Thinking outside of Philosophy: Goethe, Lévi‐Strauss, Propp

Abstract

This paper explores parallels between the morphological thought of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the structuralism of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, and the formalism of Vladimir Propp, with emphasis on the manner in which each of these three thinkers adopts an “epistemological attitude” critical of, and external to, conventional philosophical discourse. The core commonality between them lies in their skepticism about the separability of the ideal from the real, and in the seeking of meaning within the observable constitutive structures of a phenomenon rather than any noumenal essence. The first part of the article examines the way Goethe and Lévi‐Strauss negotiate the relation between abstract thought and concrete observation; the second part turns to the way Lévi‐Strauss and Propp negotiate that question within the context of twentieth‐century social science.