Art

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Aspects

effects of the experience of art with the human senses

• true aesthetic life in human beings consists in that the sense-organs are brought to life, and the life-processes (that interpenetrate) are filled with soul. Artistic perception is never so confined to the realm of a particular sense as ordinary earthly perception is (1916-08-15-GA170)
• when the I is wrapped up in looking at a piece of art and receives an inkling that an eternal may be embodied behind the sensory existence, then the artistic image works not only in the astral body, but the human being improves and purifies the etheric body (1906-11-17-GA054)
• effect on health
  • experience of the soul through the senses, and effect of aesthetic judgment (1910-11-03-GA115)
    • A desire that has ended in satisfaction, that has been neutralized, has a health-giving influence on the soul life (eg experience of art), but an unsatisfied desire remains imprisoned in itself and has a deleterious effect on the health of the soul (eg porn).
    • hence the recovering effect of aesthetic experiences where desire goes up to the boundary of the soul, turns around and returns with the judgment in itself (see explanation in lecture)
• references covered:
  • Aristotle's Poetics and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters (1916-08-15-GA170)
• arts and link to human senses and spiritual hierarchies (1909-10-28-GA271)
• interest in arts and the external world influences the state of health in a next incarnation; eg no interest in music can lead to tendency for asthma or lung disease in a next life, etc (1924-03-01-GA235)

- forces of childhood and further transformation 15-01

- beauty and ugliness 194-05

evolutionary aspects

• third Egypto-Chaldean cultural age
  • with the Chaldeans 13-10
  • Egyptian and Greek 286-05

- matter-spirit, Jupiter stage 170-11

various other

- Goethe’s view of art 2-13, 6-05

- task of European art 59-08

- and etheric body 63-01

- unaware Imagination-Inspiration 77-05

- sources of art 271-02

- arts and members 275-02

- polarities 294-03

- grasping of members by art 308-03

Unbalances

- Ahriman- Lucifer 147-03

- and Lucifer 208-04, 210-01

- counter-weight of Ahriman 275-01

- and agnosticism 78-01

various

• seven liberal arts (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric and Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music, Geometry), or also as three and four:
  • the trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, while
  • the quadrivium consists of arithmetic or number, geometry, astronomy or cosmology, music
• see also: Truth Beauty Good

Inspirational quotes

Glenn Gould

.. the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

cycles GA271 to GA292 are on the Arts

• GA271
• GA272 on Goethe's Faust
• ...
• GA276: The Arts and Their Mission
• ...
• GA292 on painting as part of the history of art I and II

Reference extracts

1906-11-17-GA054

When the I works because of religious impulses, it works into the etheric body. Also when the I is wrapped up in looking at a piece of art and receives an inkling that an eternal may be embodied behind the sensory existence, then the artistic image works not only in the astral body, but the human being improves and purifies the etheric body. If you – as practical occultist – may observe how a Wagner opera works on the various members of the human nature, it would convince you that it is especially music that lets sink its vibrations deeply down into the etheric body

other translation

Now there are things which go more deeply still into the nature of man, where the ‘I’ works down further than just into the astral body. As long as you check your vices simply by moral and legal maxims, you are working on your astral body. But there are other cultural means whereby the ‘I’ works on itself, and those are the religious impulses of humanity. What stems from religion is a driving force of the spiritual life, is more than external legal maxims or moral tenets. When the ‘I’ works on the basis of religious impulses it works into the etheric body. In just the same way, when the ‘I’ is absorbed in gazing on a work of art and gains an intimation that behind the existence of the senses there can be embodied an eternal, hidden element, then the artistic image works not only into the astral body of the human being but ennobles and purifies the etheric body. If you could only observe, as a practicing occultist, the way in which a Wagner opera works on the different members of the human nature, it would convince you that it is especially music which is able to send its vibrations deep into the etheric body.

1909-10-28-GA271

title: The Nature and Origin of the Arts

from RSH:

Imaginative portrayal of the relationships of certain senses, arts, and hierarchies:

• sense of self - movement - facial expression - archangels
• sense of life - sculpture - archai
• architecture - SoF
• sense of balance - art of dancing - SoM

Relationships of hierarchies, arts, and Imagination-Inspiration-Intuition:

• Imagination - poetry - thrones
• Inspiration - music - cherubim
• Intuition - painting - seraphim

1910-11-03-GA115

on: experience of the soul through the senses, and effect of aesthetic judgment

Let us examine more closely what it is that enters the soul as satisfaction. We have explained that sensation is fundamentally a surging of desire right up to the boundary of the soul life, while feeling remains farther within, where desire wears off.

