The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Goethe and the Platonic Worldview

[ 1 ] I have described the development of thought from Plato's to Kant's time in order to be able to show what impressions Goethe must have received when he turned to the precipitation of philosophical thought to which he could adhere in order to satisfy his so strong need for knowledge. He found no answers in the philosophies to the innumerable questions to which his nature urged him. Indeed, as often as he immersed himself in a philosopher's view of the world, there was a contrast between the direction his questions took and the world of thought from which he sought advice. The reason for this was that the one-sided Platonic separation of idea and experience was contrary to his nature. When he observed nature, it presented him with ideas. He could therefore only think it filled with ideas. A world of ideas that does not permeate the things of nature, that does not bring forth their emergence and decay, their becoming and growth, is for him a powerless web of thought. The logical continuation of series of thoughts, without immersion in the real life and creation of nature, seems unfruitful to him. For he feels intimately intertwined with nature. He sees himself as a living part of nature. What arises in his spirit has, in his view, been created in him by nature. Man should not place himself in a corner and believe that he can spin a web of thought out of himself that will shed light on the nature of things. He should allow the stream of world events to flow through him constantly. Then he will feel that the world of ideas is nothing other than the creative and active power of nature. He will not want to stand above things in order to think about them, but will burrow into their depths and extract from them what lives and works in them.

[ 2 ] His artistic nature led Goethe to such a way of thinking. With the same necessity with which a flower blossoms, he felt his poetic products grow out of his personality. The way in which the spirit in him produced the work of art seemed to him to be no different from the way in which nature produces its creatures. And just as in a work of art the spiritual element cannot be separated from spiritless matter, so it was impossible for him to imagine perception without the idea in a thing of nature. He was therefore alienated by a view that saw only something unclear and confused in perception and wanted to view the world of ideas separately, purified from all experience. He felt something contrary to nature in every world view in which the elements of one-sidedly understood Platonism lived. That is why he could not find what he was looking for in the philosophers. He was looking for the ideas that live in things and that make all the details of experience appear to grow out of a living whole, and the philosophers provided him with thought shells that they had combined into systems according to logical principles. Again and again he found himself turned back on himself when he sought enlightenment from others about the riddles that nature presented him with.

[ 3 ] It was one of the things that Goethe suffered from before his Italian journey that his need for knowledge could not find satisfaction. In Italy he was able to form a view of the driving forces from which works of art emerge. He realized that perfect works of art contain what people worship as divine, as eternal. After seeing artistic creations that particularly interested him, he wrote down the words: "The high works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." The art of the Greeks elicits the following statement from him: "I have the suspicion that they (the Greeks) proceeded according to the very laws that nature itself follows and that I am on the trail of." What Plato believed to find in the world of ideas, what the philosophers were never able to bring Goethe closer to, he saw in the works of art of Italy. For Goethe, art first reveals in perfect form that which he can regard as the basis of knowledge. He sees in artistic production a kind and higher stage of the workings of nature; artistic creation is for him a heightened creation of nature. He later expressed this in his characterization of Winckelmann: "... By being placed on the summit of nature, man sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself has to produce another summit. To this end, he increases by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, calling upon choice, order, harmony and meaning and finally elevating himself to the production of the work of art...". Goethe arrived at his world view not by logical deduction, but by contemplating the essence of art. And what he found in art, he also sought in nature.

