11. Goethe's way of Thinking in Relation to Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel

These lines vividly illustrate the profound contrast between Goethe's way of thinking and Kant's philosophy. With judgments like: Goethe was not receptive to philosophy and the like, it is not at all dismissed there. The correct thing is that an essentially different philosophy than the Kantian one was inherent in Goethe's way of thinking. Thus it happened that Goethe always misunderstood Kant's statements and when he thought he was speaking of Kantian philosophy, he had something completely different in mind than the latter. It was not his gift for poetry and not his common sense that prevented him, but only that his view of the world is exactly the opposite pole of Kant's.

In the Critique of Judgment, too, it is not Kant's own findings that attract the poet, but rather things that were essential to Goethe's thinking, but which, in the sense of Kantian philosophy, are either insignificant externalities or forced assumptions by Kant. The juxtaposition of aesthetic and teleological judgment in the Critique of Judgment is of the latter kind. What is the principle of all research in Goethe, indeed the principle of all intellectual activity: the inner sufficiency, the self-contained totality of the natural beings under consideration, Kant found it only in a [illegible word] human activity in the aesthetic production and contemplation of a work of art [and] the teleological observation of nature. And that only by breaking – as Hegel already noted – the strict framework of his philosophy and actually founding an aesthetics and teleology in an inconsistent way.

Goethe was not simply dismissive of Fichte. Those familiar with Fichte's philosophy must also admit that Fichte has far more points of contact with Goethe than with Kant. In the Annalen, Goethe is indignant about him:

He was one of the most capable personalities one had ever seen, and there was nothing wrong with his attitudes in a higher regard; but how could he have kept pace with the world that he regarded as his acquired property?

And what he, G., says in 1797 at the gate of the University of Jena: where “the interaction of talented people and fortunate circumstances would be worthy of the most faithful and vivid description,” he first mentions Fichte, who “gave a new presentation of the theory of science in the philosophical journal.” Also significant is what he wrote to Fichte on June 24, 1794, after Fichte had sent him the first sheets of the Theory of Science:

What has been sent contains nothing that I do not understand or at least believe I understand, nothing that does not readily connect with my usual way of thinking.

When Goethe's relationship to Schelling is discussed, it is only Schelling's first philosophical thesis that can be considered. As for the mystical period of Schelling's philosophy, there are neither historical points of contact nor, at least initially, any similarities. Schelling's natural philosophy does contain something of Goethe's way of thinking. The creative principle that Schelling posits as the basis of nature, which permeates all of nature as an active force, is also characteristic of Goethe. It is therefore clear that Goethe's ideas were clarified in his discussions with Schelling, that many of them took on a more definite form. But the German philosopher who understood Goethe best is likely to be Hegel. He not only regarded Goethe's scientific way of thinking as justified, but, if one disregards Hegel's peculiar mental disposition, which above all lacks cases in which everything develops according to the logical side, Hegel's philosophical way of thinking is likely to be closer to Goethe's than to that of any other German philosopher. The Humboldt brothers, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt, also had much in common with Goethean research in their way of thinking. We need only think of the words with which Goethe greeted Alexander von Humboldt's Physiognomy of Plants in 1806: “Now that Linnaeus has developed an alphabet of plant forms and left us a convenient-to-use directory; now that Jussieu has already organized the whole in a more natural way , and ingenious men with and without eyesight continue to define the distinguishing characteristics in great detail, and philosophy promises us a lively unity of a higher view: So here the man, to whom the plant forms distributed over the earth's surface are present in living groups and masses, is already hastening to take the last step and indicating how what has been individually recognized, seen, and observed can be appropriated by the mind in all its splendor and abundance, and how the woodpile that has been piled and smoking for so long can be brought to life by an aesthetic breath into a bright flame."

Goethe was, however, unable to come to terms with another of A. v. Humboldt's views, namely his volcanism. We will have more to say about this later. The extent to which Goethe's thinking was related to that of W. v. Humboldt can be seen from the fact that [text breaks off]