The Rudolf Steiner Archive

18. Goethe's World View in his “Proverbs in Prose”

[ 1 ] Man is not satisfied with what nature voluntarily offers to his observing spirit. He feels that in order to bring forth the diversity of her creations, she needs driving forces that she initially conceals from the observer. Nature does not utter her last word herself. Our experience shows us what nature can create, but it does not tell us how this creation happens. In the human spirit itself lies the means of revealing the driving forces of nature. From the human spirit arise the ideas that shed light on how nature brings about its creations. What the phenomena of the outer world conceal is revealed within man. What the human spirit conceives of the laws of nature: it is not invented in addition to nature; it is nature's own essence, and the spirit is only the arena on which nature makes the secrets of its working visible. What we observe in things is only a part of things. What wells up in our spirit when it confronts things is the other part. It is the same things that speak to us from the outside and that speak within us. Only when we hold the language of the outside world together with that of our inner being do we have the full reality. What did the true philosophers of all times want? To proclaim nothing other than the essence of things, which they themselves express when the mind presents itself to them as an organ of speech.

[ 2 ] When man allows his inner being to speak about nature, he recognizes that nature falls short of what it could achieve by virtue of its driving forces. The spirit sees what experience contains in a more perfect form. It finds that nature does not achieve its intentions with its creations. It feels called to represent these intentions in a perfect form. He creates figures in which he shows: this is what nature wanted, but it could only accomplish it to a certain extent. These figures are the works of art. In them, man creates in a perfect way what nature shows imperfectly.

[ 3 ] Philosopher and artist have the same goal. They seek to create the perfect that their minds see when they allow nature to work on them. But they have different means at their disposal to achieve this goal. A thought, an idea lights up in the philosopher when he is confronted with a natural process. He expresses it. An image of this process arises in the artist, which shows it more perfectly than it can be observed in the outside world. The philosopher and the artist develop the observation in different ways. The artist does not need to know the driving forces of nature in the form in which they reveal themselves to the philosopher. When he perceives a thing or a process, an image immediately arises in his mind in which the laws of nature are expressed in a more perfect form than in the corresponding thing or process in the outside world. These laws in the form of thought need not enter his mind. Cognition and art are, however, inwardly related. They show the faculties of nature that do not come to full development in mere external nature.

[ 4 ] If, in addition to perfect images of things, the driving forces of nature also express themselves in the form of thoughts in the mind of a true artist, then the common source of philosophy and art becomes particularly clear to us. Goethe is such an artist. He reveals the same secrets to us in the form of his works of art and in the form of thought. What he creates in his poetry, he expresses in the form of thought in his essays on the natural sciences and the arts and in his "Proverbs in Prose". The deep satisfaction that emanates from these essays and sayings is due to the fact that one sees the harmony of art and knowledge realized in a personality. There is something uplifting about the feeling that arises with every Goethean thought: here is someone speaking who can at the same time see in the image the perfection that he expresses in ideas. The power of such a thought is strengthened by this feeling. What stems from the highest needs of a personality must belong together inwardly. Goethe's wisdom teachings answer the question: What kind of philosophy is in accordance with true art? I will attempt to trace this philosophy, born of the spirit of a true artist, in context.

[ 5 ] The content of thought that arises from the human spirit when it confronts the outside world is truth. Man can demand no other knowledge than that which he himself produces. He who still seeks something behind things that is supposed to signify their actual essence has not brought himself to realize that all questions about the essence of things arise only from a human need: to penetrate with thought that which one perceives. Things speak to us, and our inner being speaks when we observe things. These two languages come from the same primordial being, and man is called to bring about their mutual understanding. This is what is called knowledge. And this and nothing else is sought by those who understand the needs of human nature. Those who do not attain this understanding remain strangers to the things of the outside world. He does not hear the essence of things speaking to him from within. He therefore assumes that this essence is hidden behind things. He believes in an outer world still behind the world of perception. But things are only external things as long as one merely observes them. When we think about them, they cease to be external to us. We merge with their inner essence. For humans, the contrast between objective external perception and the subjective inner world of thought only exists as long as they do not recognize that these worlds belong together. The human inner world is the inner world of nature.

