Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings
GA 1
Translated by Steiner Online Library
11. The Relationship Between Goethe's Way of Thinking and Other Views
[ 1 ] When we speak of the influence of earlier or contemporary thinkers on the development of Goethe’s mind, this cannot be understood to mean that he formed his views on the basis of their teachings. The way he was compelled to think, the way he viewed the world, was preformed in the very structure of his nature. Indeed, it was present in his being from his earliest youth. In this respect, he remained consistent throughout his entire life. There are primarily two significant character traits to consider here. The first is the urge toward the sources, toward the depths of all being. Ultimately, it is a belief in the Idea. Goethe is constantly filled with a sense of something higher and better. One might call this a deeply religious trait of his spirit. He does not share the need felt by so many to bring things down to their level by stripping them of all that is sacred. But he has the opposite need: to sense something higher and to work his way up toward it. He seeks to discover in every thing an aspect that makes it sacred to us. K. J. Schröer has demonstrated this most insightfully in relation to Goethe’s attitude toward love. Everything frivolous and careless is cast aside, and for Goethe, love becomes a form of piety. This fundamental trait of his character is most beautifully expressed in his own words:
“Within our pure hearts there stirs a longing,
To voluntarily surrender ourselves to a higher, purer, unknown being
Out of gratitude.
We call it: being devout!”
[ 2 ] This aspect of his nature is now [Trilogy of Passion 1: Elegy] inseparably linked to another. He never seeks to approach this Higher Reality directly; he always seeks to draw near to it through nature. “The True is godlike; it does not appear directly; we must deduce it from its manifestations” (“Prose Sayings”; Natural Writings, Vol. 4, Part 2, p. 378). Alongside his belief in the Idea, Goethe also holds the belief that we gain the Idea through contemplation of reality; it does not occur to him to seek the deity anywhere other than in the works of nature, but he seeks to discern their divine aspect everywhere. When, in his boyhood, he erects an altar to the great God who “stands in direct connection with nature” (“Poetry and Truth,” Part 1, Book 1), this cult already springs decisively from the belief that we attain the highest we can reach by faithfully cultivating our relationship with nature. Thus, Goethe possessed that way of viewing the world—which we have justified epistemologically—as an innate quality. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is merely a manifestation of the Idea, which we attain only when we elevate sensory experience to spiritual contemplation. This conviction was inherent in him, and from his youth onward he viewed the world on the basis of this premise. No philosopher could have given him this conviction. That, then, is not what Goethe sought in the philosophers. It was something else. Even though his way of viewing things lay deep within his nature, he still needed a language to express it. His nature operated philosophically—that is, in such a way that it could only be articulated in philosophical formulas and justified only on the basis of philosophical premises. And in order to bring to clear consciousness what he was, and to know what for him was living action , he looked to the philosophers. He sought from them an explanation and justification of his nature. That is his relationship to the philosophers. To this end, he studied Spinoza in his youth and later engaged in scholarly discussions with his philosophical contemporaries. In his younger years, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to express his own nature most fully. It is remarkable that he first became acquainted with both thinkers through works critical of them and, despite this circumstance, recognized how their teachings aligned with his own nature. We see this point corroborated particularly in his relationship to Giordano Bruno’s teachings. He first encountered Bruno in Bayle’s dictionary, where Bruno is fiercely attacked. And he was so deeply impressed by him that in those parts of *Faust* which, according to their conception, date from around 1770—when he was reading Bayle—we find linguistic echoes of Bruno’s statements (see *Goethe-Jahrbuch*, Vol. VII, Frankfurt am Main, 1886). In his *Tag- und Jahres-Hefte* (Daily and Annual Notebooks), the poet recounts that he returned to studying Giordano Bruno in 1812. Once again, the impression was