Understanding Art

GA 271 — 12 September 1920, Dornach

The Supernatural Origin of the Artistic

What humanity needs to take in, with an eye to developmental necessities, is an expansion of consciousness in all areas of life. Humanity lives today in such a way that what it does, what it engages in, is actually only linked to the events between birth and death. In everything that happens, we only ask about what takes place between birth and death. It will be essential for the recovery of our lives that we ask about more than just this period of time in our lives, which we spend under very special conditions. Our life includes what we are and do between birth and death, and also what we are and do between death and a new birth. In this materialistic age, people are not very aware of the role played by the life between death and birth that we have gone through before descending to this life through birth or conception; nor are they aware of how things are already taking place in this life here in the physical body that point to the life we will lead after death. Today we want to point out a few things that can show how certain cultural areas will take on a different view of the whole of human life, in that human consciousness will and must extend beyond life in the supersensible worlds.

I believe that a certain question may arise for people when they consider the full extent of our artistic life. Let us look at the supersensible life from this perspective today. Something will emerge from it that can later be used to look at social life.

We know that the actual high arts are sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry and music, and we are adding something to these arts from certain foundations of anthroposophical life and knowledge, such as eurythmy. The question that I mean, which could arise for people in relation to the arts, would be: What is the positive, the actual reason for introducing art into life? In the materialistic age, art has only to do with the immediate reality that takes place between birth and death. In this materialistic age, however, people have forgotten the supersensible origin of art and more or less merely aim to imitate what is in the external, sense-perceptible world. But anyone who has a deeper feeling for nature on the one hand and for art on the other will certainly not be able to agree with this imitation of natural existence in art, with naturalism. For the question must always be raised again and again: Can, for example, the best landscape painter somehow conjure up the beauty of a natural landscape on canvas? A person who is not educated will have the feeling, even in the presence of a naturalistically conceived landscape, however good it may be, that I expressed in the preface to my first mystery, The Portal of Initiation: that no imitation of nature will ever be able to reach nature. Naturalism will have to prove itself contrary to feeling for the better-sensed. Therefore, only that which goes beyond nature in some way will be recognized by the discerning observer as legitimate in art. It is that which attempts to give something other than what mere nature can present to man, at least in the way it is presented. But why do we, as human beings, develop art at all? Why do we go beyond nature in sculpture and poetry?

Anyone who develops an appreciation of the world's interconnections will see how, for example, a sculptor works in a unique way to capture the human form, how an attempt is made to express the human in the shaping of the form; how we cannot simply take the human form, as it appears to us in a natural man, suffused with inner inspiration, with flesh tints, with everything we see in a natural man except the form, we cannot incorporate this into the form when we are creating a sculptural work of art, when we are creating a human being. But I believe that the sculptor who creates human beings will gradually develop a very special sense. And I have no doubt that the Greek sculptor had the feeling I am about to describe, and that it was only in the naturalistic era that this feeling was lost.

It seems to me that the sculptor who forms the human figure has a completely different way of feeling when he sculpts the head and when he sculpts the rest of the body. These two things are actually fundamentally different from each other in the work: sculpting the head, and sculpting the rest of the body. If I may express myself somewhat drastically, I would like to say: when you are working on the sculptural design of the human head, you have the feeling that you are constantly being absorbed by the material, that the material wants to draw you into itself. But when you are sculpting the rest of the human body, you have the feeling that you are actually pricking and pushing into the body everywhere without authorization, that you are pushing into it from the outside. You have the feeling that you are shaping the rest of the body from the outside, that you are forming the forms from the outside. You have the feeling that when you shape the body, you are actually working inside it, and you have the feeling when you shape the head that you are working out of it.

This seems to me to be a very peculiar feeling in plastic design, which was certainly still characteristic of the Greek artist and which was only lost in the naturalistic period, when one began to be a slave to the model. One wonders: where does such a feeling come from when one intends to form the human figure with a view to the supersensible?

