1. Introduction: Setting the Stage with Adelung’s Dictionary and a Nod toward Heidegger
2. Kant’s Things-in-Themselves vs. Goethe’s Things-in-Relation
3. Goethe’s Dynamic Thing-Monism as a Metaphysical Challenge for his Science
4. Goethe’s Journey toward a Morphological Ontology in an Autobiographical Anecdote and Some Letters and Travel Accounts
5. The Circle of Things on the Cosmic Stage in Satyros and Faust
6. Conclusion: Toward a Philosophical Lineage of Goethe’s Problematic Ding
7. Notes
8. Works Cited and Further Reading

Introduction: Setting the Stage with Adelung’s Dictionary and a Nod toward Heidegger

By the time Adelung began publishing his authoritative Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (1774/93; Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of the High German Dialect) in 1774, the lexeme Ding (thing) had already devolved into “ein im Hochdeutschen veraltetes Wort” (Adelung; a superannuated word of the High German language).¹ After providing a group of archaic definitions, however, Adelung considers a more recent set of examples that subsequently extended the “vast” semantic “range” of Ding to include the exchange of spoken words in arguments, disputes, and debates, including the “ritualized speech” (feyerliches Gespräch) of legal proceedings:

[e]in Gespräch, in welchem man streitet, ein Wortwechsel, besonders ein Wortwechsel vor Gerichte, und figürlich auch eine streitige Sache, eine Rechtssache, ein Prozeß. (Adelung)

a conversation in which one argues, a disputable matter, a matter of law, a proceeding.

As a rhetorically charged concept, it seems, the figurative device came to connote an unresolved dispute about some substantive matter, or problematic “thing,” rather than a semantically settled question. In other words, by Goethe’s time, the conditions were right for the superannuated lexeme—when mediated through the transformative power of argument—to serve as a linguistic medium with the potency to become the source of its own reconceptualization.

Adelung underscores this semantic plasticity by noting the strange (i.e., figurative) occurrence of dingen in a ninth-century poem by the monk Otfrid, who used the verb to signify hope. And with this poetic configuration of the lexeme in mind, he traces a trajectory for it that involves its ongoing intensification as a linguistic signifier. Accordingly, “nowadays,” Adelung explains, Ding does not merely exhibit, in the first degree of the adjective, “a wide range of meaning” (einen weiten Umfang der Bedeutung); its semantic reach extends through the comparative and superlative degrees as well. Furthermore, and “in a still wider sense” (in noch weiterm Verstande), he continues, “thing” serves as “the most general designation” (allgemeinste Benennung) for a specific object or matter whose “proper designation” (eigentliche Benennung) “one [. . .] does not know or want to use” (man [. . .] nicht weiß, oder nicht gebrauchen will): “Was ist das für ein Ding?” (what kind of thing is that), we sometimes ask, without fully appreciating the philosophical weight of this question, which implicitly problematizes the lexeme as an ontological challenge.

Nor does the reach of Ding end here. For “in a still wider sense” (Adelung; in noch weiterer Bedeutung), the entry instructs, one of its enhanced meanings extends to the nature of reality itself, or “alles was wirklich vorhanden ist” (all that is really at hand). In fact, when predicated in its plural form of God as the “Schöpfer aller Dinge” and the “Ende aller Dinge” (the creator of all things and the end of all things), its cosmological predication conjures the alpha and omega. “In its widest sense” (in der weitesten Bedeutung), therefore, or its most potent enhancement, Ding gathers a network of philosophically informed meanings into its orbit that collectively designate

alles wovon man einen Begriff haben kann, es sey nun wirklich oder nur bloß möglich, es sey nun eine Substanz, oder nur eine Eigenschaft, eine Beschaffenheit derselben, in welchem Verstande es im Plural gleichfalls Dinge hat, und nicht nur bey den Philosophen üblich ist, das Lat. Ens auszudrucken, sondern auch im gemeinen Leben häufig ist. (Adelung)

all that one can conceptualize, be it real or merely possible, be it a substance or only a quality, a state of the same, in which sense there are likewise things in the plural, and [this] usually occurs not just when philosophers express the Latin ens, but also frequently in everyday life.

In light of Ade­lung’s summary of the semantic intensifications and graded resurgence of the word Ding across time, then, including its symbolic association with cosmological concepts like beginning and end, we can (1) see that the moment when Goethe began using the ancient lexeme was propitious and (2) explore Goethe’s creative appropriations of Ding and its cognates by following its long and unusual trajectory through his thought as a philosophical concept.

Central to this poetic journey of metaphysical exploration and discovery are certain pivotal scenes in the early verse drama Satyros (1773/1817), as well as in the world-theater Faust (1809/33). As discussed in section 5, these works for the stage can provide a cosmological framework for assessing Goethe’s ironic transformation of rationalist ontologies, as well as his progressive re-conceptualization of “Dingheit” (thingness) as a philosophical problem.² Despite the limits imposed by Kant’s Copernican Revolution, however, even Kantian constructivism had continued to privilege the subjective agency of the rational faculties in pursuit of reliable and secure knowledge about the things we perceive. By contrast, Goethe consistently interrogated an array of rationalist thinkers, including Wolff and his followers, as well as the Kantians who succeeded them through the 1780s and 1790s. When Adelung mentions “a certain writer” (Uz), then, who had recently used the German word for ontology, “Dinglehre,” in a playfully salacious poem, “Magister Duns” (1745; Master Dunce), to disparage rationalist metaphysics,³ he foreshadows how Goethe—who would have known Uz’s poem—similarly undercut rationalist ontology to reinvent Ding as a metaphysical problem.

Almost two centuries later, Heidegger also suggested that German rationalist philosophy had expanded the realm of metaphysics and its sub-discipline “Ontologia” by allowing its “Begriff des Dinges” (concept of the thing) to reach “so weit als möglich” (as far as possible).⁴ In line with Heidegger’s strategic redefinition of “thing” as “ein Seiendes” (Heidegger 2:117; something in the process of becoming), which allowed him to problematize all rationalist concepts of thingness, this entry will show how Goethe’s transformational appropriation of Spinoza’s “res singulares” (particular things) set a far-reaching creative process in motion to configure and reconfigure things in terms of their essential and enigmatic plasticity.⁵ It will also thereby situate the poet-scientist within a metaphysical lineage of like-minded heterodox thinkers who would do their part to undermine rationalist ontology, which Kant in his pre-critical phase had described as the “Wissenschaft von den allgemeinern Eigenschaften aller Dinge” (science of the more general characteristics of all things).⁶ In short, Goethe’s appreciation for the organized chaos of a cosmos comprised of a plenitude of singular things moved him to re-conceptualize Ding as a problem for figurative language to articulate and address. And this conscious reconstruction of the philosophical concept as a matter of linguistic poeisis in turn suggests that his ontological realism can be read as a response to the strictures that Kant’s critical philosophy placed on the ontological speculations of rationalist metaphysics by relegating the pure thing (noumenon) to the silent and invisible realm of the unknowable and incorporeal Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself).

Kant’s Things-in-Themselves vs. Goethe’s Things-in-Relation

In a diary entry on August 2, 1807, Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer (1774–1845) reports an extensive conversation with Goethe that suggests how we might view his friend’s morphological ontology as both an extension of and challenge to Kant’s ontological map in the first Critique and the misguided “bifurcation of nature”⁷ that grounds Kantian dualism. Riemer begins by addressing the unbridgeable gap separating Kant’s mute and invisible “things-in-themselves,” which belong to the mind-independent realm of the unknowable noumenon, from phenomenal things and the mind’s determinate judgments about them. Goethe then responds with a philosophical meditation about thingness as such. Is there not a single “universe of things”⁸ rather than the two realms separated by Kant’s unbridgeable divide, Goethe seems to be asking. In this context, he initially considers some common ground he shares with both the orthodox Kantians, like Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823), and the idealist successors to Kant, like J.G. Fichte (1763–1814) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), who have useful things to say about the realm of things beyond the reach of reason and the senses, despite the stricture of Kantian idealism against pronouncing cognitive truths about the incorporeal Ding-an-sich.

According to Goethe’s way of thinking, the opposing sides in the debates swirling around the question of Kant’s thing-in-itself would do better to recall what unites their divergent views than insist on what divides them. For even if one grants that metaphysics cannot speak directly about things-in-themselves, precisely because they are “Dingen an sich” (things-in-themselves)⁹ and so “außer Bezug auf uns und wir auf sie” (FA 2.6:217; without relationship to us or we to them), he cautions, “it is nonetheless at least evident that [the Kantians] are in agreement with us: what a person asserts about things does not exhaust their nature in its totality” (FA 2.6:217; so leuchtet doch daraus so viel ein, daß sie mit uns darin einig sind, daß, was der Mensch von den Dingen aussagt, nicht ihre ganze Natur erschöpft). Furthermore, if, as Kant claims, things-in-themselves exceed our capacity to grasp their essence in determinate judgments, it should not offend the epistemological arbiters to acknowledge that the ontological status of these things might actually be available to new kinds of metaphysical exploration. And this tacit agreement involves a corollary: “daß sie dieses Ausgesagte nicht pur allein, einzig, sondern noch viel mehr und anderes sind” (FA 2.6:217; that they [such things], [and] the things pronounced about them are not solely pure, singular, but more [than that], [they are] different). In other words, however inaccessible to rational construction and representation Kant’s thing-in-itself might be and however “empty,” or deprived of determinate sense, it must remain, this inaccessibility and emptiness can also be construed as the basis of an inexhaustible capacity for infinite repetition and differentiation.