[ 4 ] The activity through which Goethe acquires a knowledge of nature is not essentially different from the artistic one. Both merge into one another and overlap. In Goethe's opinion, the artist must become greater and more decisive if, in addition to his "talent, he is also an instructed botanist, if he recognizes, from the root, the influence of the various parts on the flourishing and growth of the plant, their purpose and reciprocal effect, if he understands and considers the successive development of flowers, leaves, fertilization, fruit and the new germ. He will then not only show his taste by choosing from the appearances, but he will also astonish and instruct us at the same time by a correct representation of the characteristics." The work of art is therefore all the more perfect the more it expresses the same lawfulness that is contained in the work of nature to which it corresponds. There is only one unified realm of truth, and this encompasses art and nature. Therefore, the ability of artistic creation cannot be essentially different from that of recognizing nature. Goethe says of the artist's style that it "rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are permitted to recognize it in visible and tangible forms." The view of the world that emerged from one-sidedly grasped Platonic ideas draws a sharp line between science and art. Artistic activity is based on the imagination, on feeling; scientific results are supposed to be the outcome of an imaginative development of concepts. Goethe sees things differently. For him, when he turns his eye to nature, the result is a sum of ideas; but he finds that in the individual object of experience the ideal component is not complete; the idea points beyond the individual to related objects in which it appears in a similar way. The philosophizing observer captures this ideal component and expresses it directly in his works of thought. This ideal also has an effect on the artist. But it drives him to create a work in which the idea does not merely work as in a work of nature, but becomes a present appearance. What is merely ideal in the work of nature and reveals itself to the observer's mind's eye becomes real in the work of art, becomes perceptible reality. The artist realizes the ideas of nature. But he does not need to bring them to consciousness in the form of ideas. When he looks at a thing or an event, another one is immediately formed in his mind, which contains in real appearance what that one contains only as an idea. The artist provides images of works of nature which transform their idea content into a perceptual content. The philosopher shows how nature presents itself to thinking contemplation; the artist shows how nature would look if its active forces were open not only to thinking but also to perception. It is one and the same truth that the philosopher presents in the form of thought and the artist in the form of image. Both differ only in their means of expression.

[ 5 ] The insight into the true relationship between idea and experience that Goethe acquired in Italy is only the fruit of the seed that was hidden in his natural disposition. The Italian journey brought him the warmth of the sun that was suitable for bringing the seed to maturity. In the essay "Nature", which appeared in the Tiefurter Journal in 1782, and which has Goethe as its author (cf. my proof of Goethe's authorship in Volume VII of the Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft), the germs of Goethe's later world view can already be found. What is a dark sentiment here later becomes a clear and distinct thought. "Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by it - unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and drives us along until we are weary and fall from her arms... She (nature) has thought and thinks constantly; but not as a human being, but as nature... She has no speech nor language, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks... I did not speak of her. No, what is true and what is false, all she has spoken. Everything is her fault, everything is her merit! -" When Goethe wrote these sentences, he did not yet realize how nature expresses its ideal essence through man; but that it is the voice of the spirit of nature that resounds in the spirit of man, he felt.

[ 6 ] In Italy, Goethe found the spiritual atmosphere in which his cognitive organs could develop, as they had to according to their nature if he was to achieve full satisfaction. In Rome, he "discussed art and its theoretical demands a great deal with Moritz"; during the journey, while observing plant metamorphosis, he developed a natural method that later proved fruitful for the knowledge of all organic nature. "For as vegetation demonstrated its process to me step by step, I could not err, but had to recognize, by letting it do so, the ways and means by which it knows how to gradually promote the most enveloped state to perfection." A few years after his return from Italy, he also succeeded in finding a method born of his spiritual needs for the observation of inorganic nature. "In physical investigations, the conviction forced itself upon me that, in all observation of objects, the highest duty is to seek out exactly every condition under which a phenomenon appears and to strive for the greatest possible completeness of the phenomena: because they are ultimately forced to line up, or rather to interlock, and must also form a kind of organization before the researcher's gaze, manifesting their inner overall life."

