Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts

Allegorie/Symbol (Allegory/Symbol)

2023-07-18T15:14:34-04:00

For Goethe, allegory and symbol function as poles of the dyad “sinnliche Darstellung” (representation). He introduced the contrasting pair in the second half of the 1790s, in the context of his project for a German classical aesthetics with Friedrich Schiller, his translation of Germaine de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions (Essay on Fiction), his ongoing work on morphology and optics, and his engagement with idealist philosophy. Despite the priority given to the symbol in Goethe’s scientific writings, he applied the term only occasionally to literature; he remained committed to the sophisticated allegorical poetics and imagery of the high baroque drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Calderón) in essentially all his mature work and was sympathetic to its use by the German Romantics. While Goethe’s own terminology often wavered between the poles of symbol and allegory, his distinction became the standard theme in discussions of poetic representation for more than a century, with symbol heavily prioritized over allegory, and it remains a theme in Goethe scholarship. The post-modernist return to allegory in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man is more a skeptical version of the Goethean symbol than earlier definitions of either allegory or symbol.

Dämonisch, das Dämonische (Daemonic, the Daemonic)

2023-10-17T10:38:00-04:00

Due to their prominence in Goethe’s autobiography (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Poetry and Truth) and in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe), Goethe scholarship has associated the lexemes dämonisch and das Dämonische with Goethe’s life, and especially with his seemingly divinely inspired artistic productivity. Yet when these lexemes are considered in relation to the ancient Greek term from which they are derived – δαíμων (German: Dämon; English: daimon or daemon) – they appear as part of a larger tradition in European thought that is concerned with non-rational sources of inspiration, as well as with the limits of reason itself. Far from offering a consistent theory or concept of the daemonic, Goethe uses this term and its cognates in various ways: to refer to a mysterious and terrifying force that influences one’s life and seems to operate at the nexus between character and fate; as a poetic topos that depicts the relation between the striving subject and its external world; as the morphological core of the personality associated with the tradition of astrology, a core which is seen as the locus of one’s productivity; and as a name or placeholder for phenomena that escape our rational comprehension. Precisely due to the flexibility and ambiguity of these terms, Goethe’s use of them has enjoyed a rich reception in fields as various as theology, religious studies, and philosophy from the nineteenth century until the present.

Ding/Unding (Thing/No-Thing)

2023-11-15T11:34:55-05:00

Guided by a series of associations of the word Ding in Adelung’s dictionary (1774/93) with metaphysical concepts and conceptualization, this entry explores how Goethe creatively appropriated the lexeme across a long trajectory of diverse textual practices. In light of the writer’s famously unsystematic approach to metaphysical problems, it focuses on scientific and literary works, as well as key autobiographical documents, in order to trace the meandering course of his ontological thinking as it developed into a morphologically informed cosmological reconstruction of the real. Through the transformative power of metaphor in his plays and poetry, in particular, as well as through scattered reflections in letters, conversations, and travel accounts, Goethe ultimately constructed a “metaphysics of appearances” (Metaphysik der Erscheinungen) that would link certain incorporeal generative ideas, including the primal plant (Urpflanze) and the no-thing (Unding), to their corporeal manifestations.

In order to frame readings of Goethe’s metaphorical cosmography as staged in the verse play Satyros, oder der vergötterte Waldteufel (1773/1817; Satyros, or the Deified Forest God) and the world-theater Faust (1809, 1832), sections 2–4 present his morphological ontology—in response to Kantian dualism—as a dualistic monism. In this context the Ding/Unding dyad is explored as the basic unit of Goethe’s ontological thinking, which refuses to privilege one of its opposing terms over the other. By reconstructing things and thingness as the intractable problem of these two mutually exclusive concepts, Goethe offers opportunities for their further philosophical reflection.

Section 2 begins with a discussion of Goethe’s conversation with Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer about Kant’s thing-in-itself—not as something real, but as an instrumentality of thought marking the unbridgeable gap between noumenal and phenomenal things. By contrast, his own dualistic monism suggests that (1) there is only a single dynamic universe of things and (2) in the process of its becoming each corporeal thing must be evaluated in relation to (a) all the other corporeal things in its midst and (b) the series of ontological modes, or the kinds of incorporeal things, that constitute the vector of its completion.