Significantly, Goethe concludes his ontological meditation with Riemer by noting that the excess (mehr) internal to things as such also makes each singular thing infinite (unendlich) and ultimately different (anders).¹⁰ In truth, he proposes, Kant’s “thing-in-itself” might more properly be called a (monadic) “singularity-in-itself”: “Wir sollten nicht von Dingen an sich reden, sondern von dem Einen an sich” (FA 2.6:218; we should not be talking about things-in-themselves, but rather about the singular and unitary thing-in-itself). “From a human perspective” (FA 2.6:218; nach menschlicher Anischt), i.e., in relation to the grasping and positing mind, all self-contained things, in both their phenomenal and noumenal aspects, entail “ein Verschiedenes und Mehreres” (FA 2.6:218; something different and more): “Dinge sind ja selbst nur Verschiedenheiten, durch den Menschen gesetzt und gemacht” (FA 2.6:218; things are themselves only differences, posited and made by human beings). Or as Deleuze would argue in Difference and Repetition (1968), there is only difference: every repetition of a thing is something new.¹¹ The essential reality of the single substance or unitary thing (Spinoza’s deus sive natura) is the hidden process of its perpetual becoming (natura naturans) and not its fugitive being (natura naturata).

From Goethe’s ontological point-of-view, which requires locating all things within a single field of constant differentiation, Kant’s stable Ding-an-sich is finally a “problematic”¹² limit-setting term, or Grenzbegriff,¹³ that is devoid of determinate content. In other words, it is not itself a thing in the restrictive sense of Kant’s phenomenon, understood as an object of sensible intuition, but a function-term, or what Nicholas Rescher calls an “instrumentality of our thought.”¹⁴ As an “ens rationis,” or “postulate of reason,” moreover, Kant’s incorporeal “mind-imposed contrivance”¹⁵ brings all positive (i.e., cognitively determined) corporeal things into its own orbit of negation and deprivation. Situated beyond the realm of determinate judgments and their representations, it marks that problematic region of primal indeterminacy where new modes of ontological discourse can emerge out of noumenal no-thingness.

At the beginning of his ontologically-oriented conversation with Riemer about Kant’s critique of rationalist epistemology, Goethe pits the philosophical “Anthropomorphismus” (FA 2.6:217; anthromorphism) practiced by Kant and his rationalist predecessors—with its commitment to “messen, rechnen, wägen etc.” (FA 2.6:217; measuring, counting, and weighing, etc.)—against his own (more realistic) understanding of what the human “measure of things” (FA 2.6:217; Maß der Dinge) inescapably involves: “Wir mögen an der Natur beobachten, messen, rechnen, wägen etc. wie wir wollen, es ist doch nur unser Maß und Gewicht, wie der Mensch das Maß der Dinge ist” (FA 2.6:217; we may observe, measure, count, weigh, etc. in nature whatever we want, it is still only our measure and weight, as the human being is the measure of things). Goethe’s point here is that each partial thing (Stück) we measure or weigh, as well as any network (Gewebe) comprised of such pieces, can be no more nor less than the human scale allows. All bodies, whether simple units or complex assemblages of such units, become legitimate objects of cognition only “in Bezug auf den Menschen” (FA 2.6:217; in relation to the human being). Since this kind of (Kantian) “anthropomorphism” limits what we can know to the things we can mathematically measure, and so fix, in time and space, however, it does not “add” anything new to our understanding of things. “Mit Duodezimal- oder Dezimalmaß wird nichts von der sonstigen anderweitigen Natur des Dinges ausgesprochen und verraten” (FA 2.6:217; measuring by duodecimals and decimals says and discloses nothing about the otherwise alternative [different] nature of the thing).

By contrast, and in strategic response to Kant’s dualist construction of things, Goethe’s ontological realism effectively bridges the divide between the phenomenal and noumenal realms by exploring both the small and large worlds of physical and mental things. According to his new anthropomorphism, and unlike Kant’s, all things are paradoxically situated in endless relations with human bodies and minds between particulars, on the one hand, which are commensurate with sense perception, and universals, on the other, which as “incorporeals” require special technologies (like a scientific experiment or a poem) to be seen for what they really are.¹⁶ And because of their capacity to proliferate, because one “discovers more relations of things to ourselves everyday” (FA 2.6:217; entdeckt täglich mehr Relationen der Dinge zu uns), they help disclose the “open secrets” of nature understood as process (natura naturans). Circulating in border regions between places where the fugitive objects of perception (phenomena) consolidate and wide-open wilderness regions where they emerge to organize themselves out of chaos, Goethean things behave much like Leibniz’s incorporeal monads, which are similarly driven by a primitive kind of appetition. Things in their monadic essence for Goethe can therefore be understood as elementary units of varying levels of desire with the potential to affect and be affected by each other: “die Dinge sind unendlich. Das wissen wir ja” (FA 2.6:217; things are infinite. We know this). And however insufficient our statements about them might be, Goethe proclaims, they are also emphatically real: “Mit einem Worte: der Mensch spricht das Objekt nicht ganz aus. Aber was er davon ausspricht, das ist ein Reales [. . .]” (FA 2.6:217–18; in a word: we do not express the object in its totality. But what we say about it, that is something real).

As Alfred North Whitehead’s post-Newtonian philosophy of organism would later caution, treating our experiences of the things we cognitively grasp (Whitheadian “prehensions”) in isolation as if they were concrete particulars is a fallacious abstraction (“fallacy of misplaced concreteness”). But this fundamental error can be avoided. We must only learn to “see” the hidden reality of both corporeal and incorporeal things, which Whitehead calls, respectively, “actual entities” and “eternal objects,”¹⁷ by experiencing them—in Goethe’s formulation—with the “eye of the mind” (Auge des Geistes).¹⁸ For Goethe, then, as well as subsequently for Whitehead and Deleuze, things cannot be legitimately grasped (understood) in their essential reality as isolated points in Newton’s absolute time or space, but instead emerge through an infinite process of perpetual becoming within networks (Whiteheadian “nexus”) of sensible and intelligible differences in opposing relations with one another.¹⁹ As Goethe remarked to Schiller in an expression of his Schelling-inspired Kantianism in early January, 1798,

[e]ben so mag sich der Idealist gegen die Dinge an sich wehren wie er will, er stößt doch ehe er sichs versieht an die Dinge außer ihm, und wie mir scheint, sie kommen ihn immer beim ersten Begegnen so in die Quere wie dem Chineser die Glutpfanne.²⁰ (FA 2.4:476–77)

the idealist may in fact resist [Kant’s] things-in-themselves as he will, before he knows it, he will nonetheless run into the things outside [i.e., things-in-relation], and it seems to me, they will always get in his way at the first encounter, like the firepot that got in the way of the Chinese man.

Goethe’s Dynamic Thing-Monism as a Metaphysical Challenge for his Science

According to one of Goethe’s late aphorisms, to be grounded in science, metaphysical inquiry must assume a universe of vibrant things that includes both corporeal particulars of a human scale, on the one hand, and those infinitesimally small or infinitely large things of cosmic scale, on the other. While individual bodies are directly accessible through the senses, moreover, the incorporeal substrate of the morphological processes through which they emerge in perception (i.e., their corresponding universals) would remain invisible without some artificial means of mediation:

Aus dem Größten wie aus dem Kleinsten (nur durch künstlichste Mittel dem Menschen zu vergegenwärtigen) geht die Metaphysik der Erscheinungen²¹ hervor; in der Mitte liegt das Besondere, unsern Sinnen Angemessene, worauf ich angewiesen bin, deshalb aber die Begabten von Herzen segne die jene Regionen zu mir heranbringen. (FA 1.25:100) (emphasis added)

The metaphysics of appearances proceeds from the largest as well as from the smallest [things] and can can only be visualized by the most artificial means; in the middle lies the particular, or what is commensurate with our sensorium, on which I rely, but therefore sincerely bless the experts who transport those [other] regions to me.

As Harmut Böhme has suggested in an essay linking this aphorism to the use of microscopes and telescopes in modern science, Goethe was well aware of the efficacy for scientific advance that professional experts (die Begabten) and their technologies offered the amateur scientists of his day, even though he also voiced skepticism about the distorting effect of laboratory instruments on scientific observations.²² However, if in addition to the various devices that facilitated Goethe’s optical research on color we understand the phrase “artificial means” to include his aphorisms, sketches, technical drawings, diagrams, outlines, schemas, geometric figures, and serialized experiments (Versuche), we can appreciate how, as a poet-scientist, he increasingly relied on more than just the naked eye to visualize the otherwise invisible life of the “things” circulating in the force fields around him. Perhaps the best known of these “mind-imposed contrivance[s]”²³ —many of which are integrated into the narrative records of his scientific works—is the Farbenkreis (color circle) from the didactic section of the Farbenlehre (1810; theory of colors). As summarized in the Goethe-Lexicon’s inaugural issue,²⁴ this visual aid captures the full range of effects (Wirkungen) produced by the polarity of light and darkness and chromatically registered on the retina by schematically representing the dynamic and concentric relations of (1) perceived colors, (2) the mental faculties, and (3) certain ethical judgments about chromatic perceptions in the overall process of their production. If any particular color can be experimentally read as the power of light and its negation (darkness) to affect and be affected by each other in reciprocal interaction, then chromatic reality, or color as such, must be read through the relation of each singular chromatic thing to all its other manifestations in the visible spectrum. In this context, Goethe conceptualizes color-in-itself (i.e., pure color) by observing and serially recording certain fugitive chromatic effects in terms of the virtual capacity within the universal light-darkness dyad to intensify individual colors and complete the circle of their dynamic connections in the process of their emergence.²⁵

To summarize the movement of Goethe’s “color-thing” through the entirety of its completion one could then say, in Spinozan terms, that with its six basic modalities, Goethe’s color wheel—which visualizes the generation of color as an endless process of polar intensification—offered a technology to track down and grasp the “modal essence” of divine light (or color coloring), as well as the “modal essence” of God’s infinite intellect (or thought thinking) by capturing and connecting the full circle of chromatic and mental effects that the Farbenlehre presents in the serial record of its staged experiments.

