The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft: On Wilhelm Dilthey’s Goethebilder ANGUS NICHOLLS Q UEEN M ARY , U NIVERSITY OF L ONDON Fragt euch nur bei jedem Gedicht: ob es ein Erlebtes enthalte … Goethe - «Ein Wort für junge Dichter» During the century that has elapsed since Wilhelm Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1906) presented Goethe as an intuitive poet giving expression to das Erlebte, the central importance of the term Erlebnis for Goethe scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been recognized. 1 Less well appreciated, however, is the rhetorical function served by Dilthey’s image of Goethe in debates concerning the relationship between the Naturand Geisteswissenschaften. The purpose of this paper is therefore not to offer yet another critique of the Lebensphilosophie approach to Goethe developed by Dilthey and furthered by figures such as Friedrich Gundolf, Georg Simmel and Eduard Spranger; 2 rather, my intention here is to examine a certain aspect of the role played by «Goethe» (the cultural figure rather than the author), in the epistemological debates that occurred at the boundaries of the natural and human sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century - debates in which Dilthey played a central role. In an essay entitled «Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften» (1954), Hans- Georg Gadamer addresses these debates by arguing that the contemporary humanities were developed at least partially in response to the revolutions in the natural sciences that took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period, Wissenschaft came to denote an experimental method that could deliver objective, testable and verifiable results. Faced by the challenge laid down by the unprecedented success of the natural sciences, the humanities and particularly the historical sciences also attempted to found a method that could ensure the objectivity and verifiability of research findings. Gadamer’s lengthy discussion of Dilthey and the problems of historicism in Wahrheit und Methode is of course designed to show that practitioners of the human sciences found themselves in a rather different epistemological situation to that enjoyed by the natural sciences. As Gadamer observes in the foreword to the second edition of Wahrheit und Methode, the human sciences are distinguished by a humanistic tradition that separates them from other kinds of scientific research, and which aligns them with extra-scientific experiences 70 Angus Nicholls akin to those found in art. 3 In «Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften,» he contends that this humanistic tradition reasserted itself during the Romantic period, as a reaction against the rise of experimental science. Accordingly, Gadamer proposes that the development of the human sciences actually owes more to the heritage of Romanticism and German Idealism than it does to the tradition of the natural sciences. This, he argues, is precisely because Romanticism and German Idealism, with their focus on a decidedly non-positivist conception of Erlebnis, contain a form of knowledge that is alive «um die Grenzen der Aufklärung und der Methode in der Wissenschaft.» 4 Now it is my contention that this knowledge that lives on the borders of the Enlightenment and science was developed first and foremost by figures who undertook what I would like to call «boundary work» in the sciences - that is to say, scientific research that was developed before firm boundaries between the humanities and the natural sciences had been delineated, and before academic disciplines had undergone detailed processes of specialization and professionalization. In this respect, Gadamer’s scientific boundary-dweller par excellence is Goethe, a fact that he makes abundantly clear in Wahrheit und Methode, where he cites Goethe’s critique of Newton as the primary example of a philosophical and speculative form of science that attempted to supplement the dominant, mainstream, and mathematically based science of physics. 5 But Gadamer’s view of Goethe is in this respect not entirely new - in fact it contains significant traces of the Goethebilder propagated by Wilhelm Dilthey during various stages of his career. In what follows, I will address two of Dilthey’s Goethebilder in terms of their importance for late nineteenthcentury debates concerning the relationship between the natural and human sciences: the first appears in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), while the second lies at the heart of the essay «Goethe und die dichterische Phantasie,» an early version of which was published under a different title in 1878, 6 before being revised three further times for inclusion in the various editions of Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung that appeared in 1906, 1907, and 1910. 7 I will argue that the cultural construct «Goethe» plays - in both Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften and «Goethe und die dichterische Phantasie» - a key role in helping Dilthey to differentiate the human sciences from the natural sciences. Finally, I shall also consider the extent to which Goethe’s own self-characterizations, and the often uncritical adoption of them by Dilthey, may have caused significant elements of his scientific writings to be overlooked and/ or misunderstood. Dilthey’s Goethebild in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften is characterized by two separate, yet interrelated aspects: the first being his consideration The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 71 of Goethe as an object of scientific inquiry; the second, his view of Goethe as a practitioner of science. In the opening passages of Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey outlines an epistemological argument through which he attempts to establish the Geisteswissenschaften as a «selbständiges Ganzes neben den Naturwissenschaften.» 