Goethe’s Notion of an Intuitive Power of Judgment

I. Introduction

In this paper, I explore the meaning of Goethe’s notion of an intuitive power of judgment (anschauende Urteilskraft) and investigate its philosophical function. In order to do so, I situate it within the development of post-Kantian thinking. My goal, however, is not antiquarian but critical. I argue that Goethe’s notion is grounded in a critique of conceptual thinking, which can be rationally reconstructed, and that it offers a possible answer to some of the shortcomings of propositional knowledge. I thus want to articulate its own systematic legitimacy.

II. Conceptual Thinking

The world according to Kant is conceptually constituted. The crux of his argument can be reconstructed in the following way.

Given the supposition that individuals have to be re-identifiable, and that such identification is done by an identifying subject, it follows that individuals have to be possible objects of these subjects. Now, being the possible object of a subject means that the subject can refer to the individual being its object. And in order to be able to refer to an individual, the subject has to stand in a definite relation to it. What is this relation like? It is characterized by two reciprocal directions. One direction leads from the individual to the subject. It bestows the subject with information about its point of reference. The other direction leads from the subject to the individual. Using the information with which it is bestowed, the subject can determine the identity of the individual. These determinations typically take the form of “There is an x, and x is such and such.” Here we have the first formula of how to identify an individual: relying on certain information, we make it the referent of an assertoric statement. This first formula is not the only one, however. Depending on the different types of judgments, we can move on to other forms of identifications that are performed in judgments, beginning with the scopes of reference and ending with the characters of mode. Kant has set them down in his table of judgments.¹ The relation of an identifying subject and an individual identified results thus in a judgmental identification of the latter by the former.

For these reasons, an individual is the possible object of a subject if the subject can make a judgment about it. Judgments, however, are conceptual units. They are functions, using general and singular terms, intended to yield a truth value, and there is nothing non-conceptual in them, albeit the conceptual terms are meant to describe non-conceptual states of affairs. The identification of individuals thus depends on conceptual items, which are used to describe them. In other words, being a possible object means to be the possible point of reference of a conceptual unit. But the point of reference of a conceptual unit is in an important respect constituted by the referring unit (the subject). Whereas it is not constituted in its existence, it is constituted as point of reference by that which refers to it. In this respect, possible objects are constituted by conceptual units. And if we conceive of the world as the mereological sum of possible objects or re-identifiable individuals, we have to say that the world is likewise constituted by these units. Thus, the world is conceptually constituted.

The conceptual constitution of the world does not imply that everything that is involved in making a judgment is conceptual. To be sure, the judgment is exclusively conceptual. But its making is not, because the information which is obtained about the individual cannot be merely conceptual. The reason is the following. Whatever else can be said about acquiring information, it is, at the start, a receptive affair. This receptivity was already expressed in the first of the two reciprocal directions mentioned above, in the one that leads from the individual to the subject. Following this direction, the subject receives the information with which it is bestowed. Now, if the received information were conceptual, the individual would have to bestow the subject with conceptual content. But in order to bestow the subject with conceptual content, the individual...