Goethe’s treatise of 1790 on botanical propagation and growth, as well as his plant-elegy of 1799—both of which have the title “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen” (The Metamorphosis of Plants)—rethink botanical thingness along similar lines. By reconfiguring the visible parts of an annual plant as the transformations of an otherwise invisible “protean” leaf, artificial devices like the treatise, or Goethe’s botanical drawings, or even his botanical love-poem, all activate and engage the “mind’s eye.” We can therefore propose that, like colors and plants, Goethean things emerge and strive to complete themselves within force fields of interconnected fugitive effects. But the ontological “reality” of each transitory thing, or the invisible essence of its infinite and universal thingness, requires the “most artificial means” to be seen for what it “really” is. As Goethe cautions in the “Vorwort” (Preface) of Zur Farbenlehre, “eigentlich unternehmen wir umsonst, das Wesen eines Dinges auszudrücken. Wirkungen werden wir gewahr, und eine vollständige Geschichte dieser Wirkungen umfaßte wohl allenfalls das Wesen jenes Dinges” (FA 1.23:12; in truth we undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We perceive effects, and a complete narrative [record] of these effects would certainly in all events encompass the essence of that thing).

In the second paragraph of “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt 1793” (FA 1.25:26–36; The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject), which Goethe drafted in connection with his experimental work in optics and botany and published in the Morphological Notebooks in 1823, the “true botanist” is challenged to study plants by investigating their “formation [and] relation to the rest of the plant kingdom.” Recalling “wie sie alle von der Sonne hervorgelockt und beschienen werden” (FA 1.25:26; how they all are lured forth and illuminated by the sun), the botanist should ideally “view” (FA 1.25:26; ansehen) and “survey” (FA 1.25:26; übersehen) them all “mit einem gleichen ruhigen Blicke” (FA 1.25:26; with a steady calm gaze). Having achieved this “objective” standpoint, however, he will discover the “measure” (FA 1.25:26; Maßstab) of his knowledge about plants, as well as “die Data der Beurteilung” (FA 1.25:26; the data of his judgment) “nicht aus sich, sondern aus dem Kreise der Dinge [. . .], die er beobachtet” (FA 1.25:26; not from himself but from the circle of the things he observes). So far, so good. At first glance, Goethe’s meditation still appears to acknowledge Kant’s hierarchy of the rational faculties in matters of cognition: by surveying the things in their field of vision with a sure and calm gaze, scientific investigators can protect the integrity of their observations from subjective bias, thereby also insuring the objectivity of their research. But in a clear departure from Kantian constructivism, which enthrones reason and the understanding in the pursuit of reliable knowledge, Goethe significantly invokes the circle of things-in-relation as the surest guide for the mind in its cognitive work and not the reverse.

This reconfiguration of “Maßstab,” which “Der Veusch” strategically links to the all-encompassing reality of the “circle of things” rather than to the human observer, has an early lyrical antecedent in the final strophe of the poem “Ganymed,” where the progression of the speaker’s grasping hand and mind through the surrounding landscape, configured with the present participle “umfangend” (FA 1. 205; embracing, enveloping, containing), undergoes a sudden reversal indicated by the past participle (of completion) umfangen!” (FA 1.205; embraced, enveloped, contained).”²⁶ And many decades later, in the conversation with Riemer about “things-in-themselves” and “things-in-relation,” we find the same reversal of events. Thus, after initially acknowledging the constitutive role played by the subject of cognition, Goethe makes a midcourse correction and reverses its relation to the vibrant things it encounters in its midst. The reflection begins with a commonplace that also underlies Kantian constructivism: human beings naturally attribute the consciousness of their unity of mind to all the things with which they feel unified. However, while the reality of what can be said about nature includes a relation to the perceiving subject, these subjective measures miss the mark. They do not circumscribe “nature in its entirety” (FA 2.6:217; die ganze Natur); nor do they capture its dynamic “totality” (FA 2.6:217; die Totalität derselben). When all has been said and done, measurements on a human scale in fact “express and disclose nothing about the essential difference of the thing” (FA 2.6:217; Mit Duodezimal- oder Dezimalmaß wird nichts von der sonstigen anderweitigen Natur des Dinges ausgesprochen und verraten).

Ultimately, then, Goethe’s radical problematization of an ontological standard (Maß) that reduces the reality of things to their accordance with measurements on a human scale produced an alternative to Kant’s anthropologically colored epistemology. Whereas §16 of the “Transcendental Analytic” had enthroned the unified and self-conscious subject of transcendental apperception as the disinterested agent of all legitimate knowledge about things in the phenomenal world and their relations to each other (Kant 3:136), Kant had refused to extend its reach into the field of noumenality. By contrast, Goethean ontology refused to restrict our productive thinking about things to what can be measured “by duodecimals and decimals.”²⁷ In accord with his rejection of Newton’s construction of absolute time and absolute space as mathematical abstractions, in fact, Goethe finally removed the Cartesian/Kantian subject from its superior position of oversight over the world of things. And with this radical move, his revisionist ontology came to recognize (1) that the essential reality of a singular thing, or its ontological status, is not some finite and, therefore, measurable state of being, but rather its own morphologically informed process of becoming and (2) that the searching and thinking self—in yet another reversal of Kant—is itself a thing that gradually emerges in affective engagements with all the other things of affection it encounters and the transformations they trigger. As Faust proclaims with a nod to Spinoza when he recites his heretical “catechism” for Gretchen, “Gefühl ist alles” (l. 3456; feeling is everything).²⁸ Divine nature, in both its corporeal and incorporeal aspects (attributes), is the modal expression of the universal capacity within each and every thing to affect and be affected by all the other things in its orbit.

In other words, the true scientist in Goethe’s estimation, like the true poet, does not pay absolute fealty to the higher mental faculties (i.e., reason and the understanding) when thinking about things. Unlike Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, which find their metaphysical foundation in Kant’s first Critique, Goethean science and metaphysics are both also and importantly matters of poeisis. As such, neither practice limits the mind’s commerce with the world of things to the objective measure of mathesis. Nor does Goethe dogmatically assert the sovereign authority of the autonomous subject over the world, as the final “Ich” in the hymn “Prometheus” (1772–74) duplicitously proclaims. Like Prometheus’ Ganymedian other, in fact, his aesthetically informed agent of scientific and philosophical inquiry finds itself submerged in a vibrant circle of swarming things. And these things shape his Spinoza-inspired subject of perpetual affection, as they are shaped by it, in a spiraling field of reciprocal attraction, comprehension, and release. As the opening sentence of the poem “Maifest” (1772) implies with its emphatic placement of nature in the subject-position and its configuration of the poet’s first-person pronoun in the dative case, things are the data offered to the nascent subject in the process of its self-formation: “Wie herrlich leuchtet/Mir die Natur!” (FA 1.1:129; how gloriously nature shines forth for me).²⁹

Goethe’s Journey toward a Morphological Ontology in an Autobiographical Anecdote and Some Letters and Travel Accounts

According to an autobiographical recollection in 1817 of his first meeting with Schiller in 1794, after offering a “lively” summary of his Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (1790) (FA 1.24:109–151; Essay to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants), Goethe drew a “symbolic plant” (FA 1.24:437; eine symbolische Pflanze). He produced the sketch, he explains, to convince Schiller that understanding the ontological essence of plants requires seeing one “take shape before his own eyes” (FA 1.24:437; vor seinen Augen entstehen) in the process of its becoming. When his interlocutor shook his head, however, and responded like an unshakable Kantian, “[d]as ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee” (FA 1.24:437; that is not an experience, it is an idea), Goethe flippantly countered, “das kann mir sehr lieb sein daß ich Ideen habe ohne es zu wissen, und sie sogar mit Augen sehe” (FA 1.24:437; I am very pleased to have ideas without knowing it and actually see them with my own eyes).

Goethe’s anecdote, which memorializes the meeting with Schiller as a “felicitous event” (FA 1.24:434; Glückliches Ereignis), constructs a realism of polar opposites by configuring the writers’ seminal friendship as an antipodal relationship. In this regard, their encounter was “eventful,”³⁰ because it provided an ontological stage to exhibit the kind of thing their evolving intellectual commerce “eventually” would become. And with the publication of the autobiographical recollection in his Morphological Notebooks nearly a quarter-of-a-century after the event, Goethe finally realized its formal potential as an anecdote to reveal a secret.³¹ That is to say, with its self-reflexive presentation of his inaugural conversation with Schiller about the mystery of “plantness,” the anecdote’s publication opened the ontological secret of both his evolving “thing” with Schiller and plant-things to further discussion.

