Goethe Studies Fundamental Ideas

One cannot achieve a full understanding of Goethe's inner life, his view of the world and of life, merely by commenting on his works from the outside. Rather, one must go back to the philosophical core of his entire being. Goethe was not a philosopher in the scientific sense, but he was a philosophical nature.

I would like to capture this nature here with a few thoughts in order to then characterize Goethe's position on Christianity. In our reactionary present, it seems to me not unjustified to reflect on the relationship of this leading spirit to religious questions.

Man is not satisfied with what nature voluntarily offers to his observing mind. He feels that in order to bring forth the diversity of her creations, she needs driving forces which he himself must acquire through observation and thought. In the human spirit itself lies the means of revealing the driving forces of nature. From the human spirit arise the ideas that shed light on how nature brings about its creations. How the phenomena of the outer world are connected is revealed within the human being. What the human spirit conceives of the laws of nature: it is not added to nature, it is nature's own essence; and the spirit is only the arena in which nature makes the secrets of its workings visible. What we observe in things is only a part of things. What wells up in our spirit when it confronts things is the other part. It is the same things that speak to us from the outside and that speak within us. Only when we hold the language of the outside world together with that of our inner world do we have the full reality.

The mind sees what experience contains in a coherent form. It seeks laws where nature offers it facts.

Philosophers and artists have the same goal. They seek to create the perfect that their minds see when they allow nature to work on them. But they have different means at their disposal to achieve this goal. A thought, an idea, lights up in the philosopher when he confronts a natural process. He expresses it. In the artist, an image of this process emerges that shows it more perfectly than it can be observed in the outside world. The philosopher and the artist develop observation in different ways. The artist does not need to know the driving forces of nature in the form in which they reveal themselves to the philosopher. When he perceives a thing or a process, an image immediately arises in his mind in which the laws of nature are expressed in a more perfect form than in the corresponding thing or process in the outside world. These laws in the form of thought need not enter his mind. Cognition and art are, however, inwardly related. They show the laws of nature that prevail in it as facts.

If, in addition to perfect images of things, the driving forces of nature also express themselves in the form of thoughts in the mind of a true artist, then the common source of philosophy and art becomes particularly clear to us. Goethe is such an artist. He reveals the same secrets to us in the form of his works of art and in the form of thought. What he creates in his poetry, he expresses in the form of thought in his essays on the natural sciences and the arts and in his "Proverbs in Prose". The deep satisfaction that emanates from these essays and sayings is due to the fact that one sees the harmony of art and knowledge realized in a personality. There is something uplifting about the feeling that arises with every Goethean thought: here is someone speaking who can at the same time see in the picture the perfection that he expresses in ideas. The power of such a thought is strengthened by this feeling. What comes from the highest needs of a personality must belong together inwardly. Goethe's wisdom teachings answer the question: what kind of philosophy is in accordance with genuine art?

What springs from the human spirit when it confronts the outside world in observation and thought is truth. Man can demand no other knowledge than that which he himself produces. He who still seeks something behind things that is supposed to signify their actual essence has not brought himself to realize that all questions about the essence of things arise only from a human need: to penetrate with thought that which one perceives. Things speak to us, and our inner being speaks when we observe things. These two languages come from the same primordial being, and man is called to bring about their mutual understanding. This is what is called knowledge. And this and nothing else is sought by those who understand the needs of human nature. Those who do not attain this understanding remain strangers to the things of the outside world. He does not hear the essence of things speaking to him from within. He therefore assumes that this essence is hidden behind things. He believes in an outer world still behind the world of perception. But things are only alien to us as long as we merely observe them. For man, the contrast between objective outer perception and subjective inner world of thought only exists as long as he does not recognize that these worlds belong together. The human inner world is a part of the world process like any other process.

These thoughts are not refuted by the fact that different people have different ideas about things. Nor by the fact that people's organizations are different, so that one does not know whether one and the same color is seen in quite the same way by different people. For what matters is not whether men form exactly the same judgment about one and the same thing, but whether the language which the inner man speaks is precisely the language which expresses the essence of things. The individual judgments differ according to the organization of man and the standpoint from which he views things; but all judgments spring from the same element and lead to the essence of things. This may be expressed in different shades of thought, but it remains the essence of things.

