| 1. Goethean Science: How Goethe's Thoughts on the Development of the Animals Arose
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
| We find the first indications of this in the year 1781. In his diary, published by Keil, under the date October 15, 1781, Goethe notes that he went to Jena with old Einsiedel and studied anatomy there. |
| Camper's letters show clearly that he could go into the matter with the best possible will, but was not able to understand Goethe at all. [ 19 ] Loder at once saw Goethe's discovery in the right light. |
| On February 13, 1785, Goethe sends him a split-open upper jawbone of a human being and one of a manatee, and gives him points of reference for understanding the matter. From Goethe's letter of April 8, it appears that Merck was won over to a certain extent. |
| 1. Goethean Science: How Goethe's Thoughts on the Development of the Animals Arose
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
[ 1 ] Lavater's great work Physiognomical Fragments for Furthering Human Knowledge and Human Love 17 appeared during the years 1775–1778. Goethe had taken a lively interest in it, not only through the fact that he oversaw its publication, but also by making contributions to it himself. But what is of particular interest now is that, within these contributions, we can already find the germ of his later zoological works. [ 2 ] Physiognomy sought, in the outer form of the human being, to know his inner nature, his spirit. One studied the human shape, not for its own sake, but rather as an expression of the soul. Goethe's sculptural spirit, born to know outer relationships, did not stop there. As he was in the middle of those studies that treated outer form only as a means of knowing the inner being, there dawned on him the independent significance of the former, the shape. We see this from his articles on animal skulls written in 1776, that we find inserted into the second section of the second volume of the Physiognomical Fragments. During that year, he is reading Aristotle on physiognomy, finds himself stimulated by it to write the above articles, but at the same time attempts to investigate the difference between the human being and the animals. He finds this difference in the way the whole human structure brings the head into prominence, in the lofty development of the human brain, toward which all the members of the body point, as though to their central place: “How the whole form stands there as supporting column for the dome in which the heavens are to be reflected.” He finds the opposite of this now in animal structure. “The head merely hung upon the spine! The brain, as the end of the spinal cord, has no more scope than is necessary for the functioning of the animal spirits and for directing a creature whose senses are entirely within the present moment.” With these indications, Goethe has raised himself above the consideration of the individual connections between the outer and inner being of man, to the apprehension of a great whole and to a contemplation of the form as such. He arrived at the view that the whole of man's structure forms the basis of his higher life manifestations, that within the particular nature of this whole, there lie the determining factors that place man at the peak of creation. What we must bear in mind above everything else in this is that Goethe seeks the animal form again in the perfected human one; except that, with the former, the organs that serve more the animal functions come to the fore, are, as it were, the point toward which the whole structure tends and which the structure serves, whereas the human structure particularly develops those organs that serve spiritual functions. We find here already: What hovers before Goethe as the animal organism is no longer this or that sense-perceptible real organism, but rather an ideal one, which, with the animals, develops itself more toward the lower side, and with man toward a higher one. Here already is the germ of what Goethe later called the typus, and by which he did not mean “any individual animal,” but rather the “idea” of the animal. And even more: Here already we find the echo of a law that he enunciated later and that is very significant in its implications—to the effect, namely, “that diversity of form springs from the fact that a preponderance is granted to this or that part over the others.” Here already, the contrast between animal and man is sought in the fact that an ideal form develops itself in two different directions, that in each case, one organ system gains a preponderance and the whole creature receives its character from this. [ 3 ] In the same year (1776), we also find, however, that Goethe becomes clear about the starting point for someone who wants to study the form of the animal organism. He recognized that the bones are the foundations of its formations, a thought he later upheld by definitely taking the study of bones as his starting point in anatomical work. In this year he writes down a sentence that is important in this respect: “The mobile parts form themselves according to them (the bones)—or better, with them—and come into play only insofar as the solid parts allow.” And a further indication in Lavater's physiognomy (“It may already have been noticed that I consider the bony system to be the basic sketch of the human being, the skull to be the fundamental element of the bony system, and all fleshy parts to be hardly more than the colour on this drawing.”) may very well have been written under the stimulus of Goethe, who often discussed these things with Lavater. These views are in fact identical to indications written down by Goethe. But Goethe now makes a further observation about this, which we must particularly take into consideration: “This statement (that one can see from the bones, and indeed most strongly of all from the skull, how the bones are the foundations of the form) which here (with respect to the animals) is indisputable, will meet with serious contradiction when applied to the dissimilarity of human skulls.” What is Goethe doing here other than seeking the simpler animal again within the complex human being, as he later expressed it (1795)! From this we can gain the conviction that the basic thoughts upon which Goethe's thoughts on the development of animal form were later to be built up had already established themselves in him out of his occupation with Lavater's physiognomy in the year 1776. [ 4 ] In this year, Goethe's study of the particulars of anatomy also begins. On January 22, 1776, he writes to Lavater: “The duke had six skulls sent to me; have noticed some marvelous things which are at your honor's disposal, if you have not found them without me.” His connections with the university in Jena gave him further stimulus to a more thorough study of anatomy. We find the first indications of this in the year 1781. In his diary, published by Keil, under the date October 15, 1781, Goethe notes that he went to Jena with old Einsiedel and studied anatomy there. At Jena there was a scholar who furthered Goethe's studies immensely: Loder. This same man then also introduces him further into anatomy, as Goethe writes to Frau von Stein on October 29, 1781,18 and to Karl August on November 4.19 To the latter he now also expressed his intention of “explaining the skeleton,” to the “young people” in the Art Academy, and of “leading them to a knowledge of the human body.” He adds: “I do it both for my sake and for theirs; the methods I have chosen will make them, over this winter, fully familiar with the basic pillars of the body.” The entries in Goethe's diary show that he actually did give these lectures, ending them on January 16. There must have been many discussions with Loder about the structure of the human body during this same period. Under the date of January 6, the diary notes: “Demonstration of the heart by Loder.” Just as we now have seen that in 1776 Goethe was already harboring far-reaching thoughts about the structure of animal organization, so we cannot doubt for a moment that his present thorough study of anatomy raised itself beyond the consideration of the particulars to higher points of view. Thus he writes to Lavater and Merck on November 14, 1781 that he is treating “bones as a text to which everything living and everything human can be appended.” As we consider a text, pictures and ideas take shape in our spirit that seem to be called forth. to be created by the text. Goethe treated the bones as just such a text; i.e., as he contemplates them, thoughts arise in him about everything living and everything human. During these contemplations, therefore. definite ideas about the formation of the organism must have struck him. Now we have an ode by Goethe, from the year 1782, “The Divine,” which lets us know to some extent how he thought at the time about the relationship of the human being to the rest of nature. The first verse reads Noble be man, [ 5 ] Having grasped the human being in the first two lines of this verse according to his spiritual characteristics, Goethe states that these alone distinguish him from all the other beings of the world. This “alone” shows us quite clearly that Goethe considered man, in his physical constitution, to be absolutely in conformity with the rest of nature. The thought, to which we already drew attention earlier, becomes ever more alive in him, that one basic form governs the shape of the human being as well as of the animals, that the basic form only mounts to such perfection in man's case that it is capable of being the bearer of a free spiritual being. With respect to his sense-perceptible characteristics, the human being must also, as the ode goes on to state: By iron laws [ 6 ] But in man these laws develop in a direction that makes it possible for him to do the “impossible”: He distinguishes, [ 7 ] Now we must also still bear in mind that while these views were developing ever more definitely in Goethe, he stood in lively communication with Herder, who in 1783 began to write his Ideas on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. This work might also be said to have arisen out of the discussions between these two men, and many an idea must be traced back to Goethe. The thoughts expressed here are often entirely Goethean, although stated in Herder's words, so we can draw from them a trustworthy conclusion about Goethe's thoughts at that time. [ 8 ] Now in the first part of his book, Herder holds the following view about the nature of the world. A principle form must be presupposed that runs through all beings and realizes itself in different ways. “From stone to crystal, from crystal to metals, from these to plant creation, from plants to animal, from it to the human being, we saw the form of organization ascend, and saw along with it the forces and drives of the creature diversify and finally all unite themselves in the form of man, insofar as this form could encompass them.” The thought is perfectly clear: An ideal typical form, which as such is not itself sense-perceptibly real, realizes itself in an endless number of spatially separated entities with differing characteristics all the way up to man. At the lower levels of organization, this ideal form always realizes itself in a particular direction; the ideal form develops in a particular way according to this direction. When this typical form ascends as far as man, it brings together all the developmental principles—which it had always developed only in a one-sided way in the lower organisms and had distributed among different entities—in order to form one shape. From this, there also follows the possibility of such high perfection in the human being. In man's case, nature bestowed upon one being what, in the case of the animals, it had dispersed among many classes and orders. This thought worked with unusual fruitfulness upon the German philosophy that followed. To elucidate this thought, let us mention here the description that Oken later gave of the same idea. In his Textbook of Natural Philosophy 20, he says. “The animal realm is only one animal; i.e., it is the representation of animalness with all its organs existing each as a whole in itself. An individual animal arises when an individual organ detaches itself from the general animal body and yet carries out the essential animal functions. The animal realm is merely the dismembered highest animal: man. There is only one human kind, only one human race, only one human species, just because man is the whole animal realm.” Thus there are, for example, animals in which the organs of touch are developed, whose whole organization, in fact, tends toward the activity of touch and finds its goal in this activity; and other animals in which the instruments for eating are particularly developed, and so forth; in short, with every species of animal, one organ system comes one-sidedly to the fore; the whole animal merges into it; everything else about the animal recedes into the background. Now in human development, all the organs and organ systems develop in such a way that one allows the other enough space to develop freely, that each one retires within those boundaries that seem necessarily to allow all the others to come into their own in the same way. In this way, there arises a harmonious interworking of the individual organs and systems into a harmony that makes man into the most perfect being, into the being that unites the perfections of all other creatures within itself. These thoughts now also formed the content of the conversations of Goethe with Herder, and Herder gives expression to them in the following way: that “the human race is to be regarded as the great confluence of lower organic forces that, in him, were to arrive at the forming of humanity.” And in another place: “And so we can assume: that man is a central creation among the animals, i.e., that he is the elaborated form in which the traits of all the species gather around him in their finest essence.” [ 9 ] In order to indicate the interest Goethe took in Herder's work Ideas on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, let us cite the following passage from a letter of Goethe to Knebel in December 8, 1783: “Herder is writing a philosophy of history, such as you can imagine, new from the ground up. We read the first chapters together the day before yesterday; they are exquisite ... world and natural history is positively rushing along with us now.” Herder's expositions in Book 3, Chapter VI, and in Book 4, Chapter I, to the effect that the erect posture inherent in the human organization and everything connected with it is the fundamental prerequisite for his activity of reason—all this reminds us directly of what Goethe indicated in 1776 in the second section of the second volume of Lavater's Physiognomical Fragments about the generic difference between man and the animals, which we have already mentioned above. This is only an elaboration of that thought. All this justifies us, however, in assuming that in the main Goethe and Herder were in agreement all that time (1783 ff.) with respect to their views about the place of the human being m nature. [ 10 ] But this basic view requires now that every organ, every part of an animal, must also be able to be found again in man, only pushed back within the limits determined by the harmony of the whole. To be sure, a certain bone, for example, must achieve a definite form in a particular species, must become predominant there, but this bone must also at least be indicated in all other species; it must in fact also not be missing in man. If, in a certain species, the bone takes on a form appropriate to it by virtue of its own laws, then, in man the bone must adapt itself to the whole, must accommodate its own laws of development to those of the whole organism. But it must not be lacking, if a split is not to occur in nature by which the consistent development of a type would be interrupted. [ 11 ] This is how the matter stood with Goethe, when all at once he became aware of a view that totally contradicted this great thought. The learned men of that time were chiefly occupied with finding traits that would distinguish one species of animal from another. The difference between animals and man was supposed to consist in the fact that the former have a little bone, the intermaxillary bone, between the two symmetrical halves of the upper jaw, which holds the upper incisors and supposedly is lacking in man. In the year 1782, when Merck was beginning to take a lively interest in osteology and was turning for help to some of the best-known scholars of that time, he received from one of them, the distinguished anatomist Sömmerring, on October 8,1782, the following information about the difference between animal and man: “I wish you had consulted Blumenbach on the subject of the intermaxillary bone, which, other things being equal, is the only bone that all the animals have, from the ape on, including even the orangutan, but that is never found in man; except for this bone, there is nothing keeping you from being able to transfer everything man has onto the animals. I enclose therefore the head of a doe in order to convince you that this os intermaxillare (as Blumenbach calls it) or os incisivum (as Camper calls it) is present even in animals having no incisors in the upper jaw.” Although Blumenbach found in the skulls of unborn or young children a trace quasi rudimentum of the ossis intermaxillaris—indeed, had once found in one such skull two fully separated little kernels of bone as actual intermaxillary bones—still he did not acknowledge the existence of any such bone. He said about this: “There is a world of difference between it and the true osse intermaxillari.” Camper, the most famous anatomist of the time, was of the same view. He referred to the intermaxillary bone, for example, as having “never been found in a human being, not even in the negro.”21 Merck held Camper in the deepest admiration and occupied himself with his writings. [ 12 ] Not only Merck, but also Blumenbach and Sömmerring were in communication with Goethe. His correspondence with Merck shows us that Goethe took the deepest interest in Merck's study of bones and shared his own thoughts about these things with him. On October 27, 1782, he asked Merck to write him something about Camper's incognitum,22 and to send him Camper's letters. Furthermore, we must note a visit of Blumenbach in Weimar in April, 1783. In September of the same year, Goethe goes to Göttingen in order to visit Blumenbach and all the professors there. On September 28, he writes to Frau von Stein: “I have decided to visit all the professors and you can imagine how much running about it requires to make the rounds in a few days.” He goes up to Kassel where he meets with Forster and Sömmerring. From there he writes to Frau von Stein on October 2: “I am seeing very fine and good things and am being rewarded for my quiet diligence. The happiest news is that I can now say that I am on the right path and from now on nothing is lost.” [ 13 ] It is in the course of these activities that Goethe must first have become aware of the prevailing views about the intermaxillary bone. To his way of looking at things, these views must right away have seemed erroneous. The typical basic form, according to which all organisms must be built, would thereby be destroyed. For Goethe, there could be no doubt that this part, which to a more or less developed degree is to be found in all higher animals, must also have its place in the development of the human form, and would only recede in man because the organs of food-intake in general recede before the organs serving mental functions. By virtue of his whole spiritual orientation, Goethe could not think otherwise than that an intermaxillary bone must also be present in man. It was only a matter of proving this empirically, of finding what form this bone takes in man and to what extent it adapts itself to the whole of his organism. He succeeded in finding this proof in the spring of 1784, together with Loder, with whom he compared human and animal skulls in Jena. On March 27, he reported the matter to both Frau von Stein23 and to Herder.24 [ 14 ] Now this individual discovery, compared to the great thought by which it is sustained should not be overvalued: for Goethe also, its value lay only in the fact that it cleared away a preconception that seemed to hinder his ideas from being consistently pursued right into the farthest details of an organism. Goethe also never regarded it as an individual discovery, but always only in connection with his larger view of nature. This is how we must understand it when, in the above mentioned letter to Herder, he says: “It should heartily please you also, for it is like the keystone to man; it is not lacking; it is there too! And how!” And right away he reminds his friend of the wider perspective: “I thought of it also in connection with your whole picture, how beautiful it will be there.” For Goethe, it could make no sense to assert that the animals have an intermaxillary bone but that man has none. If it lies within the forces that shape an organism to insert an intermediary bone between the two upper jaw bones of animals, then these same forces must also be active in man, at the place where that bone is present in animals, and working in essentially the same way except for differences in outer manifestation. Since Goethe never thought of an organism as a dead, rigid configuration, but rather always as going forth out of its inner forces of development, he had to ask himself: What are these forces doing within the upper jaw of man? It could definitely not be a matter of whether the intermaxillary is present or not, but only of what it is like, of the form it has taken. And this had to be discovered empirically. [ 15 ] The thought of writing a more comprehensive work on nature now made itself felt more and more in Goethe. We can conclude this from different things he said. Thus he writes to Knebel in November 1784, when he sends him the treatise on his discovery: “I have refrained from showing yet the result, to which Herder already points in his ideas, which is, namely, that one cannot find the difference between man and animal in the details.” Here the important point is that Goethe says he has refrained from showing the basic thought yet; he wants to do this therefore later, in a larger context. Furthermore, this passage shows us that the basic thoughts that interest us in Goethe above all—the great ideas about the animal typus—were present long before that discovery. For, Goethe admits here himself that indications of them are already to be found in Herder's ideas; the passages, however, in which they occur were written before the discovery of the intermaxillary bone. The discovery of the intermaxillary bone is therefore only a result of these momentous views. For people who did not have these views, the discovery must have remained incomprehensible. They were deprived of the only natural, historic characteristic by which to differentiate man from the animals. They had little inkling of those thoughts which dominated Goethe and which we earlier indicated: that the elements dispersed among the animals unite themselves in the one human form into a harmony; and thus, in spite of the similarity of the individual parts, they establish a difference in the whole that bestows upon man his high rank in the sequence of beings. They did not look at things ideally, but rather in an externally comparative way; and for this latter approach, to be sure, the intermaxillary bone was not there in man. They had little understanding for what Goethe was asking of them: to see with the eyes of the spirit. That was also the reason for the difference in judgment between them and Goethe. Whereas Blumenbach, who after all also saw the matter quite clearly, came to the conclusion that “there is a world of difference between it and the true ‘osse intermaxillari’,” Goethe judged the matter thus: How can an outer diversity, no matter how great, be explained in the face of the necessary inner identity? Apparently Goethe wanted to elaborate this thought now in a consistent manner and he did occupy himself a great deal with this, particularly in the years immediately following. On May 1, 1784, Frau von Stein writes to Knebel: “Herder's new book makes it likely that we were first plants and animals ... Goethe is now delving very thoughtfully into these things, and each thing that has once passed through his mind becomes extremely interesting.” To what extent there lived in Goethe the thought of presenting his views on nature in a larger work becomes particularly clear to us when we see that, with every new discovery he achieves, he cannot keep from expressly raising the possibility to his friends of extending his thoughts out over the whole of nature. In 1786, he writes to Frau von Stein that he wants to extend his ideas—about the way nature brings forth its manifold life by playing, as it were, with one main form—“out over all the realms of nature, out over its whole realm.” And when in Italy the idea of metamorphosis in the plants stands plastically in all its details before his spirit, he writes in Naples on May 17, 1787: “The same law can be applied ... to everything living.” The first essay in Morphological Notebooks (1817)25 contains the words: “May that, therefore, which I often dreamed of in my youthful spirit as a book now appear as a sketch, even as a fragmentary collection.” It is a great pity that such a work from Goethe's hand did not come about. To judge by everything we have, it would have been a creation far surpassing everything of this sort that has been done in recent times. It would have become a canon from which every endeavor in the field of natural science would have to take its start and against which one could test the spiritual content of such an endeavor. The deepest philosophical spirit, which only superficiality could deny to Goethe, would have united with a loving immersion of oneself into what is given to sense experience; far from any one-sided desire to found a system purporting to encompass all beings in one general schema, this endeavor would grant every single individual its rightful due. We would have had to do here with the work of a spirit in whom no one individual branch of human endeavor pushes itself forward at the expense of all the others, but rather in whom the totality of human existence always hovers in the background when he is dealing with one particular area. Through this, every single activity receives its rightful place in the interrelationships of the whole. The objective immersing of oneself into the observed objects brings it about that the human spirit fully merges with them, so that Goethe's theories appear to us, not as though a human spirit abstracted them from the objects, but rather as though the objects themselves formed these theories within a human spirit who, in beholding, forgets himself. This strictest objectivity would make Goethe's work the most perfect work of natural science; it would be an ideal for which every natural scientist would have to strive; for the philosopher, it would be an archetypal model of how to find the laws of objective contemplation of the world. One can conclude that the epistemology now arising everywhere as a philosophical basic science will be able to become fruitful only when it takes as its starting point Goethe's way of thinking and of looking at the world. In the Annals of 1790, Goethe himself gives the reason why this work did not come about: “The task was so great that it could not be accomplished in a scattered life.” [ 16 ] If one proceeds from this standpoint, the individual fragments we have of Goethe's natural science take on immense significance. We learn to value and understand them rightly, in fact, only when we regard them as going forth from that great whole. [ 17 ] In the year 1784, however, merely as a kind of preliminary exercise, the treatise on the intermaxillary bone was to be produced. To begin with, it was not to be published, for Goethe writes of it to Sömmerring on March 6,1785: “Since my little treatise is not entitled at all to come before the public and is to be regarded merely as a rough draft, it would please me very much to hear anything you might want to share with me about this matter.” Nevertheless it was carried out with all possible care and with the help of all the necessary individual studies. At the same time, help was enlisted from young people who, under Goethe's guidance, had to carry out osteological drawings in accordance with Camper's methods. On April 23, 1784, therefore, he asks Merck for information about these methods and has Sömmerring send him Camperian drawings. Merck, Sömmerring, and other acquaintances are asked for skeletons and bones of every kind. On April 23, he writes to Merck that it would please him very much to have the following skeletons: “... a myrmecophaga, bradypus, lion, tiger, or similar skeletons.” On May 14, he asks Sömmerring for the skull of his elephant skeleton and of the hippopotamus, and on September 16, for the skulls of the following animals: “wildcat, lion, young bear, incognitum, anteater, camel, dromedary, sea lion.” Individual items of information are also requested from his friends: thus from Merck the description of the palatal part of his rhinoceros and particularly the explanation as to “how the rhinoceros horn is actually seated upon the nasal bone.” At this time, Goethe is utterly absorbed in his studies. The elephant skull mentioned above was sketched by Waitz from many sides by Camper's methods, and was compared by Goethe with a large skull in his possession and with other animal skulls, since he discovered that in this skull most of the sutures were not yet grown together. In connection with this skull, he makes an important observation. Until then one assumed that in all animals merely the incisors were embedded in the intermaxillary bone, and that the canine teeth belonged to the upper jaw bone; only the elephant was supposed to be an exception. In it, the canine teeth were supposed to be contained in the intermaxillary bone. This skull now shows him also that this is not the case, as he states in a letter to Herder. His osteological studies accompany him on a journey to Eisenach and to Braunschweig that Goethe undertakes during that summer. On the second trip, in Braunschweig, he wants “to look into the mouth of an unborn elephant and to carry on a hearty conversation with Zimmermann.” He writes further about this fetus to Merck: “I wish we had in our cupboard the fetus they have in Braunschweig: it would be quickly dissected, skeletized, and prepared. I don't know what value such a monster in spirits has if it is not dismembered and its inner structure explained.” From these studies, there then emerges that treatise which is reported in Volume I of the natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's National Literature. Loder was very helpful to Goethe in composing this treatise. With his assistance, a Latin terminology comes into being. Moreover, Loder prepares a Latin translation. In November 1784, Goethe sends the treatise to Knebel and already on December 19 to Merck, although only shortly before (on December 2) he believes that not much will come of it before the end of the year. The work was equipped with the necessary drawings. For Camper's sake, the Latin translation just mentioned was included. Merck was supposed to send the work on to Sömmerring. The latter received it in January 1785. From there it went to Camper. When we now take a look at the way Goethe's treatise was received, we are confronted by a quite unpleasant picture. At first no one has the organ to understand him except Loder, with whom he had worked, and Herder. Merck is pleased by the treatise, but is not convinced of the truth of what is asserted there. In the letter in which Sömmerring informs Merck of the arrival of the treatise, we read: “Blumenbach already had the main idea. In the paragraph which begins ‘Thus there can be no doubt,’ he [Goethe] says ‘since the rest of them (the edges) are grown together’; the only trouble is that these edges were never there. I have in front of me now jawbones of embryos, ranging from three months of age to maturity, and no edge was ever to be seen toward the front. And to explain the matter by the pressure of bones against each other? Yes, if nature works like a carpenter with hammer and wedges!” On February 13, 1785, Goethe writes to Merck: “I have received from Sömmerring a very frivolous letter. He actually wants to talk me out of it. Oh my!”—And Sömmerring writes to Merck on May 11, 1785: “Goethe, as I can see from his letter yesterday, still does not want to abandon his idea about the ossis intermaxillaris.” [ 18 ] And now Camper.26 On September 17, 1785, he communicates to Merck that the accompanying tables were not drawn at all according to his methods. He in fact found them to be quite faulty. The outer aspect of the beautiful manuscript is praised and the Latin translation is criticized—in fact, the advice is even given to the author that he brush up on his Latin. Three days later, he writes that he has made a number of observations about the intermaxillary bone, but that he must continue to maintain that man has no intermaxillary bone. He agrees with all of Goethe's observations except the ones pertaining to man. On March 21, 1786, he writes yet again that, out of a great number of observations, he has come to the conclusion: the intermaxillary bone does not exist in man. Camper's letters show clearly that he could go into the matter with the best possible will, but was not able to understand Goethe at all. [ 19 ] Loder at once saw Goethe's discovery in the right light. He gives it a prominent place in his anatomical handbook of 1788 and treats it from now on in all his writings as a fully valid fact of science about which there cannot be the least doubt. [ 20 ] Herder writes about this to Knebel: “Goethe has presented me with his treatise on the bone; it is very simple and beautiful; the human being travels the true path of nature and fortune comes to meet him.” Herder was in fact able to look at the matter with the “spiritual eye” with which Goethe saw it. Without this eye, a person could do nothing with this matter. One can see this best from the following. Wilhelm Josephi (instructor at the University of Göttingen) writes in his Anatomy of the Mammals27 in 1787: “The ossa intermaxillaria is also considered to be one of the main characteristics differentiating the apes from man; yet, according to my observation, the human being also has such as ossa intermaxillaria, at least in the first months of his life, but it has usually grown together very early—already in the mother's womb, in fact—with the true upper jaw bones, especially in its external appearance, so that often no noticeable trace remains of it at all.” Goethe's discovery is, to be sure, also fully stated here, not as one demanded by the consistent realization of the typus, however, but rather as the expression of fact directly visible to the eye. If one relies only upon the latter, then, to be sure, it depends only upon a happy chance whether or not one finds precisely such specimens in which one can see the matter exactly. But if one grasps the matter in Goethe's ideal way, then these particular specimens serve merely as confirmation of the thought, are there merely to demonstrate openly what nature otherwise conceals; but the idea itself can be found in any specimen at all; every specimen reveals a particular case of the idea. In fact, if one possesses the idea, one is able through it to find precisely those cases in which the idea particularly expresses itself. Without the idea, however, one is at the mercy of chance. One sees, in actuality, that after Goethe had given the impetus by his great thought, one then gradually became convinced of the truth of his discovery through observation of numerous cases. [ 21 ] Merck, to be sure, continued to vacillate. On February 13, 1785, Goethe sends him a split-open upper jawbone of a human being and one of a manatee, and gives him points of reference for understanding the matter. From Goethe's letter of April 8, it appears that Merck was won over to a certain extent. But he soon changed his mind again, for on November 11, 1786, he writes to Sömmerring: “According to what I hear, Vicq d'Azyr has actually included Goethe's so-called discovery in his book.” [ 22 ] Sömmerring gradually abandoned his opposition. In his book On The Structure of the Human Body 28 he says: “Goethe's ingenious attempt in 1785, out of comparative osteology, to show, with quite correct drawings, that man has the intermaxillary bone of the upper jaw in common with the other animals, deserved to be publicly recognized.” [ 23 ] To be sure, it was more difficult to win over Blumenbach. In his Handbook of Comparative Anatomy 29 in 1805, he still stated the opinion that man has no intermaxillary bone. In his essay Principles of Zoological Philosophy, written in 1830 – 32, however, Goethe can already speak of Blumenbach's conversion. After personal communication, he came over to Goethe's side. On December 15, 1825, in fact, he presents Goethe with a beautiful example that confirmed his discovery. A Hessian athlete sought help from Blumenbach's colleague Langenbeck for an “os intermaxillare that was prominent in a quite animal-like way.” We still have to speak of later adherents of Goethe's ideas. But it should still be mentioned here that M.J. Weber succeeded, with diluted nitric acid, in separating from an upper jawbone an intermaxillary bone that had already grown into it. [ 24 ] Goethe continued his study of bones even after completion of this treatise. The discoveries he was making at the same time in botany enliven his interest in nature even more. He is continually borrowing relevant objects from his friends. On December 7, 1785, Sömmerring is actually annoyed “that Goethe is not sending him back his heads.” From a letter of Goethe's to Sömmerring on June 8,1786 we learn that he still even then had skulls of his. [ 25 ] In Italy also, his great ideas accompanied him. As the thought of the archetypal plant took shape in his spirit, he also arrives at concepts about man's form. On January 20, 1787, Goethe writes in Rome: “I am somewhat prepared for anatomy and have acquired, though not without effort, a certain level of knowledge of the human body. Here, through endless contemplation of statues, one's attention is continuously drawn to the human body, but in a higher way. The purpose of our medical and surgical anatomy is merely to know the part, and for this a stunted muscle will also serve. But in Rome, the parts mean nothing unless at the same time they present a noble and beautiful form. [ 26 ] In the big hospital of San Spirito, they have set up for artists a very beautifully muscled body in such a way that the beauty of it makes one marvel. It could really be taken for a flayed demigod, a Marsyas. [ 27 ] It is also the custom here, following the ancients, to study the skeleton not as an artificially arranged mass of bones but rather with the ligaments still attached, from which it receives some life and movement.” [ 28 ] The main thing for Goethe here is to learn to know the laws by which nature forms organic shapes—and especially human ones—and to learn to know the tendency nature follows in forming them. On the one hand, Goethe is seeking within the series of endless plant shapes the archetypal plant with which one can endlessly invent more plants that must be consistent, i.e., that are fully in accordance with that tendency in nature and that would exist if suitable conditions were present; and on the other hand, Goethe was intent, with respect to the animals and man, upon “discovering the ideal characteristics” that are totally in accord with the laws of nature. Soon after his return from Italy, we hear that Goethe is “industriously occupied with anatomy,” and in 1789, he writes to Herder: “I have a newly discovered harmonium naturae to expound.” What is here described as newly discovered may be a part of his vertebral theory about the skull. The completion of this discovery, however, falls in the year 1790. What he knew up until then was that all the bones that form the back of the head represent three modified spinal vertebrae. Goethe conceived the matter in the following way. The brain represents merely a spinal cord mass raised to its highest level of perfection. Whereas in the spinal cord those nerves end and begin that serve primarily the lower organic functions, in the brain those nerves begin and end that serve higher (spiritual) functions, pre-eminently the sense nerves. In the brain there only appears in a developed form what already lies indicated in the spinal cord as possibility. The brain is a fully developed spinal cord; the spinal cord a brain that has not yet fully unfolded. Now the vertebrae of the spinal column are perfectly shaped in conformity with the parts of the spinal cord; the vertebrae are the organs needed to enclose them. Now it seems probable in the highest degree, that if the brain is a spinal cord raised to its highest potentiality, then the bones enclosing it are also only more highly developed vertebrae. The whole head appears in this way to be prefigured in the bodily organs that stand at a lower level. The forces that are already active on lower levels are at work here also, but in the head they develop to the highest potentiality lying within them. Again, Goethe's concern is only to find evidence as to how the matter actually takes shape in accordance with sense-perceptible reality. Goethe says that he recognized this relationship very soon with respect to the bone of the back of the head, the occiput, and to the posterior and anterior sphenoid bones; but that—during his trip to northern Italy when he found a cracked-open sheep's skull on the dunes of the Lido—he recognized that the palatal bone, the upper jaw, and the intermaxillary bone are also modified vertebrae. This skull had fallen apart so felicitously that the individual vertebrae were distinctly recognizable in the individual parts. Goethe's showed this beautiful discovery to Frau von Kalb on April 30, 1790 with the words: “Tell Herder that I have gotten one whole principle nearer to animal form and to its manifold transformations, and did so through the most remarkable accident.” [ 29 ] This was a discovery of the most far-reaching significance. It showed that all the parts of an organic whole are identical with respect to idea, that “inwardly unformed” organic masses open themselves up outwardly in different ways, and that it is one and the same thing that—at a lower level as spinal cord nerve and on a higher level as sense nerve—opens itself up into the sense organ, that takes up, grasps, and apprehends the outer world. This discovery revealed every living thing in its power to form and give shape to itself from within outward; only then was it grasped as something truly living. Goethe's basic ideas, also in relation to animal development, had now attained their final form. The time had come to present these ideas in detail, although he had already planned to do this earlier, as Goethe's correspondence with F.H. Jacobi shows us. When he accompanied the Duke, in July 1790, to the Schlesian encampment, he occupied himself primarily there (in Breslau) with his studies on animal development. He also began there really to write down his thoughts on this subject. On August 31, 179(), he writes to Friedrich von Stein: “In all this bustle, I have begun to write my treatise on the development of the animals.” [ 30 ] In a comprehensive sense, the idea of the animal typus is contained in the poem “Metamorphosis of the Animals,” which first appeared in 1820 in the second of the morphological notebooks. During the years 1790–95, Goethe's primary natural-scientific work was with his colour theory. At the beginning of 1795, Goethe was in Jena, where the brothers von Humboldt, Max Jacobi, and Schiller were also present. In this company, Goethe brought forward his ideas about comparative anatomy. His friends found his presentations so significant that they urged him to put his ideas down on paper. It is evident from a letter of Goethe to the elder Jacobi that Goethe complied with this urging right away, while still in Jena, by dictating to Max Jacobi the outline of a comparative osteology which is printed in the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's National Literature. In 1796, the introductory chapters were further elaborated. These treatises contain Goethe's basic views about animal development, just as his writing, “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of the Plant,” 30 contains his basic views on plant development. Through communication with Schiller—since 1794 Goethe came to a turning point in his views, in that from now on, with respect to his own way of proceeding and of doing research, he began to observe himself, so that his way of viewing things became for him an object of study. After these historical reflections, let us now turn to the nature and significance of Goethe's views on the development of organisms.