According to Schiller’s Kant-dependent way of thinking, his friend’s botanical illustration should be properly construed as a “mental contrivance,” or Idee. Goethe, however, had visualized the incorporeal essence of the plant-thing in the sketch following the “experience” (Erfahrung) of its enigmatic idea, which he was initially unable to see for what it really was. But as his rejoinder to Schiller’s narrow idealism makes clear, one can experience ideas, or incorporeal thought-things, without “knowing” it, and these idealized experiences can subsequently emerge into conscious thought and be actualized in tangible presentations. Accordingly, both the prototypical Urpflanze—which Goethe had famously invoked in a letter to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) on May 17, 1787—and the metamorphosing leaf of annual plants—which after his return to Weimar from Italy replaced the Urpflanze as his “model” (FA 1.15.1:346; Modell) for unlocking the universal “secret” of all “botanical propagation and growth” (FA 1.15.1:346; Pflanzenzeugung und Organisation)—can be understood as tangible figures of thought that render the secret essence, or problematic reality, of botanical thingness as the paradoxical unity of two mutually exclusive concepts. The plant as such is both (Schiller’s) “Idee” and (Goethe’s) “Erfahrung.” Or to paraphrase the secret lesson that “Glückliches Ereignis” publicized about the intractable problem of realism and idealism in Deleuzean terms, with his sketch of the “symbolic plant,” Goethe visualized³² a vector-like thing of indeterminate potentiality that like Deleuze’s notion of “virtuality,” is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”³³

On June 9, 1785, about two years before he sent Herder the celebrated letter from Naples about the “innerliche Wahrheit und Notwendigkeit” (FA 1.15.1:346; inner truth and necessity) of all botanical things, Goethe had written to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) about his botanical and geological experiences “auf und unter Bergen in Ilmenau” (FA 2.2:584; in and under mountains in Ilmenau). After begging forgiveness for his reticence “wenn von einem göttlichen Wesen die Rede ist” (FA 2.2:583; when speaking about a divine being), he attributes his observations of all “singular things” (FA 2.2:583; einzelne Dinge), or rebus singularibus, to Spinoza, who has taught him to seek the divine “in herbis et lapidibus” (FA 2.2:584; in plants and stones). Insofar as such things persist “in God,” according to the scholium to proposition 45 in part 2 of the Ethics, such persistence (conatus) is not an abstract quantity, but an ontological expression of “the very nature of their existence.”³⁴

In a second letter to Jacobi, dated May 5, 1786, Goethe links his growing powers of observation, which he calls “schauen,” to Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva. This third kind of (intuitive) knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the [. . .] essence of things” (emphasis added).³⁵ And these few words from Spinoza, according to Goethe,³⁶ have encouraged him to dedicate his life to the “Betrachtung der Dinge” (FA 2.2.1:629; observation of things) without the least concern about “wie weit ich kommen werde” (FA 2.2.1:629; how far I will get). In fact, by the time of his stay in Venice as recorded in a second diary entry in the Italienische Reise (Italian journey) on October 9, 1786, Goethe appears to be well on his way to honing his observational skills and deepening his ontological insights. Earlier in the day, he reports, he had ascended the bell tower of St. Mark’s at high tide in order to survey the lagoons beneath him in “ihrer Herrlichkeit” (FA 1.15.1:99; in their glory). But he later returned at low tide to view them (schauen) a second time, now “in ihrer Demut” (FA 1.15.1:99; in their humbleness). And thus outfitted with a “proper notion” (FA 1.15.1:99; richtigen Begriff) of the rising and falling landscape between the shifting land and sea, he actually entered the liminal scene of rhythmic exchange between “Flut” and “Ebbe” (FA 1.15.1:99; high and low tide) himself, where he enjoyed a spectacle of wriggling snails, mollusks, and crabs on display at a seaside market: “Was ist doch ein Lebendiges für ein köstliches, herrliches Ding!” (FA 1.15.1:99; how delicious and glorious a living thing is), he exclaims in amazement, “[w]ie abgemessen zu seinem Zustande, wie wahr, wie seiend!” (FA 1.15.1:99; how proportionate to its condition, how true, how emergent into being!).

Significantly, this exclamatory aperçu contains the complete trajectory of Goethean thingness in the process of its essential becoming. Firstly, as something perceptibly “alive” (lebendig), the display of things at the seaside market is dynamic (in Aristotle’s sense of in dynamis, meaning the potentiality of matter to be formed). That is to say, the foodstuff—configured as an alluring collection of maritime things—exemplifies the transformative potential within all stuff of life: each of the animals on the fishmonger’s visible menu will be killed and then “reincarnated” as a delicious morsel of life-enhancing nutrition. In this connection, and in the manner of the hylozoism of a Thales or Heraclitus, Goethe came to understand thingness through an endogenous form-principle, or “innern Form, die alle Formen in sich begreift” (FA 1.18:174; inner form that comprehensively grasps all forms inside itself).³⁷ As the double attributes “köstlich” and “herrlich” suggest, moreover, such living things are situated both within and beyond the reach of the senses. On the one hand, they are corporeals, or physical things that, much like the scrumptious seafood morsels in Venice, are alluring to the senses. But as nourishing dishes to be enjoyed, these tasty bits of food are also elemental units of potentiality. They will become ingredient in mysterious processes of metamorphosis, understood as a field of incorporeal forces where birth, death, and transformative regeneration intersect. Hence, Goethe’s use of the attribute “herrlich” to celebrate the maritime feast. As physical embodiments of life, each of these items also participates in a self-organizing process of completion, or perfectibility, in the sense that theologians, according to Adelung, use the word herrlich in connection with God to designate “den ganzen Umfang seiner Vollkommenheiten” (Adelung; the full compass of his perfections). And while Goethe’s pairing of Zustand and seiend in his letter does not precisely correspond to Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference, it does locate the “truth” of living things, in the manner of Whitehead’s “creative advance,” somewhere between any of their discrete concrescences and the overall process of their perfection. As the Divan-poet says of the butterfly—which he celebrates as “das Lebend’ge” (FA 1.3:24; the living thing) in longing pursuit of some higher “union” (FA 1.3.1:25; Begattung) for itself—its fiery death (FA 1.3.1:24; Flammentod) in the shadows of darkness (FA 1.3.1:25; der Finsterniß Beschattung) exemplifies the ethical imperative within all living things (whether crustacea, papilia, or hominidae): “Stirb und Werde!/ Bist du nur ein trüber Gast/ Auf der dunklen Erde.” (FA 1.3.1:25; Die and become! otherwise you will just be a somber guest on the dark earth).

Some fifteen months after recording his Venetian epiphany about maritime things, Goethe wrote to Herder from Rome about the most beautiful “Offenbarungen” (revelations)—including “Blicke in das Wesen der Dinge und ihre Verhältnisse [. . .]” (FA 1.15.1:509; glimpses into the essence of things and their relations). At the same time, however, his letter acknowledges that these ontological aperçus have revealed “einen Abgrund von Reichtum” (emphasis added) (FA 1.15.1:509; an abyss of riches) that is as unsettling in its “abysmal” fullness as it is revelatory. Goethe’s oxymoron here is both curious and telling, for it paradoxically grounds the potential richness of his ontological revelations on a prolific abyss. A year later, in the essay “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Styl” (FA1.15.2: 872–77; Simple Imitation of Nature, Mannerism, Style) (1789), he would repeat the phrase “Wesen der Dinge.” (FA 1.15.2:874; essence of things) Only now his pursuit of “living” things in their “proliferating” essence rests on firmer ground than the “Abgrund” in the earlier letter to Herder. Goethe’s way out of the ontological abyss of primal thingness, it seems, would be found in aesthetically constructed “Gegenstände” (FA 1.15.2:874; objects), which the essay serially organizes through three graded phases of historical emergence: the simple imitation of nature, mannerism, and style.³⁸ As the final and most reliable of these successive moments of aesthetization, which rescue things from epistemological and ontological chaos, “ruht der Styl auf den tiefsten Grundfesten der Erkenntniß” (FA 1.15.2:874; style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge), Goethe proffers, “auf dem Wesen der Dinge, in so fern uns erlaubt ist es in sichtbaren und greiflichen Gestalten zu erkennen” (FA 1.15.2:874; on the essence of things, in so far as we are permitted to know it in visible and tangible forms). According to his classical aesthetic, then, the representational arts can enhance our understanding about things-in-themselves by creatively reshaping the incorporeal becomings “essential” to the life of all things into the visible and tangible forms of poetry and art. As he would propose in the Morphological Notebooks some twenty-five years later, for the aesthetically informed scientist (or philosopher), the true measure of understanding does not lie with the surveying subject, but rather with the manifold things of affection in his orbit, which are given to the “eyes of the [creative] mind” (FA 1.24:432; Geistes-Augen) for observation and aesthetic reconstruction in the circle of their reciprocal relationships.

The Circle of Things on the Cosmic Stage in Satyros and Faust

In the fourth act of the early verse-play, Satyros oder der vergötterte Waldteufel³⁹ (1773; Satyros, or the Deified Forest-Devil), a diabolical satyr charms an audience of stupefied followers with the lyrical exposition of a sacred Ding/Unding dyad, which his hymn fetishizes as a rhythmically informed process of phased ontological emergence. Introduced in the context of a “new religion” (Satyros, l. 288; neuen Religion), the satyr’s dyspeptic “Gesang” (Satyros, l. 289; song) is intended to put a cowering mass of squirrel-like neophytes “onto the deep passageway to all knowledge” (Satyros, ll. 288–89; zu dem tiefen Gang/ Aller Erkenntnisse) as they encircle him while gnawing on chestnuts.