8 It is sufficient, argues Dilthey, für die selbständige Konstituierung der Geisteswissenschaften, daß auf diesem kritischen Standpunkt von denjenigen Vorgängen, die aus dem Material des in den Sinnen Gegebenen, und nur aus diesem, durch denkende Verknüpfung gebildet werden, sich die anderen als ein besonderer Umkreis von Tatsachen absondern, welche primär in der inneren Erfahrung, sonach ohne jede Mitwirkung der Sinne, gegeben sind, und welche alsdann aus dem so primär gegebenen Material innerer Erfahrung auf Anlaß äußerer Naturvorgänge formiert werden, um diesen durch ein gewisses, dem Analogieschluß in der Leistung gleichwertiges Verfahren untergelegt zu werden. So entsteht ein eigenes Reich von Erfahrungen, welches im inneren Erlebnis seinen selbständigen Ursprung und sein Material hat, und das demnach naturgemäß Gegenstand einer besonderen Erfahrungswissenschaft ist. Und solange nicht jemand behauptet, daß er den Inbegriff von Leidenschaft, dichterischem Gestalten, denkendem Ersinnen, welchen wir als Goethes Leben bezeichnen, aus dem Bau seines Gehirns, den Eigenschaften seines Körpers abzuleiten und so besser erkennbar zu machen imstande ist, wird auch die selbständige Stellung einer solchen Wissenschaft nicht bestritten werden. 9 Goethe is presented here as being an extraordinary scientific specimen - a specimen that not only raises once again the age-old philosophical question of the mind-body problem, but which also calls for a different conception of science to that offered by the positivist natural sciences. Dilthey argues that when one is confronted by the combination of emotion, poetic creativity and thinking intuition [denkendes Ersinnen] that is the life of Goethe, it is extremely difficult to attribute such phenomena to material causes like the workings of Goethe’s brain or to his physiological characteristics. And although Dilthey does not strictly rule out the possibility that a materialist explanation for Goethe’s creativity may be discovered by scientists of the future, he at the same time claims that scientists of his own generation are compelled by the specimen «Goethe» to develop a different, non-positivist type of science. This mode of scientific inquiry, labeled Erfahrungswissenschaft, is a science which - unlike the natural sciences - deals with inner experience [innere Erfahrung] rather than with external objects, but which is nonetheless to be understood by way of analogy with the positivist natural sciences. Erfahrungswissenschaft is, for Dilthey, a type of science that endeavors to understand the Ausdrücke or expressions that arise from Erlebnisse or lived experiences. Here it is necessary briefly to explain the distinctions that Dilthey makes between the philosophically loaded terms Erlebnis, Erfahrung 72 Angus Nicholls and Vorstellung, since these distinctions are the primary means through which he endeavors to separate what he calls the Geisteswissenschaften from the Naturwissenschaften. As is noted by K. Cramer in his article on Erlebnis written for the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, the term Erlebnis did not undergo any explicit philosophical theorization until the middle of the nineteenth century, 10 and this theorization functioned at least in part as a response to literary uses of the verb erleben and the substantive das Erlebte during the Goethezeit. 11 The term Erlebnis first appears as a philosophical concept in 1838, in Wilhelm Traugott Krug’s Enzyklopädisches Lexikon in Bezug auf die neueste Literatur und Geschichte der Philosophie. An Erlebnis, according to Krug, heißt alles, was man selbst erlebt (empfunden, geschaut, gedacht, gewollt, gethan oder gelassen) hat. Solche Erlebnisse sind also die Grundlage der eigenen Erfahrung, wenn man dadurch richtige Ergebnisse zu ziehen versteht. 12 From Krug’s definition of Erlebnis it becomes clear that Erlebnisse enjoy a certain ontological priority over Erfahrungen, since an Erlebnis constitutes the basis of an Erfahrung, or (to use an analogy coined by K. Cramer) Erlebnisse are to Erfahrungen what premises are to conclusions. 13 As Karol Sauerland has shown, this ontological priority was then carried over into German Literaturwissenschaft of the mid-nineteenth century, in which both das Erlebnis and das Erlebte came to denote an authentic ground for literary works that allowed them to correspond with the purported real, inner experiences of the author. 14 In this connection, it is perhaps more than just a coincidence that Goethe himself, in his first schema for Dichtung und Wahrheit (written in 1809), uses the term das Erlebte in association with «innere Erfahrung» when he describes his autobiographical method through the following formulation: «Alles nach innerer Erfahrung. Selbstbildung durch Verwandlung des Erlebten in ein Bild». 15 Although the early Dilthey of Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften seemingly follows Krug in seeing Erlebnisse as being more basic and primordial than Erfahrungen, it is significant that the term Erlebnis itself remains distinctly under-theorized in Dilthey’s published early works, 16 and that Dilthey’s theoretical grapplings with this term were (as Frithjof Rodi has convincingly argued) often linked with his considerations of Goethe from the first Goethe essay of 1878 onwards. 17 Dilthey began explicitly to theorize the concept of Erlebnis in his attempts to write the never completed second volume of Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, the results of which can be found in the so-called «Breslau Draft» or Breslauer Ausarbeitung zum zweiten Band der Einleitung of circa 1880. 18 Frithjof Rodi’s analyses of the The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 73 «Breslau Draft» have made abundantly clear just how strenuously Dilthey attempted to differentiate the concept of Erlebnis from that of Vorstellung, 19 a differentiation which I discuss below. No doubt as a result of the preparatory work carried out in the «Breslau Draft», Dilthey’s clearest discussions of Erlebnis can be found in his Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (written mostly between 1906 and 1910), 20 and in the following passage from the Fragmente zur Poetik written in 1907-08. Here an Erlebnis is described as an experience that is so absolutely primordial and immediate that it occurs prior to the differentiation between subject and object, and is therefore not susceptible of being captured or constructed as an object of rational thought. An Erlebnis, Dilthey writes, tritt mir […] nicht gegenüber als ein Wahrgenommenes oder Vorgestelltes; es ist uns nicht gegeben, sondern die Realität Erlebnis ist für uns dadurch da, daß wir ihrer innewerden, daß ich sie als zu mir in irgendeinem Sinn zugehörig unmittelbar habe. Erst im Denken wird es gegenständlich. 