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δι
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25

THE FRUCTIFYING RAY: 
Considering Kandinskian Artistic Creation  

Through the Hegelian Alienated Consciousness

MARTIN FITZGERALD 

“The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings.” 1

INTRODUCTION

At a particular time necessities come to fruition. i.e., the creating spirit 
(which one can call the abstract spirit) finds access to the [individual] 
soul, subsequently to [many] souls, and calls forth a longing, an inner 
compulsion.

If those conditions are fulfilled which are necessary for a precise form to 
come to maturity, then this longing, this inner compulsion is empowered 
to create a new value in the human mind, which, consciously or 
unconsciously, begins to live within man.

Consciously or unconsciously, from this moment man seeks a material 
form for this new spiritual value that lives in spiritual form within him.

Thus the spiritual value seeks its materialization. Matter is here a reserve of 
supplies from which the spirit, like a cook, selects what is n e c e s s a r y in 
this case.

1 Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay 
and Peter Vergo, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 250.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

This is the positive, the creative [element]. This is the good, T h e w h i t 
e, f r u c t i f y i n g r a y.

This white ray leads to evolution, to sublimation. Thus, behind matter, 
within matter, the creative spirit lies concealed.2 

This short passage both encapsulates many of Kandinsky’s major philosophical 
themes including the internal-external division, the principle of inner necessity, 

the creating spirit, and artistic evolution and also highlights the difficulty in 
grounding Kandinsky on a systematic theory of artistic creation. It is difficult to 
understand the transition from the first inner longing to a concrete contribution 
to spiritual progress. In particular, it is not clear what this spiritual value is, how 
it actually becomes materialized, or how the artist selects the necessary matter to 
materialize it. To address this, I want to call attention to three processes which I 
will call discernment, wherein the artist realizes what his or her spiritual value is; 
translation, wherein the artist transforms the spiritual value into a form appropriate 
to be embodied in an artistic composition; and crafting, wherein the artist physically 
creates his or her composition. Guiding each of these processes is what Kandinsky 
calls the ‘creating spirit.’ I will also look at the work of G.W.F. Hegel in order to 
help supplement Kandinsky’s notion of spirit and to articulate how discernment, 
translation, and crafting bring a ‘spiritually-purposive goal’ into being. As we will 
see, this triadic structure demonstrates the path by which the artist alienates his 
consciousness from himself in the work of art in order that it may again confront 
him as an externalized force so as to drive spiritual progress.

In order to make sense of this structure, I will begin by discussing the Hegelian 
Geist, the way in which Geist alienates from itself, and the way in which alienation 
contributes to Geist’s development. This portion of the Hegelian dialectic will provide 
a lens through which to interpret Kandinsky’s theory. Using this lens, I will discuss 
Kandinsky’s vision of human spiritual progress because every spiritually-purposive 
goal derives from the artist’s position in the collective spiritual atmosphere. Against 
this backdrop, I will isolate the Kandinskian creating spirit and locate its position 
alongside what Kandinsky calls the inner need. From here, I will explain the triadic 
structure of discernment, translation, and crafting in order to demonstrate how the 
artist produces spiritually-purposive artwork. Finally, I will explain how the process of 
alienation ends with recuperation whereby the artistic composition returns feedback 
into the mind of the spectator to produce concrete spiritual progress.

CONSTRUCTING A HEGELIAN LENS
Hegel’s system of philosophy follows the historically-conditioned path of 
consciousness toward Absolute knowing and Absolute Spirit (the mind that knows 
and has itself fully as its own subject). For Hegel, consciousness, particularly human 

2 Ibid., p. 235. The unusual spacing is transcribed from Kandinsky’s own writing.



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The Fructifying Ray

consciousness, is the embodiment of reason in the world. The collective embodiment 
of reason in historically-conditioned consciousness is termed Geist. Hegel believes 
that Geist by its very nature follows a path through which Truth unfolds. Such a path 
inevitably takes consciousness out of union with the natural world and into a state 
of alienation, a fissure that consciousness eventually reunites. Hegel draws upon the 
Judeo-Christian concept of the Fall to explain this point:

Upon a closer inspection of the story of the Fall we find, as was already 
said, that it exemplifies the universal bearings of knowledge upon the 
spiritual life. In its instinctive and natural stage, spiritual life wears the 
garb of innocence and confiding simplicity; but the very essence of spirit 
implies the absorption of this immediate condition in something higher. 
The spiritual is distinguished from the natural, and more especially from 
the animal, life, in the circumstance that it does not continue a mere 
stream of tendency, but sunders itself to self−realisation. But this position 
of severed life has in its turn to be suppressed, and the spirit has by its own 
act to win its way to concord again. The final concord then is spiritual; that 
is, the principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought only. The 
hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand which heals it.3 

Consciousness not only brings itself out of natural harmony, but also brings itself back 
into harmony with nature. The reunion with nature is done through a transformation 
of nature. To “win its way to concord again,” spirit: 

impregnates the external world with his will. Thereby he humanises his 
environment, by showing how it is capable of satisfying him and how it 
cannot preserve any power of independence against him. Only by means of 
this effectual activity is he no longer merely in general, but also in particular 
and in detail, actually aware of himself and at home in his environment.4 

In order to shape the world in its own image, the human consciousness performs 
work. With work, consciousness shapes an external object in such a way that it can 
recognize itself in the object:

