The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. The Psychology of the Arts

[ 1 ] How one should speak about the arts—I must say that I have actually been grappling with this question my entire life, and I will take the liberty of using two stages as my starting point, within which I have attempted to make some headway in this struggle. The first time was when, at the end of the 1880s, I was to deliver a lecture before the Vienna Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics.” With what I wanted to say at that time about the nature of the arts, I felt like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to express through gestures what he was actually trying to point to. For at that time, certain circumstances in my life had led me to speak through philosophical judgments about the nature of the arts. I had worked my way from Kantianism to Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism confronted me in Vienna in the form of a figure representative of Herbartianism: the aesthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his major work, *A History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science*, quite some time ago. He had also already presented to the world his systematic treatise on *Aesthetics as a Science of Form*, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to share with the world in this field. And then, in the lectures at the University of Vienna, I had this representative Herbartian, Robert Zimmermann, standing before me. When I got to know Robert Zimmermann personally, I was completely captivated by this man’s spirited, animated, and outstanding personality. What lived within Robert Zimmermann as a person could not help but be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, even though Robert Zimmermann’s entire demeanor had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I actually found certain aspects of that stiffness appealing, because the way this personality came across—with that peculiar coloration that the German language takes on when spoken by those who speak it from the German-Bohemian dialect, from Prague German—that linguistic nuance made him particularly likable. Robert Zimmermann’s Prague German made him exceptionally likable to me in a rare way when he said to me—who was already intensively engaged with Goethe’s *Theory of Colors* at the time—“Oh, Goethe can’t really be taken seriously as a physicist!” A man who couldn’t even understand Newton—he can’t be taken seriously as a physicist! —And I must say, the actual meaning of that sentence completely faded into the background for me behind the coquettish, graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann conveyed such things to others. I was extraordinarily fond of that kind of opposition.

[ 2 ] But then—or perhaps even before that—I got to know Robert Zimmermann, especially when, as a Herbartian, he spoke from the lectern. And I must say, at that moment, that amiable, likable man ceased to exist as a person in the aesthetic sense; Robert Zimmermann became, through and through, a Herbartian. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant—the way this man walked in through the door, ascended the podium, set down his elegant walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked over to the chair, sat down in a peculiar way, took off his glasses in a peculiar way, paused for a moment in a peculiar way, and—with his soulful eyes, now free of glasses—let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present; and at first there was something startling about it. But since I had already been intensively engaged in reading Herbart’s writings for quite some time, a light dawned on me immediately after that first impression, and I said to myself: Ah yes, there he enters through the door in true Herbartian fashion; there he sets down his elegant Herbartian walking stick; there he takes off his Herbartian coat; there he lets his gaze wander over the audience in true Herbartian fashion with his glasses off. — And now Robert Zimmermann began to speak in his extraordinarily charming dialect, tinged with the Prague accent, about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German took on the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

[ 3 ] I experienced this, and then—from Zimmermann’s subjective point of view—I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann’s aesthetics on the first page was Schiller’s saying, which, admittedly, Robert Zimmermann had adapted to Herbartian terms: “In the annihilation of substance by form lies the true artistic secret of the master”—for I had seen how this amiable, sympathetic, thoroughly graceful man seemed to be annihilated as substance and reappeared on the lectern in Herbartian form. It was an impression of extraordinary significance for the psychology of the arts.

[ 4 ] And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take offense at the expression I am about to use—may Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, forgive me for using the word “anthroposophy”—which he used in a book to describe a cardboard cutout pieced together from logical, aesthetic, and ethical abstractions—that I have used this word to scientifically address the spiritualized and animated human being. Robert Zimmermann called his book—in which he carried out the procedure I have just described—“Anthroposophy.”

[ 5 ] I had to free myself from this experience—in which, so to speak, the artistic seemed to have been recast into a form devoid of content—when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics.” I was able to accept the well-founded nature of Zimmermann’s view that, in art, one is by no means concerned with content—not with the “what”—but rather with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creative power of the human being. And we also saw Herbart take shape from Schiller. I could certainly see the profound validity of this tendency, but I could not help but counter it by pointing out that what can be achieved as form by true imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we derive from the work of art an impression similar to that which we otherwise receive only from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what human beings can perceive, to elevate the sensual into the sphere of the spirit—not to annihilate the material through form—that was what I sought to free myself from at the time, having absorbed it through a faithful study of Herbart’s aesthetics.

