The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Sources of Artistic Imagination and the Sources of Supernatural Knowledge I

[ 1 ] From time immemorial, people have sensed the connection between artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge—what might be called “contemplative consciousness,” or, if I am not misunderstood (which could easily happen), “clairvoyance.” For the contemporary spiritual researcher, who, proceeding from the perspective of the present, attempts to penetrate the spiritual world, this relationship between artistic creation and supersensible knowledge is far more significant than the other, often emphasized connection between the visionary life—which, after all, is fundamentally based on pathological conditions— and what is truly clairvoyance—that which takes place solely within the soul, without the aid of the body.

[ 2 ] It is well known that poets—and artists in general—sometimes feel a very close connection between their entire creative process, their experiences, and the gift of clairvoyance. In particular, artists who seek their way into the supersensible realms through their creative work—fairy-tale writers or other artists who seek to embody the supersensible—rightly speak from a truly vivid experience about how they see their characters clearly before them, how these characters stand before them as if acting, making an objective, concrete impression when they engage with them. As long as such an encounter with that which is cast into artistic form does not rob the soul of its composure, as long as it does not degenerate into compulsive visions over which the human will has no power and which composure it cannot govern, then one can still speak of a kind of borderline experience between artistic perception and clairvoyance. Yet in the field of Spiritual Science research, a very clear boundary—and this is the important point—becomes apparent between artistic creation, with its source in artistic imagination, on the one hand, and seership on the other. Anyone who is unable to grasp this sharp boundary, who cannot make it fruitful for their own experience, will easily end up where many have ended up—artists I have encountered who actually harbored a certain fear that their creative work might be impaired if something of clairvoyance were to penetrate their consciousness. There are people who are true artistic souls but who consider it necessary for artistic creation that impulses well up from the subconscious or unconscious of the soul; yet they recoil from it as from a fire, fearing that something from a supersensible reality—which stands in opposition to clear consciousness—might shine into their unconscious creative process.

[ 3 ] With regard to one’s experience of artistic enjoyment, reception, and perception, and to the experience of the supersensible worlds through supersensible vision, there is, subjectively speaking, a tremendous difference in this experience. Artistic creation, reception, and vision allow the soul—in which they unfold—to retain the personality’s orientation toward the external world through the senses, aided by external perception and by a mental image, which then becomes memory. One need only recall the distinctive nature of all artistic creation and appreciation to realize: Certainly, artistic reception—and artistic creation as well—involves perception and sensory apprehension of the external world. It is not present in such a crude manner as is otherwise the case with sensory revelations; there is a spiritual element in apprehension and creation that freely intervenes and governs perception and mental images, as well as that which lives within the artist as memory and the content of memory. But one could not argue about the validity of naturalism and individualism if one were unaware of the reliance on perception. Likewise, one can be convinced that memories hidden in the soul—the subconscious, which is the memory within the human being—play a role in artistic creation and appreciation. All of this falls away in what, in the sense of modern spiritual research, constitutes the content of truly supersensory knowledge. There, one is dealing with a complete detachment of the soul from sensory perception, as well as from ordinary mental images and from what, as memory, is connected to mental images. Yes, that is precisely the great difficulty in convincing contemporaries that there can be such a thing as an inner experience that excludes perception, ordinary mental images, and memory. The natural scientist, in particular, will not admit that this could be the case. He will always assert: “You say that nothing influences your clairvoyance. I see that you are mistaken: You do not know how hidden content lies dormant in memory and emerges in subtle ways.” — This stems from the fact that those who raise this objection do not concern themselves with the methods by which one attains clairvoyance—methods that demonstrate that the impression from the spiritual world can be immediately present where nothing flows in from reminiscences or mysterious memories. The training is based precisely on finding the way to free the soul from external impressions and from mental images based on memories. This establishes a clear distinction between artistic creation and the attainment of supersensible knowledge, since the soul—the human “I”—in which supersensible knowledge lives, does not in fact draw upon the body’s organization, which nevertheless plays a role in artistic creation.

