Goethean Intuitions

My essay proposes to make a modest down payment on a much-needed narrative of Goethe’s philosophical development that refutes some widely held views. The first kind of account claims that Goethe was philosophically naive, unschooled, and uninterested.¹ A second characterization I would want to counter, which might be called the “condescending neo-Kantian” narrative, is one in which Goethe began as a naive realist, was taken in hand by Schiller, and finally converted grudgingly to a kind of poorly understood Kantianism. Both these accounts are very far from the truth.

Goethe’s philosophy and relationship to other philosophers can be characterized generally as “intuitive”—in all the senses of that (intentionally) ambiguous term. As a thinker, Goethe was inspired rather than methodical. Moreover, he was “intuitive” in his ability to size up philosophical issues and individual philosophers quickly, getting to the heart of the matter on surprisingly short acquaintance. And Goethe’s philosophical work is focused specifically on the role of the faculty of intuition (Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva; Kant’s “produktive Einbildungskraft” and “intellectus archetypus”; Fichte’s “intellektuelle Anschauung”) in epistemology, ethics, and scientific discovery.

As a philosopher of science, Goethe progresses through three phases, which one might call Realist, Idealist, and Romantic.² The major influence in the first phase is Spinoza as interpreted by Herder; in the second, Fichte.³ In the third phase, Goethe develops an original epistemology that might be termed a kind of gesteigerter Spinozismus. The focus here will be on Goethe’s Metamorphose der Pflanzen as the culmination of Goethe’s first phase; consideration of the second and third phases must be deferred to another occasion. Both Goethe’s Metamorphose der Pflanzen and the influence of Spinoza on Goethe have been studied extensively, of course, but I will argue that Goethe’s study is suffused with Spinoza’s epistemology in specific and important ways that have not been sufficiently realized.

Spinoza accompanied Goethe at every moment of his philosophical career. Even in the second phase, when his influence is not so immediately apparent, Spinoza continued to grow inside Goethe, eventually “blossoming” at the end of Goethe’s life. Eckermann’s characterization of Goethe’s evolving relationship to Spinoza is beautiful and precise:

Einen solchen Standpunkt fand Goethe früh in Spinoza, und er erkennt mit Freuden, wie sehr die Ansichten dieses großen Denkers den Bedürfnissen seiner Jugend gemäß gewesen. Er fand in ihm sich selber, und so konnte er sich auch an ihm auf das schönste befestigen.

Und da nun solche Ansichten nicht subjektiver Art waren, sondern in den Werken und Äußerungen Gottes durch die Welt ein Fundament hatten, so waren es nicht Schalen, die er bei seiner eigenen spätern tiefen Welt- und Naturforschung als unbrauchbar abzuwerfen in den Fall kam, sondern es war das anfängliche Keimen und Wurzeln einer Pflanze, die durch viele Jahre in gleich gesunder Richtung fortwuchs und sich zuletzt zu der Blüte einer reichen Erkenntnis entfaltete.

(Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 28 Feb. 1831)

The influence is especially marked in the first phase of Goethe’s philosophical development, culminating in Goethe’s thoroughly Spinozist treatise, Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790). Except for the much less influential Hamann, Spinoza is the only thinker discussed at any length in Goethe’s autobiographical account of his first 25 years, Dichtung und Wahrheit. And yet, even late in life, Goethe was unable to explain fully why he had been so drawn to Spinoza as a young man, and quickly became his “leidenschaftliche[r] Schüler” and “entschiedenster Verehrer.”⁴ Thus Goethe’s attraction to Spinoza would be an example of his “intuitive” grasp of philosophical issues: even though he could not explain exactly why, Goethe was one of the first to recognize and rehabilitate a thinker who had been ostracized from both philosophy and theology for over a century, but would prove crucial to the further development of German Idealism.

Moreover, a recurring pattern in Goethe’s scattered, intuitive remarks on Spinoza reveals that it was the centrality of the faculty of intuition, Anschauung, that attracted him to Spinoza above all. Goethe’s letter to Jacobi...