Some fifteen years before Goethe described his ontological “revelations” (FA 1.15.1:509; Offenbarungen) in Rom as an “abyss of riches” (FA 1.15.1:509; Abgrund von Reichtum), then, or used the superlative degree of the adjective “tief” in “Einfache Nachahmung” to undermine Styl as the pinnacle of artistic achievement, he had already configured the ground of all ontological knowledge as abysmal. In other words, well before the articulation of his classical aesthetic, the ostensibly firm foundations of the objects of “museal exhibition” were radically deep for Goethe as well, or to borrow thing-theorist Bill Brown’s phrase, Goethean things originate in a fluid field “beyond the grid of intelligibility.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, like the primal rock granite—yet another “Grundfeste” (FA 1.25:313; firm foundation) that Goethe paradoxically described in a youthful geological reverie as “das Höchste und das Tiefste” (FA 1.25:313; the highest and the deepest)—art (die Kunst) in “its loftiest gradation” (FA1.15.2:874; der höchste Grad) offered a similarly mysterious vantage point into the very “Eigenschaften der Dinge” (FA1.15.2:874; nature of things), or the chaotic depths from where all things emerge. From the metaphorical configuration of thingness in Satyros, then, through an early attempt to understand the earth’s origins, to his aesthetic education in Italy and his post-classical re-configurations of nature and art in Faust II, Goethe never abandoned his commitment to the disorienting ontology of the Ding/Unding dyad. Borrowing from Brown’s formulations again, we can thus say that with the “amorphousness” at its origin the lexeme Ding in Goethe’s reconstruction would become “the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates.” ⁴¹

In this context, before addressing the ontological enigma that resonates in the satyr’s lyrical guide through the terrain of thingness, it would be useful to consider Faust’s steep cognitive “descent” into the realm of the divine Mothers, which (according to the ironist Mephistopheles) is an “ascent” as well.⁴² Here the disorienting “Gang” (Satyros, l. 288; passageway) of Goethe’s pre-classical stage—which is reprised in his classical aesthetics—still holds sway as Faust embarks on his cosmological journey across the post-classical stage of Part II. Much like his demonic ancestor, in fact, who celebrates the incorporeal no-thing (Unding) as the source of all corporeal things, Mephistopheles supervises similarly formless regions of negation in the play, where things are always about to happen. Perhaps the most compelling of these enigmatic scenes of ontological confusion and productivity is staged toward the end of Faust II, Act I, when Goethe’s satanic impresario, who is a descendant of the charismatic forest-demon Satyros, guides Faust to a maternal realm of endless renewal by directing him to a pathless “way” through nothingness. Thus, in response to the query, “Wohin der Weg? (Faust, l. 6222), Mephistopheles responds, “Kein Weg! / Ins Unbetretene, / Nicht zu Betretende; ein Weg ans Unerbetene / Nicht zu Erbittende” (Faust, ll. 6222–4; no way! into the untrodden, the inaccessible; a path toward the unwelcome, the unsolicited). But the Nay-Sayer’s way that is “no way” will also (and paradoxically) lead Faust to an unmapped, life-affirming region of teeming incorporeality and perpetual generation. Hollowed of any fully articulated sense, but replete with the amorphous images (Faust, l. 6290; Schemen) of all created things (Faust, l. 6289; aller Kreatur) in the process of their becoming, Goethe’s “Realm of the Mothers” is, therefore, another prototypical landscape of endless ontological possibility: “Gestaltung, Umgestaltung, / Des ewigen Sinnes ewige Unterhaltung, / Umschwebt von Bildern aller Kreatur” (Faust, ll. 6287–89; formation, transformation, the eternal conservation of the eternal sense, in the midst of the hovering images of all living things).

Like the wilderness landscape of the satyr’s song and the remote forest where it resounds, this abysmal realm offers an iteration of a bottomless setting that is eerily empty. As a disorienting and incommensurable site, moreover, this isolated and lonely void (Faust, l. 6227; Öd’) appears as a space of pure extension about to be filled. Outside the charted cosmos, it has no fixed or clearly defined borders itself. But since Goethe’s maternal hollow lies somewhere between the abysmal beginning and soaring end of Faust’s worldly adventure, it is also a field of pure liminality.⁴³ Like the amorphous sea with its rising and falling waves (Faust, ll. 6239–41), it is “das Grenzenlose” (Faust, l. 6240; a place with no borders)—a distant and fluid void where neither sight and nor sound can pierce the darkness or silence: “Nichts wirst du sehn in ewig leerer Ferne, / Den Schritt nicht hören den du tust, / Nichts Festes finden wo du ruhst” (Faust, ll. 6246–48; you will see nothing in an eternally empty distance, not hear the step that you take, find nothing firm where you rest). The radical negativity of this place of sensory deprivation, however, also paradoxically establishes its promise as the matrix of all perceptible things (phenomena). As the enigmatic condition of possibility for cosmic design, its amorphous emptiness thus involves a potency as well: from this place that is no-place, Faust will be drawn into the regenerative laboratory of poeisis as he continues to pursue the quintessential embodiment of female beauty in the play’s next two acts. Small wonder that he is lured by Mephistopheles’ promise of chestnuts—an invigorating feast that the cowering creatures in Satyros had once enjoyed as the “forest-devil” chanted his song about the formation of things out of a chaotic void.⁴⁴ As with Faust’s earlier pursuit of Margaret in Part I, which was facilitated by the witch’s invigorating potion, an impotent man of action again requires an infernal infusion of energy to prepare him for the poetic incarnation of Helen and his linguistic union with her through the rhymed couplets of Act III.

Well before Mephistopheles’ satanic plotting would redeem Faust (as the monstrous agent) and Gretchen/Helena (as the suffering recipients) of his “destructive” deeds, however, the satyr’s paradoxical and incalculable “no-thing” had already become a constructive some-thing. In fact, both Faustian and Mephistophelean tones reverberate in the forest-devil’s song about the “deep path” to universal knowledge, which locates the origin of a process of perpetual becoming in the realm of the “Unding” (Satyros, l. 290 and 297; no-thing).⁴⁵ At first, of course, the power of the no-thing, which Goethe’s “nature spirit” urges his spellbound pack of followers to heed, is aligned only with chaos and confusion: “Vernehmet wie im Unding / Alles durch einander ging” (Satyros, l. 290–91; hear how in the no-thing all things were chaotic). Furthermore, Goethe’s initial configuration of the lexeme is conventional, conforming as it does, to a long list of satanic adjectives that, according to Grimm’s Dictionary, have defined it over the years: böses, schädliches, seltsames, widersinniges, unförmiges, and unberechenbares (Grimm 24.441; evil, harmful, strange, paradoxical, unformed, and incalculable).⁴⁶ And all of these negative qualities further align Unding with unrecht, übel, and schaden (Grimm 24.441; injustice, evil, injury). As the satyr’s song progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that, like Goethe’s reconfiguration of conventional concepts of evil in Faust, the conceptual range of the satanic Unding involves more than the traditionally destructive undoings of Unrecht, Übel, and Schaden.

In this context, the hymn goes on to describe a rhythmic process—“auf und ab sich rollend” (Satyros, l. 311; tumbling up and down)—that, like the animating beats of a poem or the surging and receding sea-waves in the final act of Faust II, harnesses the power of the negative to make something positive happen. By moving through a series of transformed and transforming things in the measured rhythms of the rhymed song, the initial amorphousness and plasticity of the incorporeal Unding thus becomes the source of its own progressive emergence and formation through corporeal events of both active and passive affections: “Das All und Ein und Ewig Ding/ Immer verändert! Immer beständig!” (Satyros, ll. 312–13; the all- and one- and eternal-thing, always changed, always the same). In the beginning—according to the song’s myth of creation—units of elementary power in the churning sea of cosmic energy lay dormant and disconnected from each other:

Vernehmet wie im Unding
Alles durch einander ging.
Im verschloßnen Haß die Elemente tosend,
Und Kraft an Kräften widrig von sich stoßend,
Ohne Feinds band, ohne Freunds band
Ohne zerstören ohne vermehren. (Satyros, l. 290–95)

Hear how in the no-thing
All things were chaotic,
Locked in hate, the elements roaring,
And force repelling repugnant forces,
Without the bond of foe, without the bond of friend,
Without annihilating without augmenting.

At the same time, however, the possibility of a recuperative reversal appears to reverberate in the satyr’s unifying rhymes and rhythms. Might some new systolic moment of formative actualization in fact issue from the hollow diastolic moment of chaotic disconnection that the first strophe describes? The fourfold repetition of the word “ohne” (without or devoid of) in the final two lines appears to imply as much: potentially, the combined forces of hostility and friendship can be reorganized in reciprocal engagement to produce a positive some-thing (i.e., an enhancement) out of the negative no-thing. Perhaps “Zerstören” (like Freud’s thanatos, understood as the drive to destroy or tear apart) and “Vermehren” (like Freud’s eros, understood as the drive to connect or augment) can cooperatively produce some cosmic design out of chaos. And, in fact, as the song’s second strophe instructs, the elemental units of potential energy that lay dormant in the cosmic “void” were subsequently released from the potent Unding in a penetrating surge of erotic power:

Wie im Unding das Urding erquoll
Lichts macht durch die Nacht scholl
Durch drang die Tiefen der Wesen all
Daß aufgekeimte Begehrungs schwall
Und die Elemente sich erschlossen
Mit Hunger in einander ergossen
All durchdringend all durchdrungen. (Satyros, ll. 297–303)

How in the no-thing the primal-thing billowed
Light’s power rang through the night
Penetrated to the depths of all beings
So that the budding swell of desire
And the elements were reciprocally disclosed
Spilled into each other famished
All penetrating, all penetrated.

Propelled by the reciprocal activity of love with its binding light, on the one hand, and deep night with its power to disrupt and destroy, on the other, the Unding swelled with desire to release a flood of generative energy. In Aristotelian terms, as the elements openly engaged one another to inaugurate a violent process formation, the stuff of the universe exchanged a condition of in dynamis (potentiality) for one of energeia (actuality). The autotelic pieces of vibrant matter⁴⁷ exploding from the void of the cavernous Unding thus set into motion a spiraling trajectory of living things, from the endlessly creative primal-thing (Urding) to the all- and one- and eternal-thing of the song’s final strophe:

Wie sich Haß und Lieb gebar
Und das All nun ein Ganzes war.
Und das Ganze klang
In lebend würkendem Ebengesang,
Sich täte Kraft in Kraft verzehren
Sich täte Kraft in Kraft vermehren,
Und auf und ab sich rollend ging
Das All und Ein und Ewig Ding
Immer verändert! immer beständig! (Satyros, ll. 305–13)

How love and hate gave birth to each other
And the All now was a Whole,
And the Whole resounded
With measured, animated, and effectual song,
Force acted with force to deplete
Force acted with force to augment,
And so went rolling up and down
The all- and one- and eternal-thing.
Always changed, always enduring!