profound, and in many of the poems written after that year, we recognize echoes of the philosopher from Nola. However, none of this should be taken to mean that Goethe borrowed or learned anything from Bruno; he merely found in Bruno the means to articulate what had long been inherent in his own nature. He found that he could express his innermost self most clearly when he did so using the words of that thinker. Bruno regards universal reason as the creator and guide of the universe. He calls it the inner artist, who shapes matter and forms it from within . It is the cause of all that exists, and there is no being in whose existence it does not lovingly share. “No matter how small and minute a thing may be, it contains within itself a part of spiritual substance” (Giordano Bruno, On the Cause, etc., ed. by A. Lasson, Heidelberg 1882). This was, after all, Goethe’s view as well: that we can only judge a thing once we see how it has been placed in its proper place by universal reason, how it has come to be precisely what it appears to us as. If we perceive through the senses, that is not enough, for the senses do not tell us how a thing relates to the universal idea of the world, what it signifies for the greater whole. We must therefore look in such a way that our reason creates an ideal foundation upon which what the senses convey to us then appears; we must, as Goethe puts it, see with the eyes of the spirit . To express this conviction as well, he found a formula in Bruno: “For just as we do not perceive colors and sounds with one and the same sense, so too do we not see the substrate of the arts and the substrate of nature with one and the same eye,” because we “see that one with the sensory eyes and this one with the eye of reason ” (see Lasson, p. 77). And with Spinoza it is no different. Spinoza’s doctrine is based, after all, on the fact that the Deity has been absorbed into the world. Human knowledge can therefore only aim to immerse itself in the world in order to recognize God. Any other path to God must seem impossible to a person who thinks consistently in the spirit of Spinozism. For God has renounced any independent existence of His own; He is nowhere except in the world. But we must seek Him where He is. All true knowledge must therefore be such that, in every aspect of our understanding of the world, it imparts to us a portion of our understanding of God. Knowledge at its highest level is thus a union with the Divinity. We call this intuitive knowledge. We perceive things “sub specie aeternitatis,” that is, as emanations of the Divinity. The laws that our mind recognizes in nature, are therefore God in His essence, not merely created by Him. What we recognize as a logical necessity is so because the essence of the Divinity—that is, eternal lawfulness—inhabits it. This was a view in keeping with Goethe’s spirit. His firm belief that nature, in all its workings, reveals something divine to us was expressed here in the clearest terms. “I hold fast—and ever more firmly—to the atheist’s (Spinoza’s) worship of God,” he wrote to Jacobi when the latter sought to cast Spinoza’s doctrine in a different light. [WA 7, 214] Herein lies the affinity between Goethe and Spinoza. And if, in the face of this deep, inner harmony between Goethe’s nature and Spinoza’s teachings, one repeatedly emphasizes only the purely superficial—namely, that Goethe was drawn to Spinoza because, like him, he would not tolerate final causes in the explanation of the world—this testifies to a superficial assessment of the situation. The fact that Goethe, like Spinoza, rejected final causes was merely a consequence of their views. One need only clearly consider the theory of final causes. A thing is explained in terms of its existence and nature by demonstrating its necessity for another. One shows that this thing is of such-and-such a nature because that other thing is such-and-such. This presupposes the existence of a principle of the universe that stands above both entities and arranges them so that they fit together. But if the ground of the world is inherent in every thing, then this mode of explanation makes no sense. For then the nature of a thing must appear to us as a consequence of the principle active within it. We will seek in the nature of a thing the reason why it is so and not otherwise. If we believe that the divine is inherent in every thing, then it would not occur to us to seek an external principle to explain its regularity. Goethe’s relationship to Spinoza can also be understood in no other way than that in Spinoza he found the formulas, the scientific language, to express the world lying within him..
