by contrasting it with a kind of physiology of taste. The aim is to examine the simplest, most elementary cases in which we experience a sensation of pleasure and then move on to increasingly complex cases, thereby countering “aesthetics from above” with “aesthetics from below.” Fechner took this approach in his *Vorschule der Ästhetik* (*Prelude to Aesthetics*). It is actually incomprehensible that such a work could find followers among a people who had a Kant. Aesthetics is supposed to proceed from the investigation of the sensation of pleasure; as if every sensation of pleasure were already an aesthetic one, and as if we could distinguish the aesthetic nature of one sensation of pleasure from another by anything other than the object through which it is produced. We know that a sensation of pleasure is an aesthetic sensation only when we recognize the object as beautiful; for, psychologically speaking, as a sensation of pleasure, the aesthetic one differs in no way from any other. It always comes down to the recognition of the object. What makes an object beautiful? That is the fundamental question of all aesthetics. We come much closer to the heart of the matter than the “aestheticians from below” do when we draw on Goethe. Merck once described Goethe’s work with these words: “You create quite differently from the rest; they seek to embody the so-called imaginative, which produces only nonsense; but you seek to give the real a poetic form.” This conveys roughly the same idea as Goethe’s words in the second part of *Faust*: “Consider not so much the What, but rather the How.” It clearly states what matters in art: not the embodiment of the supernatural, but the transformation of the sensory and factual. Reality must not be reduced to a mere means of expression: no, it must remain in its full independence; it must simply take on a new form—a form in which it satisfies us. When we lift any individual entity out of its surroundings and place it before our eyes in this isolated position, much about it will immediately seem incomprehensible to us. We cannot reconcile it with the concept, with the idea, that we must necessarily assume as its foundation. Its formation in reality is not the result of its own laws, but rather the surrounding reality directly shapes it. Had the thing been able to develop independently and freely, uninfluenced by other things, then it alone would embody its own idea. The artist must grasp this idea—which underlies the thing but is hindered in its free unfolding in reality—and bring it to fruition. He must find within the object the point from which an object can develop into its most perfect form, a form that it cannot, however, achieve in nature itself. Nature, after all, falls short of its own intention in every individual thing; alongside this plant, it creates a second, a third, and so on; none brings the full idea to concrete life; one embodies this aspect, the other that, as far as circumstances permit. The artist, however, must return to what appears to him as nature’s tendency. And this is what Goethe means when he describes his creative process with the words: “I do not rest until I find a concise point from which much can be derived.” For the artist, the entire exterior of his work must express its entire interior; in the product of nature, the former falls short of the latter, and the inquiring human spirit must first recognize it. Thus, the laws by which the artist proceeds are nothing other than the eternal laws of nature, but in their purest form, uninfluenced by any constraint. It is not, therefore, what is that underlies the creations of art, but what could be—not the real, but the possible. The artist creates according to the same principles by which nature creates; but he applies these principles to individuals, whereas—to use a phrase of Goethe’s—nature pays no heed to individuals. “It is always building and always destroying,” because it seeks to achieve perfection not through the individual but through the whole. The content of a work of art is something sensually perceptible and real—this is the “what”; in the form the artist gives it, his endeavor is to surpass nature in her own tendencies, to achieve, through her means and laws, what is possible to a greater degree than she herself is capable of.

[ 18 ] The object that the artist presents to us is more perfect than it is in its natural state; yet it possesses no perfection other than its own. ^{3Sensory reality is transfigured in art by appearing as if it were spirit. In this respect, artistic creation is not an imitation of anything that already exists, but a continuation of the world’s process springing from the human soul. The mere imitation of nature creates no more that which is new than does the depiction of the spirit that already exists. One cannot regard as a truly great artist one who gives the observer the impression of a faithful reproduction of reality, but rather one who compels the observer to follow along as he creatively continues the process of the world in his works.} In this transcendence of the object beyond itself—yet based solely on what is already hidden within it—lies beauty. Beauty is therefore not something unnatural; and Goethe is right to say: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would have remained eternally hidden were it not for its appearance,” or, in another passage: “To whom nature begins to reveal her manifest secret, that person feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” In the same sense that one can say beauty is unreal, untrue, and mere appearance—for what it represents is nowhere to be found in nature in such perfection—one can also say: beauty is truer than nature, in that it represents what nature wants to be but simply cannot be. On this question of reality in art, Goethe says: “The poet”—and we can quite easily extend his words to art as a whole—“the poet is dependent on representation. The highest form of this is when it rivals reality, that is, when its depictions are so brought to life by the spirit that they can be regarded as present for everyone.” Goethe maintains: “There is nothing beautiful in nature that is not motivated as true by the laws of nature.” (Conversations with Eckermann IH, 82.) And the other side of appearance—the surpassing of essence by itself—is expressed as Goethe’s view in “Prose Sayings” (Goethe’s Works, as above. Vol. 4 of the Natural Science Writings, Part 2, p. 495): “In the blossoms, the vegetative law reaches its highest manifestation, and the rose is merely the pinnacle of this manifestation… The fruit can never be beautiful, for there the vegetative law retreats into itself (into mere law).” Well, there we have it quite clearly: where the idea develops and finds its full expression, beauty enters; where we perceive the law directly in the outward appearance; whereas, as in the fruit, the outward appearance seems formless and clumsy because it reveals nothing of the law underlying plant formation—there the natural object ceases to be beautiful. That is why the same saying continues: “The law that manifests itself in appearance, with the greatest freedom, according to its own specific conditions, brings forth objective beauty, which, of course, must find worthy subjects to perceive it.” And this view of Goethe’s is expressed most decisively in the following statement, which we find in the Conversations with Eckermann (II. 108): “The artist must, of course, faithfully and devoutly reproduce nature in its details... but in the higher realms of the artistic process, through which an image becomes a true work of art, he has greater freedom, and here he may even venture into fiction.” Goethe describes the highest task of art as “to convey, through appearance, the illusion of a higher reality. But it is a misguided endeavor to pursue this appearance to the point where, in the end, only a commonplace reality remains.” (Poetry and Truth, III. 40.)

