The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Introduction

[ 1 ] If we want to understand Goethe's world view, we must not content ourselves with listening to what he himself says about it in individual statements. It was not in his nature to express the core of his being in crystal-clear, sharply defined sentences. Such sentences seemed to him to distort reality rather than accurately reflect it. He had a certain reluctance to capture the living, the reality in a transparent thought. His inner life, his relationship to the outside world, his observations of things and events were too rich, too full of delicate components, of intimate elements, to be put into simple formulas by himself. He speaks out when this or that experience urges him to do so. But he always says too much or too little. His vivid interest in everything that comes to him often determines him to use sharper expressions than his overall nature demands. It just as often tempts him to express himself indeterminately where his nature might compel him to express a definite opinion. He is always anxious when it comes to deciding between two opinions. He does not want to rob himself of his impartiality by giving his thoughts a sharp direction. He reassures himself with the thought: "Man is not born to solve the problems of the world, but to seek where the problem lies and then to keep within the bounds of the comprehensible. "A problem that man believes he has solved deprives him of the opportunity to see clearly a thousand things that fall within the scope of this problem. He no longer pays attention to them because he believes he is enlightened about the area in which they fall. Goethe would rather have two opinions about one thing that are opposed to each other than one certain one. For every thing seems to him to include an infinity that must be approached from different sides in order to perceive something of its fullness. "It is said that the truth lies between two opposing opinions. Not at all! The problem lies between them, the unseen, the eternally active life, thought in peace." Goethe wants to keep his thoughts alive so that he can transform them at any moment when reality prompts him to do so. He does not want to be right; he only ever wants to "go for the right". At two different times he speaks differently about the same thing. A fixed theory that seeks to express the lawfulness of a series of phenomena once and for all is questionable to him, because such a theory robs the power of cognition of its unbiased relationship to moving reality.

[ 2 ] If one nevertheless wishes to survey the unity of his views, one must listen less to his words than to his way of life. We must listen to his relationship to things when he investigates their essence and add to what he does not say himself. You have to look into the innermost part of his personality, which is largely hidden behind his statements. What he says may often contradict itself; what he lives always belongs to a self-sustaining whole. He did not record his world view in a closed system; he lived it in a closed personality. When we look at his life, all the contradictions in his words dissolve. They are present in his thinking about the world only in the same sense as in the world itself. He said this and that about nature. He never laid down his view of nature in a fixed body of thought. But if we take an overview of his individual thoughts in this area, they automatically come together to form a whole. One can imagine the body of thought that would have emerged if he had presented his views in their entirety. I have set myself the task of describing in this essay what Goethe's personality must have been like in its innermost essence in order to be able to express such thoughts about the phenomena of nature as he set down in his scientific works. I know that some of what I am going to say can be countered with Goethean statements that contradict him. However, my aim in this paper is not to give a history of the development of his sayings, but to present the foundations of his personality that led him to his profound insights into the workings of nature. These foundations cannot be recognized from the numerous sentences in which he borrows from other ways of thinking in order to make them comprehensible, or in which he uses formulas used by one philosopher or another. From the remarks on Eckermann, one could construct a Goethe who could never have written The Metamorphosis of Plants. Goethe addressed many a word to Zelter that might tempt us to conclude that he had a scientific attitude that contradicted his great thoughts on the formation of animals. I admit that there were forces at work in Goethe's personality that I have not taken into account. But these forces take a back seat to the actual determining forces that give his world view its character. I have set myself the task of characterizing these determining forces as sharply as I can. When reading this book, you will therefore have to bear in mind that nowhere have I intended to allow any elements of my own world view to shine through the portrayal of Goethe's way of thinking. I believe that in a book of this kind one has no right to represent one's own world view in terms of content, but that one has the duty to use what one's own world view gives one to understand the one described. For example, I have wanted to describe Goethe's relationship to the development of Western thought as this relationship appears from the point of view of Goethe's world view. For the consideration of the worldviews of individual personalities, this way seems to me to guarantee only historical objectivity. A different kind only comes into play when such a world view is considered in connection with others.