Goethe's phenomenological way of thinking and Urphänomen

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Goethe’s Phenomenological Way of Thinking and the Urphänomen
ArticleinGoethe Yearbook · January 2015
DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2015.0036
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Iris Hennigfeld
Leuphana University Lüneburg
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Goethe Yearbook XXII (2015)
IRIS HENNIGFELD
Goethe’s Phenomenological Way of Thinking
and the Urphänomen
Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Factische schon Theorie ist. Die Bläue
des Himmels offenbart uns das Grundgesetz der Chromatik. Man suche nur
nichts hinter den Phänomenen; sie selbst sind die Lehre. (FA 1.13:49)
[The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is
already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of chromatics.
Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena—they themselves are
the theory.1]
Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in
sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut,
schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf. (FA 1.24:596)
[The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he per-
ceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world. Every new
object, well contemplated and clearly seen, opens up a new organ within us.
(39)]
THESE TWO MAXIMS SUGGEST that Goethe’s thinking about and intuition of the world are phenomenologically grounded. They can be read as pro-
grammatic statements for his specific kind of phenomenological thinking,
evident in his poetry and his natural science and philosophical writings. I
suggest reading the first aphorism in the light of the phenomenological shib-
boleth “Back to the things themselves”2 (Zurück zu den Sachen selbst), pro-
nounced by Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological move-
ment. Similarly, the second aphorism reflects the phenomenological inter-
twinement of subject and object; it shows how each new experience might
widen the faculties of perception, cognition, and intuition and thus suggests
that the observer undergoes perpetual metamorphosis in response to each
new object of perception and cognition.
As I will show, reading Goethe’s method—his way of perceiving, experi-
encing, and reflecting—as grounded in and guided by what Husserl calls the
“principle of all principles,” that is, pure and “original intuition,”3 allows new
insights into Goethe’s works. Hence, I propose a phenomenological reading
of Goethe, especially of his philosophical and scientific writings.4 Husserl’s
philosophical language and phenomenological method, oriented toward

144 Iris Hennigfeld
clarity and truth, help to illuminate Goethe’s phenomenological thinking
and to transform implicit into explicit philosophical concepts. The relation
between Goethe’s and Husserl’s phenomenology can be viewed from two
perspectives: from the historical point of view, Goethe can be seen as a fore-
runner of phenomenological insights; from the philosophical angle, Goethe
and Husserl share similar philosophical ideas. I want to show how Goethe’s
thinking sheds new light on central questions in phenomenological philoso-
phy, in particular regarding Husserl and his followers. If we regard Goethe
as a spiritual predecessor of the phenomenological movement in the twenti-
eth and twenty-first centuries, his analyses can provide new insights into the
problems that also drove Husserl’s work.
In the following, I examine some key ideas in Goethe’s thinking, includ-
ing his notion of the Urphänomen from a phenomenological perspective. My
aim is to show that the Urphänomen can be understood as an example of a
phenomenological science of nature that explores the limits of intuition and
cognition. Furthermore, Goethe’s phenomenological way of thinking, exem-
plified by his notion of the Urphänomen, invites radical openness especially
toward phenomena that, like the Urphänomen, elude the standards of mod-
ern science and its mathematization of nature and exceed the limits of mere
objectification and representation.
This article is divided into five parts. Section 1 focuses on the phenom-
enological method in its relation to different kinds of givenness in the phe-
nomenal world. Section 2 analyzes the relation between art and science in
Goethe’s thinking and explains, from a phenomenological point of view,
why Goethe used imagination as a tool of cognition. Section 3 explains how
Goethe’s phenomenological method—particularly, his enhanced notion of
experience and his showing (Aufweisen or Ausweisen) or illumination of
the manifold conditions of appearances—led him to the “discovery” of the
Urphänomen. Section 4 parses the relation between world and conscious-
ness, phenomena and thinking, in phenomenological philosophy. I link the
phenomenological correlation of Self and world with Goethe’s attempt to
develop and enhance the organs of perception. In this last section, I turn
toward Martin Heidegger’s adoption of Goethe’s Urphänomen and its inher-
ent potential for the “task of thinking”5 in the future.
Intertwining Method and Content
in Phenomenological Thinking
Phenomenological thinking describes and analyzes manifold ways of phe-
nomenal givenness and shows how different phenomena (or ontological
regions of phenomena) correlate with particular kinds of experiences. The
late Husserl programmatically describes this correlation in his Cartesian
Meditations: “Zu jedem Gegenstandstypus gehört seine typische Art mögli-
cher Erfahrung” (Hua 1:24; Each type of object correlates to its own specific
type of possible experience). The founder of phenomenology did not first
develop a method and then apply it to different fields of phenomena; rather,
he conceived of different phenomenological methods—the “static,” “genet-
ic,” and “generative” approaches—through phenomenological investigation,

Goethe Yearbook 145
through describing and analyzing different fields of the phenomenal world
and of consciousness.6 Therefore, phenomenology is not a philosophi-
cal discipline in the same way as, for example, metaphysics, ontology, and
ethics; nor is it a technique, which, once developed and adopted, can be
applied in a uniform manner to different fields of phenomena. Rather, in
phenomenological thinking each specific type of givenness determines its
correlative methodological approach; so, as new fields of research appear,
new methods must develop.7 Consequently, in phenomenological thinking
there is a certain supremacy of the process of thinking over the result of
research.
Different phenomenologists have developed their original styles of phe-
nomenology, which differ, sometimes to a very considerable extent, from
Husserlian phenomenology. But at the same time they all share essential
communalities that mark them as exponents of phenomenological think-
ing. Because they have much in common, it is justified to turn to other phe-
nomenologists to support particular arguments, all the more so since these
thinkers developed their own approaches in response to questions raised
by Husserl. Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s most famous student, for example,
emphasized in the context of his methodological considerations in §7 of Sein
und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) that the term “phenomenology” signifies nei-
ther a “standpoint” nor a “direction” but primarily a method; phenomenologi-
cal thinking, as Heidegger continues, focuses not on “the what of the objects”
of research but rather on “the how of that research.”8 Similarly, the French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who attended Husserl’s lectures in
1929 in Paris, theorized the intertwinement of content, the object of thought,
and method in phenomenological thinking. Merleau-Ponty points out that
this correspondence is not limited to any specific field of research but char-
acterizes phenomenology itself. In the preface to his Phenomenology of
Perception (1945), he radicalizes this correlation, stating that “[p]henomenol-
ogy is accessible only through a phenomenological method.”9
In Goethe’s thought, the uniqueness of different phenomena or fields of
research calls for a variety of different methods. There is no one abstract
theoretical approach that could do justice to different kinds of phenomena.
Especially after his encounter with the Kantian Schiller, Goethe reflected on
his own method of research, and as a result, his studies on comparative anat-
omy and botany after the 1790s emphasized methodological considerations
over new scientific experiences and results.10 More than twenty years later,
in his next phase of scientific research, Goethe’s notebooks Zur Morphologie
(FA 1.24:399–642; Morphological Notebooks) and Zur Naturwissenschaft
(Scientific Notebooks) pair—under the title “Erfahrung, Betrachtung,
Folgerung, durch Lebensereignisse verbunden” (Experience, Reflection,
Conclusion, Linked by Life Events)—new essays with older attempts with-
out revising the latter. Thus, Goethe does not merely explicate his results
or a complete and closed system but rather gives insight into his process of
research, that is, how he approaches nature.11 In so doing, Goethe enables
the reader to participate actively in the process and historical development
of his research. By reenacting Goethe’s way of thinking, readers gain a deep-
er and more detailed understanding of the morphological method, which