Karlheinz Flau describes his personal discovery of Goethe’s idea of polarity and intensification. In the end, every person must find their own key to the world’s phenomena.
According to ChatGPT, “Goethe’s idea of polarity and intensification, as a central concept of his natural philosophy and his holistic worldview, stems primarily from his scientific and philosophical writings, especially in connection with his theory of colors, morphology, and his thinking about natural processes.”
I didn’t want to just take things as they came in life; I wanted to find my own way into the secrets of the world and gain insights that would allow me to think and shape things freely and independently. Our children’s first drawings were a key experience for me. What was it that every child was putting down on paper in a form we’d usually call a bunch of “scribbles”? Circles, spirals, encircling, swinging, vigorously back and forth, up and down, forming a cross. Then a cross in a circle and hammering in the center of the circle—forming a center and a circumference. This went on up to the third year or so. Then a new element came in: right angles, squares, grids, up to the fifth year. Next, triangles, points, and pointy, specific shapes, until it was time for them to start going to school. Now it was a primitive house, a triangle and square together (with many steps in between), and rhythmic forms spiraling around a central axis; then, the famous fir tree, a ladder, and on and on. . . .
These weren’t images; they were traces of movement, hieroglyphs of the forces of development! From the archetypes of circle, square, and triangle to primal forces to images of the physical world—and only then, the object consciously appears. Research shows that these steps run through all human cultures. This idea opened me to an initial understanding of the primordial elements in megalithic culture with its spirals, circles, rhombuses, crosses, and zigzags. These first expressions of the curved and the straight, above and below, can be regarded as the first building blocks, the primordial elements of all design. When the polarities are brought into free play with one another, the primordial trinity of all artistic expression emerges.
During my many years at the University of Bremen, I enjoyed sharing these thoughts and images with others. They often provoked surprise and disbelief. But later, quite a few students confirmed this evolution by watching their own children draw, and then they were touched and amazed. They brought me beautiful drawings, which I happily added to my collection.
With this sharpened view of the formative forces of nature and of human beings, many secrets were revealed to me. For example, I discovered that the lower leaves of a goose thistle were round, thick, and bulky, while the upper leaves were very fine and pointy; in between was the entire range of shapes, and in the very middle, the characteristic leaf of the species was found. In the lily flower, three petals were round and large, three were pointed and small.
I discovered Goethe’s idea of polarity and intensification everywhere. A fruitful period of creativity followed. I took as my starting point one specific phenomenon that I observed in nature and then added further observations, embedding the details in their larger context. This is how I pursued the original threefold nature of all being: the threefold nature of the course of the year with its polarity of summer and winter, and the states of oscillation during the spring and autumn equinoxes. The same applies to the social organism in its threefold division of cultural, rights, and economic life; the same for the laws of architecture in its numerical and dimensional relationships; the same for the human form, the body as temple of the gods, in the progression of the human being from spherical = head; rhythmic = chest, breath; dynamic and static = metabolism and limbs. It’s the image of a temple with a cupola, architraves, capitals, and columns—“the building becomes man”—the first Goetheanum.
Over the years, I collected page after page and filled folder after folder with an abundance of individual observations coming together to form a whole. I sculptured objects in transformation, followed by a technical design according to the criteria of truth, beauty, and goodness. In 2015, I created a long strip of paper measuring ten meters by one meter, with all the phenomena depicted as an “evolutionary series.” In ways like this, I believe everyone can forge their own key, individually, which opens the door to the secrets of the world, without falling into dogma.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image Karlheinz Flau, “Urgebärden in Kleinkinderzeichnungen” [Primal gestures in children’s drawings], Aus der gelben Mappe: Die Dreiheit als Weltgestaltungs-Prinzip [From the yellow folder: The Trinity as a principle of world formation], 6th edn. (Ottersberg: Jürgensen-Design, 2019), p. 29, ISBN 9783939240440.