All this is connected with much deeper questions, and before I go on to this, I would like to mention one more thing. Just consider how strongly one has the feeling of a certain inwardness of experience in relation to sculpture and architecture, despite the fact that sculpture and architecture apparently form externally in the external material: In architecture, one inwardly experiences the dynamics, one inwardly experiences how the column supports the beam, how the column develops into the capital. One inwardly experiences that which is outwardly formed. And in a similar way it is the case with sculpture.

This is not the case with music, and it is especially not the case with poetry. In poetry, it seems quite clear to me that in the shaping of the poetic material it is, to put it drastically, as if when one begins to shape the words – which one can still hold in one's larynx when speaking prose – into iambs or trochees, when one puts them into rhyme, they run away and one has to chase after them. They inhabit the atmosphere around you more than your inner self. You feel poetry much more externally than, for example, architecture and sculpture. And it is probably the same with music if you focus your feelings on it. Musical notes also animate your entire surroundings. You actually forget space and time, or at least space, and you live out of yourself in a moral experience. You don't have the feeling that you have to chase after the figures you create, as you do with poetry; but you do have the feeling that you have to swim in an indeterminate element that spreads everywhere and that you dissolve in the process of swimming.

There, you see, one begins to nuance certain feelings towards the whole essence of the artistic. One gives these feelings very specific characteristics. What I have described to you now, and what, I believe, the fine artistically sensitive can empathize with, cannot be believed when one looks at a crystal or any other mineral natural product, or at a plant or an animal or a physically real human being. One feels and senses differently in relation to the whole of external physical and sensory nature than one feels and senses in relation to the individual branches of artistic experience that I have just described.

One can speak of supersensible knowledge as transforming ordinary abstract knowledge into intuitive knowledge and can point the way to experiential knowledge. It is absurd to demand that in higher fields, one should prove in the same pedantic, logical, philistine way as one proves in the rough natural sciences or the like or in mathematics. If one familiarizes oneself with what the sensations become when one enters the field of art, then one gradually enters into strange inner states of mind. Very definite nuances of soul state arise when one really experiences the plastic, the architectural, inwardly, when one goes along with the dynamics, mechanics, and so on, in architecture, when one goes along with the rounding of the form in sculpture. A remarkable path is taken by the inner world of feeling: here one is confronted with an experience of the soul that is very similar to memory. Those who have the experience of remembering, the experience of memory, notice how the architectural and sculptural feeling becomes similar to the inner process of remembering. But then again, remembering is on a higher level. In other words, by way of the feeling for architecture and sculpture, one gradually comes close to the soul feeling, the soul experience, which the spiritual researcher knows as the memory of prenatal states. And indeed, the way one lives between death and a new birth in connection with the whole universe, by feeling that one moves as a spiritual soul or a spiritualized spirit in certain directions, crossing paths with beings , one is in balance with other beings, and what one experiences and lives between death and a new birth is initially remembered subconsciously and is in fact recreated in architectural art and sculpture.

And when we relive this spatial quality with our inner presence in sculpture and architecture, we discover that we actually want nothing more in sculpture and architecture than to somehow conjure up into the physical-sensory world the experiences we had in the spiritual world before our birth, or before our conception. When we build houses not purely according to the principle of utility, but when we build houses that are architecturally beautiful, we shape the dynamic relationships as they arise from our memory of experiences, of experiences of balance, of vibrating formative experiences and so on, which we had in the time between death and this birth.

And in this way one discovers how man actually came to develop architecture and sculpture as arts. The experience between death and the new birth rumbled in his soul. He wanted to bring it out somehow and put it in front of him, and he created architecture and he created sculpture. That humanity in its cultural development has produced architecture and sculpture is essentially due to the fact that the life between death and birth has an effect, that the human being wants this out of his inner being: as the spider spins, so he wants to bring out and shape what he experiences between death and this birth. He carries the experiences from before birth into physical, sensual life. And what we see in the overview of the architectural and sculptural works of art that people create is nothing other than the realization of unconscious memories of the life between death and this birth.

