The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Beauty and Art

[ 1 ] A book that evokes fond memories lies before me. Robert Vischer, the son of the famous aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer, has begun publishing his father’s works. He has titled the book *Das Schöne und die Kunst* (*Beauty and Art*), which he has compiled with great effort and care from the deceased’s surviving papers and from the notes of his students.

[ 2 ] As I read the book, all the mental images I once had about the nature of the arts come flooding back to me. That “once” refers to a time eighteen to twenty years ago. Back then, people my age turned to works on aesthetics by Vischer, Weiße, Carrière, Schasler, Lotze, and Zimmermann to gain insight into the nature of the arts.

[ 3 ] These men came from the philosophical tradition that dominated education in the first half of our century. Some drew on Hegel, while others drew on Herbart.

[ 4 ] And for these men, art was a philosophical matter.

[ 5 ] Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul, each in their own way, also formed mental images of the nature of art. They took art itself as their starting point. They articulated what a person is compelled to think when they allow art to take effect upon them. Their concepts of art were born out of art itself.

[ 6 ] Vischer, Carrière, Weiße, Zimmermann, and Schasler did not originally take nature as it is directly experienced as their starting point. They reflected on the totality of worldly phenomena. And the products of artistic creation are also part of these worldly phenomena. Just as they inquired into the nature of light, heat, and animal evolution, so too did they inquire into the nature of art. Their starting points were those of people of knowledge, not of those with an artistic sensibility.

[ 7 ] Of course, I do not mean to suggest that a man like Fr. Th. Vischer lacks artistic sensibility in the highest and purest sense of the word. On the contrary: his relationship to art is as vivid and personal as can be imagined. But when he speaks about art, he speaks as a philosopher.

[ 8 ] For Vischer, the world was a manifestation of the divine spirit. Art, therefore, is for him a representation of the divine spirit in marble, in lines and colors, and in words. How does the artist manifest the divine spirit in material form? That was the fundamental question for Vischer. All of his writings are grounded in a profound, mature philosophical education. The language he uses is understood by only a few today. It could be understood only by those who had internalized the philosophical ideas of Schelling and Hegel as an integral part of their education. Only they could take an interest in the questions Vischer posed and the ideas he shared.

[ 9 ] Today, few people can read a book by Vischer the way his contemporaries did. For people today, it discusses matters that are of no concern to them.

[ 10 ] For Vischer, art was, in the final analysis, an impersonal matter. It was one of the tasks assigned to humankind by higher powers. Although Vischer does not believe in a personal God, he does believe in a God. In a fundamental spiritual being that manifests itself in nature, in history, and in art. This fundamental being stands above humankind. Our greatest thinkers have abandoned this belief. For them, the spirit is not an independent entity. For them, the spirit exists only insofar as nature has the capacity to bring forth the spiritual from within itself. For them, the highest spirit is brought forth by humankind, which gives birth to it from its own nature. The spiritual exists only when human beings create it. Vischer believes that the spiritual exists in and of itself, and that human beings must grasp it. People today believe that only the natural exists independently of human beings, and that the spiritual is brought into being only through human beings. That is why, for Vischer, the artist is a person who is filled with the divine spirit and embodies it in his works. For people today, the artist is a person who feels the need to exert powers over things and to imprint his personality upon them. They do not believe that they are meant to embody a spirit; they want to create things that correspond to their mental images and their imagination.

[ 11 ] Vischer says: The sculptor imprints a human form on the marble that resembles no actual human being, because he unconsciously carries within himself the image, the idea of all humanity—the archetype of man—and seeks to embody it. This archetype is the divine in man. Modern artists know nothing of such an archetype. They know only that a form appears before their soul when they look at human beings, and that they wish to bring this form to life. They want to give birth to an artificial world alongside the natural world—one inspired by their own temperament and imagination. This is a world of human making, not one sprung from the divine spirit.

[ 12 ] People today no longer understand it when one speaks of art as a manifestation of the divine; they can only grasp that human beings have a need to shape things according to their temperament and inspiration.

[ 13 ] Modernists want to discuss art from a humanistic perspective; they no longer wish to address the religious undertones underlying Vischer’s remarks.