The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Relationship of Goethe's way of Thinking to Other Views

[ 1 ] When we speak of the influence of older or contemporaneous thinkers on the development of Goethe's mind, we cannot do so in the sense that he formed his views on the basis of their teachings. The way he had to think, the way he saw the world, was predetermined in the whole disposition of his nature. It was in his nature from his earliest youth. In this respect he remained the same throughout his life. There are primarily two significant character traits that come into consideration here. The first is the urge for the sources, for the depth of all being. Ultimately, it is the belief in the idea. Goethe is always filled with the premonition of something higher and better. One might call this a deeply religious trait of his spirit. He does not know what so many people need: to draw things down to themselves, stripping them of any sacredness. But he has the other need to sense something higher and to work his way up to it. He seeks to gain a side to every thing that makes it sacred to us. K. J. Schröer has shown this in the most ingenious way with regard to Goethe's behavior in love. Everything frivolous and frivolous is stripped away and love for Goethe becomes piety. This fundamental trait of his nature is most beautifully expressed in his words:

"A striving surges in the purity of our bosom,
To a higher, purer, unknown
To give ourselves voluntarily out of gratitude.
We call it: being pious!"

[ 2 ] This side of his nature is now [Trilogy of Passion 1 Elegy] inseparably connected with another. He never seeks to approach this higher thing directly; he always seeks to approach it through nature. "The true is God-like; it does not appear directly, we have to guess it from its manifestations" ("Proverbs in Prose"; Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd dept., p. 378). In addition to the belief in the idea, Goethe also has the other belief that we gain the idea through the contemplation of reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity elsewhere than in the works of nature, but he seeks to extract their divine side 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 can attain the highest we can reach by faithfully cultivating our contact with nature. Thus Goethe's way of looking at things, which we have justified in terms of epistemology, is innate. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, which we only gain when we elevate sense experience into spiritual contemplation. This conviction lay within him, and from his youth he viewed the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. So that is not what Goethe was looking for in the philosophers. It was something else. Even if his way of looking at things lay deep in his being, he still needed a language to express it. His nature was philosophical, i.e. such that it could only be expressed in philosophical formulae, could only be justified from philosophical premises. And in order to make himself clearly aware of what he was, in order to know what was his living doing, he looked to the philosophers. He looked to them for an explanation and justification of his being. This is his relationship with the philosophers. To this end, he studied Spinoza in his youth and later entered into scientific negotiations with his philosophical contemporaries. In his youth, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to express his own nature most of all. It is curious that he first became acquainted with both thinkers from opposing writings and, despite this circumstance, recognized how their teachings related to his nature. His relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings in particular confirms this. He gets to know him from Bayle's dictionary, where he is fiercely attacked. And he receives such a deep impression from him that we find linguistic echoes of Bruno's sentences in those parts of "Faust" which, according to the conception, date from around 1770, when he read Bayle (see Goethe-Jahrbuch Bd..VII, Frankfurt/M. 1886). In the Tag- und Jahres-Hefte, the poet tells us that he had again studied Giordano Bruno in 1812. This time, too, the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this is not to be taken as if Goethe had borrowed or learned anything from Bruno; he only found in him the formula for expressing what had long been in his nature. He found that he expressed his own inner self most clearly when 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 who forms matter and shapes it from within. It is the cause of everything that exists, and there is no being in whose existence it would not lovingly take part. "Be the thing ever so small and tiny, it has in itself a part of spiritual substance" (Giordano Bruno, Von der Ursache etc., ed. by A. Lasson, Heidelberg 1882). This was also Goethe's view, that we only know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been placed in its place by common reason, how it has become precisely what it appears to us as. If we perceive with the senses, that is not enough, for the senses do not tell us how a thing is connected with the general idea of the world, what it has to mean for the great whole. We must look in such a way that our reason creates an ideal ground for us, on which then appears to us what the senses deliver to us; we must, as Goethe puts it, look with the eyes of the spirit. He also found a formula in Bruno to express this conviction: "For just as we do not recognize colors and sounds with one and the same sense, so we also do not see the substrate of the arts and the substrate of nature with one and the same eye", because we "see this with the sensory eyes and that with the eye of reason" (see Lasson p. 77). And with Spinoza it is no different. Spinoza's teaching is based on the fact that the Godhead has merged into the world. Human knowledge can therefore only aim to immerse itself in the world in order to recognize God. Any other way of reaching God must appear impossible to a person who thinks consistently in the sense of Spinozism. For God has given up all existence of his own; he is nowhere apart from the world. But we must seek him where he is. Every actual knowledge must therefore be such that it gives us a piece of knowledge of God in every piece of knowledge of the world. Cognition at its highest level is therefore a union with the Godhead. We call it conceptual knowledge. We recognize things "sub specie aeternitatis", i.e. as emanations of the Godhead. The laws that our spirit recognizes in nature are therefore God in his essence, not just made by him. What we recognize as logical necessity is so because the essence of the Godhead, i.e. the eternal lawfulness, is inherent in it. This was a view in keeping with Goethe's spirit. His firm belief that nature, in all its activity, reveals a divinity to us, was expressed to him here in the clearest sentences. "I hold firmly and more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God," he wrote to Jacobi when the latter wanted to present Spinoza's teaching in a different light. [WA 7, 214] Therein lies the affinity with Spinoza in Goethe. And if, in contrast to this deep, inner harmony between Goethe's nature and Spinoza's teaching, one always and forever emphasizes the purely external: Goethe was attracted to Spinoza because, like the latter, he did not want to tolerate final causes in the explanation of the world, this testifies to a superficial assessment of the facts. The fact that Goethe, like Spinoza, rejected final causes was only a consequence of their views. Just consider the theory of final causes. One thing is explained in terms of its existence and nature by demonstrating its necessity for another. One shows that this thing is such and such because that other thing is such and such. This presupposes the existence of a world-ground which stands above the two beings and arranges them in such a way that they fit each other. But if the ground of the world is inherent in every thing, then this explanation makes no sense. For then the nature of a thing must appear to us as a consequence of the principle at work in it. We will look in the nature of a thing for the reason why it is this way and not otherwise. If we have the belief that divinity is inherent in every thing, then it will not occur to us to look for an external principle to explain its lawfulness. Nor can Goethe's relationship to Spinoza be understood in any other way than that he found in him the formulas, the scientific language, to express the world that lies within him.

