Judgment through Intuitive Perception

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

https://archive.org/details/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe-scientific-studies

In seeking to penetrate Kant’s philosophy,’ or at least apply it as well as I could, I often got the impression that this good man had a roguishly ironic way of working: at times he seemed determined to put the narrowest limits on our ability to know things, and at times, with a casual gesture, he pointed beyond the limits he himself had set. He had no doubt observed man’s precocious and cocky way of making smug, hurried, thoughtless pronouncements based on one or two facts, of rushing to hasty conclusions by trying to impose on the objective world some notion that passes through one’s head. Thus our master limits his thinking person to a reflective, discursive faculty of judgment and absolutely forbids him one which is determinative. But then, after he has succeeded in driving us to the wall, to the verge of despair in fact, he makes the most liberal statements and leaves it to us to decide how to enjoy the freedom he allows us. In this sense I view the following passage as particularly significant:

We can, however, think an understanding which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, i.e. from the whole to the parts. . . . It is here not at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the idea of it—which too contains no contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding, which has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and to the contingency of its constitution.” Here, to be sure, the author seems to point to divine reason. In the moral area, however, we are expected to ascend to a higher realm and approach the primal being through faith in God, virtue, and immortality. Why should it not also -hold true in- the intellectual area that through an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative processes? Impelled from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly toward primal image and prototype, and had even succeeded in building up a method of representing it which conformed to nature. Thus there was nothing further to prevent me from boldly embarking on this “adventure of reason” (as the Sage of Königsberg himself called it).