Conclusion: Toward a Philosophical Lineage of Goethe’s Problematic Ding

In a maxim published in the journal Ueber Kunst und Alterthum (1825; On Art and Antiquity), Goethe describes “einen hohlen Fleck im Gehirn d.h. eine Stelle wo sich kein Gegenstand abspiegelt” (FA 1.22:183; a hollowed out spot in the brain, i.e., a place where no object is reflected), as well as “im Auge selbst ein Fleckchen [. . .] das nicht sieht ” (FA 1.22:183; a tiny spot in the eye that does not see). If a person becomes too absorbed in these voids, “vertieft er sich darin” the observation continues,

so verfällt er in eine Geisteskrankeit, ahnet hier Dinge aus einer andern Welt, die aber eigentlich Undinge sind und weder Gestalt noch Begrenzung haben, sondern als leere Nacht-Räumlichkeit ängstigen und den der sich nicht losreißt mehr als gespensterhaft verfolgen. (FA 1.22:184)

if he submerges himself in them, he will then sink into mental illness, will imagine seeing things from another world that are in fact no-things and, devoid of defined shape or limits, as empty night-spatiality frighten and hauntingly persecute whoever cannot tear himself away.

Goethe’s association of the otherworldly Unding with a mental pathology that hallucinates forbidding objects (Gegenstände) unavailable for symbolic representation (wiederholte Spiegelungen) does not, of course, suggest that we dismiss the satyr’s song as mere madness or discount the tricks of his wily kinsman Mephistopheles as deceptive illusions. Instead, both nature-demons—without knowing it—effectively open up places on the cosmological stage that feature “leere Nacht-Räumlichkeit” (FA 1.22:183), or a frightening dark void of infinite extension, as the unstable, treacherous, and amorphous ground of things in their essential becomings. Like the “shuddering” Faust (Faust, l. 6216) upon contemplating the terrifying place where the Mothers “dwell” (Faust, l. 6220) outside of Newtonian time and space (Faust, l. 6214), the awestruck and befuddled audience of the satyr’s beguiling song are thus given poetic access to the powerful Unding as it generates the kind of ἓν καὶ πᾶν (one and all) at the heart of Goethe’s heterodox thinking about the dynamic cosmological network of “God, mind, and world” (FA 1.2:379–83; Gott, Gemüt und Welt). As Goethe concluded in his conversation with Riemer in 1807, “[w]ir sollten nicht von Dingen an sich reden, sondern von dem Einen an sich [. . .]; aber von diesem Einen an sich zu reden, wer vermag es?” (FA 2.6:218; we should not speak about things-in-themselves, but rather about the singular and unitary thing-in-itself [. . .]; yet to speak about this singular and unitary thing-in-itself, who can do that?).

The unspoken response to Goethe’s rhetorical question could be the poet-scientist or poet-philosopher—that is to say, all “improper” (or creatively “mad”) thinkers—like himself and his satyr-bard—who engage the power of poetic language to visualize the transcendental ground of cosmological things beyond the reach of reason’s perceptual apparatus (Kant).⁴⁸ Of course, Goethe’s metaphysical forays, including his poetically driven adventure in morphological ontology, are not isolated episodes within the philosophical tradition that interrogates things. And this entry has already made passing reference to a number of like-minded philosophical contrarians—both before and after Goethe—whose adventures in ontological conceptualization exemplify what Richard Rorty called the anti-foundational tradition of “edifying” philosophy.⁴⁹ The list of topics has included, most prominently, the ancient Stoic notion of incorporeals; Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism with its concepts of actual entity, eternal object, bifurcation of nature, fallacy of misplaced concrescence, and creative advance;⁵⁰ Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of entities and beings as the ontic-ontological difference; Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental materialism with its plane of immanence and virtuality; and Bill Brown’s thing-theory.

Additionally, however, some problematic moments of conceptualization within more orthodox philosophical systems have also figured in this discussion, including the attributes of divine substance and affection in Spinoza’s modal metaphysics, perception and appetition in Leibniz’s monadology, and most prominently, the thing-in-itself in Kant’s critical epistemology. In the context of these extensive filiations, we can now return to the mysterious figure of “leere Nacht-Räumlichkeit” (FA 1.22:184; empty night-spatiality) in order to situate Goethe’s vector-like Ding within a philosophical lineage that reaches from Aristotle’s sterēsis and the void in Stoic ontology through Heidegger’s Leere (emptiness) to Deleuze’s plane of immanence and the incorporeal in Elizabeth Grosz’s analysis of the relationship of ideality to materiality.

Walter A. Brogan has linked what he calls the “twofoldedness of being” in Martin Heidegger to that philosopher’s phenomenological reading of Aristotle. According to Brogan,

the existential Gegen opens Dasein to a not-being that belongs to its very way of being. Heidegger suggests that Aristotle recognized this in his notion of στέρεσις (sterēsis), a notion of nonbeing and refusal that Aristotle says [. . .] belongs to being itself.⁵¹

Along similar lines, we might consider the dualistic monism of Goethe’s morphological ontology in terms of each dynamic thing’s ontological being-in-the-world, rather than the ontic facticity of any isolated something. That is to say, like the all-embracing cosmological field of Heideggerian Dasein, the field in which we imagine Goethean thingness requires—as its condition of possibility—an existential “Gegen” (opposing term); and this requirement, in turn, connects Goethean thingness to Aristotle’s notion of deprivation (sterēsis), or “non-being.”⁵² If, according to Heidegger’s Aristotelean reading, all entities (things) are disclosed from Dasein’s deep ontological vantage point as “either contraries or composed of contraries,”⁵³ then according to the satyr’s cosmological song, “the all- and one- and eternal-thing,” is similarly disclosed to thought as the replete “Urding (primal thing)” in parodoxical relation to the empty Unding (no-thing). For Goethe, as for Aristotle before him and Heidegger afterwards, “privation” (lack, non-being) is constitutive of the negative reality that lurks within the world of teeming things. As the (proto-Aristotelean and proto-Heideggerian) satyr proclaims, the positive “power of light” (Lichts macht), which is the source of all living things, “rang through the night.” And thus coupled with darkness (the deprivation of light), a primal brightness broke through the dark void to illuminate “the depths of all beings” from within (die Tiefen der Wesen all).

Decades later, Goethe would stage another scene of “leere Nacht-Räumlichkeit” (FA 1.22:184; empty night-spatiality) as the blinded Faust also experiences a light from within:“Die Nacht scheint tiefer tief hereinzudringen / Allein im Innern leuchtet helles Licht” (Faust, ll. 11499–50; night seems to penetrate deep and deeper, yet a bright light shines from within). Of course, Faust’s blindness, which is triggered by Sorge (care),⁵⁴ momentarily suggests that his dying vision is delusional. The legions of workers he “sees” erecting dikes and dams to hold back the sea and wrest a strip of firm ground from a swamp beneath a distant mountain range are actually lemurs digging (graben) his grave (Grab). Lest we forget, however, the “delusional” vision of Faustian blindness, i.e., Goethe’s “tiny spot in the brain that does not see,” also involves an act of poeisis. By imagining an as yet unfulfilled future of collective activity, it creates a figure of thought that like Deleuze’s virtual refers to a communal “thing,” or state of affairs, that is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”⁵⁵ And the mere intimation of this opposing, more essential and more powerful reality, which weaves the colorful tapestry of life between heaven and earth, will finally redeem Faust’s two contending souls (Faust, ll. 1110–25; zwei Seelen) as the model of endless ontological exploration.

In this regard, Goethe’s staging of thingness in Satyrus and Faust within a foundational void that is paradoxically abysmal shows some remarkable similarities to Heidegger’s revisionist ontology as set forth in a group of later works, including his essay “Das Ding” (1950). As described there and analyzed by Heidegger, the reality of a simple kitchen utensil, which he calls a “jug-thing” (Heidegger 1:170; Krug-Ding), is tied to its conceptualization as an ideal or “virtual” container (in Deleuze’s sense of the word). In a radical reversal of the obvious linkage of “the jug’s thing-essence” (1:170; [d]as Dinghafte des Kruges) to its fluid contents (1:170; Flüssigkeit), however, Heidegger shifts our attention to its primordial “emptiness” (1:171; Leere). Now invested with the negative capability to make some-thing happen, the jug’s hollow (or lack of Füllung) becomes the abysmal foundation, or condition of possibility, of its own “Herstellen” (Heidegger 1:169, 171; manufacture).

Furthermore, Heidegger emphatically disassociates the jug’s thingness from its mere physical shape, or the idea of its outer form: “was und wie der Krug als dieses Krug-Ding ist, läßt sich durch die Hinsicht auf das Aussehen, die ιδέα, niemals erfahren, geschweige denn sachgemäß denken (Heidegger 1:170; what and how the jug is as this jug-thing can never be experienced—much less objectively thought—in terms of its outward appearance, its ιδέα). As a “manufactured” article, it is just a simple object (Gegenstand). And while the potter’s shaping of the clay allows the jug to stand firmly in place and make it present as an impervious container (das Fassende) for wine, these corporeal attributes do not constitute what its essential content is: “Wand und Boden, woraus der Krug besteht und wodurch er steht, sind nicht das eigentlich Fassende” (1:171; wall and base out of which the jug consists and through which it stands are not what essentially constitutes it as a container).

Accordingly, after first proposing that “das Dinghafte des Kruges” (1:170; the thingness of the jug) lies with the fact “daß er als Gefäß ist” (1:170; that it is as a container/receptacle), Heidegger goes on to disclose the jug-thing’s “void” as its hidden essence.⁵⁶ Grasped (gefaßt) in its essential thingness as a receptacle that will receive and dispense the wine destined to fill it, the jug’s incorporeal emptiness thus paradoxically “contains” (umfasst) its ontological reality: “die Leere is das Fassende des Gefäßes” (1:170; the void is the containing [thing] of the container) And this void, or negative capability, “dieses Nichts am Krug” (1:170; this nothing about the jug), according to Heidegger, “ist das, was der Krug als das fassende Gefäß ist” (1:170; is that which the jug [really] is as the containing container).

