ABSTRACT
The point about Goethe's influence on the discovery of the mind can be made briefly. It can actually be summarized in a four-word epigram: Man is his deeds. This formulation is widely associated with existentialism and specifically with Sartre's influential lecture L'Existentialism est un humanisme (1946). Goethe implicitly calls into question the existence of the mind. Neither the Buddhist doctrine that there is no mind nor William James' essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" (in Essays in Radical Empiricism) would have startled him. Mind becomes an inclusive term for feeling and intelligence, reason and emotion, perception and will, thought and unconscious. If we see things that way, does it make any sense to speak of discovering the mind? It does, as a kind of shorthand. Goethe and Schiller did not believe in spirits, but used "spirit" (Geist) nevertheless, mindful that it was a poetic rather than a scientific term.