[ 3 ] Turning now to Goethe’s relationship with the philosophers of his time, we must first and foremost discuss Kant . Kant is generally regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. In his day, he sparked such a powerful movement that it was essential for every educated person to engage with his ideas. For Goethe, too, this engagement became a necessity. Yet it could not prove fruitful for him. For there is a profound contrast between what Kantian philosophy teaches and what we recognize as the Goethean way of thinking. Indeed, one might even say that the entire spectrum of German thought runs along two parallel lines: one steeped in the Kantian way of thinking, and another that is close to Goethean thought. But as philosophy today moves ever closer to Kant, it distances itself from Goethe, and with that, our era is increasingly losing the opportunity to comprehend and appreciate the Goethean worldview. Let us set forth the main tenets of Kant’s doctrine here insofar as they are relevant to Goethe’s views. For Kant, the starting point of human thought is experience—that is, the world as given to the senses (which includes the inner sense that conveys to us psychological, historical, and other such facts). This is a multiplicity of things in space and of processes in time. It makes no difference that I encounter this particular thing or experience that particular process; it could just as easily be otherwise. I can, in fact, conceive of the entire multiplicity of things and processes as nonexistent. But what I cannot conceive of as nonexistent is space and time. For me, there can be nothing that is not spatial or temporal. Even if there were a thing without space or time, I could know nothing of it, for I cannot conceive of anything without space and time. Whether space and time belong to things themselves, I do not know; I only know that things must appear to me in these forms. Space and time are thus the preconditions of my sensory perception. I know nothing of the thing-in-itself; I only know how it must appear to me if it is to exist for me. With these sentences, Kant introduces a new problem. He presents a new question in science. Instead of asking, as earlier philosophers did, “What are things like?”, he asks: “How must things appear to us in order for them to become the object of our knowledge?” For Kant, philosophy is the science of the conditions of possibility of the world as a human phenomenon. We know nothing about the thing-in-itself. We have not yet fulfilled our task when we reach the sensory perception of a multiplicity in time and space. We strive to synthesize this multiplicity into a unity. And that is the task of the understanding. The understanding is to be conceived as a sum of activities whose purpose is to synthesize the sensory world according to certain forms pre-established within it. It synthesizes two sensually given perceptions by, for example, designating one as cause and the other as effect, or one as substance and the other as property, and so on. Here, too, it is the task of philosophical science to show under what conditions the understanding succeeds in forming a system of the world. Thus, in Kant’s sense, the world is essentially a subjective phenomenon that appears in the forms of the sensory world and the understanding. The only thing that is certain is that there is a thing-in-itself; how it appears to us depends on our constitution. It is also natural, then, that it makes no sense to ascribe to that world—which the understanding has formed in conjunction with the senses—any significance other than its significance for our cognitive faculties. This becomes clearest when Kant speaks of the significance of the world of ideas. For him, ideas are nothing but higher perspectives of reason, from which the lower units created by the understanding are comprehended. For example, the intellect brings the phenomena of the soul into a context; reason, as the faculty of ideas, then grasps this context as if everything originated from a single soul. But this has no significance for the matter itself; it is merely a means of orientation for our cognitive faculties. This is the content of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, insofar as it may be of interest to us here. One immediately recognizes in it the opposite pole of Goethe’s philosophy. According to Kant, given reality is determined by ourselves; it is as it is because we conceive of it that way. Kant skips over the actual epistemological question. At the outset of his Critique of Reason, he takes two steps that he does not justify, and his entire philosophical edifice suffers from this flaw. He immediately establishes the distinction between object and subject without asking what significance it actually has when the mind separates these two realms of reality (here, the knowing subject and the object to be known). He then seeks to establish the mutual relationship between these two realms conceptually , again without asking what purpose such a determination serves. Had he not misjudged the central epistemological question, he would have realized that the distinction between subject and object is merely a transitional stage in our cognition, that both are grounded in a deeper unity comprehensible to reason, and that what is attributed to a thing as a property, insofar as it is conceived in relation to a cognizing subject, by no means has merely subjective validity. The thing is a unity of reason, and the distinction between a “thing-in-itself” and a “thing-for-us” is a product of the understanding. It is therefore not valid to say that what is attributed to a thing in one respect can be denied to it in another. For whether I consider the same thing from this perspective at one time or from that perspective at another, it is, after all, a unified whole.