What do we find at the end of desire, there where the soul life achieves satisfaction within itself? We find feeling. So when desire achieves its end in satisfaction within the soul life, feeling comes into being. That represents only one category of feelings, however. Another arises in a different manner, namely, through the fact that actually interrelationships exist in the depths of the soul life between the inner soul life and the outer world.

Considered by itself, the character of our desires expresses itself in the fact that these are directed toward external things, but unlike sense perceptions they do not achieve contact with them. Desire, however, can be directed toward its objective in such a way as to act from a distance, as a magnetic needle points to the pole without reaching it. In this sense, then, the outer world enjoys a certain relationship to the soul life and exercises an influence within it, though not actually reaching it. Feelings can therefore also arise when desire for an unattainable object continues. The soul approaches an object that induces desire; the object is not able to satisfy it; desire remains; no satisfaction results.

Let us compare this condition with a desire that achieves satisfaction; there is a great difference.

• A desire that has ended in satisfaction, that has been neutralized, has a health-giving influence on the soul life, but
• an unsatisfied desire remains imprisoned in itself and has a deleterious effect on the health of the soul.

The consequence of an unsatisfied desire is that the soul lives in this unsatisfied desire, which is carried on because it was not fulfilled and because in the absence of its object a living relationship is maintained between the soul and what we may call a void. Hence, the soul lives in unsatisfied longing, in inner contexts not founded on reality, and this suffices to produce a baneful influence upon the health of the physical and spiritual life with which the soul is bound up. Desires that remain should be sharply distinguished from those that are satisfied. When such phenomena appear in obvious forms they are readily distinguished, but there are cases in which these facts are not at all easy to recognize.

Referring now only to those desires that are wholly encompassed by the soul life, let us suppose a Man faces an object; then he goes away and says the object had satisfied him, that he liked it; or else, it had not satisfied him and he disliked it. Connected with the satisfaction is a form of desire, no matter how thoroughly hidden, which was satisfied in a certain way, and in the case of the dislike the desire itself has remained. This leads us into the realm of aesthetic judgment.

There is but one variety of feelings, and this is significantly characteristic of the soul life, that appears different from the others. You will readily understand that feelings, either satisfied or unsatisfied desires, can link not only with external objects but with inner soul experiences. A feeling of the kind we designated “satisfied desire” may connect with something reaching far into the past. Within ourselves as well we find the inceptions of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. Distinguish, for a moment, between desires provoked by external objects and those stimulated by our own soul lives. By means of outer experiences we can have desires that remain with us, and in the soul as well we find causes of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. But there are other tiny inner experiences in which we have an unfulfilled longing. Let us assume that in a case where our desires face an outer object our reasoning powers prove too weak to reach a decision; you might have to renounce a decision. There you have an experience of distress brought about by your feeling of dissatisfaction.

There is one case, however, in which our reasoning does not reach a decision, nor does desire end in satisfaction, and yet no feeling of distress arises. Remember that when we do not reason in facing the objects of daily life through ordinary sense experiences we halt at the sense phenomena, but in reasoning we transcend the sense experience. When we carry both reasoning and desire to the boundary of the soul life, where the sense impression from the outer world surges up to the soul, and we then develop a desire, permeated by the power of reasoning that stops exactly at the boundary, then a most curiously constituted feeling arises.

Let this line represent the eye as the portal of sight. Now we let our desire (horizontal lines) stream to the portal of sense experiences, the eye, in the direction outward from the soul. Now let our reasoning powers (vertical lines) flow there as well. This would give us a symbol of the feeling just mentioned, a feeling of unique composition.

Remember that ordinarily when reasoning power is developed the fulfillment of psychic activity lies not within but outside the soul. Then you will appreciate the difference between the two currents that flow as far as the outer impression. If our reasoning power is to decide something that is to proceed as far as the boundary of the soul, the latter must take into itself something concerning which it can make no decisions of its own initiative, and that is truth. Desire cannot flow out; truth overwhelms desire. Desire must capitulate to truth. It is necessary, then, to take something into our soul that is foreign to the soul as such: truth.

The lines representing reasoning (cf. diagram) normally proceed out of the soul life to meet something external, but desire cannot pass the boundary where either it is hurled back or it remains confined within itself. In the present example, however, we are assuming that both reasoning and desire proceed only to the boundary, and that as far as the sense impression is concerned they coincide completely. In this case our desire surges as far as the outer world and from there brings us back the verdict.