[ 3 ] If we now turn to Goethe's relationship to the philosophers of his time, we must speak above all of Kant. Kant is generally regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. In his time, he provoked such a powerful movement that every educated person felt the need to engage with him. For Goethe, too, this debate became a necessity. But it could not be fruitful for him. For there is a profound contrast between what Kant's philosophy teaches and what we recognize as Goethe's way of thinking. Indeed, one could almost say that the whole of German thought runs in two parallel directions, one steeped in the Kantian way of thinking and the other close to the Goethean way of thinking. But as philosophy today moves ever closer to Kant, it moves further and further away from Goethe, and thus the possibility of understanding and appreciating Goethe's world view is increasingly lost for our time. We want to set out the main propositions of Kant's teaching here in so far as they are of interest to Goethe's views. For Kant, the starting point for human thought is experience, i.e. that which is available to the senses (which includes the inner sense that conveys psychological, historical, etc. facts to us). facts). This is a multiplicity of things in space and of processes in time. That this particular thing confronts me, that I experience this particular process, is indifferent; it could also be otherwise. I can think away the whole multiplicity of things and processes. But what I cannot think away is space and time. For me, there can be nothing that is not spatial or temporal. Even if there is a spaceless or timeless thing, I cannot know anything about it, because I cannot imagine anything without space and time. I do not know whether things themselves have space and time; I only know that things must appear to me in these forms. Space and time are therefore 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 be there for me. Kant introduces a new problem with these sentences. He poses a new question in science. Instead of asking, like the earlier philosophers, how things are constituted, he asks: how must things appear to us so that they can become the object of our knowledge? For Kant, philosophy is the science of the conditions of the possibility of the world as a human phenomenon. We know nothing of the thing in itself. We have not yet fulfilled our task when we arrive at the sensory perception of a multiplicity in time and space. We strive to summarize this multiplicity into a unity. And that is a matter for the intellect. The intellect is to be understood as a sum of activities which have the purpose of summarizing the world of the senses according to certain forms predetermined in it. It summarizes two sensory perceptions, for example, by calling one a cause and the other an effect, or by calling one a substance and the other a property, and so on. Here, too, it is the task of philosophical science to show under what conditions the intellect succeeds in forming a system of the world. Thus, in Kant's sense, the world is actually a subjective phenomenon occurring in the forms of the sense world and the understanding. Only one thing is certain, that there is a thing in itself; how it appears to us depends on our organization. It is now also natural that it makes no sense to ascribe to that world, which the intellect has formed in conjunction with the senses, any meaning other than a meaning for our cognitive faculty. This becomes clearest when Kant speaks of the significance of the world of ideas. For him, ideas are nothing but higher points of view of reason, under which the lower units created by the intellect are understood. The intellect, for example, brings the phenomena of the soul into a context; reason, as the faculty of ideas, then conceives this context as if everything proceeded from one soul. But this has no significance for the matter itself; it is only a means of orientation for our cognitive faculty. This is the content of Kant's theoretical philosophy, insofar as it can interest us here. One immediately sees in it the opposite pole of Goethe's. The given reality is determined by Kant according to ourselves; it is so because we imagine it to be so. Kant skips the actual epistemological question. At the beginning of his critique of reason, he takes two steps that he does not justify, and his entire philosophical doctrine suffers from this error. He immediately establishes the distinction between object and subject without asking what significance it has at all when the mind makes the separation of two realms of reality (here the cognizing subject and the object to be cognized). It then seeks to establish the mutual relationship between these two areas conceptually, again without asking what meaning such a statement has. If he had not seen the main epistemological question askew, he would have noticed that the separation of subject and object is only a transit point of our cognition, that both are based on a deeper unity that can be grasped by reason, and that what is attributed to a thing as a property, insofar as it is thought in relation to a cognizing subject, is by no means only subjectively valid. The thing is a unit of reason and the separation into a "thing in itself" and a "thing for us" is a product of reason. It is therefore unacceptable to say that what is attributed to a thing in one respect can be denied to it in another. For whether I look at the same thing once from this point of view and another time from that point of view, it is still a unified whole.