21 An Erlebnis is therefore experienced with an immediacy that calls for a different type of expression (i.e., poetic or artistic expression) to that normally associated with scientific representation. As Gadamer has observed, Dilthey’s invocations of the concept of Erlebnis carry with them a Romantic philosophical heritage, in that the word Erlebnis evoziert offenkundig die Kritik am Rationalismus der Aufklärung, die im Ausgang von Rousseau den Begriff des Lebens zur Geltung brachte. Es dürfte der Einfluß Rousseaus auf die deutsche Klassik sein, der den Maßstab des «Erlebtseins» in Kraft setzte und damit die Wortbildung «Erlebnis» ermöglichte. Der Begriff des Lebens bildet aber auch den metaphysischen Hintergrund, der das spekulative Denken des deutschen Idealismus trägt […] Gegenüber der Abstraktion des Verstandes ebenso wie gegenüber der Partikularität der Empfindung oder Vorstellung impliziert dieser Begriff die Verbindung zur Totalität, zur Unendlichkeit. Das ist in dem Ton, den das Wort Erlebnis bis zum heutigen Tage hat, deutlich vernehmbar. 22 The epistemological roots of Dilthey’s privileging of Erlebnis over both Erfahrung and Vorstellung can be found in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften and (in a much more explicit form) in the «Breslau Draft». As is well known, the concept of Erfahrung has, at least since Locke, Hume and Kant, been differentiated from Erlebnis in that an Erfahrung combines the raw sense impressions of an experience with rational cognition. It is therefore precisely the rational and cognitive elements involved in an Erfahrung which see it lose the alleged immediacy of an Erlebnis, as Dilthey suggests when he complains that there runs «in den Adern des erkennenden Subjekts, das Locke, Hume und Kant konstruierten, […] nicht wirkliches Blut, sondern der verdünnte Saft von Vernunft als bloßer Denktätigkeit». 23 A Vorstellung is, for Dilthey in 74 Angus Nicholls the «Breslau Draft», at even further remove from an Erlebnis than is an Erfahrung, since Dilthey sees Vorstellungen as being representations accompanied by an explicit intentionality. 24 The advantage of the human sciences, as Dilthey conceives them, is that they concern themselves with understanding the Ausdrücke or life-expressions that arise from pre-intentional (and therefore eminently vibrant and authentic) Erlebnisse, while the natural sciences are associated with mere instrumental analyses and consequently with weak and attenuated Vorstellungen of natural objects. Thus, as Frithjof Rodi observes, the «Breslau Draft» introduces the concept of Erlebnis precisely in order to theorize and capture «die ganze Breite der über den Bereich der Vorstellungen weit hinausgehenden Tatsachen des Bewußtseins.» 25 It is the nature or perhaps even the structure of an Erlebnis which Dilthey sees as providing the Geisteswissenschaften with an entirely different subject matter to that which is investigated by the natural sciences. This is because the objects of knowledge in the human sciences are in fact not objects in the same way that, say, a plant or mineral specimen may be for a natural scientist. Rather, the subject matter of the human sciences is revealed by a certain duality inherent in the concept of Erlebnis itself, a duality that is usefully analyzed by Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode. Although the term Erlebnis already appears in Krug’s literary and philosophical Lexicon of 1838, Gadamer points out that it did not actually achieve common usage in German until the 1870s, when it began to be used with greater frequency, particularly in biographical writing and especially in Dilthey’s biography of Schleiermacher. 26 On the one hand, the word Erlebnis is at least partially derived from the verb erleben, which Gadamer defines as «noch am Leben sein, wenn etwas geschieht», and which refers to an experience that has been lived through by the individual and cannot be understood secondhand through the account of another person. This aspect of the term represents, in other words, the immediacy and irreducibility of an experience for a particular individual. On the other hand, the term Erlebnis is also derived from das Erlebte, which Gadamer sees as referring to the «bleibende Gehalt dessen, was da erlebt wird»: the residue or product, as it were, that an experience leaves behind. 27 The dualistic nature of the concept of Erlebnis is seen by Gadamer as mediating between two separate and antagonistic poles in Dilthey’s epistemology: the positivist and the pantheistic. 28 Das Erlebte or the alleged product of an Erlebnis - say, for example, Goethe’s poem «Mächtiges Überraschen» - becomes an artifact of scientific investigation in more or less the positivist sense of the term. The goal of the scientific investigator is therefore to understand this concrete artifact by tracing it back to its cause: the subjective and personal experience that gave rise to it and the life-world in which this experience took The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 75 place. It is the origin of the artifact - the subjectivity of its progenitor, and the life-world that shaped this selfsame subjectivity - which represents the pantheistic or speculative side of Dilthey’s epistemology. In order to understand this aspect of an Erlebnis, the researcher is required, through a combination of historical reconstruction and empathetic projection, figuratively to transport his or herself back into the life-world of a given artifact and the psychology of its creator. Such a methodology satisfied two requirements sought by Dilthey in his attempt positively to redefine the nature of the human sciences: on the one hand, the human sciences are endowed with a sense of rigor in that their methodology involves tracing effects (artifacts or texts) back to their causes, thereby constituting an analogical relationship between the human and natural sciences; while on the other hand the nature of these causes - individual subjectivity and the historical conditions that shaped this subjectivity - are not available to the scientific observer in the same way that plants or minerals are, and must therefore be imaginatively, creatively and empathetically reconstructed. The indirect effect of such a methodology on literary scholarship was to endow the author’s biography, and especially his or her biographical reflections on the genesis of particular works, with a high degree of scientific value. Although this was probably not Dilthey’s intention, since his concept of Leben is rather more ontological than it is strictly biographical, the practical consequences of such an approach are nowhere more clear than in the case of Goethe, who perhaps more than any other author of his age successfully shaped his own legacy by offering biographical accounts of the events that purportedly gave rise to certain works, thereby also influencing the interpretation of these works. Thus, for example, Goethe’s remarks in Dichtung und Wahrheit and in Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe about the biographical circumstances that gave rise to Die Leiden des jungen Werthers have played an enormously important role in shaping the reception history of that novel, 29 while the poem alluded to earlier - «Mächtiges Überraschen» - has been interpreted as Goethe’s reflection upon his romantic attachments at the time of its genesis, rather than to the philosophical themes suggested by the actual terminology used in the poem itself. 