From the point where it turns back, desire brings back the verdict. What sort of a verdict does it bring back?

Under these conditions only aesthetic verdicts are possible, that is, judgments in some way linked with art and beauty. Only in connection with artistic considerations can it happen that desire flows to the boundary and is satisfied, that reasoning power stops at the frontier and yet the final verdict is brought back.

When you look at a work of art, can you say that it provokes your desire? Yes, it does, but not through its own agency. When that is the case, which is possible, of course, the arrival at an aesthetic decision does not depend upon a certain development of the soul.

It is quite conceivable that certain souls might not respond in any way to a work of art. Naturally, this can happen in connection with other objects as well, but then we find complete indifference, and in that case the same process would take place when looking at a work of art as when confronting any other object. When you are not indifferent, however, when your soul life responds appropriately to the work of art, you will notice a difference. You let reasoning and desire flow to the boundary of the soul life, and then something returns, namely, a desire expressing itself in the verdict. That is beautiful. To the one, nothing returns, to the other, desire returns, but not desire for the work of art, but the desire that has been satisfied by the verdict. The power of desire and the power of reasoning come to terms in the soul, and in such a case where the outer world is the provoker only of your own inner soul activity, the outer world itself can satisfy you. Exactly as much returns to you as had streamed forth from you.

Note that the actual presence of the work of art is indispensable, because the soul substance of desire must certainly flow to the frontier of the senses. Any recollection of the work really yields something different from the aesthetic judgment in its presence.

Truth, then, is something to which desires capitulate as to a sort of exterior of the soul life. Beauty is something in which desire exactly corresponds to reasoning. The verdict is brought about by the voluntary termination of desire at the soul's boundary, the desire returning as the verdict. That is why the experience of beauty is a satisfaction that diffuses so much warmth. The closest balance of the soul forces is achieved when the soul life flows to its boundary as desire and returns as judgment. No other activity so completely fulfills the conditions of a healthy soul life as devotion to beauty.

When a longing of the soul surges in great waves to the frontier of the senses and returns with the verdict, we can see that one condition of ordinary life can better be met through devotion to beauty than in any other way. In seeking the fruits of thought we are working in the soul with a medium to which the power of desire must constantly surrender. Naturally, the power of desire will always surrender to the majesty of truth, but when it is forced to do so, the inevitable consequence is an impairment of the soul life's health. Continual striving in the realm of thought, during which desires must constantly capitulate, would eventually bring about aridity of the human soul, but reasoning that brings satisfied desire and judgment in equal measure provides the soul with something quite different.

Naturally this is not a recommendation that we should incessantly wallow in beauty and maintain that truth is unhealthy. That would be setting up the axiom that the search for truth is unhealthy: let us eschew it; wallowing in beauty is healthy: let us indulge in it. But the implication of what has been said is that in view of our search for truth, which is a duty, a necessity, we are compelled to fight against the life of desires, to turn it back into itself. Indeed, in seeking truth we must do this as a matter of course.

More than anything else, therefore, this search inculcates humility and forces back our egotism in the right way. The search for truth renders us ever more humble. Yet if man were merely to live along in this way, becoming more and more humble, he would eventually arrive at his own dissolution; the sentience of his own inner being, essential to the fulfillment of his soul life, would be lacking. He must not forfeit his individuality through the constant necessity surrendering to truth; this is where the life of aesthetic judgment steps in. The life of aesthetic judgment is so constituted that man brings back again what he has carried to the boundary of the soul life.

1916-08-15A-GA170 not correct check

from RSH

• Steiner describes how one can enliven the senses and transform the life processes into soul processes without lapsing into the old Moon conditions of consciousness.
• Art goes the way from the material to the spiritual. Not only earthly reality is included in a piece of art (in this respect it is even a lie) but something that points beyond the Earth to the Future Jupiter stage. One can only arrive at the right point of view toward a piece of art from the region of the elemental world where that is real which is contained in a piece of art.

1916-08-15B-GA170

title: The sense organs and aesthetic experience

Painting or the aesthetic enjoyment of paintings does not only appeal to the sense of sight, but the colours are also absorbed through the sense of taste in a subtle way, and the sense of smell takes up the nuances of the colours. In poetry not only the word sense, but also the ensouled senses of balance and movement are active. Life processes that are elevated to mental processes (secretion/excretion, growth, maintaining, and reproduction) accompany hearing music

This leads to the emergence of soul-powers which have the character of thinking, feeling and willing; again three. But they are different; not thinking, feeling and willing as they normally are on earth, but somewhat different. They are nearer to life-processes, but not as separate as life-processes are on Earth.