 Man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the 
impulse, in whatever is given to him, in what is present to him externally, 
to produce himself and therein equally to recognise himself. This aim 
he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of 
his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. 
Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its 
inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external 
realisation of himself.5 

3 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 24.
4 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 256.
5 Ibid.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

This process by which “he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he 
now finds again his own characteristics,” Hegel calls alienation6. In this process 
of alienation it is not merely the external world which is changed. As Rae notes, 
alienation provides the consciousness an ability to view itself in a way that it would 
otherwise not have access to, thereby changing it in the process.7 The alienated 
consciousness is like a mirror which reflects back to the subject what his or her 
consciousness must really be like in the first place. Pippin points out that “we don’t 
know, in any determinate or ‘living’ detail, who we actually take ourselves to be 
except in such externalization, either in action or in such material productions as 
artworks.”8 In this ‘mirror reflection,’ consciousness sees not only itself, but also a 
collective consciousness of Geist in the larger sense. 

Individual consciousness, as Hegel claims, is essentially constituted by historical 
processes, which play out on a societal level. History begins with the break from 
immediate nature, and, from this point, consciousness itself begins its historical 
development. This is to say that the very nature of consciousness is constituted 
by historical, societal forces. As such, even when consciousness is afforded the 
opportunity to gaze upon itself, it necessarily always sees, knowingly or unknowingly, 
the society which has formed it into its current state.

Within Hegel’s work, alienation is understood in two senses. Alienation is the 
English word chosen for what are in reality two German words: Entfremdung and 
Entaüsserung. Rae associates the two words as follows:

Entfremdung describes a process or state where consciousness is separated 
from, at least, one of the aspects that are required for consciousness to 
fully understand itself. In contract, ‘Entaüsserung’ describes the process 
whereby consciousness externalizes itself in object form and, through this 
objectification, develops a better understanding of itself.9 

These two uses of the word are interrelated. Entfremdung, the state of the 
consciousness before it properly knows its own nature as the universal self, is the 
state of consciousness after the Fall. Sayers notes, as is consistent with this reading, 
that this sense of “alienation can and will be overcome when spirit has completed 
its development and come to be at home in the world.”10 To progress to where 
consciousness is at home again in the world, consciousness needs to use Entaüsserung. 
Entaüsserung is the way in which the conscious subject puts his consciousness before 
himself in an object in order to be able to observe what his own consciousness is like to 
gain a better understanding of it. The two senses of alienation are interrelated insofar 

6  Ibid. 
7 Gavin Rae, “Hegel, Alienation, and the Phenomenological Development of Consciousness,” International Journal 

of Philosophical Studies 20.1 (February 10, 2012), p. 24.
8 Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism, (Chicago: The University 

of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 41.
9 Ibid.
10 Sean Sayers, “Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx,” Historical Materialism 11.1 (2003), p. 120.



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as the understanding afforded by Entaüsserung helps reunite the split of consciousness 
in Entfremdung. Although aspects of Kandinsky’s thought resonate with both of these 
senses of alienation, the focus of this paper is on Entaüsserung, hereafter referred to 
simply as alienation. Alienation takes place in all categories of work, one of which, 
artistic work, will be the focus of this paper.

Even though Kandinsky is concerned with artistic work, there is no particular 
need to invoke pieces of art as distinct from other kinds of objects from a Hegelian 
perspective for this analysis. In other words, although Hegel has an entire separate 
theory of aesthetics, we can use Hegelian alienation as a framework for art as a 
general type of work. If we do as such, then a piece of art is no longer particularly 
distinct from another object arising from work. Art itself can be understood as a type 
of work, for work itself finds “its highest expression … in the free creative activity of 
art.”11 Artistic creation is still itself an act of work. Although Hegel does clearly draw 
a distinction between art and other types of objects, the point here is to look at how 
art is a kind of work and trace alienation within that work. Pippin writes that artistic 
creation involves alienation as it has been defined above:

Very roughly, Hegel’s view was that the production or “externalization” 
of our ideas in artworks represents a distinct and, until very recently, 
indispensable form of self- knowledge. His unusual phrase is that the 
human being, understood as Geist, must “double itself ” (sich verdoppeln) 
(A, 1:31) … And with that one characterization, we are already in 
uncharted waters; art does not double or imitate reality as in so many 
mimetic theories, but rather in art, Geist, some sort of achieved collective 
like- mindedness, doubles itself.12 

Thus, it seems fitting to consider the art object in this context. On a basic level, 
artistic creation is similar to other acts of work insofar as it is the act by which 
consciousness externalizes itself in order to see and better understand itself as well as 
to craft the world in its own image. Although it is not necessary to invoke Hegel’s 
aesthetics, it is necessary to give special attention to the art object within Kandinsky’s 
work. Hegel’s philosophy provides the opportunity to see the artist as one kind of 
worker and to see artistic creation as a kind of work alongside other kinds of work. 
While, again, art is a special kind of work, it still belongs to the general category 
of work. Kandinsky’s writings, however, do not provide this opportunity: in them, 
artistic creation is necessarily artistic in quality. There is no larger reference to work as 
a category in Kandinsky’s theory. However, Hegel’s notion of work can provide this 
more general category. Alienation provides a Hegelian lens through which to observe 
how artistic creation works in Kandinsky’s theory. In particular, I want to consider 
the way in which the doubling of consciousness serves as a framework to understand 
Kandinsky’s creative process. 

