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

But not much is accomplished by this distinguishing between what is conscious and what is unconscious. For that is, after all, only a distinction for my consciousness. But one must grapple with the idea in all its objectivity, in all its fullness of content; one must consider not only that the idea is at work unconsciously, but also what this working element is. If Hartmann had stopped at the fact that the idea is unconscious and if he had explained the world out of this unconscious element—that is, out of a one-sided characteristic of the idea—then he would have added a new uniform system to the many systems that derive the world from some abstract formal principle or other. And one cannot declare his first main work to be entirely free of this uniformity. But Eduard von Hartmann's spirit works too intensively, too comprehensively and penetratingly, for him not to have recognized that the idea cannot be grasped merely as something unconscious; rather, one must in fact go deeply into what one has to address as unconscious, must go beyond this characteristic to its concrete content and derive from it the world of individual phenomena. In this way, Hartmann transformed himself from the abstract monist, which he still is in his Philosophy of the Unconscious, into a concrete monist. And it is the concrete idea that Goethe addresses in the three forms: archetypal phenomenon, typus, and “idea in the narrower sense.”