Goethe, the Observer, and Schiller, the Thinker

The creations of Goethe and Schiller during their time as friends are among the most beautiful blossoms of human intellectual life. However, this friendship only came about because both men overcame serious inner obstacles that kept their souls apart. These obstacles can be seen in the conversation reported by Goethe, which the two had when they had once come from a lecture on the plant world that had taken place at the Naturalists' Society in Jena. Schiller found that the lecture was unsatisfactory because the individual plant forms were juxtaposed without the context becoming apparent in the consideration. Goethe replied that he had such a context in mind in his Urpflanze (primordial plant), which contains what lives as the essence in all individual plants. This “Urpflanze” does not resemble a single plant; but it makes every plant understandable from this primordial form that underlies the entire plant kingdom. Goethe sketched this primal form with a few characteristic strokes in front of Schiller's eyes. Schiller replied: but that is not an experience, that is an idea. Goethe, however, insisted that for him such an idea was at the same time an experience (observation), and that if one called such an idea an idea, he perceived his ideas with his eyes. From Goethe's description of the conversation, it is clear that the two of them had not yet been able to reconcile their opinions.

Goethe felt justified in addressing what formed itself in his mind about the things of nature in the form of ideas, as a result of observation, as he did, for example, about the red color of the rose. For him, science was spirit-filled and yet at the same time the objective result of observation. Schiller could not come to terms with such a view. For him, it was clear that man must first form the ideas out of himself if he wanted to combine the results of observation, which were only given as details. Goethe felt at home in nature with his spiritual content, while Schiller felt out of touch with nature with the same content.

Anyone who follows the course of their friendship from their correspondence will see how it deepened as Schiller came to understand Goethe's way of looking at things. He came to accept the objective rule of the spirit in the creations of nature, which was something that Goethe took for granted. It may be said that Schiller was the first to separate from Goethe the view that man stands outside nature and that when he speaks about nature, he adds something to it. Goethe was never unclear about the fact that in man nature expresses its essence as spiritual content itself, if man only puts himself in the right relationship to it.

For Goethe, the essence of nature lives in man as knowledge. And human knowledge is for him a revelation of the essence of nature. For Goethe, the process of knowledge is not merely a formal reflection of a hidden essence in nature, but the real manifestation of that which would not exist in nature at all without the human spirit. Nevertheless, for him, the spirit is the true content of nature itself, because he conceives of knowledge as the human soul immersing itself in nature. Schiller initially found it difficult to reconcile this with his Kantianism. And he had adopted this Kantianism; Goethe never found anything in Kant's view that could come close to his way of thinking.

In the feeling of Goethe's artistic creations, Schiller found himself in his way of thinking and approached Goethe more and more. In the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” one sees Schiller's striving to bring Goethe's artistic experience to full understanding. After he had reformed himself in this direction, he came to recognize in the artistic experience of the world the only human state of mind in which one could be a true human being in the full sense of the word. And so, for him, science became a way of experiencing the world in which man could not reveal himself in his entirety.

Goethe, on the other hand, wanted a science that, in its own way, would bring out the whole person just as art does in its own. Schiller first had to work his way towards such a view. He did so, and in doing so, his spiritual community with Goethe was placed on the right footing. Goethe, in turn, approached Schiller in that Schiller provided him with the intellectual justification for his way of thinking. He himself could not have arrived at this, for he lived in this way before the bond of friendship, as in something self-evident, which had not even occurred to him as a problem. Schiller was able to enrich Goethe's soul by showing him how it could become a self-aware mystery and search for the solution to it.

Schiller gave Goethe the incentive to continue his Faust. The “Prologue in Heaven” was created directly from this stimulus. If you compare this with one of the oldest Faust scenes, where Faust turns away from the spirit of the great world and towards the spirit of the earth, you can see the turnaround in Goethe. Before, the turning away from the intellectual content of the great world; after, the pictorial representation of the same. In the stimulus of thought that Schiller had given, lay for Goethe the germ of the artistic image of man's life in the world-spirit before the eye of the soul. Before, he was unable to do this because he accepted this life as something only felt as a matter of course, without forming it inwardly.

For posterity, it will always be significant to be able to learn to see Goethe's essence with the eye of the soul through Schiller; to see Goethe's essence fully unfold in a certain period of his life in the stimuli that emanate from Schiller.

The sense of the obstacles that both had to overcome in order to come together, and the other of the way in which they ultimately complemented each other, provides an impulse for the deepest soul observations. In doing so, however, he also penetrates to one of the most important points in the workings of the spirit in the development of humanity.