Understanding Art

GA 271 — 1 June 1918, Vienna

The Sensual and the Supernatural — Spiritual Knowledge and Artistic Creation

Some friends who were present at my lectures in Munich on the relationship between spiritual science and art were of the opinion that I should also speak about the thoughts expressed there here in Vienna. And in complying with this wish, I would ask you to accept what I am going to say this evening entirely as meant to be unpretentious and as consisting only of aphoristic remarks about many things that could be said about the relationship between what might be called modern seership, as it is striven for by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and artistic creation and the nature of artistic enjoyment.

First of all, there is a certain prejudice against such a consideration as the one to be presented here, and prejudices are not always unfounded. There is a certain well-founded prejudice that is based on the insight that artistic creation, artistic enjoyment, artistic feeling actually have nothing to do with any view of art, with any knowledge of art. And very many people who are involved in the artistic process are of the opinion that they actually do harm to the element of the artistic creation and the artistic enjoyment if they associate thoughts, concepts, and ideas with what one experiences as an artist. I believe, however, that this prejudice is well-founded with regard to everything that can be called abstract, conventionally scientific aesthetics. I think that this science is rightly shunned by the artistic view, because truly artistic feeling is actually desolate, impaired by anything that somehow leads to a conventionally scientific view.

On the other hand, however, we live in an age in which, out of a certain necessity in world history, much of what previously worked unconsciously in man must become conscious. Just as we are no longer able to view the social and societal relationships between people in the light of myth, as was the case in earlier times, but are simply forced by the course of human development to seek our refuge in a real understanding of what is pulsating in the historical process, if we want to recognize what social structure, social togetherness and so on is among human beings, it is also necessary that much of what has rightly been sought in a more or less conscious or unconscious way in the instinctive workings of the human imagination and the like, be raised into consciousness. It would be raised up even if we did not want it. But if it were raised up in a way that was contrary to the progress of creation, the result would be what should be avoided: impairment of the intuitive-artistic, which impairment must be excluded precisely by the living-artistic.

I am not speaking as an esthete, nor as an artist, but as a representative of spiritual scientific research, as a representative of a world view that is imbued with the conviction that, as human development progresses, we will increasingly be able to penetrate into the real spiritual world that underlies our sensory world. I am not speaking of some metaphysical speculation, I am not speaking of some philosophy, but of what I would call supersensible experience. I do not believe that it will take long before it is recognized that all mere philosophical speculation and all logical or scientific endeavor is inadequate to penetrate into the spiritual realm. I believe that we are on the threshold of an epoch that will recognize as a matter of course that there are forces slumbering in the human soul and that these slumbering forces can be drawn out of this soul in a very systematic way. I have described how these slumbering powers in the human soul can be awakened in my various books, in 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds', 'Soul Mysteries' and 'The Riddle of Man'. So I understand spiritual knowledge to mean something that is basically not yet there, something that is only taken into account by a few people today, something that is not based on the continuation of already existing knowledge, be it mysticism or natural science, but on the acquisition of a special kind of human knowledge, which is based on the fact that man, through the methodical awakening of certain slumbering soul powers, brings about a state of consciousness that relates to ordinary waking life as this waking life relates to sleeping or dreaming life. Today, we are basically only familiar with these two opposing human states of consciousness: the dull, chaotic consciousness of sleep, which is only seemingly completely empty, only subdued, and the daytime consciousness from waking up to falling asleep. We can relate the mere images of dream life, when the will nature of the human being falls asleep, to the external physical reality, which relates him to the things of the environment. Likewise, as humanity continues to develop, it will come to effect an awakening from this waking consciousness to what I call the seeing consciousness, where one does not have external objects and processes before one, but a real spiritual world that underlies our own.

Philosophers want to open it up; you cannot open it up, only experience it. Just as little as you can experience your physical environment in dream life, you cannot experience the spiritual environment in waking consciousness: not through mysticism, not through abstract philosophy, but by bringing yourself into a different state of mind, by moving from dream life into ordinary waking consciousness.