Now we have a real answer to the question of why man creates art. If man were not a supersensible being who enters into this life through conception or birth, he would certainly not create any sculpture or architecture.

And we know what a peculiar connection exists between two successive or, let us say, three successive earthly lives: what you have today as a head is, in the formative forces, the headless body of your previous incarnation, and what you have today as a body will transform into your head by the next incarnation. The human head has a completely different meaning: it is old; it is the transformed previous body. The forces that one has experienced between the previous death and this birth have formed this outer form of the head; the body, which carries within itself the seething forces that will be formed in the next earthly life.

So there you have the reason why the sculptor feels differently about the head than about the rest of the body. With the head, he feels something like: the head wants to absorb him because the head is formed from the previous incarnation through forces that reside in its present forms. With the rest of the body, he feels something like: he wants to push into it and the like, by developing it plastically, because the spiritual forces that lead through death and lead across to the next incarnation are seated in it. The sculptor in particular senses this radical difference between the past and the future in the human body. What the formative forces of the physical body are, and how they work from incarnation to incarnation, is expressed in plastic art. What is now seated deeper in the etheric body, which is our equilibrium carrier, the carrier of our dynamics, comes out more in architectural art.

You see, you cannot really grasp human life in its entirety if you do not take a look at the supersensible life, if you do not seriously answer the question: How do we come to develop architecture and sculpture? — The fact that people do not want to look at the supersensible world stems from the fact that they do not want to look at the things of this world in the right way.

Basically, how do most people react to the arts that reveal a spiritual world? Actually, like a dog to human speech. The dog hears human speech, but probably thinks it is barking. Unless he is a “Mannheim Rolf,” he does not perceive the meaning that lies within the sounds. This was an apt dog that caused quite a stir some time ago among people who deal with such useless arts. This is how man stands before the arts, which actually speak of the supersensible world that man has experienced: he does not see in these arts what they actually reveal.

Let us look, for example, at poetry. Poetry clearly emerges for those who can feel it through – but when characterizing such things, one must always bear in mind that, with some variation, Lichtenberg's saying applies: Ninety-nine percent more is written than our globe's humanity needs for its happiness, and than is real art – real poetry emerges from the whole person. And what does it do? It does not stop at prose: it shapes prose, it introduces meter and rhythm into prose. It does something that the prosaic man of the world finds superfluous for life. It specially shapes that which – already unformed – would give the meaning that one wants to associate with it. When you listen to a recitation, which is real art, and you get a sense of what the poetic artist makes out of the content of the prose, then you get a peculiar character of the sensations. One cannot perceive the mere content, the prose content of a poem as a poem. One perceives as a poem how the words roll in iambs or in trochaics or in anapaests, how the sounds repeat themselves in alliterations, assonances or in other rhymes. One perceives much else that lies in the how of the shaping of the prosaic material. That is what must be conveyed in the recitation. If one recites in such a way that one merely brings the prose content, however seemingly profound, out of one's inner being, then one believes one is reciting “artistically”! If you can really hold this peculiar nuance of feeling, which includes the feeling of the poetic, then you come to say to yourself: This actually goes beyond ordinary feeling, because ordinary feeling clings to the things of sensual existence, the poetic does not cling to the things of sensual existence. I expressed it earlier by saying: the poetically shaped then lives more in the atmosphere that surrounds you; or you want to burst out of yourself in order to actually experience the words of the poet correctly outside of yourself.

This comes from the fact that you create something out of yourself that you cannot experience at all between birth and death. One develops something of the soul that one can also leave between birth and death if one only wants to live. One can live and die quite well until death without doing anything other than making the sober prose content the content of life. But why does one feel the need to add rhythm and assonance and alliteration and rhymes to this sober prose content? Well, because one has more in oneself than one needs until death, because one also wants to shape out during this life what one has more in oneself than one needs until death. It is foresight of the life that follows death: because one already carries within oneself what follows after death, therefore one feels impelled not just to speak, but to speak poetically. And just as sculpture and architecture are connected with prenatal life, with the forces within us from prenatal life, so poetry is connected with the life that takes place after death, or rather with the forces within us that are already within us for the life after death. And it is more the ego, as it lives here between birth and death, as it passes through the gate of death and then lives on, that already carries within itself the powers that poetry expresses.