11 Sayers, “Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx,” p. 113.
12 Pippin, After the Beautiful, p. 32.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

THE ARTIST
As noted above, the artist is one particular type of determination of consciousness 
capable of performing work. Although in Hegel’s theory any consciousness can 
perform work which doubles itself, Kandinsky gives an account of the creative 
process as it relates specifically to an artist. The general mechanisms of Hegelian 
consciousness, such as self-discovery through alienation, are very much still present 
within the Kandinskian artist, but with Kandinsky’s view the artist does a more 
specific kind of work. This work is artistic work, what Kandinsky calls the creative 
act. In the world of spirit,13 Kandinsky regards the creative act as essential because 
art is an irreplaceable instrument in humanity’s shared spiritual progress.14 The artist, 
being the one who creates art, is thus a necessary part of spiritual progress himself 
both through creating individual compositions, as well as using a lifetime’s effort to 
achieve a larger goal. The artist’s very existence is meant not to serve his own aims, 
but rather he exists “exclusively for the sake of the spectator, because the artist is the 
slave of humanity.”15 Indeed, the artist:

has a threefold responsibility: (1) he must render up again that talent which 
has been bestowed upon him; (2) his actions and thoughts and feelings, 
like those of every human being, constitute the spiritual atmosphere, in 
such a way that they purify or infect the spiritual air; and (3) these actions 
and thoughts and feelings are the material for his creations, which likewise 
play a part in constituting the spiritual atmosphere. He is a ‘king’, as Sar 
Peladan calls him, not only in the sense that he has a great power, but also 
in that he has great responsibilities.16 

The kind of art which the artist creates in order to effect spiritual progress, 
Kandinsky calls spiritually-purposive art. Indeed, Kandinsky believes that an artist 
has a committal responsibility to the non-artist to create spiritually-purposive art. 
Why is it that the artist occupies such a privileged position for Kandinsky? There 
are two compelling reasons: one, that the artist is sensitive enough to hear the call of 
what Kandinsky calls the creating spirit, and two, that the artist is effectively able to 
alienate his consciousness into an art object through the creative act in such a way 
that it makes the call of the creating spirit perceptible to a spectator.

The artist’s sensitivity to the creating spirit is, in a word, the ability of the artist to 
determine what spiritual value is necessary to drive spiritual progress. As a gloss, Paul 
Klee’s simile of the tree is a useful comparison. The Kandinskian creating spirit is like 
the root system of Klee’s tree: 

13 Not to be confused with the Hegelian Spirit. As written with a lowercase “s,” this refers to Kandinsky’s 
understanding of spirit.

14 Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and 
Peter Vergo, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 212.

15 Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Artist,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter 
Vergo, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 418.

16 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, pp. 213-214.



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The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, 
unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order 
into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in 
nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with 
the root of the tree. From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through 
him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered 
and stirred by the strength of the flow, he moulds his vision into his work 
… Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its 
root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious 
that different functions expanding in different elements must produce vital 
divergences … standing at his [the artist’s] appointed place, the trunk of 
the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him 
from the depths. He neither serves nor rules – he transmits. His position 
is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a 
channel.17 

With this line of thought, the artist is said to draw from his or her surrounding 
life and transmit it into the crown of the tree, which is the artistic composition. 
In a similar way, the creating spirit is “one’s inner impulse … [that] will inexorably 
create at the right moment the form it finds necessary,”18 to give expression to some 
content. Just as with the roots of Klee’s tree, the Kandinskian creating spirit draws 
from the “passing stream,” which is in this case the collective spiritual atmosphere 
that Kandinsky describes as the “spiritual triangle.”19 From the spiritual triangle, the 
creating spirit “calls forth a … spiritual value [which] seeks its materialization.”20 
Kandinsky does not explicitly state what the content of such a value is or could be, 
but nevertheless insists that “art in general is not a mere purposeless creating of things 
that dissipate themselves in a void, but a power that has a purpose and must serve the 
development and refinement of the human soul – the movement of the triangle.”21 If 
spiritually-purposive art is created both to materialize a spiritual value (and no other 
thing22 ), as well as to raise the spiritual triangle, then the spiritual value is one which, 
when materialized, directs itself towards raising the spiritual triangle.

The process of materialization – the creative act – takes place through a Hegelian 
alienation of the artist’s consciousness into the artistic composition. In this process, 
the artist, through contact with the creating spirit, must first determine what spiritual 
value is necessary and suitable to express. Then, the artist must comprehend the way 
in which this value is capable of being materialized in an artistic composition. Finally, 
the artist must then proceed to make this composition. When performed correctly, 

17 Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 13-15.
18 Wassily Kandinsky, “Cologne Lecture,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter 

Vergo, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 396.
19 See section The Spiritual Triangle
20 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” p. 235.
21 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 212.
22 Kandinsky acknowledges that many different forces affect the production of a piece of art but nevertheless states 

that only the inner spiritual value is the true goal of the piece of art. Epoch, personality, and so forth give rise to 
artistic expression, but are not the goal of a piece of art.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

the artist produces a spiritually-purposive composition which embodies his or her 
externalized consciousness.