[ 19 ] Let us now ask ourselves what the source of pleasure in works of art is. Above all, we must be clear that the pleasure derived from objects of beauty is in no way inferior to the purely intellectual pleasure we derive from the purely spiritual. It always signifies a decisive decline in art when its purpose is sought in mere amusement, in the satisfaction of a base pleasure. The source of our enjoyment of works of art, therefore, can be none other than that which allows us to experience, in relation to the world of ideas, that joyful exaltation that lifts the whole human being beyond itself. What, then, is it about the world of ideas that gives us such satisfaction? Nothing other than the inner, heavenly peace and perfection that it holds within itself. No contradiction, no discord stirs in the world of ideas rising within us, because it is infinite in itself. Everything that makes this image perfect lies within it. This perfection, inherent in the world of ideas, is the reason for our exaltation when we stand before it. If beauty is to offer us a similar sense of exaltation, then it must be structured according to the pattern of the idea. And this is something entirely different from what the German idealizing aestheticians desire. It is not the “idea in the form of a sensory appearance”; it is precisely the opposite—it is a “sensory appearance in the form of the idea.” The content of beauty—the substance underlying it—is therefore always something real, something immediately real, and the form of its manifestation is the ideal. We see that the exact opposite of what German aesthetics claims is true; it has simply turned things upside down. The Beautiful is not the Divine in a sensually real guise; no, it is the sensually real in a divine guise. The artist brings the Divine to earth not by allowing it to flow into the world, but by elevating the world into the sphere of divinity. Beauty is an illusion because it conjures up before our senses a reality that presents itself as such—as an ideal world. Consider not so much the “what” as the “how,” for it is in the “how” that what matters lies. The “what” remains a sensory reality, but the “how” of its manifestation becomes an ideal. Where this ideal form of appearance is most fully revealed in the sensory realm, there the dignity of art is also most highly manifested. Goethe says of this: “The dignity of art perhaps appears most eminently in music, because it has no substance that needs to be accounted for. It is entirely form and content, and it elevates and ennobles everything it expresses.” Aesthetics, however, based on the definition: “Beauty is a sensory reality that appears as if it were an idea”—this does not yet exist. It must be created. It can simply be described as the “aesthetics of Goethe’s worldview.” And that is the aesthetics of the future. Even one of the most recent scholars of aesthetics, Eduard von Hartmann, who has produced an excellent work in his *Philosophy of the Beautiful*, clings to the old error that the content of the beautiful is the idea. He says quite correctly that the fundamental concept from which all science of beauty must proceed is the concept of aesthetic appearance. Yes, but is the manifestation of the ideal world as such ever to be regarded as mere appearance? The Idea is, after all, the highest truth; when it appears, it appears precisely as truth and not as mere appearance. It is, however, a true appearance when the natural and the individual appear in an eternal, imperishable guise, endowed with the character of the idea; for in reality, this does not belong to them.

[ 20 ] Viewed in this light, the artist appears to us as the continuator of the World Spirit; the former continues creation where the latter leaves off. He appears to us in intimate communion with the World Spirit, and art as the free continuation of the natural process. In this way, the artist rises above ordinary, real life, and he lifts us—who immerse ourselves in his works—up with him. He does not create for the finite world; he transcends it. In his poem “The Artist’s Apotheosis,” Goethe has the Muse convey this view to the artist with the words:

“Thus does the noble man exert a powerful influence
for centuries upon his peers:
For what a good person can achieve
cannot be attained within the narrow confines of life.
Therefore, he lives on even after his death
and remains as influential as he was in life;
The good deed, the beautiful word,
It strives immortally, just as he strove in mortality.
So you, too (the artist), live on through immeasurable time;
Enjoy this immortality!”

[ 21 ] This poem perfectly captures Goethe’s thoughts on what I would call the artist’s cosmic mission.

[ 22 ] Who, like Goethe, has grasped art with such depth; who knew how to bestow such dignity upon it! When he says: “Great works of art, like the greatest works of nature, have been created by human beings according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imagined falls away: there is necessity; there is God,” this speaks sufficiently to the full depth of his views. An aesthetics in his spirit can certainly not be bad. And this will likely apply to many other areas of our modern sciences as well.

[ 23 ] When Walther von Goethe, the poet’s last descendant, died on April 15, 1885, and the treasures of the Goethe House were made accessible to the nation, many may well have shrugged their shoulders at the zeal of the scholars, who took charge of even the smallest remnants of Goethe’s estate and treated them like precious relics that, in the interest of research, must by no means be regarded with contempt. But Goethe’s genius is inexhaustible; it cannot be grasped at a glance, and we can only approach it more and more closely from various angles. And to that end, everything must be welcome to us. Even what appears worthless in isolation gains “significance” when we view it in the context of the poet’s comprehensive worldview. Only when we explore the full richness of the expressions of life through which this universal spirit has manifested itself does its essence—its underlying tendency, from which everything in his work springs and which marks a pinnacle of humanity—reveal itself to our soul. Only when this tendency becomes the common heritage of all who strive spiritually, when there is a widespread belief that we should not merely understand Goethe’s worldview but that we must live within it—and it within us—only then will Goethe have fulfilled his mission. This worldview must serve as the symbol for all members of the German people—and far beyond—in which they meet and recognize one another as part of a shared endeavor.