Thus we speak of a spiritual world from which the spiritual and soul-life emerges just as the physical and bodily life emerges from the sense world. Such spiritual research is, of course, completely misunderstood in its peculiarity today. People are such that they judge what arises among them according to the ideas they already have, some even according to the words they already have. They want to tie in with something already known. As far as the results of the seeing consciousness are concerned, this is not the case, because it is not what is already known. The seeing consciousness, one could, if the word were not misunderstood, call it the visionary, the clairvoyant consciousness, whereby I do not understand anything superstitious. What comes from the visionary is judged by what people already know. Everything of a dubious nature, such as visionary life, hallucinations, mediumship and so on, has been brought close. What I mean here has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. All that I have listed last are the products of the sick soul life, that soul life which is more deeply embedded in the physical body and which brings images from the physical body to the soul. What I call the seeing consciousness takes the opposite path. The hallucinatory consciousness goes below the ordinary state of mind into the physical, while the seeing consciousness goes above the ordinary state of mind, lives and breathes only in the spiritual-mental realm, making the soul completely free from bodily life. In our ordinary consciousness, only pure thinking is free from bodily life, which many philosophers therefore deny because they do not believe that man can unfold an activity that is free from the body. That is the starting point: a seeing consciousness can be trained that develops upwards into the spiritual world, where there is nothing physical around us. This seeing consciousness now feels completely unrelated to any medium or visionary, but it does feel very much related to a real, genuine artistic understanding of the world. That is what I hope and long for, that a bridge could be built between real, genuine seership and artistic experience, whether in creation or in artistic enjoyment, in an unpedantic, artistic way between these two human perspectives.

It is indeed an experience for those who live in a visionary way that the source, the real source from which the artist creates, is exactly the same as that from which the seer, the observer of the spiritual worlds, draws his experiences. The only difference is the way in which the seer attempts to gain his experiences and to express these experiences in concepts and thoughts, and the way in which the artist creates. This is a considerable difference, and one which we may perhaps discuss today. But the source from which the artist and the seer draw is, in reality, one and the same.

Before I go into this question of principle, I would like to make a few preliminary remarks that may seem trivial to some, but which claim nothing less than to show that an artistic world view is not something that is arbitrarily added to life. For someone who strives for a certain totality, for a certain wholeness of life, artistic world view appears as something that belongs to life just as much as knowledge and the external banal hustle and bustle. A dignified existence is inconceivable without the permeation of our cultural life with artistic feeling.

It is important to truly recognize that wherever we go and stand, there is a latent urge within us to perceive the world aesthetically, artistically. I would like to give a few examples of this. However, we often do not become aware of the artistic experience that accompanies our life, our existence between the lines. It lives quite below the threshold of consciousness. If I have to visit someone and I enter their room and the room has red walls, red wallpaper, and they then come and talk to me about the silliest things, or perhaps don't talk at all, behave very boringly, then I feel that there is a falsehood. It remains entirely in feeling; it does not become thought, but I feel that there is untruth. However strange, however paradoxical it may appear, if someone papers his room in red, he disappoints me if he does not bring me something meaningful in thoughts in the red room in which he receives me. This does not need to be true, of course, it does not need to happen, but it does accompany our soul life. We have this feeling deep in our souls. If we enter a room with blue walls and someone spouts words at us, not letting us get a word in edgewise and considering himself the only person of importance, we feel it is at odds with the blue or violet walls of his room. The external prosaic truth need not correspond to this, but there is a special aesthetic truth that is as I have stated it. If I am invited to dinner somewhere, or let's not say snowed in, but politely invited to dinner, and I see that the place setting is red, painted red, I have the feeling that these are gourmets who eat to eat, enjoy eating. If I find a blue place setting, I have the feeling that they don't eat to eat, but that they want to tell each other something while eating, and leave the telling to the telling that otherwise accompanies social gatherings. These are real feelings that always live in the subconscious. If I meet a lady in a blue dress on the street and she shoots at me and behaves aggressively instead of reservedly, I find that contradictory to the blue dress, but I would find it natural if I met a lady in a red dress like that. Of course, I would also find it natural if a lady with snail hair was snappish. There is something that lives in the soul as a fundamental tone. I do not mean to say anything other than that an aesthetic feeling is there, even if we do not bring it to mind, which we cannot exclude: our mood depends on it; we are in a good or bad mood. We know what a good or bad mood is, but only those who engage more closely with things can become aware of the reasons for it. In this lies what might be called the necessity to pass from natural aesthetic feeling to life in art. Art simply accommodates natural life, just as the other ways of looking at people do.

