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WorkRudolf Steiner

Goethe's World View

The book in which fifteen years of editing Goethe's science become a claim that ideas can be seen in the things themselves.

by Rudolf Steiner252 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Goethes Weltanschauung
First published
(aged 36)
Original language
German

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Overview

In Jena in 1794 Goethe sketched his archetypal plant for Schiller, and Schiller answered that this was an idea, not an experience. Goethes Weltanschauung is built around that conversation, and it sides with Goethe. Rudolf Steiner had been editing Goethe's scientific writings since 1882, when he was twenty-one, first for a popular series of German classics and then for the great Weimar edition, and this book is where that apprenticeship ends. He had planned it by 1890; the Weimar publisher Emil Felber asked for the finished text in December 1891; it appeared only in 1897, the year Steiner left Weimar for Berlin. Since Plato, he argues, Western thought has split the world in two, with ideas in one realm and the things we see in another, and Kant's limits on knowledge are the latest form of that split. Goethe refused it: he looked for the idea inside the plant, the bone, the colour, and he found it there by watching things change. The middle of the book follows that method through Goethe's actual research, the metamorphosis of plants, the small bone in the human upper jaw whose existence Goethe demonstrated, the theory of colours he set against Newton, and his notes on rocks and weather. The last chapter sets Goethe beside Hegel and finds each falling short: Goethe lived among ideas without ever observing them as such, while Hegel reasoned about ideas and never observed nature. For the new edition of 1918 Steiner rewrote only the two chapters on Plato, and it needed two reprints within the year.

Key concepts

What is the archetypal plant, Goethe's Urpflanze?

Not a plant that grows anywhere, and not a mere abstraction either. It is the formative principle common to all plants, grasped by watching one organ, the leaf, transformed into seed leaf, stem leaf, sepal, petal and stamen. Once it is grasped, Goethe wrote, one could even invent plants that do not exist but could. Steiner reads it as an idea perceived in nature, not added to it.

What is a primal phenomenon?

The simplest case in which a law of nature shows itself openly, reached by arranging observations until nothing more needs to be added. For colour Goethe found it in light and darkness meeting through a turbid medium: darkness seen through it turns blue, light seen through it turns yellow and red. Steiner defends the idea as the proper end of explanation, the point where thinking and seeing coincide.

Which split between idea and experience does the book blame on Plato?

The belief that ideas and the things we see belong to two different worlds, the ideas true and eternal, the things passing copies of them. Steiner traces it from Plato through Christian theology to Kant, for whom the thing in itself lies beyond experience altogether. Goethe's world view is presented as the first thorough refusal of that split: the idea is to be found in the experienced thing.

Why does the book set Goethe beside Hegel?

Because each had half of what a complete world view needs. Goethe lived among ideas in his research and saw them at work in plants and colours, but never turned round to observe ideas themselves. Hegel made ideas his whole subject and built a system from them, but never looked at nature as Goethe did. The book's claim is that the two halves belong together in one way of knowing.

Why can a living organism not be explained like a machine?

Because in a machine the parts come first and the whole results from their arrangement, whereas in an organism the whole is at work in every part and shapes it. Mechanical explanation, cause pushing effect, suits inorganic nature; the living, Steiner argues with Goethe, needs a way of thinking that grasps the type, the formative idea, and follows it through all its variations.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Idea Seen in the Thing

Are ideas only in the head, or can they be found in things themselves? Against a split running from Plato to Kant, the book sides with Goethe, who looked for the idea inside the plant, the bone and the colour.

Since Plato, Steiner argues, Western thought has placed ideas in one realm and the things we see in another, and Kant's limits on knowledge are the latest form of that divide. Goethe never accepted it. When Schiller told him that his archetypal plant was an idea and not an experience, Goethe replied that he was glad to have ideas without knowing it, and even to see them with his eyes. The closing chapter names the gap that remains: Goethe lived among ideas without observing them as such, while Hegel reasoned about ideas without observing nature.

  • epistemology
  • perception
  • ideas
  • idealism
  • platonism
  • empiricism
  • observation
  • abstraction
  • metaphysics
  • knowledge
  • experience
  • ethics
  • freedom

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Metamorphosis and the Living Form

What does it take to understand a living thing rather than take it apart? Goethe's answer, which the book defends, is to watch how a form changes and find the one shape that runs through all its variations.

Leaf, sepal, petal and stamen are, on Goethe's view, one organ transformed, and the archetypal plant is the principle that makes every actual plant possible. Steiner insists this is not vague poetry. Goethe brought the same method to the skeleton and demonstrated the small intermaxillary bone in the human upper jaw, which the anatomists of his day said humans lacked. The living, Steiner argues, cannot be explained as mechanics explains a machine from its parts, because the whole is at work in each part. The book follows the method on into Goethe's notes on rocks and weather.

  • morphology
  • metamorphosis
  • plant morphology
  • organicism
  • organism
  • organic development
  • philosophy of biology
  • nature
  • philosophy of nature
  • mechanism
  • human nature
  • geology

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Colour Against Newton

Was Newton wrong about colour, or was Goethe asking a different question? The book defends Goethe's theory of colours as a method: stay with the phenomenon until it explains itself, instead of reaching past it to hidden causes.

Newton had split white light into colours with a prism and treated colour as a property of light's hidden components. Goethe objected that this left out the conditions under which colours actually appear: at the border of light and darkness, in turbid media, in the eye itself. Steiner sides with Goethe on method. An explanation, he argues, should arrange the phenomena until the primal phenomenon, the simplest case, shows itself, and should not replace what is seen with something unseen. Physicists, he holds, misjudged the theory by testing it as an attempt at their own kind of physics.

  • color theory
  • scientific method
  • scientific explanation
  • philosophy of science
  • aesthetics

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Within this work

passages held
252
distinct concepts
295
by passages held, corpus-wide
#298

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologyperception10
epistemologynature8
color theoryperception7
empiricismperception7
empiricismepistemology5
epistemologyphilosophy of nature5
ideasphilosophy of nature5
naturescientific method5
empiricismideas4
empiricismphilosophy of nature4
epistemologyideas4
epistemologyscientific method4
ideasperception4
color theoryscientific method3
natureperception3
empiricismscientific method2
ideasnature2
perceptionphilosophy of nature2
philosophy of naturescientific method2
ideasscientific method1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)

    The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.

     DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)

    Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.

     DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung) you are here DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)

    The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.

     DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)

    The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.

     DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)

    Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.

     EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)

    Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.

     DEEN
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