[originally published in Impressions, 1988] Gottfried Richter. Art and Human Consciousness. Spring Valley, New York: Anthroposophic Press, l985. [Translated from the German Ideen zur Kunstgeschichte and originally published in l937]. David Seamon As it relates implicitly to a phenomenology of aesthetic experience, art historian Gottfried Richter’s Art and Human Consciousness is a significant book because it illustrates a way of “reading” art experientially whereby the art object is an expression of a particular epoch’s human experience and consciousness, particularly in regard to spiritual experience. Written by a disciple of the Austrian Christian mystic Rudolph Steiner, the book is frequently couched in Christian symbolism and perhaps sometimes overplays the contribution of Western art and Christianity to the development of collective human consciousness. On the other hand, the book is invaluable in that it provides a way of looking by which the beholder seeks to experience directly the spiritual sense out of which the art work arises, either consciously or unconsciously. Richter believes that art is crucial to self-understanding because it reaches beyond the level of the individual to the sphere of humanness and human being: “Every work of art is a symbol, a hieroglyph of a ‘human’ experience” (p. xv). Richter argues that the genuine art work is not a product of the individual working autonomously through himself or herself but, instead, is a densification of something higher that the artist senses and brings to actualization, even though—as in our current time—there may seem to be little direct connection between the art work and spirituality. In this sense, the artist is a kind of vessel, either unconsciously or not, for the manifestation of more sensitive sightings. Art becomes “the condensation and embodiment of something invisible which has become visible …” (p. l). True art involves: the artist’s sense of being looked at by a “divine being” and “takes what is merely personal and raises it to the level of what is shared by all humanity. It places it into the wholeness of the world and allows it to speak back to us out of this wholeness, out of eternity (p. l). At the same time, Richter argues that art reflects different modes and stages of consciousness because the experiences and existence of humankind during different historical eras are different. Following Goethe and Steiner’s conception of human evolution, Richter does not believe that these different stages are arbitrary and haphazard. Rather, the changes in human consciousness reflect an evolutionary process unfolding in time and space like the stages in a plant’s growth. Richter interprets the whole of human history as parallel to one human being in the process of development: “World history is not only the sum of the histories of individual peoples. It is the manifestation of precisely this visible-invisible human being who has been developing and struggling into existence step by step for thousands of years, in innumerable single individualities, within the nationalities and cultures that blossom and die away again” (p. xiv). In this sense, history, particularly art history, is an expression of a higher, spiritual entity unfolding in the time of earth and humanity. In most general terms, this process of development is an awakening “into ever broader and more comprehensive spheres of human awareness, into higher and higher heavens.” Humankind came from God and returns to God, and the major question that Richter addresses is the specific route this pathway takes. In one sense, the goal of this journey is human beings’ sense of individual selfness—their own interior space, which Richer argues that human beings reach at the time of the Renaissance. In civilizations before the Renaissance, humans have little sense of individuality or inner life. Particularly as reflected in Egypt, human beings’ sense of themselves was only in relation to the wider world of community and cosmos. Art was an expression of higher forces as they were sensed in the heavens (Egypt), the natural world (Greece), or a larger human group (medieval society). With the coming of the late Gothic and Renaissance periods, however, human beings begin to move into themselves as they separate from the world, which becomes an object and setting rather than a taken-for-granted context in which human beings are unselfconsciously an immersed member. Before this coming of individual awareness, according to Richter, higher forces worked through human beings but outside them, thereby closing humankind off from “the garden in which God dwells” (p. 250). In dramatic contrast, the door to this garden stands open today, and human beings have access as much to the bad as to the good, thus contemporary art regularly revels in sex, ugliness, and violence as much as it expresses beauty, harmony, and hope: “The gods, but also the demons, are beginning to become visible and active among us” (p. 250). Richter concludes that the human sense of higher forces today must come entirely from within the person through a redemption and transfiguration of the ordinary, mundane, and ugly—“the reverence for what is underneath us,” as Richter calls it (p. 230). What is the practical method that allows Richter to see art as it speaks for the consciousness and experience of particular groups and