A very intimate and delicate process occurs in a Man when he is able to endure something like a thinking back into the Old Moon, not to the extent of having visions, and yet a form of comprehension arises which has a certain similarity to them. The sense-regions become life-regions; the life-processes become soul-processes. A Man cannot stay always in that condition, or he would be unfitted for the Earth. He is fitted for the Earth through his senses and his life-organs being normally such as we have described. But in some cases a Man can shape himself in this other way, and then,

• if his development tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creativity; or,
• if it tends more towards comprehension, towards perception, it leads to aesthetic experience.

.

Real aesthetic life in human beings consists in this, that the sense-organs are brought to life, and the life-processes filled with soul.

This is a very important truth about human beings, for it enables us to understand many things.

The stronger life of the sense-organs and the different life of the sense-realms must be sought in art and the experience of art. And it is the same with the processes of life; they are permeated with more activity of soul in the experience of art than in ordinary life. Because these things are not considered in their reality in our materialistic time, the significance of the alteration which goes on in a human being within the realm of art cannot be properly understood. Nowadays man is regarded more or less as a definite, finished being; but within certain limits he is variable. This is shown by a capacity for change such as the one we have now considered.

What we have gone into here embraces far-reaching truths.

Take one example: it is those senses best fitted for the physical plane which have to be transformed most if they are to be led back halfway to the Old Moon condition. The I—sense, the Thought-sense, the immediate sense of Touch, because they are directly fitted for the earthly physical world, have to be completely transformed if they are to serve the human condition which results from this going back halfway to the Old Moon period.

• For example, you cannot use in art the encounters we have in life with an I or with the world of thought. At the most, in some arts which are not quite arts the same relationship to the I and to thought can be present as in ordinary earthly life. To paint the portrait of a man as an I, just as he stands there in immediate reality, is not a work of art. The artist has to do something with the I, go through a process with it, through which he raises this I out of the specialisation in which it lives today, at the present stage in the development of the Earth; he has to give it a wide general significance, something typical. The artist does that as a matter of course.
• In the same way the artist cannot express the world of thought, as it finds expression in the ordinary earthly world, in an artistic way immediately; for he would then produce not a poem or any work of art, but something of a didactic, instructive kind, which could never really be a work of art. The alterations made by the artist in what is actually present form a way back towards that reanimation of the senses I have described.

There is something else we must consider when we contemplate this transformation of the senses.

The life-processes, I said, interpenetrate. Just as the planets cover one another, and have a significance in their mutual relationships, while the constellations remain stationary, so is it with the regions of the senses if they pass over into a planetary condition in human life, becoming mobile and living; then they achieve relationships to one another. Thus artistic perception is never so confined to the realm of a particular sense as ordinary earthly perception is. Particular senses enter into relationships with one another.

[painting]

Let us take the example of painting.

If we start from real spiritual science, the following result is reached. For ordinary observation through the senses, the senses of sight, warmth, taste and smell are separate senses.

In painting, a remarkable symbiosis, a remarkable association of these senses comes about, not in the external sense-organs themselves, but in what lies behind them, as I have indicated.

A painter, or someone who appreciates a painting, does not merely look at its colours, the red or blue or violet; he really tastes the colours, not of course with the physical sense-organ—then he would have to lick it with his tongue. But in everything connected with the sphere of the tongue a process goes on which has a delicate similarity to the process of tasting. If you simply look at a green parrot in the way we grasp things through the senses, it is your eyes that see the green colour. But if you appreciate a painting, a delicate imaginative process comes about in the region behind your tongue which still belongs to the sense of taste, and this accompanies the process of seeing. Not what happens upon the tongue, but what follows, more delicate physiological processes - they accompany the process of seeing, so that the painter really tastes the colour in a deeper sense in his soul. And the shades of colour are smelt by him, not with the nose, but with all that goes on deeper in the organism, more in the soul, with every activity of smelling. These conjoined sense-activities occur when the realms of the senses pass over more into processes of life.

[poetry]

If we read a description which is intended to inform us about the appearance of something, or what is done with something, we let our speech-sense work, the word-sense through which we learn about this or that. If we listen to a poem, and listen in the same way as to something intended to convey information, we do not understand the poem. The poem is expressed in such a way that we perceive it through the speech-sense, but with the speech-sense alone we do not understand it. We have also to direct towards the poem the ensouled sense of balance and the ensouled sense of movement; but they must be truly ensouled. Here again united activities of the sense-organs arise, and the whole realm of the senses passes over into the realm of life.

