Art and Knowledge II

"If today, as is customary, one sees man as the highest product of nature, as a being brought forth at a certain point in earthly evolution (part of an evolutionary series fashioning a variety of beings), one falsifies the position of man in respect to the world; falsifies it because man has, in truth, no right to the self-satisfaction which would enter his soul, inevitably, as an elemental impulse of soul, if he were indeed only the terminal point of natural creation. If the animals had developed in the way currently assumed by natural science, then man, as the highest product of nature, would have to content himself with this status in the cosmos; he would have no call whatsoever to create something transcending nature.
For instance, if in art one wishes to create, as the Greeks did, an idealized human being, one has to be dissatisfied with what nature offers. For, if satisfied, one could never inject into nature something which surpasses her. Similarly, if satisfied with the nightingale's and lark's song, one could never compose sonatas and symphonies; such a combination of sounds would seem untrue; the true, the natural, being exhaustively expressed by the birds.
The naturalistic world-conception demands that those who wish to create something content themselves with imitations of the natural. For it is only when we envisage a world other than the natural one that we can see a transcending of nature as anything but dishonesty and sham.
We must grasp this fact. But present-day human beings do not draw the logical conclusion from naturalism as it affects the arts. What would happen if they did? They would have to demand that people imitate nature; nothing else. Well, but if a Greek prior to Aeschylus had been shown a mere imitation of nature, he would have said something like this: “Why all that? Why let actors speak as people do in everyday life? If you wish to hear such things, go into the street. Why present them on the stage? It is quite unnecessary. The street is a far better place to find out what people say to one another in ordinary life.” In other words, only a person who participates in spiritual life has an impulse for a creative activity transcending the merely natural. Otherwise, where would the impulse come from? In all ages the human souls in which the artistic element flourished have had a definite relation to the spiritual world. It was out of a spirit-attuned state that the artistic urge proceeded. And this relation to the spiritual world will be, forever, the prerequisite for genuine creativity. Any age strictly naturalistic must, to be true to itself, become inartistic, philistine. Unfortunately our own age has an immense talent for philistinism..."

Rudolf Steiner, 1923