[ 6 ] However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of that time, whom I admired just as much as Robert Zimmermann—a man who is exceptionally dear to me—Eduard von Hartmann, wrote on all areas of philosophy, and during that very period he also wrote on aesthetics, approaching the subject from a perspective that was partly similar to and partly different from Robert Zimmermann’s. And again, please do not interpret the objectivity I am striving for as though I were trying to be unfeeling because of this. Eduard von Hartmann’s aesthetics can indeed be characterized by the fact that he stripped the arts—which were actually quite distant from him—of something he then called “aesthetic appearance.” He stripped the arts of what he called “aesthetic appearance,” much as one might proceed if one were to peel the skin off a living person. And then, following this procedure—after he had, so to speak, peeled the skin off the arts, the living arts—Eduard von Hartmann fashioned his aesthetics from it. And the flayed skin—is it any wonder that it turned into leather under the harsh treatment it then underwent at the hands of the aesthetician, who stood so far removed from the arts?—That was the second thing from which I had to free myself at that time. And I tried to incorporate into the mood of my lecture at that time what I would like to call: If the philosopher wishes to speak about the arts, he must have the self-denial to fall silent in a certain respect and seek only to allude, through chaste gestures, to that which philosophy, even when speaking, can never truly penetrate—before which it must come to an impassable halt and point to the essential like a silent observer.

[ 7 ] That was the mood—psychologically speaking—that I described at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.”

[ 8 ] Later, I was faced with the task of making a second stop along the path of that question I characterized at the beginning of my reflection today. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts.” And now, given the prevailing mood of the entire milieu at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within the artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once again that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at that time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics.” And so I spoke in such a way as to carefully avoid slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterizations immediately strips the very essence of art from the words. The inartistic nature of the mere concept, at that time, undermined the very forces from which speech arises. And, drawing on that mood, I now attempted to speak psychologically about the arts, strictly avoiding any drift toward philosophical formulations. Today I am to speak once again about the psychology of the arts.

[ 9 ] It’s actually not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages so vividly in one’s inner life, to pause at any other point. And so I had no choice but to turn my contemplation toward life. I sought some point through which I could enter into life by reflecting on the artistic. And lo and behold, I found—as if it were something naturally given—the charming Romantic, Novalis. And now, after taking this look at Novalis, when I ask myself the question: What is poetic? What is actually contained in this particular form of artistic experience within poetic life?—the figure of Novalis stands vividly before me. It is remarkable: Novalis was born into this world with a unique fundamental sensibility that carried him beyond the external, prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that, as if endowed with wings, soars in poetic spheres above what constitutes the prose of life. There is something that lived among us humans as if it were meant to express, at a certain point in the course of world events: This is how it stands in contrast to the outwardly sensory and real world with the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis immerses itself in life, and he begins a love affair—spiritually real through and through—with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And the entire love for this girl, who is not yet sexually mature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry—so thoroughly clothed in poetry that one is never tempted, when contemplating this relationship, to think of anything sensual or concrete. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul hovers freely above prosaic reality, as if in poetic spheres—all the fervor of this feeling lives in Novalis’s love for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after turning fourteen, at that time when the reality of physical life touches other people so strongly that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could occur for Sophie von Kühn, she is carried away into spiritual worlds, and Novalis resolves—out of a consciousness more profound than the instinctive-poetic one he had possessed until then—to, as it were, die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who, with the deepest human sensitivity, approached Novalis after that time say that, though he walked the earth as a living being, he was like one who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, speaking to something that is not on this earth, that does not in reality belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, detached from prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the mastery of external forces—the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality—already appears to him within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his way of life.