The seer who has developed these powers, of which I have spoken, has a special way of experiencing art, and I believe that, even if not artistically, then at least in terms of the evaluation and perception of art, something can be gained from the special experience of seership in relation to art. The seer, who awakens his soul in such a way that he can have a spiritual world around him, is always able to turn his soul life away, to distract it from all that is merely external, sensual reality. If I have before me – I speak in the third person, not individually – a piece of external physical object or process, I am always able, in the space where the object is, to exclude perception for myself, so that I see nothing of the physical in that space. That is the real abstraction that is possible for seership. It can only be done with natural objects, not with what is truly artistically created. And I consider that to be something significant. When confronted with a work of art, the seer is not able to completely exclude the object, the artistic process, just as he can exclude an external process. What is truly artistic creation, imbued with spirit, remains spiritually before the consciousness of the seer.

This is the first thing that can testify to us that truly artistic creation and visionary beholding come from the same source. But there is much more that is very significant in this direction. You see, the seer, when he applies the means that develop his soul, comes to a very different way of conceiving as well as willing. If we use ordinary expressions, we can of course say that both the conceiving and the willing become inward, but this 'inward' is actually not correct, because one is still outside, spreading one's whole view over a real spiritual world. A different conceiving and a different willing occurs in seership.

The visualization does not proceed in abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are something that is suitable for the physical world, for registering it in its phenomena, for finding natural laws, and so on. The seer does not think in such thoughts, he does not think in abstractions, he thinks in thoughts that are actually weaving images. This is still somewhat difficult to understand in the present, because it is not yet fully known what is meant by an activity that is actually a thinking, but which does not think abstract thoughts and follows things, living in the forms and configurations of things. This imagining can be compared to the formation of surfaces and curves, as the mathematician does. But it comes to life inwardly, as Goethe attempted in his theory of metamorphosis in its elementary state. Today, the inward, visual imagination can become much more alive. This visual imagination is extraordinarily akin to the basis of certain areas of creative art, namely sculpture and architecture.

The strange thing is that in relation to this new thinking, this new imagining that the seer acquires, he feels most akin to the forms that the truly artistic architect develops and the forms that the sculptor must base his work on. There is really something like architectural visualization, or visualization in sculptural forms, that is capable of following things in the visionary grasp of the world in such a way that one learns to understand them in their spiritual inwardness, and also learns to transcend them, to rise purely into the spiritual world. With abstract thoughts one can learn nothing about the inner nature of things. The seer feels akin to the architect and the sculptor in his new thinking. He must think the world in the way of spiritualizing that unconsciously or subconsciously underlies the work of the sculptor and the architect. This prompts one to inquire as to the source of this. The question arises: What is it that the seer actually uses? He uses certain hidden senses, senses that are present in ordinary life but that only resonate softly and are not fully expressed in ordinary life. For example, we have a sense that could be called the sense of balance. We live in it, but we are only aware of it to a limited extent, not fully consciously. When we take a step, for example, or stretch out or bend our hand, all these actions that bring us into some kind of relationship with space are connected with a perception that does not quite reach our consciousness, as it does with seeing and hearing, except that these senses are much louder and more clearly audible. But this sense of balance and the related sense of movement are only subtly present because they are not just meant for our inner life, but convey our place in the cosmos. How I stand in the cosmos, whether I am walking towards the sun or away from it and feel that I am drawing closer and closer to the light, and at the distance the light feels dimmed in some way, this feeling of being inside the whole of the world is something that cannot be described in any other way than to say: man in his movement is constructed as a microcosm out of the macrocosm and experiences as a microcosm his being placed in the macrocosm through such a sense.