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| 1. Goethean Science: The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| [ 4 ] This is how matters stood when Goethe undertook to devote himself to the organic sciences. But he entered into these studies after preparing himself for them in a most appropriate way, through repeated readings of the philosopher Spinoza. |
| In 1796 attempts were made to grow plants in darkness and under coloured glass. Later on, the metamorphosis of insects was also investigated. [ 34 ] A further stimulus came from the philologist F.A. |
| Also, Goethe's Metamorphosis had already been translated into French by F. de Gingins-Lassaraz. Under such conditions, Goethe could definitely hope that a translation of his botanical writings into French, carried out with his collaboration, would not fall on barren ground. |
| 1. Goethean Science: The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development
Translated by William Lindemann |
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[ 1 ] The great significance of Goethe's morphological works is to be sought in the fact that in them the theoretical basis and method for studying organic entities are established, and this is a scientific deed of the first order. [ 2 ] If one is to do justice to this rightly, one must above all bear in mind the great difference existing between the phenomena of inorganic nature and those of organic nature. A phenomenon of the first kind, for example, is the impact of two elastic balls upon one another. If one ball is at rest and the other ball strikes it from a certain direction and with a certain velocity, then the first ball is likewise given a certain direction and velocity. If it is a matter then of comprehending such a phenomenon, this can be achieved only by our transforming into concepts what is directly there for the senses. We would succeed in this to the extent that nothing of a sense-perceptibly real nature remained that we had not permeated conceptually. We see one ball approach and strike the other, which then goes on moving. We have comprehended this phenomenon when, from the mass, direction, and velocity of the first ball, and from the mass of the second, we can determine the direction and velocity of the second ball; when we see that under the given conditions this phenomenon must necessarily occur. But this means nothing other than: that which offers itself to our senses must appear as a necessary consequence of what we have to postulate ideally beforehand. If this is the case, then we can say that concept and phenomenon coincide. There is nothing in the concept that is not also in the phenomenon, and nothing in the phenomenon that is not also in the concept. Now we must take a closer look into those relationships out of which a phenomenon of inorganic nature occurs as a necessary consequence. The important fact arises here that the sense-perceptible processes of inorganic nature are determined by factors that likewise belong to the sense world. In our example, mass, velocity, and direction—i.e., exclusively factors belonging to the sense world—come into consideration. Nothing further arises as a determining factor for the phenomenon. It is only the directly sense-perceptible factors that determine one another. A conceptual grasp of such processes is therefore nothing other than a tracing of something sense-perceptibly real back to something sense-perceptibly real. Spatial-temporal relationships, mass, weight, or sense-perceptible forces such as light or warmth call forth phenomena that themselves belong in the same category. A body is heated and increases thereby in volume; the heating and the expanding both belong to the sense world; both the cause and the effect do so. We therefore do not need to go outside the sense world at all in order to comprehend such processes. We merely trace, within the sense world, one phenomenon back to another. When we therefore explain such a phenomenon, i.e., want to permeate it conceptually, we do not need to take up into the concept any elements other than those which are observably perceptible to our senses. We can observe everything that we want to comprehend. And the congruence of perception (phenomenon) and concept consists in this. Nothing in the processes remains obscure to us, because we know the relationships from which they follow. With this, we have elaborated upon the character of inorganic nature and have shown at the same time to what extent we can explain inorganic nature out of itself, without going out of or beyond it. Now one has never doubted this explainability, ever since one first began to think about the nature of these things. One has not, to be sure, always gone through the above train of thought from which the possibility of a congruence of concept and perception follows; but still one has never hesitated to explain phenomena out of the nature of their own being in the way indicated.31 [ 3 ] But matters were different, up until Goethe, with respect to the phenomena of the organic world. In the case of an organism, sense-perceptible factors appear—form, size, colour, warmth conditions of an organ, for example—that are not determined by factors of the same kind. One cannot say of the plant, for example, that the size, form, location, etc., of the roots determine the sense-perceptible factors of the leaf or blossom. A body for which this were the case would not be an organism but rather a machine. It must be admitted that all the sense-perceptible factors of a living being do not manifest as a result of other sense-perceptible factors,32 as is the case with inorganic nature. On the contrary, in an organism, all sense-perceptible qualities manifest as the result of a factor that is no longer sense-perceptible. They manifest as the result of a higher unity hovering over the sense-perceptible processes. It is not the shape of the root which determines that of the trunk, nor the trunk's shape which determines that of the leaf, and so on, rather, all these forms are determined by something standing over them that itself is not again a form observable by the senses; these forms do exist for one another, but not as a result of one another. They do not mutually determine one another, but rather are all determined by something else. Here we cannot trace what we perceive with our senses back to other sense-perceptible factors; we must take up, into the concept of the processes, elements that do not belong to the world of the senses; we must go out of and beyond the sense world. Observation no longer suffices; we must grasp the unity conceptually if we want to explain the phenomena. Because of this, however, a separation occurs between observation and concept; they no longer seem to coincide with each other; the concept hovers over what is observed. It becomes difficult to see the connection. Whereas in inorganic nature concept and reality were one, here they seem to diverge and actually to belong to two different worlds. The observation that offers itself directly to the senses no longer seems to bear within itself its own basis, its own being. The object does not seem explainable out of itself, but rather from something else. Because the object appears in a way not governed by the laws of the sense world, but is there for the senses nevertheless, appears to the senses, it is then as though we stood here before an insoluble contradiction in nature, as though a chasm existed between inorganic phenomena, which are comprehensible through themselves, and organic beings, in which an intrusion into the laws of nature occurs, in which universally valid laws seem suddenly to be broken. Up until Goethe, in fact, science generally considered this chasm to exist; he was the first to succeed in speaking the word that solved the riddle. Before him, one thought that only inorganic nature was explainable out of itself; man's ability to know ceases when confronted by organic nature. One can best estimate the greatness of the deed Goethe accomplished when one considers that the great reformer of philosophy in recent time, Kant, not only shared completely in that old error, but even sought, in fact, to find a scientific foundation for the view that the human spirit will never succeed in explaining organic entities. He saw the possibility, to be sure, of an intellect—of an intellectus archetypus, of an intuitive intellect—to which it would be granted to see into the relationship of concept and reality in organic beings just as it does in inorganic things; only, he denied to man himself the possibility of any such intellect (Verstand).33 For Kant, it is supposedly characteristic of the human intellect that it can think of the unity, the concept of a thing, only as resulting from the interaction of its parts—as an analytical generalization gained by a process of abstraction—but not in such a way that each individual part manifests as the outflow of a definite concrete (synthetical) unity, of a concept in an intuitive form. For this reason, it is also supposedly impossible for the intellect to explain organic nature, because organic nature would have to be thought of, indeed, as working from the whole into the parts. Kant says about this: “It is characteristic of our intellect, therefore, with respect to our power of judgment, that it does not determine knowledge through itself, does not determine what is particular through what is general, and that therefore the particular cannot be traced back to the general.”34 According to this, we would therefore have to renounce all knowledge, with regard to organic entities, of the necessary connection between the idea of the whole—which can only be thought—and what manifests to our senses in space and time. According to Kant, we must limit ourselves to the recognition that such a connection exists; but the logical challenge to know how the general thought, the idea, steps out of itself and manifests itself as sense-perceptible reality, this supposedly cannot be fulfilled with respect to organisms. Rather we would have to assume that concept and reality confront each other here without mediation; and that some influence lying outside them both creates them in somewhat the same way a person, according to an idea he has thought up, constructs some composite thing or other—a machine, for example. In this way the possibility of an explanation of the world of organisms was denied, its impossibility in fact seemingly proven. [ 4 ] This is how matters stood when Goethe undertook to devote himself to the organic sciences. But he entered into these studies after preparing himself for them in a most appropriate way, through repeated readings of the philosopher Spinoza. [ 5 ] Goethe took up Spinoza for the first time in the spring of 1774. In Poetry and Truth, he says of this, his first acquaintance with the philosopher: “That is, after vainly looking around in the whole world for a means of educating my strange being, I finally happened upon the Ethics of this man.” In the summer of the same year, Goethe met with Friedrich Jacobi. The latter, who had come more thoroughly to terms with Spinoza—as his letters of 1785 about Spinoza's teachings show—was entirely qualified to lead Goethe more deeply into the essential nature of the philosopher. Spinoza was also very much discussed at that time, for in Goethe “everything was still in its first effects and counter-effects, fermenting and seething.” Somewhat later, he found a book in his father's library whose author heatedly opposed Spinoza, even distorting him, in fact, into a total caricature. This gave Goethe the stimulus to occupy himself seriously once more with the profound thinker. In Spinoza's writings he found elucidation on the deepest scientific questions that he was then capable of raising. In 1784, the poet reads Spinoza with Frau von Stein. On November 19, 1784, he writes to her: “I am bringing Spinoza along in Latin, in which everything is much clearer ...” The effect of this philosopher upon Goethe was now immense. Goethe himself was always clear about this. In 1816, he writes to Zelter: “Except for Shakespeare and Spinoza, I do not know that any departed soul has had such an effect upon me (as Linnaeus).” He regards Shakespeare and Spinoza therefore as the two spirits who have exerted the greatest influence on him. The manner in which this influence now manifested itself with respect to his studies of organic development becomes clearest to us if we consider a statement about Lavater from Goethe's Italian Journey; Lavater was also in fact a proponent of the view generally prevalent then that something living can arise only through an influence that does not lie in the nature of the entity itself, through a violation of the general laws of nature. Goethe then wrote the following words about this: “Recently I found, in a pitiful, apostolically monkish declamation of the Zürich prophet, the nonsensical words that everything that has life lives by something outside itself. Or it sounded something like that. Now a missionary can write down something like that, and when he is revising it no good spirit tugs at his sleeve.” Now that is expressed entirely in the spirit of Spinoza. Spinoza makes a distinction between three kinds of knowledge. The first kind is that in which upon hearing or reading certain words we recall certain things and form certain mental pictures of these things which are similar to the pictures by which we represent the things to ourselves pictorially. The second kind of knowledge is that in which, out of sufficient mental pictures of the characteristics of things, we form general concepts for ourselves. The third kind of knowledge, however, is that in which we advance from an adequate picture of the real being of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the being of things. Spinoza calls this kind of knowledge scientia intuitiva, knowledge in beholding. This last, the highest kind of knowledge, is that for which Goethe strove. One must above all be clear about what Spinoza meant by this The things are to be known in such a way that we recognize within their being certain attributes of God. Spinoza's God is the idea-content of the world, the driving principle that supports and carries everything. Now one can picture this either in such a way that one takes this principle to be an independent being—existing by itself, separated off from finite beings—that has these finite things outside itself, governs them, and causes them to interact. Or, on the other hand, one can picture this being as having merged into finite things in such a way that it is no longer over and outside them, but rather now exists only within them. This view in no way denies that primal principle; it acknowledges it entirely; only, it regards this principle as having been poured out into the world. The first view regards the finite world as a manifestation of the infinite, but this infinite remains with its own being intact; it relinquishes nothing of itself. It does not go out of itself; it remains what it was before it manifested itself. The second view also regards the finite world as a manifestation of the infinite, only it assumes that this infinite, in becoming manifest, has gone entirely out of itself, has laid itself, its own being and life, into its creation in such a way that it now exists only within this creation. Now since our activity of knowing is obviously a becoming aware of the essential being of things, and since this being can after all consist only in the involvement a finite being has in the primal principle of all things, our activity of knowing must then mean a becoming aware of that infinite within the things.35 Now, as we have described above, it was readily assumed, before Goethe, with respect to inorganic nature, that one could explain it out of itself, that it carries within itself its own substantiation and essential being, but that this is not the case with organic nature. Here one could not know, within an object itself, that essential being that manifests itself within the object. One therefore assumed this being to be outside the object. In short: one explained organic nature according to the first view and inorganic nature according to the second. As we have seen, Spinoza had proven the necessity for a unified knowledge. He was too much the philosopher to have been able also to extend this theoretical requirement out over the specialized area of organic science. It remained for Goethe to do this now. Not only his statement about Spinoza quoted above, but also numerous others show us that Goethe adhered decisively to Spinoza's views. In Poetry and Truth: “Nature works according to laws that are eternal, necessary, and so divine that even the Divinity Himself could change nothing about them.” And, in connection with Jacobi's book, Of Divine Things and their Manifestation,36 Goethe remarks: “How could the book of such a beloved friend be welcome to me when I had to see developed in it the thesis that nature conceals God. With my pure, deep, inborn, and trained way of looking at things, which had taught me absolutely to see God in nature, nature in God, such that this way of picturing things constituted the foundation of my whole existence, would not such a peculiar, one-sidedly limited statement estrange me forever in spirit from this most noble man whose heart I revered and loved?” Goethe was completely conscious of the great step he was taking in science; he recognized that by breaking down the barriers between inorganic and organic nature and by consistently carrying through on Spinoza's way of thinking, he was giving science a significant turn. We find his knowledge of this fact expressed in his essay Power to Judge in Beholding (Anschauende Urteilskraft). After he had found, in the Critique of Judgment, the Kantian establishment of the in ability of the human intellect to explain an organism, as we described above, Goethe expresses his opposition to it in this way: “To be sure, the author (Kant) seems here to point to a divine intellect; but when we, in fact, lift ourselves in the moral sphere into a higher region through belief in God, virtue, and immortality and mean to draw near to the primal being, so likewise, in the intellectual realm, it could very well be the case that we would make ourselves worthy, through beholding an ever-creating nature, of participating spiritually in its productions. Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more could keep me then from courageously under taking the adventure of reason, as the old man of Königsberg himself calls it.” [ 6 ] The essential thing about a process of inorganic nature—a process belonging merely to the sense world, in other words—consists in the fact that it is caused and determined by another process which likewise belongs only to the sense world. Let us assume now that the causal process consists of the elements m, d, and v (mass, direction, and velocity of a moving elastic ball) and that the resulting process consists of the elements m', d', and v'; then what m, d, and v are will always determine what m', d', and v' are. If I now want to comprehend the process, I must represent the whole process, consisting of cause and effect, in one common concept. But this concept is not of such a sort that it could lie within the process itself and determine the process. The concept now brings both processes together into one common expression: It does not cause and determine. Only the objects of the sense world determine each other. The elements m, d, and v are elements that are also perceptible to the external senses. The concept appears there only in order to serve man's spirit as a means of drawing things together; it expresses something that is not ideally, conceptually real, but rather is sense-perceptibly real. And that something which it expresses is a sense-perceptible object. Knowledge of inorganic nature is based upon the possibility of grasping the outer world through the senses and of expressing its interactions through concepts. Kant saw the possibility of knowing things in this way as the only way man has. He called this thinking “discursive.” What we want to know is an external perception; the concept, the unity that draws things together, is merely a means. But if we wanted to know organic nature, we would then have to consider the ideal element, the conceptual factor, not as something that expresses or signifies something else, but rather we would have to know the ideal element as such; it would have to have a content of its own, stemming from itself, and not from the spatial-temporal world of the senses. That unity which, in inorganic nature, man's spirit merely abstracts from the world, would have to build upon itself, would have to develop itself out of its own self, would have to be fashioned in accordance with its own being and not according to the influences of other objects. Man is supposedly denied the ability to apprehend such an entity as this that develops itself out of itself and that manifests itself out of its own power. Now what is necessary for such an apprehension? A power of judgment that can impart to a thought yet another substance (Stoff) than one merely taken up by the outer senses, a power of judgment that can apprehend not merely what is sense-perceptible, but also what is purely ideal, by itself, separated from the sense world. Now one can call a concept that is not taken from the sense world by abstraction, but rather has a content flowing out of itself and only out of itself, an “intuitive concept” and knowledge of this concept an “intuitive” one. What follows from this is clear: An organism can be apprehended only in an intuitive concept. Goethe shows, through what he does, that it is granted to the human being to know in this way. [ 7 ] What prevails in the inorganic world is the interaction of the parts of a series of phenomena; it is their reciprocal determining of each other. This is not the case in the organic world. There, one part of an entity does not determine the other, but rather the whole (the idea), out of itself and in accordance with its own being, determines each individual part. One can follow Goethe in calling this self-determining whole an “entelechy.” An entelechy is therefore a power that, out of itself, calls itself into existence. What comes into manifestation also has a sense-perceptible existence, but this is determined by that entelechical principle. From this also arises the seeming contradiction. An organism determines itself out of itself, fashions its characteristics in accordance with a presupposed principle, and yet it is sense-perceptibly real. It has therefore arrived at its sense-perceptible reality in a completely different way than the other objects of the sense world; thus it seems to have arisen in an unnatural way. But it is also entirely explainable that an organism, in its externality, is just as susceptible to the influences of the sense world as is any other body. The stone falling from a roof can strike a living entity just as well as an inorganic object. An organism is connected with the outer world through its intake of nourishment, etc.; all the physical circumstances of the outer world affect it. Of course this can also occur only insofar as the organism is an object of the sense world, a spatial-temporal object. This object of the outer world then, this entelechical principle that has come into existence, is the outer manifestation of the organism. But since the organism is subject not only to its own laws of development but also to the conditions of the outer world, since it is not only what it should be in accordance with the being of the self-determining entelechical principle, but also is what other dependencies and influences have made it, therefore the organism never seems, as it were, to accord fully with itself, never seems obedient merely to its own being. Here human reason enters and forms for itself, in idea, an organism that is not in accordance with the influences of the outer world, but rather corresponds only to that entelechical principle. Every coincidental influence that has nothing to do with the organism as such falls away entirely here. This idea, now, that corresponds purely to what is organic in the organism is the idea of the archetypal organism; it is Goethe's typus. From this one can also see the great justification for this idea of the typus. This idea is not merely an intellectual concept; it is what is truly organic in every organism, without which an organism would not be one. This idea is, in fact, more real than any individual real organism, because it manifests itself in every organism. It also expresses the essential nature of an organism more fully, more purely than any individual, particular organism. It is acquired in an essentially different way than the concept of an inorganic process. This latter is drawn from, abstracted from, reality; it is not at work within reality; the idea of the organism, however, is active, is at work as entelechy within the organism; it is, in the form grasped by our reason, only the being of the entelechy itself. This idea does not draw the experience together; it brings about what is to be experienced. Goethe expresses this in the following words: “Concept is summation, idea is result of experience; to find the sum requires intellect; to grasp the result requires reason” (Aphorisms in Prose). This explains that kind of reality which belongs to the Goethean archetypal organism (archetypal plant or archetypal animal). This Goethean method is clearly the only possible one by which to penetrate into the essential nature of the world of organisms. [ 8 ] With respect to the inorganic, the fact should be regarded as essential that the phenomenon, in all its manifoldness, is not identical with the lawfulness that explains it, but rather points, merely, to this lawfulness as to something external to it. The observation (the material element of knowledge, given us by the outer senses) and the concept (the formal element, by which we recognize the observation as necessitated) confront each other as two elements that objectively require each other, it is true; but they do so in such a way that the concept does not lie within the individual parts of a series of phenomena themselves but rather within a relationship of these parts to each other. This relationship, which brings the manifoldness into a unified whole, is founded within the individual parts of the given, but as a whole (as a unity) it does not come to real, concrete manifestation. Only the parts of this relationship come to outer existence—in the object. The unity, the concept, first comes to manifestation as such within our intellect. The intellect has the task of drawing together the manifoldness of the phenomenon; it relates itself to the manifoldness as its sum. We have to do here with a duality: with the manifold thing that we observe, and with the unity that we think. In organic nature the parts of the manifoldness of an entity do not stand in such an external relationship to each other. The unity comes into reality in the observed entity simultaneously with the manifoldness, as something identical with the manifoldness. The relationship of the individual parts of a phenomenal whole (an organism) has become a real one. It no longer comes to concrete manifestation merely within our intellect, but rather within the object itself, and in the object it brings forth the manifoldness out of itself. The concept does not have the role merely of summation, of being a combiner that has its object outside itself; the concept has become completely one with the object. What we observe is no longer different from that by which we think the observed; we are observing the concept as the idea itself. Therefore, Goethe calls the ability by which we comprehend organic nature the power to judge in beholding (Anschauende Urteilskraft). What explains (the formal element of knowledge, the concept) and what is explained (the material, the beheld) are identical. The idea by which we grasp the organic is therefore essentially different from the concept by which we explain the inorganic; the idea does not merely draw together—like a sum—a given manifoldness, but rather sets forth its own content out of itself. The idea is the result of the given (of experience), is concrete manifestation. Herein lies the reason why in inorganic natural science we speak of laws (natural laws) and explain the facts by them, and in organic nature, on the other hand, we do this by types. The law is not one and the same with the manifoldness of the observed that the law governs; the law stands over it; in the typus, however, the ideal element and the real element have become a unity; the manifoldness can be explained only as going forth from a point of the whole, the whole that is identical with the manifoldness. [ 9 ] In Goethe's knowledge of this relationship between the science of the inorganic and that of the organic lies what is so significant in his research. One is in error, therefore, when today one often explains his research as a forerunner of that monism which wants to found a unified view of nature—comprising both the organic and the inorganic—by endeavoring to trace what is organic back to the same laws (mechanical-physical categories and laws of nature) by which the inorganic is determined. We have seen how Goethe conceives a monistic view to be. The way he explains the organic is essentially different from the way he proceeds with respect to the inorganic. He wants to be sure that the mechanistic way of explaining things is strictly avoided with respect to what is of a higher nature (see his Aphorisms in Prose). He criticizes Kieser and Link for wanting to trace organic phenomena back to inorganic activity. [ 10 ] What gave rise to the erroneous view about Goethe indicated above was the relationship into which he brought himself to Kant with respect to the possibility of a knowledge of organic nature. But when Kant asserts that our intellect is not able to explain organic nature, he certainly does not mean by this that organic nature rests upon mechanical lawfulness and that he is only unable to grasp it as resulting from mechanical-physical categories. For Kant, the reason for this inability lies, rather, precisely in the fact that our intellect can explain only mechanical-physical things and that the being of the organism is not of this nature. Were it so, then the intellect, by virtue of the categories at its command, could very well grasp its being. It is definitely not Goethe's thought now to explain the organic world as a mechanism in spite of Kant; but rather he maintains that we by no means lack the ability to know that higher kind of nature's working which establishes the essential being of the organic. [ 11 ] As we consider what has just been said, we are confronted right away by an essential difference between inorganic and organic nature. Since in inorganic nature any process whatever can cause another, and this in turn yet another, and so on, the sequence of occurrences seems nowhere to be a closed one. Everything is in continuous interaction, without any one particular group of objects being able to close itself off from the effects of others. The sequences of inorganic activity have nowhere a beginning nor an end; there is only a chance connection between one happening and the next. If a stone falls to earth, the effect it produces depends upon the chance form of the object on which it falls. It is a different matter now with an organism. Here the unity is primary. The entelechy, built upon itself, comprises a number of sense-perceptible developmental forms of which one must be the first and another the last; in which one form can always only follow the other in an altogether definite way. The ideal unity puts forth out of itself a series of sense-perceptible organs in a certain sequence in time and in a particular spatial relationship, and closes itself off in an altogether definite way from the rest of nature. It puts forth its various states out of itself. These can therefore also be grasped only when one studies the development of successive states as they emerge from an ideal unity; i.e., an organic entity can be understood only in its becoming, in its developing. An inorganic body is closed off, rigid, can only be moved from outside, is inwardly immobile. An organism is restlessness within itself, ever transforming it self from within, changing, producing metamorphoses. The following statements of Goethe refer to this: “Reason is oriented toward what is becoming, the intellect toward what has become; the former does not bother itself about purpose (wozu?); the latter does not ask about origin (woher?). Reason rejoices in development; intellect wishes to hold everything fixed in order to use it” (Aphorisms in Prose) and: “Reason has rulership only over what is living; the world that has already come about, with which geognosy concerns itself, is dead.” (Ibid.) [ 12 ] The organism confronts us in nature in two main forms: as plant and as animal, in a different way in each. The plant differs from the animal in its lack of any real inner life. This last manifests in the animal as sensation, arbitrary movement, etc. The plant has no such soul principle. It still consists entirely in its externality, in its form. By determining its life, as it were, out of one point, that entelechical principle confronts us in the plant in such a way that all its individual organs are formed according to the same developmental principle. The entelechy manifests here as the developmental force of the individual organs. These last are all fashioned according to one and the same developmental type; they manifest as modifications of one basic organ, as a repetition of this organ at different levels of development. What makes the plant into a plant, a certain form-creating force, is at work in every organ in the same way. Every organ appears therefore as identical to all the others and also to the whole plant. Goethe expresses this as follows: “I have realized, namely, that in that organ of the plant which we are usually accustomed to address as ‘leaf,’ the true Proteus lies hidden that can conceal and reveal itself in every formation. Anyway you look at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ (Keim) that one cannot think the one without the other.” (Italian Journey) Thus the plant appears, as it were, composed of nothing but individual plants, as a complex individual consisting in turn of simpler ones. The development of the plant progresses therefore from level to level and forms organs; each organ is identical to every other, i.e., similar in formative principle, different in appearance. The inner unity spreads itself out, as it were, in the plant; it expresses itself in manifoldness, loses itself in this manifoldness in such a way that it does not gain—as the animal does, as we will see later—a concrete existence which is endowed with a certain independence and which, as a center of life, confronts the manifoldness of the organs and uses them as mediators with the outer world. [ 13 ] The question now arises: What brings about that difference in the appearance of plant organs which, according to their inner principle, are identical? How is it possible for developmental laws that all work according to one formative principle to bring forth at one time a leaf and at another a petal? In the case of plant life, which lies entirely in the realm of the external, this differentiation can also be based only upon external, i.e., spatial, factors. Goethe regards an alternating expansion and contraction as just such external factors. As the entelechical principle of plant life, working out from one point, comes into existence, it manifests itself as something spatial; the formative forces work in space. They create organs with definite spatial forms. Now these forces either concentrate themselves, they strive to come together, as it were, into one single point (this is the stage of contraction); or they spread themselves out, unfold themselves, seek in a certain way to distance themselves from each other (this is the stage of expansion). In the whole life of the plant, three expansions alternate with three contractions. Everything that enters as differentiation into the plant's formative forces which in their essential nature are identical—stems from this alternating expansion and contraction. At first the whole plant, in all its potential, rests, drawn together into one point, in the [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] [ 14 ] seed (a). It then comes forth and unfolds itself, spreads itself out in leaf-formation (c). The formative forces thrust themselves apart more and more; therefore the lower leaves appear still raw, compact (cc'); the further up the stem they are, the more ribbed and indented they become. What formerly was still pressing together now separates (leaf d and e). What earlier stood at successive intervals (zz') from each other appears again in one point of the stem (w) in the calyx (f). This is the second contraction. In the corolla, an unfolding, a spreading out, occurs again. Compared with the sepals, the petals (g) are finer and more delicate, which can only be due to a lesser intensity at one point, i.e., be due to a greater extension of the formative forces. The next contraction occurs in the reproductive organs (stamens (h), and pistil (i)), after which a new expansion takes place in the fruiting (k). In the seed (a) that emerges from the fruit, the whole being of the plant again appears contracted to a point.37 [ 15 ] The whole plant represents only an unfolding, a realization, of what rests in the bud or in the seed as potentiality. Bud and seed need only the appropriate external influences in order to become fully developed plant forms. The only difference between bud and seed is that the latter has the earth directly as the basis of its unfolding, whereas the former generally represents a plant formation upon the plant itself. The seed represents a plant individuality of a higher kind, or, if you will, a whole cycle of plant forms. With the forming of every bud, the plant begins a new stage of its life, as it were; it regenerates itself, concentrates its forces in order to unfold them again anew. The forming of a bud is therefore an interruption of vegetation. The plant's life can contract itself into a bud when the conditions for actual real life are lacking, in order then to unfold itself anew when such conditions do occur. The interruption of vegetation in winter is based on this. Goethe says about this: “It is very interesting to observe how a vegetation works that is actively continued and uninterrupted by severe cold; here there are no buds, and one only learns now to comprehend what a bud is.”38 What lies hidden in the bud where we are is open to the day there; what lies within the bud, therefore, is true plant life; only the conditions for its unfolding are lacking. [ 16 ] Goethe's concept of alternating expansion and contraction has met with especially strong opposition. All the attacks on it, however, originate from a misunderstanding. One believes that these concepts could be valid only if a physical cause could be found for them, only if one could demonstrate a way of working of the laws at work in the plant from which such expansion and contraction could proceed. This only shows that one is setting the matter down on its tip instead of its base. There is not something there that causes the contraction and expansion; on the contrary, everything else is the result of these; they cause a progressive metamorphosis from stage to stage. One is just not able to picture the concept in its own characteristic form, in its intuitive form; one requires that the concept represent the result of an external process. One can only think of expansion and contraction as caused and not as causing. Goethe does not look upon expansion and contraction as resulting from the nature of the inorganic processes occurring in the plant; rather he regards them as the way that inner entelechical principle shapes itself. He could therefore not view them as a sum, as a drawing together, of sense-perceptible processes and deduce them from such processes, but rather had to see them as proceeding from the inner unified principle itself. [ 18 ] The plant's life is maintained by metabolism. With respect to this, an essential difference sets in between those organs closer to the root—i.e., to that organ which sees to the taking in of nourishment from the earth—and those organs that receive the nourishment which has already passed through the other organs. The former appear directly dependent upon their external inorganic environment; the latter, on the other hand, upon the organic parts that precede them. Each subsequent organ thus receives a nourishment prepared, as it were, for it by the preceding organ. Nature progresses from seed to fruit through a series of stages in such a way that what follows appears as the result of what precedes. And Goethe calls this progressing a progressing upon a spiritual ladder. Nothing more than what we have indicated lies in his words, “that an upper node—through the fact that it arises out of the preceding one and receives its sap indirectly through it—must receive its sap in a more refined and more filtered state, must also enjoy the effects of what the leaves have done with the sap in the meantime, must develop itself more finely and bring a finer sap to its leaves and buds.” All these things become comprehensible when one applies to them the meaning intended by Goethe. [ 18 ] The ideas presented here are the elements inherent in the being of the archetypal plant—inherent in a way that conforms, in fact, only to this archetypal plant itself, and not as these elements manifest in any given plant where they no longer conform to their original state but rather to external conditions. [ 19 ] Something different occurs now, to be sure, in animal life. Life does not lose itself here in its external features, but rather separates itself, detaches itself from its corporeality and uses its corporeal manifestation only as a tool. It no longer expresses itself as the mere ability to shape an organism from within outward, but rather expresses itself within an organism as something that is still there besides the organism, as its ruling power. The animal appears as a self-contained world, a microcosm in a much higher sense than the plant. It has a centre that each organ serves.
