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(c) KEPLER AND THE 'MUSIC OF THE SPHERES'
'One must choose one's saints .. . and so I have chosen mine, and before all others, Kepler. In my ante-room he has ever a niche of his own, with his bust in it.'
This opinion of Goethe's must surprise us in view of the fact that Kepler was the discoverer of the three laws called after him, one of which is supposed to have laid the foundation for Newton's mechanical conception of the universe. In what follows it will be shown how wrong it is to see in Kepler a forerunner of the mechanistic conception of the world; how near, in reality, his world-picture is to the one to which we are led by working along Goetheanistic lines; and how right therefore Goethe was in his judgment on Kepler.
Goethe possessed a sensitive organ for the historical appropriateness of human ideas. As an illustration of this it may be mentioned how he reacted when someone suggested to him that Joachim Jungius - an outstanding German thinker, contemporary of Bacon, Van Helmont, etc. - had anticipated his idea of the metamorphosis of the plant. This remark worried Goethe, not because he could not endure the thought of being anticipated (see his treatment of K. F. Wolff), but because this would have run counter to the meaning of man's historical development as he saw it. 'Why do I regard as essential the question whether Jungius conceived the idea of metamorphosis as we know it? My answer is, that it is most significant in the history of the sciences, when a penetrating and vitalizing maxim comes to be uttered. Therefore it is not only of importance that Jungius has not expressed this maxim; but it is of highest significance that he was positively unable to express it - as we boldly assert.'12
For the same reason Goethe knew it would be historically unjustified to expect that Kepler could have conceived an aspect of the universe implicit in his own conception of nature. Hence it did not disturb him in his admiration for Kepler, that through him the Copernican aspect of the universe had become finally established in the modern mind - that is, an aspect which, as we have seen, is invalid as a means of forming a truly dynamic conception of the world.
In forming his picture of the universe, it is true, Copernicus was concerned with nothing but the spatial movements of the luminous entities discernible in the sky, without any regard to their actual nature and dynamic interrelationships. Hence his world-picture - as befits the spectator-form of human consciousness which was coming to birth in his own time - is a purely kinematic one. As such it has validity for a certain sphere of human observation.
When Kepler, against the hopes of his forerunner and friend, Tycho Brahe, accepted the heliocentric standpoint and made it the basis of his observations, he did so out of his understanding of what was the truth for his own time. Kepler's ideal was to seek after knowledge through pure observation. In this respect Goethe took him as his model. Kepler's discoveries were a proof that man's searching mind is given insight into great truths at any stage of its development, provided it keeps to the virtue of practising pure observation.
It has been the error of Newton and his successors up to our own day, to try to conceive the world dynamically within the limits of their spectator-consciousness and thus to form a dynamic interpretation of the universe based on its heliocentric aspect. This was just as repellent to Goethe as Kepler's attitude was attractive.
But by so sharply distinguishing between Newton and Kepler, do we not do injustice to the fact that, as the world believes, Kepler's third law is the parent of Newton's law of gravitation? The following will show that this belief is founded on an illusory conception of the kind we met before. As we shall see, Kepler's discovery, when treated in a Keplerian way, instead of leading to Newton, is found to be in full agreement with the very world-picture to which our own observations have led us.