When a sculpture is created, it is nothing more than perceptions of a usually hidden meaning being translated into the design of external surfaces and the like. What we as human beings always carry with us in our feeling for the world is unconsciously expressed in architecture and sculpture. However strange this observation may at first seem, anyone who is truly able to explore psychically the relationship between individual architectural forms, what lives in the sculptor's imagination as he shapes his surfaces, knows that what I have just hinted at plays a mysterious part in this creative work. The seer does nothing other than to bring this sense of placing oneself in the world to full consciousness. He develops it in the same way that the architect, the sculptor, is artistically prompted by what he feels in his body to shape as forms in the external material. From this point of view, one sees certain things; I could not only talk for many hours in this regard, I could talk for days. Anyone who acquires a feeling for sculpture knows that mere imitation is not truly sculptural. Those who try to answer the question “What is actually in the sculptural?” perceptively, not abstractly, cannot say that a surface is only significant to them because it imitates a surface in the human body and the like that exists in external nature. That is not it. What is experienced in the sculptural is the intrinsic life of the surface. Anyone who has discovered the difference between a surface that is curved only once and one that is curved again knows that no surface that is curved only once can somehow have sculptural life within itself. Only a surface that is curved within its curvature can express life as a surface. This inner expression – not symbolic, but artistic – is what is at issue here, not imitation, not adhering to the model, this is what constitutes the secret of the two-dimensional itself.

This touches on a question that is indeed as unresolved as possible in the present day. Not only do we see many people today enjoying art, which is quite right, but we also see many people judging art almost professionally. Now, I believe that, precisely on the basis of the premises underlying today's considerations, I really do not have to express a critical judgment, but simply express what comes more and more to mind: I do not believe that anyone who has never kneaded clay, who is only a critic, can ever get an idea of what is actually essential to sculpture. I do believe that everyone can enjoy art, but I don't believe that anyone can judge art who has not made those attempts that have shown him what artistic forms can be realized within the material. Because very different things are realized in reality by the material than mere imitation of the model and the like. Mere imitation of the model is thus artistically no more valuable than the imitation of the nightingale's song through the use of certain tones. Real art begins where nothing is imitated anymore, but where something new and creative is created. In architecture – not in music, but very much so in sculpture – we draw on the model. But something that is somehow imitative in relation to the model is not art. Art begins where imitation can no longer be spoken of. And what works and weaves as an independent spiritual reality, unconsciously by the artist, consciously by the seer, is what is common to the seer's perception of the world and the artist's creation, except that it is also expressed spiritually by the seer, and by the artist, because he cannot express it, but only has it unconsciously in his hands, in his imagination, to which “material can be incorporated.

The seer feels a completely different affinity with the poetic and the musical arts. It is particularly interesting in the case of music how the seer experiences his experiences in a different way when he enters the realm of art with his seership. I must make a comment about what I call seeing: I do not mean all the time, but only in the moments when one puts oneself in this state. Therefore, it does not apply that the seer experiences the musical in other times than when he wants, as it is now described. At other times, he experiences music as any other person does. He can compare what he experiences musically and what he experiences when he sees the musical work of art. When it comes to musical works of art, it is important that the seer is clear about experiencing music in such a way that it is entirely spiritual, and in such a way that the concrete spiritual feels a direct connection to the musical. I have said before that the seer develops a new power of imagination, he visualizes in such a way that he feels at home in architectural and sculptural creation. — In that the seer not only grasps things imaginatively, but also develops feeling and pictorial powers, but in such a way that they enter into a union, one cannot speak of a separation of feeling and willing; one must speak of a feeling will and a willing feeling, of an experience of the soul that connects these two, which usually go hand in hand in ordinary consciousness, to form the totality of feeling will. Sometimes this sentient volition is more nuanced towards volition, at other times more towards feeling. When the seer, in the elevated spiritual state of soul, places himself in the realm of music, he experiences everything that occurs in his soul with the nuance of feeling in the truly musical, in the genuine musical. He experiences it in such a way that he does not separate the objective tone and the subjective tone experience from one another, but that these are one in the visionary experience, that the soul flows as the tones flow into one another, only that everything is spiritualized. He experiences his soul poured out into the musical element; he knows that what he experiences through the newly formed feeling volition is woven into the tone substance by the musician from the same source. It is particularly interesting to investigate the origin of the fact that the creative musician brings up from the unconscious the spiritual that the seer beholds and lays it into his material. In the realm of music, there is a revelation of what underlies it.