All this must be accompanied by life-processes which are ensouled, transformed in such a way that they participate in the life of the soul, and are not working only as ordinary life-processes belonging to the physical world.

[music]

If the listener to a piece of music develops the fourth life-process, secretion, so far that he begins to sweat, this goes too far; it does not belong to the aesthetic realm when secretion leads to physical excretion. It should be a process in the soul, not going as far as physical excretion; but it should be the same process that underlies physical excretion. Moreover, secretion should not appear alone.

All four life-processes—secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction—should work together, but all in the realm of soul. So do the life-processes become soul-processes.

[lecture continues with ao Aristotle's Poetics and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795))]

1923-06-09-GA276

The [new] task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world.

All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory - disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness.

If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

1924-03-01-GA235

Interest in the external world, oa art etc .. forms the basis for the state of health in the next life:

Suppose a man has little interest in the physical world around him. Perhaps he just manages to interest himself in the things that immediately concern his bodily life—whether, for instance, one can eat more or less well in this or that district. Beyond that, his interests do not go; his soul remains poor. He does not imprint the world into himself. He carries very little in his inner life, very little of what has radiated into him from the phenomena of the world, through the gate of death into the spiritual realms. Thereby he finds the working with the spiritual beings, with whom he is then together, very difficult. And as a consequence, in the next life he does not bring with him, for the up-building of his physical body, strength and energy of soul, but weakness—a kind of faintness of soul. The model works into him strongly enough. The conflict with the model finds expression in manifold illnesses of childhood; but the weakness persists. He forms, so to speak, a frail or sickly body, prone to all manner of illnesses.

Thus, karmically, our interest of soul-and-spirit in the one earthly life is transformed into our constitution as to health in the next life. Human beings who are “bursting with health” certainly had a keen interest in the visible world in a former incarnation. The detailed facts of life work very strongly in this respect.

[example1]

No doubt it is more or less “risqué” nowadays to speak of these things, but you will only understand the inner connections of karma if you are ready to learn about the karmic details. Thus, for example, in the age when the human souls who are here today were living in a former life on Earth, there was already an art of painting; and there were some human beings even then who had no interest in it at all. Even today, you will admit, there are people who do not care whether they have some atrocity hanging on the walls of their room or a picture beautifully painted. And there were also such people in the time when the souls who are here today were living in their former lives on Earth.

Now, I can assure you, I have never found a man or a woman with a pleasant face—a sympathetic expression—who did not take delight in beautiful paintings in a former life on earth. The people with an unsympathetic expression (which, after all, also plays its part in karma, and signifies something for destiny) were always the ones who passed by the works of art of painting with obtuse and phlegmatic indifference.

...

[example2]

People, for instance, who in our time take absolutely no interest in music—people to whom music is a matter of indifference—will certainly be born again in a next life on earth either with asthmatic trouble, or with some disease of the lung. At any rate, they will be born with a tendency to asthma or lung disease.

And so it is in all respects; the quality of soul which develops in our earthly life through the interest we take in the visible world, comes to expression in our next life in the general tone of our bodily health or illness.

Related pages

• Music
• Speech
• Eurythmy
• Truth Beauty Good

References and further reading

• Heimo Rau (1912-1993)
  • Normannische Kunst in Sizilien (1956)
  • Griechische Kunst in Sizilien (1957)
  • Die Kunst Indiens : bis zum Islam (1958)
  • Indiens Erbe - Illusion und Wirklichkeit heute (1982)
  • Stilgeschichte der indischen Kunst (2 Volumes) (1986-87)
• Rudolf Steiner and Michael Howard: 'Art as Spiritual Activity - Rudolf Steiner's Contribution to the Visual Arts'

Seven (liberal) arts

In the context as a way to develop virtues (see 2006 book by Lutters)

• Diether Rudloff: 'Die Parabel der sieben Künste : Ueber den Zusammenhang der Künste mit dem Wesen des Menschen ; Grundlegendes zu einer spirituellen Aesthetik' (1987)
• Sergej O. Prokofieff: 'Der Jahreskreislauf und die sieben Künste' (1994)
• Frans Lutters:
  • De zeven vrije kunsten (1992)
  • 'Het Graalmysterie en de Zeven Vrije Kunsten' (2006)