[ 4 ] It is a mistake that runs through Kant's entire doctrinal structure that he regards sensory diversity as something fixed, and that he believes that science consists in bringing this diversity into a system. He does not even suspect that the manifold is not an ultimate thing that must be overcome if it is to be grasped; and therefore all theory becomes to him merely an ingredient that brings understanding and reason to experience. The idea is not for him that which appears to reason as the deeper ground of the given world when it has overcome the multiplicity lying on the surface, but only a methodical principle according to which it arranges the phenomena for the sake of an easier overview. According to Kant's view, we would be quite mistaken if we regarded things as derivable from the idea; in his opinion, we can only arrange our experiences as if they stem from a unity. According to Kant, we have no idea of the ground of things, of the "in itself". Our knowledge of things is only there in relation to us, is only valid for our individuality. Goethe could not gain much from this view of the world. For him, the contemplation of things in relation to us always remained entirely subordinate, concerning the effect of objects on our feelings of pleasure and displeasure; he demands more from science than merely an indication of how things are in relation to us. In the essay: "Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt" (Natw. Schr., 2nd vol., p. 10ff.) the task of the researcher is defined: He is to take the standard for knowledge, the data for judgment, not from himself, but from the circle of things he observes. This single sentence characterizes the profound contrast between Kant's and Goethe's way of thinking. Whereas with Kant all judgment of things is only a product of subject and object and only provides knowledge of how the subject looks at the object, with Goethe the subject is selflessly absorbed in the object and takes the data for judgment from the circle of things. Goethe therefore says of Kant's students themselves: "They heard me well, but could answer me nothing, nor be of any help to me." [Natw. Schr., 2nd vol., p. 29] The poet believed he had gained more from Kant's Critique of Judgment.