In all unconscious phenomena that occur in the life of the soul, the miracle structure of our organism plays a role in a completely different way. It is becoming more and more apparent that our organism should not be regarded in the way that it is by the ordinary biologist and physiologist, but that it must be regarded as an image of a spiritual model. What the human being carries within him is the image of a spiritual model. The human being enters into existence through birth or through conception, and he applies the laws of heredity that are his, as well as that which descends from a spiritual world and behaves in relation to the physical in such a way that the physical is truly an image of the spiritual. How this comes about, I cannot explain today. The fact exists that in our organism such a working takes place, which proceeds according to spiritual-pictorial laws. With music, this is particularly remarkable. We believe that when we enjoy music, the ear is involved and perhaps the nervous system of our brain, but only in a very external way. Physiology is only just beginning in this field and will only reach a certain level when artistic ideas are incorporated into this physiological and biological area. There is something completely different at the root of it than the mere hearing process or what takes place in the nervous system of our brain. What underlies the sense of music can be described as follows: every time we breathe out, the brain, the head space, the inner space of the head, is caused by breathing to let its brain water descend through the spinal cord sac into the diaphragm region; a descent is caused. The inhalation corresponds to the reverse process: the brain water is driven against the brain. There is a continuous rhythmic up and down movement of the cerebral fluid. If this were not the case, the brain would not lose as much of its weight as is necessary to prevent it from crushing the underlying blood vessels; if it did not lose so much of its weight, it would crush our blood vessels. This cerebral fluid moves up and down in the arachnoid space, in expansions that are elastic and less elastic, so that when it rises and falls, the cerebral fluid flows over the less elastic expansions, over some that expand more or less. This gives a very wondrous way of working within a rhythm. The whole human organism, apart from the head and limbs, expresses itself in this inner rhythm. What flows in through the ear as sound, what lives in us as a sound image, becomes music when it encounters the inner music that is played by the fact that the whole organism is a strange musical instrument, as I have just described.

If I were to describe everything to you, I would have to describe a wonderful inner human music, which is not heard but is experienced inwardly. What is experienced musically is basically nothing more than the response of an inner singing of the human organism. This human organism is, precisely in relation to what I have just described, the image of the macrocosm: that we carry within us, in the most concrete laws, more strictly than natural laws, this lyre of Apollo, on which the cosmos plays within us. Our organism is not what biology alone recognizes, but it is the most wonderful musical instrument.

One can cite very rough things to show how man is built according to strange cosmic laws. To cite the most trivial thing: we take eighteen breaths on average in one minute. Let's calculate how many that is in a twenty-four hour day: that's 25,920 breaths; that's how many breaths in a whole day. Let's calculate a human day. We can calculate a person's day, although many people grow older, to be between seventy and seventy-one years: a person's day. Try to calculate how much that is for a single twenty-four-hour day! 25,920 – that's how many breaths you take in one day! The world breathes us out and breathes us in as we are born and as we die. It takes just as many breaths during a human day as we do during a twenty-four-hour day.

Take the Platonic solar year. The sun rises in a certain sign of the zodiac. The vernal point moves on. In ancient times, the sun rose in the sign of Taurus, then in Aries, now in Pisces. Modern astronomy schematizes. This vernal point apparently goes around the whole sky – but apparently, but that is not important – and of course, after a significant number of years, it arrives at the same point again: after 25,920 years. The Platonic solar year is 25,920 years long! Take a human day of 71 years: it has 25,920 individual days; take a single human day of 24 hours: it has 25,920 breaths in the experience. You see, we are integrated into the rhythm of the world. I believe — and one could engage in many reflections on this point — that there is no more abstract religious concept that could evoke such fervor as the awareness that one's own outer physical organism is so embedded in the macrocosm, in the cosmic structure. The seer attempts to penetrate this embeddedness in a spiritual way. It lives itself out in our inner music: What comes out of the organism, what strikes up into the soul — the soul's resonance, resonating with the cosmos — is the unconscious element of artistic creation. The whole world resonates when we truly create artistically.

