ABSTRACT
my title is not Goethe’s Philosophy of Art nor Goethe’s Theory of Art, for the most significant thing about Goethe is his integrity—the fact that we cannot detach any part of his thought and consider it in isolation. Art and Morality, Science and Philosophy, Religion and Politics—all are knit into one consistent fabric. The part is only fully significant in relation to the whole; there are no boundaries or fences. If we want to know what Goethe thought about a subject like art, we must look with equal expectation on every page he ever wrote—not only in his diaries and letters, his books of travel or of maxims, but also in his novels, his books about the morphology of plants and animals, in his Theory of Colour and, of course, in his poems. When we have done that—and it would be almost a life’s work to do it competently—then I think we should be in possession of a complete understanding of the nature and significance of art. It may be that with such an understanding we could then formulate a science of art, a theory of aesthetics. But that is not what Goethe did—on the contrary, that is just what he deliberately refrained from doing. For he realized—and these are his own words—“that our understanding of a work of art, as of a work of nature, always remains incommensurable. We contemplate it; we feel it; it is effective; but it eludes exact cognition, and its essence, its quality, cannot be expressed in words”.