30 The second key aspect of Dilthey’s Goethebild in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, his consideration of Goethe as a practitioner of science, is revealed in the following passage. Significantly, Dilthey sees Goethe alongside Rousseau as part of a broad counter movement that reacts against the rise of mechanical and mathematical method in the natural sciences. «Mit der Macht einer unwiderstehlichen Naturerscheinung», he writes, 76 Angus Nicholls hat sich zugleich mit der Durchführung der mechanischen Naturerklärung das tiefe Bewußtsein des Lebens in der Natur, wie es in der Totalität unseres eigenen Lebens gegeben ist, in der Poesie ausgesprochen; nicht als eine Art von schönem Schein oder von Form (wie Vertreter der formalen Ästhetik annehmen würden), sondern als gewaltiges Lebensgefühl; zunächst in der Naturempfindung von Rousseau, dessen Lieblingsneigungen naturwissenschaftliche waren, alsdann aber in Goethes Poesie und Naturphilosophie. Dieser bekämpfte mit leidenschaftlichem Schmerz, vergebens, ohne die Hilfsmittel klarer Auseinandersetzung, die sicheren Resultate der Newtonschen mechanischen Naturerklärung, indem er diese als Naturphilosophie betrachtete, nicht als das, was sie war: Entwicklung eines in der Natur gegebenen Teilzusammenhangs als abstraktes Hilfsmittel der Erkenntnis und Benutzung der Natur. 31 Apparently swept along by a «gewaltiges Lebensgefühl,» Goethe is seen to have fundamentally misunderstood the goal of Newtonian physics, in that he took it to be a philosophy of nature when in actual fact it was something entirely different and altogether less profound: an «abstraktes Hilfsmittel» used in order to understand and exploit nature. In this respect, Dilthey’s assessment of Goethe as a scientist appears to have heavily been influenced by negative assessments of the Farbenlehre offered by two extremely important figures in midto late nineteenth century German science. Both Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond had, in public lectures held in 1853 and 1882 respectively, argued that since Goethe had no grasp of mechanical causality and the methods of modern physics, his critique of Newton in the Farbenlehre was altogether mistaken. On the other hand, both of these scientists thought that Goethe was more successful in the fields of morphology and comparative anatomy, but only because this type of empirical research enabled him to use the intuitive techniques of observation also found in art. In short, Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond thought that Goethe was essentially an artist whose limited success in the sciences was due to fortunate artistic intuition rather than to rigorous method. 32 In Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, published just one year after Du Bois-Reymond’s lecture, Dilthey agreed, proposing that because Goethe was in his essential nature and temperament an intuitive and subjective artist, he quite simply failed to grasp what Newton was trying to do in his Opticks. Without making a foray here into the minute details of Goethe’s critique of Newton’s color experiments, it is necessary to point out that recent scholarship has shown that Goethe’s critique of Newton has often been misunderstood as being an embarrassingly flawed attack upon Newton’s experimental results in the Opticks. Yet as I have argued in a recent essay, 33 and in this respect I have followed the work of both Roger Stephenson and Daniel Steuer, 34 Goethe does not attack the results that Newton derived from his prism ex- The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 77 periments concerning the refrangibility of color; rather, his target was Newton’s scientific methodology in general. What Goethe finds so distasteful is Newton’s proposition that a highly artificial experimental situation - passing beams of light through prisms configured in a particular way in order to confirm a certain hypothesis - can be equated with an observation of nature. For Goethe, such a situation more closely resembles what Dilthey calls a Vorstellung: that is, nature intentionally reorganized and distorted so that it may correspond with a prearranged theoretical construct. Dilthey is therefore correct when he refers to the «sicheren Resultate der Newtonschen mechanischen Naturerklärung», since Newton and others were able to repeat the experiments concerning diverse refrangibility with accuracy. And for this reason, Dilthey is also correct and essentially in agreement with contemporary scholarship on the Farbenlehre when he argues that Goethe’s critique of Newton does not amount to a successful refutation of Newton’s experimental results; rather, as Daniel Steuer has observed, Goethe’s anti-Newtonian polemic is hermeneutically based, objecting to the interpretation and arrangement of experiments in order to serve a preconceived metaphysics. 35 But Dilthey is wrong when he alleges that Goethe simply misunderstood what Newton was trying to do in his Opticks. In fact, Goethe was well aware that Newton’s scientific method used the language of mathematics in order to represent nature in a way that suited his own hypotheses and that also allowed natural phenomena to be fragmented, distorted and ultimately exploited. To sum up: Goethe did not misunderstand Newton; rather, it seems that Dilthey may have misunderstood Goethe. Why then, and in what way, did Dilthey misunderstand Goethe? In order to begin answering these questions, let me now turn to Dilthey’s Goethebild in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1906). In many respects, Goethe represents for Dilthey the paradigm challenge that lies before the science of hermeneutics. This is because of the purported deep continuity between Goethe’s poetic productions and what Dilthey calls Leben or life. Poetry is, for Dilthey, the expression of life, by which he means the expression of the emotions, feelings and passions arising from immediate experiences or Erlebnisse. 