And it is the astral body that already lives here in the world of sound, that forms the world of sound into melody and harmony, which we do not find in the physical world outside, because what we experience after death is already in our astral body. You know, this astral body that we carry within us only lives with us for a while after death, then we also discard it. Nevertheless, this astral body has the actual musical element in it. But it has it in the way it experiences it here between birth and death in its life element, the air. We need the air if we want to have a medium for musical feeling.

When we arrive at the station after death, where we discard our astral body, we also discard everything that reminds us of our musical life on earth. But in this moment in the world, the musical element transforms into the music of the spheres. We become independent of what we experience as musical in the air and live our way up into a musicality that is the music of the spheres. For that which is experienced here as music in the air is, above, the music of the spheres. And now the reflection lives itself into the element of air, becomes denser, becomes that which we experience as earth music, which we imprint on our astral body, which we develop, which we relive as long as we have our astral body. After death we discard our astral body: then — forgive the banal expression — our musicality leaps up into the music of the spheres. Thus we have in music and in poetry a pre-life of that which after death is our world, our existence. We experience the supersensible in two directions. This is how these four arts present themselves to us.

And painting? There is still another spiritual world that lies behind our sensory world. The coarse-materialistic physicist or biologist speaks of atoms and molecules behind the sensory world. They are not molecules and atoms. Behind them are spiritual beings. There is a spiritual world that we live through between falling asleep and waking up. This world, which we bring over from sleep, is what actually inspires us when we paint, so that we bring the spiritual world that surrounds us spatially onto the canvas or onto the wall in general. Therefore, when painting, one must be very careful to paint from the color, not from the line, because the line lies in painting. The line is always something of the memory of prenatal life. If we want to paint in an expanded consciousness that includes the spiritual world, then we must paint what comes out of the color. And we know that color is experienced in the astral world. When we enter the world that we live through between falling asleep and waking up, we experience this color. And however we want to create a harmony of colors, however we want to put the colors on the canvas, it is nothing other than what is pushing us: we push into it, we let flow into our waking body what we have experienced between falling asleep and waking up. That is in there, and that is what the person wants to put on the canvas when painting. In turn, what emerges in painting is the reproduction of a supersensible reality. So that the arts actually point to the supersensible everywhere. For those who can perceive it in the right way, painting becomes a revelation of the spiritual world that surrounds us in space and permeates us from space, in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and waking up. Sculpture and architecture bear witness to the spiritual world that we live through between death and a new birth before conception, before birth; music and poetry bear witness to how we live through life post mortem, after death. In this way, that which is our share in the spiritual world penetrates into our ordinary physical life on earth.

And if we philistinely regard what a person presents as art in life as being only connected with what happens between birth and death, then we actually take away all meaning from artistic creation. For artistic creation is definitely a way of bringing spiritual, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. And it is only because man is pressed by that which he carries within him from prenatal life, because he is pressed in the waking state by that which he carries within him from the supersensible life during sleep, because he is pressed by that which is already within him and which wants to shape him after death, that he places architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry in the world of sensory experience. That people do not usually speak of supersensible worlds is merely because they do not understand the sensory world either, especially not even understand what spiritual human culture once knew, but what has been lost and what has become an externalization: art.

If we learn to understand art, it is a true proof of human immortality and of the human being having come into existence. And we need this so that our consciousness expands beyond the horizon that is limited by birth and death, so that we can connect what we have in our physical life on earth to the superphysical life.

If we now create out of a knowledge that, like anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, goes straight for the spiritual world, to include the spiritual world in the imagination, in the thinking, in the feeling, the feeling, the will, then there will be fertile soil for an art that, so to speak, synthetically summarizes the prenatal and the afterlife.