THE SPIRITUAL TRIANGLE
Spiritually-purposive art is only spiritually-purposive if it contributes to the 
advancement of the collective spiritual atmosphere. Kandinsky elaborates this 
viewpoint in the first four chapters of On the Spiritual in Art with the simile of the 
“spiritual triangle.”23 All of humanity’s collective spiritual life:

can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided 
into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. 
The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive and deeper 
become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, 
barely perceptibly, forward and upward so that where the highest point is 
‘today’; the next division is ‘tomorrow,’ i.e. what is today comprehensible 
only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle 
is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the 
life of the second segment.24 

Due to the geometry of the triangle, there are fewer and fewer people in each level 
as the apex is approached; the majority of people fall within one of the lower levels. 
At the very top level “stands sometimes only a single man”25 who, through his efforts 
alone, brings the triangle towards tomorrow. This person is analogous to Hegel’s 
notion of the world-historical individual. World-historical individuals are “agents of 
the World-Spirit,” meaning that they have “an insight into the requirements of the 
time.”26 

This was the very Truth for their age, for their world; the species next in 
order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time. It 
was theirs to know this nascent principle; the necessary, directly sequent 
step in progress, which their world was to take; to make this their aim, and 
to expend their energy in promoting it. World-historical men – the Heroes 
of an epoch – must, therefore, be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their 
deeds, their words are the best of that time.27 

Kandinsky locates the apex of the triangle similarly. The visionary at the apex 
hears the voice of spirit and opens the way to “the spiritual bread for the spiritual 
awakening now beginning.”28 His progress is a progress for all in that the work of 
the visionary advances the triangle absolutely. Even if the fruits of his innovations are 

23 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 133.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Hegel, G.W.F., The Philosophy of History. Ontario: Batoche Books, 1900. https://www.marxists.org/reference/ 

archive/hegel/works/hi/introduction-lectures.htm#s1.
27 Ibid.
28 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 138.



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not immediately felt by all, the progress still stands as a universal progress. However, 
not everyone has direct access to this progress. Instead, it is the unique role of the 
artist to make spiritual values available to non-artists. Just like non-artists, Kandinsky 
notes that artists have different degrees of spiritual development and as such reside in 
different segments of the triangle. Thus:

In every division of the triangle, one can find artists. Every one of them who 
is able to see beyond the frontiers of his own segment is the prophet of his 
environment, and helps the forward movement of the obstinate cartload of 
humanity. … It is obvious that every such segment hungers – consciously 
or (much more often) completely unconsciously – after its corresponding 
spiritual bread. This bread is given it by its artists, and tomorrow the next 
segment will reach for that same bread.29 

And, in this way, the progress of the apex is ostensibly the progress of all. Once the 
apex has broken into new ground, the new ground is separated from others only by 
a train of “tomorrows.”

Kandinsky believes that all pure art is spiritually-purposive art, which is to say that 
all pure art furthers the advance of the spiritual triangle. According to Kandinsky, art 
is uniquely and exclusively positioned to perform this function. Thus, “art is for this 
reason indispensable and purposeful,”30 because “there is no other power that can 
replace art.”31 

Just, then, as work is crucial to the development of Geist, so too is the creative act 
crucial to the development of Kandinskian spirit. If spiritual progress requires the 
production of art, then a form of work, the work which produces art, is necessary to 
raise the spiritual triangle. This work must take the creating spirit and inner need as 
its guidance, proceeding from contact with the spiritual triangle. 

COMPOSITION
An artistic composition is the material result of the creative act. In it resides the artist’s 
externalized consciousness in the form of a concrete pictorial goal. A composition is 
distinct from the more general term ‘art object.’ Kandinsky offers several different 
definitions for the word, each of which slightly different from, but not excluding, the 
others. First, a composition is “the internally purposive subordination of individual 
elements [and] of the structure to a concrete pictorial goal.”32 The elements themselves 
are defined as “the concrete result produced by force operating upon the material,” 
where “tensions, for their part, give expression to the inner sound of the element.”33 

29 Ibid., p. 134.
30 Wassily Kandinsky, “On Stage Composition,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and 

Peter Vergo, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 258.
31 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 212.
32 Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. Lindsay and 

Peter Vergo, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 552.
33 Ibid, p. 611.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Thus it is also appropriate to call a composition “the logically precise organization 
of … living forces encapsulated within elements in the guise of tensions.”34 An 
element’s inner sound is a “spiritual being possessing qualities which are identical to 
that form.”35 

These inner sounds are what communicate with the spectator spiritually. In 
addition to internal effect produced by inner sound, every color, form, and object 
in a composition also has an external effect. Kandinsky’s writing is concerned with 
measuring internal effect through external forms, and not with measuring external 
effect itself. Inner sounds awaken movements in the spirit through the sense which 
experiences the art. For example, Kandinsky describes “color [as] a means of exerting 
a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The 
soul is the piano, with its many strings.”36 Similarly, “form itself, even if completely 
abstract, resembling geometrical form, has its own inner sound.”37 Outside of 
painting, “musical sound has direct access to the soul. It finds there an echo, for 
man ‘hath music in himself ’.”38 In other words, inner effect is a property of artistic 
compositions in general, not merely of paintings. It is necessary to note, however, 
that each discipline of art has its own peculiarities. Although one can represent the 
same inner effect in both painting and music, the two effects can never be the same; 
“each art has its own forces, which cannot be replaced by those of another art.”39 