36 The object of poetry is accordingly not an intellectually apprehended reality, an Erfahrung or Vorstellung, but rather the expression of immediate life-relations. As an intuitive expression of life, Goethe’s poetry is for Dilthey exemplary: Da ist […] die erste und entscheidende Eigenschaft der Dichtung Goethes, daß sie aus einer außerordentlichen Energie des Erlebens erwächst […] Sein Leben und seine Dichtungen sind hierin nicht unterschieden. 37 78 Angus Nicholls Goethe, according to Dilthey, was a purely instinctive and natural poet: a «Genie des Auges» who intuited nature’s forms in such a way that no process of self-conscious reflection intervened between his lived experiences and his poetic expressions of them. 38 In Goethe, the normally separate activities of Leben, Bilden and Dichten are, says Dilthey, unified in a way that is unprecedented in the history of Western literature. 39 Even Goethe’s scientific studies (including the Farbenlehre) are, according to Dilthey, dominated by his eye-oriented imagination and his powers of intuition. 40 Concurring wholeheartedly with Schiller’s characterization of Goethe in his famous letter dated 23 August 1794, Dilthey observes that Goethe had little talent for philosophy or abstract thinking. 41 In short, rather than being a self-conscious philosopher of nature, Goethe simply was nature and acted like nature herself, and for this reason Dilthey observes that Goethe’s «dichterische Entwickelung ist wie das Wachstum der Pflanzen.» 42 The challenge that the «organic» genius of Goethe represented for Dilthey also brings us to the heart of what Dilthey understood to be the task of hermeneutics as a human science. This task was to provide a firm epistemological basis for the humanities - a basis that would allow the humanities to compete with the positivism that had become the successful methodology of the natural sciences. While Dilthey acknowledged the main pitfall of historicism - that all knowledge is dependent upon the historical position of the researcher - he also believed that this relativity could be controlled and perhaps even mastered through a process combining detailed historical research, self-reflection on the part of the scientist or historian, and a capacity to empathize with or feel one’s way into a text and the psychology of its author. In encountering a purported genius (like Goethe) from an earlier historical period, the disciplined and self-reflective researcher should have the ability, according to Dilthey, to surmount the prejudices of his or her own historical Weltanschauung, and to project his or herself back into the life-world of the text and its author. 43 This is especially important with respect to a poet like Goethe, since Goethe’s apparently unrivalled capacity to express lived experience in an organic and unmediated fashion makes available to the historical researcher a vibrant portrait of an earlier phase in human history. Such a portrait does not, however, rely on empirical data akin to that found in the natural sciences, since the impressions created by the poet do not emerge from objective, testable and verifiable knowledge; rather, they are derived from the poet’s Erlebnisse: the irreducibly personal experiences that he has lived through and which have crystallized themselves into poetic artifacts. In this respect, the poet is, according to Dilthey, more or less the inverse of the sci- The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 79 entist, in that his intuitive nature brings forth subjective creations rather than objective documents. It is for this reason that the creative process of the poet must sharply be differentiated from what Dilthey calls the regulated Phantasie that one finds in the politician, the inventor, or the scientific researcher, since such individuals are said to possess a «beständige Selbstkontrolle, die Bildungsprozesse am Maß der Wirklichkeit festhält.» 44 In fact, the sorry fate of Goethe’s Farbenlehre allegedly gives expression to the fundamental opposition between the poet and natural scientist, since it shows us that Goethe had «kein Auge für die Notwendigkeit, welche die Stufen des Fortschritts der Naturerkenntnis bestimmt.» 45 From all of this it becomes relatively easy to discern that Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung uses the figure of Goethe to create an abstract opposition between the natural sciences on the one hand and the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften on the other. This is hardly surprising, since Dilthey’s first major consideration of Goethe was published in 1878, during the precise period in which he was attempting to secure an alternative epistemological justification for the Geisteswissenschaften. This justification would eventually find its fullest and most detailed manifestation five years later in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. The image of Goethe as an intuitive poet who could never live up to the conscious rationality of the mathematical natural sciences embodies for Dilthey a stringent opposition between the Naturand Geisteswissenschaften, and this opposition in turn allows Dilthey to propose an alternative methodology for the Geisteswissenschaften. At the same time, however, Dilthey attempts to furnish the Geisteswissenschaften with a sense of scientific authority that is borrowed from the Naturwissenschaften, in that he sees the purpose of the human sciences as being the task of uncovering and understanding the primal cause that lies behind all culture in its various historical manifestations: Geist, or, to use Dilthey’s terminology, Leben. Although Dilthey’s concept of Leben in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung is based upon his notion of subjective poetic expression, he nevertheless attempts to endow it with a degree of objectivity, in that the purportedly unmediated character of Goethe’s poetic Ausdrücke are seen to arise from their primordial relation to nature and to lived experience. As Bernd Peschken observes, for Dilthey «Goethe, Dichtung, [und] Wissenschaft von der Dichtung stehen in enger Beziehung,» and this is precisely because Dilthey sees Goethe’s poetic works as reproducing «das tiefste Verständnis des Geschehnisses nach den Beziehungen des Geschehnisses zur ganzen Breite des Lebens.» 