And let us consider eurythmy. We set the human body itself in motion. What do we set in motion? We set the human organism in motion so that its limbs move. The limbs are what primarily lives itself over into the next earthly life, what points to the future, to what happens after death. But how do we shape the movements of the limbs that we produce in eurythmy? We study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, how the larynx and all the speech organs have developed out of the head — through the intellectual and sentient faculties of the chest — out of our previous life. We directly connect the prenatal with the afterlife. We take only that part of the human being that is the physical material: the human being himself, who is the tool, the instrument for eurythmy. But we allow what we study inwardly to appear in the human being, what is formed in him from previous lives, and we transfer this to his limbs, that is, to that which is formed in the afterlife. In eurythmy we provide a form of human organism and movement that is direct outward proof of the human being's life in the supersensible world. We connect the human being directly to the supersensible world by letting him or her eurythmize.

Wherever art is created out of a true artistic spirit, art is a testimony to the connection between human beings and the supersensible worlds. And when, in our time, man is called upon to take the gods, as it were, into his own soul forces, so that he does not merely wait in faith for the gods to bring him this or that, but wants to act as if the gods lived in his active will , then humanity will want to experience it, where, so to speak, man must pass from the externally shaped objective arts to an art that will take on completely different dimensions and forms in the future: to an art that directly represents the supersensible. How could it be otherwise? Spiritual science also wants to directly represent the supersensible, so it must, so to speak, also create such an art out of itself.

And the pedagogical-didactic application will gradually educate people who, through education in this direction, will find it natural that they are supersensible beings because they move their hands, arms and legs in such a way that the forces of the supersensible world are active within them. It is indeed the soul of the human being, the supersensible soul, that comes to life in eurythmy. It is the living out of the supersensible that comes to light in the eurythmic movements.

Everything that is brought by spiritual science is truly in harmony inwardly. On the one hand, it is brought so that the life in which we live can be seen more deeply and more intensely, so that we learn to direct our gaze to the living proofs that are there for the unborn and the immortal; and on the other hand, what is supersensible in man is introduced into human will.

This is the inner consistency that underlies spiritual science when it is oriented anthroposophically. As a result, spiritual science will expand human consciousness. Man will no longer be able to walk through the world as he did in the materialistic age, when he only had an overview of what lives between birth and death, and perhaps still had a belief in something else that , which makes him happy, which redeems him, but of which he cannot form a concept, of which he only allows himself to be preached in a sentimental way, of which he actually only has an empty content. Through spiritual science, man is to receive real content from the spiritual worlds again. People are to be released from an abstract life, from a life that only wants to stop at perception, at thinking between birth and death, and that at most still absorbs in words some vague references to a supersensible world. Spiritual science will bring about an awareness in people that broadens their horizons and enables them to perceive the supersensible world when they live and work here in the physical world. We go through the world today, having turned thirty, and know that what we have at thirty has been instilled in us at ten, at fifteen: we remember that. We remember that when we read at thirty, our learning to read twenty-two or twenty-three years ago is linked to the present moment. But we do not consider that at every moment between birth and death, what we have lived through between the last death and this birth vibrates and pulses within us. If we turn our gaze to what has been born out of these forces in architecture and sculpture, and understand it in the right sense, then we will also transfer it to life in the right sense and in turn gain a sense for the superfluous shaping of prose into rhythm and beat and rhyme, into alliteration and assonance in poetry, in the face of philistine, prosaic life. Then we will correctly connect this nuance of feeling with the immortal essence within us, which we carry through death. We will say: No human being could become a poet if it were not for the fact that what actually creates in the poet is in all people: the power that only comes to life externally after death, but that is already in us now.

This is the inclusion of the supersensible in the ordinary consciousness, which must be expanded again if humanity is to avoid sinking further into what it has rushed into by contracting its consciousness so much that it only really lives in what takes place between birth and death, and at most allows itself to be preached to about what exists in the supersensible world.

As you can see, spiritual science is everywhere when we speak of the most important cultural needs of the present.