34. On Goethe and the 1830 Dispute Between Scholars

Goethe did not expect any political revolution to happen. He knew that the world of ideas, which still dominated European humanity at the time, was outdated and overripe. The old forms of government and life went together with the old world of thought and feeling. There was a thirst for freedom, a desire to break out of the old forms of life and society; but it could not be done because in feeling and in thinking people still lived deeply in the traditional conceptions.

Hegel was the right philosopher for this old world view. In the Prussian state, this world view found its corresponding realization.

It was not the political revolutions that overthrew the old sentiments; they do not truly revolutionize. And more important than bloodshed and bayonets for the progress of humanity are the spiritual revolutions.

That such a revolution was announced in the French dispute was felt by Goethe. And he felt it because he himself, in his youth, had confronted the dying ideas with the ideas of the new world order. What Geoffroy proclaimed in France, Goethe proclaimed in Germany 40-50 years earlier.

Goethe felt the need for a worldview. The urge for knowledge dominated his entire being. But it was not the urge for knowledge as most researchers see it. That is something that is learned.

Goethe's personality strove for the all-round development of the personality. Nothing should be missing that belongs to the individual in order to be a whole person. The great fundamental question belongs to this personal wholeness: what is man's relationship to the world? What is his task? How can he fulfill his mission? What is his responsibility? Can he set his own tasks; or does he have to comply with the decrees of a higher being?

Goethe would have liked to have had contemporary philosophers teach him about these questions. He could not find anyone who could have given him an answer to the questions of knowledge that he had to ask. What the philosophers could tell him contradicted his nature. He did not understand his surroundings. This lack of understanding of his surroundings is vividly illustrated in [text breaks off]