[ 20 ] In the case of the plant, the whole plant is in every organ, but the life principle exists nowhere as a particular center; the identity of the organs lies in their being formed according to the same laws. In the case of the animal, every organ appears as coming from that center; the center shapes all organs in accordance with its own nature. The form of the animal is therefore the basis for its external existence. This form, however, is determined from within. The way an animal lives must therefore take its direction from those inner formative principles. On the other hand, the inner development in itself is unrestricted, free; within certain limits, it can adapt itself to outer influences; but this development is still determined by the inner nature of the typus and not by mechanical influences from outside. Adaptation cannot therefore go so far as to make an organism seem to be only a product of the outer world. Its development is restricted to certain limits.
[ 21 ] If every animal being existed only in accordance with the principles lying within the archetypal animal, then they would all be alike. But the animal organism members itself into a number of organ systems, each of which can arrive at a definite degree of development. This is the basis now for a diverse evolution. Equally valid among the others as idea, one system can nevertheless push itself forward to a particular degree; it can use for itself the supply of formative forces lying within the animal organism and can deprive the other organs of it. The animal will thus appear as particularly developed in the direction of that organ system. Another animal will appear as developed in another direction. Herein lies the possibility for the differentiation of the archetypal organism in its transition to the phenomenal realm in genera and species. [ 22 ] The real (factual) causes of this differentiation, however, are still not yet given thereby. Here adaptation and the struggle for existence come into their own right—the former causing the organism to shape itself in accordance with the outer conditions surrounding it, the latter working in such a way that only those entities survive that are best adapted to existing conditions. Adaptation and the struggle for existence, however, could have absolutely no effect upon the organism if the constituting principle of the organism were not of such a kind that—while continuously maintaining its inner unity—it can take on the most manifold forms. The relationship of outer formative forces to this principle should in no way be regarded as one in which, for example, the former determine the latter in the same way one inorganic entity determines another. The outer conditions are, to be sure, the stimulus for the typus to develop in a certain form; but this form itself cannot be derived from the outer determining factors, but only from the inner principle. In explaining the form, one should always seek the outer factors, but one should not regard the form itself as resulting from them. Goethe would have rejected the derivation of the developmental forms of an organism from the surrounding outer world through mere causality, just as much as he rejected the teleological principle according to which the form of an organ is traced back to an external purpose it is to serve. [ 23 ] In the case of those organ systems of an animal in which what matters is more the external aspect of the structure—in the bones, for example—there that law which we saw in the plants appears again, as in the forming of the skull bones. Goethe's gift for recognizing the inner lawfulness in purely external forms manifests here quite especially. [ 24 ] The difference between plant and animal established by these views of Goethe might seem meaningless in face of the fact that modern science has grounds for justifiable doubt that there is any definite borderline between plant and animal. Goethe, however, was already aware of the impossibility of setting up any such borderline. In spite of this, there are specific definitions of plant and animal. This is connected with Goethe's whole view of nature. He assumes absolutely nothing constant, fixed, in the phenomenal realm; for in this realm everything fluctuates in continuous motion. But the essential being of a thing, which can be held fast in a concept, cannot be derived from the fluctuating forms, but rather from certain intermediary stages at which this being can be observed. For Goethe's view, it is quite natural that one set up specific definitions and that these are nevertheless not held to in one's experience of certain transitional forms. In fact, he sees precisely in this the mobile life of nature. [ 25 ] With these ideas, Goethe established the theoretical foundations of organic science. He found the essential being of the organism. One can easily fail to recognize this if one demands that the typus, that self-constituted principle (entelechy), itself be explained by something else. But this is an unfounded demand, because the typus, held fast in its intuitive form, explains itself. For anyone who has grasped that “forming of itself in accordance with itself” of the entelechical principle, this constitutes the solution of the riddle of life. Any other solution is impossible, because this solution is the essential being of the thing itself. If Darwinism has to presuppose an archetypal organism, then one can say of Goethe that he discovered the essential being of that archetypal organism.39 It is Goethe who broke with the mere juxtaposing of genera and species, and who undertook a regeneration of organic science in accordance with the essential being of the organism. Whereas the systems before Goethe needed just as many different concepts (ideas) as there were outwardly different species for which no intermediary existed, Goethe maintained that in idea all organisms are alike, that they are different only in their manifestation; and he explained why they are so. With this, the philosophical foundation for a scientific system of organisms was created. It was then only a matter of implementing this system. It would have to be shown how all real organisms are only manifestations of an idea, and how they manifest themselves in a given case. [ 26 ] The great deed thus accomplished for science was also widely acknowledged by those more educated in the field. The younger d'Alton writes to Goethe on July 6, 1827: “I would regard it as my greatest reward if Your Excellency, whom natural science has to thank not only for a total transformation through magnificent perspectives and new views in botany, but also for many first-rate contributions to the field of osteology, should recognize in the accompanying pages an endeavor worthy of praise.” Nees von Esenbeck, on June 24, 1820, wrote: “In your book, which you called An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, the plant has spoken about itself among us for the first time, and, in this beautiful anthropomorphism, also captivated me while I was still young.” And finally Voigt, on June 6, 1831: “With lively interest and humble thanks I have received your little book on metamorphosis, which now so obligingly includes me historically also as one of the early adherents of this theory. It is strange: one is fairer toward animal metamorphosis—I do not mean the old metamorphosis of the insects, but rather the new kind about the vertebrae—than toward plant metamorphosis. Apart from the plagiarisms and misuses, the silent recognition of animal metamorphosis may rest on the belief that one was risking less there. For, in the skeleton the separate bones remain ever the same, whereas in botany, metamorphosis threatens to topple the whole terminology and consequently the determining of species, and there weak people are afraid, because they do not know where something like that might lead.” Here there is complete understanding for Goethe's ideas. The awareness is there that a new way of viewing what is individual must take place; and the new systematics, the study of particulars, should only first proceed then from this new view. The self-supporting typus contains the possibility of assuming endlessly manifold forms as it enters into manifestation; and these forms are the object of our sense perception, are the genera and species of the organism living in space and time. Insofar as our spirit apprehends that general idea, the typus, it has grasped the whole realm of organisms in all its unity. When now our spirit beholds the development of the typus in each particular form of manifestation, this form becomes comprehensible to it; this form appears to our spirit as one of the stages, one of the metamorphoses, in which the typus realizes itself. And the nature of the systematics to be founded by Goethe was to consist in demonstrating these different stages. In the animal, as well as in the plant realm, there holds sway an ascending evolutionary sequence; organisms are divided into highly developed and undeveloped ones. How is this possible? It is characteristic of the ideal form of the typus of the organisms, in fact, that it consists of spatial and temporal elements. For this reason, it also appeared to Goethe as a sensible-supersensible form. It contains spatial temporal forms as ideal perception (intuitive). When the typus now enters into manifestation, the truly (no longer intuitive) sense-perceptible form can correspond fully to that ideal form or not; the typus can come to its full development or not. The lower organisms are indeed lower through the fact that their form of manifestation does not fully correspond with the organic typus. The more that outer manifestation and organic typus coincide in a given entity, the more highly developed it is. This is the objective basis of an ascending evolutionary sequence. It is the task of any systematics to demonstrate this relationship with respect to the form of every organism. In arriving at the typus, the archetypal organism, however, no account can be taken of this; in arriving at the typus it can only be a matter of finding a form that represents the most perfect expression of the typus. Goethe's archetypal plant is meant to provide such a form. [ 27 ] One has reproached Goethe for taking no account of the world of cryptogamia in arriving at his typus. We have indicated earlier that this could only have been so out of the fullest consciousness, since he did occupy himself also with the study of these plants. This does have its objective basis, however. The cryptogamia are in fact those plants in which the archetypal plant only comes to expression in a highly one sided way; they represent the idea of the plant in a one-sided sense-perceptible form. They can be judged according to the idea thus set up; but this idea itself only bursts forth fully in the phanerogamia. [ 28 ] But what is to be said here is that Goethe never accomplished this implementation of his basic thought, that he entered too little into the realm of the particular. Therefore all his works remain fragmentary. His intention of also shedding light here is shown by his words in the Italian Journey (September 27, 1786) to the effect that it will be possible, with the help of his ideas, “truly to determine genera and species, which until now has occurred in a very arbitrary way, it seems to me.” He did not carry out this intention, did not make a specific presentation of the connection of his general thoughts to the realm of the particular, to the reality of the individual forms. This he himself regarded as a deficiency in his fragments; with respect to this he writes to Soret von de Candolle on June 28, 1828: “It is also becoming more and more clear to me how he regards my intentions, in which I am persisting and which, in my short essay on metamorphosis, are stated definitely enough, it is true, but whose connection with botany based on perception does not emerge clearly enough, as I have known for a long time.” This is certainly also the reason why Goethe's views were so misunderstood; they were misunderstood only because they were not understood at all. [ 29 ] In Goethe's concepts we also gain an ideal explanation for the fact, discovered by Darwin and Haeckel, that the developmental history of the individual represents a repetition of the history of the race. For, what Haeckel puts forward here cannot after all be taken for anything more than an unexplained fact. It is the fact that every individual entity passes, in a shortened form, through all those stages of development that paleontology also shows us as separate organic forms. Haeckel and his followers explain this by the law of heredity. But heredity is itself nothing other than an abbreviated expression for the fact just mentioned. The explanation for it is that those forms, as well as those of the individual, are the manifest forms of one and the same archetypal image that, in successive epochs, brings to unfoldment the formative forces lying within this image as potentiality. Every higher entity is indeed more perfect through the fact that, through the favorable influences of its environment, it is not hindered in the completely free unfolding of itself in accordance with its inner nature. If, on the other hand, because of certain influences, the individual is compelled to remain at a lower stage, then only some of its inner forces come to manifestation, and then that which is only a part of a whole in a more highly developed individual is this individual's whole. And in this way the higher organism appears in its development as composed of the lower organisms, or too the lower organisms appear in their development as parts of the higher one. In the development of a higher animal, we must therefore also see again the development of all the lower ones (biogenetic law). Just as the physicist is not satisfied with merely stating and describing-facts, but also seeks out their laws—i.e., the concepts of the phenomena—so, for the person who wants to penetrate into the nature of organic entities, it also does not suffice for him merely to cite the facts of kinship, heredity, struggle for existence, etc.; but rather he wants to know the ideas underlying these things. We find this striving in Goethe. What Kepler's three laws are for the physicist, Goethe's ideas of the typus are for the organic scientist. Without them, the world is a mere labyrinth of facts for us. This has often been misunderstood. One declares that the concept of metamorphosis in Goethe's sense is merely a picture that basically occurs only in our intellect through abstraction. That Goethe was not clear about the fact that the concept of the transformation of leaves into flower organs makes sense only if the latter, the stamens, for example, were once real leaves. However, this turns Goethe's view upside down. A sense-perceptible organ is turned into a principally primary one and the other organ is then derived from it in a sense-perceptible way. Goethe never meant it this way. For him, what is first in time is absolutely not also first with respect to the idea, to the principle. It is not because the stamens were once true leaves that they are now related to the leaves; no, but rather because they are related ideally, in accordance with their inner nature, they appeared at one time as true leaves. The sense-perceptible transformation is only the result of the ideal relatedness and not the other way around. Today, it is an established empirical fact that all the lateral organs of the plant are identical; but why does one call them identical? According to Schleiden, because these all develop on the axis in such a way that they are pushed forth as lateral protuberances, in such a way that lateral cell formation remains only on the original body and that no new cells form on the tip that is formed first. This is a purely external relatedness, and one considers the idea of identity to be the result of this. Again the matter is otherwise for Goethe. For him the lateral organs are identical in their idea, in their inner being; therefore they also manifest outwardly as identical formations. For him, sense-perceptible relatedness is a result of inner, ideal relatedness. The Goethean conception differs from the materialistic one in the way it poses its questions; the two do not contradict one another; they complement one another. Goethe's ideas provide the foundation for the other view. Goethe's ideas are not merely a poetic foreshadowing of later discoveries but rather independent principle discoveries that have not by far been valued enough and upon which natural science will still draw for a long time. Even when the empirical facts that he used shall have been far surpassed, or in part even disproven, by more exact and detailed research. still the ideas he set up are fundamental once and for all for organic science, because they are independent of those empirical facts. Just as, according to Kepler's laws, every newly discovered planet must revolve around its star, so must every process in organic nature occur according to Goethe's ideas. Long before Kepler and Copernicus, people saw the occurrences in the starry heavens. These two first found the laws. Long before Goethe, people observed the realm of organic nature; Goethe found its laws. Goethe is the Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world. [ 30 ] One can also clarify for oneself the nature of the Goethean theory in the following way. Besides ordinary empirical mechanics, which only collects the facts, there is also a rational mechanics, which, from the inner nature of the basic mechanical principles, deduces the a priori laws as necessary ones. As empirical mechanics relates to rational mechanics, so the theories of Darwin, Haeckel, etc., relate to the rational organic science of Goethe. About this aspect of his theory, Goethe was not at once clear from the beginning. Later, to be sure, he expressed it quite emphatically. When he writes to Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Wackenroder, on January 21, 1832: “Continue to acquaint me with everything that interests you; it will connect somewhere with my reflections,” he means by this only that he has found the basic principles of organic science from which everything else must be derived. At an earlier time, however, this all worked unconsciously in his spirit and he just treated the facts according to it.40 It first became objectively clear to him through that first scientific conversation with Schiller which we will describe later. Schiller recognized right away the ideal nature of Goethe's archetypal plant and declared that no reality could be consistent with such a plant. This stimulated Goethe to think about the relationship of what he called “typus” to empirical reality. He encountered a problem here that belongs to the most significant problems of all human investigation: the problem of the relationship between idea and reality, between thinking and experience. This became ever clearer to him: No one single empirical object corresponds entirely to his typus; no entity of nature was identical to it. The content of the typus concept cannot therefore stem from the sense world as such, even though it is won in the encounter with the sense world. Its content must therefore lie within the typus itself; the idea of the archetypal entity could only be of a kind which, by virtue of a necessity lying within itself, develops a content out of itself that then in another form—in the form of a perception—manifests within the phenomenal world. it is interesting in this regard to see how Goethe himself, when meeting empirical natural scientists. stood up for the rights of experience and for keeping idea and object strictly separated. In 1786, Sömmerring sends him a book in which Sömmerring makes an attempt to discover the seat of the soul. In a letter that he sends to Sömmerring on August 28, 1796, Goethe finds that Sömmerring has woven too much metaphysics into his views; an idea about objects of experience has no justification if it goes beyond these, if it is not founded in the being of the object itself. With objects of experience, the idea is an organ for grasping, in its necessary interconnection, that which otherwise would be merely perceived in a blind juxtaposition and succession. But, from the fact that the idea is not allowed to bring anything new to the object, it follows that the object itself, in its own essential being, is something ideal and that empirical reality must have two sides: one, by which it is particular, individual, and the other by which it is ideal-general. [ 31 ] Association with contemporary philosophers and the reading of their works led Goethe to many points of view in this respect. Schelling's work On the World-Soul 41 and his Sketch of a System of natural Philosophy 42 as well as Steffen's Basic Features of a philosophical Natural Science 43 were fruitful for him. Also a great deal was talked through with Hegel. These stimuli finally led him to take up Kant again, with whom Goethe had already once occupied himself at Schiller's instigation. In 1817 (see his Annals) he takes a historical look at Kant's influence upon his ideas on nature and natural things. To these reflections, going to the core of science, we owe the following essays:
How the Essay on the Metamorphosis of the Plants Arose[ 32 ] All these essays express the thought already indicated above, that every object has two sides: the direct one of its manifestation (form of manifestation), and the second one that contains its being. In this way, Goethe arrives at the only satisfactory view of nature, which establishes the one truly objective method. If a theory regards the ideas as something foreign to the object itself, as something merely subjective, then it cannot profess to be truly objective if it ever uses the idea at all. But Goethe can maintain that he adds nothing to the objects that does not already lie in the objects themselves. [ 33 ] Goethe also pursued the detailed factual aspects of those branches of science to which his ideas were related. In 1795, he attended lectures by Loder on the ligaments; during this period, he did not at all lose sight of anatomy and physiology, which seems all the more important since it was precisely then that he was writing his lectures on osteology. In 1796 attempts were made to grow plants in darkness and under coloured glass. Later on, the metamorphosis of insects was also investigated. [ 34 ] A further stimulus came from the philologist F.A. Wolff who drew Goethe's attention to his namesake Wolff who, in his Theoria Generationis, had already expressed ideas in 1759 that were similar to those of Goethe on the metamorphosis of the plants. Goethe was moved by this fact to concern himself more deeply with Wolff, which he did in 1807; he discovered later, however, that Wolff, with all his acuity, was not yet clear on precisely the main points. Wolff did not yet know the typus as something non-sense-perceptible, as something that develops its content merely out of inner necessity. He still regarded the plant as an external, mechanical complex of individual details. [ 35 ] Goethe's exchanges with his many scientist friends, as well as the joy of having found recognition and imitation of his endeavors among many kindred spirits, led Goethe to the thought, in 1807, of publishing the fragments of his natural-scientific studies that he had held back until then. He gradually abandoned his intention of writing a more comprehensive natural-scientific work. But the individual essays did not yet reach publication in 1807. His interest in the colour theory pushed morphology into the background again for a time. The first booklet of these essays first appeared in 1817. By 1824, two volumes of these essays had appeared, the first in four booklets, the second in two. Besides the essays on Goethe's own views, we also find here discussions of significant literary publications in the realm of morphology, and also treatises of other scholars, whose presentations, however, are always complementary to Goethe's interpretation of nature. [ 36 ] On yet two further occasions, Goethe was challenged to occupy himself more intensively with natural-scientific matters. Both of these involved significant literary publications—in the realm of science—that related most deeply to his own strivings. On the first occasion, the stimulus was given by the studies of the botanist Martius on the spiral tendency in plants, on the second occasion, by a natural-scientific dispute in the French Academy of Sciences. [ 37 ] Martius saw plant form, in its development, as comprised of a spiral and a vertical tendency. The vertical tendency brings about growth in the direction of the root and stem; the spiral tendency brings about the spreading out of leaves, blossoms, etc. Goethe saw in this thought only an elaboration of ideas he had already set down in 1790 in his book on metamorphosis, but here focusing more on spatial elements (vertical, spiral). For proof of this assertion, we refer you to our comments on Goethe's essay, On the Spiral Tendency of Vegetation,44 from which the fact emerges that Goethe, in this essay, does not bring forward anything essentially new with respect to his earlier ideas. We want to direct this statement particularly to those who assert that there is evident here, in fact, a retrogression of Goethe from his earlier clear views back into the “deepest depths of mysticism.” [ 38 ] Even at a most advanced age (1830–32), Goethe still wrote two essays on the dispute between the two French natural scientists, Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In these essays we find yet once more, in striking conciseness, a synthesis of the principles of Goethe's view of nature. [ 39 ] Cuvier was altogether an empiricist of the old school of natural science. For each species of animal he sought a particular corresponding concept. He believed he had to take up into the conceptual edifice of his system of organic nature as many individual types as there are animal species present in nature. But for him the individual types stood there side by side without any mediation. What he did not take into consideration is this. Our need for knowledge is not satisfied with the particular as such in the way it approaches us directly as phenomenon. But since we approach an entity of the sense world with no other intention, in fact, than of knowing it, we should not assume that the reason we declare ourselves unsatisfied with the particular as such is to be found in the nature of our ability to know. On the contrary, the reason must lie within the object itself. The essential being of the particular itself, in fact, by no means consists only in this, its particularness; it presses, in order to be understood, toward a kind of being that is not particular, but rather, general (ein Allgemeines). This ideal-general is the actual being—the essence of every particular entity. Only one side of the existence of a particular entity lies in its particularness; the other side is the general—the typus (see Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose). This is how it is to be understood when the particular is spoken of as a form of the general. Since the ideal-general is therefore the actual being, the content, of the particular, it is impossible for the ideal-general to be derived, abstracted, from the particular. Since it has nowhere from which to borrow its content, it must give this content to itself. The typical-general is therefore of such a nature that, in it, content and form are identical. But it can therefore also be grasped only as a whole, independent of what is individual. Science has the task with every particular entity of showing how, according to the entity's essential being, the entity subordinates itself to the ideal-general. Through this the particular kinds of existence enter the stage of mutually determining and depending upon each other. What otherwise can be perceived only as spatial-temporal juxtaposition and succession is now seen in necessary interconnection. But Cuvier wouldn't hear of any such view. This view, on the other hand, was the one held by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This is actually the aspect that aroused Goethe's interest in this dispute. The matter has often been misrepresented because one saw the facts, through the glasses of most modern views, in a completely different light than that in which they appear if one approaches them without preconceptions. Geoffroy referred not only to his own research, but also to a number of German scientists of like mind, among whom Goethe is also named. [ 40 ] Goethe's interest in this matter was extraordinary. He was extremely happy to find a colleague in Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: “Now Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is also definitely on our side and with him all his significant students and adherents in France This event is of inconceivably great value to me, and I am right to jubilate about the final victory of something to which I have dedicated my life and which is pre-eminently also my own,” he says to Eckermann on August 2, 1830. It is altogether a strange phenomenon that in Germany Goethe's research found a response only among philosophers and but little among natural scientists, whereas the response in France was more significant among the latter. De Candolle gave Goethe's theory of metamorphosis his closest attention and treated botany generally in a way that was not far from Goethean views. Also, Goethe's Metamorphosis had already been translated into French by F. de Gingins-Lassaraz. Under such conditions, Goethe could definitely hope that a translation of his botanical writings into French, carried out with his collaboration, would not fall on barren ground. Such a translation was then provided in 1831, with Goethe's continuous assistance, by Friedrich Jakob Soret. It contained that first Attempt of 1790, the history of Goethe's botanical studies, and the effect of his theories upon his contemporaries, as well as something about de Candolle,—in French, with German on the opposite page.