Because an artistic composition is a physical thing, the inner sound is necessarily 
revealed through some sort of contact with the material of the composition. However, 
curiously, Kandinsky notes that there are kinds of music which “lead us into a new 
realm, where musical experiences are no longer acoustic, but purely spiritual.”40 
Kandinsky seems to be saying that, despite the material nature of a composition 
(in the case of music, acoustic vibrations produced from physical instruments), the 
spiritual effect can offer itself up directly, as though the material did not exist at all. 
“The manner of listening to a ‘pure’ musical work is identical to that of seeing a work 
of ‘concrete’ painting.”41 

A work of art is pure when all of its elements are chosen and arranged by necessity. In 
analyzing Kandinsky’s tableau Thirty, Florman finds a striking similarity between the 
arrangement of forms in the painting and the composition and function of Hegel’s 
ideal state. She cites Frederick Beiser’s analysis:

First, the whole exists for each of the parts as much as each of the parts 
exists for the whole; in other words, the individual is as much a means as 

34 Ibid.
35 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 163.
36 Ibid., p. 160.
37 Ibid., p. 163.
38 Ibid., p. 161.
39 Ibid., p. 155.
40 Ibid., p. 155.
41 Wassily Kandinsky, “Abstract and Concrete Art,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed, Kenneth C. 

Lindsay, and Peter Vergo. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 841.



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an end for the state. Second … there must be life in each part of the state, 
so that each has some degree of autonomy and independence. Third, each 
part, in maintaining itself and seeking its own self-interest, also promotes 
the interest of the whole.42 

Florman uses this analysis of the state to make sense of Thirty’s highly variegated 
structure, noting that “it’s these independent units, mediating between the Kraft or 
power of the whole and the variety of the particular, often opposed forces pulling 
the smaller parts in one direction or the other, that give the comparison whatever 
plausibility it has.”43 The comparison, however, stretches further. Kandinsky 
understands compositions as a general form as “the internally purposive subordination 
… of the individual elements and … of the structure (construction) to a concrete 
pictorial goal.”44 Thus, while Thirty might be the painting through which Kandinsky 
most explicitly states this relationship, Kandinsky’s elements-based approach means 
that the “organic model”45 of Hegel’s state applies equally well to all of his proper 
compositions. This also helps make sense of Florman’s other observation: that “in 
his ideal state, Hegel had assigned a crucial role to independent bodies – civic 
corporations of one kind or another – which were charged with reconciling the 
conflicting claims of community and freedom.”46 Kandinsky believes that within a 
composition, “independent … complexes can be subordinated to other, still larger, 
ones which themselves form only part of the overall composition.”47 While the end 
result of the creative act is a unified composition, the composition nevertheless 
contains smaller organs within it, which are compositions in their own right.

For the comparison to hold, then the elements’ existence must be as dependent on 
the composition as the composition is on the elements, just as the individual is just 
as much a means as an end for the state. If an element is to be understood as simply 
a physical form on the canvas then the comparison falls apart, for the physical form 
exists outside of its organization into a composition. Crucially, however, Kandinsky 
has defined an element as an “encapsulated tension.” The tension is dependent 
on the hand of the artist, who alienates his consciousness to create that particular 
element. Kojève reaches a similar conclusion in his essay “The Concrete Paintings 
of Kandinsky,” raising the example of a drawing “in which Kandinsky incarnates a 
Beautiful [sic] involving a combination of a triangle with a circle:”48 

Just as the tableau “represents” nothing external to it, its Beautiful is also 
purely immanent, it is the Beautiful of the tableau that exists only in the 
tableau. This Beautiful was created by the artist, just as was the circle-

42 Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 
2014), p. 64.

43 Ibid.
44 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, p. 552.
45 Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, p. 64.
46 Ibid.
47 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, p. 616.
48 Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, p. 163.



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triangle that embodies it. The circle-triangle does not exist in the real, 
nonartistic world; it does not exist before, outside of, or apart from the 
tableau; it was created in and by – or as – the tableau. 49

Florman’s comparison to Hegel’s ideal state is apt in more ways than she states. The 
artist’s concrete goal both determines and is determined by the artistic elements which 
embody it. Yet, there is still a gap between the between the work of the creating spirit 
and the finished composition. The artist has to pass through a triadic stage of creation 
whereby the artist realizes his or her spiritual value (discernment), morphs it into a 
form appropriate to an artistic composition (translation), and then create the actual 
material composition (crafting).50 

DISCERNMENT 
To begin the process of alienation, the artist must determine what spiritual value 
is necessary to drive spiritual progress. Although the artist has contact with the 
creating spirit for this purpose, the spiritual value to be materialized does not arrive 
in a finished form, nor in a way which can be directly cognized. Kandinsky suggests 
that the creative spirit implants the value only as a latent potentiality; it arrives as 
a longing. It is only later that “if those conditions are fulfilled which are necessary 
for a precise form to come to maturity, then this longing, this inner compulsion, is 
empowered to create a new value in the human mind.”51 In other words, the artist 
does not originally possess the value in its final form. The artist only comes to possess 
the value through realizing a “precise form,” which empowers the longing.52 As such, 
to realize what value the artist must embody in his artwork is dependent on contact 
with the physical world. I call the process by which the artist comes to realize his 
value discernment.