civilizations? This method is founded on Goethe’s way of science, which emphasizes a careful and reverent looking at the phenomena themselves, with the hope that they will eventually reveal their underlying patterns and deeper realities. This approach leads Richter to discoveries about art that seem alive, real, and grounded in thoughtful, loving meditations on the art works themselves. Richter’s heartfelt descriptions continually bring the reader innovative understandings as to what an art work says and suggests a way of being with the art work that allows it to present the human experience and world out of which it originally arose. As Konrad Oberhuber, writing in the preface to Richter’s book, describes this process: ... Human beings can school their powers of observation to such a degree that they can penetrate empathetically to the seemingly invisible and often not quite explicitly or consciously expressed aims and aspirations of a culture, of a person, or even of the life and things of the world, and in doing this reach an objective reality. It is a trust in the human power of imagination and capacity for synthesis, allowing the researcher to grasp the unifying forces behind the wealth of outer phenomena …. The whole human being must be transformed into a sense organ whose findings can finally be expressed in conscious ideas and images (p. xi). For myself, I have found this method of looking important because it provides a way to become interested in historical periods with which before I felt little resonance, as with Egyptian art, for which in the past I could supply only formatory descriptions that had no deeper meaning. In reading Richter’s two chapters on Egyptian art and architecture, however, I began to see what Richter means when he says that a work of art is both the expression and shaper of a particular culture’s world. For example, Richter describes how the design of the typical Egyptian temple provided a means for Egyptians (who, Richter says, had no sense of selfness but were, rather, a kind of human sounding board receiving the touch of the surrounding cosmos) to discover themselves bodily. I have not been to Egypt and have never stood next to the huge masses of stone that the pyramids and monumental temples are. But I can imagine Richter’s argument that, for a person with no sense of bodily self, the experience of moving into the smaller and smaller spaces provided by a temple’s progression of hollowed-stone rooms could support—at least for the priests who had access to the deeper recesses of these buildings—an experiential transformation from dream-like consciousness toward an incipient sense of body and selfness. The architecture of Egypt, says Richter, begins the movement toward individualized existence that continues in modern art, which has the task of breaking people out of their fragmented, mundane reality into worlds more whole and deep. What especially struck me in Richter’s account of this historical transition is that there is both more and less: human beings lose in terms of a universal consciousness (so become less in terms of their relation to wholeness), but they gain in terms of moving toward selfness (so become more, in that there is the potential to find one’s uniqueness and thereby deepen and grow as an individual). The path toward individual consciousness, Richter claims, is not reached till the Renaissance. Before covering this period, he describes in three chapters how Greek culture was crucial because the Greeks discovered beauty through art, while medieval art—particularly the great cathedrals— provided the starting place whereby human beings could begin to look inwardly and find higher meanings within, at least at the collective level. With the coming of the Renaissance, art opens up to reflect self-individuality; thus architects create unified interior spaces that have been ordered from themselves rather than as a byproduct of form and structure or through the addition of smaller interior spaces (as in Romanesque and Gothic buildings). At this point in human history, Richter writes, ... human beings enter the interior space within themselves, find themselves there and awakens with an infinite, triumphant joy and feeling of strength to the experience of a self-sustaining individuality that acknowledges no law but its own and no limit but the one it sets itself. Human beings begin to create out of themselves. No longer are they anonymous members or tools of some greater being that does its work through them. They themselves emerge from their work…. They are their work, for they express their own personalities through it. Human beings create space around themselves and project a whole world into it out of their own natures. The Form they thus surround themselves with is part of their own being because they come toward themselves out of these works and finds themselves again within these works (p. 3). What Richter suggests in Art and Human Consciousness is that what humankind was given far back at the dawning of human history—i.e., human awareness as inseparable from universal awareness—must, in our own modern times, be won over again through individual striving—a treacherous path, since, in our modern times, the gates of heaven are no longer guarded by the Muses, but neither are the gates of hell. One can understand why our world seems to have so much good