[ 5 ] Although Goethe was furthered philosophically by Schiller more than by Kant. It was through him that he was really brought a step further in the realization of his own way of looking at things. Up until that famous first conversation with Schiller, Goethe* had practiced a certain way of looking at the world. He had looked at plants, based them on an original plant and derived the individual forms from it. This primordial plant (and also a corresponding primordial animal) had formed itself in his mind and was useful to him in explaining the relevant phenomena. However, he had never thought about what this primordial plant was in essence. Schiller opened his eyes by telling him: it is an idea. From then on, Goethe was aware of his idealism. Until that conversation, he therefore called the original plant an experience, because he believed he saw it with his eyes. However, in the introduction to the essay on the metamorphosis of the plant, which was added later, he says: "Thus I now sought to find the primordial animal, that is, ultimately, the concept, the idea of the animal." [Natw. Schr., 1st vol., p. 15] It should be noted, however, that Schiller did not pass on anything foreign to Goethe, but rather only penetrated himself to the realization of objective idealism through the contemplation of Goethe's spirit. He only found the term for the way of looking at things that he recognized and admired in Goethe.

[ 6 ] Goethe received little support from Fichte. Fichte moved in a sphere that was far too foreign to Goethe's thinking for this to have been possible. Fichte founded the science of consciousness in the most astute way. He deduced the activity by which the "I" transforms the given world into an imagined one in a uniquely exemplary way. 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 satisfactory form, that brings the incoherently given into the appropriate contexts; he regarded it as a creation of everything that takes place within the "I". Thus his doctrine appears as a one-sided idealism that takes all its content from consciousness. Goethe, who always focused on the objective, could probably find little to attract him in Fichte's philosophy of consciousness. Goethe lacked understanding for the area in which it applies; but the extension that Fichte gave it - he saw it as a universal science - could only appear to the poet as an error.

[ 7 ] Goethe had many more points of contact with the young Schelling. The latter was a student of Fichte. However, he not only continued the analysis of the activity of the "I", but also pursued that activity within consciousness through which the latter grasps nature. That which takes place in the ego in the cognition of nature seemed to Schelling to be at the same time the objective of nature, the actual principle within it. For him, nature outside was only a fixed form of our concepts of nature. What lives within us as a view of nature appears to us again on the outside, only in a dispersed, spatio-temporal way. What confronts us from outside as nature is a finished product, is only the conditioned, the rigidized form of a living principle. We cannot gain this principle through experience from the outside. We must first create it within ourselves. "To philosophize about nature is to create nature," says our philosopher. ^{94Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie; Jena and Leipzig 1799, p. 6.} "We call nature as mere product (natura naturata) nature as object (this alone is the object of all empiricism). Nature as productivity (natura naturans) we call nature as subject (to this alone goes all theory)." (Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf. ,Jena u. Leipzig 1799, p. 22..) "The contrast between empiricism and science now rests precisely on the fact that the latter regards its object in being as something finished and brought about; science, on the other hand, regards the object in becoming and as something first to be brought about." (ibid. p. 20) Through this doctrine, which Goethe learned partly from Schelling's writings and partly from personal contact with the philosopher, the poet was brought up another level. Now the view developed in him that his tendency was to progress from the finished, the product to the becoming, the producing. And with a decided echo of Schelling, he writes in the essay "Anschauende Urteilskraft" (Viewing Power of Judgment) that his aspiration was "to make himself worthy of spiritual participation in the productions of an ever-creating nature" (Natw. Schr., 1st vol., p. 116).

[ 8 ] Through Hegel, Goethe finally received the last encouragement from the side of philosophy. It was through him that he gained clarity about how what he called the original phenomenon fits into philosophy. Hegel grasped the significance of the primordial phenomenon most profoundly and characterized it aptly in his letter to Goethe of 20 February 1821. February 1821 with the words: "You place the simple and abstract, which you very aptly call the primal phenomenon, at the top, then point out the more concrete phenomena as arising through the addition of further modes of action and circumstances and govern the whole course in such a way that the sequence progresses from the simple conditions to the more composite ones, and thus ranked, the complex now appears in its clarity through this decomposition. To trace out the original phenomenon, to free it from the other surroundings which are accidental to it, - to conceive it abstractly, as we call it, this I regard as a matter of the great spiritual sense of nature, as well as that course in general as the truly scientific aspect of knowledge in this field..." ... "May I now also speak to you, etc., of the special interest that such an outstanding primordial phenomenon has for us philosophers, namely that we can use such a preparation for philosophical purposes! For once we have worked our initially oyster-like, gray, or completely black absolute towards air and light, so that it has become desirous of them, we need windows in order to bring it fully out into the light of day; our schemas would float away into a haze if we wanted to place them in the colorful, confused company of the repulsive world. Here, then, Your Grace's primordial phenomena are of excellent service to us; in this twilight, spiritual and comprehensible through its simplicity, visible and tangible through its sensuality - the two worlds, our abstruse, and the appearing existence, greet each other." Thus, through Hegel, the idea becomes clear to Goethe that the empirical researcher must go as far as the primal phenomena, and that from there the philosopher's path leads further. From this, however, it is also clear that the basic idea of Hegel's philosophy is a consequence of Goethe's way of thinking. The overcoming of humanity, the immersion in it in order to ascend from the created to the creative, from the conditional to the conditional, is the basis of Goethe's, but also of Hegel's, philosophy. In philosophy, Hegel wants to offer nothing other than the eternal process from which everything that is finite emerges. He wants to recognize the given as a consequence of what he can accept as unconditional.