In light of Heidegger’s ontological reconstruction of a simple kitchen utensil, which makes an unknowing nod to Goethe’s Unding, we can now offer two final comments about the problem of “thingness” as staged in Faust and Satyros. First: the pairing of Mephistopheles’ “Ewig-Leere” (Faust, l. 11603; eternal void) with the Mystical Choir’s “Ewig-Weibliche” (Faust, l. 12110; eternal feminine) in the final act of Faust creates an oppositional dyad that discloses the mysterious power of the negative to shape something positive from nothing in an eternal process of formation and transformation (Faust l. 6287; Gestaltung, Umgestaltung,). And second: with the satyr’s rehearsal of the ontological passage of the hollowed-out “Unding” through the emergent “Urding” to the cosmic “All,” “Ein,” and “Ewig Ding,” Goethe has staged the perpetual organization of a “universe of things” out of the chaotic amorphousness of the void. As each singular thing (Ein Ding) emerges from the primal thing (Urding)—which is inextricably linked to the generative no-thing (Unding)—it is ultimately contained (umfasst) within the organized cosmos of the eternal all-thing (All Ding), which is situated “at the edge of chaos.” Or, in Deleuze’s appropriation of James Joyce’s portmanteau of chaos and cosmos in Finnegan’s Wake, we can say that the Goethean circle of things, which expresses the dualistic unity of his morphological ontology, is a “chaosmos.”⁵⁷

Significantly, the lexeme leer (empty, void, vacant, hollow) is uttered four times in short order as Faust and Mephistopheles attempt to describe the chaotic realm of amorphous incorporeal activity where the creative work of the Mothers is initiated: once as a qualifying adjective (Faust, l. 6246) and three times in the adjective’s nominalized form, as “das Leere” or “Leeres” (Faust, ll. 6232 and 6251). And it is there, “im tiefsten, allertiefsten Grund” (Faust, l. 6284; in the deepest, deepest ground of all), where Faust—with the assistance of Mephistopheles—obtains a phallic key. With the touch of his hand, he is told, “[d]as kleine Ding” (Faust, l. 6259; that small thing) will swell with an illuminating flash to provide access to the dark primordial “void” (Leeres), which paradoxically contains the “wunderbarsten Dinge” (Faust, l. 6270; the most wondrous things). And prominent among these mysterious things to be illuminated in the flashing light of Faust’s tiny explosive “thing” are the hovering “prototypes” of “all creatures,” i.e., created things, which as “specters,” or amorphous, disembodied spirits awaiting materialization,⁵⁸ can see each other but are themselves blind to Faust’s corporeal presence: “Umschwebt von Bildern aller Kreatur. / Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur” (Faust, ll. 6289–90; surrounded by the hovering images of all creatures, they do not see you, for all they (can) see are specters).

Of course, there could be no more fitting guide for Faust’s passage to the chaotic “Realm of the Mothers” than “[d]es Chaos wunderlicher Sohn” (l. 1384; son of chaos), the nature-spirit Mephistopheles, who had first introduced himself to the exhausted scholar after passing through a series of animal incarnations. Already less than human, in this regard, and with no fixed corporeal form, the demon’s humorously enigmatic answer to Faust’s question about his “essential being” (l. 1333; Wesen)—“[w]er bist du denn?” (l. 1333; who are you then)—situates him within a cosmology that resembles the myth of origin in the satyr’s song. As “ein Teil des Teils, der Anfangs alles war” (Faust, l. 1349; a part of the part that in the beginning was everything), Goethe’s “Geist der stets veneint” (l. 1338; spirit of perpetual negation), aligns himself with the paradoxical power of the Unding, which occupies an empty and amorphous space at the edge of a cosmic whole in a perpetual process of formation. That is to say, Goethe’s monstrous nature-spirit of “perpetual negation,” who serves as Faust’s guide in his passage through the “small” and “large” worlds of the play, exhibits the positive power within the negative to effect good. Hence his initial self-characterization as “ein Teil von jener Kraft, / Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft” (Faust, ll. 1335–36; a part of that force that continually wants something evil and continually creates something good). And with a third iteration the piecemeal effectiveness of Mephistophelean negativity as “ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar” (Faust, l. 1350; a part of the darkness that brought forth the light), Goethe’s master of negation situates himself on the dark side of a universe about to be formed out of the life-enhancing conflict of opposing forces in the primordial void.⁵⁹

Ultimately, then, Goethe’s graded staging of ontological being as an endless process of “formation, transformation” (Faust, l. 6287; Gestaltung, Umgestaltung) cannot be thought apart from the phenomenal things of the world and their primordial negation. As already indicated, such thinking about the genesis of actual things within force fields of pure potentiality that are emptied of all perceptible form connects Goethe’s conceptualization of the oppositional dyad no-thing/something to ontological paradigms reaching back to Aristotle’s sterēsis and Stoic cosmology, while also looking forward to Heidegger’s Leere and Deleuze’s virtual. Each of these cosmological narratives, moreover, features the same deprivation of materialized form, or modes of incorporeality, that we have identified as constitutive of Goethe’s conceptualization of thingness in terms of the generative polarity between corporeals and incorporeals. And each also exhibits the same kind of dualistic unity that we attributed to Goethe’s morphological ontology after examining the reciprocal relation between actual things and the amorphous Unding in Satyros and Faust. By employing “die künstlichste[n] Mittel” (FA 1.25:100); the most artificial means) to stage the mysterious power of “leere Nacht-Räumlichkeit” (FA 1.22:184; empty night-spatiality), Goethe illuminated the contours of positive things from within their abysmal interiors and so shed some light on the dark processes of ontological generation. That is to say, by exploring the liminal zone of emergence between potentiality and actualization where the mysterious no-thing does its work, he set the stage for his poetic and ongoing re-conceptualization of the endlessly plastic Ding, which Adelung’s entry had begun to lay out.