[ 7 ] Goethe found no enlightenment anywhere. He had to enlighten himself. He sought the reason for this and believed he found it in the fact that he had no organ for philosophy in the proper sense. But it was to be found in the fact that the one-sided Platonic way of thinking, which dominated all the philosophies accessible to him, contradicted his healthy natural disposition. In his youth he had repeatedly turned to Spinoza. He even confesses that this philosopher always had a "peaceful effect" on him. This was based on the fact that Spinoza regarded the universe as a great unity and that everything individual necessarily emerged from the whole. However, even when Goethe became involved in the content of Spinoza's philosophy, he felt that it remained alien to him. "But do not think that I would have subscribed to his writings and literally professed them. For I had already realized all too clearly that no one understands the other, that no one thinks the same thing with the same words that the other thinks, that a conversation, a reading, provokes different trains of thought in different people, and the author of Werther and Faust can be credited with this, that he, deeply imbued with such misunderstandings, did not himself cherish the conceit of fully understanding a man who, as a pupil of Descartes, through mathematical and rabbinical culture, elevated himself to the summit of thought; who to this day still seems to be the goal of all speculative endeavors. " It was not the fact that Spinoza had been trained by Descartes, nor that he had risen to the summit of thought through mathematical and rabbinical culture, that made him an element for Goethe to which he could not completely devote himself, but his purely logical way of treating knowledge that was alien to reality. Goethe could not devote himself to pure, experience-free thinking because he was unable to separate it from the totality of reality. He did not want to link one thought to another merely logically. Rather, such mental activity seemed to him to distract from true reality. He had to immerse his mind in experience in order to arrive at ideas. For him, the interaction between idea and perception was a spiritual breathing space. "Time is governed by the swing of the pendulum, the moral and scientific world by the alternating movement of idea and experience." Viewing the world and its phenomena in terms of this sentence seemed natural to Goethe. For for him there was no doubt that nature observes the same process: that it is "a development from a living mysterious whole" to the manifold particular phenomena that fill space and time. The mysterious whole is the world of the idea. "The idea is eternal and unique; that we also need the plural is not well done. All that we become aware of and can speak of are only manifestations of the idea; we express concepts, and in this respect the idea itself is a concept." The creation of nature proceeds from the whole, which is of an ideal nature, into the individual, which is given to perception as something real. Therefore, the observer should: "recognize the ideal in the real and appease his respective discomfort with the finite by elevating it to the infinite". Goethe is convinced that "nature proceeds according to ideas, and likewise that man pursues an idea in everything he begins". If man really succeeds in elevating himself to the idea and in grasping the details of perception from the idea, he accomplishes the same thing that nature accomplishes by allowing its creatures to emerge from the mysterious whole. As long as man does not feel the working and creation of the idea, his thinking remains separated from living nature. He must regard thinking as a merely subjective activity that can create an abstract image of nature. But as soon as he feels how the idea lives and is active within him, he regards himself and nature as one whole, and what appears as subjective within him is at the same time regarded as objective; he knows that he is no longer a stranger to nature, but feels himself to be one with the whole of it. The subjective has become objective; the objective is completely permeated by the spirit. Goethe is of the opinion that Kant's fundamental error consists in the fact that he "now regards the subjective faculty of knowledge itself as an object and distinguishes the point where subjective and objective meet, sharply but not quite correctly." (Sophien-Ausgabe, 2. Abteilung, Vol. XI, p.376.) The faculty of cognition appears to man as subjective only so long as he does not realize that it is nature itself that speaks through it. Subjective and objective meet when the objective world of ideas comes to life in the subject, and that which is active in nature itself lives in the spirit of man. When this is the case, then all opposition between subjective and objective ceases. This opposition has meaning only as long as man maintains it artificially, as long as he regards ideas as his thoughts, through which the essence of nature is represented, but in which it is not itself active. Kant and the Kantians had no idea that in the Ideas of Reason the essence, the Ansich of things is directly experienced. For them, everything ideal is merely subjective. Therefore they came to the opinion that the ideal could only be necessarily