 Kandinsky himself suggests two conditions through which the precise form can be 
recognized: the external condition and the internal condition. The internal condition 
is the power of the human spirit to hear the call of the creating spirit which “impels 
the human spirit forward and upward.”53 The external condition is the condition 
whereby “no barriers stand in the way,” of “evolution, progress forward and upward.”54 
Kandinsky mentions these conditions are necessary to bring a longing to fruition. 
Thus, the implantation of the longing takes place prior to these two conditions. 

Discernment is thus guided by the creative spirit, which is the artist’s own inner 
impulse, through the two conditions, internal and external, in order to find the 

49 Ibid.
50 None of these terms exist in Kandinsky’s actual texts, nor does he allude to such a triadic process. However, 

I believe the triadic movement to be the correct reading of his account of the creative act, not a Hegelian 
imposition.

51 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” p. 235.
52 I understand ‘form’ to refer to the material art object which can embody the value. This use of ‘form’ is consistent 

with both the term as it is generally used in Kandinsky’s work as well as within this particular essay.
53 Ibid., p. 236.
54 Ibid.



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precise form which converts the inner longing into a new value which lives “in a 
spiritual form within him.”55 What is the event, or events, which causes, or cause, 
the conversion of a longing into a value? One thing is certain, that the artist must to 
some degree look outside him or herself to do this. The inner longing is temporally 
conditioned (hence why it only arises at a particular time), which is to say that the 
longing is a historical event. The conversion of a longing into a value is done through 
the discovery of a form. This, too, is historically conditioned, for “form is always 
temporal, i.e. relative, since it is nothing more than the means necessary today, the 
means which the revelation of today sounds forth, manifests itself.”56 Form itself is 
subject to both “time (period) and space (nationality).”57 Because form is temporally 
conditioned, the artist does not freely imagine a precise form. The artist can only 
discover this necessarily temporal form through contact with the temporal world. 
Even the value itself is one which participates in the “continual triumph of new 
values,”58 which, insofar as they drive the evolution of humanity as a whole, rely on 
a temporal spectator. In the same way that the Hegelian world-historical individual 
is not simply just a great person, but one who is intensely aware of Spirit as it is in 
the world at the moment, so too is the great artist one who is intensely aware of the 
spiritual needs of the age.

The question still remains, however, the extent to which the artist’s contact with 
the outside world can be done spiritually, materially, or otherwise. Does the artist 
discover his or her precise form through pure thought, through observing other 
forms, or through some other means? Whatever the case, once the artist has discerned 
his or her spiritual value, the artist must produce a piece of art to embody that value. 
To do so, the artist translated that value into a concrete pictorial goal.

TRANSLATION
The artist advances the spiritual triangle by disseminating his new value through his 
artwork. To do so, the artist must translate the spiritual value into a mode which can 
actually guide the creation of an art object. “From [the] moment,” when the artist 
realizes the precise form of his value, he “seeks a material form for this new value that 
lives in a spiritual form within him.”59 Translation is the process whereby the artist 
comes to discover which artistic spiritual effect is capable of materially embodying the 
spiritual value found through discernment. An artwork embodies the value through 
possessing a combined spiritual effect which resonates with the spectator in such a 
way as to inspire that value in the spectator as well. Thus, Kandinsky says that “every 
phenomenon in both external and internal worlds can be given linear expression – a 
kind of translation”60 and also notes the existence of such translations in other art 

55 Ibid., p. 235.
56 Ibid., p. 237. Kandinsky’s emphasis.
57 Ibid. Kandinsky’s emphasis.
58 Ibid., p. 236.
59 Ibid., p. 235.
60 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, pp. 583-584.



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forms such as music as well. The result of the translation, the spiritual effect, we may 
rightly call the goal of the composition as the artist relates to it. The artist’s aim is to 
create a composition with the guidance of the translated spiritual value. This agrees 
with Kandinsky’s essay “On Stage Composition” where he identifies “the goal of a 
work of art” as “a certain complex of vibrations.”61 

The spiritual effect of the composition is not the same thing as the value which it 
embodies, nor can one proceed directly from a spiritual value to a spiritual effect, 
which is why translation is a necessary step in the creative process. This is due to 
the inherent metaphysical properties of artistic compositions in Kandinsky’s thought 
and not merely due to the way the creating spirit acts in the artist. First, the nature 
of art makes it impossible to translate the goal purely rationally. Kandinsky bites the 
bullet and “abandon[s] the realm of objective reasoning” by stating that “the artist 
can never either grasp or recognize fully his own goal.”62 This points to the fact that 
each category of art adds its own peculiarities to the same internal effect and that 
the internal effect of an element is dependent on the context it is put in. The key to 
translation is that the artist does not proceed directly from the imagined spiritual 
value to a fully translated pictorial goal. Rather, the artist has to understand the value 
from the side of the composition. Translation imagines what spiritual effect within a 
composition will inspire the spiritual value in the spectator through internal effect. 
Where each category of art has its own peculiarities in internal effect, the artist can 
only understand the combined effect through understanding how each kind of art 
modifies the entire spiritual effect of the composition. Thus, a proper examination 
of the properties of artistic forms is the only way to determine how the artist can 
perform a translation.

In his “Cologne Lecture,” Kandinsky notes his discovery of what Florman calls “color’s 
fundamental mutability.”63 The actual inner sound of a color can be “redefined ad 
infinitum by its different uses,”64 as opposed to being constant across all paintings. 
What appears to be a warm color can be made cool in a particular use. This means 
that the artist cannot reliably use the same color or form to achieve the same spiritual 
effect repeatedly, as the spiritual effect will change, even drastically so, depending on 
the other elements of the composition. For translation, this means that the artist has 
to imagine and/or create a substantial portion of the composition before being able 
to imagine how each individual form is affected by the others. The inner sound is 
constantly changing as more elements are added, which is problematic because there 
is an infinite number of inner sounds, so an element can frequently come to possess 
an inner sound previously unknown.