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| 1. Goethean Science: Concluding Remarks on Goethe's Morphological Views
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| [ 14 ] Since one has made a fortunate and successful beginning at explaining Goethe's literary works in that way, there already lies in that the challenge to bring all the works of his spirit under this kind of study. This cannot remain unaccomplished forever, and I will not be the last among those who will heartily rejoice if my successor succeeds better than I. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Concluding Remarks on Goethe's Morphological Views
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
[ 1 ] When, at the end of this consideration of Goethe's thoughts on metamorphosis, I look back over the views that I felt compelled to express, I cannot conceal from myself the fact that a very great number of outstanding adherents of the various tendencies in scientific thought are of a different view than I. Their position with respect to Goethe is completely clear to me; and the judgment they will pronounce on my attempt to present the standpoint of our great thinker and poet is quite predictable. [ 2 ] The views about Goethe's strivings in the realm of natural science are separated into two opposing camps. [ 3 ] The adherents of modern monism with Professor Haeckel at their head, recognize in Goethe the prophet of Darwinism who conceives of the organic completely in the Darwinian sense: as governed by the laws that are also at work in inorganic nature. The only thing Goethe lacked, they believe, was the theory of natural selection by which Darwin first founded the monistic world view and which raised the theory of evolution into a scientific conviction. [ 4 ] Opposing this standpoint there stands another, which assumes that Goethe's idea of the typus is nothing more than a general concept, an idea in the sense of Platonic philosophy. According to this view, Goethe did indeed make individual statements that remind one of the theory of evolution at which he arrived through the pantheism inherent in his nature; however, he did not feel any need to go all the way to the ultimate mechanical foundations. Thus there can be no question of finding the theory of evolution in the modern sense in Goethe. [ 5 ] As I was attempting to explain Goethe's views, without taking any definite standpoint beforehand, purely out of Goethe's nature, out of the whole of his spirit, it became clear to me that neither the one nor the other of these two camps—extraordinarily significant as their contributions have been toward an assessment of Goethe—has interpreted his view of nature altogether correctly. [ 6 ] The first of the two views characterized above is entirely right in asserting that Goethe, in striving to explain organic nature, combats the dualism that assumes insuperable barriers to exist between organic nature and the inorganic world. But Goethe asserted the possibility of this explanation not because he conceived of the forms and phenomena of organic nature in a mechanistic context, but rather because he saw that the higher context in which they do stand is in no way closed to our knowledge. He did indeed conceive of the universe in a monistic way as an undivided unity—from which he by no means excluded the human being—but he also therefore recognized that within this unity levels are to be discerned that have their own laws. Already from his youth up, he reacted negatively to efforts to picture unity as uniformity, and to conceive of the organic world, as well as everything that appears as higher nature in nature, as being governed by the laws at work in the inorganic world (see History of my Botanical Studies). It was also this rejection that later compelled him to assume the existence of a power to judge in beholding, by which we grasp organic nature, in contrast to the discursive intellect, by which we know inorganic nature. Goethe conceives of the world as a circle of circles, each of which has its own principle of explanation. Modern monists know only one single circle: that of inorganic natural laws. [ 7 ] The second of the two opinions about Goethe described above recognizes that with him it is a matter of something different than with modern monism. But since the adherents of this second view consider it a postulate of science that organic nature is explained in the same way as inorganic nature, and since from the very start they reject with abhorrence a view like Goethe's, they regard it as altogether useless to go more deeply into his strivings. [ 8 ] Thus Goethe's high principles could gain full validity in neither camp. And it is precisely these principles that are so outstanding in his work, which, for someone who has recognized them in all their depth, do not lose in significance even when he sees that many a detail of Goethean research needs to be corrected. [ 9 ] This fact now requires of a person who is attempting to present Goethe's views that he direct his attention away from the critical assessment of each individual thing Goethe discovered in one or another chapter of natural science, and toward what is central to the Goethean view of nature. [ 10 ] By seeking to meet this requirement, one comes close to possibly being misunderstood by precisely those by whom it would be most painful for me to be misunderstood: by the pure empiricists. I mean those who pursue in every direction the factually demonstrable relationships of organisms, the empirically given materials, and who regard the question as to the primal principles of the organic realm as one that is still open today. What I bring cannot be directed against them, because it does not touch on them. On the contrary: I build a part of my hopes precisely on them, because their hands are still free in every respect. They are also the ones who will still have to correct many an assertion of Goethe, for he did sometimes err in the factual realm; here, of course, even the genius cannot overcome the limitations of his time. [ 11 ] In the realm of principles, however, he arrived at fundamental views that have the same significance for organic science that Galileo's basic laws have for mechanics. [ 12 ] To establish this fact was the task I set myself. [ 13 ] I hope that those whom my words cannot convince will at least see the good will with which I strove, without respect to persons, attentive only to the subject at hand, to solve the problem I have indicated—explaining Goethe's scientific writings out of the whole of his nature—and to express a conviction that for me is uplifting. [ 14 ] Since one has made a fortunate and successful beginning at explaining Goethe's literary works in that way, there already lies in that the challenge to bring all the works of his spirit under this kind of study. This cannot remain unaccomplished forever, and I will not be the last among those who will heartily rejoice if my successor succeeds better than I. May youthful and striving thinkers and researchers—especially those who are not merely interested in breadth of vision, but who rather look directly at what is central to our knowing activity—grant my reflections some attention, and follow in great numbers to set forth more perfectly what I was striving to present. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Way of Knowledge
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
| Every right-minded person would in fact have to refuse a happiness that some external power might offer him, because he cannot after all experience something as happiness that is just handed him as an unearned gift. If some creator or other had undertaken the creation of man with the thought in mind of bestowing happiness upon his likeness at the same time, as an inheritance, then he would have done better to leave him uncreated. |
| [ 11 ] This kind of empiricism also underlies the philosophy of Eduard v. Hartmann. Eduard v. Hartmann seeks the ideal unity in nature, as this does positively yield itself to a thinking that has real content. |
| My epistemology 46 shows the way by which a kind of thinking that understands itself and is not self-contradictory arrives at this world view. I then found that this objective idealism, in its basic features, permeates the Goethean world view. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Way of Knowledge
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
[ 1 ] In June 1794, Johann Gottlieb Fichte sent the first sections of his Theory of Science 45 to Goethe. The latter wrote back to the philosopher on June 24: “As far as I am concerned, I will owe you the greatest thanks if you finally reconcile me with the philosophers, with whom I can never do without and with whom I have never been able to unite myself.” What the poet is here seeking from Fichte is what he sought earlier from Spinoza and later from Schelling and Hegel: a philosophical world view that would be in accordance with his way of thinking. None of the philosophical directions with which he became acquainted, however, brought the poet complete satisfaction. [ 2 ] This fact makes our task considerably more difficult. We want to draw nearer to Goethe from the philosophical side. If he himself had designated one standpoint of knowledge as his own, then we could refer to it. But this is not the case. And so the task devolves on us to recognize the philosophical core of all we have from the poet and to sketch a picture of it. We consider the right way to accomplish this task to be a direction in thinking that is gained upon the foundations of German idealistic philosophy. This philosophy sought, in fact, in its own way to satisfy the same highest human needs to which Goethe and Schiller devoted their lives. It came forth from the same contemporary stream. It therefore also stands much nearer to Goethe than do those views that to a large degree govern the sciences today. What Goethe expressed in poetic form and what he presented scientifically can be regarded as the consequence of a view that can be formed out of that philosophy. They could definitely never be the consequence of such scientific directions as our present-day ones. We are very far removed today from that way of thinking which lay in Goethe's nature. [ 3 ] It is indeed true that we must acknowledge progress in all areas of culture. But that this progress is one into the depths of things can hardly be asserted. For the content of an epoch, however, only progress into the depths of things is decisive, after all. But our epoch might best be characterized by the statement: It rejects, as unattainable for man, any progress at all into the depths of things. We have become faint-hearted in all areas, especially in that of thinking and willing. With respect to thinking: one observes endlessly, stores up the observations, and lacks the courage to develop them into a scientific, whole view of reality. One accuses German idealistic philosophy of being unscientific, however, because it did have this courage. Today one wants only to look with one's senses, not think. One has lost all trust in thinking. One does not consider it able to penetrate into the mysteries of the world and of life; one altogether renounces any solution to the great riddle questions of existence. The only thing one considers possible is: to bring what experience tells us, into a system. But in doing so one forgets that with this view one is approaching a standpoint considered to have been overcome long ago. The rejection of all thinking and the insistence upon sense experience is, grasped more deeply, nothing more, after all, than the blind faith in revelation of the religions. The latter rests, after all, only upon the fact that the church provides finished truths that one has to believe. Thinking may struggle to penetrate into the deeper meaning of these truths; but thinking is deprived of the ability to test the truth itself, to penetrate by its own power into the depths of the world. And the science of experience, what does it ask of thinking? That it listen to what the facts say, and interpret, order, etc., what is heard. It also denies to thinking the ability to penetrate independently into the core of the world. On the one hand, theology demands the blind subjection of thinking to the statements of the church; on the other, science demands blind subjection to the statements of sense observation. Here as there, independent thinking that penetrates into the depths counts as nothing. The science of experience forgets only one thing. Thousands and thousands of people have looked at a sense-perceptible fact and passed it by without noting anything striking about it. Then someone came along who looked at it and became aware of an important law about it. How? This can only stem from the fact that the discoverer knew how to look differently than his predecessors. He saw the fact with different eyes than his fellow men. In looking, he had a definite thought as to how one must bring the fact into relationship with other facts, what is significant for it and what is not. And so, thinking, he set the matter in order and saw more than the others. He saw with the eyes of the spirit. All scientific discoveries rest on the fact that the observer knows how to observe in a way governed by the right thought. Thinking must naturally guide observation. It cannot do so if the researcher has lost his belief in thinking, if he does not know what to make of thinking's significance. The science of experience wanders helplessly about in the world of phenomena; the sense world becomes a confusing manifoldness for it, because it does not have enough energy in thinking to penetrate into the center. [ 4 ] One speaks today of limits to knowledge because one does not know where the goal of thinking lies. One has no clear view of what one wants to attain and doubts that one will attain it. If someone came today and pointed out clearly to us the solution to the riddle of the world, we would gain nothing from it, because we would not know what to make of this solution. [ 5 ] And it is exactly the same with willing and acting. One cannot set oneself any definite task in life of which one would be capable. One dreams oneself into indefinite unclear ideals and then complains about the fact that one does not achieve something of which one hardly has a dim, let alone a clear, picture. Just ask one of the pessimists of our day what he actually wants and what it is he despairs of attaining. He does not know. Problematical natures are they all, incapable of meeting any situation and yet satisfied with none. Do not misunderstand me. I do not wish to extol that superficial optimism which, satisfied with the trivial enjoyments of life, demands nothing higher and therefore never suffers want. I do not wish to condemn individuals who painfully feel the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that we are dependent on conditions that have a laming effect on everything we do and that we strive in vain to change. But we should not forget that pain is the woof and happiness the warp. Think of the mother, how her joy in the well-being of her children is increased if it has been achieved by earlier cares, suffering, and effort. Every right-minded person would in fact have to refuse a happiness that some external power might offer him, because he cannot after all experience something as happiness that is just handed him as an unearned gift. If some creator or other had undertaken the creation of man with the thought in mind of bestowing happiness upon his likeness at the same time, as an inheritance, then he would have done better to leave him uncreated. The fact that what man creates is always ruthlessly destroyed again raises his stature; for he must always build and create anew; and it is in activity that our happiness lies; it lies in what we ourselves accomplish. It is the same with bestowed happiness as with revealed truth. Only this is worthy of man: that he seek truth himself, that neither experience nor revelation lead him. When that has been thoroughly recognized once and for all, then the religions based on revelation will be finished. The human being will then no longer want God to reveal Himself or bestow blessings upon him. He will want to know through his own thinking and to establish his happiness through his own strength. Whether some higher power or other guides our fate to the good or to the bad, this does not concern us at all; we ourselves must determine the path we have to travel. The loftiest idea of God is still the one which assumes that God, after His creation of the human being, withdrew completely from the world and gave man completely over to himself. [ 6 ] Whoever acknowledges to thinking its ability to perceive beyond the grasp of the senses must necessarily acknowledge that it also has objects that lie beyond merely sense-perceptible reality. The objects of thinking, however, are ideas. Inasmuch as thinking takes possession of the idea, thinking fuses with the primal ground of world existence; what is at work outside enters into the spirit of man: he becomes one with objective reality in its highest potency. Becoming aware of the idea within reality is the true communion of man. [ 7 ] Thinking has the same significance with respect to ideas as the eye has with respect to light, the ear to tone. It is an organ of apprehension. [ 8 ] This view is in a position to unite two things that are regarded today as completely incompatible: the empirical method, and idealism as a scientific world view. It is believed that to accept the former means necessarily to reject the latter. This is absolutely not true. To be sure, if one considers the senses to be the only organs of apprehension for objective reality, then one must arrive at the above view. For, the senses offer us only such relationships of things as can be traced back to mechanical laws. And the mechanistic world view would thus be given as the only true form of any such world view. In this, one is making the mistake of simply overlooking the other component parts of reality which are just as objective but which cannot be traced back to mechanical laws. What is objectively given by no means coincides with what is sense-perceptibly given, as the mechanistic world conception believes. What is sense-perceptibly given is only half of the given. The other half of the given is ideas, which are also objects of experience—of a higher experience, to be sure, whose organ is thinking. Ideas are also accessible to the inductive method. [ 9 ] Today's science of sense experience follows the altogether correct method of holding fast to the given; but it adds the inadmissible assertion that this method can provide only facts of a sense-perceptible nature. Instead of limiting itself to the question of how we arrive at our views, this science determines from the start what we can see. The only satisfactory way to grasp reality is the empirical method with idealistic results. That is idealism, but not of the kind that pursues some nebulous, dreamed-up unity of things, but rather of a kind that seeks the concrete ideal content of reality in a way that is just as much in accordance with experience as is the search of modern hyper-exact science for the factual content. [ 10 ] By approaching Goethe with these views, we believe we are entering into his essential nature. We hold fast to idealism and develop it, not on the basis of Hegel's dialectic method, but rather upon a clarified higher empiricism. [ 11 ] This kind of empiricism also underlies the philosophy of Eduard v. Hartmann. Eduard v. Hartmann seeks the ideal unity in nature, as this does positively yield itself to a thinking that has real content. He rejects the merely mechanistic view of nature and the hyper-Darwinism that is stuck on externals. In science, he is the founder of a concrete monism. In history and aesthetics, he seeks concrete ideas, and does all this according to empirical inductive methods. [ 12 ] Hartmann's philosophy differs from mine only on the question of pessimism and through the metaphysical orientation of his system toward the “unconscious.” We will consider the latter point further on in the book. But with respect to pessimism, let the following be said: What Hartmann cites as grounds for pessimism—i.e., for the view that nothing in the world can fully satisfy us, that pain always outweighs pleasure—that is precisely what I would designate as the good fortune of mankind. What he brings forward is for me only proof that it is futile to strive for happiness. We must, in fact, entirely give up any such striving and seek our destiny purely in selflessly fulfilling those ideal tasks that our reason prescribes for us. What else does this mean than that we should seek our happiness only in doing, in unflagging activity? [ 13 ] Only the active person, indeed only the selflessly active person who seeks no recompense for his activity, fulfills his destiny. It is foolish to want to be recompensed for one's activity; there is no true recompense. Here Hartmann ought to build further. He ought to show what, with such presuppositions, can be the only mainspring of all our actions. This can, when the prospect of a goal one is striving for falls away, only be the selfless devotion to the object to which one is dedicating one's activity; this can only be love. Only an action out of love can be a moral one. In science, the idea, and in our action, love, must be our guiding star. And this brings us back to Goethe. “The main thing for the active person is that he do what is right; he should not worry about whether the right occurs.” “Our whole feat consists in giving up our existence in order to exist” (Aphorisms in Prose). [ 14 ] I have not arrived at my world view only through the study of Goethe or even of Hegelianism, for example. I took my start from the mechanistic-naturalistic conception of the world, but recognized that, with intensive thinking, one cannot remain there. Proceeding strictly according to natural-scientific methods, I found in objective idealism the only satisfying world view. My epistemology 46 shows the way by which a kind of thinking that understands itself and is not self-contradictory arrives at this world view. I then found that this objective idealism, in its basic features, permeates the Goethean world view. Thus the elaborating of my views does, to be sure, for years now run parallel with my study of Goethe; and I have never found any conflict in principle between my basic views and the Goethean scientific activity. I consider my task fulfilled if I have been at least partially successful in, firstly, developing my standpoint in such a way that it can also become alive in other people, and secondly, bringing about the conviction that this standpoint really is the Goethean one.
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| 1. Goethean Science: The Arrangement of Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| [ 1 ] In the editing of Goethe's natural-scientific writings, for which I was responsible, I was guided by the thought of enlivening the study of the particulars in these writings by presenting the magnificent world of ideas that underlies them. It is my conviction that every single assertion of Goethe's acquires an entirely new sense—its rightful sense, in fact—if one approaches it with a full understanding for his profound and comprehensive world view. |
| He always takes his start from concrete facts, compares and orders them. During this activity, the ideas underlying the facts occur to him. It is a great mistake to assert that, because of that familiar enough remark he made about the idea of Faust, it is not ideas that are the driving principle in Goethe's creative work. |
| Here there first revealed itself to him a rich content of ideas that we then find again as components in his general and methodological essays. If we want to understand these last, we must already have filled ourselves with that content. The essays on method are mere networks of thought for someone who is not intent upon following the path Goethe followed. |
| 1. Goethean Science: The Arrangement of Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
[ 1 ] In the editing of Goethe's natural-scientific writings, for which I was responsible, I was guided by the thought of enlivening the study of the particulars in these writings by presenting the magnificent world of ideas that underlies them. It is my conviction that every single assertion of Goethe's acquires an entirely new sense—its rightful sense, in fact—if one approaches it with a full understanding for his profound and comprehensive world view. There is no denying the fact that many of Goethe's statements on natural-scientific matters seem entirely insignificant when one considers them from the standpoint of modern science, which has progressed so far in the meantime. But this is not a matter for any further consideration at all. The point is what a given statement of Goethe's signifies within his world view. Upon the spiritual heights on which the poet stands, his scientific needs are also more intense. Without scientific needs, however, there is no science. What questions did Goethe address to nature? That is what is important. Whether and how he answered them are matters of only secondary consideration. If today we have more adequate means, a richer experience—well, then we will succeed in finding more comprehensive solutions to the questions he posed. But my expositions are meant to show that we can do no more than just this: to proceed with our greater means upon the paths he marked out for us. What we should learn from him, therefore, above all else, is how one should address questions to nature. [ 2 ] One overlooks the main point if one does not credit Goethe with anything more than having given us many an observation that was rediscovered by later research, and that constitutes today an important part of our world view. The important thing for him was not at all the communicated finding, but rather the way in which he arrived at it. He himself declares appropriately: “With the opinions that one risks, it is like pieces that one pushes forward on the board; they can be taken, but they have initiated a game that will be won.” He arrived at a method thoroughly in accord with nature. He sought, with the help of those means available, to introduce this method into science. It may be the case that the individual results he attained by this have been transformed by the progress of science; hut the scientific process that he introduced is a lasting gain for science. [ 3 ] These points of view could not be without influence upon the arrangement of the materials to be published. One can, with some seeming justification, ask: Why, since I have already departed from the order of the writings that has been usual until now, did I not right away take the route that seems recommended over all the others: to bring the general scientific writings in the first volume, the organic, mineralogical, and meteorological ones in the second volume, and those on physics in the third. The first volume would then contain the general points of view, and the following volumes the particular elaborations of the basic thoughts. As tempting as this might be, it could never have occurred to me to use this arrangement. In doing so, I would not have been able coming back to Goethe's comparison once more—to achieve what I wanted: by the pieces that are risked first, to make the plan of the game recognizable. [ 4 ] Nothing was farther from Goethe's nature than taking one's start in a conscious way from general concepts. He always takes his start from concrete facts, compares and orders them. During this activity, the ideas underlying the facts occur to him. It is a great mistake to assert that, because of that familiar enough remark he made about the idea of Faust, it is not ideas that are the driving principle in Goethe's creative work. In his contemplation of things, after he has stripped away everything incidental, everything unessential, there remains something for him that is idea in his sense. The method Goethe employs remains—even there where he lifts himself to the idea—one that is founded upon pure experience. For, nowhere does he allow a subjective ingredient to slip into his research. He only frees the phenomena from what is incidental in order to penetrate into their deeper foundations. His subject has no other task than that of arranging the object in such a way that it discloses its innermost nature. “The true is Godlike; it does not appear directly; we must divine it from its manifestations.” The point is to bring these manifestations into such a relationship that the “true” appears. The true, the idea, already lies within the fact which we confront in observation; we must only remove the covering that conceals it from us. The true scientific method consists in the removing of this covering. Goethe took this path. And we must follow him upon it if we wish to penetrate completely into his nature. In other words: we must begin with Goethe's studies on organic nature, because he began with them. Here there first revealed itself to him a rich content of ideas that we then find again as components in his general and methodological essays. If we want to understand these last, we must already have filled ourselves with that content. The essays on method are mere networks of thought for someone who is not intent upon following the path Goethe followed. As to the studies on physical phenomena: they first arose for Goethe as a consequence of his view of nature. |
| 1. Goethean Science: From Art to Science
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| In its own formations, nature gets itself, “in its specific forms, into a cul-de-sac”; one must go back to what ought to have come about if the tendency could have unfolded unhindered, just as the mathematician always keeps his eye, not upon this or that particular triangle, but always upon that lawfulness which underlies every possible triangle. The point is not what nature has created but rather the principle by which nature has created it. |
| It is a question of inferring, from what we have of Goethe's work, the underlying principles. What must we postulate in order for Goethe's scientific assertions to appear as the results of these postulates? |
| 1. Goethean Science: From Art to Science
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
[ 1 ] Someone who sets himself the task of presenting the spiritual development of a thinker has to explain that thinker's particular direction in a psychological way from the facts given in his biography. But in presenting Goethe the thinker the task does not end there. What is asked for here is not only a justification and explanation of his specific scientific direction, but rather, and primarily how this genius came at all to be active in the scientific realm. Goethe had to suffer much through the incorrect views of his contemporaries who could not believe it possible that poetic creativity and scientific study could be united in one soul. The important point here is above all to answer the question What are the motives that drive the great poet to science? Did the transition from art to science lie purely in his subjective inclinations, in personal arbitrariness? Or was Goethe's artistic direction of such a kind that it had to drive him necessarily to science? [ 2 ] If the first were the case, then his simultaneous devotion to art and science would merely signify a chance personal enthusiasm for both these directions of human striving; we would have to do with a poet who also happened to be a thinker, and it might very well have been the case that, if his course in life had been somewhat different, he would have taken the same path in his poetry, without concerning himself with science at all. Both sides of this man would then have interested us separately, each in its own right; each on its own would perhaps have helped the progress of mankind a good deal. All this would still be the case if the two directions in spirit had also been divided between two personalities. Goethe the poet would then have had nothing to do with Goethe the thinker. [ 3 ] If the second were the case, then Goethe's artistic direction was of such a kind that, from within outward, it necessarily felt the urge to be supplemented by scientific thinking. Then it is utterly inconceivable that the two directions could have been divided between two personalities. Then each of the two directions interests us not only for its own sake but also because of its relationship to the other. Then there is an objective transition from art to science; there is a point at which the two meet in such a way that perfection in the one realm demands perfection in the other. Then Goethe was not following a personal inclination, but rather the direction in art to which he devoted himself awakened needs in him that could be satisfied only by scientific activity. [ 4 ] Our age believes itself correct in keeping art and science as far apart as possible. They are supposed to be two completely opposing poles in the cultural evolution of mankind. Science, one thinks, is supposed to sketch for us the most objective picture of the world possible; it is supposed to show us reality in a mirror; or, in other words, it is supposed to hold fast purely to the given, renouncing all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world determines the laws of science; science must subject itself to this world. Science should take the yardstick for what is true and false entirely from the objects of experience. [ 5 ] The situation is supposedly quite different in the case of artistic creations. Their law is given them by the self-creative power of the human spirit. For science, any interference of human subjectivity would be a falsifying of reality, a going beyond experience; art, on the other hand, grows upon the field of the subjectivity of a genius. Its creations are the productions of human imagination, not mirror images of the outer world. Outside of us, in objective existence, lies the source of scientific laws; within us, in our individuality, lies the source of aesthetic laws. The latter, therefore, have not the slightest value for knowledge; they create illusions without the slightest element of reality. [ 6 ] Whoever grasps the matter in this way will never become clear about the relationship of Goethean poetry to Goethean science. He will only misunderstand both. Goethe's world historic significance lies, indeed, precisely in the fact that his art flows directly from the primal source of all existence, that there is nothing illusory or subjective about it, that, on the contrary, his art appears as the herald of that lawfulness that the poet has grasped by listening to the world spirit within the depths of nature's working. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the mysteries of the world just as science is also, in a different sense. [ 7 ] And Goethe always conceived of art in this way. It was for him one of the revelations of the primal law of the world; science was for him the other one. For him art and science sprang from one source. Whereas the researcher delves down into the depths of reality in order then to express their driving powers in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to imbue his medium with these same driving powers. “I think that one could call science the knowledge of the general, abstracted knowing; art, on the other hand, would be science turned into action; science would be reason, and art its mechanism; therefore one could also call art practical science. And finally then science could be called the theorem and art the problem.” What science states as idea (theorem) is what art has to imprint into matter, becomes art's problem. “In the works of man, as in those of nature, it is the intentions that are primarily worthy of note,” says Goethe. He everywhere seeks not only what is given to the senses in the outer world, but also the tendency through which it has come into being. [ 8 ] To grasp this scientifically and to give it artistic form is his mission. In its own formations, nature gets itself, “in its specific forms, into a cul-de-sac”; one must go back to what ought to have come about if the tendency could have unfolded unhindered, just as the mathematician always keeps his eye, not upon this or that particular triangle, but always upon that lawfulness which underlies every possible triangle. The point is not what nature has created but rather the principle by which nature has created it. Then this principle is to be developed in the way that accords with its own nature, and not in the way this has occurred in each particular entity of nature in accordance with thousands of chance factors. The artist has “to evolve the noble out of the common and the beautiful out of the unformed.” [ 9 ] Goethe and Schiller take art in all its full profundity. The beautiful is “a manifestation of secret laws of nature, that, except for the phenomenon of the beautiful, would have remained forever hidden to us.” A look into the poet's Italian Journey suffices for us to know that this is not an empty phrase, but rather deep inner conviction. When he says the following, one can see that for him nature and art are of the same origin: “The great works of art have at the same time been brought forth by human beings according to true and natural laws. just as the greatest works of nature are. Everything that is arbitrary, thought-up, falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” Relative to the art of the Greeks, he says in this direction: “I have the impression that they proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds and whose tracks I am following.” And about Shakespeare: “Shakespeare allies himself with the world spirit; he penetrates the world like it does; nothing is hidden to either; however, if it is the world spirit's business to preserve mysteries before, and often after, the fact, so the poet is of a mind to give the secret away.” [ 10 ] Here we should also recall the statement about the “joyful epoch in life” that the poet owed to Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment 47 and for which he actually has only the fact to thank that he here “saw creations of art and of nature each treated like the other, and that aesthetic and teleological powers of judgment illuminated each other reciprocally.” “I was happy,” says the poet, “that the art of poetry and comparative natural science are so closely related, through the fact that both of them are subject to the same power of judgment.” In his essay, The Significant Benefit of a Single Intelligent Word 48 Goethe juxtaposes, with exactly the same thought in mind, his objective poetizing and his objective thinking. [ 11 ] Thus, to Goethe, art seems to be just as objective as science. Only the form of each is different. Each appears to flow forth from one being, to be the necessary stages of one evolution. Any view was antithetical to him that relegates art or what is beautiful to an isolated position outside of the total picture of human evolution. Thus he says: “In the aesthetic realm, it is not good to speak of the idea of the beautiful; in doing so, one isolates the beautiful. which after all cannot be thought of as separate.” Or: “Style rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge, upon the being of things, insofar as we are allowed to know this being in visible and tangible forms.” Art rests therefore upon our activity of knowing. The latter has the task of recreating in thought the order according to which the world is put together; art has the task of developing in detail the idea of this order that the world-all has. The artist incorporates into his work everything about the lawfulness of the world that is attainable to him. His work thus appears as a world in miniature. Herein lies the reason why the Goethean direction in art must supplement itself with science. As art, it is already an activity of knowing. Goethe, in fact, wanted neither science nor art: he wanted the idea. And he expresses or represents the idea in the direction from which the idea happens to present itself to him. Goethe sought to ally himself with the world spirit, and to reveal to us how it holds sway; he did this through the medium of art or of science as required. What lay in Goethe was not any one-sided artistic or scientific striving, but rather the indefatigable urge to behold “all working forces and seeds.” [ 12 ] In this, Goethe is still not a philosophical poet, for his literary works do not take any roundabout path through thought in arriving at a sense-perceptible form; rather they stream directly from the source of all becoming, just as his scientific research is not imbued with poetic imagination, but rather rests directly upon his becoming aware of ideas. Without Goethe's being a philosophical poet, his basic direction seems, for the philosophical observer, to be a philosophical one. [ 13 ] With this, the question as to whether Goethe's scientific work has any philosophical value or not takes on an entirely new form. It is a question of inferring, from what we have of Goethe's work, the underlying principles. What must we postulate in order for Goethe's scientific assertions to appear as the results of these postulates? We must express what Goethe left unexpressed, but which alone makes his views comprehensible.
