Introduction—Goethe and Idealism: Points of Intersection

Geister Ihrer Art wissen daher selten, wie weit sie gedrungen sind, und wie wenig Ursache sie haben, von der Philosophie zu borgen, die nur von Ihnen lernen kann. Diese kann bloß zergliedern, was ihr gegeben wird, aber das Geben selbst ist nicht die Sache des Analytikers sondern des Genies, welches unter dem dunklen aber sichern Einfluß reiner Vernunft nach objektiven Gesetzen verbindet.

(Schiller to Goethe, 23 August 1794)

With these words to Goethe, Schiller suggests an important connection that the great poet of Weimar had to the spectacular philosophical developments unfolding at the turn of the nineteenth century. Alas, Schiller’s insight did not find much resonance in the years that followed. For many of the last 200 years, philosophers have taken their lead from a narrative like Richard Kroner’s Von Kant bis Hegel (1921). Hence the dominant narrative of the development of German Idealism has come from the great system builder, Hegel (1770–1831), and in this narrative, Hegel emerges as the hero of the story of post-Kantian philosophy. The story that unfolds according to this “von-Kant-bis-Hegel” narrative, is that Kant (1724–1804) cleared the ground of the earlier metaphysics and brute empiricism, but limited knowledge to the world of appearances and thereby bracketed out things in themselves; Fichte (1762–1814), then, following the spirit if not always the letter of Kant’s philosophy, radicalized the consequences of Kant’s critical philosophy by placing the self-positing I (Ich) firmly at the center or foundation of philosophy; and Schelling (1775–1854), first an enthusiastic follower of Fichte, responded to this subjectivist position with a turn to Nature as an equal (if not primary) partner in the constitution of the world and knowledge. This left the door open for Hegel to overcome both “subjective” and “objective” Idealism dialectically with his own transcendental or speculative or absolute philosophy.

Left out of this narrative are the many “minor” players—minor not so much because they were unimportant but because Hegel cast them into the shadows. (Indeed, Hegel spent important years in the early 1800s “clearing the ground” with dismissive essays in the Kritisches Journal on a number of these very thinkers.) The history of this period stood in need of more careful presentation, and a recent surge of work (often connected to the so-called “Konstellationsforschung”) has tried to bring to the fore the contributions of figures such as Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, Maimon, Reinhold, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and von Hardenberg (Novalis) to post-Kantian philosophy. Whether harshly critical or positively disposed, these thinkers raised important questions about the limitations to Kant’s revolutionary approach. Some were explicitly picked up by the “biggies” (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), whereas others exerted influence without being duly recognized, and still others opened up possibilities that are only now being explored.

One figure not present in almost any of these narratives, especially because those retelling the story are philosophers, is the literary elephant in the room, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The goal of the present special volume of the Goethe Yearbook is to examine Goethe’s role in some of the central philosophical developments of his period. Each of the essays assembled here addresses Goethe’s role in the development of German Idealism. German Idealism is not an unproblematic term, and so some of the essays attempt to refine the ways in which the historical category “German Idealism” should be defined, other essays comment upon the spectrum of Goethe’s influence on German Idealism: on one extreme we have the view that “without Goethe, there would have been no Idealism as we know it”; on the other, the milder notion that Goethe’s genial abilities (in both senses of his genius and his congeniality) reinforced ideas that others were formulating on their own. What emerges from this collection of essays is that Goethe’s role in German Idealism deserves further study both in order to reconsider the significance of Goethe’s intellectual work and also to shed light on the very meaning of German Idealism. These essays reveal that Goethe can be...