Human Freedom and The Artist

Part 3 of 3

Read: Part 1, Part 2

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” - Robert Henri

We’ve done our work for the day and the sun is setting. We’ve eaten our daily bread, but the light is fading. In these late hours, where time becomes untethered from necessity, what does creative freedom look like in that distinctly human way? An animal takes a nap, or a plant dreams. But in these liminal spaces, human beings tell stories, make art, and cultivate community.

A plant is a plant by being who it is, according to its species. But Steiner suggests that each human being is so distinct that every person is a species unto itself. Just imagine: you are as different from another person as a lion is from a dandelion! Nonetheless, every human being is more like each other than like any other species, and, as such, the external conditions we must each overcome share some common features, even if our destinies vary significantly. 

As each individual human being exists with a distinct journey within society, each species exists for its own distinct purpose within the scheme of creation. This means that no individual person, and no species, can be considered merely as a means to some other selfish end. The good of the Other must remain an inextricable aspect of our consideration. In short, as each individual is their own species, “ethical individualism” must be deeply cosmological and unavoidably ecological. Each human “I” exists in the ever-shifting interstices connecting Others who are the same in their uniqueness.¹ Considered within the hermetic tradition, the entire universe is a refracted image of the macrocosm, with the human being as the quintessential focal point of this microcosmic reflection.² 

These days there are many formulations of freedom. One is that we should be able to do whatever we please. But even here, as Hans Urs von Balthasar says, “Do what you will, you remain a captive of love.”³ Rousseau famously said, “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”⁴ But this, of course, is too one-sided to be completely true. Even our birth is determined by the imprint of biology, history, and family. All of these influence our likes and dislikes, which means, from the start, we are not entirely free in an abstract sense. As Albert Einstein paraphrased Arthur Schopenhauer, “A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.”⁵ That is to say, why do you want what you want? You didn’t choose all (or even most) of those wants in this lifetime. And because you didn’t freely choose to want what you want, how are you free when you want things that were imposed on you? Bodily pleasure arises from a sort of evolutionary nostalgia to repeat what has been pleasant for millions of years. But then there is your particular genetic makeup, so some people experience cilantro tasting like soap while others find it delicious. Going even further, your family upbringing compels you to return to familiar eating habits whether or not they are good for you. As St. Paul suggests, “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are helpful.’”⁶ Add to this all the trauma and social pressures around you, and we have to ask: How is anyone really free? 

As John Piper suggests in his influential book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the possibility of culture arises out of free time. But where do we get free time? And how do we hold open the possibility of freedom to others? 

Being forced to work two or three jobs, and suffering the indignity of work without proper compensation starves human beings of their creative potential. Evil, as such, is always a parasite on the vitality of others: it does not create, it is coldblooded, vampiric, and follows behind life seeking to usurp creativity. If we are completely exhausted by the end of the workday, there is little energy left for dissent, often even less for constructive creative expression. A biodynamic farm as such aspires towards energy independence, striving towards the goal of living within today’s allotment of starlight. The economic aspirations of ecological movements reach much further than can be discussed now, but the biodynamic impulse is one vector among many in that constellation of good work. Biodynamics strives to make farms more ecologically responsible and self-sufficient, relying on fewer expensive inputs. As a result, saved expenses and a new kind of vitality offer a recovered degree of independence and freedom. And from this, the aurora of freedom may be glimpsed.

Image: St. Michael the Archangel engaged in the perennial regenerative struggle of imbuing the shells of the past will new life. Image by Sophia Montefiore, All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission. Please check out Sophia’s upcoming workshops composing Steiner’s planetary seals, projective geometry, and more!  

But freedom does not mean for us the complete removal of barriers or eradicating the need for individual effort. Necessity is something that must always be grappled with, but a space has to be carved out in which we are free to act without compulsion. Plants in the garden are meant to have to work (at least a bit) for what they need. Depriving people of their free time through enslavement aims to suffocate the impulse of creative culture and, ultimately, of freedom itself. Even depriving people of boredom robs them of the fertile soil of creativity. As Steiner states, “For the human being in his present state is neither free nor unfree; but he is on the way to freedom. He is partially free, partially unfree. He is free to the degree he has acquired knowledge and consciousness of world relations. — The fact that our destiny, our karma, meets us in the form of absolute necessity is no obstacle to our freedom.”⁷ What solidifies out of the past is not a complete impediment to free mobility unless we become overwhelmed by its weight. The density of the ground under our feet enables us to run.  Just because I must live with the hard consequences of yesterday does not contradict my freedom to modify my future today. 

Inasmuch as we are able to surmount these conditions and refine precious flecks of gold from crude materials–to that degree we are free to be ourselves. No one is absolutely free, because we all have external limitations, but within those limitations, we have an array of choices. But we may not even recognize some avenues as options at all. New concepts open up doors to freedom. As Aldous Huxley writes, “Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived.”⁸ If we believe in determinism, we aren’t likely to try very hard to use our free will. And if we lack a concept of, say, a “trapdoor” we might not be able to see how to escape the confines of a small room. Steiner’s effort was to introduce certain thoughts in an appropriate language precisely in order to open up new possibilities for you as a thinking human being. He did not speak of “etheric” or “astral” because he was trying to be obscure but because our normal language lacks the terms to speak of subtle processes at work behind the veil of our senses. How can we take care of the sensitive harmony of an ecosystem if we believe nature is a dead mechanism? How can we be aware of processes of which we have no concept by which to grasp them? 