To analyze these propositions, section 3 focuses on Goethean science, which equipped the investigator with “the eye of the mind” to see through to the essential reality of such dynamic things as optical, chromatic, and botanical phenomena in the otherwise invisible process of their formation. Section 4 then completes the preparatory framing by considering Goethe’s meditation about the ontological status of his Urpflanze (primal plant) in the anecdote “Glückliches Ereignis” (1817; Felicitous Event). Guided by this autobiographical account of his inaugural meeting with Friedrich Schiller, which configures their seminal friendship as an antipodal relationship, we can describe Goethe’s morphological ontology as a dualistic thing-monism that relies on essential polarities to sustain its non-reductive dynamism. With this complication of Goethe’s ontological point-of-view in mind, section 4 concludes by considering Ding in some letters that further connect it with Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, which as the highest of three gradations of knowledge is adequate to the essence of things. Unlike Spinoza, however, whose geometrical method relies on the power of reason to build an ethically grounded epistemology, Goethe enlists the powers of the poetic imagination to construct a morphological ontology that is grounded in the power of negation.

In this context section 5 offers readings of critical passages in Satyros and Faust that locate things on the vertiginous cosmological stage of perpetual becoming. And as section 6 argues in conclusion, the informing figures of thought in these works, including the void, allow us to situate Goethe’s Ding/Unding dyad within a lineage of philosophical and theoretical exploration that includes Heidegger’s late meditations on “Dingheit” (thingness) and “Leere” (void), as well conceptual innovations like the “virtual” in Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental materialism and the “incorporeal” in Elizabeth Grosz’s problem-oriented ontology.

Ethik (Ethics)

2022-07-13T11:14:06-04:00

Does Goethe’s work contain an ethical system? Goethe’s life coincided with the flowering and end of ethics as a philosophical discipline, and his two Wilhelm Meister novels—Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants)—constitute a reflection in the position of the individual in the Age of Ethics. In the Lehrjahre, Goethe narrates the travails of the individual in a world no longer secured by the moral cosmology of Christianity, while, in the Wanderjahre, he paints a picture of a fragmented world, dominated by the single value of utility, in which the individual seems scarcely to play any role at all. Each novel contains a sustained engagement with a philosophical ethics—the former, that of Kant and his notion of the Ideal; the latter, that of Spinoza and the relationship between the part and whole—that it seeks not to represent, but rather to adapt as a narrative and hermeneutic practice. In this way, both Wilhelm Meister novels stand, together, as one single plea for an artistic ethics in a world at once administered and disintegrating.

Offenbares Geheimnis (Open Secret)

2023-10-17T08:41:47-04:00

The phrase “offenbares Geheimnis” (open secret) is central and unique to Goethe’s thought. This was indicated for the first time by the Grimm dictionary, which labels it “ein Göthen beliebter unentbehrlicher begriff” (a concept that is dear and indispensable to Goethe) and quotes several occurrences of it in Goethe’s corpus. Linguistically, it is an oxymoron, that is, a syntagm juxtaposing two contradictory ideas. It comprises “offenbar” (open, evident), an adjective qualifying what is to the highest degree open, evident, clear—“ein verstärktes offen” (a reinforced open), according to the Grimms—and “Geheimnis,” a noun referring to something hidden, inaccessible, mysterious (the term translates “mysterium” in Luther’s Bible). “Open secret” thus refers to the paradoxical condition of what is simultaneously concealed and unconcealed. Goethe employs this phrase and other ones closely connected to it—“öffentliches Geheimniß” (public secret), “offenbares Räthsel” (open mystery), “geheimnißvoll offenbar” (secretly open)—in two primary senses: (1) “offenbares Geheimnis” indicates a secret that can cease (or has already ceased) to be a secret—a secret that is actually accessible to someone under certain conditions; (2) in a second, more radical sense, “offenbares Geheimnis” denotes a secret that cannot be definitively removed from its secrecy. Schematically, it could be said that this phrase can indicate either (1) an “offenbares Geheimnis” (open secret) or (2) an “offenbares Geheimnis” (open secret). The first meaning can refer to two rather distinct situations in Goethe’s writings. What provisionally prevents something from fully manifesting itself can be either (1.a) a deliberate act of concealment (a dissimulation, an encryption, an effort to keep something and/or someone in the dark) or (1.b) the opaque nature of what is hidden, which requires effort to be definitively brought to light. According to all these different meanings, “offenbares Geheimnis” can assume an epistemological (1.a), phenomenological (1.b) or ontological (2) value.