valid if that to which it refers, the world of experience, is also only subjective. Kant's way of thinking stands in sharp contrast to Goethe's views. There are indeed individual statements by Goethe in which he speaks of Kant's views in an approving manner. He tells us that he attended many a conversation about these views. "I noticed with some attention that the old main question was renewing itself, how much our self and how much the outside world contribute to our spiritual existence. I had never separated the two, and when I philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with unconscious naivety and really believed that I saw my opinions before my eyes. But as soon as that controversy came up, I liked to take the side that did man the most honor, and gave complete approval to all friends who, with Kant, claimed that even if all our knowledge began with experience, it did not all spring from experience." Nor, in Goethe's view, does the idea originate from that part of experience which presents itself to mere perception through the human senses. Reason and imagination must become active, must penetrate into the inner being in order to take possession of the ideal elements of existence. In this respect, the spirit of man has a share in the realization of knowledge. Goethe thinks that it is a credit to man that the higher reality, which is not accessible to the senses, appears in his spirit; Kant, on the other hand, denies the world of experience the character of higher reality because it contains elements that come from the spirit. Only when he reinterpreted Kant's propositions in terms of his world view could Goethe agree with them. The foundations of Kant's way of thinking contradict Goethe's nature in the sharpest possible terms. If he did not emphasize the contradiction sharply enough, it was probably only because he did not engage with these foundations because they were too foreign to him. "It was the entrance (to the Critique of Pure Reason) that appealed to me, but I could not venture into the labyrinth itself: sometimes the gift of poetry hindered me, sometimes common sense, and nowhere did I feel better." Goethe had to admit about his conversations with the Kantians: "They heard me well, but could neither answer me nor be of any help. More than once I encountered one or the other admitting with smiling astonishment that it was, of course, an analog of Kant's way of thinking, but a strange one." It was, as I have shown, not an analogy either, but the most decided opposite of the Kantian mode of conception.

[ 8 ] It is interesting to see how Schiller seeks to clarify the contrast between Goethe's way of thinking and his own. He feels the originality and freedom of Goethe's world view. But he cannot remove the one-sidedly grasped Platonic elements of thought from his own mind. He cannot rise to the insight that idea and perception do not exist separately in reality, but are only artificially thought separately by the intellect seduced by the wrong direction of ideas. He therefore contrasts Goethe's way of thinking, which he describes as intuitive, with his own as speculative and claims that both, if they are powerful enough, must lead to the same goal. Schiller assumes of the intuitive mind that it holds to the empirical, the individual, and from there ascends to the law, to the idea. If such a mind is ingenious, it will recognize the necessary in the empirical, the genus in the individual. The speculative mind, on the other hand, should take the opposite path. It should first be given the law, the idea, and from this it should descend to the empirical and the individual. If such a spirit is ingenious, it will always have only genera in mind, but with the possibility of life and with a well-founded relationship to real objects. The assumption of a special kind of mind, the speculative as opposed to the intuitive, is based on the belief that the world of ideas has a separate existence from the world of perception. If this were the case, then there could be a way in which the content of ideas could enter the mind via the things of perception, even if the mind did not seek it out in experience. But if the world of ideas is inseparably connected with the reality of experience, if both exist only as one whole, then there can only be an intuitive cognition that seeks out the idea in experience and at the same time grasps the genus with the individual. In truth, there is also no purely speculative spirit in Schiller's sense. For the genera exist only within the sphere to which the individuals also belong; and the spirit cannot find them elsewhere. If a so-called speculative mind really has generic ideas, these originate from the observation of the real world. If the living feeling for this origin, for the necessary connection between the generic and the individual, is lost, then the opinion arises that such ideas can also arise in reason without experience. The advocates of this opinion describe a sum of abstract generic ideas as the content of pure reason, because they do not see the threads by which these ideas are bound to experience. Such a deception is most easily possible with the most general, comprehensive ideas. Since such ideas embrace wide areas of reality, much is erased or blotted out in them which belongs to