[ 4 ] But since this is the case, the question arises all the more: What is the relationship between the impulses that weave their way into artistic creation and appreciation from the subconscious depths of the soul, and that which is born from the pure spiritual world in immediately present impressions arising from supersensible knowledge? — To answer this question, I would like to begin with some experiences the seer himself has had with art. These experiences with the arts in general are characteristic right from the outset. It then becomes apparent that the person who has learned to dwell within the supersensible life and to gather supersensible knowledge truly becomes capable, for certain periods of time, of excluding all sensory impressions and the lasting mental images associated with these impressions. These can indeed be excluded; they can be pushed aside from the soul. Now, when the one who is thus immersed in supersensible vision also attempts to clearly take in, in the presence of a work of art, all that he is accustomed to taking in when faced with an external sensory appearance, a completely different experience arises. In the face of a sensory appearance, the seer is always able to exclude sensory perceptions and mental images capable of being retained in memory; but not in the face of a work of art. Despite the fact that everything based on the senses and the imagination is, of course, excluded, an important inner content always remains for the seer—one that he can neither exclude nor wishes to exclude. The work of art offers something that proves to be related to his capacity for seeing. This raises the question: In what does this relationship consist?

[ 5 ] One comes to realize this when one seeks to grasp what is at work within a person when he looks purely spiritually through supersensory knowledge. Then one comes to realize how flawed our mental images are—as human beings—about ourselves and our relationship to the outside world when we remain in ordinary consciousness. We believe that our mental images, feelings, and will are strictly separated from one another. Psychology does trace these activities back to one another, but not with the proper skill. But the one who experiences the true complexity of the soul’s life, as it manifests in clairvoyance, knows that such a distinction between mental images, feeling, and will does not even exist; rather, in ordinary consciousness and life, there is a remnant of feeling and will in every mental image, and a remnant of mental images and will in every feeling, and in every act of willing there is also a mental image, indeed even perception; a remnant of perception remains in the act of willing, hidden within it, subconscious. One must take this into account if one wishes to understand clairvoyance. For from what has been said, you can infer that in clairvoyant vision, mental images and perception are silent, but feeling and willing are not. But it would not be clairvoyance if a person were to develop only feeling and willing, as in ordinary consciousness. On the contrary, as a person enters the clairvoyant state, all willing, as it exists in ordinary life, must be silenced. The person enters a state of complete stillness.

[ 6 ] The term “clairvoyance” as used here does not refer to the restless striving to enter the spiritual world, as seen, for example, in dervish practices, but rather to the complete silence of everything that manifests as volition in ordinary life—as the force of emotional feelings. In whatever a person allows to pass from volition into action, something of emotional feeling still lives on. This feeling—even in relation to revelation—must be silenced within the volition. But it is not emotional feeling as such that is silenced, and above all, not the impulse of volition. Perception and mental images fall silent, but the impulses of emotional feeling and volition are justified; they merely transition into a state of tranquil mental disposition and will therefore develop their perceptive and imaginative character differently than usual. If one were to remain at the level of mere feeling, or at a false, mystical inner expression of volition, one would not enter the spiritual world. But in this tranquil state of mind, what are otherwise emotional feelings and impulses of volition play themselves out in a spiritual manner. Feeling and willing, in particular, express themselves in such a way that they appear before the human soul as objective, thought-filled spiritual beings, as the aspect of perception and mental images—which otherwise remained unnoticed in feeling and willing—comes to light and becomes capable of entering the spiritual world. Once one has grasped this—that as a seer one lives in feeling and volition just as a human being otherwise lives in thinking and perception—not in unclear thinking and feeling, not in nebulous mysticism, but as clearly as in mental images and perception— then one can engage fruitfully with art—though only in such a way that one first becomes aware of how worthless such generalizations are, as expressed, for example, by the word “art.”

[ 7 ] Art encompasses a wide variety of fields: architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, painting, and others; and one might say: If one were to establish the relationships between the various arts through the experience of the beholder, the diversity of the arts would appear much more significant than what philosophy seeks to summarize under the term “art.” — By attaining the ability to experience the world’s intellectual content and spiritual substance through emotional feeling and volition transformed into thought, one arrives at the point where one can establish a remarkable relationship with architecture.