46 A similar view is expressed by Gadamer, when he notes that Dilthey’s Lebensbegriff is 80 Angus Nicholls teleologisch gedacht: Leben ist für Dilthey Produktivität schlechthin. Indem sich Leben in Sinngebilden objektivitiert, ist alles Verstehen von Sinn «ein Zurückübersetzen der Objektivationen des Lebens in die geistige Lebendigkeit, aus der sie hervorgegangen sind». So bildet der Begriff des Erlebnisses die erkenntnistheoretische Grundlage für alle Erkenntnis von Objektivem. 47 As I hope to show in the concluding section of this paper, the problem with such a methodology is that the essentially poetic concept of Leben upon which it is based can in no way provide a secure epistemological foundation for Dilthey’s hermeneutics. This is, moreover, especially the case with respect to Dilthey’s treatment of the concept of Leben in relation to Goethe, since Dilthey adopts more or less in toto the poetic (and in this sense fictional) selfimage that Goethe created in his correspondence with Schiller and in various autobiographical texts. In Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923), Georg Lukács famously argued that the proletariat, at once the driving force behind political change and the chief potential beneficiaries of such change, may be seen as the subject-object of history. 48 Notwithstanding the undoubted fact that, politically and sociologically speaking, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the proletariat have very little if anything in common, there is a certain case to be made for Goethe’s status as both the subject (which is to say, the at least partial creator) and the object (the focus or figure) of his own reception in the history of ideas and especially in the history and philosophy of science. Thus, if Dilthey’s Goethebilder are of any use to us today, their value may inhere in their capacity to demonstrate that the in many ways misleading image of Goethe to have emerged from Weimar Classicism is to some extent responsible for his reception as a natural scientist during the late nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century. At the heart of Dilthey’s Goethebild is an autobiographical document that Goethe penned in August 1797, entitled simply «Selbstschilderung.» Here Goethe describes all of his activities as being determined by a restless «poetischer Bildungstrieb» that is directed outward toward the objects of nature, and which forms the very basis of his existence. Since this drive presents itself, at least initially, as a «zufälliges, unbestimmtes Streben,» it can lead Goethe in directions that amount to alleged false tendencies. 49 One such false tendency is allegedly science - an area of endeavor for which Goethe says he had insufficient persistence. In Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, Dilthey invokes precisely this self-characterization by Goethe as a testament to the intuitive and restless «schaffende Kraft» that emerged from Goethe’s «Phantasie.» 50 Goethe’s purported failure as a scientist is thereby presented as a mere stepping-stone The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 81 that helped him to find the way to his true poetic existence. Yet Dilthey fails to mention the closing stages of this text, in which Goethe presents his experiences as a scientist in a rather different, rather more positive light. «Seitdem er hat einsehen lernen,» writes Goethe of himself in the third person, daß es bei den Wissenschaften mehr auf die Bildung des Geists der sie behandelt als auf die Gegenstände selbst ankommt seitdem hat er das was sonst nur ein zufälliges unbestimmtes Streben war, hat er dieser Geistestätigkeit nicht entsagt sondern sie nur mehr reguliert. 51 Writing in 1797, some seven years after his first encounters with Kant’s critical philosophy, Goethe reveals that it was scientific rather than poetic experiences that led him to understand how one’s subjectivity can influence and even distort one’s cognition of external objects. And as I have argued in a different context to the present one, 52 it was precisely the scientific essays that Goethe wrote in the 1790s under the influence of Kant - beginning with «Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt» (1792) and continuing through the work on comparative anatomy and the preparatory work for the Farbenlehre - that saw him develop an eminently self-reflective scientific methodology that served to counter what might be called his naïve or intuitive tendencies. 53 But the image of Goethe that suited Dilthey’s own purposes was that of the Genie des Auges - the visually oriented poet with a special empathy for nature and a tendency to favour sensuous experience over philosophical theorizing. Schiller first hit upon this formulation in his letter to Goethe dated 23 August 1794, and Goethe was later willing to confirm this interpretation when he observed of himself, in an eminently misleading autobiographical text entitled «Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie,» that he had no real inclination for philosophy, that Kant’s works were entirely beyond his range of comprehension, and that when he did philosophize he did so with a certain unconscious naiveté. 54 This image is then reinforced by Goethe in a short but extremely influential text that has been described by the editors of the Münchner Ausgabe as a «Resümee und Testament zugleich»: the essay «Ein Wort für junge Dichter.» 55 In this public relations exercise, probably written some time in 1832, Goethe gives expression to the intuitive and wholly untheorized concept of Leben that lies at the heart of Dilthey’s Goethebilder. Goethe insists that in terms of the history of German poetry, he was not the master but rather the liberator of young German poets, in that he taught them that artists must work «von innen heraus», since «poetischer Gehalt […] ist Gehalt des eigenen Lebens.» To the young generation of German poets that will follow in his wake, Goethe urges, «fragt euch nur bei jedem Gedicht: ob es ein Erlebtes enthalte und ob dies Erlebte euch gefördert habe.» 56 In terms 82 Angus Nicholls of the public image that he would leave to posterity, Goethe evidently preferred the role of intuitive Dichter des Lebens to that of the stringently selfreflective natural philosopher, and this is the Goethebild that would so appeal to the Dilthey of Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. In this way the key issue in Dilthey’s misunderstanding of Goethe, his failure to acknowledge the latter’s essentially positive reception of Kant’s critical philosophy, emerges directly from a central myth of Weimar Classicism: the notion of a dialectical relationship between Goethe’s sensuous powers of intuition on the one hand and Schiller’s cerebral, self-reflective Kantianism on the other. While Dilthey follows this myth by invoking Goethe as a thinker whose spontaneous and intuitive approach to the natural world lay in strict opposition to the a priori methodology of Kant, and who was somewhat reluctantly introduced to Kant’s philosophy by Schiller, recent research by Geza von Molnár has shown that Goethe studied and annotated both the first and third Critiques in 1790 and 1791, some three to four years before his supposedly fateful discussion with Schiller about Kant in 1794. 