61 Kandinsky, “On Stage Composition,” p. 257.
62 Kandinsky, “Cologne Lecture,” p. 399.
63 Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, p. 85.
64 Kandinsky, “Cologne Lecture,” p. 398.



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Further, “each art has its own forces, which cannot be replaced by those of another 
art.”65 

Where do the differences lie? Kandinsky notes that “in the last essentials, these 
means,” the material forms, “are wholly alike: their final goal extinguishes their 
external dissimilarities and reveals their inner identity.”66 This is not to say that the 
inner effect of two kinds of art can be identical, for “an exact ‘translation’ of one art 
to another is impossible.”67 Rather the implication is that their identity as spiritually 
affective art is preserved across category. If the dissimilarity is not due to identity, 
for they are both spiritually affective art forms at base, and is not due to limitations 
in inner sound, then the dissimilarity is to be found in the difference in material 
between categories of art. The affectivity of a certain kind of art owes to the material 
proper to that kind of art. This means that matter itself has a kind of affectivity 
peculiar to it. In the process of translation, the artist imagines the concrete pictorial 
goal in terms of the material they intend to use. But, because the matter is affective in 
a special way, one which the artist can never fully grasp, the artist cannot immediately 
determine how the goal is to be translated. Thus, “nothing is more damaging and 
more sinful than to seek one’s forms by force.”68 

The artist cannot directly impose himself on the matter because he cannot grasp the 
translated goal without mediation, hence the sinfulness of forcing forms. However, 
the artist is capable of perceiving the translated goal in the finished composition even 
if he is not capable of dictating exactly what it is he perceived. This means the artist 
can place himself in the presence of the translated goal by the mediation of spiritually 
affective matter. This is not to say that the artist necessarily approaches the canvas in 
a state of paralysis, but rather is to say that translation is never complete as a purely 
mental phenomenon alone. 

Indeed, the impossibility of translation as a purely mental phenomenon points 
towards the very root of the process of alienation. The goal of a composition, as we 
have seen, springs forth from the creating spirit, which itself springs forth from the 
artists’ consciousness. In other words, the goal of the composition is created by, and is 
held in, the artist’s consciousness. However, as Hegel says, the consciousness cannot 
simply observe itself as it truly is. Instead, consciousness must observe itself through 
alienation by recognizing itself in an external object. In this case, the creative act is 
the work which invests consciousness in an external object, the composition, and 
allows the artist to recognize himself. Hence, the artist cannot simply immediately 
realize his translated goal, as to do so would be to observe consciousness directly. 
Rather, the artist must first begin crafting his composition.

65 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 155. 
66 Kandinsky, “On Stage Composition,” p. 257.
67 Kandinsky, “Abstract and Concrete Art,” p. 841.
68 Kandinsky, “Cologne Lecture,” p. 396.



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CRAFTING
Creation is the actual physical process by which the artist creates the art object which 
will materialize the spiritual value by embodying the value’s translation into artistic 
spiritual effect. In crafting, the goal serves to guide which forms must be placed by 
inner necessity. Crafting includes things such as painting, sculpting, writing, or any 
such physical activity. As with translation and discernment, crafting is a necessary step 
in the creative process, especially insofar as the result of crafting, the composition, is 
what mediates the spiritual value back into the spiritual triangle. An artist creates a 
composition by combining the elements proper to the type of art they are working 
in as guided by the goal they wish to create. For example, graphic art features the 
point and the line. 

Kandinsky does not speak much about the actual physical process of crafting. Indeed, 
to speak too much of it would risk a descension into “virtuoso painting,”69 or painting 
that focuses on external effect rather than internal effect. However, he does mention 
that form must “enter into the work of art of its own accord, and, moreover, at that 
level of completeness which corresponds to the development of the creative spirit.”70 
The physical “matter is here a reserve of supplies from which the spirit, like a cook, 
selects what is necessary in this case.”71 There are many different ways to produce 
forms just as there are many different categories of art. Point and Line to Plane makes 
a particular study of etching, woodcutting, and lithography to demonstrate how 
different technical methods can impact the inner sound of certain elements. Each 
of these three crafting techniques gives a point “various faces and hence various 
expressions.”72 As a grouping, “technical resources arise no less intentionally and 
purposively than all other phenomena, both in the “material” world (spruce, lion, 
star, louse) and in the “spiritual” (work of art, moral principle, scientific method, 
religious idea).”73 

As the artist gazes at the forms he has created, he becomes a spectator to his own 
work. The artist’s own composition as it is being crafted inspires a spiritual effect in 
the artist himself. This can help the artist further realize his own spiritual value or 
realize exactly how it is that value translates into a concrete pictorial goal. 

COLLAPSE OF THE TRIAD
 The separation of the creative act into each of these three stages contains within 
it a problem. Each of the three stages requires something outside of itself to 
reach completeness, indeed even to begin in the first place. Discernment requires 
recognition of a precise form for the spiritual value to make itself apparent. If the 

69 Kandinsky, “On the Artist,” p. 412.
70 Kandinsky, “Cologne Lecture,” p. 396.
71 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” p. 235.
72 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, p. 566.
73 Ibid., p. 563.