There you have the common source between being an artist and being a seer: unconsciously in the artist, by incorporating the laws of the world into the material; consciously in the seer, by attempting to behold the purely spiritual through the seeing consciousness.

By studying these things in this way, one learns to recognize what causes the artist to unconsciously incorporate what is entrusted to the material. Just as inner music lives in our respiratory system, which then becomes outer music in art, so too does poetry live there. In this respect, today's physiology is still very far behind. Because if you want to understand it, it is not the sensory physiology or the nervous physiology of the brain that needs to be studied, but the border area where the brain and nervous system converge. It is precisely at this border, in the physiological area where, if a person is predisposed to it – you always have to be predisposed to the artistic – that the source of poetic creation lies. And the seer finds the poetic creation most particularly when he enters into the realm of his inner experience, where the feeling-will inclines more toward the side of the will. Otherwise, the will expresses itself in the entire physical body; in that which is the imagination, the will lives where the brain and nerves and sense organs meet: that is where the poetic images are generated. When this is detached from the physical, it is the feeling will through which the seer enters into the realms from which the poet draws from the same source. Therefore, through this feeling, willing sense of the seer, when he appropriates the state of mind in order to enjoy the poetic with his state of mind, he feels in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the poetic. He must see what the poet creates. This leads to the fact that at the moment when the poet presents one thing or another, not drawing from reality but presenting something that is actually merely imagined, composed, unreal, inartistic, at that moment the seer sees in a creative way what is presented. A person who is not a seer does not feel so strongly when the playwright presents an unreal figure. The seer, for example, cannot feel about Thekla from “Wallenstein” other than as if she were made of papier-mâché, so that when he looks at her, he sees her knees buckling. And this with a great poet! Every deviation from reality, every failure to depict reality, is felt in such a way that the seer must recreate in plastic form precisely what the poet creates, and he withdraws his thinking from the plastic. The seer submerges himself in an inner plastic in relation to the poet. The peculiar thing about this is that in the poetic, the seeing consciousness creates sculpture, which is why the seer sees caricatures in what is often truly much praised. But the satirist cannot but see in many a dramatic performance, in which it is not even noticed that the figures are only puppets stuffed with tow, such puppets marching across the stage, or they arise before him when he reads the drama. Therefore, the seer can endure torments through what is brought about by fashion folly or otherwise, because he sees what is created formlessly in mere poetry.

Christian Morgensiern, who aspired to seership, made a beautiful statement. It can be found in the last volume of his posthumous works, in the “Stufen”. There he says, wanting to characterize his own soul, that he feels close to the architectural, the sculptural. This is the feeling: When one aspires towards the visionary, inwardly the poetic aspect is transformed into the plastic. When one looks at it this way, one can never believe that the visionary, with its inner mobility and its response to spiritual entities, can have a scorching and paralyzing effect on the artist, but only as a good friend, a good patron. They cannot disturb each other. Only things that flow together can disturb each other. But the seer can never allow his seership to disturb his artistry; he can permeate it with his seership. They are completely separate from each other; flowing from the same source, they can never disturb each other in life. This is no longer sufficiently felt.

The seer has a very difficult time making himself understood to people. He has to use language. But language has something very peculiar about it. It only appears to be a unity; in reality it is a tripartite thing. One experiences it namely on three levels. First, as we have it, in the way we communicate from person to person in everyday life, in the way we live our philistine lives and say the words that have to flow from person to person in order to shape that philistine life. Anyone who has a vivid sense of language, who experiences language through the eyes of a seer, cannot help but feel that the use of language as just described is a debasing of it. Perhaps one will say: Man is grumbling about life. He merely recognizes that not everything can be perfect, and thus refrains from creating perfection in a sphere where imperfection must necessarily prevail. In the outer physical life it is absolutely necessary that there should be imperfections: trees must also wither, not only grow. There must always be imperfection in life for perfection to arise. Language is pressed down from its original level, is pushed to a subordinate level. And the way we use language in life, we could only become a schoolmaster, then we would only turn a withered, dried-up, philistine state into a straw-like being, but otherwise we would achieve nothing. Words cannot have the values that they have by themselves, because language, as the property of a people, lives on its own level and, on its own level, is an artificial construct, not a prosaic one. It is not there to facilitate communication in everyday life; as an expression of the national spirit, it is an artificial construct. We belittle it, but we have to, by pressing that which is actually an artistic creation down into the prose of life. It only comes into its own in the poetic creations of a people when the spirit of language truly reigns. That is the second way in which language lives.

