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

Thus the Goethean world view offers many points of reference for philosophical elaboration. But these were initially taken up only by the pupils of Hegel. The rest of philosophy took a stand of dignified rejection toward the Goethean view. Only Schopenhauer bases himself in many respects upon the poet, whom he values highly. We will speak in a later chapter about his apologetic of the colour theory. Here it is a matter of describing the general relationship of Schopenhauer's teachings to Goethe.[^2] In one point the Frankfurt philosopher comes close to Goethe. Schopenhauer rejects, namely, any deriving from outer causes of the phenomena given us and admits the validity only of an inner lawfulness, of a deriving of one phenomenon from another. This seems to be the same as the Goethean principle of taking the data for an explanation from the things themselves; but only seemingly. Schopenhauer wants to remain in the realm of phenomena because he believes we cannot attain in knowledge the “in-itself” lying outside this realm, since all the phenomena given us are only mental pictures[^3] and our ability to make mental pictures never takes us outside our consciousness; Goethe, on the other hand, wants to remain within the phenomena, because he in fact seeks within the phenomena themselves the data needed for their explanation.