[ 10 ] If one then attempts to understand everything that sprang from this wonderfully formed soul—a soul that was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, and that was thus able to live with what had truly been torn from it before a certain stage of external reality had been reached—and if one opens oneself to all that then flowed from this soul of Novalis, one obtains the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question resolves itself simply by immersing oneself in the artistic current of poetic expression that flows from Novalis’s poetic and prose writings.

[ 11 ] But then one is left with a strange impression. When one delves psychologically in this way into the essence of the poetic—into a reality of life, that of Novalis—one gets the impression that there is something hovering behind the poetic, something that resonates through all that is poetic. One gets the impression that Novalis emerged from spiritual and soulful spheres, bringing with him something that, bathed in poetic radiance, transforms his outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world, bringing with it the spiritual-soul aspect in its purest form, so that it permeated and spiritualized the entire body, and that it absorbed space and time into the soul’s constitution—which was spiritual and soulful—in such a way that space and time, shedding their outward nature, reappeared poetically in Novalis’s soul. In Novalis’s poetry, it is as if space and time were being devoured.

[ 12 ] As we can see, poetry enters the world with a strong soul and a strong spirit, and out of its strength it carves out a place for itself in space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting them together through the power of the human soul, and in this melting together of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. Yet throughout Novalis’s work, something resounds through this process of the melting together of space and time—something that was like a deep, fundamental element within it. One could hear it everywhere—one can hear it everywhere—through what Novalis revealed to the world, and one cannot help but say to oneself: What is soul, what is spirit, came to light there in order to remain poetic, to poetically fuse space and time by appropriating them. But at first it remained something like the foundation of this soulfulness—something that lies deepest within the human soul, so deep within that it can be discovered as a creative force by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living creatively as the soul in the innermost being of the human being. The musical element—the musical, the resonant artistic world that reveals itself out of the harmony of the worlds and that, even in the most intimate aspects of human existence, is the artistic creative force emerging from the cosmos—lived as a fundamental element in all of Novalis’s poetry.

[ 13 ] If one attempts to enter the sphere where the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being creates most intimately, one encounters a musical formation within the human being, and one says to oneself: Before the musician sends his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has already taken hold of the musician’s being and first embodied the musical within his human nature, shaping it into his being; and the musician reveals that which the harmony of the worlds has unconsciously laid deep within the foundations of his soul. And this is the basis of music’s mysterious effect. It is also the basis for the fact that, when speaking of the musical, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself for contemplation through the corresponding experiences, by entering into this Novalisian poetry, one grasps something I would like to call the psychology of music.

[ 14 ] And then our attention turns to the end of Novalis’s life, which came at the age of twenty-nine. Novalis passed away peacefully, but surrendered to the element that had resonated through his poetry throughout his entire life. His brother had to play the piano for him as he was dying, and that very element—which he had brought with him to let it resonate through his poetry—was to receive him once more as he passed from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sounds of the piano, the twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He sought that musical homeland which he had, in the fullest sense of the word, left behind at his birth in order to draw the musicality of poetry from it.

[ 15 ] This, I think, is how one immerses oneself in the psychology of the arts, moving from reality into it. The path must be a delicate one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be stripped bare by abstract philosophical forms—neither by those derived from rational thought in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that, in the sense of Gustav Fechner, are the “bones” of external observation of nature.

[ 16 ] And Novalis—this is how he stands before us: Freed from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate within the poetic, merging space and time with the poetic, having not touched the external, prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and drawing us back into musical spirituality.

[ 17 ] And the question may arise: If Novalis had been physically capable of living longer—if what resonated musically and was expressed poetically in the inner, active psychology of the human soul and spirit—if that had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had continued to live on through a more robust physical constitution—where would that soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain longer within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at a time when there was still time to return to the musical, spaceless world without contact with external space and external time?

