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

Abstract

After an exchange of letters early in 1821, Goethe was so pleased by 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 dedication:Dem Absolutenempfiehlt sichschonstenszu freundlicher AufnahmeUrphanomen.1This vignette, tongue-in-cheek though it is, points to an enduring meeting of minds between two thinkers, which can be detected in most surprising places. The parallels between Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan (1819) and 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 apparent differences in voices of these two thinkers to 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 concept of negation Hegel deploys in his account of natural development in Vorwort to his Phanomenologie des Geistes (not, as Goethe calls it in letter, Logik, which at time was unpublished): Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blute, und man konnte sagen, das jene von dieser widerlegt wird .. 7T28-31).4 Although Goethe retracted his initial scathing comments almost immediately (FA 7:131), and declared himself to be more satisfied once Seebeck had explained context of remark to him (FA 7:151), negation was one aspect of Hegel's system that remained foreign to him.5 Yet other moments in Phanomenologie 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 self and poetry-are particularly striking, and demand to be explored further. My concern here is not with narrow question of who influenced whom: indeed, such an approach would hardly allow comparison room to breathe. Rather, parallels can be attributed partly to philosophical tradition (especially thought of Leibniz and Spinoza) in which both were steeped, and partly to 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, process of becoming perfect or complete is as significant as goal; and it is interdependence of these two, of process and telos,that constitutes life.6 In preface to his Phanomenologie, Hegel lays down fundamental principles of 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 Ausfuhrung und sein Ende wirklich ist (Werke 3:23)For Hegel, then, end state of Geist (its truth), goal of its development, is always implicit in its beginning; 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, most new, in sense that it is originary, embryonic, and always present in newer forms that succeed it. Brady Bowman observes that the peculiar coincidence of succession and simultaneity, of genesis and structure, is a striking feature shared by [the] methods [of both Goethe and Hegel];7 and in Divan poem Unbegrenzt (FA 3. …