Proteus (Proteus)

2023-10-11T13:29:49-04:00

Beginning with his botanical epiphany in Sicily in 1787, Goethe turned to the ancient Greek sea god Proteus as a key figure for imagining natural metamorphosis. “Proteus” is perhaps a surprising term for a lexicon of philosophical concepts. Its connection to symbol, myth, and what Hegel would call representational thinking (Vorstellungsdenken) contrasts with more overtly abstract terms of philosophy. Yet for the unorthodox thinker, Goethe, who consistently straddled the line between literature and philosophy, the boundaries between symbolic representation and speculative abstraction were often porous. Nowhere is this more evident than in his theory of metamorphosis, which was developed throughout his life in an aggregate of scientific, poetic, and biographical texts. The lexeme “Proteus,” as Goethe used it, grows out of and defines this uniquely interdisciplinary thinking. Itself a deeply protean concept in his oeuvre, it gives occasion to consider the mutually productive relationship between philosophy, literature, and life within the broader constellation of Goethe’s thought.

In this entry, I situate Goethe’s “protean” model of metamorphosis vis-à-vis his engagement with maritime environments and literature, specifically Homer’s Odyssey, during the period of the Italian journey (1786-1788). As a symbol, I argue, Proteus played an especially important role in Goethe’s dynamic reconception of natural forms as well as his rebuttal to the “terrestrially biased” imagery of Carl Linnaeus, who construed the formal characteristics of plants through metaphors of geographical enclosure. Additionally, I consider how Goethe’s “protean” botany informed his theory of natural types (Typen) and prepared his theory and practice of science as “zarte Empirie” (WA IV/45:11; delicate empiricism). By reading the mythical figure of Proteus back into the adjective “protean,” which is used to characterize Goethe’s view of nature in his scientific and poetic writings, we can uncover a uniquely Goethean conception of metamorphosis and creativity.

Trübe (Turbidity, Cloudiness, Gloominess)

2023-08-09T09:56:10-04:00

The lexeme Trübe (turbidity, cloudiness, gloominess), which plays a major conceptual role in Goethe’s discourse on colors and their perception, exhibits a diverse range of meaning across a variety of textual practices. As the “zarteste Materie” (most delicate form of matter), or the first membrane of corporeality, turbidity manifests itself in the atmosphere as metamorphosing aggregates of particulates such as fog and haze, which at times can also surround the mind metaphorically in acts of perception. In Goethe’s optical and chromatic studies, Trübe mediates the polarity of light and darkness in the physiological formation of colors on the retina, while also serving as an attribute of the semi-opaque experimental media that are used to study physical and entoptic colors. Color’s physical properties and its experimental stagings, moreover, translate into such conceptual problems as the mediation of subject and object or—as with Goethe’s Urphänomen—the relation of the universal to the particular, as well as the mind to matter. And when introduced into a poetics of the self, Trübe challenges the linearity of experience by facilitating an optically sophisticated means of refracting the subject and its depths. Ultimately, these uses together align Goethe with key shifts in metaphysical thinking during the period around 1800. While Goethean Trübe softened epistemological distinctions, as a philosophical concept it also attributed ontological complexity to nature and rethought the world of appearances, thereby articulating challenges for representation.

Unendlichkeit (Infinity)

2023-09-29T10:18:25-04:00

This entry argues that, in his poetic as well as theoretical and scientific writings, Goethe adopts a dialectical position vis-à-vis one of the dominant philosophical concepts of the modern age: infinity (Unendlichkeit). While the concept of infinity came to be embraced by the end of the eighteenth century in literature and philosophy, as well as in the powerful tool of infinitesimal calculus, Goethe consistently emphasized the need for a dialectic between the finite and the infinite in which the internal force driving humans and nature beyond all limits must be balanced or counteracted by an equal force drawing them back towards the world of finitude. Goethe depicts this dialectic as both an inherent law of nature and an ethical and existential feature of humanity.