[ 4 ] A mistake that runs through Kant’s entire body of thought is that he regards sensory diversity as something fixed, and that he believes science consists in organizing this diversity into a system. He does not even suspect that this diversity is not an ultimate reality that one must overcome in order to comprehend it; and therefore, for him, all theory is merely an adjunct that brings understanding and reason into contact with experience. For him, the idea is not what appears to reason as the deeper ground of the given world once it has overcome the diversity lying on the surface, but merely a methodological principle by which reason arranges phenomena for the sake of a clearer overview. We would be completely mistaken, according to Kant’s view, if we regarded things as derivable from the idea; in his view, we can only organize our experiences as if they originated from a single unity. According to Kant, we have no conception of the ground of things, of the “in itself.” Our knowledge of things exists only in relation to us; it is valid only for our individuality. Goethe could not gain much from this view of the world. For him, the consideration of things in relation to us always remained entirely secondary—concerning the effect of objects on our feelings of pleasure and displeasure; he demands more from science than merely a description of how things are in relation to us. In the essay “The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject” (Natw. Schr., Vol. 2, p. 10ff.), the researcher’s task is defined: He is to derive the standard for knowledge and the data for judgment not from himself, but from the realm of the things he observes. This single sentence characterizes the profound contrast between Kantian and Goethean modes of thought. Whereas for Kant, all judgment about things is merely a product of the subject and object and provides only knowledge of how the subject views the object, for Goethe the subject selflessly merges with the object and derives the data for judgment from the realm of things. Goethe therefore says of Kant’s students themselves: “They heard me well, but could not reply to me, nor be of any help.” [Natw. Schr., Vol. 2, p. 29] The poet believed he had gained more from Kant’s *Critique of Judgment*..
[ 5 ] Goethe was influenced philosophically by Schiller far more than by Kant. Indeed, it was Schiller who truly helped him take a step forward in understanding his own way of seeing the world. Up until that famous first conversation with Schiller, Goethe* had cultivated a certain way of viewing the world. He had observed plants, posited a primordial plant as their basis, and derived the individual forms from it. This primordial plant (and also a corresponding primordial animal) had taken shape in his mind and served him well in explaining the relevant phenomena. However, he had never reflected on what this primordial plant actually was in its essence. Schiller opened his eyes by telling him: it is an idea. From this point on, Goethe became aware of his own idealism. He therefore referred to the primordial plant as an “experience” up until that conversation, because he believed he could see it with his own eyes. In the introduction added later to the essay on the metamorphosis of the plant, however, he says: “So I now sought to find the primordial animal—that is to say, ultimately, the concept, the idea of the animal...” [Natw. Schr., Vol. 1, p. 15] It should be noted, however, that Schiller did not pass on anything foreign to Goethe; rather, it was only through contemplation of Goethe’s spirit that he himself struggled to arrive at an understanding of objective idealism . He merely found the term for the mode of perception that he recognized and admired in Goethe.
[ 6 ] Goethe received little encouragement from Fichte. Fichte operated in a sphere far too alien to Goethe’s way of thinking for such encouragement to have been possible. Fichte laid the foundations for the science of consciousness in the most astute manner. He derived, in a truly exemplary manner, the activity through which the “I” transforms the given world into a conceptual one. In doing so, however, he made the mistake of conceiving this activity of the “I” not merely as one that brings the given content into a satisfying form, or that places disjointed givens into their proper contexts; he regarded it as the creation of everything that takes place within the “I.” Consequently, his doctrine appears as a one-sided idealism that derives its entire content from consciousness. Goethe, who always focused on the objective, could find little of appeal in Fichte’s philosophy of consciousness. Goethe lacked an understanding of the realm to which it applies; but the scope that Fichte gave it—he regarded it as a universal science—could only appear to the poet as an error..*
