The Sources of Artistic Imagination and Supersensible Knowledge II

Sometimes, however, what is meant by vision is misunderstood because one thinks of supersensible science and knowledge too much in terms of ordinary sensory science and knowledge. However, people who approach spiritual science sometimes feel disappointed: they do not find convenient answers to their down-to-earth questions, but they do find other worlds that sometimes have much deeper riddles than those in the world of the senses. Through an introduction to spiritual science, new riddles arise that cannot be solved in theory, but promise to dissolve vividly in the process of life and thus create new riddles. If one lives into this higher liveliness, one remains related to art. Hebbel demands conflicts that must remain unresolved, and he finds Grillparzer philistine when, despite all his beauty, he resolves conflicts in a way that only makes sense to someone smarter than his hero. — This is the ultimate goal of true vision: it does not create cheap answers, but rather worldviews that complement the ones we perceive with our senses. Of course, profound artists have already sensed this. In his recently published book “Stufen” (Stages), Morgenstern expresses the idea that anyone who, like the artist, really wants to get to the spiritual must be willing to absorb and unite with what can already be comprehended today, through supersensible knowledge, of the divine-spiritual. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced of the Divine-Spiritual today, not penetrating it with knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with his primer under his pillow.”