[ 8 ] I said that in this form of clairvoyance, ordinary mental images and perception cease, but a completely different kind of thinking takes their place—one that flows from feeling and volition, an imagination that is, in fact, thinking in forms, which, as it thinks, could immediately represent forms of force distribution in space, proportional relationships in space. This thinking feels akin to what is expressed in architecture and sculpture when they represent true artistic forms. One feels particularly at home with the thinking and perception found in architecture and sculpture because that shadowy, abstract thinking—which the present age so loves—ceases, falls silent, and a concrete form of thinking takes its place—one that cannot help but allow its content to flow into spatial forms, into dynamic spatial forms—forms that expand, arch, and bend—in which the will flowing through the world finds expression. The seer is compelled not to grasp what he wishes to perceive from the spiritual world through thinking, as the rest of science does. One would recognize nothing spiritual that way. One is merely deceiving oneself if one believes that one is perceiving the spiritual, for one cannot penetrate the spiritual world with ordinary thoughts. Whoever wishes to penetrate the spiritual world must, as a thinker, possess something that creates within itself plastic or architectural—yet living—forms. This leads to the realization that the artist enters into an experience of forms in the subconscious. These forms rise up, fill his soul, and are transformed into ordinary mental images, some of which can be calculated; they are then translated into what is ultimately artistically shaped. The architect and the sculptor serve as conduits for what the seer experiences as a mental image and perception in the spiritual world. What the seer grasps as form for his life of thought and perception creeps into the architect’s creative process. From the depths of the soul’s life, it rises in waves and becomes conscious. This is how the architect and sculptor create their forms. The only difference is that what underlies architectural and sculptural creation as the essential formative force arises from subconscious impulses, and that the seer discovers these impulses as what he needs to grasp the great interconnections of the spiritual world. Just as one otherwise has a mental image and perception, so the seer must develop gifts that point to what permeates and stirs the great structure of the world. And what he, as a seer, thus perceives and experiences lives on in an unconscious way within the architect and sculptor, permeating their work as they give artistic form to it.

[ 9 ] Those who have had extrasensory experiences and seek a connection to poetic and musical creation feel their experiences in a different way. In this case, the seer gradually comes to perceive his inner world quite differently from ordinary consciousness, which creates a mental image of the sensory external world and perceives it: he feels himself within himself in his feelings and will.

[ 10 ] Anyone who can practice self-observation knows that one is present within oneself only through feeling and willing. But the seer, in fact, lifts feeling and willing out of himself; and because feeling and willing provide him with mental images and perceptions, he departs from himself in his feeling and willing. But something else takes its place. He finds himself again. By having the clear awareness of having stepped out of his body—and of perceiving nothing through his body—he finds himself again in the external world, intuitively passing into what he has perceived in moving forms and shaped into mental images. He carries his self into the external world. In doing so, he learns, as it were, to say to himself: Through truly inner experience gained from experience, I can recognize that I have stepped out of my body—which has always served as my mediator in relation to the external world—but I have found myself again by immersing myself in the spiritual world. — As this becomes an inner experience, the seer finds that he is compelled to receive his will and feeling once more from the spiritual world, to receive himself once more from the supersensible world. He must do this by once again receiving a feeling and a will—but a transformed feeling and will that does not rely on the body—a feeling that is intimately related to the experience of music, so closely related, in fact, that one could say: It is even more musical than the perception of music itself. It is such a feeling that it is as if one’s soul were flowing out in tones toward a symphony or another musical work, becoming a melody and a vibration oneself.

[ 11 ] With poetry, it is a matter of will. That is what poetry demands—the kind of poetry that one learns to perceive as true poetry precisely in this way, by rediscovering one’s own will within it. Feeling in music, will in true poetry.

