Livre-arbítrio e sistema: conflitos e conciliações em Böhme e Goethe

Abstract

There is a natural and universally known conflict between the unconditioned state of freedom, which originates our decisions both about ideas and beliefs, and the purely logical necessity of holding that same ideas and beliefs in a system. From this deep philosophical tension two typical positions may be derived, constituting significant patterns of Western Thought, not to mention strong similarities in other cultural environments. Only the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, though, offered exhaustive and qualified answers to this drama. Our purpose is to turn our sight back to the historical scene when Jakob Böhme and Johann W. Goethe tried to build their visionary and still much ignored synthesis between the spheres of will and reason. This endeavor required psychological and mystic incursions, while dragging from this liminal conscious region massive portions of the shadowy mental matter that could be enlightened only symbolically. We shall observe how their very similar method and mood seem to be, to this day, able to feed science and metaphysics with concepts that they frequently lack; and in which sense such approach alters the very definition of religion, a term that eventually starts to swallow any and every other knowledge or activity.