1. Adelung’s two entries for Ding (in columns 1495–1500) will be cited according to the online version of his dictionary as Adelung: https://lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de/adelung/lemma/bsb00009131_6_0_6632 and https://lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de/adelung/lemma/bsb00009131_6_0_663. All translations of these entries are my own. ↩
2. See Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding (1950),” in Gesamtausgabe: Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 7:172. Hereafter cited in the text as Heidegger 1, followed by volume and page number. ↩
3. See Johann Peter Uz, Lyrische und andere Gedichte (Ansbach: Christoph Pesch, 1755), 28: “Magister Duns, das grosse Licht, / Des deutschen Pindus Ehre, / Der Dichter, dessen Muse spricht, / Wie seine Dingerlehre; / Der lauter Metaphysik ist, / Und metaphysisch lacht und küßt; / Ließ jüngst bey siner Schönen / Ein zärtlich Lied ertönen” (Master Dunce, that great light [and] honor of the Pindus, whose muse speaks as does his ontology—which is pure metaphysics—recently played a tender song for his beautiful one). https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/uz_gedichte_1755/?hl=Duns&p=42. ↩
4. See Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, 117. Hereafter cited in the text as Heidegger 2, followed by page number. ↩
5. See Baruch de Spinoza, Ethica 2d7: “Per res singulares intelligo res, quae finitae sunt et determinatam habent existentiam. Quod si plura individua in una actione ita concurrant, ut omnia simul unius effectus sint causa, eadem omnia eatenus ut unam rem singularem considero” (by particular things I understand things that are finite and have a determinate [ limited] existence. If a number of individuals work together in one process so that together they are all the cause of one effect, I consider them all, to that extent, one particular thing). https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/spinoza1665part2.pdf ↩
6. Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, 2:911. Hereafter cited as Kant, followed by volume and page number. ↩
7. The term is from chapter two in Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 26–48. https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1920/White1_02.html. ↩
8. The term is the title of a story by Gwyneth Jones that Steven Shaviro discusses in his book on Whitehead of the same name. See Shaviro, The Universe of Things, 45–64. ↩
9. Unless otherwise noted, works by Goethe are cited according to the Frankfurt edition (FA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 2.6:217. Hereafter cited in the text as FA, followed by volume, section, and page number. ↩
10. See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 5: “Temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects).” ↩
11. As cited in the entry on Deleuze in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/gilles-deleuze. ↩
12. “Ich nenne einen Begriff problematisch, der keinen Widerspruch enthält, der auch als eine Begrenzung gegebener Begriffe mit andern Erkenntnissen zusammenhängt, dessen objective Realität aber auf keine Weise erkannt werden kann.” (Kant, 3:279; I call a concept problematic that contains no contradiction, yet while serving as a boundary of existing concepts, connects with other [moments of] cognition, the objective reality of which, however, can in no way be cognized). ↩
13. “Der Begriff eines Noumenon ist also bloß ein Grenzbegriff, um die Anmaßung der Sinnlichkeit einzuschränken, und also nur von negativem Gebrauche.” (Kant, 3:279; the concept of the noumenon is, therefore, just a limiting concept only to restrain the pretentions of sensibility, and so its use is only negative). ↩
14. Nicholas Rescher, Kant and the Reach of Reason, 19. ↩
15. Rescher, 20. ↩
16. See Elizabeth Grosz, “The Stoics, Materialism, and the Incorporeal” in The Incorporeal, 15–53. Grosz’s discussion of the Stoic void offers a number of suggestive insights that allow us to connect Goethe’s Unding (no-thing) to a metaphysical lineage extending from Stoicism through Heidegger to Deleuze and contemporary thing-theory. ↩
17. For a useful elaboration of Whitehead’s concept of the “eternal object” and Deleuze’s notion of the “virtual,” see Steven Shaviro’s blog “The Pinocchio Theory,” http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=578. ↩
18. See Eckart Förster, “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes.’” ↩
19. Goethe called these differences “polarities.” ↩
20. See Daniel L. Purdy’s “Between Nanjing and Weimar,” 59–88, for a penetrating reading of the Chinese context to the debates in Jena-Weimar between the orthodox Kantians and their idealist successors that Goethe cites in this letter. ↩
21. See John McCarthy’s entry “Erscheinung, Erscheinen (Manifestation).” ↩
22. See Hartnut Böhme, “Die Metaphysik der Erscheinungen”: “Daß ohne instrumentelle Technik die neuzeitliche Naturwissenschaft nicht auf die Bahn gekommen wäre, wußte Goethe sehr genau, auch wenn er gegen sie seine eigene, am Phänomen orientierte Naturforschung aufbot” (359; Goethe knew very well that modern science would not have found its way without technological instruments, even if he opposed these with his own brand of scientific investigation, which aligned itself with the phenomenon). ↩
23. Rescher, 20. ↩
24. https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/40. ↩
25. See Clark S. Muenzer, “Fugitive Images and Visual Memory in Goethe’s Discourse on Color,” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, eds. Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 220–37. ↩
26. For a detailed analysis of this reversal with reference to Whitehead’s process metaphysics, see Clark Muenzer, “A Whiteheadian Take,” 35. ↩
27. See paragraphs 722-729 in the “Didactic Part” of the Farbenlehre (FA 1.23.1:234–6), where Goethe discusses the relationship of his color-theory to mathematics and laboratory measurements. ↩
28. Both Goethe’s Faust and Satyros will be cited by line numbers according Frankfurt edition (FA 1.7 and 1.4). For the best digitized Faust‑text in German, see https://faustedition.net/print/faust. ↩
29. See Muenzer, “A Whiteheadian Take,” 39–40, for a reading of the doubled “mir” in “Ganymed,” which is explicated with reference to the roles that “subjective aims” and “objective data” play in Whitehead’s construction of “creative advance” as a serialized system of “prehensions” and “concrescences.” Both Whitehead and Goethe reconstruct the modern, imperial subject in its Cartesian and Kantian modes as an aesthetically driven vector of self-composition and decomposition (Gestaltung/Umgestaltung) that is constituted in fields of affection. Whitehead calls this subjective entity a “superject.” ↩
30. See Reinhart Nethersole’s entry “Ereignis (Event)” in the GLPC. ↩
31. Historically, the term “anecdote” referred to secret or private stories. https://www.etymonline.com/word/anecdote. ↩
32. Adelung reminds us “daß ereignen unstreitig von Auge abstammet” (that ereignen indisputably derives from eye). https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=Adelung#3. ↩
33. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 208. ↩
34. See Ethics IIp45s in A Spinoza Reader, 145: “For I am speaking of the very nature of existence, which is attributed to singular things [rebus singularibus] because infinitely many things follow from the eternal necessity of God’s nature in infinitely many modes.” ↩
35. Ethics IIp40s2 in A Spinoza Reader, 141. Goethe quotes this passage in his letter. ↩
36. FA 2.2:629. ↩
37. See David E. Wellbery’s entry “Form.” ↩
38. See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” which distinguishes things from objects in a way that recalls Goethe’s construction of objects (Gegenstände) as those singular (corporeal) things, or perceptibles, that are actualized in artistic and scientific works: “But the very semantic irreducibility of things to objects, coupled with the semantic irreducibility of things to objects, would seem to mark one way of recognizing how, although objects typically arrest a poet’s attention, and although the object was what was asked to join the dance in philosophy, things may still lurk in the shadows of the ballroom and continue to lurk there after the subject and object have done their thing, long after the party is over.” (3) ↩
39. FA 1.4:391-406. ↩
40. Brown, 5. ↩
41. Brown, 5. ↩
42. “Versinke denn! Ich könnt auch sagen: steige!” (l. 6275; sink down then; I could also say: climb up) ↩
43. See Clark Muenzer, “At the Edge of Chaos” and “Borders, Monuments and Goethe’s Reconstruction of Knowledge.” ↩
44. The chestnut tree has a long association in folklore and magic with life forces, including male vitality and abundance. Agrippa placed the horse-chestnut tree (æsculus) in the orbit of Jupiter. In the Georgics Virgil configured the plant—in Dryden’s rendering—with “topmost boughs” that “to heaven ascend” and roots that “to hell’s dominion tend.” ↩
45. See Vanessa de Harven, “How Nothing can be Something,” for a discussion of Stoic materialism that in many respects accords with Goethe’s morphological ontology. ↩
46. See the entry for “Unding” in Jakob and Wilhlem Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 24: column 441, hereafter cited as Grimm in the body of text.
    https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=U05817. ↩
47. See the Goethe-Lexicon entry on “Materie” (Matter), where Jennifer Caisley suggests that “for Goethe [. . .] Materie is a far cry from the inert, dead masses that the English term ‘matter’ suggests to a lay reader. Rather, it is something imbued with ‘Geist’ (spirit, mind): vibrant, ever-changing, and fundamental to all life on earth.” ↩
48. See Clark Muenzer, “Goethe’s Improper Mode of Thought,”196–97: “By following the twists and turns of poetic tropes, Goethe learned to speak and think poetically about the perennial problems of metaphysics [. . .]. [B]y favouring metaphysical problems without solutions over universal judgments of truth, [he] challenged the orthodox system builders and rethought the pathway of traditional metaphysical inquiry.” ↩
49. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 357–94. ↩
50. See Muenzer, “A Whiteheadian Take,” 27–42. ↩
51. Walter A. Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle, 19. ↩
52. In 2017 Andree Hahmann discussed Goethe’s connection to Aristotle’s sterēsis in a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania entitled “‘Der Geist der stets verneint’: Simple Negation or Privation in Goethe’s Faust?” ↩
53. See Aristotle’s Metaphysics (4, 1005a). Among the four kinds of opposition for Aristotle, the two most relevant for Goethe are privation/possession and affirmation/negation (Categories, 11b). ↩
54. Care (Sorge) is the last and most commanding of the four gray crones (graue Weiber) who confront Faust at midnight after Mephistopheles and his three henchman murdered Philomen and Baucis. The other three—Mangel (deprivation), Schuld (debt), and Not (need)—exit the scene, but Sorge slips through a keyhole in the door to Faust’s palace, thereby suggesting her superior position over her sisters. See Ellis Dye, “Sorge in Heidegger and Goethe’s Faust.” ↩
55. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 208. ↩
56. Heidegger used the lexeme some 36 times in in his essays and lectures between 1910 and 1976. ↩
57. See Alain Beaulieu, “Introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s Cosmological Sensibility,” 201: “The notion of chaosmos, borrowed from James Joyce, points to another aspect of Deleuze’s cosmological sensitivity. Joyce’s neologism ‘chaosmos’ expresses the fact that chaos and cosmos (disorder and order) are not opposites, but part of a larger continuum [. . .]. There is a symbiosis between order and disorder and their boundaries are somewhat undefined.” ↩
58. Similarly amorphous “schwankende Gestalten” (l. 1; wavering forms) are invoked by the poet in the very first line of the play. ↩
59. For yet another myth of origin that describes the birth of dawn out of the primordial struggle of light and darkness, see the love-poem “Wiederfinden” (1819), which Goethe first published in the West-östlicher Diwan (FA 1.3:96–98) and then republished in 1827 in the cosmological cycle Gott und Welt (FA 1.2:490–91). ↩

Works Cited and Further Reading

• Aristotle. Metaphysics. Book Θ. Translated by Stephen Makin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.
• Adelung, Johann Christoph. Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart: mit beständiger Vergleichung der übrigen Mundarten, besonders aber der Oberdeutschen, 2nd rev. ed. Edited by Franz Xaver Schönberger. 4 vols. Vienna: B. Ph. Bauer, 1811. https://lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de/adelung/lemma/bsb00009131_4_1_1068.
• Beaulieu, Alain. “Introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s Cosmological Sensibility.” Philosophy and Cosmology 16 (2016): 199–210.
• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010.
• Bell, Jeffrey A. Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
• Böhme, Hartmut. “Die Metaphysik der Erscheinungen. Teleskop und Mikroskop bei Goethe, Leeuwenhoek und Hooke.” In Kunstkammer–Laboratorium–Bühne: Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardig, 359–96. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110201765.359
• Brogan, Walter A. Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldedness of Being. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005.
• Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22.
• Caisley, Jennifer. “Materie (Matter).” https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/60.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
• ________. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1992
• ________. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
• Dye, Ellis. “Sorge in Heidegger and Goethe’s Faust.” Goethe Yearbook 16 (2009): 207–18.
• Eisler, Rudolf. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, 2nd ed. Berlin: Ernst Mittler und Sohn, 1904. https://www.textlog.de/1331.html.
• Förster, Eckart. “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes.’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75 (2001): 187–101.
• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Edited by Hendrik Birus, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et. al. 40 vols. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–2013.
• Goethe-Wörterbuch. Edited by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, and Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978-2020. http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=GWB.
• Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Edited by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 33 vols. Leipzig and Munich: S. Hirzel and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1854–1972.
• Grosz, Elisabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.
• de Harven, Vanessa. “How Nothing can be Something: The Stoic Theory of Void.” Ancient Philosophy 35.2 (2015): 405–29.
• Heidegger, Martin. “Das Ding (1950).” In Gesamtausgabe: Vorträge und Aufsätze, 7: 165–87. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000.
• __________. Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den tranzendentalen Grundsätzen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1962.
• Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel. 13 vols. Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007.
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