The third way is only experienced in the realm of seeing. One is in a strange position: for if one wants to express what is seen, one does not have the words of the language. They are not there in reality. Just as one learns to speak in any language and uses the words to express what one wants, one cannot express what one has as a seer's vision. The words are not shaped for it. Therefore, the seer has the need to express some things quite differently. He is always struggling with language to be able to say what he wants to say. He has to choose the way to put some thing into a sentence that approximately expresses what he wants to say; he has to say a second sentence that says something similar. He must count on the goodwill of his listeners so that one sentence illuminates the other. If this goodwill is lacking, then people want to criticize various contradictions. The one who really has something to express must work in contradictions, and one contradiction must illuminate the other, since the truth lies in the middle. By putting oneself in this position, one arrives at something in terms of language that already expresses the relationship between the artistic and the visionary in this field. The seer must count on goodwill to seek to penetrate more into how he says the thing than what he says. He strives to say much more in the way he says the thing than in what he says. He gradually succeeds in transporting himself back to the spirit of language creativity that prevailed before any language came into being, to re-immersing himself in the sounds, in the genius of the sounds, to submerging himself in it with his mind. He sees how a vowel is enclosed, how a vowel soon flows into this or that language. In order to transport himself back into the language-creative state of his people, the seer is compelled to express himself more through the how than through the what. In this way, one can distinguish in language the stages that stand side by side, artistically and seerically. Because they are experienced separately, they cannot disturb each other; on the other hand, they can support each other because, when they live side by side, they illuminate each other. The time may come when hostility towards the visionary on the part of the artistic side will no longer be tolerated, nor the opposite on the visionary side. For unfortunately all that is false scholasticism tends too much towards a supersensible philistinism. To clothe everything that is not seen with the external senses in visionary seeing is hostile to artistry. But what is really grasped by the seeing consciousness of the spiritual world is already the same as what lives unconsciously in artistic creation and in aesthetic perception. It is commonly believed that the clairvoyance referred to here is something quite alien to man; it is present in human life, only in an area where it goes unnoticed.

There is a great difference in the way we face a plant, a mineral, an animal or another human being. External things affect me through what they are with the help of my sense organs. When one person faces another, the senses work quite differently. In our time, people are quite averse to grasping the spiritual. People say that some fields have overcome materialism – yes, people talk about that today. They can find such arguments, but they say: When I stand opposite a person, I see the shape of his nose, and from such a shaped nose I conclude that he is a human being. An analogy. There is no such thing in reality. He who can perceive the world seerically knows where conclusions lie; these conclusions to the analogous do not exist. The soul of man is perceived directly; his external sensuality is such that it is annulled. This is very important to bear in mind when considering another art, because it makes clear to us the juxtaposition of seership and artistic skill.

