Part 7 (1/2)
According to Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature because nature itself is spirit. It is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his essay, Influence of
Modern Philosophy: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was completely outside my world. I attended many conversations concerning this book, and with some attention I could observe that the old main question of how much our own self contributed to our spiritual existence, and how much the outside world did, was renewed. I never separated them, and when I philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with an unconscious naivete, really believing that I saw my opinion before my very eyes.
We need not waver in this estimate of Goethe's att.i.tude toward Kant, in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favorable judgment about the philosopher of Koenigsberg.
This opposition between Kant and himself would only then have become quite clear to him if he had engaged himself in a thorough study of Kant, but this he did not do. In the above- mentioned essay he says, ”It was the introductory pa.s.sages that I liked; into the labyrinth itself, however, I could not venture to go; I was kept from it now by my poetic imagination, now by my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself furthered.”
Goethe has, nevertheless, expressed his opposition distinctly on one occasion in a pa.s.sage that has been published only from the papers of the residuary estate in the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2; Abteilung, Band XI, page 377). The fundamental error of Kant was, as here expressed by Goethe, that he ”considers the subjective faculty of knowledge as an object and discriminates the point where the subjective and the objective meet with great penetration but not quite correctly.” Goethe just happens to be convinced that it is not only the spirit as such that speaks in the subjective human faculty of cognition, but that it is the spirit of nature that has created for itself an organ in man through which it reveals its
secrets. It is not man at all who speaks about nature, but it is nature who speaks in man about itself. This is Goethe's conviction. Thus, he could say that whenever the controversy concerning Kant's world view ”was brought up, I liked to take the side that gave most honor to man, and I completely agreed with all those friends who maintained with Kant that, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it nevertheless does not originate from experience.” For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit, but for this reason, they were not merely the subjective laws of the spirit for him, but the objective laws of the order of nature itself.
It is for this reason also that Goethe could not agree when Schiller, under the influence of Kant, erected a forbidding wall of separation between the realms of natural necessity and of freedom. Goethe expressed himself on this point in his essay, First Acquaintance with Schiller: Schiller and some friends had absorbed the Kantian philosophy, which elevates the subject to such height while apparently narrowing it. It developed the extraordinary traits that nature had laid into his character and he, in his highest feeling of freedom and self determination, tended to be ungrateful to the great mother who had certainly not treated him stingily. Instead of considering nature as self-supporting, alive and productively spreading order and law from the lowest to the highest point, Schiller took notice of it only in the shape of a few empirical human natural inclinations.
In his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy, Goethe points to his difference with Schiller in these words. ”He preached the gospel of freedom; I was unwilling to see the rights of nature infringed upon.” There was, indeed, an element of Kant's mode of conception in Schiller, but so far as Goethe is concerned, we are right in accepting what he himself said with
regard to some conversations he had with the followers of Kant. ”They heard what I had to say but they could not answer me or further me in any way. More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted to me with a surprised smile that my conception was, to be sure, a.n.a.logous to that of Kant, but in a curious fas.h.i.+on indeed.”
Goethe did not consider art and beauty as a realm that was torn out of the interconnection of reality, but as a higher stage of nature's order. At the sight of artistic creations that especially interested him during his Italian journey he wrote, ”Like the highest works of nature, the lofty works of art have been produced by men according to true and natural laws.
Everything that is arbitrary and merely imagined fades away before them. Here is necessity; here is G.o.d.” When the artist proceeds as the Greeks did, namely, ”according to the laws that Nature herself follows,” then his works contain the same G.o.dly element that is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is ”a manifestation of secret natural laws.” What the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human completion of nature, for ”as man finds himself placed at the highest point of nature, he again considers himself a whole nature and as such has again to produce a peak in himself. For this purpose he raises his own existence by penetrating himself with all perfections and virtues, produces choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally lifts himself as far as to the production of the work of art.” Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest of man's works of art, and everything in this nature is ruled by the same ”eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws,” such that ”the G.o.dhead itself could not change anything about it” (Poetry and Truth, Book XVI).
When, in 1811, Goethe read Jacobi's book, On Things Divine, it made him ”uneasy.”
How could the book of a so warmly beloved friend, in which I was to see the thesis developed that nature conceals G.o.d, be welcome to me! My mode of world conception - purely felt, deeply-seated, inborn and practised daily as it was - had taught me inviolably to see G.o.d in Nature, Nature in G.o.d, and this to such an extent that this world view formed the basis of my entire existence. Under these circ.u.mstances, was not such a strange, one-sided and narrow-minded thesis to estrange me in spirit from this most n.o.ble man for whose heart I felt love and veneration? I did not, however, allow my painful vexation to linger with me but took refuge in my old asylum, finding my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza's Ethics, and as my inner education had progressed in the meantime, to my astonishment I became aware of many things that revealed themselves to me in a new and different light and affected me with a peculiar freshness.
The realm of necessity in Spinoza's sense is a realm of inner necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides of its essence. ”The sun sheds its light over those good and evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars s.h.i.+ne brightly.” Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature, Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his moral order and his art.
What G.o.d would just push the world from without, And let it run in circles on his finger?
Him it behooves to move it in its core, Be close to nature, hug her to her breast So that what lives and weaves in him and is, Will never lack his power and his spirit.