[ 9 ] So for Goethe, becoming acquainted with philosophers and philosophical schools of thought meant a progressive enlightenment about what already lay within him. He gained nothing for his view; he was only given the means to talk about what he was doing, what was going on in his soul.

[ 10 ] Thus, Goethe's view of the world offers enough clues for philosophical development. However, these were initially only taken up by Hegel's students. The rest of philosophy is nobly opposed to Goethe's view. Only Schopenhauer relied in some respects on the poet, whom he held in high esteem. We will discuss his apologetics of the theory of colors in a later chapter. What matters here is the general relationship of Schopenhauer's teaching to Goethe. ^{95 Dr. Adolf Harpf's essay Goethe and Schopenhauer (Philos. Monatshefte 1885) is well worth reading. Harpf, who has already written an excellent essay on "Goethe's Principle of Knowledge" (Philos. Monatshefte 1884), shows the correspondence between Schopenhauer's inherent dogmatism and Goethe's objective knowledge. Harpf, who is himself a Schopenhauerian, does not find the fundamental difference between Goethe and Schopenhauer, as we characterized it above. Nevertheless, Harpf's remarks deserve our full attention.} The Frankfurt philosopher comes close to Goethe in one respect. Schopenhauer rejects all derivation of the phenomena given to us from external causes and only accepts an inner lawfulness, only a derivation of one phenomenon from another. This is apparently equivalent to Goethe's principle of taking the data of explanation from the things themselves; but only apparently. For while Schopenhauer wants to remain within the phenomenal, because we cannot reach the "in itself" lying outside it in cognition, since all phenomena given to us are only ideas and our imagination never leads us beyond our consciousness, Goethe wants to remain within the phenomena, because he seeks the data for their explanation in them themselves.

[ 11 ] Finally, we want to link Goethe's view of the world with the most significant scientific phenomenon of our time, with the views of Eduard v. Hartmann. This thinker's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" is a work of the greatest historical significance. Together with Hartmann's other writings, which expand on all sides of what is outlined there, indeed in many respects bring new points of view to that main work, it reflects the entire intellectual content of our time. Hartmann is characterized by an admirable profundity and an astonishing mastery of the material of the individual sciences. Today he stands on the high guard of education. It is not necessary to be his follower, and this must be acknowledged without reservation.

[ 12 ] His view is not as far removed from Goethe's as one might think at first glance. Those who have nothing other than the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" will, of course, not be able to see this. For the decisive points of contact between the two thinkers can only be seen when one considers the consequences that Hartmann drew from his principles and which he set down in his later writings.

[ 13 ] Hartmann's philosophy is idealism. He does not want to be a mere idealist. However, where he needs something positive in order to explain the world, he does call upon the idea for help. And the most important thing is that he thinks the idea is the basis of everything. For his assumption of an unconscious has no other meaning than that what is present in our consciousness as an idea is not necessarily bound to this form of appearance - within consciousness. The idea is not only present (effective) where it becomes conscious, but also in another form. It is more than a mere subjective phenomenon; it has a meaning founded in itself. It is not merely present in the subject, it is an objective world principle. Even if Hartmann in addition to the idea also includes the will among the principles constituting the world, it is incomprehensible how there are still philosophers who regard him as a Schopenhauerian. Schopenhauer took the view that all conceptual content is only subjective, only a phenomenon of consciousness, to the extreme. With him there can be no question of the idea having participated in the constitution of the world as a real principle. For him, the will is the exclusive ground of the world. This is why Schopenhauer was never able to achieve a substantive treatment of the special philosophical sciences, whereas Hartmann had already pursued his principles into all the special sciences. While Schopenhauer knows nothing to say about the whole rich content of history except that it is a manifestation of the will, Ed. v. Hartmann knows how to find the ideal core of every single historical phenomenon and to integrate it into the whole historical development of mankind. Schopenhauer cannot be interested in the individual being, the individual phenomenon, for he only knows how to say the one essential thing about it, that it is a manifestation of the will. Hartmann takes up every special existence and shows how the idea is to be perceived everywhere. The basic character of Schopenhauer's view of the world is uniformity, that of Hartmann is unity. Schopenhauer bases his view of the world on an empty, monotonous urge, Hartmann on the rich content of the idea. Schopenhauer takes abstract unity as his basis; in Hartmann we find the concrete idea as a principle in which unity - or rather uniformity - is only a property. Schopenhauer could never have created a philosophy of history like Hartmann, never a science of religion. When Hartmann says: "Reason is the logical formal principle of the idea inseparably united with the will and as such regulates and determines the content of the world process without remainder" ("Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart"; Leipzig 1885, p. 27), this presupposition makes it possible for him to seek out the logical core in every phenomenon that confronts us in nature and history, which is not comprehensible to the senses, but nevertheless comprehensible to thought, and thus to explain it. Anyone who does not make this assumption will never be able to justify why he wants to make something out about the world at all through thinking by means of ideas.

[ 14 ] With his objective idealism, Ed. v. Hartmann stands entirely on the ground of Goethe's worldview. When Goethe says: "All that we become aware of and can speak of are only manifestations of the idea" ("Proverbs in Prose"; Natw. Schr, 4, 2nd vol., p. 379), and when he demands that man must develop in himself such a faculty of cognition that the idea becomes as vivid to him as external perception is to the senses, he is standing on that ground where the idea is not merely a phenomenon of consciousness but an objective world principle; thinking is the flashing forth in consciousness of that which objectively constitutes the world. The essential thing about the idea is therefore not what it is for us, for our consciousness, but what it is in itself. For through its own essence it underlies the world as a principle. Therefore, thinking is an awareness of what is in and of itself. Although, therefore, 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 what it is in itself, what lies in itself, to which becoming conscious does nothing. Therefore, according to Ed. v. Hartmann, we must take the idea, apart from becoming conscious, as the active unconscious of the world. This is the essential point in Hartmann's work, that we have to look for the idea in everything that is unconscious.

[ 15 ] But the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious does not do much. For that is after all only a difference for my consciousness. But one must approach the idea in its objectivity, in its full content; one must not only see that the idea is unconsciously effective, but what this effectiveness is. If Hartmann had stopped at the fact that the idea is unconscious and had explained the world from this unconsciousness - that is, from a one-sided characteristic of the idea - he would have created a new monotonous system in addition to the many systems that derive the world from some abstract formula principle. And one cannot completely absolve his first major work of this uniformity. But Ed. v. Hartmann's spirit is too intense, too comprehensive and deeply urgent for him not to have recognized that the idea must not be grasped merely as the unconscious; rather, one must delve into that which one has to address as unconscious, go beyond this quality to its concrete content and derive the world of individual phenomena from it. Thus Hartmann has developed 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 defines under the three forms: Urphänomen, Typus and "idea in the narrower sense".

[ 16 ] The realization of an objective in our world of ideas and the devotion to it that follows from this realization is what we find of Goethe's worldview in Ed. v. Hartmann's philosophy. Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious led him to this absorption in the objective idea. Since he recognized that the essence of the idea does not lie in consciousness, he had to acknowledge the latter as something existing in and of itself, as something objective. The fact that he also includes the will in the constitutive principles of the world, of course, distinguishes him again from Goethe. However, where Hartmann is really fruitful, the motive of will does not come into consideration at all. That he accepts it at all is because he regards the idea as a dormant thing that, in order to come into effect, needs the impulse of the will. According to Hartmann, the will alone can never come to create the world, for it is the empty, blind urge to exist. If it is to bring something into being, the idea must be added, for only this gives it the content of its activity. But what are we to do with this will? It slips away from us when we want to grasp it; for we cannot grasp the empty, meaningless urge. And so it is that everything we really grasp of the world principle is an idea, because what can be grasped must have content. We can only grasp what is full of content, not what is empty of content. If we are to grasp the concept of will, it must appear in the content of the idea; it can only appear in and with the idea, as the form of its appearance, never independently. What exists must have content; there can only be a fulfilled, not an empty being. This is why Goethe presents the idea as active, as something effective that no longer requires any impetus. For that which is full of content must not and cannot be given the impetus to come into existence by an empty content. The idea is therefore to be grasped in Goethe's sense as entelechy, i.e. already as active existence; and one must first abstract from its form as an active thing if one then wants to bring it back under the name will. The motive of will is also completely worthless for positive science. Hartmann does not need it either, where he approaches the concrete phenomenon.

[ 17 ] If we have recognized an echo of Goethe's world view in Hartmann's view of nature, we find it even more significant in the ethics of that philosopher. Eduard v. Hartmann finds that all striving for happiness, all pursuit of egoism is ethically worthless, because we can never achieve satisfaction in this way. Hartmann considers acting out of egoism and to satisfy it to be illusory. We should grasp the task we have been given in the world and work purely for the sake of this, with self-emptying. We should find our goal in devotion to the object, without claiming to gain anything for our subject. The latter, however, is the basic feature of Goethe's ethics. Hartmann should not have suppressed the word that expresses the character of his moral doctrine: love. ^{96 This is not to claim that the concept of love is not taken into account in Hartmann's ethics. H. has treated it in phenomenal and metaphysical terms (see Das sittliche Bewußtsein 2nd ed., pp. 223-247, 629-631, 641, 638-641). But he does not regard love as the last word in ethics. Sacrificial, loving devotion to the world process does not seem to him to be a last thing, but only the means! for redemption from the restlessness of existence and for regaining the lost blissful peace.} Where we make no personal claim, where we act only because we are driven by the objective, where we find the motives for action in the deed itself, there we act morally. But there we act out of love. All self-will, everything personal must disappear there. It is characteristic of Hartmann's powerful and healthy mind that in theory, although he first grasped the idea in the one-sided manner of the unconscious, he nevertheless advanced to concrete idealism and that, although he started from pessimism in ethics, this erroneous standpoint led him to the moral doctrine of love. Hartmann's pessimism does not have the meaning that those people put into it who like to complain about the fruitlessness of our work because they hope to derive justification from it for laying their hands in their laps and accomplishing nothing. Hartmann does not stop at lamentation; he rises above any such sentiment to a pure ethic. He shows the worthlessness of the pursuit of happiness by revealing its fruitlessness. He thus points us to our activity. That he is a pessimist at all is his error. This is perhaps still an appendage from earlier stages of his thinking. Where he stands now, he would have to realize that the empirical proof that the non-satisfactory predominates in the world of reality cannot justify pessimism. For the higher man can desire nothing other than that he must achieve his own happiness. He does not want it as a gift from outside. He only wants happiness in his deeds. Hartmann's pessimism dissolves before (Hartmann's own) higher thinking. If the world leaves us unsatisfied, we create the most beautiful happiness for ourselves in our actions.

[ 18 ] So Hartmann's philosophy is once again proof for us of how, starting from different points of departure, one arrives at the same goal. Hartmann starts from different premises than Goethe; but in the execution we are confronted with Goethean ideas at every turn. We have explained this here because we wanted to show the deep, inner solidity of Goethe's view of the world. It is so deeply rooted in the nature of the world that we must encounter its basic features wherever energetic thinking penetrates to the sources of knowledge. In this Goethe, everything was so original, so nothing at all an incidental fashionable view of the time, that even the reluctant must think in his sense. The eternal riddle of the world is expressed in individuals; in modern times, it is most meaningful in Goethe, which is why one can almost say that the height of a person's view today can be measured by the relationship in which it stands to Goethe's."