[ 6 ] These thoughts are not refuted by the fact that different people have different ideas about things. Nor by the fact that people's organizations are different, so that one does not know whether one and the same color is seen in quite the same way by different people. For what matters is not whether men form exactly the same judgment about one and the same thing, but whether the language which the inner man speaks is precisely the language which expresses the essence of things. The individual judgments differ according to the organization of man and the standpoint from which he views things; but all judgments spring from the same element and lead to the essence of things. This may be expressed in different shades of thought, but it remains the essence of things.

[ 7 ] The human being is the organ through which nature reveals its secrets. The deepest content of the world appears in the subjective personality. "When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being " (Goethe, "Winckelmann ", Kürschners National-Literatur, vol. 27, p. 42). The goal of the universe and the essence of existence does not lie in what the outside world provides, but in what lives in the human spirit and emerges from it. Goethe therefore considers it a mistake for the natural scientist to want to penetrate the interior of nature through instruments and objective experiments, for "man in himself, in so far as he makes use of his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact physical apparatus that can exist, and that is precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics, that one has, as it were, separated experiments from man, and merely wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed to limit and prove what it can achieve". "But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Indeed, one could say, what are the elementary phenomena of nature itself compared to man, who must first tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?" (Cf. Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd dept., p. 351)

[ 8 ] Man must let things speak from his spirit if he wants to recognize their essence. Everything he has to say about this essence is borrowed from the spiritual experiences of his inner being. Man can only judge the world from within himself. He must think anthropomorphically. An anthropomorphism is introduced into the simplest phenomenon, e.g. the collision of two bodies, when one speaks about it. The judgment: "One body pushes the other" is already anthropomorphic. For if we want to get beyond the mere observation of the process, we must transfer to it the experience that our own body has when it sets a body in the outside world in motion. All physical explanations are hidden anthropomorphisms. Nature is humanized when it is explained; the inner experiences of man are placed within it. But these subjective experiences are the inner essence of things. And therefore one cannot say that man does not recognize the objective truth, the "in itself" of things, because he can only form subjective ideas about them. ^{106Goethe's views stand in the sharpest possible contrast to Kant's philosophy. This is based on the view that the world of imagination is governed by the laws of the human mind and therefore everything that is brought to it from outside can only be present in it as a subjective reflection. Man does not perceive the "in itself" of things, but the appearance that arises from the fact that things affect him and he combines these affects according to the laws of his understanding and reason. Kant and the Kantians have no idea that the essence of things speaks through this reason. That is why Kant's philosophy could never mean anything to Goethe. When he appropriated individual propositions from it, he gave them a completely different meaning than they have within the teachings of their originator. It is clear from a note that only became known after the Weimar Goethe Archive was opened that Goethe was well aware of the contrast between his world view and that of Kant. For him, Kant's fundamental error lies in the fact that he "now regards the subjective capacity for knowledge itself as an object and separates the point where subjective and objective meet, sharply but not quite correctly". Subjective and objective come together when man combines what the outside world expresses and what his inner self lets him hear into the unified being of things. But then the contrast between subjective and objective ceases completely; it disappears in the unified reality. I have already alluded to this in this paper p. 218ff. K. Vorländer now polemicizes against my remarks at that time in the first issue of "Kantstudien". He finds that my view of the contrast between Goethe's and Kant's conception of the world is "at least strongly one-sided and contradicts Goethe's own clear testimony" and is explained "by my complete misunderstanding of Kant's transcendental method". Vorländer has no idea of the world view in which Goethe lived. It would do me no good at all to polemicize with him, because we speak different languages. How clear his thinking is is shown by the fact that he never knows what is meant by my sentences. For example, I make a comment on Goethe's sentence. As soon as man becomes aware of the objects around him, he considers them in relation to himself, and rightly so. For his whole fate depends on whether he likes or dislikes them, whether they attract or repel him, whether they are useful or harmful to him. This quite natural way of looking at and judging things seems to be as easy as it is necessary . . . Those whose lively instinct for knowledge strives to observe the objects of nature in themselves and in their relations to one another, they seek and examine what is, and not what is pleasing, undertake a far more difficult day's work." My comment is: "This shows how Goethe's world view is precisely the opposite pole of Kant's. For Kant, there is no view at all of things as they are in themselves, but only as they appear in relation to us. Goethe accepts this view only as a very subordinate way of relating to things." To this Vorländer says. These (words of Goethe) want nothing more than to introduce the trivial difference between the pleasant and the true. The researcher should seek what is and not what is pleasant. Whoever, like Steiner, dares to describe the latter, admittedly very subordinate way of relating to things as that of Kant, is to be advised to first make clear to himself the basic concepts of Kant's doctrine, e.g. the difference between subjective and objective feeling, for example from § 3 of the Kr. d. U.". Now, as is clear from my sentence, I have not at all said that this way of relating to things is Kant's, but that Goethe does not find Kant's view of the relationship between subject and object to correspond to the relationship in which man stands to things when he wants to recognize how they are in themselves. Goethe is of the opinion that Kant's definition does not correspond to human cognition, but only to the relationship in which man places himself to things when he considers them in relation to his pleasure and displeasure. He who can misunderstand a sentence in such a way as Vorländer may spare himself the trouble of giving other people advice about their philosophical education, and rather first acquire the ability to learn to read a sentence correctly. Anyone can look up Goethe's quotations and put them together historically; interpreting them in terms of Goethe's world view, at least Vorländer cannot.} There can be no question of anything other than a subjective human truth. For truth is the insertion of subjective experiences into the objective context of appearance. These subjective experiences can even take on a completely individual character. Nevertheless, they are the expression of the inner essence of things. One can only put into things what one has experienced in oneself. Accordingly, each person will, according to his individual experiences, put something different into things in a certain sense. How I interpret certain processes of nature is not entirely comprehensible to someone else who has not had the same inner experience. But it is not at all a question of all men thinking the same about things, but only of their living in the element of truth when they think about things. Therefore, one cannot regard the thoughts of another as such and accept or reject them, but one should regard them as the proclaimers of his individuality. "Those who disagree and argue should sometimes consider that not every language is comprehensible to everyone" (Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd dept., p. 355). A philosophy can never deliver a universally valid truth, but it describes the inner experiences of the philosopher, through which he interprets the external phenomena.