[ 18 ] I have no interest in giving this answer in theoretical terms. Here, too, I would like to turn my gaze toward reality, and it is there; it, too, has played out its part in the course of human development. When Goethe reached the age at which Novalis, having moved beyond his musical-poetic mood, departed from the physical world, the deepest longing arose in Goethe’s soul to penetrate that artistic world which had achieved the highest level in the embodiment of that essence capable of expressing itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, a burning longing arose in Goethe to journey south and, through Italy’s works of art in space and time, to perceive something of that from which an art had emerged—an art that understood precisely how to carry the truly artistic into the forms of space and time, above all into the forms of space. And when Goethe then stood before the Italian works of art and perceived that which, emerging from space, could speak not only to the senses but to the soul, the thought sprang from his soul: here it dawned on him how the Greeks—whose work he believed he recognized anew in these artworks—had created just as nature itself creates, and he believed he was on the trail of those nature-creating, creative laws. And in the face of the spiritual and soulful that met him there in the forms of space, a religious feeling welled up within him: “There is necessity; there is God.”—Before he had journeyed south, he had sought God together with Herder in their reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soulful expression of the transcendent in the external sensory world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza’s God, together with Herder, had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza’s philosophy regarding God came alive in his soul as he stood before the works of art, in which he believed he could once again glimpse the Greek art of space, and the feeling welled up within him: “There is necessity; there is God.”

[ 19 ] What did he feel? He evidently sensed how Greek works of art—in architecture and sculpture—gave form to that which lives within human beings as spiritual and soulful, that which seeks to express itself creatively into space, and that which surrenders itself to space—and, when it becomes painterly, also to time in a spatial sense. And Goethe psychologically embodied the other aspect, which lies on the polar opposite of Novalis’s experience. Novalis experienced how, when a human being penetrates into the innermost depths of space and time and wishes to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human perception. Goethe experienced how, when a human being works his or her spiritual-soul aspect into the spatial realm—chiseling it in—this spiritual-soul aspect does not cause the spatial and temporal to melt away, but rather surrenders itself in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual-soul aspect re-emerges, objectified from the spatial and temporal. Just as the human spirit and soul, without stopping at sensory perception, without remaining confined to the eye, breaks through to penetrate beneath the surface of things and, from the forces at work beneath that surface, to create architecture and shape sculpture—this is what Goethe experienced in those moments that led him to the statement: There is necessity; there is God. Therein lies all that which, from divine-spiritual existence, resides in the human subconscious—that which the human being communicates to the world without pausing at the chasm that his senses create between himself and the world. There is that which a person experiences artistically when he is able to imprint, chisel, and infuse the spiritual and soulful into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically speaking, musical, poetic, and creative? What is it in Goethe that drives him to feel the fullest necessity of nature’s creative work in the visual arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature’s creative work in “the spatial, the material works of art”? What is it that compels him, despite this sense of necessity, to say to himself: there is God?

[ 20 ] At both poles—with Novalis and with Goethe—where at one pole lies the destination toward which the path to a psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must lead, and where at the other pole lies the destination toward which psychological understanding must lead if it is to grasp the plastic-architectural—at both poles lies an experience that is inwardly lived in the realm of art, and in relation to which its greatest task in terms of reality is to carry it outward into the world: the experience of human freedom.

[ 21 ] In ordinary spiritual-physical-sensory experience, the spiritual-soul aspect penetrates formatively all the way to the organization of the senses; then it allows external physical-material reality to shine into the senses, and within the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-psychic existence, entering into that mysterious connection that causes physiology and psychology so much concern. Then, when someone is born into life with a primal poetic-musical disposition—one that sustains itself in such a way that it still seeks to express itself outwardly through the sounds of music—this spiritual-psychic aspect does not advance as far as the sensory waves; rather, it permeates and spiritualizes the entire organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, then it places the whole human being into the world in the same way that otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed into the world. Then the spiritual-soul aspect takes root within the human being, and then, when this spiritual-soul aspect engages externally with the material world, space and time are not absorbed into prosaic reality; rather, space and time are melted away in human perception. $o it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it fuses the reality of space and time in its perception. There the soul lives, without touching the ground of physical, prosaic existence, in freedom—though a freedom that cannot penetrate down into this prosaic reality.

