A religião de Goethe

Abstract

This thesis presents the central tenets of Johann W. Goethe’s thought. The latter is basically understood as a kind of philosophy of religion which serves as the starting point for Goethe’s view of nature, as well as for his anthropological and aesthetical conceptions. An effort was made to systematize a way of thinking that over the decades appeared to be sparse and even marked by contradictions. We were able to identify, as the central concept guiding Goethe’s concerns, that of the “God-Nature”. We thereby attempted to situate Goethe’s thought in a more favorable way in terms of intellectual history, as well as to highlight his pioneering and complex panentheist notion, one which seeks to reconcile Spinoza’s monism with the monadic and preromantic notion of individual freedom, also in the realm of ethics.