Aesthetics is, as the Basel philosopher Heinrich Barth once put it, not only a discipline concerned with works of art, but one that fundamentally opens up ‘what we are to understand by appearance’. Aesthetics thus makes a fundamental contribution to the ‘knowledge of existence’. It examines the connection between the sense world and the spiritual as a unity and establishes a relationship to the world beyond the subject-object divide.

Rudolf Steiner had already pursued a similar approach earlier in his engagement with Goethe. He called for the artistic process to elevate the material into the spiritual sphere. Thus, how can the approach of Rudolf Steiner’s aesthetics, based on Goethe, be made fruitful in its significance for the understanding of art and artistic processes in general, so that the perspective of this new aesthetics becomes an all-encompassing principle of life? To explore and present these connections is the aim of the research project, which brings together various scientific and artistic disciplines.

More details on the research project