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| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Epistemology
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| It is an enemy of perception only when a philosophy that does not understand itself wants to spin the whole rich content of the sense world out of the idea. For then philosophy conveys a system of empty phrases instead of living nature. |
| under the presupposition that what is given to the senses is mental picture. That is the basic mistake in Volkelt's epistemology. |
| Thus his epistemology consists only in answering the question: How is knowing possible, under the presupposition that the given is a manifoldness of mental pictures? For us the matter appears quite different. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Epistemology
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
[ 1 ] We have already indicated in the previous chapter that Goethe's scientific world view does not exist for us as a complete whole, developed out of one principle. We have to do only with individual manifestations from which we see how one thought or another looks in the light of his way of thinking. This is the case with his scientific works, with the brief indications he gives about one concept or another in his Aphorisms in Prose, and with his letters to his friends. And the artistic development of his world view, finally, which does also offer us the most manifold clues to his basic ideas, is there for us in his literary works. By unreservedly acknowledging that Goethe never expressed his basic principles as a coherent whole, however, we are by no means accepting at the same time the validity of any assertion to the effect that Goethe's world view does not spring from an ideal center that can be brought into a strictly scientific formulation. [ 2 ] We must above all be clear about what the real question here is. What it was in Goethe's spirit that worked as the inner driving principle in all his creations, that imbued and enlivened them, could not come to the fore as such, in its own particular nature. Just because it imbues everything about Goethe, it could not at the same time appear before his consciousness as something separate. If the latter had been the case, then it would have had to appear before his spirit as something complete and at rest instead of being, as was actually the case, continuously active and at work. The interpreter of Goethe is obliged to follow the manifold activities and manifestations of this principle, to follow its constant flow, in order then to sketch it in its ideal outlines, and as a complete whole. If we are successful in expressing, clearly and definitely, the scientific content of this principle and in developing it on all sides with scientific consistency, only then will Goethe's exoteric expositions appear in their true light, because we will see them in their evolution, from a common center. [ 3 ] In this chapter we will concern ourselves with Goethe's epistemology. With respect to the task of this science, a certain confusion has unfortunately arisen since Kant that we must briefly touch upon before proceeding to Goethe's relationship to this science. [ 4 ] Kant believed that philosophy before him had taken wrong paths because it strove for knowledge of the being of things without first asking itself how such a knowledge might be possible. He saw what was fundamentally wrong with all philosophizing before him to lie in the fact that one reflected upon the nature of the object to be known before one had examined the activity of knowing itself, with regard to what it could do. He therefore took this latter examination as his basic philosophical problem and inaugurated thereby a new direction in thought. Since then the philosophy that has based itself on Kant has expended untold scientific force in answering this question; and today more than ever, one is seeking in philosophical circles to come closer to accomplishing this task. But epistemology, which at the present time has become nothing less than the question of the day, is supposedly nothing other than the detailed answer to the question: How is knowledge possible? Applied to Goethe the question would read: How did Goethe conceive of the possibility of knowledge? [ 5 ] Upon closer examination, however, the fact emerges that the answering of this question may absolutely not be placed at the forefront of epistemology. If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be. [ 6 ] The forming of a particular judgment, the establishing of a fact or a series of facts—which according to Kant one could already call knowledge—is not yet by any means knowing in Goethe's sense. Otherwise he would not have said about style that it rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge and through this fact stands in contrast to simple imitation of nature in which the artist turns to the objects of nature, imitates its forms and colours faithfully, diligently, and most exactly, and is conscientious about never distancing himself from nature. This distancing of oneself from the sense world in all its directness is indicative of Goethe's view of real knowing. The directly given is experience. In our knowing, however, we create a picture of the directly given that contains considerably more than what the senses—which are after all the mediators of all experience—can provide. In order to know nature in the Goethean sense, we must not hold onto it in its factuality; rather, nature, in the process of our knowing, must reveal itself as something essentially higher than what it appears to be when it first confronts us. The school of Mill assumes that all we can do with experience is merely bring particular things together into groups that we then hold fast as abstract concepts. This is no true knowing. For, those abstract concepts of Mill have no other task than that of bringing together what is presented to the senses with all the qualities of direct experience. A true knowing must acknowledge that the direct form of the world given to sense perception is not yet its essential one, but rather that this essential form first reveals itself to us in the process of knowing. Knowing must provide us with that which sense experience withholds from us, but which is still real. Mill's knowing is therefore no true knowing, because it is only an elaborated sense experience. He leaves the things in the form our eyes and ears convey them. It is not that we should leave the realm of the experiencable and lose ourselves in a construct of fantasy, as the metaphysicians of earlier and more recent times loved to do, but rather, we should advance from the form of the experiencable as it presents itself to us in what is given to the senses, to a form of it that satisfies our reason. [ 7 ] The question now confronts us: How does what is directly experienced relate to the picture of experience that arises in the process of knowing? We want first to answer this question quite independently and then show that the answer we give follows from the Goethean world view. [ 8 ] At first, the world presents itself to us as a manifoldness in space and time. We perceive particulars separated in space and time: this colour here, that shape there; this tone now, that sound then, etc. Let us first take an example from the inorganic world and separate quite exactly what we perceive with the senses from what the cognitive process provides. We see a stone flying toward a windowpane, breaking through it, and falling to the ground after a certain time. We ask what is given here in direct experience. A series of sequential visual perceptions, originating from the places successively occupied by the stone, a series of sound perceptions as the glass shatters, the pieces of glass flying, etc. Unless someone wishes to deceive himself he must say: Nothing more is given to direct experience than this unrelated aggregate of acts of perception. [ 9 ] One also finds the same strict delimitation of what is directly perceived (sense experience) in Volkelt's excellent book Kant's Epistemology Analysed for its Basic Principles,49 which belongs to the best that modern philosophy has produced. But it is absolutely impossible to see why Volkelt regards the unrelated pictures of perception as mental pictures and thereby at the very start blocks the path to any possible objective knowledge. To regard direct experience from the very start as a complex of mental pictures is, after all, a definite preconception. When I have some object or other before me, I see, with respect to it, form and colour; I perceive a certain degree of hardness, etc. Whether this aggregate of pictures given to my senses is something lying outside myself, or whether it is a mere complex of mental pictures: this I cannot know from the very start. Just as little as I know from the very start—without thinking reflection—that the warmth of a stone is a result of the enwarming rays of the sun, so just as little do I know in what relationship the world given to me stands with respect to my ability to make mental pictures. Volkelt places at the forefront of epistemology the proposition “that we have a manifoldness of mental pictures of such and such kinds.” That we are given a manifoldness is correct; but how do we know that this manifoldness consists of mental pictures? Volkelt, in fact, does something quite inadmissible when first he asserts that we must hold fast to what is given us in direct experience, and then makes the presupposition, which cannot be given to direct experience, that the world of experience is a world of mental pictures. When we make a presupposition like that of Volkelt, then we are forced at once into stating our epistemological question wrongly as described above. If our perceptions are mental pictures, then our whole science is a science of mental pictures and the question arises: How is it possible for our mental picture to coincide with the object of which we make a mental picture? [ 10 ] But where does any real science ever have anything to do with this question? Look at mathematics! It has a figure before it arising from the intersection of three straight lines: a triangle. The three angles a, b, c remain in a fixed relationship; their sum is one straight angle or two right angles (180°). That is a mathematical judgment. The angles a, b, and c are perceived. The cognitive judgment occurs on the basis of thinking reflection. It establishes a relationship between three perceptual pictures. There is no question here of any reflecting upon some object or other standing behind the picture of the triangle. And all the sciences do it this way. They spin threads from picture to picture, create order in what, for direct perception, is a chaos; nowhere, however, does anything else come into consideration besides the given. Truth is not the coinciding of a mental picture with its object, but rather the expression of a relationship between two perceived facts. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] [ 11 ] Let us return to our example of the thrown stone. We connect the sight perceptions that originate from the individual locations in which the stone finds itself. This connection gives us a curved line (the trajectory), and we obtain the laws of trajectory; when furthermore we take into account the material composition of the glass, and then understand the flying stone as cause, the shattering of the glass as effect, and so on, we then have permeated the given with concepts in such a way that it becomes comprehensible to us. This entire operation, which draws together the manifoldness of perception into a conceptual unity, occurs within our consciousness. The ideal interrelationship of the perceptual pictures is not given by the senses, but rather is grasped absolutely on its own by our spirit. For a being endowed only with the ability to perceive with the senses, this whole operation would simply not be there. For such a being the outer world would simply remain that disconnected chaos of perceptions we characterized as what first (directly) confronts us. [ 12 ] So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete. [ 13 ] Everything depends on what one conceives the relationship between idea and sense-perceptible reality to be. By sense-perceptible reality I mean here the totality of perceptions communicated to the human being by the senses. Now the most widely held view is that the concept is a means, belonging solely to human consciousness, by which consciousness takes possession for itself of the data of reality. The essential being of reality, according to this view, lies in the “in-itselfness” of the things themselves, so that, if we were really able to arrive at the primal ground of things, we would still be able to take possession only of our conceptual copy of this primal ground and by no means of the primal ground itself. This view, therefore, assumes the existence of two completely separate worlds. The objective outer world, which bears its essential being, the ground of its existence, within itself, and the subjective-ideal inner world, which is supposedly a conceptual copy of the outer world. The inner world is a matter of no concern to the objective world, is not required by it; the inner world is present only for the knowing human being. To bring about a congruence of these two worlds would be the epistemological ideal of this basic view. I consider the adherents of this view to be not only the natural-scientific direction of our time, but also the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Neo-Kantians, and no less so the last phase of Schelling's philosophy. AII these directions of thought are in agreement about seeking the essence of the world in something transsubjective, and about having to admit, from their standpoint, that the subjective ideal world—which is therefore for them also merely a world of mental pictures—has no significance for reality itself, but purely and simply for human consciousness alone. [ 14 ] I have already indicated that this view leads to the assumption of a perfect congruency between concept (idea) and perception. What is present in the latter would also have to be contained in its conceptual counterpart, only in an ideal form. With respect to content, both worlds would have to match each other completely. The conditions of spatial-temporal reality would have to repeat themselves exactly in the idea; only, instead of perceived extension shape colour, etc., the corresponding mental pictures would have to be present. If I were looking at a triangle, for example, I would have to follow in thought its outline, size, directions of its sides, etc., and then produce a conceptual photograph of it for myself. In the case of a second triangle, I would have to do exactly the same thing, and so on with every object of the external and internal sense world. Thus every single thing is to be found again exactly, with respect to its location and characteristics, within my ideal world picture. [ 15 ] We must now ask ourselves: Does the above assumption correspond to the facts? Not in the least. My concept of the triangle is a single one, comprising every single perceived triangle; and no matter how often I picture it, this concept always remains the same. My various pictures of the triangle are all identical to one another. I have absolutely only one concept of the triangle. [ 16 ] Within reality, every single thing presents itself as a particular, quite definite “this,” surrounded by equally definite, actual, and reality-imbued “those.” The concept, as a strict unity, confronts this manifoldness. In the concept there is no separation, no parts; it does not multiply itself; it is, no matter how often it is pictured, always the same. [ 17 ] The question now arises: What is then actually the bearer of this identity that the concept has? Its form of manifestation as a picture cannot in fact be this bearer, for Berkeley was completely right in maintaining that my present picture of a tree has absolutely nothing to do with my picture of the same tree a minute later, if I closed my eyes in between; and the various pictures that several people have of one object have just as little to do with each other. The identity can therefore lie only within the content of the picture, within its what. The significance, the content, must insure the identity for me. [ 18 ] But since this is so, that view collapses that denies to the concept or idea any independent content. This view believes, namely, that the conceptual unity as such is altogether without any content; that this unity arises solely through the fact that certain characteristics of the objects of experience are left aside and that what they have in common, on the other hand, is lifted out and incorporated into our intellect so that we may comfortably bring together the manifoldness of objective reality according to the principle of grasping all of experience with the mind in the fewest possible general unities—i.e., according to the principle of the smallest measure of force (Kraftmasses). Along with modern natural philosophy Schopenhauer takes this standpoint. But this standpoint is presented with the harshest, and therefore most one-sided consistency in the little book of Richard Avenarius, Philosophy as Thinking about the World According to the Principle of the Smallest Measure of Force. Prolegomena of a Critique of Pure Experience.50 [ 19 ] But this view rests solely upon a total misconstruing not only of the content of the concept but also of the perception. [ 20 ] In order to gain some clarity here, one must go back to the reason for contrasting the perception, as something particular, with the concept, as something general. [ 21 ] One must ask oneself the question: Wherein do the characteristic features of the particular actually lie? Can these be determined conceptually? Can we say: This conceptual unity must break up into this or that particular, visible manifoldness? “No,” is the very definite answer. The concept itself does not know particularity at all. The latter must therefore lie in elements that are altogether inaccessible to the concept as such. But since we do not know any in-between entity between the perception and the concept—unless one wishes to introduce something like Kant's fantastic-mystical schemata, which today, however, cannot be taken seriously after all—these elements must belong to the perception itself. The basis for particularization cannot be derived from the concept, but rather must be sought within the perception itself. What constitutes the particularity of an object cannot be grasped conceptually, but only perceived. Therein lies the reason why every philosophy must founder that wants to derive (deduce) from the concept itself the entire visible reality in all its particularization. Therein lies also the classic error of Fichte, who wanted to derive the whole world from consciousness. [ 22 ] But someone who wants to reproach and dismiss idealistic philosophy because he sees this impossibility of deriving the world from the concept as a defect in it—such a person is acting no more intelligently than the philosopher Krug, a follower of Kant, who demanded of the philosophy of identity that it deduce for him a pen with which to write. [ 23 ] What really distinguishes the perception essentially from the idea is, in fact, just this element that cannot be brought into the concept and that must, in fact, be experienced. Through this, concept and perception confront each other, to be sure, as kindred yet different sides of the world. And since the perception requires the concept, as we have shown, the perception proves that it does not have its essence in its particularity but rather in its conceptual generality. But this generality, in its manifestation, can first be found only within the subject; for, this generality can indeed be gained in connection with the object, but not out of the object. [ 24 ] The concept cannot derive its content from experience, for it does not take up into itself precisely that which is characteristic of experience: its particularity. Everything that constitutes this particularity is foreign to the concept. The concept must therefore give itself its own content. [ 25 ] It is usually said that an object of experience is individual, is a lively perception, and that the concept, on the other hand, is abstract, is poor, sorry, and empty when compared to the perception with its rich content. But wherein is the wealth of differentiations sought? In their number, which because of the infinitude of space can be infinitely great. For all this, however, the concept is no less richly defined. The number there is replaced by qualities here. But just as in the concept the numbers are not to be found, so in the perception the dynamic-qualitative character is lacking. The concept is just as individual, just as rich in content, as the perception. The difference is only that for grasping the content of perception nothing is necessary except open senses and a purely passive attitude toward the outer world, whereas the ideal core of the world must arise in man's spirit through his own spontaneous activity, if this core is to come into view at all. It is an entirely inconsequential and useless kind of talk to say that the concept is the enemy of living perception. The concept is the essential being of the perception, the actual driving and active principle in it; the concept adds its content to that of the perception, without eliminating the latter—for, the content of perception as such does not concern the concept at all—and the concept is supposed to be the enemy of perception! It is an enemy of perception only when a philosophy that does not understand itself wants to spin the whole rich content of the sense world out of the idea. For then philosophy conveys a system of empty phrases instead of living nature. [ 26 ] Only in the way we have indicated can a person arrive at a satisfactory explanation of what knowledge of experience actually is. The necessity of advancing to conceptual knowledge would be totally incomprehensible if the concept brought nothing new to sense perception. A knowledge purely of experience must not take one step beyond the millions of particulars that lie before us as perceptions. The science of pure experience, in order to be consistent, must negate its own content. For why create once more in concept form what is already there without it as perception? A consistent positivism, in the light of these reflections, would simply have to cease all scientific work and rely merely upon whatever happens to occur. If it does not do this, then it carries out in practice what it rejects in theory. It is altogether the case that materialism, as well as realism, implicitly admits what we are maintaining. The way they proceed is only justified from our standpoint and is in the most glaring contradiction to their own basic theoretical views. [ 27 ] From our standpoint, the necessity for scientific knowledge and the transcending of sense experience can be explained without any contradictions. The sense world confronts us as that which is first and directly given; it faces us like an immense riddle, because we can never find in the sense world itself what is driving and working in it. Reason enters then and, with the ideal world that it presents, holds out to the sense world the principle being that constitutes the solution to the riddle. These principles are just as objective as the sense world is. The fact that they do not come into appearance to the senses but only to reason does not affect their content. If there were no thinking beings, these principles would, indeed, never come into appearance; but they would not therefore be any less the essence of the phenomenal world. [ 28 ] With this we have set up a truly immanent world view in contrast to the transcendental one of Locke, Kant, the later Schelling, Schopenhauer, Volkelt, the Neo-Kantians, and modern natural scientists. [ 29 ] They seek the ground of the world in something foreign to consciousness, in the beyond; immanent philosophy seeks it in what comes into appearance for reason. The transcendental world view regards conceptual knowledge as a picture of the world; the immanent world view regards it as the world's highest form of manifestation. The first view can therefore provide only a formal epistemology that bases itself upon the question: What is the relationship between thinking and real being? The second view places at the forefront of its epistemology the question: What is knowing? The first takes its start from the preconception that there is an essential difference between thinking and real being; the second begins, without preconceptions, with what alone is certain—thinking—and knows that, other than thinking, it can find no real being. [ 30 ] If we now summarize the results we have achieved from these epistemological reflections, we arrive at the following: We have to take our start from the completely indeterminate direct form of reality, from what is given to the senses before we bring our thinking into movement, from what is only seen, only heard, etc. The point is that we be aware what the senses convey to us and what thinking conveys. The senses do not tell us that things stand in any particular relationship to each other, such as for example that this is the cause and that is the effect. For the senses, all things are equally essential for the structure of the world. Unthinking observation does not know that a seed stands at a higher level of development than a grain of sand on the road. For the senses they are both of equal significance if they look the same outwardly. At this level of observation, Napoleon is no more important in world history than Jones or Smith in some remote mountain village. This is as far as present-day epistemology has advanced. That it has by no means thought these truths through exhaustively, however, is shown by the fact that almost all epistemologists make the mistake—with respect to this for the moment undefined and indeterminate configuration that we confront in the first stage of our perception—of immediately designating it as “mental picture.”51 This means, in fact, a violating, in the crudest way, of its own insight which it had just achieved. If we remain at the stage of direct sense perception, we know just as little that a falling stone is a mental picture as we know that it is the cause of the depression in the ground where it hit. Just as we can arrive at the concept “cause” only by manifold reflection, so also we could arrive at the knowledge that the world given us is merely mental picture—even if this were correct—only by thinking about it. My senses reveal nothing to me as to whether what they are communicating to me is real being or whether it is merely mental picture. The sense world confronts us as though fired from a pistol. If we want to have it in its purity, we must refrain from attaching any predicate to it that would characterize it. We can say only one thing: It confronts us; it is given us. With this, however, absolutely nothing at all is determined about it itself. Only when we proceed in this way do we not block the way for ourselves to an unbiased judgment about this given. If from the very start we attach a particular characterization to the given, then this freedom from bias ceases. If we say, for example, that the given is mental picture, then the whole investigation which follows can only be conducted under this presupposition. We would not be able in this way to provide an epistemology free of presuppositions, but rather would be answering the question “What is knowing?” under the presupposition that what is given to the senses is mental picture. That is the basic mistake in Volkelt's epistemology. At the beginning of it, he sets up the very strict requirement that epistemology must be free of any presuppositions. But he then places in the forefront the statement that what we have is a manifoldness of mental pictures. Thus his epistemology consists only in answering the question: How is knowing possible, under the presupposition that the given is a manifoldness of mental pictures? For us the matter appears quite different. We take the given as it is: as a manifoldness of—something or other that will reveal itself to us if we allow ourselves to be taken along by it. Thus we have the prospect of arriving at an objective knowledge, because we are allowing the object itself to speak. We can hope that this configuration we confront will reveal everything to us we need, if we do not make it impossible, through some hindering preconception, for it freely to approach our power of judgment with its communications. For even if reality should forever remain a riddle to us, a truth like this would be of value only if it had been attained in connection with the things of the world. It would be totally meaningless, however, to assert that our consciousness is constituted in such and such a way and that therefore we cannot gain any clarity about the things of this world. Whether our spiritual powers are adequate for grasping the essential being of things must be tested by us in connection with these things themselves. I might have the most highly developed spiritual powers; but if things reveal nothing about themselves, my gifts are of no avail. And conversely: I might know that my powers are slight; whether, in spite of this, they still might not suffice for me to know the things, this I still do not know. [ 31 ] What we have recognized in addition is that the directly given, in the first form of it which we have described, leaves us unsatisfied. It confronts us like a challenge, like a riddle to be solved. It says to us: I am there; but in the form in which I confront you there, I am not in my true form. As we hear this voice from outside, as we become aware that we are confronting a half of something, are confronting an entity that conceals its better side from us, then there announces itself within us the activity of that organ through which we can gain enlightenment about that other side of reality, and through which we are able to supplement that half of something and render it whole. We become aware that we must make up through thinking for what we do not see, hear, etc. Thinking is called upon to solve the riddle with which perception presents us. [ 32 ] We will first become clear about this relationship when we investigate why we are unsatisfied by perceptible reality, but are satisfied, on the other hand, by a thought-through reality. Perceptible reality confronts us as something finished. It is just there; we have contributed nothing to its being there in the way it is. We feel ourselves confronted, therefore, by a foreign entity that we have not produced, at whose production we were not even, in fact, present. We stand before something that has already come about. But we are able to grasp only something about which we know how it has become what it is, how it has come about; when we know where the strings are that support what appears before us. With our thinking, this is different. A thought-configuration does not come before me unless I myself participate in its coming about; it comes into the field of my perception only through the fact that I myself lift it up out of the dark abyss of imperceptibility. The thought does not arise in me as a finished entity the way a sense perception does, but rather I am conscious of the fact that, when I do hold fast to a concept in its complete form, I myself have brought it into this form. What then lies before me appears to me not as something first, but rather as something last, as the completion of a process that is so integrally merged with me that I have always stood within it. But this is what I must demand of a thing that enters the horizon of my perception, in order to understand it. Nothing may remain obscure to me; nothing may appear closed off; I myself must follow it to that stage at which it has become something finished. This is why the direct form of reality, which we usually call experience, moves us to work it through in knowledge. When we bring our thinking into movement, we then go back to the determining factors of the given that at first remained hidden to us; we work our way up from the product to the production; we arrive at the stage where sense perception becomes transparent to us in the same way the thought is. Our need for knowledge is thus satisfied. We can therefore come to terms with a thing in knowledge only when we have completely (thoroughly) penetrated with thinking what is directly perceived. A process of the world appears completely penetrated by us only when the process is our own activity. A thought appears as the completion of a process within which we stand. Thinking, however, is the only process into which we can completely place ourselves, into which we can merge. Therefore, to our knowing contemplation, the reality we experience must appear to emerge as though out of a thought-process, in the same way as pure thought does. To investigate the essential being of a thing means to begin at the center of the thought-world and to work from there until a thought-configuration appears before our soul that seems to us to be identical to the thing we are experiencing. When we speak of the essential being of a thing or of the world altogether, we cannot therefore mean anything else at all than the grasping of reality as thought, as idea. In the idea we recognize that from which we must derive everything else: the principle of things. What philosophers call the absolute, the eternal being, the ground of the world, what the religions call God, this we call, on the basis of our epistemological studies: the idea. Everything in the world that does not appear directly as idea will still ultimately be recognized as going forth from the idea. What seems, on superficial examination, to have no part at all in the idea is found by a deeper thinking to stem from it. No other form of existence can satisfy us except one stemming from the idea. Nothing may remain away from it; everything must become a part of the great whole that the idea encompasses. The idea, however, requires no going out beyond itself. It is self-sustained being, well founded in itself. This does not lie at all in the fact that we have the idea directly present in our consciousness. This lies in the nature of the idea itself. If the idea did not itself express its own being, then it would in fact also appear to us in the same way the rest of reality does: needing explanation. But this then seems to contradict what we said earlier, that the idea appears in a form satisfying to us because we participate actively in its coming about. But this is not due to the organization of our consciousness. If the idea were not a being founded upon itself, then we could not have any such consciousness at all. If something does not have within itself the center from which it springs, but rather has it outside itself, then, when it confronts me, I cannot declare myself satisfied with it; I must go out beyond it, to that center, in fact. Only when I meet something that does not point out beyond itself, do I then achieve the consciousness: now you are standing within the center; here you can remain. My consciousness that I am standing within a thing is only the result of the objective nature of this thing, which is that it brings its principle along with it. By taking possession of the idea, we arrive at the core of the world. What we grasp there is that from which everything goes forth. We become united with this principle; therefore the idea, which is most objective, appears to us at the same time as most subjective. [ 33 ] Sense-perceptible reality is such a riddle to us precisely because we do not find its center within itself. It ceases to be a riddle to us when we recognize that sense-perceptible reality has the same center as the thought-world that comes to manifestation within us. [ 34 ] This centre can only be a unified one. It must in fact be of such a kind that everything else points to it as that which explains it. If there were several centers to the world—several principles by which the world were to be known—and if one region of reality pointed to this world principle and another one to that world principle, then, as soon as we found ourselves in one region of reality, we would be directed only toward the one center. It would not occur to us at all to ask about still other centers. One region would know nothing about the other. They would simply not be there for each other. It therefore makes no sense at all to speak of more than one world. The idea, therefore, in all the places of the world, in all consciousnesses, is one and the same. The fact that there are different consciousnesses and that each of them presents the idea to itself does not change the situation at all. The ideal content of the world is founded upon itself, is complete within itself. We do not create it, we only seek to grasp it. Thinking does not create it but rather perceives it only. Thinking is not a producer, but rather an organ of apprehension. Just as different eyes see one and the same object, so different consciousnesses think one and the same thought-content. Manifold consciousnesses think one and the same thing; only, they approach this one thing from different sides. It therefore appears to them as modified in manifold ways. This modification is not a differentness of objects, however, but rather an apprehending from different angles of vision. The differences in people's views are just as explainable as the differences that a landscape presents to two observers standing in different places. If one is capable at all of pressing forward to the world of ideas, then one can be certain that one ultimately has a world of ideas that is common to all human beings. Then at most it can still be a question of our grasping this world in a quite one-sided way, of our taking a standpoint from which this world of ideas does not appear to us in the most suitable light, and so on. [ 35 ] We never do confront a sense world completely devoid of all thought-content. At most, in early childhood where there is as yet no trace of thinking, do we come close to pure sense perception. In ordinary life we have to do with an experience that is half-permeated by thinking, that already appears more or less lifted out of the darkness of perception into the bright clarity of spiritual comprehension. The sciences work toward the goal of fully overcoming this darkness and of leaving nothing in experience that has not been permeated with thought. Now what task has epistemology fulfilled with respect to the other sciences? It has made clear to us what the purpose and task of any science is. It has shown us what the significance is of the content of the individual sciences. Our epistemology is the science that characterizes all the other sciences. It has made clear to us that what is gained by the individual sciences is the objective ground of world existence. The sciences arrive at a series of concepts; epistemology teaches us about the actual task of these concepts. By arriving at this distinctive conclusion, our epistemology, which is in keeping with the sense of Goethe's way of thinking, diverges from all other epistemologies of the present day. Our epistemology does not merely want to establish a formal connection between thinking and real being; it does not want to solve the epistemological problem in a merely logical way; it wants to arrive at a positive result. It shows what the content of our thinking is; and it finds that this what is at the same time the objective content of the world. Thus epistemology becomes for us the most significant of the sciences for the human being. It gives man clarity about himself; it shows him his place in the world; it is thereby a source of satisfaction for him. It first tells him what he is called to be and to do. The human being feels himself uplifted in his possession of its truths; his scientific investigation gains a new illumination. Now he knows for the first time that he is most directly connected with the core of world existence, that he uncovers this core which remains hidden to all other beings, that in him the world spirit comes to manifestation, that the world spirit dwells within him. He sees himself as the one who completes the world process; he sees that he is called to accomplish what the other powers of the world are not able to do, that he has to set the crown upon creation. If religion teaches that God created man in His own image, then our epistemology teaches us that God has led His creation only to a certain point. There He let the human being arise, and the human being, by knowing himself and looking about him, sets himself the task of working on, of completing what the primal power began. The human being immerses himself ; in the world and recognizes how he can build further on the ground that has been laid; he grasps the indication that the primal spirit has made and carries out this indication. [ 36 ] Thus epistemology is the teaching both of the significance and of the vocation (Bestimmung) of man; and it solves this task (of the “vocation of man”) in a far more definite way than Fichte did at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. One does not by any means achieve, through the thought-configurations of this powerful spirit, the same full satisfaction that must come to us from a genuine epistemology. [ 37 ] We have the task, with regard to every single entity, of working upon it in such a way that it appears as flowing from the idea, that it completely dissolves as a single thing and merges with the idea, into whose element we feel ourselves transferred. Our spirit has the task of developing itself in such a way that it is capable of seeing into all the reality given it, of seeing it in the way it appears as going forth from the idea. We must show ourselves to be continuous workers in the sense that we transform every object of experience so that it appears as part of our ideal world picture. With this we have arrived at where the Goethean way of looking at the world takes its start. We must apply what we have said in such a way that we picture to ourselves that the relationship between idea and reality that we have just presented is what Goethe actually does in his investigations; Goethe grapples with things in just the way we have shown to be the valid one. He himself sees his inner working, in fact, as a living helper in learning (Heuristik), a helper that recognizes an unknown, dimly-sensed rule (the idea) and resolves to find it in the outer world and to introduce it into the outer world (Aphorisms in Prose). When Goethe demands that the human being should instruct his organs (Aphorisms in Prose), that also means only that the human being does not simply give himself over to what his senses convey to him, but rather directs his senses in such a way that they show him things in the right light.
