11. Relationship of the Goethean Way of Thinking to Other Views

This side of his being, now, is inseparably connected with another one. He never seeks to approach this higher something directly; he always seeks to draw near to it through nature. “The true is like God; it does not appear directly; we must guess it from its manifestations” ( Aphorisms in Prose). Besides his belief in the idea Goethe also has the other one: that we can gain the idea by contemplating reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity anywhere else than in the works of nature, but he seeks everywhere to gain from them their divine aspect. When, in his youth, he erects an altar to the great God who “ stands in direct connection with nature” ( Poetry and Truth), this ritual definitely springs already out of a belief that we gain the highest that we can attain by a faithful fostering of our interrelationship with nature. Thus, that way of looking at things which we have validated epistemologically is innate in Goethe. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, and that we can attain this idea only when we raise sense experience into a spiritual beholding. This conviction was inherent in him, and from his youth up, he looked at the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. This is therefore not what Goethe sought from the philosophers. It was something else. Even though his way of looking at things lay deep in his nature, still he needed a language in which to express it. His nature worked in a philosophical way, i.e., in such a way that it can be expressed only in philosophical formulations and can be validated only by philosophical presuppositions. And he looked into the philosophers in order also to bring clearly to consciousness for himself what he was, in order also to know what lay in him as living activity. He sought in them an explanation and validation of his own being. That is his relationship to the philosophers. To this end, he studies Spinoza in his youth and entered later into scientific discourse with his philosophical contemporaries. In his early years, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to best express his own nature. It is remarkable that he first learned to know both thinkers from books hostile to them, and, in spite of this fact, recognized how their teachings relate to his nature. We see this substantiated especially in his relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings. He becomes acquainted with him in Bayle's dictionary, where he is vehemently attacked. And Goethe receives such a deep impression from him that, in those parts of Faust which in their conception stem from the period around 1770 when he was reading Bayle, the language echoes sentences of Bruno. In his daily and yearly notebooks the poet relates that he again occupied himself with Giordano Bruno in 1812. This time also the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we can recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this should not be taken to mean that Goethe borrowed or learned anything from Bruno; he only found in him the formulations in which to express what had lain in his own nature for a long time. He found that he could most clearly present his own inner life if he did so in the words of that thinker. Bruno regarded universal reason as the creator and director of the universe. He calls it the inner artist that forms matter and shapes it from within outward. It is the cause of everything that exists, and there is no being in whose existence it does not take a loving interest. “However small and trifling a thing may be, it still has within it a portion of spiritual substance”, (Giordano Bruno, About the Cause, etc.). That was also Goethe's view, that we first know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been set in its place by universal reason, how it has come to be precisely that which confronts us. Perceiving with the senses does not suffice, for the senses do not tell us how a thing relates to the general world idea, what it means for the great whole. There we must look in such a way that our reason creates an ideal basis on which there can then appear to us what the senses convey to us; we must, as Goethe expresses it, look with the eyes of the spirit. Even for expressing this conviction he found a formulation in Bruno: “For, just as we do not recognize colours and sounds with one and the same sense, so also we do not recognize the substratum of the arts and that of nature with one and the same eye,” because we “see the first with the physical eye and the second with the eye of reason.” And with Spinoza it is no different. Spinoza's teachings are indeed based on the fact that the divinity has merged with the world. Human knowing can therefore aim only to penetrate into the world in order to know God. Any other way of arriving at God must seem impossible to anyone thinking consistently according to Spinoza's way of thinking. For God has given up all existence of His own; outside the world He exists nowhere. But we must seek Him where He is. Any actual knowing must therefore be of such a kind that, in every piece of world knowledge, it conveys to us a piece of divine knowledge. Knowing, at its highest level, is therefore a coming together with the divinity. There we call it knowing in beholding ( anschauliches Wissen). We know things “ sub specie æternitatis,” that is, as flowing from the divinity. The laws that our spirit recognizes in nature are therefore God in His very being; they are not only made by Him. What we recognize as logical necessity is so because the being of the divinity, i.e., the eternal lawfulness, dwells within it. That was a view which is in accordance with the Goethean spirit. His own firm belief that nature, in all its doings, reveals something divine to us lay before him in Spinoza's writings in the clearest statements. “I am holding firmly and ever more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza) way of revering God,” he writes to Jacobi when the latter wanted to put the teachings of Spinoza in another light. Therein lies the relatedness of Goethe to Spinoza. And it indicates a superficial judgment of the matter when, with respect to this deep inner harmony between Goethe's nature and Spinoza's teachings, one ever and again emphasizes something purely external by saying that Goethe was drawn to Spinoza because he, like Spinoza, would not tolerate a final cause in explaining the world. The fact that Goethe, like Spinoza, rejected final causes was only one result of their views. But let us put the theory of final causes clearly before us. A thing is explained, in its existence and nature, by the fact that one demonstrates its necessity for something else. One shows that this thing is of such and such a nature because that other thing is like this or that. This presupposes that a world ground exists which stands over and above both beings and arranges them in such a way that they match each other. But if the world ground is inherent in every single thing, then this kind of explanation makes no sense. For then the nature of a thing must appear to us as the result of the principle at work within it. We will seek, within the nature of a thing, the reason why it is as it is and not different than it is. If we hold the belief that something divine is inherent in each thing, then it will not in fact occur to us to seek to explain its lawfulness by any outer principle. The relationship of Goethe to Spinoza should also not be grasped in any other way than that he found in Spinoza the formulations, the scientific language, for expressing the world lying within him.