‘Anschauende Urteilskraft’: Goethe Reads Kant

Abstract

Based on an analysis of Goethe’s marginalia in his copy of the Critique of Judgment (1790), preserved in his archive in Weimar, the article reconstructs the main circle of problems, where the influence and creative interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of nature and aesthetics are clearly visible. Rethinking ideas and using Kantian philosophical tools, Goethe tries to prove the knowability of the purposefulness of nature by means of the new term he introduced, “contemplative power of judgment”, a new understanding of the idea and artistic symbolic poetics.