Incroci del vedere: Heidegger e Goethe

The dissertation examines Heidegger’s relationship to Goethe from a twofold perspective and with a twofold objective: firstly, to identify the sources, forms and context of Heidegger’s reception of Goethe’s work, updating and complementing the only existing monograph on the subject, Heidegger liest Goethe (2019) by Germanist scholar Sebastian Kaufmann; secondly and primarily, to explore the deep reasons for Heidegger’s engagement with and distancing from Goethe by outlining a theoretical comparison between their intellectual universes. The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter I is devoted to a preliminary contextualisation of Goethe’s view of nature, which serves as the basis for all subsequent analyses; Chapters II, III and IV examine respectively the three phases into which Heidegger’s relationship with Goethe is to be divided: the 1910s and 1920s (II), the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s (III), the later 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (IV). Chapter I examines the general characteristics of Goethe’s science, and goes through both important passages of his works and the current interpretations thereof. It is argued that Goethe’s approach to nature can be fundamentally described as concrete, polar and ana-logical; moreover, that it engages in what Kant calls the “adventure of reason” and attempts to establish a dynamic balance between the subjective and objective poles of the cognitive situation. In Chapter II, after reconstructing the channels through which the early Heidegger comes into contact with Goethe’s thinking (Dilthey, Jaspers, Simmel) and the passages in his early courses in which Goethe is directly or indirectly involved, it is emphasised that a hidden harmony between Heidegger’s “practical” phenomenology and Goethe’s proto-phenomenology can be traced from the perspective of their way of “seeing” phenomena. Chapter III attempts to explain Heidegger’s pronounced hostility towards Goethe during the central years of his Denkweg. In addition to readings (Nietzsche, Otto, Kommerell) and important contextual factors (the climate of so-called “secret Germany” and the epochal contrast between Goethe and Hölderlin), which lead Heidegger to misunderstand Goethe’s thinking in a metaphysical sense, Heidegger distances himself from Goethe—I argue—also and fundamentally because his reflection loses the phenomenological and “horizontal”—indeed, Goethian—character that had marked it in the 1920s, to undertake a problematic movement beyond phenomena. Finally, Chapter IV shows that later Heidegger comes close both to Goethe and—not coincidentally—to some phenomenological accents from the early phases of his thought. It is also shown that in this phase the physicists with whom he is in contact (W. Heisenberg, C. von Weizsäcker) play an important role in conveying Goethe’s thought to Heidegger, that Heidegger finds an ally in Goethe in his attempt to problematize technology and modernity, and that—above all—a symbolic over-interpretation of Goethe’s thought and a parallel horizontalization of Heidegger’s question of being bring about a final (and yet fleeting) rapprochement between their worlds.