[ 7 ] Goethe had far more points of contact with the young Schelling. Schelling was a student of Fichte. However, he not only continued the analysis of the activity of the “I,” but also traced that activity within consciousness through which the latter apprehends nature . What takes place within the “I” during the cognition of nature seemed to Schelling to be, at the same time, the objective aspect of nature—the very principle within it. To him, nature outside was merely a solidified form of our concepts of nature. What lives within us as a view of nature reappears to us externally, only stretched out in space and time. What confronts us from the outside as nature is a finished product; it is merely the conditioned, the form of a living principle that has become rigid. We cannot gain this principle through external experience. We must first create it within ourselves. “To philosophize about nature means to create nature ,” says our philosopher. 94Schelling, First Draft of a System of Natural Philosophy; Jena and Leipzig 1799, p. 6. “We call nature as a mere product (natura naturata) nature as an object (all empiricism pertains solely to this). We call nature as productivity (natura naturans) nature as a subject (all theory pertains solely to this).” (Introduction to his Draft, Jena and Leipzig 1799, p. 22.) “The contrast between empiricism and science now rests precisely on the fact that the former regards its object in being as something finished and already accomplished; science, on the other hand, regards the object in becoming and as something yet to be brought about.” (Ibid., p. 20) Through this doctrine, which Goethe came to know partly from Schelling’s writings and partly through personal contact with the philosopher, the poet was raised yet another level. He now developed the view that his tendency was to progress from the finished, the product, toward the becoming, the producing. And with a clear echo of Schelling, he writes in the essay “Anschauende Urteilskraft” that his aspiration was to “make himself worthy, through the contemplation of an ever-creating nature, of spiritual participation in its productions ” (Natw. Schr., Vol. 1, p. 116).
[ 8 ] It was through Hegel, finally, that Goethe received the ultimate endorsement from philosophy. Through him, Goethe gained clarity on how what he called Urphänomen fits into philosophy. Hegel understood the significance of the Urphänomen most deeply and characterized it admirably in his letter to Goethe dated February 20, 1821, with the words: “You place the simple and abstract—which you very aptly call the ‘Urphänomen’—at the forefront, then point out the more concrete phenomena as arising from the addition of further modes of influence and circumstances, and govern the entire process in such a way that the sequence progresses from the simple conditions to the more complex ones, and arranged in such a way that what is complex now appears in all its clarity through this decomposition. To discern the primordial phenomenon, to free it from the other circumstances incidental to it—to grasp it abstractly, as we call it—this I consider a matter of great intellectual insight into nature, just as I regard that approach in general as the truly scientific method of knowledge in this field...” ... “May I now also speak to Your Excellency, etc., of the special interest that such a prominent primordial phenomenon holds for us philosophers, namely, that we can put such a specimen to direct philosophical use! For once we have worked our Absolute—which at first is oyster-like, gray, or entirely black—toward air and light, so that it has come to crave them, we need windows to bring it fully out into the light of day; our spectres would vanish into mist if we were to cast them so directly into the colorful, chaotic company of the repulsive world. Here, Your Excellency’s “primordial phenomena” come to our aid admirably; in this twilight—spiritual and comprehensible through its simplicity, visible and tangible through its sensuality—the two worlds, our abstruse realm and the world of appearing existence, greet one another...” Thus, through Hegel, the idea becomes clear to Goethe that the empirical researcher must go as far as the primordial phenomena, and that from there the philosopher’s paths lead onward. But it also follows from this that the fundamental idea of Hegel’s philosophy is a consequence of Goethe’s mode of thought. The overcoming of humanity, the immersion into it in order to ascend from the created to the creative, from the conditioned to the condition, lies at the foundation of both Goethe’s and Hegel’s thought. After all, Hegel seeks to offer nothing else in philosophy than the eternal process from which everything that is finite emerges. He seeks to recognize the given as a consequence of what he can accept as the unconditional.
[ 9 ] For Goethe, therefore, becoming acquainted with philosophers and philosophical schools of thought meant a gradual enlightenment regarding what was already within him. He gained nothing new for his worldview; he was merely given the means to speak about what he was doing and what was taking place within his soul.
