ABSTRACT
Victoria Walters (2012) points out that Beuys was first and foremost a German thinker and artist for whom it was very natural to use dialectics as an artistic method of enquiry. She asserts that unlike Hegel, for whom dialectics was a route to pure Reason, Beuys was seeking to bring about "the creative shaping of all thought, all forming … whereby the human being … comes to shape new forms in response" to the world. According to Walters, the knife hints for a "quasi-homeopathic" healing practice that operates within Beuys's work by triggering "a small degree of pain that stimulates the patient's system to heal itself". Beuys adopted from Rudolf Steiner the idea of three-fold social order that split the society into three separate spheres each of which embraced a different ideal from the French revolution: cultural freedom, fraternity in economics, and equality in front of law and politics.