When we stand face to face with a person, we look at him, and we do not know that what appears of him appears in such a way that it cancels itself out, that he makes himself spiritually transparent. Every time I stand face to face with a person, I see him clairvoyantly. The seer has a very special problem where the person stands opposite him: this is the mysterious incarnate. The seer sees the incarnate parts of a person not in a static way, but rather in an oscillating movement. When he is standing opposite a person, he sees a state in which what appears on the person fades, and then again, where the person, when warmed, becomes redder than he is. The physical form oscillates between these extremes, so that it appears to the seer as if the human form changes, reddens with shame and pales with fear, as if it were constantly establishing its normal state between feelings of fear and shame, just as the pendulum has its point of rest between swinging up and down. The complexion as it appears to us in the external world is only an intermediate state. The seen complexion is connected with something that remains unconscious to the human being: it makes possible the first unconscious glimpse behind the scenes. The way the human complexion is seen by the seer, so that he sees in it something soul-like in the sense-perceptible — the seer beholds in the complexion something sense-supersensuous — so everything that is out there in color and form is gradually transformed in such a way that one sees it spiritually. He beholds it in such a way that he perceives something inward in all that is otherwise colored, the impression of form. You will find the most elementary of this in Goethe's sensual-moral part of the “Theory of Colors”. The whole theory of colors becomes an experience, but in such a way that the seer experiences the spiritual in it. He also experiences the rest of the spiritual world in such a way that he has the same experiences that he otherwise has of colors. In my “Theosophy” you will find that the soul is seen in the form of a kind of aura. It is described in colors. Coarse people who do not go into the matter in greater depth, but write books themselves, believe that the seer describes the aura by saying that there really is a mist in front of him. What the seer has before him is a spiritual experience. When he says the aura is blue, he is saying that he has a soul-spiritual experience that is as if he were seeing blue. He describes everything he experiences in the spiritual world and what is analogous to what can be experienced in the sensual world in terms of colors.

This gives an indication of the way the seer experiences painting. It is a different experience from that of any other art. In the presence of every other art, one has the feeling that one is immersed in the artistic element itself. One has the element, goes to a limit, where the seership ends. If the seer were to continue, he would have to put this color here and that color there; if he were to continue, he would have to tint what he experiences entirely in colors. If he experiences painting, it comes to meet him from the other side. The painter, by painting what is formed out of light and dark, brings his artistic work exactly to the point where painting meets seeing, where the seeing begins. And that is exactly where the seeing begins, where, if one wanted to continue it outwardly, one begins to paint. When one has a concrete seer-like vision, one knows: one should paint this color with the brush, and next to it the other. Then one begins to grasp the secret of color, to understand what is written in my mystery drama “The Portal of Initiation”, that the form of color is a work, that actually drawing lines is an artistic lie. There is no line. The sea does not border on the sky with a line; where the colors border on one another, there is the boundary. I can help myself with a line, but it is only the consequence of the interaction of colors. The secrets of color are revealed to you. You learn that you perform an inner movement, that movement lives in what you paint. You know: you cannot do it any other way than by treating the blue in a certain way. You live with color its inwardness. That is the special thing about painting, that the visionary and the artistic, the creative, touch each other.

If one understands what is at stake in this field, then one will see that what is meant by the visionary can be very much in harmony with artistic creation, that they can stimulate and inspire each other. However, it will become more and more apparent that those who have never held a paintbrush and know nothing of what can be done should not judge from abstract principles. Criticism from outside art, critical criticism, will perhaps have to retreat when friendship between artistry and vision arises. But precisely what is meant here by modern spiritual science is something quite different from what was formerly called aesthetics and is so called today. Artists have told me that such people are called “aesthetic grunters of delight”. Aesthetic bliss is not what is meant here; it is a life in the same element in which the artist also lives, only that the seer experiences in the pure spiritual what the artist forms. I would like to say that this also seems to me to be one of the many things that help humanity. I believe that the times when it was thought that the elementary and original would be affected by what is explored through the spirit will come to an end.

Christian Morgenstern said: “Anyone today who still believes that they should not grasp that which lives in the world as spiritual in clear ideas, but only wants to reach it in a dark, mystical contemplation, is like an illiterate who, with the reading book under his pillow, wants to sleep away his entire life in illiteracy. We are living in a time when much of what is subconscious must be raised into consciousness. The art of seeing will only then have found its true home when it rises above all philosophy and feels akin to the art of creating. I believe that in this field, too, there is something that is connected with the significant questions of human development. More and more will be understood of the fact that the sense world is based on a supersensible one. What can be recognized by supersensible vision cannot be an arbitrary addition to life, but what is true is what Goethe said from his experience of life: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” — Anyone who wants to understand how art is part of life as a whole, of its overall development, anyone who truly understands art in its essence, and feels it while understanding, must admit to themselves that this is aided by the gift of sight, that the gift of sight will be something that, in the future, will stand hand in hand with the artist, providing new inspiration and support.