21. The Activity of Knowing and Artistic Creativity
Our epistemology has divested human knowing of the merely passive
character often attributed to it and has grasped it as an activity
of the human spirit. One usually believes that the content of science is
taken up from outside; it is believed, in fact, that the more man's
spirit refrains from any participation of its own in what is taken up,
the more one will be able to maintain a high level of objectivity in
science. Our considerations have shown that the true content of
science is not at all the perceived outer material but rather the idea
grasped in the spirit, which leads us deeper into the working of the
world than all dissection and observation of the outer world as mere
experience. The idea is the content of science. In contrast to
perception, which is taken up passively, science is therefore a
product of the activity of the human spirit.
With this we have brought knowing activity nearer to artistic
creativity, which is also a productive, human activity. At the same
time we have introduced the necessity of clarifying their mutual
interrelationship.
Both knowing and artistic activity are based upon the fact that the
human being lifts himself from reality as product to reality as
producer; that he ascends from the created to the creating, from
chance happening to necessity. Because outer reality always shows us
only a creation of creative nature, we lift ourselves in spirit to the
unity of nature that manifests to us as the creator. Each object of
reality presents us with one of the endless possibilities lying
hidden in the womb of creative nature. Our spirit lifts itself to the
contemplation of that source in which all these possibilities are
contained. Now science and art are the objects into which the human
being impresses what this contemplation offers him. In science this
occurs only in the form of the idea, which means in a directly
spiritual medium; in art it occurs in an object that is
sense-perceptibly or spiritually perceivable. In science nature
manifests in a purely ideal way as “that which encompasses
everything individual”; in art an object of the outer world
appears as depicting that which encompasses everything individual.
That infinite element, which science seeks within the finite and seeks
to present in the idea, is what art impresses into some medium taken
from the real world. That which appears in science as idea is an image
in art. The same infinite element is the object of both science and
art, only it appears differently in one than in the other. The manner
of presentation is different. Goethe therefore criticized the fact
that one spoke of the idea of the beautiful as though the beautiful
were not simply the sense-perceptible reflection of the idea.
Here we can see how the true artist must draw directly from the primal
source of all existence, how he impresses into his works the necessity
which, in science, we seek ideally in nature and spirit. Science seeks
out the lawfulness in nature; art no less so, only it implants this
lawfulness in addition into raw substance. A product of art is no less
nature than a product of nature, only the lawfulness of nature has
already been poured into the product of art in the way this lawfulness
appeared to the human spirit. The great works of art that Goethe saw
in Italy appeared to him as the direct copy of the necessity that man
becomes aware of in nature. For him art is therefore also a
manifestation of the secret laws of nature.
In a work of art everything depends upon the degree to which the
artist has implanted the idea into his medium. The main thing is not
what his subject is but rather how he handles it. If in
science the externally perceived substance has to disappear completely so
that only its essential being, the idea, remains, so in the product
of art this substance has to remain — but the artistic treatment has
to overcome completely anything about it of a particularized or chance
nature. The object must be lifted entirely out of the sphere of chance
and transferred into that of necessity. Nothing must remain in the
artistically beautiful upon which the artist has not impressed his
spirit. The what must be conquered by the how.
The overcoming of the sense-perceptible by the spirit is the goal of
art and science. Science overcomes the sense perceptible by dissolving
it entirely into spirit; art does so by implanting spirit into the
sense-perceptible. A statement of Goethe, which expresses these truths
in a comprehensive way, may serve to bring our considerations to a
close: “I think one could call science the knowledge of the
general, abstracted knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be
science turned into deed; science would be reason, and art its
mechanism; therefore one could also call it practical science. And so,
finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem.”
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