[ 10 ] Goethe’s worldview thus offers ample points of reference for philosophical elaboration. However, these were initially taken up only by Hegel’s students. The rest of the philosophical community takes a decidedly dismissive stance toward Goethe’s perspective. Only Schopenhauer draws upon the poet—whom he held in high esteem—in certain respects. We will discuss his defense of the theory of colors in a later chapter. What matters here is the general relationship between Schopenhauer’s teachings and Goethe’s. 95 Dr. Adolf Harpf’s essay “Goethe and Schopenhauer” (Philos. Monatshefte 1885) is well worth reading. Harpf, who had previously written an excellent treatise on “Goethe’s Principle of Knowledge” (Philos. Monatshefte 1884), demonstrates the convergence of Schopenhauer’s “immanent dogmatism” with Goethe’s concrete knowledge. Harpf, who is himself a Schopenhauerian, fails to identify the fundamental difference between Goethe and Schopenhauer as we characterized it above. Nevertheless, Harpf’s remarks deserve our full attention. On one point, the Frankfurt philosopher comes close to Goethe. Schopenhauer, in fact, rejects any derivation of the phenomena given to us from external causes and acknowledges only an internal regularity—only the derivation of one phenomenon from another. This appears to correspond to Goethe’s principle of deriving the data for explanation from the things themselves; but it is only an appearance. For while Schopenhauer wishes to remain within the phenomenal realm—because we cannot reach the “in itself” lying outside of it through cognition, since all phenomena given to us are merely representations and our power of representation never leads us beyond our consciousness—Goethe wishes to remain within the phenomena because he seeks the data for their explanation precisely within them.
[ 11 ] In conclusion, let us compare Goethe’s worldview with the most significant scientific development of our time—the ideas of Eduard von Hartmann. This thinker’s *Philosophy of the Unconscious* is a work of the greatest historical significance. Together with Hartmann’s other writings—which expand upon the ideas outlined there in every direction and, in many respects, indeed introduce new perspectives on that magnum opus—it reflects the entire intellectual content of our time. Hartmann is distinguished by an admirable depth of thought and an astonishing mastery of the material from the various sciences. Today, he stands at the vanguard of education. One need not be his follower to acknowledge this unreservedly.
[ 12 ] His view is not as far removed from Goethe’s as one might think at first glance. Of course, anyone who has read nothing but the *Philosophy of the Unconscious* will not be able to see this. For the clear points of contact between the two thinkers only become apparent when one examines the consequences that Hartmann drew from his principles and set forth in his later writings.
[ 13 ] Hartmann’s philosophy is idealism. He does not, however, wish to be a mere idealist. However, whenever he needs something positive to explain the world, he nevertheless turns to the idea for help. And the most important thing is that he conceives of the idea as underlying everything. For his assumption of an unconscious has no other meaning than that which exists in our consciousness as an idea is not necessarily bound to this form of appearance—within consciousness. The idea is not only present (active) where it becomes conscious , but also in other forms. It is more than a mere subjective phenomenon; it has a meaning grounded in itself. It is not merely present in the subject; it is an objective principle of the world. Even though Hartmann includes the will alongside the idea among the principles constituting the world, it is nevertheless incomprehensible that there are still philosophers who regard him as a Schopenhauerian. Schopenhauer took to the extreme the view that all conceptual content is merely subjective, merely a phenomenon of consciousness. For him, there can be no question whatsoever that the Idea has participated in the constitution of the world as a real principle. For him, the will is the exclusive foundation of the world. For this reason, Schopenhauer was never able to achieve a substantive treatment of the specialized philosophical disciplines, whereas Hartmann has already traced his principles into all the particular sciences. While Schopenhauer has nothing to say about the rich content of history other than that it is a manifestation of the will, Ed. v. Hartmann is able to identify the ideal core of every single historical phenomenon and integrate it into the overall historical development of humanity. Schopenhauer cannot take an interest in the individual being or the individual phenomenon, for he knows only how to say of it the one essential thing—that it is a manifestation of the will. Hartmann takes up every particular existence and shows how the Idea can be perceived everywhere. The fundamental character of Schopenhauer’s worldview is uniformity; that of von Hartmann is unity. Schopenhauer bases his view on a contentless, uniform drive of the world, while Hartmann bases his on the rich content of the Idea. Schopenhauer takes abstract unity as his foundation; in Hartmann, we find the concrete Idea as the principle, in which unity—or rather, uniformity—is merely a property. Schopenhauer could never have created a philosophy of history or a science of religion, as Hartmann did. When Hartmann says: “Reason is the logical formal principle of the Idea, inseparably united with the will, and as such governs and determines the content of the world process without exception” (“Philosophical Questions of the Present”; Leipzig 1885, p. 27), this premise enables him to seek out, in every phenomenon we encounter in nature and history, the logical core—which, while not perceptible to the senses, is nevertheless graspable by thought—and thus to explain them. Anyone who does not accept this premise will never be able to justify why they wish to make sense of the world at all through reflection by means of ideas..