The human being is the organ through which nature reveals its secrets. The deepest content of the world appears in the subjective personality. "When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being" (Goethe, Winckelmann: Antikes). Modern natural science expresses the same idea through its means and methods. "But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Indeed, one could say, what are the elementary phenomena of nature itself compared to man, who must first tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?" (Goethe, Proverbs in Prose.)

If a thing expresses its essence through the organ of the human mind, then the full reality only comes about through the confluence of observation and thought. Neither through one-sided observation nor through one-sided thinking does man recognize reality. It does not exist as something finished in the objective world, but is only brought about by the human spirit in connection with things. Those who praise experience alone must reply with Goethe that "experience is only half of experience". "Everything factual is already theory" (Proverbs in prose), that is, a law is revealed in the human mind when it observes a fact. This view of the world, which recognizes the essence of things in ideas and understands knowledge as a living into the essence of things, is not mysticism. What it has in common with mysticism, however, is that it does not regard objective truth as something existing in the external world, but as something that can really be grasped within man. The opposite view of the world places the causes of things behind appearances, in a realm beyond human experience. It can now either indulge in a blind faith in these reasons, which contains its content from a positive religion of revelation, or it can put forward intellectual hypotheses and theories about how this otherworldly realm of reality is constituted. The mystic as well as the confessor of Goethe's world view rejects both the belief in an otherworldly realm and the hypotheses about such a realm and adheres to the real spiritual realm that expresses itself in man himself. Goethe writes to Jacobi: "God has punished you with metaphysics and put a stake in your flesh, but blessed me with physics... I hold firmly and more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave to you everything that you call and must call religion. You hold to faith in God, I to seeing." What Goethe wants to see is the essence of things expressed in his world of ideas. The mystic also wants to recognize the essence of things by immersing himself in his own inner being; but he rejects the world of ideas, which is clear and transparent in itself, as unsuitable for the attainment of a higher knowledge. He believes that he must develop not his faculty of ideas but other inner powers in order to see the primal causes of things. It is usually vague sensations and feelings in which the mystic believes he grasps the essence of things. But feelings and sensations only belong to the subjective nature of man. They do not express anything about things. Only in the ideas of natural law do the things themselves speak. Mysticism is a superficial view of the world, even though the mystics give themselves much credit for their "depth" compared to rational people. They know nothing about the nature of feelings, otherwise they would not regard them as expressions of the essence of the world; and they know nothing about the nature of ideas, otherwise they would not regard them as shallow and rationalistic. They have no idea what people who really have ideas experience in them. But for many, ideas are just words. They cannot assimilate the infinite abundance of their content. No wonder they find their own unimaginative words empty.

Those who seek the essential content of the objective world in their own inner being can also only relocate the essence of the moral world order in human nature itself. Whoever believes that there is an otherworldly reality behind human nature must also seek the source of morality in it. For the moral in the higher sense can only come from the essence of things. The believer in the beyond therefore accepts moral commandments to which man must submit. These commandments either come to him by way of revelation, or they enter his consciousness as such, as is the case with Kant's categorical imperative. Nothing is said about how this comes from the otherworldly "in itself" of things into our consciousness. It is simply there, and we have to submit to it.

Goethe allows the moral to emerge from the natural world of man. It is not objective norms or the mere world of instinct that guides moral action, but the natural instincts of animal life that have become moral ideas, through which man gives himself direction. He follows them because he loves them as one loves a child. He wants their realization and stands up for them because they are part of his own being. The idea is the guiding principle; and love is the driving force in Goethe's ethics. For him, "duty is where one loves what one commands oneself" (Proverbs in prose).

Action in the sense of Goethean ethics is naturally conditioned, but ethically free. For man is dependent on nothing but his own ideas. And he is responsible to no one but himself. In my "Philosophy of Freedom" I have already refuted the cheap objection that the consequence of a moral world order in which everyone obeys only himself must be the general disorder and disharmony of human action. Anyone who raises this objection overlooks the fact that people are similar beings and that they will therefore never produce moral ideas which, due to their essential differences, will cause disharmony.