[ 9 ] When a thing expresses its essence through the organ of the human mind, the full reality only comes about through the confluence of the external objective and the internal subjective. Neither through one-sided observation nor through one-sided thinking does man recognize reality. This is not present as something finished in the objective world, but is only produced by the human spirit in connection with things. Objective things are only a part of reality. Those who praise only sensory experience must reply, with Goethe, "that experience is only half of experience" (Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd section, p. 503). "Everything factual is already theory", i.e. an ideal is revealed in the human mind when it contemplates a fact. This view of the world, which recognizes the essence of things in ideas and understands knowledge as a living into the essence of things, is not mysticism. But it has in common with mysticism that it does not regard objective truth as something existing in the external world, but as something that can really be grasped within the human being. The opposite view of the world places the causes of things behind appearances, in a realm beyond human experience. It can now either indulge in a blind belief in these reasons, which receives its content from a positive religion of revelation, or it can put forward intellectual hypotheses and theories about how this otherworldly realm of reality is constituted. The mystic as well as the confessor of Goethe's world view reject both the belief in an otherworldly realm and the hypotheses about such a realm, and adhere to the real spiritual realm that expresses itself in man himself. Goethe writes to [F. H.] Jacobi: "God has punished you with metaphysics and put a stake in your flesh, blessed me on the other hand with physics ... I hold firmly and more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God ... and leave to you all that you call and must call religion ... If you say that one can only believe in God ..., I tell you that I believe a great deal in looking." [WA 7, 214] What Goethe wants to see is the essence of things expressed in his world of ideas. The mystic also wants to recognize the essence of things by immersing himself in his own inner being; but he rejects precisely the world of ideas, which is clear and transparent in itself, as unsuitable for the attainment of a higher knowledge. He does not believe that he must develop his faculty of ideas, but other powers of his inner being, in order to see the primal causes of things. It is usually vague sensations and feelings in which the mystic believes he grasps the essence of things. But feelings and sensations only belong to the subjective nature of man. Nothing about things is expressed in them. Only in the ideas do the things themselves speak. Mysticism is a superficial view of the world, even though the mystics give themselves much credit for their "depth" compared to rational people. They know nothing about the nature of feelings, otherwise they would not regard them as expressions of the essence of the world; and they know nothing about the nature of ideas, otherwise they would not regard them as shallow and rationalistic. They have no idea what people who really have ideas experience in them. But for many, ideas are just words. They cannot assimilate the infinite abundance of their content. No wonder they perceive their own unimaginative words as empty.