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| 1. Goethean Science: Knowing and Human Action in the Light of the Goethean Way of Thinking Methodology
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| This self-shaping principle, which in this realm underlies every phenomenon, which I must seek in every one, is the typus. We are in the realm of organic nature. |
| The human being, insofar as he is a being of nature, is also to be understood according to the laws that apply to nature's working. But neither as a knowing nor as a truly ethical being can he, in his behavior, be understood according to merely natural laws. |
| In order for him to do so it is necessary above all that he understand his time. Then, in inner freedom, he will fulfill its tasks; then he will set to at the right place with his own work. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Knowing and Human Action in the Light of the Goethean Way of Thinking Methodology
Translated by William Lindemann |
|---|
1. Methodology[ 1 ] We have established what the relationship is between the world of ideas—attained by scientific thinking—and directly given experience. We have learned to know the beginning and end of a process: experience devoid of ideas and idea filled apprehension of reality. Between the two, however, there lies human activity. The human being must actively allow the end to go forth from the beginning. The way in which he does this is the method. It is of course the case, now, that our apprehension of that relationship between the beginning and end of knowledge will also require its own characteristic method. Where must we begin in developing this method? Scientific thinking must prove itself, step by step, to represent an overcoming of that dark form of reality which we have designated as the directly given, and to represent a lifting up of the directly given into the bright clarity of the idea. The method must therefore consist in our answering the question, with respect to each thing: What part does it have in the unified world of ideas; what place does it occupy in the ideal picture that I make for myself of the world? When I have understood this, when I have recognized how a thing connects itself with my ideas, then my need for knowledge is satisfied. There is only one thing that is not satisfying to my need for knowledge: when a thing confronts me that does not want to connect anywhere with the view I hold of things. The ideal discomfort must be overcome that stems from the fact that there is something or other of which I must say to myself: I see that it is there; when I approach it, it faces me like a question mark; but I find nowhere, within the harmony of my thoughts, the point at that I can incorporate it; the questions I must ask upon seeing it remain unanswered, no matter how I twist and turn my system of thoughts. From this we can see what we need when we look at anything. When I approach it, it faces me as a single thing. Within me the thought-world presses toward that spot where the concept of the thing lies. I do not rest until that which confronted me at first as an individual thing appears as a part of my thought-world. Thus the individual thing as such dissolves and appears in a larger context. Now it is illuminated by the other thought-masses; now it is a serving member; and it is completely clear to me what it signifies within the greater harmony. This is what takes place in us when we approach an object of experience and contemplate it. All progress in science depends upon our becoming aware of the point at which some phenomenon or other can be incorporated into the harmony of the thought-world. Do not misunderstand me. This does not mean that every phenomenon must be explainable by concepts we already have, that our world of ideas is closed, nor that every new experience must coincide with some concept or other that we already possess. That pressing of the thought-world within us toward a concept can also go to a spot that has not yet been thought by anyone at all. And the ideal progress of the history of science rests precisely on the fact that thinking drives new configurations of ideas to the surface. Every such thought-configuration is connected by a thousand threads with all other possible thoughts—with this concept in this way, and with another in that. And the scientific method consists in the fact that we show the concept of a certain phenomenon in its relationship with the rest of the world of ideas. We call this process the deriving (demonstrating) of the concept. All scientific thinking, however, consists only in our finding the existing transitions from concept to concept, consists in our letting one concept go forth from another. The movement of our thinking back and forth from concept to concept: this is scientific method. One will say that this is the old story of the correspondence between the conceptual world and the world of experience. If we are to believe that the going back and forth from concept to concept leads to a picture of reality, then we would have to presuppose that the world outside ourselves (the transsubjective) would correspond to our conceptual world. But that is only a mistaken apprehension of the relationship between individual entity and concept. When I confront an entity from the world of experience, I absolutely do not know at all what it is. Only when I have overcome it, when its concept has lighted up for me, do I then know what I have before me. But this does not mean to say that this individual entity and the concept are two different things. No, they are the same; and what confronts me in this particular entity is nothing other than the concept. The reason I see that entity as a separate piece detached from the rest of reality is, in fact, that I do not yet know it in its true nature, that it does not yet confront me as what it is. This gives us the means of further characterizing our scientific method. Every individual entity of reality represents a definite content within our thought-system. Every such entity is founded in the wholeness of the world of ideas and can be comprehended only in connection with it. Thus each thing must necessarily call upon a twofold thought activity. First the thought corresponding to the thing has to be determined in clear contours, and after this all the threads must be determined that lead from this thought to the whole thought-world. Clarity in the details and depth in the whole are the two most significant demands of reality. The former is the intellect's concern, the latter is reason's. The intellect (Verstand) creates thought-configurations for the individual things of reality. It fulfills its task best the more exactly it delimits these configurations, the sharper the contours are that it draws. Reason (Vernunft) then has to incorporate these configurations into the harmony of the whole world of ideas. This of course presupposes the following: Within the content of the thought-configurations that the intellect creates, that unity already exists, living one and the same life; only, the intellect keeps everything artificially separated. Reason then, without blurring the clarity, merely eliminates the separation again. The intellect distances us from reality; reason brings us back to it again. Graphically this can be represented in the following way: [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] [ 2 ] In this diagram everything is connected; the same principle lives in all the parts. The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations—because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements52—and reason recognizes the unity.53 [ 3 ] If we have the following two perceptions: 1. the sun shining down and 2. a warm stone, the intellect keeps both things apart, because they confront us as two; it holds onto one as the cause and onto the other as the effect; then reason supervenes, tears down the wall between them, and recognizes the unity in the duality. All the concepts that the intellect creates—cause and effect, substance and attribute, body and soul, idea and reality, God and world, etc.—are there only in order to keep unified reality separated artificially into parts; and reason, without blurring the content thus created, without mystically obscuring the clarity of the intellect, has then to seek out the inner unity in the multiplicity. Reason thereby comes back to that from which the intellect had distanced itself: to the unified reality. If one wants an exact nomenclature, one can call the formations of the intellect “concepts” and the creations of reason “ideas.” And one sees that the path of science is to lift oneself through the concept to the idea. And here is the place where the subjective and the objective element of our knowing differentiates itself for us in the clearest way. It is plain to see that the separation has only a subjective existence, that it is only created by our intellect. It cannot hinder me from dividing one and the same objective unity into thought-configurations that are different from those of a fellow human being; this does not hinder my reason, in its connecting activity, from attaining the same objective unity again from which we both, in fact, have taken our start. Let us represent symbolically a unified configuration of reality (figure 1). I divide it intellectually thus (figure 2); another person divides it differently (figure 3). We bring it together in accordance with reason and obtain the same configuration. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] [ 4 ] This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea. And all human beings must ultimately meet each other in this channel if energetic thinking leads them out of and beyond their own particular standpoints. It can indeed be possible that a limited experience or an unproductive spirit leads us to a one-sided, incomplete view; but even the smallest amount of what we experience must ultimately lead us to the idea; for we do not lift ourselves to the idea through a lesser or greater experience, but rather through our abilities as a human personality alone. A limited experience can only result in the fact that we express the idea in a one-sided way, that we have limited means at our command for bringing to expression the light that shines in us; a limited experience, however, cannot hinder us altogether from allowing that light to shine within us. Whether our scientific or even our general world view is also complete or not is an altogether different question; as is that about the spiritual depth of our views. If one now returns to Goethe, one will recognize that many of his statements, when compared with what we have presented in this chapter, simply follow from it. We consider this to be the only correct relationship between an author and his interpreter. When Goethe says: “If I know my relationship to myself and to the outer world, then I call it truth. And in this way each person can have his own truth, and it is after all always the same one” (Aphorisms in Prose), this can be understood only if we take into account what we have developed here. 2. Dogmatic and Immanent Methods[ 5 ] A scientific judgment comes about through the fact that we either join two concepts together or join a perception to a concept. The judgment that there is no effect without a cause belongs to the first kind; the judgment that a tulip is a plant belongs to the second kind. Daily life also recognizes judgments where one perception is joined to another, for example when we say that a rose is red. When we make a judgment, we do so for one reason or another. Now, there can be two different views about this reason. One view assumes that the factual (objective) reasons for our judgment being true lie beyond what is given us in the concepts or perceptions that enter into the judgment. According to this view, the reason a judgment is true does not coincide with the subjective reasons out of which we make this judgment. Our logical reasons, according to this view, have nothing to do with the objective reasons. It may be that this view proposes some way or other of arriving at the objective reasons for our insight; the means that our knowing thinking has are not adequate for this. For my knowing, the objective entity that determines my conclusion lies in a world unknown to me: my conclusion. along with its formal reasons (freedom from contradictions, being supported by various axioms, etc.), lies only within my world. A science based on this view is a dogmatic one. Both the theologizing philosophy that bases itself on a belief in revelation, and the modern science of experience are dogmatic sciences of this kind; for there is not only a dogma of revelation; there is also a dogma of experience. The dogma of revelation conveys truths to man about things that are totally removed from his field of vision. He does not know the world concerning which the ready-made assertions are prescribed for his belief. He cannot get at the grounds for these assertions. He can therefore never gain any insight as to why they are true. He can gain no knowledge, only faith. On the other hand, however, the assertions of the science of experience are also merely dogmas; it believes that one should stick merely to pure experience and only observe, describe, and systematically order its transformations, without lifting oneself to the determining factors that are not yet given within mere direct experience. In this case also we do not in fact gain the truth through insight into the matter, but rather it is forced upon us from outside. I see what is happening and what is there; and register it; why it is this way lies in the object. I see only the results, not the reason. The dogma of revelation once ruled science; today it is the dogma of experience that does so. It was once considered presumptuous to reflect upon the preconditions of revealed truths; today it is considered impossible to know anything other than what the facts express. As to why they are as they are and not something different, this is considered to be unexperiencable and therefore inaccessible. [ 6 ] Our considerations have shown that it is nonsensical to assume any reason for a judgment being true other than our reason for recognizing it as true. When we have pressed forward to the point where the being of something occurs to us as idea, we then behold in the idea something totally complete in itself, something self-supported and self-sustaining; it demands no further explanation from outside at all, so we can stop there. We see in the idea—if only we have the capacity for this—that it has everything which constitutes it within itself, that with it we have everything we could ask. The entire ground of existence has merged with the idea, has poured itself into it, unreservedly, in such a way that we have nowhere else to seek it except in the idea. In the idea we do not have a picture of what we are seeking in addition to the things; we have what we are seeking itself. When the parts of our world of ideas flow together in our judgments then it is the content of these parts itself that brings this about, not reasons lying outside them. The substantial and not merely the formal reasons for our conclusions are directly present within our thinking. [ 7 ] That view is thereby rejected which assumes an absolute reality—outside the ideal realm—by which all things, including thinking, are carried. For that world view, the foundation for what exists cannot be found at all within what is accessible to us. This foundation is not innate (eingeboren) to the world lying before us; it is present outside this world, an entity unto itself, existing alongside this world. One can call that view realism. It appears in two forms. It either assumes a multiplicity of real beings underlying the world (Leibniz, Herbart), or a uniform real (Schopenhauer). Such an existent real can never be recognized as identical with the idea; it is already presupposed to be essentially different from the idea. Someone who becomes aware of the clear sense of the question as to the essential being of phenomena cannot be an adherent of this realism. What does it mean then to ask about the essential being of the world? It means nothing more than that, when I approach a thing, a voice makes itself heard in me that tells me that the thing is ultimately something quite else in addition to what I perceive with my senses. What it is in addition is already working in me, presses in me toward manifestation, while I am seeing the thing outside me. Only because the world of ideas working in me presses me to explain, out of it, the world around me, do I demand any such explanation. For a being in whom no ideas are pressing up, the urge is not there to explain the things any further; he is fully satisfied with the sense-perceptible phenomenon. The demand for an explanation of the world stems from the need that thinking has to unite the content accessible to thinking with manifest reality, to permeate everything conceptually, to make what we see, hear, etc., into something that we understand. Whoever takes into consideration the full implications of these statements cannot possibly be an adherent of the realism characterized above. To want to explain the world by something real that is not idea is such a self-contradiction that one absolutely cannot grasp how it could possibly find any adherents at all. To explain what is perceptibly real to us by something or other that does not take part in thinking at all, that, in fact, is supposed to be basically different from any- thing of a thought nature, for this we have neither the need nor any possible starting point. First of all: Where would the need originate to explain the world by something that never intrudes upon us, that conceals itself from us? And let us assume that it did approach us; then the question arises again: In what form and where? It cannot of course be in thinking. And even in outer or inner perception again? What meaning could it have to explain the sense world by a qualitative equivalent? There is only one other possibility: to assume that we had an ability to reach this most real being that lies outside thought in another way than through thinking and perception. Whoever makes this assumption has fallen into mysticism. We do not have to deal with mysticism, however; for we are concerned only with the relationship between thinking and existence, between idea and reality. A mystic must write an epistemology for mysticism. The standpoint of the later Schelling—according to which we develop only the what (das Was) of the world content with the help of our reason, but cannot reach the that (das Dass)54—seems to us to be the greatest nonsense. Because for us the that is the presupposition of the what, and we would not know how we are supposed to arrive at the what of a thing whose that has not already been surely established beforehand. The that, after all, is already inherent in the content of my reason when I grasp its what. This assumption of Schelling—that we can have a positive world content, without any conviction that it exists, and that we must first gain the that through higher experience—seems to us so incomprehensible to any thinking that understands itself, that we must assume that Schelling himself, in his later period, no longer understood the standpoint of his youth, which made such a powerful impression upon Goethe. [ 8 ] It will not do to assume higher forms of existence than those belonging to the world of ideas. Only because the human being is often not able to comprehend that the existence (Sein) of the idea is something far higher and fuller than that of perceptual reality, does he still seek a further reality. He regards ideal existence as something chimerical, as something needing to be imbued with some real element, and is not satisfied with it. He cannot, in fact, grasp the idea in its positive nature; he has it only as something abstract; he has no inkling of its fullness, of its inner perfection and genuineness. But we must demand of our education that it work its way up to that high standpoint where even an existence that cannot be seen with the eyes, nor grasped with the hands, but that must be apprehended by reason, is regarded as real. We have therefore actually founded an idealism that is realism at the same time. Our train of thought is: Thinking presses toward explanation of reality out of the idea. It conceals this urge in the question: What is the real being of reality? Only at the end of a scientific process do we ask about the content of this real being itself; we do not go about it as realism does, which presupposes something real in order then to trace reality back to it. We differ from realism in having full consciousness of the fact that only in the idea do we have a means of explaining the world. Even realism has only this means but does not realize it. It derives the world from ideas, but believes it derives it from some other reality. Leibniz' world of monads is nothing other than a world of ideas; but Leibniz believes that in it he possesses a higher reality than the ideal one. All the realists make the same mistake: they think up beings, without becoming aware that they are not getting outside of the idea. We have rejected this realism, because it deceives itself about the actual ideal nature of its world foundation; but we also have to reject that false idealism which believes that because we do not get outside of the idea, we also do not get outside of our consciousness, and that all the mental pictures given us and the whole world are only subjective illusion, only a dream that our consciousness dreams (Fichte). These idealists also do not comprehend that although we do not get outside of the idea, we do nevertheless have in the idea something objective, something that has its basis in itself and not in the subject. They do not consider the fact that even though we do not get outside of the unity of thinking, we do enter with the thinking of our reason into the midst of full objectivity. The realists do not comprehend that what is objective is idea, and the idealists do not comprehend that the idea is objective. [ 9 ] We still have to occupy ourselves with the empiricists of the sense-perceptible, who regard any explaining of the real by the idea as inadmissible philosophical deduction and who demand that we stick to what is graspable by the senses. Against this standpoint we can only say, simply, that its demand can, after all, only be a methodological one. To say that we should stick to what is given only means, after all, that we should acquire for ourselves what confronts us. This standpoint is the least able to determine anything about the what of the given; for, this what must in fact come, for this standpoint, from the given itself. It is totally incomprehensible to us how, along with the demand for pure experience, someone can demand at the same time that we not go outside the sense world, seeing that in fact the idea can just as well fulfill the demand that it be given. The positivistic principle of experience must leave the question entirely open as to what is given, and unites itself quite well then with the results of idealistic research. But then this demand coincides with ours as well. And we do unite in our view all standpoints, insofar as they are valid ones. Our standpoint is idealism, because it sees in the idea the ground of the world; it is realism because it addresses the idea as the real; and it is positivism or empiricism because it wants to arrive at the content of the idea, not through a priori constructions, but rather as something given. We have an empirical method that penetrates into the real and that is ultimately satisfied by the results of idealistic research. We do not recognize as valid any inferring, from something given and known to us, of an underlying, non-given, determinative element. We reject any inference in which any part of the inference is not given. Inferring is only a going from given elements over to other equally given elements. In an inference we join a to b by means of c; but all these must be given. When Volkelt says that our thinking moves us to presuppose something in addition to the given and to transcend the given, then we say: Within our thinking, something is already moving us that we want to add to the directly given. We must therefore reject all metaphysics. Metaphysics wants, in fact, to explain the given by something non-given, inferred (Wolff, Herbart). We see in inferences only a formal activity that does not lead to anything new, but only brings about transitions between elements actually present. 3. The System of Science[ 10 ] What form does a fully developed science (Wissenschaft) have in the light of the Goethean way of thinking? Above all we must hold fast to the fact that the total content of science is a given one; given partly as the sense world from outside, partly as the world of ideas from within. All our scientific activity will therefore consist in overcoming the form in which this total content of the given confronts us, and in making it over into a form that satisfies us. This is necessary because the inner unity of the given remains hidden in its first form of manifestation, in which only the outer surface appears to us. Now the methodological activity that establishes a relationship between these two forms turns out to vary according to the realm of phenomena with which we are working. The first realm is one in which we have a manifoldness of elements given to sense perception. These interact with each other. This interaction becomes clear to us when we immerse ourselves into the matter through ideas. Then one or another element appears as more or less determined by the others, in one way or another. The existential conditions of one become comprehensible to us through those of the others. We trace one phenomenon back to the others. We trace the phenomenon of a warm stone, as effect, back to the warming rays of the sun, as cause. We have explained what we perceive about one thing, when we trace it back to some other perceptible thing. We see in what way the ideal law arises in this realm. It encompasses the things of the sense world, stands over them. It determines the lawful way of working of one thing by letting it be conditional upon another. Our task here is to bring together the series of phenomena in such a way that one necessarily goes forth out of the others, that they all constitute one whole and are lawful through and through. The realm that is to be explained in this way is inorganic nature. Now the individual phenomena of experience by no means confront us in such a way that what is closest in space and time is also the closest according to its inner nature. We must first pass from what is closest in space and time over into what is conceptually closest. For a certain phenomenon we must seek the phenomena that are directly connected to it in accordance with their nature. Our goal must be to bring together a series of facts that complement each other, that carry and mutually support each other. We achieve thereby a group of sense-perceptible, interacting elements of reality; and the phenomenon that unfolds before us follows directly out of the pertinent factors in a transparent, clear way. Following Goethe's example, we call such a phenomenon an “archetypal phenomenon” (Urphänomen) or a basic fact. This archetypal phenomenon is identical with the objective natural law. The bringing together discussed here can either occur merely in thoughts—as when I think about the three determining factors that come into consideration when a stone is thrown horizontally: 1. the force of the throw, 2. the force of gravity, and 3. the air's resistance and then derive the path of the flying stone from these factors; or, on the other hand, I can actually bring the individual factors together and then await the phenomenon that follows from their interaction. This is what we do in an experiment. Whereas a phenomenon of the outer world is unclear to us because we know only what has been determined (the phenomenon) and not what is determining, the phenomenon that an experiment presents is clear, because we ourselves have brought together the determining factors. This is the path of research of nature: It takes its start from experience, in order to see what is real; advances to observation, in order to see why it is real; and then intensifies into the experiment, in order to see what can be real. [ 11 ] Unfortunately, precisely that essay of Goethe's seems to have been lost that could best have supported these views. It is a continuation of the essay, The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object.55 Starting from the latter, let us try to reconstruct the possible content of the lost essay from the only source available to us, the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. The essay on The Experiment came out of those studies of Goethe that he undertook in order to show the validity of his work in optics. It was then put aside until the poet took up these studies again in 1798 with new energy and, with Schiller, submitted the basic principles of the natural-scientific method to a thorough and scientifically serious investigation. On January 10, 1798 (see Goethe's correspondence with Schiller) he then sent the essay on The Experiment to Schiller for his consideration and on January 13 informed his friend that he wanted, in a new essay, to develop further the views expressed there. And he did undertake this work; on January 17 already he sent a little essay to Schiller that contained a characterization of the methods of natural science. This is not to be found among his works. It would indisputably have been the one to provide the best points of reference for an appreciation of Goethe's basic views on the natural-scientific method. We can, however, know what thoughts were expressed there from Schiller's detailed letter of January 19, 1798; along with this, the fact comes into consideration that we find many confirmations and supplementations to the indications in Schiller's letter in Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose.56 [ 12 ] Goethe distinguishes three methods of natural-scientific research. These rest upon three different conceptions of phenomena. The first method is ordinary empiricism, which does not go beyond the empirical phenomenon, beyond the immediate facts. It remains with individual phenomena. If ordinary empiricism wants to be consistent, it must limit its entire activity to exactly describing in every detail each phenomenon that meets it, i.e., to recording the empirical facts. Science, for it, would merely be the sum total of all these individual descriptions of recorded facts. Compared to ordinary empiricism rationalism then represents the next higher level, it deals with the scientific phenomenon. This view no longer limits itself to the mere describing of phenomena, but rather seeks to explain these by discovering causes, by setting up hypotheses, etc. It is the level at which the intellect infers from the phenomena their causes and inter-relationships. Goethe declares both these methods to be one-sided. Ordinary empiricism is raw non-science, because it never gets beyond the mere grasping of incidentals; rationalism, on the other hand, interprets into the phenomenal world causes and interrelationships that are not in it. The former cannot lift itself out of the abundance of phenomena up to free thinking; the latter loses this abundance as the sure ground under its feet and falls prey to the arbitrariness of imagination and of subjective inspiration. Goethe censures in the sharpest way the passion people have for immediately attaching to the phenomena deductions arrived at subjectively, as, for example, in Aphorisms in Prose: “It is bad business—but one that happens to many an observer—where a person immediately connects a deduction to a perception and considers them both as equally valid,” and: “Theories are usually the overly hasty conclusions of an impatient intellect that would like to be rid of the phenomenon and therefore sets in its place pictures, concepts, indeed often only words. One senses, one even sees, in fact, that it is only an expedient; but have not passion and a partisan spirit always loved expedients? And rightly so, since they need them so much.” Goethe particularly criticizes the misuse to which the concept of causality has given rise. Rationalism, in its unbridled fantasy, seeks causality where, if you are looking for facts, it is not to be found. In Aphorisms in Prose he says: “The most innate, most necessary concept, that of cause and effect, when applied, gives rise to innumerable and ever-recurring errors.” Rationalism is particularly led by its passion for simple relationships to think of phenomena as parts of a chain attached to one another by cause and effect and stretching out merely lengthwise; whereas the truth is, in fact, that one or another phenomenon that, in time, is causally determined by an earlier one, still depends also upon many other effects at the same time. In this case only the length and not the breadth of nature is taken into account. Both paths, ordinary empiricism and rationalism, are for Goethe certainly transitional stages to the highest scientific method, but, in fact, only transitional stages that must be surmounted. And this occurs with rational empiricism, which concerns itself with the pure phenomenon that is identical to the objective natural laws. The ordinary empirical element—direct experience—offers us only individual things, something incoherent, an aggregate of phenomena. That means it offers us all this not as the final conclusion of scientific consideration, but rather, in fact, as a first experience. Our scientific needs, however, seek only what is interrelated, comprehend the individual thing only as a part in a relationship. Thus, seemingly, our need to comprehend and the facts of nature diverge from each other. In our spirit there is only relatedness, in nature only separateness; our spirit strives for the species, nature creates only individuals. The solution to this contradiction is provided by the reflection that the connecting power of the human spirit, on the one hand, is without content, and therefore, by and through itself alone, cannot know anything positive; on the other hand, the separateness of the objects of nature does not lie in their essential being itself, but rather in their spatial manifestation; in fact, when we penetrate into the essential being of the individual, of the particular, this being itself directs us to the species. Because the objects of nature are separated in their outer manifestation, our spirit's power to draw together is needed in order to show their inner unity. Because the unity of the intellect by itself is empty, the intellect must fill this unity with the objects of nature. Thus at this third level phenomenon and spiritual power come to meet each other and merge into one, and only then can the human spirit be fully satisfied. [ 13 ] A further realm of investigation is that in which the individual thing, in its form of existence, does not appear as the result of something else existing beside it; we therefore also do not comprehend it by seeking help from something else of the same kind. Here, a series of sense-perceptible phenomenological elements appears to us as the direct formation of a unified principle, and we must press forward to this principle if we want to comprehend the individual phenomenon. In this realm, we cannot explain the phenomenon by anything working in from outside; we must derive it from within outward. What earlier was a determining factor is now merely an inducing factor. In the first realm I have comprehended everything when I have succeeded in regarding it as the result of something else, in tracing it back to an outer determining factor; here I am compelled to ask the question differently. When I know the outer influence, I still have not gained any information as to whether the phenomenon then occurs in this, and only in this, way. I must derive this from the central principle of that thing upon which the outer influence took place. I cannot say that this outer influence has this effect; but only that, to this particular outer influence, the inner working principle responds in this particular way. What occurs is the result of an inner lawfulness. I must therefore know this inner lawfulness. I must investigate what it is that is taking shape from within outward. This self-shaping principle, which in this realm underlies every phenomenon, which I must seek in every one, is the typus. We are in the realm of organic nature. What the archetypal phenomenon is in inorganic nature, the typus is in organic nature. The typus is a general picture of the organism: the idea of the organism; the animalness in the animal. We had to bring the main points here again of what we already stated about the typus in an earlier chapter, because of the context. In the ethical and historical sciences we then have to do with the idea in a narrower sense. Ethics and history are sciences of ideas. Their reality is ideas. It is the task of each science to work on the given until it brings the given to the archetypal phenomenon, to the typus, and to the leading ideas in history. “If ... the physicist can arrive at knowledge of what we have called an archetypal phenomenon, then he is secure and the philosopher along with him; he is so because he has convinced himself that he has arrived at the limits of his science, that he finds himself upon the empirical heights, from which he can look back upon experience in all its levels, and can at least look forward into the realm of theory if not enter it. The philosopher is secure, for he receives from the physicist's hand something final that becomes for him now something from which to start” (Sketch of a colour Theory).57—This is in fact where the philosopher enters and begins his work. He grasps the archetypal phenomena and brings them into a satisfying ideal relationship. We see what it is, in the sense of the Goethean world view, that is to take the place of metaphysics: the observing (in accordance with ideas), ordering, and deriving of archetypal phenomena. Goethe speaks repeatedly in this sense about the relationship between empirical science and philosophy—with special clarity in his letters to Hegel. In his Annals he speaks repeatedly about a schema of science. If this were to be found, we would see from it how he himself conceived the interrelationships of the individual archetypal phenomena to be, how he put them together into a necessary chain. We can also gain a picture of it when we consider the table of all possible kinds of workings that he gives in the fourth section of the first volume of On Natural Science.58