[ 12 ] Visionary art occupies a unique and particularly significant position in relation to painting. The situation is such that neither one nor the other occurs, but rather something else—something even more characteristic. In contrast to true painting, the seer has the feeling—and he could be a painter himself, for we shall hear that artistic creation and supersensory perception can coexist— that the painter comes toward him from some indeterminate part of the world, bringing a world of line and color to him, while he himself comes toward the painter from the opposite direction and is compelled to incorporate into what he experiences in the spiritual world—as imaginations—that which the painter brings with him, that which the painter has transferred from the outer world into his art. Only the colors experienced by the seer are different from those of the painter, and yet they are the same. They do not conflict with one another. Anyone who wishes to form a mental image of this should take a look at the sensory-moral section of Goethe’s Theory of Colors concerning the moral effects of colors. The most fundamental elements are contained there. It describes, with inner instinct, what emotional effects individual colors evoke in the soul. Up to this level of feeling, clairvoyance emerges from the spiritual world—up to this feeling that one truly experiences every day in the higher world.

[ 13 ] One should not assume that, when describing the colored aura, the seer speaks in the same way that a painter speaks of colors. He experiences the sensation that one otherwise associates with yellow and red, but it is experienced spiritually and should not be confused with physical visions. This is where the greatest misunderstanding lies. For the seer, the experience of painting is like what might be described as an encounter with a counterpart coming from the opposite direction, where understanding is possible because what comes from the outside is the same as what is created from within. I always assume here that we are dealing with artistic creation, with which understanding is possible if art—rather than naturalism—is present from the outset. The seer is compelled to imagine what he experiences—roughly speaking, to illustrate it. This happens as he expresses what he experiences in colors and forms: there he encounters the painter. And again, one must say, if he were to ask the painter, “How do we relate to one another?”—the painter would have to answer: “Something lives within me!” As I walked through the world with my ordinary eye, seeing color and form and artistically transforming them, I experienced within myself something that had previously stirred in the depths of my soul; it rose into consciousness and became art.” — The seer would say to the painter: “What lives in the depths of your soul lives in things.” As you have walked through things, you live with your soul in the spirit of the things within them. But—in order to retain the strength for painting and to consciously experience what you experienced as you walked through things outside, so that what reaches the senses is not extinguished within you—you must keep alive in your subconscious the impulses that create the painting. — The point is that the unconscious impulses now welled up into consciousness. The seer says: I walked through the same world, but paid attention to what lives within you. I looked at what arose in your subconscious; I brought what was subconscious to your consciousness.

[ 14 ] It is precisely with such a view that the human soul will encounter, as a major and significant problem, something that might otherwise not always be properly observed. When one comes to know what has just been described through inner experience, one encounters something that deeply touches one’s life. This is the mystery of the incarnate being—this wondrous human flesh color—which is actually a major problem for clairvoyance. It serves as a powerful reminder that the kind of clairvoyance I am referring to is not entirely foreign or unknown to ordinary life; it is simply ignored. I would like to state this paradoxical but true proposition: Every human being is a clairvoyant, but people deny this in theory even where they cannot deny it in practice. If one were to deny it in practice, it would destroy all of life.

[ 15 ] There are people today who think: How is it that I find myself face to face with the “I” of a stranger? — They want to remain entirely within the realm of naturalism; they want to remain true naturalists, which is why they tell themselves: I have the shape of the face and other features in my memory, and because I have learned from various experiences that a human being is hidden within such forms, I conclude that there must be a human “I” behind this shape of the nose. — One finds such arguments today among the “intelligent people.” But this does not correspond to the experience one arrives at when observing life through one’s own participation in it. I do not infer a self from the shape of the face and so on. I am conscious of a self because the perception of what confronts one as a physical human being is based on something other than the perception of crystals or plants. It is not true that inanimate natural objects make the same impression as a human being. With animals, it is different. What stands before one as a sensory human object transcends itself, becomes ideationally transparent, and through true clairvoyance one sees a person’s “I” directly every time one stands before a human being. That is the real fact. This clairvoyance consists of nothing other than extending the way one faces a human being with one’s own subjectivity to the world, in order to see whether there is anything else to perceive in the same way as a human being.