57 Moreover, if Dilthey had been more keenly aware of Goethe’s Kant reception, and if he had examined the epistemological argumentation of the Farbenlehre with this reception in mind, he may have found there an eminently Kantian approach to scientific cognition that belies the cliché of the intuitive poet. Unlike Dilthey (and here one thinks especially of the late Dilthey in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung), Goethe saw essential similarities between the methodologies of the human and natural sciences, in that both areas of research attempt to understand and approach external objects through the use of concepts embedded in language. As Goethe writes in his Anfänge der Farbenlehre: Wenn wir ein Phänomen aussprechen, beschreiben, besprechen, so übersetzen wir es schon in unsre Menschensprache. Was hier schon für Schwierigkeiten sind, was für Mängel uns bedrohen, ist offenbar. Erste Terminologie paßt auf ein beschränkt isoliert Phänomen; wird auch angewendet auf ein weiteres. Zuletzt wird das gar nicht mehr Passende doch noch fortgebraucht. Vorsicht. Mathematiker übersetzen auch das Phänomen in ihre Sprache. 58 Precisely because of the linguistic and conceptual elements involved in any act of cognition, and especially in scientific research, Goethe urged that the scientist should maintain a diligent awareness of the radical disjunction between human representations of objects and objects in themselves. Rather than criticising Newton from a position of purported intuitive oneness with the objects of nature, Goethe in fact castigates Newton for not being Kantian enough in his use of concepts. The physicist, he writes in section 716 of the Didactic Part of the Farbenlehre, The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 83 soll sich eine Methode bilden, die dem Anschauen gemäß ist; er soll sich hüten, das Anschauen in Begriffe, den Begriff in Worte zu verwandeln, und mit diesen Worten, als wären’s Gegenstände, umzugehen und zu verfahren. 59 I have, in a separate publication, given a fuller account of Goethe’s languageoriented critique of Newton. 60 But from these short sections of the Farbenlehre alone it is clear that following Goethe’s encounters with Kant’s first and third Critiques, he had already come round to the view that all depictions of external objects in language amount to representations or Vorstellungen, and that there is consequently always a radical distinction, rather than an essential unity, between life and one’s linguistic representations of lived experience. Evidently the mature, post-Kantian Goethe was not the intuitive Augenmensch that Schiller and Dilthey took him to be, and for this reason the Goethebild that appears in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung arguably has its spiritual home not in the year of its first publication (1906), but very much in the early phases of the nineteenth century. Notes 1 I would like to thank Paul Bishop, Rüdiger Görner, and Julia Mansour for their helpful comments and advice on earlier versions of this paper. An early draft of this paper was first delivered as part of the panel «Goethe and the Nineteenth Century» organized by Clark Muenzer and John Lyon and held at the 2006 German Studies Association conference in Pittsburgh (28 September to 1 October, 2006). This paper was written with financial support from the Claussen-Simon Stiftung. 2 On this subject, see Galin Tihanov, «Dilthey, Gundolf, Simmel: On the Genesis of a New Paradigm in the Goethe Cult at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,» Acta Germanica 26/ 27 (1998/ 99): 27-34 and Bernd Peschken, Versuch einer germanistischen Ideologiekritik: Goethe, Lessing, Novalis, Tieck, Hölderlin, Heine in Wilhelm Diltheys und Julian Schmidts Vorstellungen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972) 11-49. 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, «Vorwort zur 2. Auflage, Wahrheit und Methode,» Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986) 2: 438. References from Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke will hereafter be cited as GGW, followed by volume and page numbers. 4 Gadamer, «Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften,» GGW 2: 37-43; here: 38; Wahrheit und Methode, GGW 1: 70-76. 5 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GGW 1: 464. 6 Wilhelm Dilthey, «Über die Einbildungskraft der Dichter,» Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie 10 (1878): 42-104. 7 For an account of the changes that Dilthey made to the various versions of this essay, see Peschken, Versuch einer germanistischen Ideologiekritik 11-49. The final version of 1910 is that which appears in the most recent edition of Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften, and it is upon this final version that my analysis is based. 8 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften, 26 vols., ed. Karlfried Gründer et al. (Göttingen, Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1959-2005) 84 Angus Nicholls 1: 4. References from Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften will hereafter be cited as DGS, followed by volume and page numbers. 9 Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, DGS 1: 8-9. 10 According to Karol Sauerland, one of the earliest recorded appearances of the term Erlebnis exists in a letter written by Hegel in 1827, in which he speaks of «meine ganze Erlebnis.» Gadamer has observed (quoted in Sauerland) that Hegel’s use of the term with the feminine gender, rather than the standard usage das Erlebnis, suggests that the word was at that time just beginning to enter common parlance. See Karol Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972) 1. 