The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Goethe and Schiller

[ 1 ] Goethe recounts a conversation that once ensued between him and Schiller after both had attended a meeting of the natural history society in Jena. Schiller was not very satisfied with what had been presented at the meeting. He was confronted with a fragmented way of looking at nature. And he remarked that such a view could in no way appeal to the layman. Goethe replied that it might remain uncanny even to the initiated, and that there could be another way of depicting nature not as separate and isolated, but as working and living, as striving from the whole into the parts. And now Goethe developed the great ideas that had occurred to him about plant nature. He drew "a symbolic plant with a few characteristic strokes of the pen" before Schiller's eyes. This symbolic plant was to express the essence that lives in each individual plant, whatever particular form it takes. It was to show the successive development of the individual parts of the plant, their emergence from one another and their relationship to one another. On April 17, 1787 in Palermo, Goethe wrote down the following words about this symbolic plant form: "There must be one after all! How else would I recognize that this or that structure is a plant if they were not all formed according to a pattern?" Goethe had developed in himself the idea of a plastic-ideal form that reveals itself to the mind when it surveys the diversity of plant forms and observes what they have in common. Schiller looked at this structure, which should not live in a single plant, but in all plants, and said, shaking his head: "This is not an experience, this is an idea." These words seemed to Goethe to come from a strange world. He was aware that he had arrived at his symbolic figure through the same kind of naive perception as he had arrived at the idea of a thing that you can see with your eyes and grasp with your hands. Like the individual plant, the symbolic or primordial plant was an objective being for him. He did not believe he owed it to arbitrary speculation, but to unbiased observation. He could only reply: "It can be very dear to me when I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes." And he was quite unhappy when Schiller followed this up with the words: "How can an experience ever be given that should be appropriate to an idea. For therein consists the peculiarity of the latter, that it can never be congruent with an experience."

[ 2 ] Two opposing worldviews confront each other in this conversation. Goethe sees in the idea of a thing an element that is directly present in it, that acts and creates in it. In his view, an individual thing takes on certain forms for the reason that the idea must live itself out in a particular way in the given case. It makes no sense for Goethe to say that a thing does not correspond to the idea. For the thing cannot be anything other than what the idea has made it to be. Schiller thinks differently. For him, the world of ideas and the world of experience are two separate realms. The manifold things and events that fill space and time belong to experience. Opposite it is the realm of ideas, as a different kind of reality, which reason takes possession of. Because knowledge flows to man from two sides, from outside through observation and from within through thinking, Schiller distinguishes between two sources of knowledge. For Goethe, there is only one source of knowledge, the world of experience, in which the world of ideas is embedded. For him, it is impossible to say: experience and idea, because the idea lies before the mind's eye through spiritual experience in the same way as the sensory world lies before the physical.

[ 3 ] Schiller's view emerged from the philosophy of his time. The fundamental ideas that shaped this philosophy, and which became the driving forces of the entire Western intellectual formation, must be sought in Greek antiquity. One can gain a picture of the particular nature of Goethe's world view if one tries to characterize it entirely from within itself, as it were with ideas that one merely borrows from it. This is what will be attempted in the later parts of this essay. Such a characterization can, however, be aided by a previous consideration of the fact that Goethe expressed himself about certain things in one way or another because he felt himself to be in agreement or in opposition to what others thought about an area of natural and spiritual life. Some of Goethe's statements only become understandable if one considers the kinds of ideas he found himself confronted with and with which he grappled in order to gain his own point of view. How he thought and felt about this or that also sheds light on the nature of his own world view. If we want to talk about this area of Goethe's nature, we have to express some things that remained only unconscious feelings in his mind. In the conversation with Schiller referred to here, a world view contrary to his own stood before Goethe's mind's eye. And this contrast shows how he felt about the kind of conception which, coming from one side of Greekness, sees an abyss between sensual and spiritual experience and how, without such an abyss, he saw the experience of the senses and the experience of the spirit united in a world view which conveyed reality to him. If one wants to consciously revive as thoughts what Goethe more or less unconsciously carried within him as an opinion about the shape of the Western worldviews, these thoughts will be the following. At a fateful moment a Greek thinker was seized by a distrust of the human sense organs. He began to believe that these organs did not transmit the truth to man, but that they deceived him. He lost confidence in what naive, unbiased observation offered. He found that thinking made different statements about the true nature of things than experience. It will be difficult to say in which mind this mistrust first took root. One encounters it in the Eleatic school of philosophers, whose first representative is Xenophanes, who was born in Colophon around 570 BC. Parmenides appears to be the most important personality of this school. For he asserted with a sharpness like no one before him that there are two sources of human knowledge. He declared that the impressions of the senses are deception and delusion, and that man can only arrive at knowledge of the true through pure thought, which takes no account of experience. The way in which this view of thinking and sensory experience appears in Parmenides inoculated many subsequent philosophies with a developmental disease from which scientific education still suffers today. It is not the place within the context of Goethe's world view to discuss the origin of this type of conception in oriental views.