The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Goethe's Science According to Schiller's Method

[ 1 ] With the foregoing, we have determined the direction that the following investigations will take. They are to be a development of what asserted itself in Goethe as a scientific sense, an interpretation of his way of looking at the world.

[ 2 ] One could object that this is not the way to represent a view scientifically. A scientific view should under no circumstances be based on authority, but must always be based on principles. We want to anticipate this objection immediately. We do not consider a view based on Goethe's view of the world to be true because it can be derived from this, but because we believe that we can base Goethe's view of the world on tenable principles and represent it as an intrinsically sound one. The fact that we take Goethe as our starting point should not prevent us from taking the foundation of the views we represent just as seriously as the representatives of an allegedly unconditional science. We represent Goethe's view of the world, but we justify it according to the requirements of science.

[ 3 ] Schiller set the course for such investigations. No one has seen the greatness of Goethe's genius like him. In his letters to Goethe, he held up a mirror image of the latter's nature; in his letters "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" he deduced the ideal of the artist as he recognized it in Goethe; and in his essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" he describes the nature of genuine art as he gained it from Goethe's poetry. This also justifies why we describe our explanations as being based on the Goethe-Schiller world view. You want to look at Goethe's scientific thinking according to the method for which Schiller provided the model. Goethe's gaze is directed towards nature and life; and the way of looking at things that he follows in doing so is to be the reproach (the content) for our treatise; Schiller's gaze is directed towards Goethe's mind; and the way of looking at things that he follows in doing so is to be the ideal of our method.

[ 4 ] In this way, we think of Goethe's and Schiller's scientific endeavors as being made fruitful for the present day.

[ 5 ] According to the usual scientific terminology, our work will have to be understood as theory of knowledge. The questions it deals with will, of course, often be of a different nature than those that are almost universally posed by this science today. We have seen why this is so. Where similar investigations occur today, they are almost invariably based on Kant. In scientific circles it has been quite overlooked that, in addition to the epistemology founded by the great Königsberg thinker, there is another direction, at least in terms of possibility, which is no less capable of objective deepening than Kant's. At the beginning of the sixties, Otto Liebmann said: "We must go back to Kant if we want to arrive at an uncontradictory view of the world. This is probably the reason why we have an almost immense amount of Kant literature today.

[ 6 ] But even this path will not help philosophical science. It will only play a role in cultural life again when, instead of going back to Kant, it immerses itself in the scientific views of Goethe and Schiller.

[ 7 ] And now let us approach the basic questions of a science of knowledge corresponding to these preliminary remarks.