11 K. Cramer, «Erleben, Erlebnis,» Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 12 vols., ed. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, Gottfried Gabriel et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2004) 2: 702-11. 12 Quoted in Cramer 705. 13 Cramer 705. 14 See Sauerland 6-8. 15 See Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurter Ausgabe), 2 parts, 40 vols., ed. Hendrik Birus et al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2003) 1, 14: 864. References from the Frankfurter Ausgabe of Goethe’s works are cited as FA, followed by part, volume and page numbers. 16 Frithjof Rodi writes, in this connection, that in the first (1878) edition of Dilthey’s Goethe essay, the relationship between the concepts of Erlebnis, Ausdruck and Verstehen is not conceptually fixed, to the extent that these concepts are like separate threads that have not yet been gathered together. Frithjof Rodi, Das strukturierte Ganze: Studien zum Werk von Wilhelm Dilthey (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003) 100. 17 Frithjof Rodi, Morphologie und Hermeneutik: Diltheys Ästhetik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969) 80-92. 18 See DGS 19: 58ff. 19 See Rodi, Das strukturierte Ganze 107-11. 20 See, for example, DGS 7: 229-31. 21 Dilthey, Fragmente zur Poetik, DGS 6: 313. 22 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GGW 1: 68-69. 23 Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, DGS 1: xviii. 24 Dilthey, DGS 19: 65-67; also discussed by Rodi in Das strukturierte Ganze 108. 25 Rodi, Das strukturierte Ganze 109. 26 Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Reimer, 1870). 27 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GGW 1: 66-67. 28 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GGW 1: 70. 29 For Goethe’s comments on Werther, see FA 1, 14: 639; 2, 12: 529. 30 For autobiographical interpretations of «Mächtiges Überraschen,» see Hans-Jürgen Schlütter’s reception history of the poem in Goethes Sonette: Anregung, Entstehung, Intention (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1969) 111-15. I have recently offered a non-biographical and philosophically informed interpretation of this poem in Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006) 202-25. 31 Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, DGS 1: 372. 32 Hermann von Helmholtz, «Über Goethes wissenschaftliche Arbeiten. Ein Vortrag, gehalten in der deutschen Gesellschaft in Königsberg, 1853,» Allgemeine Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Literatur (1853): 383-98; Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Goethe und kein Ende. Rede bei Antritt des Rectorats der Koenigl. Friedrich-Wilhelms Universitaet zu The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft … 85 Berlin, am 15. October 1882 (Leipzig: Veit, 1883). Here it should be noted that in a second lecture on Goethe delivered to the Goethe Society in Weimar in 1892, Helmholtz offered a more positive appreciation of Goethe’s critique of Newton. This text does not, however, seem to have exerted an influence on Dilthey’s view of Goethe as a scientist. See Helmholtz, Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen. Rede, gehalten in der Generalversammlung der Goethe-Gesellschaft zu Weimar den 11. Juli 1892 (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Paetel, 1892). A short and useful summary of this lecture can be found in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 328-30. 33 Angus Nicholls, «The Hermeneutics of Scientific Language in Goethe’s Critique of Newton,» Sprachkunst 36 (2005): 203-26. 34 R.H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995) 25-27; Daniel Steuer, Die stillen Grenzen der Theorie (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999) 209-15. 35 Steuer, Die stillen Grenzen der Theorie 169. 36 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 115. 37 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 116. 38 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 161, 152. 39 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 130. 40 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 160. 41 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 158. See also: «Schiller to Goethe, 23 August 1794,» Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe), 21 vols. in 31, ed. K. Richter, H.G. Göpfert, N. Miller and G. Sauder (Munich: Hanser, 1985-98) 8.1: 12-16. References from the Münchner Ausgabe of Goethe’s works are cited with MA, followed by volume and page numbers. 42 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 146, 165. 43 See, on this subject, Dilthey, «Das Verstehen anderer Personen und ihrer Lebensäußerungen,» DGS 7: 205-27. 44 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung" DGS 26: 119. 45 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 26: 151. 46 Peschken, Versuch einer germanistischen Ideologiekritik 19, 25. 47 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GGW 1: 71. A similar view has more recently been expressed by Frithjof Rodi. See Das strukturierte Ganze 110. 48 Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik (Berlin: Malik, 1923). 49 Goethe, «Selbstschilderung,» MA 4.2: 515-16. 50 Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, DGS 1: 114. 51 Goethe, «Selbstschilderung,» MA 4.2: 516. 52 See Nicholls, «Kantian Science and the Limits of Subjectivity,» Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic 167-201. 53 See in this connection Goethe, «Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt,» FA 1, 25: 26-36; «Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ausgehend von der Osteologie,» FA 1, 24: 227-62. Goethe’s preparatory work for the Farbenlehre is discussed below. 54 Goethe, «Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie,» FA 1, 24: 442-43. 55 See MA 18.2: 988. 56 Goethe, «Ein Wort für junge Dichter,» MA 18.2: 219-20. 86 Angus Nicholls 57 Geza von Molnár, Goethes Kantstudien (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1994). Goethe gives an account of his first conversation with Schiller about Kant in the short autobiographical essay «Glückliches Ereignis,» FA 1, 24: 434-38. 58 Goethe, «Anfänge der Farbenlehre,» Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft (Leopoldina Ausgabe), ed. Dorothea Kuhn, vol. 1.3 (Weimar: Hermann Bohlhaus Nachfolger, 1951) 300-01. 59 Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, MA 10: 215. 60 See Nicholls, «The Hermeneutics of Scientific Language in Goethe’s Critique of Newton.»