Goethe’s Phenomenological Way of Thinking and the Urphänomen

Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Factische schon Theorie ist. Die Bläue des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik. Man suche nur nichts hinter den Phänomenen; sie selbst sind die Lehre.

(FA 1.13:49)

[The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of chromatics. Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena—they themselves are the theory.¹]

Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf.

(FA 1.24:596)

[The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world. Every new object, well contemplated and clearly seen, opens up a new organ within us. (39)]

These two maxims suggest that Goethe’s thinking about and intuition of the world are phenomenologically grounded. They can be read as programmatic statements for his specific kind of phenomenological thinking, evident in his poetry and his natural science and philosophical writings. I suggest reading the first aphorism in the light of the phenomenological shibboleth “Back to the things themselves”² (Zurück zu den Sachen selbst), pronounced by Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement. Similarly, the second aphorism reflects the phenomenological intertwinement of subject and object; it shows how each new experience might widen the faculties of perception, cognition, and intuition and thus suggests that the observer undergoes perpetual metamorphosis in response to each new object of perception and cognition.

As I will show, reading Goethe’s method—his way of perceiving, experiencing, and reflecting—as grounded in and guided by what Husserl calls the “principle of all principles,” that is, pure and “original intuition,”³ allows new insights into Goethe’s works. Hence, I propose a phenomenological reading of Goethe, especially of his philosophical and scientific writings.⁴ Husserl’s philosophical language and phenomenological method, oriented toward clarity and truth, help to illuminate Goethe’s phenomenological thinking and to transform implicit into explicit philosophical concepts. The relation between Goethe’s and Husserl’s phenomenology can be viewed from two perspectives: from the historical point of view, Goethe can be seen as a forerunner of phenomenological insights; from the philosophical angle, Goethe and Husserl share similar philosophical ideas. I want to show how Goethe’s thinking sheds new light on central questions in phenomenological philosophy, in particular regarding Husserl and his followers. If we regard Goethe as a spiritual predecessor of the phenomenological movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, his analyses can provide new insights into the problems that also drove Husserl’s work.

In the following, I examine some key ideas in Goethe’s thinking, including his notion of the Urphänomen from a phenomenological perspective. My aim is to show that the Urphänomen can be understood as an example of a phenomenological science of nature that explores the limits of intuition and cognition. Furthermore, Goethe’s phenomenological way of thinking, exemplified by his notion of the Urphänomen, invites radical openness especially toward phenomena that, like the Urphänomen, elude the standards of modern science and its mathematization of nature and exceed the limits of mere objectification and representation.

This article is divided into five parts. Section 1 focuses on the phenomenological method in its relation to different kinds of givenness in the phenomenal world. Section 2 analyzes the relation between art and science in Goethe’s thinking and explains, from a phenomenological point of view, why Goethe used imagination as a tool of cognition. Section 3 explains how Goethe’s phenomenological method—particularly, his enhanced notion of experience and his showing (Aufweisen or Ausweisen) or illumination of the manifold conditions of appearances—led him to the “discovery” of the Urphänomen. Section 4 parses the relation between world and consciousness, phenomena and thinking, in phenomenological philosophy. I link...