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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Kant and Goethe

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In this paper we want to consider the inner connection between Kant and Goethe; therefore we want to emphasize primarily aspects they have in common rather than points of opposition. Goethe says for example about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that this “voice has brought a great advancement,” in so far as through it man has been able “to awaken concerning himself,” concerning his “highest faculty of reason.” Goethe was above all impressed, however, by the Critique of Judgment and he confessed: “The great main ideas of this work were analogous to my own previous ideas.” It was for him “an exceedingly great deed... that Kant placed art and nature in his Critique of Judgment side by side” so that they could “illuminate each other.” Goethe found it very important that Kant “drew the boundaries which the human intellect is able to reach” and that he nevertheless arrived through his transcendental, critical method at necessary philosophical insights. Goethe, however, wanted to expand these insights still further by means of his own morphological method.3