the individualities belonging to this area. One can absorb a number of such general ideas through tradition and then believe that they are innate to man, or that they have been spun out of pure reason. A mind that falls prey to such a belief can regard itself as speculative. But he will never be able to get more out of his world of ideas than those from whom he has received them. If Schiller thinks that the speculative mind, when it is ingenious, "always produces only genera, but with the possibility of life and with a well-founded relation to real objects" (cf. Schiller's letter to Goethe of August 23, 1794), he is mistaken. A truly speculative mind that lived only in generic concepts could find in its world of ideas no other founded relation to reality than that which already lies in it. A mind that has relations to the reality of nature and yet calls itself speculative is caught up in a delusion about its own essence. This delusion can lead it to neglect its relationship to reality, to immediate life. He will believe that he can dispense with direct observation because he thinks he has other sources of truth. The consequence of this is always that the world of ideas of such a mind has a dull, pale character. His thoughts will lack the fresh colors of life. Whoever wants to live in union with reality will not be able to gain much from such a world of ideas. The speculative mind cannot be regarded as a way of thinking on an equal footing with the intuitive mind, but rather as a stunted way of thinking that lacks life. The intuitive mind does not merely deal with individuals, it does not seek the character of necessity in the empirical. Rather, when it turns to nature, perception and idea unite directly to form a unity. Both are seen in each other and perceived as a whole. He can ascend to the most general truths, to the highest abstractions: the directly real life will always be recognizable in his world of thought. Such was Goethe's way of thinking. In his Anthropology, Heinroth spoke an excellent word about this thinking, which Goethe liked to the highest degree because it enlightened him about his nature. "Dr. Heinroth ... speaks favorably of my nature and activity, indeed, he describes my way of proceeding as a peculiar one: namely, that my thinking faculty is objectively active, by which he means to say that my thinking does not separate itself from the objects; that the elements of the objects, the views, enter into it and are most intimately permeated by it; that my viewing itself is a thinking, my thinking a viewing." Basically, Heinroth describes nothing but the way in which every healthy thinking relates to objects. Any other way of proceeding is a deviation from the natural way. If a person is dominated by his view, then he remains attached to the individual; he cannot penetrate into the deeper reasons of reality; if abstract thinking predominates in him, then his concepts appear insufficient to understand the living fullness of reality. The extreme of the first aberration is represented by the crude empiricist who is content with individual facts; the extreme of the other aberration is given in the philosopher who worships pure reason and who only thinks without having a sense of the fact that thought is by its nature bound to perception. Goethe describes in a beautiful picture the feeling of the thinker who ascends to the highest truths without losing his feeling for living experience. At the beginning of 1784, he wrote an essay on granite. He places himself on a peak made of this rock, where he can say to himself: "Here you rest directly on a ground that reaches to the deepest places of the earth, no recent layer, no heaped up, washed together debris has come between you and the solid ground of the primeval world, you do not walk over a lingering grave as in those fertile valleys, these peaks have produced nothing living and devoured nothing living, they are before all life and above all life. At this moment, when the inner attracting and moving forces of the earth act directly on me, as it were, when the influences of heaven hover closer around me, I am attuned to higher contemplations of nature, and just as the human spirit animates everything, so too a parable is stirred in me, the sublimity of which I cannot resist. So lonely, I say to myself, as I look down at this completely naked peak and barely see a little moss growing at the foot in the distance, so lonely, I say, does it feel to the man who only wants to open his soul to the oldest, first, deepest feelings of truth. Yes, he can say to himself: Here, on the oldest, eternal altar, which is built directly on the depths of creation, I make an offering to the essence of all beings. I feel the first, most solid beginnings of our existence; I survey the world, its more rugged and gentler valleys and its distant fertile pastures, my soul is elevated above itself and above everything and longs for the nearer heaven. But soon the burning sun calls back thirst and hunger, his human needs. He looks around for those valleys beyond which his spirit has already soared." Such enthusiasm for knowledge, such feelings for the oldest, most solid truths can only be developed by those who repeatedly find their way back from the regions of the world of ideas to the immediate views.