[ 10 ] Those who seek the essential content of the objective world in their own inner being can also relocate the essence of the moral world order only in human nature itself. Anyone who believes that there is an otherworldly reality behind human nature must also seek the source of morality in it. For the moral in the higher sense can only come from the essence of things. The believer in the beyond therefore accepts moral commandments to which man must submit. These commandments either come to him by way of revelation or they enter his consciousness as such, as is the case with Kant's categorical imperative. Nothing is said about how this comes from the otherworldly "in itself" of things into our consciousness. It is simply there, and we have to submit to it. The philosopher of experience, who expects all salvation from the pure observation of the senses, sees in the moral only the working of human instincts and drives. From the study of these should follow the norms that are decisive for moral action.

[ 11 ] Goethe allows the moral to emerge from the world of human ideas. It is not objective norms or the mere world of instinct that guides moral action, but the clear ideas through which man gives himself direction. He does not follow them out of duty, as he would have to follow objective moral norms. Nor out of compulsion, as one follows one's drives and instincts. Instead, he serves them out of love. He loves them as one loves a child. He wants their realization and stands up for them because they are part of his own being. The idea is the guiding principle and love is the driving force in Goethe's ethics. For him, duty is "where one loves what one commands oneself" (Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd abb. p. 460).

[ 12 ] Action in the sense of Goethean ethics is a free action. For man is dependent on nothing but his own ideas. And he is responsible to no one but himself. In my "Philosophy of Freedom" ^{107Berlin 1894 [Complete Edition Dornach 1973]} I have already refuted the cheap objection that the consequence of a moral world order in which everyone obeys only himself must be the general disorder and disharmony of human action. He who makes this objection overlooks the fact that men are homogeneous beings, and that they will therefore never produce moral ideas which, by their essential difference, will produce a discordant harmony. ^{108The following circumstance shows how little understanding there is for ethical views, as well as for an ethics of freedom and individualism in general, among the specialist philosophers of the present day. In 1892, in an essay in "Zukunft" (No. 5), I spoke out in favor of a strictly individualistic view of morality [now in "Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte 1887-1901"; Complete Edition Dornach 1966, pp. 169ff]. Ferdinand Tönnies referred to this essay in Kiel in a brochure: "˂Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite. Nietzsche fools in the ˂future and in the ˂present˃. ." (Berlin 1893). He put forward nothing but the main propositions of philistine morality put into philosophical formulas. But he says of me that "on the road to Hades I could not have found a worse Hermes" than Friedrich Nietzsche. It seems truly comical to me that Tönnies, in order to condemn me, brings up some of Goethe's "sayings in prose". He has no idea that if there was a Hermes for me, it was not Nietzsche, but Goethe. I have already explained the relationship between the ethics of freedom and Goethe's ethics on p. 195 ff. of this pamphlet. I would not have mentioned the worthless brochure if it were not symptomatic of the misunderstanding of Goethe's world view that prevails in specialist philosophical circles.}

[ 13 ] If man did not have the ability to produce creations that are designed entirely in the same sense as the works of nature, and only bring this sense to view in a more perfect way than nature is capable of, then there would be no art in Goethe's sense. What the artist creates are natural objects on a higher level of perfection. Art is a continuation of nature, "for in that man is placed on the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself must again produce a summit. To this end he increases by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, by calling up choice, order, harmony and meaning and finally raising himself to the production of the work of art" (Goethe, "Winckelmann"; Nat.-Lit. vol. 27, p. 47). After seeing the Greek works of art in Italy, Goethe wrote: "These high works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature produced by man according to true and natural laws." ^{109Italian Journey, Sept. 6, 1787.} Compared to the mere sensory reality of experience, works of art are a beautiful appearance; for those who are able to look deeper, they are "a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without them" ([free reproduction] cf. Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd Abt., p. 494).

[ 14 ] It is not the material that the artist takes from nature that makes the work of art, but only what the artist puts into the work from within himself. The highest work of art is that which makes us forget that it is based on a natural material, and which arouses our interest only through what the artist has made of this material. The artist creates naturally; but he does not create like nature itself. These sentences seem to me to express the main ideas that Goethe set down in his Aphorisms on Art.