Without specific concepts, options cannot even appear to us as options: they are simply invisible to us. If we aren’t familiar with different plant species, we’ll see a forest as vague greenery and won’t be able to distinguish one plant from another – and therefore will be deprived of the choices one might otherwise make by recognizing different plants. By learning about plants, we see their character both in terms of ecological functions and for human uses. The medicinal qualities of each herb are drawn from the character of the plant itself and its desire to be who it is becoming. Each generation of plants is like an aspiring artist sketching a portrait on a notepad, then scrapping the drawing – the ghost of the previous images remains impressed upon the subsequent pages. With each new revision, the image becomes clearer. If an artist is sketching a dandelion, the first attempts may be embarrassing, but with each repetition, the representation approaches a truer approximation of the intended subject. Evolution cannot be seen merely as the past leading to the future but as an aspiration towards an invisible form. One would not say that the final painting an artist completes is “caused” by the prior sketches, but that those preceding pictures were a dry run. 

If we consider Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology, the material out of which you craft something co-determines the final product. A cup made of wood or metal involves a radically different process, even though the final products have similar uses. Heidegger says, “Silver is that out of which the silver chalice is made. As this matter (hyle), it is co-responsible for the chalice. The chalice is indebted to, i.e., owes thanks to, the silver for that out of which it consists. But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not only to the silver. As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring. Thus the sacrificial vessel is at the same time indebted to the aspect (eidos) of chaliceness. Both the silver into which the aspect is admitted as chalice and the aspect in which the silver appears are in their respective ways co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel.”⁹ In this sense, there are multiple causal factors influencing the emergence of any particular phenomenon. A plant requires earth, water, air filled with light, and warmth. Yet we cannot merely say that the plant is only the soil from which it grows or only the water that nourishes and enhances its form, or even that it is only the gases it inhales, nor that it is only the light it crystallizes into sugars through photosynthesis. 

Every artist begins the external work with the raw materials.¹⁰ One would never claim that painting materials of oil paints and a blank canvas exclusively “cause” the emerging portrait the artist creates, though the materials are certainly an influence. Physical materials are certainly relevant to whatever is produced: you will not produce the same picture of a dandelion with watercolors as you might with oils or charcoal. In our soils, the geological conditions belong to the material of the past. But if an artist cannot “overcome” the raw materials and depict a recognizable dandelion, there is a problem. Whether we’re seeking a photorealistic dandelion or not is beside the point for this analogy, but the artist Francis Bacon developed a project around producing paintings in which the bare minimum of features were present for the picture to be recognizable. One might suggest that Francis Bacon’s artwork rather seems to approximate Leibniz’s “law of the minimum” in art. Of course, if we want to eat something from the garden, we would prefer the plant be perhaps a bit more than the “bare minimum.” A plant grows out of the influence of the material of the earth with its salts, but it is not merely minerals. The plant is a child of the heavenly father and the earthly mother.

Image: Left: William Blake (1955) by Francis Bacon, after the death mask created after Blake’s passing. Right: William Blake’s death mask (1827), of which his widow remarked looked nothing like her late husband, bringing this mode of representation into question. Nonetheless, with spare precision, Bacon’s art resembles its object enough to be recognized, while participating in resemblance as little as possible. 

A second influence¹¹, the formative image, is the image towards which the artist is striving, namely, to reproduce the vibrancy of the wild dandelion on a two-dimensional canvas. This is the “constellation” to which each species has a connection, a spiritual form in the cosmos. Borrowing from Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course, “the new [plant] that is built up is always the image of some cosmic constellation.”¹² Notably, the stars are not stationary but moving, which would suggest that the constellations themselves are changing, which corresponds to the gradual evolution of species here on earth. If a plant has restricted water, its expressive form will be limited as when an artist doesn’t have enough paint to cover a canvas. Conversely, if there is too much water in an artist’s pigment, the paint will be runny. In a plant, when there is too much water, its growth is also too loose and does not express its proper form.

IMAGE: Cosmos impressing its influence upon the seed. Lines of force raying inward from the periphery of the cosmos (zodiac belt) towards a glowing seed at the center. Image by Stewart Lundy after image of Rudolf Steiner in the Agriculture Course (GA327, 1924)

While there is the substrate from which a plant grows and its cosmic influence, there is also the guiding hand of the farmer. As a painter uses oils or pastels and aspires to create a new image, the painter is restrained by her skill.¹³ If a plant lacks the right amount of potential energy in the soil, it will stop halfway to its goal. Similarly, an artist may abandon the work out of exhaustion or distraction. Without an aspiration towards a particular form, the plant wouldn’t grow in the first place.¹⁴ An artist, even if lacking a particular image, usually initiates the work on a canvas with a particular mood to express. Based on the clarity of the image the artist wishes to realize through painting, plus the limitations of the materials on hand, and the artist’s skill, the final product emerges as the unified culmination of the confluence of these influences. It is the same for gardeners.

Owen Barfield suggests, “the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends… is a system of collective representations.”¹⁵ The evolution of appearances only occurred under the selective influence of appearing to the consciousness of other beings. If there were no honeybee to perceive the flower, there would not have been the selective influence favoring particularly colored flowers over others. The evolution of appearances at all presupposes watchful consciousness to which things can appear at all. The development of a leopard’s spots presupposes the watchful consciousness of other creatures.

The blossoming of the human being is there to appear to others. Art is meant to be experienced by others and always presumes an audience. As Schiller says, “Art is the daughter of freedom.” In that sense, art is inevitably social. Inasmuch as art inspires others to creativity, it is also generative: it reproduces creativity in others by kindling them to new enthusiasm. This enthusiasm is a love born out of freedom.

Emulating the free expression of the plant, the farm holds a space open for the platform of human freedom and the unfolding of creative artistic culture, the pinnacle of human expression. Biodynamics helps us overcome what is dead from the past and to cultivate openness to ever-new life of the future for ourselves and for others.