18. Thoughts on Goethe's Literary Estate

It is one of the peculiarities of genius that it sketches out in broad outline the plan of the development of culture, the details of which are left to the following generation. Long periods of time must often elapse before the world arrives in a roundabout way at a full understanding of what an individual has created at the height of his intellectual culture. And whenever a seed planted by a leading genius of education is ripe to bear fruit for posterity, the latter returns to that leader to confront him once again.

The numerous proclamations that continually emerge from all parts of educated Europe with regard to Goethe are to be understood as such disputes. It is increasingly felt that the further one has come in education, the more one has to learn from Goethe. The branch of culture that has demonstrated this most vividly in recent decades is probably natural science. Numerous researchers who had arrived at some truth literally felt their consciences relieved when they found a clue that Goethe's view of the question they had raised was similar to their own. The chapter "Goethe and Natural Science" has been on the agenda for a long time and would undoubtedly remain so for an unforeseeable period if it were not for the extraordinary circumstance that the publications of the Goethe Archive have now considerably enriched our knowledge in this field. Since the latter is to a large extent the case, however, the discussion of the relevant questions will enter a new stage in the near future.

The author of these lines already drew the attention of the readers of the Goethe Chronicle some time ago to the expected enrichment of our knowledge of Goethe in this direction. The studies he resumed a few months ago in the Goethe Archive have not only strengthened his conviction, but have also increased his experience in this field by many a valuable piece. The high owner of the Goethe treasures, the Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony, has now graciously allowed him, in agreement with the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archive, Prof. Suphan, to use the results of his research for the preliminary orientation of the public, which circumstance also makes this essay possible.

The maxim on which contemporary natural science places particular emphasis is that it wants to obtain all its results by means of observation. Nothing should be considered true that does not owe its origin to experience, to empiricism. It is not the place here to go into a comprehensive examination of the correctness of the viewpoint thus characterized. However, we must draw the attention of our readers to one thing, because it is of fundamental importance for the assessment of Goethe's scientific way of thinking. We mean the precise answer to the question: what actually is observation? What is experience? - If I present any proposition of science as the result of experience, I have not thereby indicated an objective characteristic of this proposition, but only the way in which the researcher arrived at it. I have said nothing about the thing itself, but only something about the relation of the observing man to things. He who recommends to me the strict observance of the principle of experience tells me nothing more than how I should act in order to arrive at correct results. He must leave the nature of these results themselves completely undetermined. For it lies in his demand that I should obtain information about their nature from the things themselves, that I should open my faculty of perception freely to the influence of the world and allow the objects to approach me. Then they themselves should reveal to me what is recognizable to me in them.

This principle is immediately contradicted if one claims, based on the demand of strict empirical science, that because the world is only recognizable through experience, it must therefore have these or those properties. Anyone who allows the principle of experience to push them towards materialism, atomism and so on is overstepping the boundaries they have set for themselves.

Among those researchers who have kept strictly within these boundaries is Goethe. But how is it that his views often differ considerably from those of the so-called pure empiricists? The latter, after all, reject the standpoint of idealism, and this is Goethe's standpoint. Is the demand of experience at all compatible with idealism? We answer: yes, if the empiricist knows how to observe not only with the senses of the body, but also with those of the mind. Just as the eye produces colors and forms, just as the ear produces sounds, so the mind produces ideas as results of experience.

This is a contradiction, we hear from the empiricists. Ideas can never be the object of experience, because they are not contained in the outside world, but only in us, in our soul. So say the representatives of experience, without realizing that they are committing a tremendous inconsistency. What entitles me to say that only that which can be perceived with the external sense organs belongs to the things of the external world? The objects can never reveal themselves to me in their entire content if I prescribe to them that they may have no other qualities than those which my physical organs allow me to recognize. The principle of experience demands that I hold up everything that is in me to the objects in order to explore their essence in all its aspects. But the sensory faculty of perception is only one side of man's being. And Goethe cannot accept as a true researcher someone who condemns himself from the outset to knowing only half of things because he claims that only half of his being provides him with the truth. Only in the unfolding of all our powers of cognition does the essence of things reveal itself to us, in Goethe's view, insofar as it is recognizable to us at all.

Whoever devotes himself in a one-sided way merely to thinking, to the development of our conceptual faculty, his scientific views are empty, devoid of content, they bear the character of the superfluous, because they flee the very area into whose riddle they are supposed to introduce us; He who trusts only in the senses, who seeks nothing but what they deliver to him, suffers from spiritual blindness; he gropes around at the objects without knowing the thread that leads him into the interior, where the apparent lack of rules reveals itself to him as lawful order. For Goethe, the true scientific spirit manifests itself in the fact that it continually alternates between sensual perception and thinking reflection. Just as inhalation and exhalation sustain life, so the to and fro movement of the mind between spreading out over the mass of the sensory world and drawing it back to the lawful sources of this multiplicity sustains proper research. Indeed, all scientific activity is ultimately only comprehensible to Goethe as such a vital human activity. Theories and hypotheses are dead in themselves; they only gain life when they dominate the mind like systole and diastole.¹ Goethe is not concerned with the results, but with coming closer to creative nature through the living power of the spirit. This cannot be achieved by those who are content with finished, dead knowledge, but only by those who creatively bring this dead material to life within themselves and thus bring forth within that which, apart from themselves, nature can become. For Goethe, the highest thing is not what man is able to gather from the world, but how he comes to terms with it in order to fill his spirit with true-to-life world content.

Whoever does not succeed in allowing things to affect him in such a way that the world within him is as alive, as active and thoroughly effective as the world outside us, where there is no part that is not affected by innumerable forces, has not done enough in Goethe's sense of the principle of experience.

What appears to be at rest in the world, to have become, to have solidified, is empty appearance, is only the superficial result of eternal becoming and working. But this apparent rest is the object of the senses, this becoming and working is revealed in the idea.² And so the idea is the result of experience. Of course, it only reveals itself to those who are not satisfied with superficial experience. Goethe never had any other view of the results of his scientific research than that he arrived at them by way of observation. But from the moment when he was urged by Schiller to reflect on the character of his experiences, it became ever clearer to him that his whole endeavor was only a search for ideas as the highest forms in which reality expresses itself.³ This conviction became more and more apparent to us as we tried to visualize the path that this genius took in the scientific field by means of Goethe's papers that he left behind. No observation remains isolated; other related observations are always added to it in order to move beyond the "what" to the "how", beyond the individual to the whole, to ascend from knowledge to perception. Goethe is never directly interested in experiences as they are in themselves, but always as a question to nature. Anyone who immerses themselves in these notes will see an idea behind every single note, which in Goethe's mind always works its way out of the indeterminate into the more definite.

Those who thus follow the signs on the paper, which express clearly enough how ideas arise in Goethe through constant contact with the world, will also understand what it means: idealism is entirely compatible with empirical science. For idealism is nothing other than the whole of experience, the sum of all that it is possible for us to know of things, whereas what empiricists usually make the object of their science is only half experience, the summands without the sum. Francis Bacon, the famous English philosopher, once said that scientific research is a task of addition; but he did not get any further than an instruction on how to set up the individual items; how to find the sum remained hidden from him because he considered the senses to be the only mediators of experience and did not know that reason has the same claim to this title. Goethe also established the latter in its rights and thus fulfilled a high mission. The senses are wonderful messengers of the external world when the spirit understands the manifestations of their ideal meaning which they bring it; but their writings are worthless if we merely stare at what we should read. Anyone who claims that there is nothing to read will be answered by all those who went to school with Goethe: don't look for the reason in the things of this world, but in yourself.