[ 14 ] It is according to this ascending sequence that one would have to guide oneself in ordering the archetypal phenomena. 4. Limits to Knowledge and the Forming of Hypotheses[ 15 ] One speaks a great deal today about limits to our knowing. Man's ability to explain what exists, it is said, reaches only to a certain point, and there he must stop. We believe we can rectify the situation with respect to this question if we ask the question correctly. For, it is, indeed, so often only a matter of putting the question correctly. When this is done, a whole host of errors is dispelled. When we reflect that the object that we feel the need within us to explain must be given, then it is clear that the given itself cannot set a limit for us. For, in order to lay any claim at all to being explained and comprehended, it must confront us within given reality. Something that does not appear upon the horizon of the given does not need to be explained. Any limits could therefore lie only in the fact that, in the face of a given reality, we lacked all means of explaining it. But our need for explanation comes precisely from the fact that what we want to consider a given thing to be—that by which we want to explain it—forces itself onto the horizon of what is given us in thought. Far from being unknown to us, the explanatory essential being of an object is itself the very thing which, by manifesting within our spirit, makes the explanation necessary. What is to be explained and that by which it is to be explained are both present. It is only a matter of joining them. Explaining something is not the seeking of an unknown, but only a coming to terms about the reciprocal connection between two knowns. It should never occur to us to explain a given by something of which we have no knowledge. Now something does come into consideration here that gives a semblance of justification to the theory of a limit to knowledge. It could be that we do in fact have an inkling of something real that is there, but that nevertheless is beyond our perception. We can perceive some traces, some effects or other of a thing, and then make the assumption that this thing does exist. And here one can perhaps speak of a limit to our knowing. What we have presupposed to be inaccessible in this case, however, is not something by which to explain anything in principle; it is something perceivable even though it is not perceived. What hinders me from perceiving it is not any limit to knowledge in principle, but only chance outer factors. These can very well be surmounted. What I merely have inklings of today can be experienced tomorrow. But with a principle that is not so; with it, there are no outer hindrances, which after all lie mostly only in place and time; the principle is given to me inwardly. Something else does not give me an inkling of a principle when I myself do not see the principle. [ 16 ] Theory about the forming of hypotheses is connected with this. A hypothesis is an assumption that we make and whose truth we cannot ascertain directly but only in its effects. We see a series of phenomena. It is explainable to us only when we found it upon something that we do not perceive directly. May such an assumption be extended to include a principle? Clearly not. For, something of an inner nature that I assume without becoming aware of it is a total contradiction. A hypothesis can only assume something, indeed, that I do not perceive, but that I would perceive at once if I cleared away the outer hindrances. A hypothesis can indeed not presuppose something perceived, but must assume something perceivable. Thus, every hypothesis is in the situation that its content can be directly confirmed only by a future experience. Only hypotheses that can cease to be hypotheses have any justification. Hypotheses about central scientific principles have no value. Something that is not explained by a positively given principle known to us is not capable of explanation at all and also does not need it. 5. Ethical and Historical Sciences[ 7 ] The answering of the question, What is knowing, has illuminated for us the place of the human being in the cosmos. The view we have developed in answering this question cannot fail to shed light also upon the value and significance of human action. We must in fact attach a greater or lesser significance to what we perform in the world, according to whether we attribute a higher or lower significance to our calling as human beings. [ 8 ] The first task to which we must now address ourselves will be to investigate the character of human activity. How does what we must regard as the effect of human action relate to other effects within the world process? Let us look at two things: a product of nature and a creation of human activity, a crystal form and a wheel, perhaps. In both cases the object before us appears as the result of laws expressible in concepts. Their difference lies only in the fact that we must regard the crystal as the direct product of the natural lawfulness that determines it, whereas with the wheel the human being intervenes between the concept and the object. What we think of in the natural product as underlying the real, this we introduce into reality by our action. In knowing, we experience what the ideal determining factors of our sense experience are; we bring the world of ideas, which already lies within reality, to manifestation; we therefore complete the world process in the sense that we call into appearance the producer who eternally brings forth his products. but who, without our thinking, would remain eternally hidden within them. In human actions, however, we supplement this process through the fact that we translate the world of ideas, insofar as it is not yet reality, into such reality. Now we have recognized the idea as that which underlies all reality as the determining element, as the intention of nature. Our knowing leads us to the point of finding the tendency of the world process, the intention of the creation, out of all the indications contained in the nature surrounding us. If we have achieved this, then our action is given the task of working along independently in the realizing of that intention. And thus our action appears to us as the direct continuation of that kind of activity that nature also fulfills. It appears to us as directly flowing from the world foundation. But what a difference there is, in fact, between this and that other (nature) activity! The nature product by no means has within itself the ideal lawfulness by which it appears governed. It needs to be confronted by something higher, by human thinking; there then appears to this thinking that by which the nature product is governed. This is different in the case of human action. Here the idea dwells directly within the acting object; and if a higher being confronted it, this being could not find in the object's activity anything other than what this object itself had put into its action. For, a perfect human action is the result of our intentions and only that. If we look at a nature product that affects another, then the matter is like this: we see an effect; this effect is determined by laws grasped in concepts. But if we want to comprehend the effect, then it is not enough for us to compare it with some law or other; we must have a second perceptible thing—which, to be sure, must also be dissolvable entirely into concepts. When we see an impression in the ground we then look for the object that made it. This leads to the concept of a kind of effect where the cause of a phenomenon also appears in the form of an outer perception, i.e., to the concept of force. A force can confront us only where the idea first appears in an object of perception and only in this form acts upon another object. The opposite of this is when this intermediary is not there, when the idea approaches the sense world directly. There the idea itself appears as causative. And here is where we speak of will. Will, therefore, is the idea itself apprehended as force. It is totally inadmissible to speak of an independent will. When a person accomplishes something or other, one cannot say that will is added to the mental picture. If one does speak in that way, then one has not grasped the concepts clearly, for, what is the human personality if one disregards the world of ideas that fills it? It is, in fact, an active existence. Whoever grasps the human personality differently—as dead, inactive nature product—puts it at the level of a stone in the road. This active existence, however, is an abstraction; it is nothing real. One cannot grasp it; it is without content. If one wants to grasp it, if one wants a content for it, then one arrives, in fact, at the world of ideas that is engaged in doing. Eduard von Hartmann makes this abstraction into a second world-constituting principle beside the idea. It is, however, nothing other than the idea itself, only in one form of manifestation. Will without idea would be nothing. The same cannot be said of the idea, for activity is one of its elements, whereas the idea is the self-sustaining being. [ 19 ] So much for the characterization of human action. Let us proceed to a further essential distinguishing feature of it that necessarily results from what has already been said. The explaining of a process in nature is a going back to its determining factors: a seeking out of the producer in addition to the product that is given. When I perceive an effect and then seek its cause, these two perceptions do not by any means satisfy my need for explanation. I must go back to the laws by which this cause brings forth this effect. It is different with human action. Here the lawfulness that determines a phenomenon itself enters into action; that which makes a product itself appears upon the scene of activity. We have to do with a manifesting existence at which we can remain, for which we do not need to ask about deeper-lying determining factors. We have comprehended a work of art when we know the idea embodied in it; we do not need to ask about any further lawful relationship between idea (cause) and creation (effect). We comprehend the actions of a statesman when we know his intentions (ideas); we do not need to go any further beyond what comes to appearance. This is therefore what distinguishes the processes of nature from the actions of human beings: with nature processes the law is to be regarded as the determining background for what comes into manifest existence, whereas with human actions the existence is itself the law and manifests as determined by nothing other than itself. Thus every process of nature breaks down into something determining and something determined, and the latter follows necessarily from the former, whereas human action determines only itself. This, however, is action out of inner freedom (Freiheit). When the intentions of nature, which stand behind its manifestations and determine them, enter into the human being, they themselves become manifestation; but now they are, as it were, free from any attachment behind them (rückenfrei). If all nature processes are only manifestations of the idea, then human doing is the idea itself in action. [ 20 ] Since our epistemology has arrived at the conclusion that the content of our consciousness is not merely a means of making a copy of the world ground. but rather that this world ground itself, in its most primal state comes to light within our thinking, we can do nothing other than to recognize directly in human action also the undetermined action of that primal ground. We recognize no world director outside ourselves who sets goals and directions for our actions. The world director has given up his power, has given everything over to man, abolishing his own separate existence, and set man the task: Work on. The human being finds himself in the world, sees nature, and within it, the indication of something deeper, a determining element, an intention. His thinking enables him to know this intention. It becomes his spiritual possession. He has penetrated the world; he comes forth, acting, to carry on those intentions. Therefore, the philosophy presented here is the true philosophy of inner freedom (Freiheitsphilosophie). In the realm of human actions it acknowledges neither natural necessity nor the influence of some creator or world director outside the world. In either case, the human being would be unfree. If natural necessity worked in him in the same way as in other entities, then he would perform his actions out of compulsion, then it would also be necessary in his case to go back to determining factors that underlie manifest existence, and then inner freedom is out of the question. It is of course not impossible that there are innumerable human functions that can only be seen in this light; but these do not come into consideration here. The human being, insofar as he is a being of nature, is also to be understood according to the laws that apply to nature's working. But neither as a knowing nor as a truly ethical being can he, in his behavior, be understood according to merely natural laws. There, in fact, he steps outside the sphere of natural realities. And it is with respect to this, his existence's highest potency, which is more an ideal than reality, that what we have established here holds good. Man's path in life consists in his developing himself from a being of nature into a being such as we have learned to know here; he should make himself free of all laws of nature and become his own law giver. [ 21 ] But we must also reject the influence of any director—outside the world—of human destiny. Also where such a director is assumed, there can be no question of true inner freedom. There he determines the direction of human action and man has to carry out what this director sets him to do. He experiences the impulse to his actions not as an ideal that he sets himself, but rather as the commandment of that director; again his actions are not undetermined, but rather determined. The human being would not then, in fact, feel himself to be free of any attachment from behind him, but would feel dependent, like a mere intermediary for the intentions of a higher power. [ 22 ] We have seen that dogmatism consists in seeking the basis for the truth of anything in something beyond, and inaccessible to, our consciousness (transsubjective), in contrast to our view that declares a judgment to be true only because the reason for doing so lies in the concepts that are present in our consciousness and that flow into the judgment. Someone who conceives of a world ground outside of our world of ideas thinks that our ideal reason for recognizing something as true is a different reason than that as to why it is objectively true. Thus truth is apprehended as dogma. And in the realm of ethics a commandment is what a dogma is in science. When the human being seeks the impulse for his action in commandments, he acts then according to laws whose basis is independent of him; he conceives of a norm that is prescribed for his action from outside. He acts out of duty. To speak of duty makes sense only when looked at this way. We must feel the impulse from outside and acknowledge the necessity of responding to it; then we act out of duty. Our epistemology cannot accept this kind of action as valid where the human being appears in his full ethical development. We know that the world of ideas is unending perfection itself; we know that with it the impulses of our action lie within us; and we must therefore only acknowledge an action as ethical in which the deed flows only out of the idea, lying within us, of the deed. From this point of view, man performs an action only because its reality is a need for him. He acts because an inner (his own) urge, not an outer power, drives him. The object of his action, as soon as he makes himself a concept of it, fills him in such a way that he strives to realize it. The only impulse for our action should also lie in the need to realize an idea, in the urge to carry out an intention. Everything that urges us to a deed should live its life in the idea. Then we do not act out of duty; we do not act under the influence of a drive; we act out of love for the object to which our action is to be directed. The object, when we picture it, calls forth in us the urge to act in a way appropriate to it. Only such action is a free one. For if, in addition to the interest we take in the object, there had yet to be a second motivation from another quarter, then we would not want this object for its own sake; we would want something else and would perform that, which we do not want we would carry out an action against our will. That would be the case, for example, in action out of egoism. There we take no interest in the action itself; it is not a need for us; we do need the benefits, however, that it brings us. But then we also feel right away as compulsion the fact that we must perform the action for this reason only. The action itself is not a need for us; for we would leave it undone if no benefits followed from it. An action, however, that we do not perform for its own sake is an unfree one. Egoism acts unfreely. Every person acts unfreely, in fact, who performs an action out of a motivation that does not follow from the objective content of the action itself. To carry out an action for its own sake means to act out of love. Only someone who is guided by love in doing, by devotion to objectivity, acts truly freely. Whoever is incapable of this selfless devotion will never be able to regard his activity as a free one. [ 23 ] If man's action is to be nothing other than the realization of his own content of ideas, then naturally such a content must lie within him. His spirit must work productively. For, what is supposed to fill him with the urge to accomplish something if not an idea working its way up in his spirit? This idea will prove to be all the more fruitful the more it arises in his spirit in definite outlines and with a clear content. For only that, in fact, can move us with full force to realize something, which is completely definite in its entire “what.” An ideal that is only dimly pictured to oneself, that is left in an indefinite state, is unsuitable as an impulse to action. What is there about it to fire us with enthusiasm if its content does not lie clear and open to the day? The impulses for our action must therefore always arise in the form of individual intentions. Everything fruitful that the human being accomplishes owes its existence to such individual impulses. General moral laws, ethical norms, etc., that are supposed to be valid for all human beings prove to be entirely worthless. When Kant regards as ethically valid only that which is suitable as a law for all human beings, then one can say in response to this that all positive action would cease, that everything great would disappear from the world, if each person did only what was suitable for everyone. No, it is not such vague, general ethical norms but rather the most individual ideals that should guide our actions. Everything is not equally worthy of being done by everyone, but rather this is worthy of him, that of her, according to whether one of them feels called to do a thing. J. Kreyenbühl has spoken about this in apt words is his essay Ethical Freedom in Kant's View59: “If freedom is, in fact, to be my freedom, if a moral deed is to be my deed, if the good and right is to be realized through me, through the action of this particular individual personality, then I cannot possibly be satisfied by a general law that disregards all individuality and all the peculiarities of the concurrent circumstances of the action, and that commands me to examine every action as to whether its underlying motive corresponds to the abstract norm of general human nature and as to whether, in the way it lives and works in me, it could become a generally valid maxim.” ... “An adaptation of this kind to what is generally usual and customary would render impossible any individual freedom, any progress beyond the ordinary and humdrum, any significant, outstanding ethical achievement.” [ 24 ] These considerations shed light upon the questions a general ethics has to answer. One often treats this last, in fact, as though it were a sum total of norms according to which human action ought to direct itself. From this point of view, one compares ethics to natural science and in general to the science of what exists. Whereas science is to communicate to us the laws of that which exists, of what is, ethics supposedly has to teach us the laws of what ought to exist. Ethics is supposedly a codex of all the ideals of man, a detailed answer to the question: What is good? Such a science, however, is impossible. There can be no general answer to this question. Ethical action is, in fact, a product of what manifests within the individual; it is always present as an individual case, never in a general way. There are no general laws as to what one ought or ought not to do. But do not regard the individual legal statutes of the different peoples as such general laws. They are also nothing more than the outgrowth of individual intentions. What one or another personality has experienced as a moral motive has communicated itself to a whole people, has become the “code of this people.” A general natural code that should apply to all people for all time is nonsense. Views as to what is right and wrong and concepts of morality come and go with the different peoples, indeed even with individuals. The individuality is always the decisive factor. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of an ethics in the above sense. But there are other questions to be answered in this science, questions that have in part been touched upon briefly in these discussions. Let me mention only: establishing the difference between human action and nature's working, the question as to the nature of the will and of inner freedom, etc. All these individual tasks can be summed up in one: To what extent is man an ethical being? But this aims at nothing other than knowledge of the moral nature of man. The question asked is not: What ought man to do? but rather: What is it that he is doing, in its inner nature? And thereby that partition falls which divides all science into two spheres: into a study of what exists and into one of what ought to exist. Ethics is just as much a study of what exists as all the other sciences. In this respect, a unified impulse runs through all the sciences in that they take their start from something given and proceed to its determining factors. But there can be no science of human action itself; for, it is undetermined, productive, creative. Jurisprudence is not a science, but only a collection of notes on the customs and codes characteristic of an individual people. [ 25 ] Now the human being does not belong only to himself; he belongs, as a part, to two higher totalities. First of all, he is part of a people with which he is united by common customs, by a common cultural life, by language, and by a common view. But then he is also a citizen of history, an individual member in the great historical process of human development. Through his belonging to these two wholes, his free action seems to be restricted. What he does, does not seem to flow only from his own individual ego; he appears determined by what he has in common with his people; his individuality seems to be abolished by the character of his people. Am I still free then if one can find my actions explainable not only out of my own nature but to a considerable extent also out of the nature of my people? Do I not act, therefore, the way I do because nature has made me a member of this particular community of people? And it is no different with the second whole to which I belong. History assigns me the place of my working. I am dependent upon the cultural epoch into which I am born; I am a child of my age. But if one apprehends the human being at the same time as a knowing and as an acting entity, then this contradiction resolves itself. Through his capacity for knowledge, man penetrates into the particular character of his people; it becomes clear to him whither his fellow citizens are steering. He overcomes that by which he appears determined in this way and takes it up into himself as a picture that he has fully known; it becomes individual within him and takes on entirely the personal character that working from inner freedom has. The situation is the same with respect to the historical development within which the human being appears. He lifts himself to a knowledge of the leading ideas, of the moral forces holding sway there; and then they no longer work upon him as determining factors, but rather become individual driving powers within him. The human being must in fact work his way upward so that he is no longer led, but rather leads himself. He must not allow himself to be carried along blindly by the character of his people, but rather must lift himself to a knowledge of this character so that he acts consciously in accordance with his people. He must not allow himself to be carried by the progress of culture, but must rather make the ideas of his time into his own. In order for him to do so it is necessary above all that he understand his time. Then, in inner freedom, he will fulfill its tasks; then he will set to at the right place with his own work. Here the humanities60 (history, cultural and literary history, etc.) must enter as intermediaries. In the humanities the human being has to do with his own accomplishments, with the creations of culture, of literature, with art, etc. Something spiritual is grasped by the human spirit. And the purpose of the humanities should not be any- thing other than that man recognize where chance has placed him; he should recognize what has already been accomplished, what falls to him to do. Through the humanities he must find the right point at which to participate with his personality in the happenings of the world. The human being must know the spiritual world and determine his part in it according to this knowledge. [ 26 ] In the preface to the first volume of his Pictures from the German Past,61 Gustav Freytag says: “All the great creations of the power of a people, inherited religion, custom, law, state configurations, are for us no longer the results of individual men; they are the organic creations of a lofty life that in every age comes to manifestation only through the individual, and in every age draws together into itself the spiritual content of the individual into a mighty whole ... Thus, without saying anything mystical, one might well speak of a folk-soul ... But the life of a people no longer works consciously, like the will forces of a man. Man represents what is free and intelligent in history; the power of a people works ceaselessly, with the dark compulsion of a primal force.” If Freytag had investigated this life of a people, he would have found, indeed, that it breaks down into the working of a sum of single individuals who overcome that dark compulsion and lift what is unconscious up into consciousness; and he would have seen how that which he addresses as folk-soul, as dark compulsion, goes forth from the individual will impulses, from the free action of the human being. [ 27 ] But something else comes into consideration with respect to the working of the human being within his people. Every personality represents a spiritual potency, a sum of powers which seek to work according to the possibilities. Every person must therefore find the place where his working can incorporate itself in the most suitable way into the organism of his people. It must not be left to chance whether he finds this place. The constitution of a state has no other purpose than to take care that everyone find his appropriate sphere of work. The state is the form in which the organism of a people expresses itself. [ 28 ] Sociology and political science have to investigate the way the individual personality can come to play a part appropriate to it within a state. The constitution must go forth from the innermost being of a people. The character of a people, expressed in individual statements, is the best constitution for a state. A statesman cannot impose a constitution upon a people. The leader of a state must investigate the deep characteristics of his people and, through a constitution, give the tendencies slumbering in the people a direction corresponding to them. It can happen that the majority of a people wants to steer onto paths that go against its own nature. Goethe believes that in this case the statesman must let himself be guided by the people's own nature and not by the momentary demands of the majority; that he must in this case advocate the character of his people against the actual people (Aphorisms in Prose). [ 29 ] We must still add a word here about the method of history. History must always bear in mind that the causes of historical events are to be sought in the individual intentions, plans, etc., of the human being. All tracing back of historical facts to plans that underlie history is an error. It is always only a question of which goals one or another personality has set himself, which ways they have taken, and so on. History is absolutely to be based on human nature. Its willing, its tendencies are to be fathomed. [ 30 ] By statements of Goethe we can now substantiate again what has been said here about the science of ethics. The following statement is to be understood only out of the relationship in which we have seen the human being to stand with respect to historical development: “The world of reason is to be regarded as a great immortal individual, which ceaselessly brings about the necessary and thereby makes itself master, in fact, of chance happening.”62—A reference to a positive, individual substratum of action lies in the words: “Undetermined activity, of whatever kind, leads to bankruptcy in the end.” “The least of men can be complete if he moves within the limits of his abilities and skills.”—The necessity for man of lifting himself up to the leading ideas of his people and of his age is expressed like this: “Each person must ask himself, after all, with which organ he can and will in any case work into his age.” and: “One must know where one is standing and where the others want to go.” Our view of duty is recognizable again in the words: “Duty: where one loves what one commands oneself to do.” [ 31 ] We have based man, as a knowing and acting being, entirely upon himself. We have described his world of ideas as coinciding with the world ground and have recognized that everything he does is to be regarded as flowing only from his own individuality. We seek the core of existence within man himself. No one reveals a dogmatic truth to him; no one drives him in his actions. He is sufficient unto himself. He must be everything through himself, nothing through another being. He must draw forth everything from himself. Even the sources of his happiness. We have already recognized, in fact, that there can be no question of any power directing man, determining the direction and content of his existence, damning him to being unfree. If happiness is to come to a person therefore, this can come about only through himself. Just as little as an outer power prescribes norms for our action, will such a power bestow upon things the ability to awaken in us a feeling of satisfaction if we do not do it ourselves. Pleasure and pain are there for man only when he himself first confers upon objects the power to call up these feelings in him. A creator who determines from outside what should cause us pleasure or pain, would simply be leading us around like a child. [ 32 ] All optimism and pessimism are thereby refuted. Optimism assumes that the world is perfect, that it must be a source of the greatest satisfaction for man. But if this is to be the case, man would first have to develop within himself those needs through which to arrive at this satisfaction. He would have to gain from the objects what it is he demands. Pessimism believes that the world is constituted in such a way that it leaves man eternally dissatisfied, that he can never be happy. What a pitiful creature man would be if nature offered him satisfaction from outside! All lamentations about an existence that does not satisfy us, about this hard world, must disappear before the thought that no power in the world could satisfy us if we ourselves did not first lend it that magical power by which it uplifts and gladdens us. Satisfaction must come to us out of what we make of things, out of our own creations. Only that is worthy of free beings.
