Im flüßgen Element hin und wieder schweifen: Development and Return in Goethe’s Poetry and Hegel’s Philosophy

After an exchange of letters early in 1821, Goethe was so pleased by the sensitivity of Hegel’s reflections on a concept central to his own thought that he sent Hegel a gift of an opaque wine glass, with the dedication:

Dem Absoluten empfiehlt sich schönstens zu freundlicher Aufnahme Urphänomen.¹

This vignette, tongue-in-cheek though it is, points to an enduring meeting of minds between the two thinkers, which can be detected in the most surprising places. The parallels between Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (1819) and the fundamentals of Hegel’s thought have never been remarked upon, even though they are remarkable. My purpose here is to draw out those similarities, to listen beyond the apparent differences in the voices of these two thinkers to the internal resonance between their ideas.

Goethe and Hegel corresponded intermittently for some two decades, and there was significant mutual respect, even admiration, between them. Hegel was outspoken in his defense of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, which had been harshly received, and he was deeply influenced by Goethe’s theory of morphology.² Goethe, for his part, valued Hegel’s unique mind, and commented on more than one occasion on Hegel’s sensitivity to his own ideas.³ Of course, they remained profoundly different thinkers. It goes without saying that Goethe did not share Hegel’s conception of Geist, and that he did not seek, as Hegel did, to develop an all-encompassing philosophical system. Moreover, in his drafted letter to Seebeck of November 28, 1812, Goethe expresses disquiet at the concept of negation Hegel deploys in his account of natural development in the Vorwort to his Phänomenologie des Geistes (not, as Goethe calls it in the letter, the Logik, which at the time was unpublished): “Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte sagen, daß jene von dieser widerlegt wird . . .” (FA 7:128–31).⁴ Although Goethe retracted his initial scathing comments almost immediately (FA 7:131), and declared himself to be more satisfied once Seebeck had explained the context of the remark to him (FA 7:151), negation was one aspect of Hegel’s system that remained foreign to him.⁵ Yet other moments in the Phänomenologie bear a much stronger relation to Goethe’s way of thinking. The similarities between their conceptions of development—in Hegel’s case, of Geist, in Goethe’s, of the self and poetry—are particularly striking, and demand to be explored further. My concern here is not with the narrow question of who influenced whom: indeed, such an approach would hardly allow the comparison room to breathe. Rather, the parallels can be attributed partly to the philosophical tradition (especially the thought of Leibniz and Spinoza) in which both were steeped, and partly to the currents of thought, known collectively as Idealism, which were swirling around both.

Goethe and Hegel share an understanding of being as becoming, as Werden: for both, the process of becoming perfect or complete is as significant as the goal; and it is the interdependence of these two, of process and telos, that constitutes life.⁶ In the preface to his Phänomenologie, Hegel lays down the fundamental principles of the life of Geist:

“[Das Wahre] ist das Werden seiner selbst, der Kreis, der sein Ende als seinen Zweck voraussetzt und zum Anfange hat und nur durch die Ausführung und sein Ende wirklich ist.”

(Werke 3:23)

For Hegel, then, the end state of Geist (its “truth”), the goal of its development, is always implicit in its beginning; the many forms that it takes are all part of a process of it becoming more itself. Old and new, beginning and ending, are not separate, static poles, but are intimately bound up in one another. That which is “old” is also, in some ways, the most new, in the sense that it is originary, embryonic, and always present in the newer forms that succeed it. Brady Bowman observes that “the peculiar coincidence of succession and simultaneity, of genesis and...