[ 14 ] With his objective idealism, Ed. v. Hartmann stands firmly on the ground of Goethe’s worldview. When Goethe says: “Everything we perceive and can speak of is merely a manifestation of the Idea” (“Prose Sayings”; Natw. Schr., Vol. 4, Part 2, p. 379), and when he asserts that human beings must develop within themselves such a capacity for knowledge that the Idea becomes as vivid to them as external perception is to the senses, he stands on that ground where the Idea is not merely a phenomenon of consciousness but an objective principle of the world; thinking is the flash in consciousness of that which objectively constitutes the world. The essential aspect of the idea is therefore not what it is for us, for our consciousness, but what it is in and of itself. For through its own essence, it underlies the world as a principle. Therefore, thinking is a becoming aware of what is in and of itself. Although, then, the Idea would not appear at all if there were no consciousness, it must nevertheless be grasped in such a way that it is not consciousness that constitutes its characteristic, but rather what it is in itself, what lies within it, to which becoming conscious adds nothing. Therefore, according to Ed. v. Hartmann, we must posit the idea—apart from becoming conscious—as the active unconscious underlying the world. This is the essential point in Hartmann’s thought: that we must seek the idea in everything that is unconscious.
[ 15 ] But distinguishing between the conscious and the unconscious doesn’t get us very far. After all, that is really just a difference for my consciousness. One must, however, tackle the idea in its objectivity, in its full content; one must not only consider that the idea is unconsciously effective, but what this effective force is. Had Hartmann stopped at the assertion that the Idea is unconscious, and had he explained the world on the basis of this unconsciousness—that is, on the basis of a one-sided characteristic of the Idea—he would have created yet another monotonous system to join the many that derive the world from some abstract formal principle. And one cannot entirely absolve his first major work of this monotony. But Ed. v. Hartmann’s mind is too intense, too comprehensive, and too profoundly compelling for him not to have recognized that the Idea must not be conceived merely as the unconscious; rather, one must delve into precisely what is referred to as the unconscious, go beyond this characteristic to its concrete content, and derive the world of individual phenomena from it. Thus, Hartmann has evolved 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 refers to among the three forms: primordial phenomenon, type, and “idea in the narrower sense.”
[ 16 ] The realization of an objective reality within our world of ideas, and the devotion to that reality that follows from this realization, is what we find in Ed. v. Hartmann’s philosophy that echoes Goethe’s worldview. Hartmann was led to this absorption in the objective idea through his philosophy of the unconscious. Since he recognized that the essence of the idea does not lie in consciousness, he had to acknowledge the latter as existing in and of itself, as something objective. The fact that he also includes the will among the constitutive principles of the world, however, distinguishes him once again from Goethe. However, where Hartmann is truly fruitful, the motif of the will does not come into play at all. The fact that he accepts it at all stems from his view of the Idea as something at rest, which, in order to come into effect, requires the impetus of the will. According to Hartmann, the will alone can never bring about the creation of the world, for it is the empty, blind urge toward existence. If it is to produce something , then the Idea must come into play, for only the Idea provides it with the content of its activity. But what are we to make of that will? It eludes us the moment we try to grasp it; for we cannot, after all, grasp that contentless, empty urge. And so it follows that everything we truly grasp of the world-principle is an idea, for what is graspable must, by definition, have content. We can only comprehend that which has content, not that which is devoid of it. If, then, we are to grasp the concept of “will” , it must necessarily appear through the content of the idea; it can only appear in and through the idea, as the form of its manifestation, never independently. What exists must have content ; there can only be a fulfilled being, not an empty one. That is why Goethe presents the idea as active , as something effective that no longer requires any impetus. For that which is rich in content cannot and must not first receive an impulse from that which is devoid of content in order to come into being. The idea must therefore, in Goethe’s sense, be understood as entelechy, that is, already as active existence; and one must first abstract from its form as an active entity if one then wishes to bring it back under the name will . The “will” motif is also completely worthless for positive science. Even Hartmann has no need for it when he approaches concrete phenomena.