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| 1. Goethean Science: Relationship of the Goethean Way of Thinking to Other Views
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| It was also necessary for Goethe to do so. But this did not prove to be a fruitful undertaking for him. For there is a deep antithesis between what the Kantian philosophy teaches and what we have recognized as the Goethean way of thinking. |
| This is a matter for the intellect. The intellect is to be understood as a sum of activities whose purpose is to draw the sense world together according to certain forms already sketched out in the intellect. |
| But in the introduction that he later added to his essay on the metamorphosis of the plants he says: “So from now on, I undertook to find the archetypal animal, which means, ultimately, the concept, the idea of the animal.” |
| 1. Goethean Science: Relationship of the Goethean Way of Thinking to Other Views
Translated by William Lindemann |
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[ 1 ] When one speaks of the influence of earlier or contemporary thinkers upon the development of Goethe's spirit, this cannot be done out of the assumption that he formed his views on the basis of their teachings. The way he had to think, the way he saw the world, were inherent in the whole predisposition of his nature. And it lay in his being, indeed, from his earliest youth. In this respect he then also remained the same his whole life long. It is principally two significant character traits that come into consideration here. The first is his pressing urge to find the sources, the depths of all existence. This is, ultimately, his belief in the idea. Goethe is always filled with an intimation of something higher, better. One would like to call this a deep religious impulse of his spirit. What so many people need to do—to strip things of everything holy and pull them down to their own level—is unknown to him. But he does have the other need: to sense something higher and to work his way up to it. He sought to gain from everything an aspect by which it becomes holy to us. K. J. Schröer has shown this in the most brilliant way with respect to Goethe's attitude toward love. Goethe divests love of everything frivolous, careless, and it becomes for him a devout state. This fundamental trait of his being is expressed most beautifully in his words:
[ 2 ] This side of his being, now, is inseparably connected with another one. He never seeks to approach this higher something directly; he always seeks to draw near to it through nature. “The true is like God; it does not appear directly; we must guess it from its manifestations” (Aphorisms in Prose). Besides his belief in the idea Goethe also has the other one: that we can gain the idea by contemplating reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity anywhere else than in the works of nature, but he seeks everywhere to gain from them their divine aspect. When, in his youth, he erects an altar to the great God who “stands in direct connection with nature” (Poetry and Truth), this ritual definitely springs already out of a belief that we gain the highest that we can attain by a faithful fostering of our interrelationship with nature. Thus, that way of looking at things which we have validated epistemologically is innate in Goethe. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, and that we can attain this idea only when we raise sense experience into a spiritual beholding. This conviction was inherent in him, and from his youth up, he looked at the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. This is therefore not what Goethe sought from the philosophers. It was something else. Even though his way of looking at things lay deep in his nature, still he needed a language in which to express it. His nature worked in a philosophical way, i.e., in such a way that it can be expressed only in philosophical formulations and can be validated only by philosophical presuppositions. And he looked into the philosophers in order also to bring clearly to consciousness for himself what he was, in order also to know what lay in him as living activity. He sought in them an explanation and validation of his own being. That is his relationship to the philosophers. To this end, he studies Spinoza in his youth and entered later into scientific discourse with his philosophical contemporaries. In his early years, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to best express his own nature. It is remarkable that he first learned to know both thinkers from books hostile to them, and, in spite of this fact, recognized how their teachings relate to his nature. We see this substantiated especially in his relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings. He becomes acquainted with him in Bayle's dictionary, where he is vehemently attacked. And Goethe receives such a deep impression from him that, in those parts of Faust which in their conception stem from the period around 1770 when he was reading Bayle, the language echoes sentences of Bruno. In his daily and yearly notebooks the poet relates that he again occupied himself with Giordano Bruno in 1812. This time also the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we can recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this should not be taken to mean that Goethe borrowed or learned anything from Bruno; he only found in him the formulations in which to express what had lain in his own nature for a long time. He found that he could most clearly present his own inner life if he did so in the words of that thinker. Bruno regarded universal reason as the creator and director of the universe. He calls it the inner artist that forms matter and shapes it from within outward. It is the cause of everything that exists, and there is no being in whose existence it does not take a loving interest. “However small and trifling a thing may be, it still has within it a portion of spiritual substance”, (Giordano Bruno, About the Cause, etc.). That was also Goethe's view, that we first know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been set in its place by universal reason, how it has come to be precisely that which confronts us. Perceiving with the senses does not suffice, for the senses do not tell us how a thing relates to the general world idea, what it means for the great whole. There we must look in such a way that our reason creates an ideal basis on which there can then appear to us what the senses convey to us; we must, as Goethe expresses it, look with the eyes of the spirit. Even for expressing this conviction he found a formulation in Bruno: “For, just as we do not recognize colours and sounds with one and the same sense, so also we do not recognize the substratum of the arts and that of nature with one and the same eye,” because we “see the first with the physical eye and the second with the eye of reason.” And with Spinoza it is no different. Spinoza's teachings are indeed based on the fact that the divinity has merged with the world. Human knowing can therefore aim only to penetrate into the world in order to know God. Any other way of arriving at God must seem impossible to anyone thinking consistently according to Spinoza's way of thinking. For God has given up all existence of His own; outside the world He exists nowhere. But we must seek Him where He is. Any actual knowing must therefore be of such a kind that, in every piece of world knowledge, it conveys to us a piece of divine knowledge. Knowing, at its highest level, is therefore a coming together with the divinity. There we call it knowing in beholding (anschauliches Wissen). We know things “sub specie æternitatis,” that is, as flowing from the divinity. The laws that our spirit recognizes in nature are therefore God in His very being; they are not only made by Him. What we recognize as logical necessity is so because the being of the divinity, i.e., the eternal lawfulness, dwells within it. That was a view which is in accordance with the Goethean spirit. His own firm belief that nature, in all its doings, reveals something divine to us lay before him in Spinoza's writings in the clearest statements. “I am holding firmly and ever more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza) way of revering God,” he writes to Jacobi when the latter wanted to put the teachings of Spinoza in another light. Therein lies the relatedness of Goethe to Spinoza. And it indicates a superficial judgment of the matter when, with respect to this deep inner harmony between Goethe's nature and Spinoza's teachings, one ever and again emphasizes something purely external by saying that Goethe was drawn to Spinoza because he, like Spinoza, would not tolerate a final cause in explaining the world. The fact that Goethe, like Spinoza, rejected final causes was only one result of their views. But let us put the theory of final causes clearly before us. A thing is explained, in its existence and nature, by the fact that one demonstrates its necessity for something else. One shows that this thing is of such and such a nature because that other thing is like this or that. This presupposes that a world ground exists which stands over and above both beings and arranges them in such a way that they match each other. But if the world ground is inherent in every single thing, then this kind of explanation makes no sense. For then the nature of a thing must appear to us as the result of the principle at work within it. We will seek, within the nature of a thing, the reason why it is as it is and not different than it is. If we hold the belief that something divine is inherent in each thing, then it will not in fact occur to us to seek to explain its lawfulness by any outer principle. The relationship of Goethe to Spinoza should also not be grasped in any other way than that he found in Spinoza the formulations, the scientific language, for expressing the world lying within him. [ 3 ] When we now pass on to Goethe's connection to contemporary philosophers, we must speak above all about Kant. Kant is generally regarded as the founder of present-day philosophy. In his time he called forth such a powerful movement that every educated person needed to come to terms with it. It was also necessary for Goethe to do so. But this did not prove to be a fruitful undertaking for him. For there is a deep antithesis between what the Kantian philosophy teaches and what we have recognized as the Goethean way of thinking. In fact, one can even say that all German thinking runs it course in two parallel streams: one permeated by the Kantian way of thinking and another that is close to Goethean thinking. But as philosophy today draws ever closer to Kant, it is distancing itself from Goethe, and through this the possibility for our age of grasping and appreciating the Goethean world view is being lost more and more. Let us set before us the main postulates of Kant's teachings insofar as they are of interest with respect to Goethe's views. For Kant, the starting point for human thinking is experience, i.e., the world given to the senses (among which is included the inner sense that conveys to us such facts as the psychic, historical, and the like). This world is a manifoldness of things in space and of processes in time. The fact that precisely this thing confronts me or that I experience precisely that process is of no consequence; it could also be different. I can think away the whole manifoldness of things and processes altogether. What I cannot think away, however, are space and time. For me, there can be nothing that is not spatial or temporal. Even if there were some non-spatial or non-temporal thing, I can know nothing about it, for I can picture nothing to myself without space and time. I do not know whether the things themselves partake of space and time; I only know that the things must appear to me in these forms. Space and time are therefore the prerequisites of my sense perception. I know nothing of any thing-in-itself; I only know how it must appear to me if it is to be there for me. With these postulates Kant introduces a new problem. He appears in science with a new way of asking questions. Instead of asking, as earlier philosophers did: What is the nature of things?, he asks: How must things appear to us in such a way that they can become the object of our knowing? For Kant, philosophy is the science of the factors that determine the possibility of the world as a manifestation for human beings. We know nothing about the thing-in-itself. We have not yet fulfilled our task when we arrive at a sense perception of a manifoldness in time and space. We strive to draw this manifoldness together into a unity. This is a matter for the intellect. The intellect is to be understood as a sum of activities whose purpose is to draw the sense world together according to certain forms already sketched out in the intellect. It draws together two sense perceptions by, for example, designating one as the cause and the other as the effect, or the one as substance and the other as attribute, etc. Here also it is the task of the science of philosophy to show under which conditions the intellect succeeds in forming a system of the world. Thus the world, according to Kant, is actually a subjective phenomenon arising in the forms of the sense world and of the intellect. Only one thing is certain: that there is a thing-in-itself; how it appears to us depends upon our organization. It is also obvious now that it makes no sense to ascribe to that world which the intellect has formed in association with the senses any significance other than what it has for our ability to know. This becomes clearest of all where Kant speaks of the significance of the world of ideas. Ideas for him are nothing other than the higher points of view of reason from which the lower entities, which the intellect has created, are understood. The intellect brings soul phenomena, for example, into a relationship; reason, as the faculty for ideas, then grasps this relationship as though everything went forth from one soul. But this has no significance for the thing itself; it is only a means of orientation for our cognitive faculty. This is the content of Kant's theoretical philosophy insofar as it can be of interest to us here. One sees at once that it is the polar opposite of the Goethean philosophy. Given reality is determined, according to Kant, by us ourselves; it is as it is because we picture it that way. Kant skips over the real epistemological question. At the beginning of his Critique of Reason he takes two steps that he does not justify, and his whole edifice of philosophical teachings suffers from this mistake. He right away sets up a distinction between object and subject, without asking at all what significance it has then for the intellect to undertake the separation of two regions of reality (in this case the knowing subject and the object to be known). Then he seeks to establish conceptually the reciprocal relationship of these two regions, again without asking what it means to establish something like that. If his view of the main epistemological question had not been all askew, he would have seen that the holding apart of subject and object is only a transitional point in our knowing, that a deeper unity, which reason can grasp, underlies them both, and that what is attributed to a thing as a trait, when considered in connection with a knowing subject, by no means has only subjective validity. A thing is a unity for our reason and the separation into “thing-in-itself” and “thing-for-us” is a product of our intellect. It will not do, therefore, to say that what is attributed to a thing in one connection can be denied it in other connections. For, whether I look at the same thing one time from this point of view and another time from that: it is after all still a unified whole. [ 4 ] It is an error, running through Kant's entire edifice of teachings, for him to regard the sense-perceptible manifoldness as something fixed, and for him to believe that science consists in bringing this manifoldness into a system. He has no inkling at all that the manifoldness is not something ultimate, that one must overcome it if one wants to comprehend it; and therefore all theory becomes for him merely a supplement that the intellect and reason add onto experience. For him, the idea is not what appears to reason as the deeper ground of the given world when reason has overcome the manifoldness lying on the surface, but rather the idea is only a methodological principle by which reason orders the phenomena in order to have a better overview of them. According to the Kantian view, we would be going totally amiss if we were to regard things as traceable back to the idea; in his opinion, we can only order our experiences as though they stemmed from a unity. According to Kant, we have no inkling of the ground of things, of the “in-itself.” Our knowing of things is only there in connection with us; it is valid only for our individuality. Goethe could not gain much from this view of the world. The contemplation of things in their connection to us always remained for him a quite subordinate one, having to do with the effect of objects upon our feelings of pleasure and pain; he demands more of science than a mere statement as to how things are in their connection to us. In the essay The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object, he determines what the task of the researcher is: He should take his yardstick for knowledge, the data for his judgment, not from himself, but rather from the sphere of the things he observes. This one statement characterizes the deep antithesis between the Kantian and the Goethean way of thinking. Whereas with Kant, all judgments about things are only a product of subject and object, and only provide a knowing about how the subject beholds the object, with Goethe, the subject merges selflessly into the object and draws the data for his judgment from the sphere of the things. Goethe himself says therefore of Kant's adherents: “They certainly heard me but had no answer for me nor could be in any way helpful.” The poet believed that he gained more from Kant's critique of the power of judgment. [ 5 ] Philosophically, Goethe benefited far more from Schiller than from Kant. Through him, namely, Goethe was really brought one stage further in the recognition of his own way of viewing things. Up to the time of that first famous conversation with Schiller, Goethe had practiced a certain way of viewing the world. He had observed plants, found that an archetypal plant underlies them, and derived the individual forms from it. This archetypal plant (and also a corresponding archetypal animal) had taken shape in his spirit, was useful to him in explaining the relevant phenomena. But he had never reflected upon what this archetypal plant was in its essential nature. Schiller opened his eyes by saying to him: It is an idea. Only from then on is Goethe aware of his idealism. Up until that conversation, he calls the archetypal plant an experience for he believed he saw it with his eyes. But in the introduction that he later added to his essay on the metamorphosis of the plants he says: “So from now on, I undertook to find the archetypal animal, which means, ultimately, the concept, the idea of the animal.” But we must bear in mind here that Schiller did not provide Goethe with something foreign to him, but rather Schiller, by observing the Goethean spirit, struggled through for the first time to a knowledge of objective idealism. He only found the right term for the way of viewing things that he recognized and marveled at in Goethe. [ 6 ] Goethe experienced but little benefit from Fichte. Fichte moved in a sphere that was much too foreign to Goethean thinking to be of much possible benefit. Fichte founded the science of consciousness in the most brilliant way. In a unique and exemplary way, he traced the activity by which the “I” transforms the world that is given, into a world that is thought. But in doing so, he made the mistake of not merely regarding this activity of the “I” as one that brings the given content into a satisfactory form, that brings the unrelated given into the appropriate relationships; he saw this activity as a creating of everything which takes place within the “I.” Therefore his teachings appear as a one-sided idealism that takes its whole content from consciousness. Goethe, who always devoted himself wholly to what is objective, could find very little to attract him in Fichte's philosophy of consciousness. Goethe lacked understanding for the region where that philosophy is valid; but the lengths to which Fichte carried it (he saw it as the universal science) could only appear to the poet as an error. [ 7 ] Goethe had many more points of contact with the young Schelling. Schelling was a student of Fichte. He did not only carry further the analysis of the activity of the “I,” however, but also investigated this activity within the consciousness by which nature is grasped. What takes place in the “I” when it is knowing nature seemed to Schelling to be at the same time that which is objective about nature, the actual principle within it. External nature was for him only a form of our nature concepts that has become fixed. What lives in us as a view of nature appears to us again outside, only spread out, spatial-temporally. What confronts us from outside as nature is a finished product, is only something already determined, the form of a living principle that has become rigid. We cannot gain this principle through experience from outside. We must first create it within our inner being. “To philosophize about nature means to create nature,” our philosopher says therefore. “We call nature, as a mere product (natura naturata), ‘nature as object’ (all empiricism devotes itself to this alone). We call nature, as productivity (natura naturans), ‘nature as subject’ (all theory devotes itself to this alone).” (Introduction to Schelling's First Sketch of a System of Natural Philosophy)63 “The contrast between empiricism and science rests, indeed, on the fact that empiricism studies its object in existence as something finished and already brought about, whereas science, on the other hand, studies the object in its becoming and as something still to be brought about.” (Ibid.) Through these teachings, with which Goethe became acquainted partly from Schelling's writings and partly from personal encounters with the philosopher, the poet was again brought a stage higher. He now developed the view that his tendency was to proceed from what is finished, the product, to what is becoming, the productive. And, with a definite echo of Schelling, he writes in his essay The Power to Judge in Beholding that his striving was to make himself “worthy, through beholding an ever-creating nature, of participating spiritually in its productions.” [ 8 ] And through Hegel, finally, Goethe received his last help from the side of philosophy. Through him he gained clarity, namely, as to how what he called the archetypal phenomenon fitted into philosophy. Hegel understood the significance of the archetypal phenomenon more deeply than anyone else and characterized it aptly in a letter to Goethe on February 20, 1821 with the words: “The simple and abstract, what you quite aptly call the archetypal phenomenon, this you put first, and then show the concrete phenomena as arising through the participation of yet other influences and circumstances; and you direct the whole process in such a way that the sequence proceeds from the simple, determining factors to the composite ones, and, thus arranged, something complex appears in all its clarity through this decomposition. To seek out the archetypal phenomenon, to free it from other extraneous chance surroundings—to grasp it abstractly, as we call it—this I consider to be the task for a great spiritual sense for nature, just as I consider that procedure altogether to be what is truly scientific in gaining knowledge in this field.” ... “But may I now also speak to you about the particular interest which the archetypal phenomenon, lifted out in this way, has for us philosophers; namely, that we can put something prepared in this way precisely to philosophical use! If, in spite of everything, we have finally led our initially oysterlike, grey, or completely black absolute out toward the air and light, so that it desires them, then we need windows in order to lead it out fully into the light of day; our schemata would disperse into mist if we were to transfer them directly into the colourful, confused society of a resistant world. Here is where your archetypal phenomena now stand us in excellent stead; in this twilight—spiritual and comprehensible through its simplicity, visible or graspable through its sense-perceptibility—the two worlds greet each other: our abstruse existence and the manifest one.” In this way, through Hegel, the thought becomes clear to Goethe that the empirical researcher has to go as far as the archetypal phenomena and that the paths of the philosopher lead on from there. But from this it is also clear that the basic thought of Hegelian philosophy follows from the Goethean way of thinking. The overcoming of human nature, the entering deeply into it in order to ascend from the created to the creating, from the determined to the determining, is fundamental to Goethe, but also to Hegel. Hegel, indeed, wants to present nothing other in philosophy than the eternal process from which everything finite emerges. He wants to know the given as a result of that to which he can grant validity as something undetermined. [ 9 ] Thus for Goethe, acquainting himself with philosophers and with directions in philosophy means an ongoing clarification of what already lay in him. He gained nothing new for his views; he was only given the means of speaking about what he did, about what was going on in his soul. [ 10 ] Thus the Goethean world view offers many points of reference for philosophical elaboration. But these were initially taken up only by the pupils of Hegel. The rest of philosophy took a stand of dignified rejection toward the Goethean view. Only Schopenhauer bases himself in many respects upon the poet, whom he values highly. We will speak in a later chapter about his apologetic of the colour theory. Here it is a matter of describing the general relationship of Schopenhauer's teachings to Goethe.64 In one point the Frankfurt philosopher comes close to Goethe. Schopenhauer rejects, namely, any deriving from outer causes of the phenomena given us and admits the validity only of an inner lawfulness, of a deriving of one phenomenon from another. This seems to be the same as the Goethean principle of taking the data for an explanation from the things themselves; but only seemingly. Schopenhauer wants to remain in the realm of phenomena because he believes we cannot attain in knowledge the “in-itself” lying outside this realm, since all the phenomena given us are only mental pictures65 and our ability to make mental pictures never takes us outside our consciousness; Goethe, on the other hand, wants to remain within the phenomena, because he in fact seeks within the phenomena themselves the data needed for their explanation. [ 11 ] In conclusion, let us still compare the Goethean world view with the most significant scientific phenomenon of our time, with the views of Eduard von Hartmann. This thinker's Philosophy of the Unconscious66 is a work of the greatest historical significance. Taken together with the other writings of Hartmann (which elaborate in all directions what he there sketched out and in fact bring new points of view to that main work in many respects), this book mirrors the entire spiritual content of our age. Hartmann demonstrates a remarkable profundity and an amazing mastery of the material of the individual sciences. He stands today in the vanguard of culture. One does not need to be an adherent of his to have to acknowledge this unreservedly. [ 12 ] His view is not so far from Goethe's as one might believe at first glance. Someone who has access only to the Philosophy of the Unconscious will not, to be sure, be able to see this. For, one sees the definite points of contact between these two thinkers only when one goes into the consequences that Hartmann drew from his principles and which he set down in his later writings. [ 13 ] Hartmann's philosophy is idealism. He does not want to be a mere idealist, it is true. But where, for the purpose of explaining the world, he needs something positive, he does after all seek help from ideas. And the most important thing is that he thinks of the idea as the underlying principle everywhere. His assumption of an unconscious means nothing other, in fact, than that what is present in our consciousness as idea is not necessarily bound to this form of manifestation within our consciousness. The idea is not only present (active), where it becomes conscious, but also in another form. The idea is more than a merely subjective phenomenon; it has a significance founded within itself. It is not merely present within the subject; it is the objective world principle. Even though Hartmann includes will, in addition to the idea, among the principles constituting the world, it is nevertheless incomprehensible that there are still philosophers who regard him as an adherent of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer carried to extremes the view that all conceptual content is only subjective, is only a phenomenon of consciousness. With him, it is absolutely out of the question for the idea to have participated as a real principle in the constitution of the world. For him, will is the exclusive world ground. Therefore Schopenhauer could never find a way, with any content, of handling the specialized branches of philosophy, whereas Hartmann followed up his principles into all the particular sciences. Whereas Schopenhauer can say nothing more about the extremely rich content of history than that it is a manifestation of will, Eduard von Hartmann knows how to find the ideal core of every single historical phenomenon, and how to incorporate each phenomenon into the total historical development of mankind. The individual entity, the individual phenomenon, cannot be of interest to Schopenhauer, for he knows only one essential thing to say about it: that it is a manifestation of the will. Hartmann takes up each particular entity and shows how the idea is everywhere perceptible. The basic character of Schopenhauer's world view is uniformity; that of von Hartmann is unity. Schopenhauer bases the world upon an empty uniform urge; Hartmann bases it upon the rich content of the idea. Schopenhauer sets an abstract unity as a basis; with Hartmann, we find the concrete idea as principle, whose unity—or rather unifiedness—is only one characteristic of the idea. Schopenhauer would never have been able, as Hartmann was, to create a philosophy of history or a science of religion. When Hartmann says that “reason is the logical form principle of the idea—of the idea that is inseparably united with the will—and as such altogether governs and determines the content of the world process” (Philosophical Questions of the Present Day67), then this presupposition makes it possible for him, in every phenomenon that confronts us in nature and in history, to seek out its logical core, which, although not graspable by the senses, is quite graspable by thinking, and in this way to explain the phenomenon. Whoever does not make this presupposition will never be able to justify his wanting to determine anything at all about the world by reflection in the medium of ideas. [ 14 ] In his objective idealism Eduard von Hartmann stands entirely upon the ground of the Goethean world view. When Goethe says that “everything of which we become aware and about which we are able to speak is only a manifestation of the idea” (Aphorisms in Prose), and when he states that the human being must develop within himself a capacity for knowledge of such a kind that the idea becomes just as observable to him as an outer perception is to his senses, then he stands upon that ground where the idea is not merely a phenomenon of consciousness but is an objective world principle; thinking is the flashing up in consciousness of that which objectively constitutes the world. The essential thing about the idea, therefore, is not what it is for us, for our consciousness, but rather what it is in itself. For, through its own particular being it underlies the world as principle. Therefore thinking is a becoming aware of what exists in and of itself. Therefore, although the idea would not come to manifestation at all if there were no consciousness, still the idea must be grasped in such a way that its characteristic feature consists not of its being conscious but rather of what it is in itself, of what lies within the idea itself; and this is not affected by its becoming conscious. Therefore, according to Eduard von Hartmann, we must base the world upon the idea—without regard to its becoming conscious—as something working and unconscious. That is what is essential for Hartmann: that we must seek the idea in everything unconscious. [ 15 ] But not much is accomplished by this distinguishing between what is conscious and what is unconscious. For that is, after all, only a distinction for my consciousness. But one must grapple with the idea in all its objectivity, in all its fullness of content; one must consider not only that the idea is at work unconsciously, but also what this working element is. If Hartmann had stopped at the fact that the idea is unconscious and if he had explained the world out of this unconscious element—that is, out of a one-sided characteristic of the idea—then he would have added a new uniform system to the many systems that derive the world from some abstract formal principle or other. And one cannot declare his first main work to be entirely free of this uniformity. But Eduard von Hartmann's spirit works too intensively, too comprehensively and penetratingly, for him not to have recognized that the idea cannot be grasped merely as something unconscious; rather, one must in fact go deeply into what one has to address as unconscious, must go beyond this characteristic to its concrete content and derive from it the world of individual phenomena. In this way, Hartmann transformed himself from the abstract monist, which he still is in his Philosophy of the Unconscious, into a concrete monist. And it is the concrete idea that Goethe addresses in the three forms: archetypal phenomenon, typus, and “idea in the narrower sense.” [ 16 ] What we find of Goethe's world view in Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy is the becoming aware of something objective within our world of ideas, and the devotion, arising from this becoming aware, to this objective element. Hartmann was led by his philosophy of the unconscious to this merging with the objective idea. Since he recognized that the being of the idea does not lie in its being conscious, he had to recognize the idea also as something existing in and of itself, as something objective. The fact that he also includes the will among the principles constituting the world does make him differ again from Goethe, to be sure. Nevertheless, where Hartmann is really fruitful, the will motif does not come into consideration at all. That he assumes this motif at all comes from the fact that he regards the ideas as something static which, in order to begin working, needs the impetus of will. According to Hartmann, the will alone can never achieve the creation of the world, for it is the empty, blind urge for existence. If the will is to bring forth something, then the idea must enter in, because only the idea gives the will a content for its working. But what are we to make of this will? It slips away from us when we want to grasp it; for we cannot after all grasp an empty urging that has no content. And so it turns out after all that everything which we actually grasp of the world principle is idea, because what is graspable must in fact have content. We can only grasp what is full of content, not what is empty of content. If therefore we are to grasp the concept will, it must after all arise in the content of the idea; it can appear only in and along with the idea, as the form in which it arises, never independently. What exists must have content; there can only be existence which is full; there cannot be an empty one. Therefore, Goethe pictures the idea as active, as something working, which needs no further impetus. For, something full of content may not and cannot first receive from something empty of content, the impetus to come into existence. The idea therefore, according to Goethe, is to be grasped as entelechy, i.e., as an already active existence; and one must first draw an abstraction from its form as an active existence if one then wants to bring it back again under the name will. The will motif also has no value at all for positive science. Hartmann also does not need it when he confronts the concrete phenomenon. [ 17 ] If we have recognized in Hartmann's view of nature an echo of Goethe's world view, we find an even more significant one in that philosopher's ethics. Eduard von Hartmann finds that all striving for happiness, all pursuing of egoism, is ethically worthless, because we can, after all, never achieve contentment on this path. Hartmann considers acting out of egoism, and trying to satisfy it, to be illusory. We should grasp the task we are set in the world, and act purely for the sake of this task itself, with self-renunciation. We should find our goal in our devotion to the object, without demanding that our subject profit from it in some way. But this forms the basic impulse of Goethe's ethics. Hartmann should not have suppressed the word that expresses the character of his teachings on morality: love.68 Where we claim nothing personally, where we act only because something objective moves us, where we find in the act itself the motive for our action, there we are acting morally. But there we are acting out of love. All self-will, everything personal, must disappear there. It is characteristic of the way Hartmann's powerful and healthy spirit works, that in spite of the fact that he first grasped the idea one-sidedly as unconscious, he still pressed forward to concrete idealism; and that in spite of the fact that he took his start in ethics from pessimism, he was still led by this mistaken standpoint to the ethical teaching of love. Hartmann's pessimism, in fact, does not mean what those people interpret it to mean who like to lament about the fruitlessness of our activity because they hope to find themselves justified by this in folding their hands in their laps and accomplishing nothing. Hartmann does not stop at such lamenting; he raises himself above any such impulse to a pure ethics. He shows the worthlessness of the pursuit of happiness by revealing its fruitlessness. He directs us thereby to our own activity. That he is a pessimist at all is his error. That is perhaps still a remnant from earlier stages of his thinking. From where he stands now, he would have to realize that the empirical demonstration that in the world of reality what is unsatisfying outweighs what is satisfying cannot establish pessimism. For the higher human being cannot wish for anything else at all than that he must achieve his happiness for himself. He does not want it as a gift from outside. He wants his happiness to consist only in his action. Hartmann's pessimism dissolves before (Hartmann's own) higher thinking. Because the world leaves us dissatisfied, we create for ourselves the most beautiful happiness in our own activity. [ 18 ] Thus Hartmann's philosophy is yet another proof of how people starting from different points of departure arrive at the same goal; Hartmann takes his start from different presuppositions than Goethe does, but in his development of them, the Goethean train of thought confronts us at every turn. We have presented this here because we wanted to show the deep inner soundness of the Goethean world view. It lies so deeply founded in the being of the world that we must meet its basic features wherever energetic thinking penetrates to the sources of knowledge. Within Goethe everything was so very original, so totally free from the incidental, fashionable views of the time, that even his opponent must think in his sense. The eternal riddle of the world expresses itself, in fact, in single individuals; in Goethe most significantly of all in recent time; therefore one can even say that the level of a person's view can be measured today by the relationship in which it stands to the Goethean view.
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| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe and Mathematics
Translated by William Lindemann |
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| How often has Goethe spoken out against the undertakings of problematical people who strive for goals without bothering about whether, in doing so, they are keeping within the bounds of their abilities! |
| Everything depends upon establishing what task mathematics has and where its application to natural science begins. Now Goethe did actually undertake the most conscientious study of this. Where it is a question of determining the limits of his productive powers, the poet develops a sharpness of understanding surpassed only by his genius' depth of understanding. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe and Mathematics
Translated by William Lindemann |
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[ 1 ] Among the main hindrances standing in the way of a just evaluation of Goethe's significance for science belongs the preconception that exists about his relationship to mathematics. This preconception is twofold. Firstly, one believes that Goethe was an enemy of this science and failed in the worst way to recognize its great significance for human knowing; and secondly, one maintains that the poet excluded any mathematical approach from the physical parts of the natural science pursued by him only because the mathematical approach was uncomfortable to him, as he had benefited from no training in mathematics. [ 2 ] As regards the first point, one can say in refutation of it that Goethe repeatedly gave expression to his admiration for the science of mathematics in such a decisive manner that there can be absolutely no question of his attaching little value to it. In fact, he wants to be sure that all natural science is permeated by that strictness which is characteristic of mathematics. “We must learn from the mathematicians to take care to place next to each other only the elements that are closest to each other, or rather to deduce from each the elements closest to it, and even where we use no calculations, we must always proceed as though obliged to render account to the strictest geometrician.” “I heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy, of mathematics altogether, which no one, after all, can value more highly than I do ...” [ 3 ] As regards the second criticism: it is of such a kind that hardly anyone who has once looked into Goethe's nature could raise it seriously. How often has Goethe spoken out against the undertakings of problematical people who strive for goals without bothering about whether, in doing so, they are keeping within the bounds of their abilities! And he himself should have violated this precept, he should have set up natural-scientific views, ignoring his insufficiencies in mathematical things! Goethe knew that the paths to what is true are infinitely many, and that each person can travel the one most in accordance with his abilities, and will arrive at his goal. “Every human being must think in his own way: for he will always find something true along his path, or a kind of truth that will help him through life; but he must not just let himself go; he must control himself ...” (Aphorisms in Prose). “The least of men can be complete if he is active within the limits of his abilities and skills; but even good qualities become obscured, cancelled out, and destroyed if that absolutely essential proportion is lost.” (Ibid.) [ 4 ] It would be ludicrous for someone to assert that Goethe would go into an area lying outside his field of vision in order to accomplish anything at all. Everything depends upon establishing what task mathematics has and where its application to natural science begins. Now Goethe did actually undertake the most conscientious study of this. Where it is a question of determining the limits of his productive powers, the poet develops a sharpness of understanding surpassed only by his genius' depth of understanding. We would especially like to make those people aware of this who have nothing else to say about Goethe's scientific thinking than that he lacked a logical, reflective way of thinking. The manner in which Goethe established the boundary between the natural-scientific method he employed and that of the mathematicians reveals a deep insight into the nature of the science of mathematics. He knew exactly what the basis is for the certainty of mathematical theorems; he had formed a clear picture for himself of the relationship in which mathematical lawfulness stands with respect to the lawfulness of the rest of nature. [ 5 ] If a science is to have any value at all as knowledge, it must open up for us a particular region of reality. Some aspect or other of the world content must manifest itself in it. The way in which it does this constitutes the spirit of a particular science. Goethe had to recognize the spirit of mathematics in order to know what can be attained in natural science without the help of computation and what cannot. This is the point that really matters. Goethe himself indicated this with great decisiveness. The way he does this reveals a deep insight into the nature of the mathematical. [ 6 ] Let us examine this nature more closely. Mathematics deals with magnitude, with that which allows of a more or less. Magnitude, however, is not something existing in itself. In the broad scope of human experience there is nothing that is only magnitude. Along with its other characteristics, each thing also has some that are determined by numbers. Since mathematics concerns itself with magnitudes, what it studies are not objects of experience complete in themselves, but rather only everything about them that can be measured or counted. It separates off from things everything that can be subjected to this latter operation. It thus acquires a whole world of abstractions within which it then works. It does not have to do with things, but only with things insofar as they are magnitudes. It must admit that here it is dealing only with one aspect of what is real, and that reality has yet many other aspects over which mathematics has no power. Mathematical judgments are not judgments that fully encompass real objects, but rather are valid only within the ideal world of abstractions that we ourselves have conceptually separated off from the objects as one aspect of reality. Mathematics abstracts magnitude and number from things, establishes the completely ideal relationships between magnitudes and numbers, and hovers in this way in a pure world of thoughts. The things of reality, insofar as they are magnitude and number, allow one then to apply mathematical truths. It is therefore definitely an error to believe that one could grasp the whole of nature with mathematical judgments. Nature, in fact, is not merely quantity; it is also quality, and mathematics has to do only with the first. The mathematical approach and the approach that deals purely with what is qualitative must work hand in hand; they will meet in the thing, of which they each grasp one aspect. Goethe characterizes this relationship with the words: “Mathematics, like dialectics, is an organ of the inner, higher sense; its practice is an art, like oratory. For both, nothing is of value except the form; the content is a matter of indifference to them. It is all the same to them whether mathematics is calculating in pennies or dollars or whether rhetoric is defending something true or false.” (Aphorisms in Prose) And, from Sketch of a Colour Theory: “Who does not acknowledge that mathematics is one of the most splendid organs of man, is from one aspect very useful to physics?” In this recognition, Goethe saw the possibility that a mind which does not have the benefit of a mathematical training can still occupy itself with physical problems. Such a mind must limit itself to what is qualitative. |