[ 16 ] One cannot gain a true impression of clairvoyance without considering what underlies another person’s perception—a perception that is so nuanced precisely because it is based on the clairvoyance of the other soul. In this form of clairvoyance, the incarnate being plays a special role. For the outward observation of a person, it is a finished thing; for the one who sees supernaturally, however, the experience of observation changes in relation to the physical body. For him, there is an intermediate state. It arises when one directs the clairvoyance—which extends to the other realms of the world—toward the human form in such a way that the calm physical body oscillates between opposites and the intermediate state. One perceives paleness and blushing, which are as if they were radiating warmth. In this—in seeing a person turn pale and blush—the middle state is present. Connected to this experience of movement is the knowledge that one is also immersing oneself in the human being’s outer nature, not merely in their soul or their “I.” One delves into what the person is through his soul within his body—through the incarnate being. This is something that leads one into the relationship between artistic perception and supersensible knowledge. For what becomes so dynamic in the perception of the incarnate being lies unconsciously within the artistic creation of the incarnate being. The artist need only be subtly aware of this. But only by being able to experience this will an artist be able to place the subtle, living vibration at the center of the Incarnate Being.

[ 17 ] Thus, in painting, we see how the sources of artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge converge. In everyday life, they converge—even if we do not notice it—in the realm of language. Today, language is generally viewed in a highly intellectual, scientific manner; yet the life of language within us exists in a threefold way. Anyone who approaches language with clairvoyance and must express what is perceived in the spiritual world first acquires a feeling toward language that one might call crazy: When people speak to one another in this way, and even when they engage in ordinary science, everything they say is a degradation of language below the level at which language ought to stand. Language as a mere means of communication is a degradation. One senses that language actually lives in its own essence where poetry flows through it, where what springs from the innermost being of the human being flows through language. There the spirit of language itself is at work. It is actually the poet who first discovers where the true level of language lies, perceiving ordinary language as a neglect of that higher level. One can understand how a subtle poet, such as Morgenstern, could arrive at the observation that, in fact, a lower limit of speech is perceptible—one that is very widespread—the limit that can be called chatter. He finds that chatter has its roots in ignorance of the meaning and value of individual words, and that the chatterer ends up pulling the word out of its fixed contours and into vagueness. Morgenstern senses that this expresses a profound mystery of life. He says that language takes its revenge on the vague, on the ambiguous. — Since he was able to bridge the gap between poetry and visionary insight, this is just as understandable as when he finds their kinship with sound, image, architecture, and so on.

[ 18 ] This very connection, after all, lay at the heart of Goethe’s entire body of work; for a time in his life, he did not know whether he should become a poet or a sculptor. The seer, however, experiences what constitutes the content of his spiritual experience outside of language. This is something that is difficult to explain, because most people think in words, but the seer thinks without words and is then compelled to pour what is wordless in his experience into language that has already taken fixed form. He must adapt to the formal constraints of language. He need not feel this as a constraint, for he comes to understand the secret of language creation. He can make himself understood by stripping away the conceptual aspects of language. That is why it is so significant to understand that how the seer says it is more important than what he says. What he says is conditioned by the mental images that everyone brings with them from the outside. To avoid being regarded as a fool, he is compelled to clothe what he has to say in conventional sentences and mental images. For the highest realms of the spirit, what matters is how the seer says something. One truly understands the seer who has grasped the “how” of expression—who has realized that the seer takes care to say some things briefly, others more extensively, and others not at all; that he is compelled to formulate a sentence from one perspective and then add another from the opposite perspective. What is formative is what is important in relation to the higher realms of the spiritual world. Therefore, for understanding, it is important not merely to listen to the content—which, as a revelation of the spiritual world, is of course also important—but to penetrate through the content to the manner in which it is expressed, in order to see whether the speaker is merely stringing together sentences and theories, or whether he is speaking from experience. Speech from the spiritual world becomes evident in the manner in which it is spoken—not so much in the content, insofar as it is theoretical in nature, but in how it is expressed. In such communications arising from the forms of speech, the artistic element of language can influence the seer, inspiring him to rise to the very process of language creation, so that he recreates something of what existed when language emerged from the human organism.

[ 19 ] What, then, is the reason that what appears in clairvoyant consciousness is lived into the spirit world through artistic creation, yet lives in the artistic imagination in an unconscious and subconscious manner? — Artistic creation is, of course, a conscious process, but the impulses—the driving force—must remain in the unconscious if artistic creation is to be unbiased. Only those who know that human ordinary consciousness is, for certain reasons, destined for something other than leading us into the full world can understand what is at stake here.