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precise form is to be appropriate for the spiritual value, then the value must already 
be conceived of as a translated value. However, translation requires contact with the 
material of the composition because the inner sound of the elements is unknowable 
in isolation. Because the artist cannot fully imagine the inner sound of each element 
without viewing the element’s inner sound in juxtaposition with other sounds, the 
artist cannot perfectly picture a complete canvas in his head before the piece has 
been created. Translation is thus only approximate at best until the artist sees how 
the inner sounds of familiar elements are modified by their juxtapositions. Likewise, 
crafting requires a concrete pictorial goal to choose and order the elements. The 
artist must choose elements in accordance with the translated goal, which is itself 
dependent on the artist’s discernment of the spiritual value, which is itself dependent 
on realizing the precise form of the composition. The artistic process seems to be at 
a standstill. Each stage requires something from the other stage in order to proceed.

Hegel himself recognizes a similar problem in the Phenomenology of Spirit in chapter 
5, C “Individuality which Takes Itself to be Real in and for Itself ”:

Consciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become 
explicit for it; in other words, action is simply the coming-to-be of Spirit 
as consciousness. What the latter is in itself, it knows therefore from what 
it actually is. Accordingly, an individual cannot know what he [really] is 
until he has made himself a reality through action. However, this seems to 
imply that he cannot determine the End of his action until he has carried 
it out; but at the same time, since he is a conscious individual, he must have 
the action in front of him beforehand as entirely his own, i.e. as an End. 
The individual who is going to act seems, therefore, to find himself in a 
circle in which each moment already presupposes the other, and thus he 
seems unable to find a beginning, because he only gets to know his original 
nature, which must be his End, from the deed, while, in order to act, he 
must have that End beforehand. But for that very reason he has to start 
immediately, and, whatever the circumstances, without further scruples 
about beginning, means, or End, proceed to action; for his essence and 
intrinsic nature is beginning, means, and End, all in one. 74 

The “End” here is analogous to the artist’s concrete pictorial goal and the deadlock is 
much the same. How can the artist proceed, oriented towards the concrete pictorial 
goal, that is, his End, when that End is only found through the action? If the End 
must be had beforehand, it seems impossible to proceed. However, where the End 
springs forth from consciousness itself, the deadlock can be broken. Because the artist 
alienates his own consciousness as the concrete pictorial goal, the intrinsic nature of 
that very consciousness contains the beginning, means, and End within it already. It 
is immediate action which leads to the end of the creative act.

74 Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 240.



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Florman, while having a different account for the creative act, nonetheless arrives at a 
similar conclusion. Through her analysis, Florman has also identified a triadic creative 
process. In the first moment the artist lays in the main body of the composition, in 
the second moment he balances the individual elements against one another, and in 
the third the artist makes tiny alterations in color to profoundly alter the combined 
effect.75 Florman notes that “the implication here is that the painting’s completion 
turned on a process not wholly, not even primarily, within the artist’s conscious 
control. Especially at this third stage, Kandinsky would have us know, progress was 
driven by painting’s own logic or ‘inner necessity.’”76 Florman’s description picks up 
after implantation of the inner longing,77 but nevertheless demonstrates something 
profound about Kandinsky’s account of the creative process in agreement with 
Hegel: that true distinctions between moments of the creative process are ultimately 
untenable. Even if the artist lays out the main forms first, the forms are not the same 
in essence as the final forms. As was said above,78 the elements and goal are mutually 
constitutive. If the goal changes after the main forms are laid in, then those forms 
change as well. It is in this same way that discernment, translation, and crafting 
collapse into one another. 

CONCLUSION
At the end of the creative act, the artist’s externalized consciousness lies ready to 
re-confront itself in the completed composition. The triadic movement described 
above ultimately sunders into the more general process of alienation. Now latent 
in the composition is consciousness as implanted through a concrete pictorial goal 
in the creative act. In order to drive spiritual progress, the composition now offers 
itself up to the spectator; for, after all, the artist exists “exclusively for the sake of the 
spectator, because the artist is the slave of humanity.”79 The spiritual bread offered in 
the composition is a spiritual value created by the artist’s own inner impulse under 
the guise of the creating spirit. Truly, then, the artist offers his own consciousness up 
as the people’s spiritual bread. In doing so, “in rendering itself objective and making 
this [–] its being [–] an object of thought, [spirit,] on the one hand, destroys the 
determinate form of its being, and, on the other hand, gains a comprehension of the 
universal element which it involves and, thereby, gives a new form to its inherent 
principle … [which] has risen into another, and, in fact, a higher principle.” The 
higher principle is still shrouded in mystery for Kandinsky, but he nevertheless 
maintains conviction that the spiritual triangle moves ever upward. It is only through 
Hegel’s theory of alienation, however, that the movement of the triangle is given 
its fullest expression, for in it we see that the creative act is itself the movement of 
consciousness from the triangle into the composition through the artist’s hand. F

75 Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, p. 85.
76 Ibid.
77 See Discernment
78 See Composition
79 Kandinsky, “On the Artist,” p. 418.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Florman, Lisa Carol. Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art. 
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford: 
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——— Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by John Sibree. New York: 
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——— “Point and Line to Plane.” Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Kenneth C. 
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