and so much bad at the same time, and why present-day art—one has only to look at current television and cinema—can have so much violence and beauty at the same time (often in the same art work, as in a film like The Mission). First, then, Richter’s book is important because it provides a deeper way to grasp historical meanings and to realize that the present has inescapable relationship to the past, particularly as art works reveal connections. Second, and perhaps more important, Richter’s book is useful because it offers a new way to look at and experience art: to try to move behind and beyond the art object as material form and to encounter the kind of human experience and existence that the art work both reflects and sustains. Let me relate two personal experiences as an example of what I mean here. Last summer, I had just read Art and Human Consciousness for the first time and was particularly affected by Richter’s discussion of Egypt. Shortly after, I visited the Egyptian exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I set myself to approach these art works as Richter might: in a state of openness, empathizing with the art object—trying to become as much as I could the pieces before me. I had two moving experiences. In the first, I approached a life-size stone sculpture of a striding male figure with arms at his sides, left foot one step ahead of the right. I stood next to the figure, took his position, worked to make contact with the inner experience that must have been the basis for this human sculpture. After a short time, I came to sense that the key to this figure was in the head and gaze that seemed infinite and eternal. I felt a powerful sense of wholeness, vastness, and pervasive fullness. I felt something of what Richter must be referring to as he describes similar stone figures: How they stride, as though from one eternity to another! Their walking absorbs them so completely that the only reality they know is the overwhelming grip of a higher guidance. They seem like beings who go from star to star, for the earth has no spaces like the ones in which they live and move. The soles of their feet know nothing of the ground on which they stand. The knees, the hips, indeed the whole of the striding body has no sense of itself at all; it senses only the overpowering command that it must obey (p. 25). For the outsider, Richter’s description might seem nonsensical because it is so foreign to the way we have been conventionally taught to speak of art—i.e., aesthetically, as it speaks compositionally in terms of form, space, line, shade, color and so forth; or culturally, as it reflects the life, needs, and aspirations of a people. But for me, in that moment, I had a fuller inkling of what Richter described. I recognized that what Richter offered was a different but rewarding way to touch the art work—to “go into it” and meet the inner place from where the creator might have originally drawn forth the making of the form. The second experience in the Egyptian exhibit involved a sculpture of a seated King Khephren behind whose head is the Horus-falcon, a symbol of the Egyptian sun god. This creature sat bolt upright behind the king, embracing him with outstretched wings and directing a stern downward gaze directly into the pharaoh’s head. I stood next to the statue and took on the king’s gaze, which had the same timeless, infinite quality as the striding figure above. I closed my eyes and sensed a harsh, cold energy of intimidating vastness bathing me and everything around. In this experience, I felt in a new way the phrase “monumental” art and architecture, for here was an encounter that spoke of timelessness and vastly long periods of waiting and longing. As Richter describes it, Khephren “hears the ancient words of creation which have given rise to all that is; he hears them as though they were resounding out of the heart of the world itself” (p. 28). I felt a certain sadness and longing as I stood there, and I also understood why stone is so integral to Egyptian sacred architecture—because stone experiences this long-ness and longing. Stone endures and experiences in the way that these figures do, looking out and existing in an eternity of oblivion and vastness and cold. These are only two experiences, but I believe that Richter’s descriptions of other art works—the Greek temple, the early Christian basilica, the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, the Renaissance church, the paintings of Van Gogh and other modernists—present other authentic experiences that the practiced experiencer may be able contact directly, through approaching art in this open, Goethean way. For anyone who wishes to see and understand more clearly, Richter’s book is an invaluable guide that deserves repeated study and practice. In the end, Richter provides one base for making better choices. By learning to be open to works of art and to let them speak, one becomes more discriminating and has a better basis for right decisions. Through dedicated, perceptive examples, Richter instructs us. Through his own discrimination, Richter gives us the wish to discriminate. What is needed, he suggests, is not exhortations and rules, but examples and a practical method. Art and Human Consciousness provides exactly that. It is a remarkable book that can extend both one’s sense of self and sense of world.