Johann Wolfgang von Goethe saw the change in thought that occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a new awareness of a “living quality” in which the subject and object are dissolved together in a poise of inquiry. The new thought was organic rather than geometrical, based on sensibility and intuition rather than on imposed order, and evolving rather than created. Goethe thus rejected teleological and deterministic views of growth within organisms. Goethe believed the world as a whole grows through continuous, external and internal strife.
Goethe also rejected the notion of rationality as the sole interpreter of reality, and thus rejected the mechanistic views that contemporaneous science was extolling. Goethe believed all knowledge to be related to humanity through its functional value alone and that such knowledge presupposes a perspectival quality. Goethe’s views place him firmly in two different worlds; that of the Age of Reason and that of Romanticism. Such a split mode of thought places him alongside Adam Smith, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Adam Smith as a figure in two worlds. Why not use one of your IwantOneOfThose discount codes to buy his work?
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