In these words Goethe summed up his credo. Against Hailer, who had written the lines, ”Into nature's sacred center, no created spirits enter,” Goethe turns with his sharpest words: ”Into nature's sacred center,”
O, Philistine past compare ”No created spirits enter”
Wished you never would remind Me and all those of my kind Of this shallow verbal banter.
We think we are everywhere With every step in Nature's care.
”Happy he to whom she just Shows her dry external crust.”
I hear that repeated these sixty years Curse under my breath so no one hears, And to myself I a thousand times tell: Nature has neither core nor sh.e.l.l, Everything yields she gladly and well.
Nature is at our beck and call Nature herself is one and all.
Better search yourself once more Whether you be crust or core.
In following this world conception Goethe could also not recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had ascertained in his Critique of Judgment. Goethe tended to explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless nature is explained.
Concerning the various species in the plant world, the leading botanist of that time, Linne, states that there were as many species as there ”have been created fundamentally different forms.” A botanist who holds such an opinion can only attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not consent to such a view of nature. ”What Linnaeus wanted
with might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as striving into union.” Goethe searched for an ent.i.ty that was common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step.
The many plants I have heretofore been used to see only in buckets and pots, here grow merrily and vigorously under the open sky, and while they thus fulfill their destination, they become clearer to us. At the sight of such a variety of new and renewed forms, my curious and favorite idea again occurred to me. Could I not discover in this crowd the archetypal plant (Urpflanze)? There really must be such a thing. How should I otherwise know that this or that given form is a plant if they had not all been designed after one model?
On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this archetypal plant by saying, ”It is going to become the strangest creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me.
With this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and necessity.” As Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, exclaims, ”Give me matter and I will build you a world out of it,” because he has gained insight into the law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe p.r.o.nounces here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one would be in possession of the law of their origin and their development.
What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he tells Herder about his
discovery of the archetypal plant, he adds, ”The same law will be applicable to all other living beings,” and Goethe applies it, indeed. In 1795, his persevering studies of the animal world led him to ”feel free to maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man, were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms daily through propagation.”
In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a risky ”adventure of reason,” should reason attempt to explain the living with regard to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit for such an explanation.
It is of infinite importance for reason not to eliminate the mechanism of nature in its productions, and not to pa.s.s by this idea in their explanation because without it no insight into the nature of things can be obtained. Even if it is admitted to us that the highest architect has created the forms of nature as they have been forever, or predetermined those that form according to the same model in the course of their development, our knowledge of nature would thereby nevertheless not be furthered in the slightest degree because we do not know at all the mode of action and the ideas of this being that are to contain the principles of the possibility of the natural beings and therefore cannot explain nature by means of them from above.
Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers: If, in the moral realm through faith in G.o.d, virtue and immortality, we are to lift ourselves into the higher region and to approach the first Being, we should be in the same situation in the intellectual field, so that we, through the contemplation
of an ever creative nature, should make ourselves worthy of a spiritual partic.i.p.ation in its productions. As I had at first unconsciously and, following an inner instinct, insisted upon and relentlessly striven toward the archetypal, the typical, as I had even succeeded in constructing an appropriate picture, there was now nothing to keep me from courageously risking the adventure of reason, as the old man from Koenigsberg himself calls it.
In his archetypal plant, Goethe had seized upon an idea ”with which one can . . . invent plants to infinity, but they must be consistent, that is to say, even if they do not exist, nevertheless they could exist and are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination but have an inner truth and necessity.” Thus, Goethe shows that he is about to find not merely the perceptible idea, the idea that is thought, in the self-conscious ego, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego experiences a realm in itself that manifests itself as both self- contained and at the same time appertaining to the external world, because the forms of the latter prove to be moulded after the models of the creative powers. With this step the self- conscious ego can appear as a real being. Goethe has developed a conception through which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it feels itself in union with the creative ent.i.ties of nature. The world conception of modern times attempted to master the riddle of the self-conscious ego; Goethe plants the living idea into this ego, and with this force of life pulsating in it, it proves to be a life-saturated reality.
The Greek idea is akin to the picture; it is contemplated like a picture. The idea of modern times must be akin to life, to the living being; it is inwardly experienced. Goethe was aware of the fact that there is such an inward experience of the idea. In the self-conscious ego he perceived the breath of the living idea.
Goethe says of Kant's Critique of Judgment that he ”owed a most happy period of his life to this book.” ”The great leading thoughts of this work were quite a.n.a.logous to my previous creations, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, the unfolding of the activity in both cases from within, was distinctly expressed in this book.” Yet, this statement of Goethe must not deceive us concerning his opposition to Kant, for in the essay in which it occurs, we also read, ”Pa.s.sionately stimulated, I proceeded on my own paths so much the quicker because I, myself, did not know where they led, and because I found little resonance with the Kantians for what I had conquered for myself and for the methods in which I had arrived at my results. For I expressed what had been stirred up in me and not what I had read.”
A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole universe reveals its law structure - ”from the brick that falls from the roof to the brilliant flash of inspiration that dawns on you and that you convey.” For ”all effects of whatever kind they may be that we observe in experience are interconnected in the most continuous fas.h.i.+on and flow into one another.”
A brick is loosened from a roof. We ordinarily call this accidental. It hits the shoulder of a pa.s.serby, one would say mechanically, but not completely mechanically; it follows the laws of gravity and so its effect is physical. The torn vessels of living tissue immediately cease to function; at the same moment, the fluids act chemically, their elementary qualities emerge. But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and tries to restore itself. In the meantime, the whole human being is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered.