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Paper short abstract:

The article attempts to fathom the unmeasurable impact of Goethe on the Eastern and the Western philosophy, by consulting Cassirer and Nishida. Goethean morphology will explain the controversial views on the relation of individual life to the universal spirit, symbolic or purely experiential.

Paper long abstract:

This article aims to reduce to a simple formula the unfathomable influence of Goethe both on the German and on the Japanese philosophy, employing Cassirer and Nishida as pregnant points. Since some studies have already shown an implicit, but intimate interconnection between them, the following argument uses the mediating or conciliatory role of Goethe as catalysis to promote both debates: Goethe, Cassirer, and Nishida can together contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental philosophical problem, namely the relation of man and universe.

Goethe thought, in introducing his notion of last phenomenon (Urphänomen), to have earned the gratitude of philosophers. He seems to claim, being himself a non-philosopher, to possess the philosopher’s stone which lacks the philosopher or wisdom, like Mephistopheles ridicules in Faust Part II. This provocation has found resonance in the widest circle of academics. Goethe occupies this unique position where he represents the Occident and fascinates the Orient. Although Goethe himself intimates in his gingko poem that two cultures can be simultaneously one and double, questions remain: How can we, instead of aestheticizing, comprehend this intricate identity of dichotomy? In which respect is Goethe’s Weltanschauung so attractive?

Answers can be found in the morphological relation of ideal-universal spirit (Geist) and real-individual life, which is consciously thematized by Cassirer and Nishida with different accentuations, which correspond with a tension of Goethe’s universe. Cassirer’s “symbolic forms” conceptualize an everlasting type of man as cultural being, parallel to original plant / animal (Urpflanze / -tier) of Goethe; Nishida on the contrary wants to grasp in “pure experience” human life, whose form is ultimately formless, because, like Goethe underlines, flora and fauna undergo an incessant transformation (“ein fortwährendes Umbilden“). From the vantagepoint of metamorphosis, Cassirer and Nishida are investigating one and the same phenomena or Urphänomen called spiritual life of man. It is, like Goethe once admired the work of Nature, the eternal one that manifests itself in multiplicity. Cassirer’s idealism search for the paradigm of man in the universal spirit, while Nishida brings concrete life of individuals to the fore, that embodies the spirit and cultivates its earthly soil.