Between Nanjing and Weimar: Goethe's Metaphysical Correspondences

Abstract:This article examines how Goethe places his reading about a Jesuit disputation with a Buddhist monk in seventeenth-century China within the context of German philosophical debates. Goethe immediately draws an analogy connecting Weimar debates between Kantians and idealists to the earlier Nanjing debate about Jesuit and Buddhism metaphysics. His inclination to perceive parallels between philosophy in China and Germany anticipates his later comments to Eckermann about the similarities between the Chinese and European novels that served as the basis for his pronouncements about Weltliteratur (world literature). A careful reading of Goethe and Schiller's letters shows that as a heretical thinker, Goethe was inclined to identify with the Buddhist dismissal of Christian theism; however, the emerging atheism controversy surrounding accusations made against Fichte's lectures at the University of Jena led him to cautiously avoid entering into yet another Enlightenment debate about religion.