[ 20 ] Our ordinary consciousness tends, on the one hand, toward a view of nature. But what this view provides us with does not conform to our concepts; they do not extend into the realm where matter haunts space, says Dz Bois-Reymond. And again: What lives in the soul cannot be fulfilled by reality. Even the most profoundly mystical experience always hovers above reality. Human beings do not attain the full world either through the observation of nature or through the observation of the soul. There is an abyss there that usually cannot be bridged. It is consciously bridged in contemplative consciousness, in artistic creation. There, self-knowledge must become something other than what is usually called by that name. Mystical insight, after all, considers itself to have accomplished enough when it is said: “I have experienced God, my higher self, within.” — True self-knowledge aims to penetrate to the core of how that which is otherwise experienced as the mere point of the “I” lives creatively within the organism. In that we have mental images and perception, we are not merely imagining and perceiving beings; we are also constantly breathing in and out. While we face the world in waking consciousness, we are always breathing in and out, but ordinary consciousness perceives nothing of what is taking place within us. Something wondrous is taking place there, which can only be recognized through contemplative consciousness—not by looking merely at nebulous concepts or at the abstract “I,” but by observing how this “I” lives, taking shape in the concrete. This reveals the following:

[ 21 ] When we exhale, the cerebrospinal fluid flows into the spinal canal, a long sac that contains all sorts of stretchy, elastic areas; it pushes downward, pressing against the veins of the body. I describe what happens there as an external process. Ordinary consciousness does not penetrate this process, but the soul subconsciously experiences it—this spreading of what comes from the brain into the veins of the body, and, upon inhalation, the backflow of venous blood into the veins of the back through the spinal canal, the influx of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain, and what takes place there as an interplay between the nerves and the sense organs. Ordinary consciousness is merely a shadow here, unaware of any of this, but the soul and the spirit are involved in it. This process appears chaotic. What pulses back and forth there takes the form of music in every human being. Inner music lives within this process. And the creative aspect of music is this: to raise into outer, conscious form what the musician has grown accustomed to experiencing as the music of his soul-body. Within it lives the tone, the subconscious life-rain of music, in which the human soul weaves. Our psychology is still entirely in the elemental realm; it has yet to explore the things that shed light on the artist’s life in harmony with the visionary tradition. Human experience is a complex matter. It is this subconscious knowledge of the soul that is the true impulse of artistic imagination, in that musical life unfolds between the spinal cord and the brain, where the blood surges in and the cerebrospinal fluid flows, so that the nerve is set into vibration, which resonates upward toward the brain. When this is considered in connection with the possibility of higher perception, there is more inner music to be savored in it than in the objective impulse from which the human soul is born, as the human being enters physical existence from spiritual life through birth or conception. The soul enters existence by learning to play the instrument of the physical body.

[ 22 ] And what happens when all this movement takes place—this vibration of the cerebrospinal fluid as it rises? What is happening there in the interplay between the nerves and the senses? — When the nerve wave strikes the external senses—note, not yet sensory perception—when the nerve wave simply strikes while one is awake, it lives unconsciously and is drowned out by perception: poetry! Between the senses and the nervous system lies a region where a person unconsciously creates poetry. The nerve impulse rolls into his senses—it flows unconsciously; this can be established physiologically—this life flows within the senses and is the production of poetry: the human being lives by creating inner poetry. And poetic creation is the bringing forth of this unconscious life.