[ 17 ] If we have recognized echoes of Goethe’s worldview in Hartmann’s view of nature, we find them even more significant in that philosopher’s ethics. Eduard von Hartmann believes that all striving for happiness, all pursuit of self-interest, is ethically worthless, because we can never achieve satisfaction in this way. Hartmann considers acting out of self-interest and for the sake of satisfying it to be illusory. We should grasp the task set for us in the world and act purely for the sake of this itself, through the renunciation of our own self. We should find our goal in devotion to the object, without any claim to gain anything for ourselves. This latter point, however, constitutes the fundamental feature of Goethe’s ethics. Hartmann should not have suppressed the word that expresses the character of his moral philosophy: love. 96 This is not to claim that the concept of love is not taken into account in Hartmann’s ethics. Hartmann has treated it in both phenomenal and metaphysical terms (see *Das sittliche Bewusstsein*, 2nd ed., pp. 223–247, 629–631, 641, 638–641). However, he does not regard love as the final word in ethics. To him, self-sacrificing, loving devotion to the world process does not seem to be the ultimate , but only the middle! toward redemption from the restlessness of existence and the regaining of lost, blissful peace. Where we make no personal claim, where we act only because the objective drives us, where we in fact find the motives for our action within the action itself—there we act morally. There, however, we act out of love. All self-will, everything personal must fade away there. It is characteristic of Hartmann’s powerful and wholesome spirit that, in theory—even though he initially conceived the idea in the one-sided manner of the unconscious—he nevertheless advanced to concrete idealism, and that, even though he began with pessimism in ethics, this mistaken standpoint led him to the moral doctrine of love . Hartmann’s pessimism does not, after all, have the meaning that those people ascribe to it who like to complain about the futility of our actions, because they hope to derive from it a justification for sitting idly by and accomplishing nothing. Hartmann does not stop at lamentation; he rises above any such impulse to a pure ethics. He demonstrates the worthlessness of the pursuit of happiness by revealing its fruitlessness. In doing so, he directs our attention to our own activity. That he is a pessimist at all is his error. This is perhaps still a remnant from earlier stages of his thinking. From where he stands now, he ought to realize that the empirical evidence that the unsatisfying prevails in the real world cannot justify pessimism. For the higher human being can desire nothing else but to have to achieve his own happiness. He does not want it as a gift from outside. He wants happiness solely in his own actions. Hartmann’s pessimism dissolves in the face of (Hartmann’s own) higher thinking. If the world leaves us unsatisfied, let us create the most beautiful happiness for ourselves through our actions..
[ 18 ] Thus, Hartmann’s philosophy once again serves as proof to us of how one can arrive at the same goal starting from different points of departure. Hartmann proceeds from different premises than Goethe; yet in his exposition, we encounter Goethe’s line of thought at every turn. We have elaborated on this here because our aim was to demonstrate the profound, inner solidity of Goethe’s worldview. It is so deeply rooted in the nature of the world that we must encounter its fundamental features wherever vigorous thinking penetrates to the sources of knowledge. In Goethe, everything was so fundamentally original—and nothing was a mere passing fad of the time—that even those who resist him must think in the spirit of his worldview. It is precisely in individual human beings that the eternal mystery of the world finds expression; in modern times, this is most significant in Goethe, which is why one can say quite plainly that the height of a person’s worldview today can be measured by the relationship it has to Goethe’s.”