[ 22 ] And at the other pole, the soul—the spiritual aspect of the human being—lives just as it did, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spirit are so powerful that they not only permeate the physical body of the human being all the way to the sensory waves, but also penetrate these senses and extend even beyond them. In Novalis, I would say, there is such a delicate spiritual quality that it does not penetrate to the point of fully organizing the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong spiritual-soulful quality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and sinks beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic; hence, above all, it yearns for an understanding of those artistic realms that carry the spiritual-soulful into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it seeks to immerse itself, together with that which extends beyond the limits of the human skin, into the animated space of sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial force of architecture, and into the suggestion of those forces that have already been internalized as forces of space and time, yet can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

[ 23 ] Here, too, it is a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what a human being becomes when their spiritual and soul aspects come to rest in the depths of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic and musical realms: freedom lives there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in the sculptural, architectural, and painterly experience: but freedom through such strength that if it were to express itself in any way other than artistically, it would shatter external, physical-sensual existence, because it dives beneath its surface.

[ 24 ] One senses this when one approaches with true understanding what Goethe said so forcefully—for example, in *Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years*—about his social ideas. What cannot be entrusted to reality—if it is to be shaped in freedom—becomes musical and poetic; what, in contemplation, must not be brought all the way to the reality of sensory, physical mental images, if it is not to destroy external reality; what must be left out of the form created by spatial and temporal forces, what must be left out of the mere imitation of the block of wood—because otherwise it would destroy the organic, for which it is death—becomes the plastic, becomes architecture.

[ 25 ] No one can understand the psychology of the arts who cannot comprehend the “more” of the soul that must live within the sculptor and the architect, beyond what is found in ordinary life. No one can understand the poetic-musical realm who does not allow for that “more” that lives in the spiritual-soul aspect of a human being—who cannot let this spiritual “more,” this spiritual transcendence of the physical organization, descend to the physical-sensual realm, but must hold it back in freedom. Liberation—that is the experience present in the true apprehension of the arts: the experience of freedom in relation to its polar opposites.

[ 26 ] What constitutes a person’s form resides within the person. In human reality, this form is interwoven with what becomes the person’s movement. Within the human form, the will permeates from within and perception from without, and the human form is, first and foremost, the outward expression of this interpenetration. A person lives in bondage when their will—their inwardly developed will, which seeks to enter into movement—must come to a halt before the sphere into which perception is absorbed. And as soon as a person is able to reflect on their whole being, a feeling comes alive within them: There is more alive within you than you can bring to life within yourself through your nervous-sensory organization in your interaction with the world. — Then arises the compulsion to transform the resting human form—which is the expression of this normal relationship—into movement, into movements that carry the form of the human figure itself out into space and time. Once again, it is a struggle of the human inner being with space and time. When one attempts to capture this artistically, eurythmy emerges from the interplay between the musical-poetic and the sculptural-architectural-pictorial.

[ 27 ] I believe that, in a certain sense, one must remain inwardly rooted in the arts when one attempts—which is still nothing more than stammering—to speak about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only does much lie outside, between heaven and earth, that human philosophy—as it usually presents itself—cannot even dream of, but that within the human inner being lies what, in entering into a relationship with the physical-bodily, brings about liberation, first within the artistic realm toward the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one seeks to grasp it within the normal soul, but that one can grasp it only in the higher spiritual-soul aspect of the human being, which transcends this normal soul and is predisposed toward supersensible worlds.

[ 28 ] When we look at two such eminently artistic figures as Novalis and Goethe, the secrets of the psychology of the arts are revealed to us phenomenologically, emerging from reality itself, as I believe. Schiller once felt this particularly deeply when, upon seeing Goethe, he spoke these words: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you enter the realm of knowledge.”—In other words: Only through artistic immersion in the fullness of the human soul do you struggle your way up into the realms of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful—I believe an artist’s—saying when it is said: “Create, artist, do not speak”—but a saying against which one must, because human beings are, after all, speaking beings, inevitably sin. Yet as true as it is that one must sin against such a saying: “Create, artist, do not speak”—it is also true, I believe, that one must constantly atone for this sin, that one must always strive, when speaking about the arts, to create through speech. Create, artist, do not speak; and if, as a human being, you are compelled to speak about the arts, then try to speak in a way that creates, and to create through speech.