Abstract
The lexeme Begriff marks Goethe’s ongoing reconstruction of the traditional philosophical concept across a variety of disciplinary practices. In its most developed articulations, it also works transcendentally to establish the conditions of possibility for thought and intelligibility on a dynamic plane of verbal experimentation and reinvention that cuts immanently through the world. Unlike the clear and distinct concepts of rationalist metaphysics, which function as fixed universals beyond the reach of the senses, Goethe’s extensive usages and ongoing conceptualizations of Begriff draw on an expressive power within language to generate sequences of cognitive moves and moments of transitional understanding that stand in close relation to each other and can be gathered in graded series to be saved for further observation, description, reflection, and reconfiguration. Through its successive linguistic manifestations, moreover, and in line with Goethe’s heterodox approach to systematic philosophy, Begriff lays out force fields of verbal and philosophical activity and discovery with fluid and permeable borders. In ways comparable to the power of reflective judgment in Kant’s third critique, which dispenses with the categories of the understanding and their determining judgments to work intuitively within the world of living forms (Gestalten), Goethe’s lebendiger Begriff (living concept) proves to be a more encompassing structure of thought and its processes than the conceptual machinery of orthodox metaphysical systems with their regulatory regimes of limit-setting terms. Redeployed as an experimental object of experience, Begriff is, therefore, also anschaulich (visual, accessible to intuition). By offering a dynamic perspective onto the fugitive things of the world—including its thought things—it continually reveals the hidden secrets of its own perpetual becomings.
Highlights
Born into an era of cultural upheaval and transformation that would carry his name, Goethe came of intellectual age on the battlefield of philosophy
While Goethe engaged with philosophy from his earliest days as a student in Leipzig and Strasbourg and while he continued to mature as a philosopher throughout the classical and post-classical stages of his philosophical edification, he eventually came to understand his philosophical engagements as a series of counter-maneuvers against systematic metaphysics and the conceptual machinery that powered it
As a philosophical contrarian, Goethe typically responded in random asides or brief comments to the entrenched beliefs of the followers of Christian Wolff (1679-1754)—who had dominated the university curriculum during his student years—as well as the metaphysical debates that were circulating among philosophical luminaries of the day, including Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), Salomon Maimon (1753-1800), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (17621814), Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831), and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854)
Summary
Born into an era of cultural upheaval and transformation that would carry his name, Goethe came of intellectual age on the battlefield of philosophy. The journey of the word Begriff in German philosophical discourse did not begin with Goethe, but with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), whose translation of the Latin verb concipere (to conceive, gather) in its past participle form conceptus (product of conception, fetus) linked the mental act of conceptualizing with physical activities like grasping, holding, gathering, collecting, and containing, and with the biological events of conception (zeugen) and giving birth.[5] By the early nineteenth century, Begriff had acquired widespread currency within German intellectual circles, and it would appear some 1,700 times across Goethe’s works, while its Latin derivative Konzept has about 600 occurrences.[6] Among all of Goethe’s usages, 137 occur in variations of Adelung’s phrase, “im Begriff seyn oder stehen” (to be poised or stand ready) While this substantive, along with the two infinitives that are often paired with it, suggest a stable state of being, it can be followed by infinitive phrases other than “to be” or “to stand” to suggest potentiality and motion. As the Latin verb concipere (to conceive), along with its past participle conceptus (embryo or fetus) suggests, all of its modifications and synonyms work together to configure Begriff as a morphological process that moves through the distinct phases of life, including birth, maturation, conception, fruition, death, and regeneration
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