[ 23 ] I have described this in relation to the breathing process. When exhaling, we must take into account that the cerebrospinal fluid pushes downward within the body, countered by the forces emanating from the body and by the forces through which the human being engages with the external world. We are constantly in a certain state of equilibrium in the external world, whether with legs spread apart, with a bent arm, whether we are crawling as a child, or whether we transform this state of crawling into the state of standing upright: we are in a state of inner equilibrium. The inner forces that counteract the waves exhaled are the basis of what is shaped in sculpture and architecture. The emotional feeling that lives within a person when they transition into movement yet keep that movement at rest is expressed in sculpture. This is an inner experience connected to the forms of the body. One recognizes this only when one is accustomed to shaping perception and thought into calm, formal imagery. One learns that what emerges from the body are not chaotic forces, but forms that reveal how the human being is integrated into the cosmos. By focusing more on external forces that the soul experiences subconsciously, one is dealing more with the plastic imagination. Between the two lies a strangely unconscious realm that the soul possesses deep within itself. As the nerve impulse vibrates between the body and the brain, it—which is essentially the cold, intellectual aspect of the human body—comes into contact with the warm blood. In such warmth and spiritual depth lie, unconsciously, the sources of artistic creation, which inspire the painter as he applies his impressions—drawn up from the subconscious—to the wall in colors. Human beings stand unconsciously within the spiritual world, which is only opened up through clairvoyance.

[ 24 ] It was not for nothing that, in ancient times, the body was regarded as a temple for the soul. This hinted at how architecture is related to the balance between the entire body and the entire cosmos.

[ 25 ] Art is meant to express what the artist is able to imbue in his creations only because his soul experiences it in connection with the world, because his body is a microcosmic image of the entire macrocosm. If this is to be brought to consciousness, it can only happen through the gift of vision. Why, then, does conventional aesthetics—which is modeled after the natural sciences—prove so unproductive? — The artist can make no headway with this academic aesthetics, which seeks to bring the unconscious in human nature to consciousness in exactly the same way as conventional natural science. What lives in artistic creation is brought to consciousness through the gift of vision; the artist, however, must not—unlike so many others—fear this gift of vision. The two realms can coexist separately within the human personality because they can be so distinct. It is possible for the soul to live outside the body in the spiritual world: then it can observe how that which otherwise remains in the subconscious crystallizes into artistic form, but also how that which can be artistically experienced by the seer—separate from his seership—can be experienced. Only through this experience can the artistic realm be enriched, and it can only benefit artists—just as artists, in turn, can enrich the seer’s vision. The seer who possesses artistic sensibility or taste will be spared from allowing Spiritual Science to become too heavily permeated by philistinism. He will depict this spiritual world with vitality and will be able to give more appropriate form to the “how” of Spiritual Science—of which I spoke—than one who, lacking artistic sensibility, has gained entry into the spiritual world. It is not necessary, as many artists do, to develop a fear of clairvoyance. I am speaking of a genuine fear, not merely the fear that someone might be accused of being an anthroposophist. I am speaking of the very common, principled fear that clairvoyance would impair the immediacy of artistic creation. In truth, this impairment does not exist. But we live in an age in which, due to the historical necessity of human development, the soul is compelled to transform into conscious awareness what was previously present in a naive, subconscious form. Only those who increasingly transform the unconscious into the free grasp of the conscious can truly understand the times in which we live today.

[ 26 ] If this demand of the times is not met, humanity will reach a cultural dead end. Art cannot be understood through conventional science; therefore, artists reject this form of aesthetics. Clairvoyance, however, develops a science that does not strip the dew from the blossoms of art by seeking to comprehend it. Clairvoyance is flexible enough to comprehend art. Therefore, one can recognize as a fact of our time that a bridge must be built between artistry and clairvoyance; one can emphasize this as a necessity, just as Christian Morgenstern so beautifully emphasized it in words that point to the necessity of a radical change. He says: “Whoever wishes to immerse themselves in what can be experienced of the divine-spiritual today merely through feeling, rather than penetrating it through understanding, is like the illiterate person who sleeps with a primer under their pillow their whole life.”

[ 27 ] People often want to sleep their whole lives with the primer of world knowledge under their pillow, so as not to let clairvoyant science weaken their original, elemental creativity. Anyone who grasps clairvoyant science—as it can be understood today in keeping with the spirit of the times—will understand that, in the spirit of Morgenstern, one must emerge from illiteracy, build bridges between artistry and clairvoyance, and that through this, new light will shine upon art, and new warmth will flow into clairvoyance through art. Thus, as the fruit of the right efforts, in a healing future, a profoundly significant impulse can work into the future development of humanity through clairvoyant light and artistic warmth.