59. Eurythmy Performance

But now it can no longer be denied that all that appears in these fields today as a striving for a new artistic formal language, that most of it still leaves us unsatisfied, simply because, for example, what one wants to express in a new way cannot be achieved with a brush and paint today. Sculpture is equally unsuccessful in expressing what is intended through its forms. If I were to use a word for what many people today may be striving for more or less unconsciously, I would use Goethe's word for the sensual-supersensory. Because in art it is indeed the case that the means of expression must be used to bring the sensual to representation. For that which cannot be perceived by the senses, which can only be grasped in an idea, cannot be considered artistic in any way, not even in terms of an external sign. Therefore, everything symbolic is inartistic, and everything allegorical is inartistic. The artistic must present itself to people in a sensory way, but at the same time, the sensory must appear as supersensory. One must receive such an impression from the sensual as one otherwise only receives from the supersensible. Schiller, in a magnificent way that has not yet been appreciated, expressed this view, which is also that of Goetheanism, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race.