45 intelligibility of scientific laws conceived as technai. It rejects the logical dialectic to which Cohen restricts his concept of Ursprung, emphasising the Kantian account of Aesthetic Ideas in order to distance the grasping of such truth from any intellectual intuition of the Idea itself. This approach is described not as a vision – even an intellectual vision – of the subject in relation to an object which stands apart from it, but a ‘total immersion and absorption’ into truth (OGT 36). However, Benjamin distinguishes this absorption from the Romantic concept of the “experiment” when he insists that their attempt to renew the Platonic theory of ideas is frustrated by their concept of truth as one of ‘reflective consciousness’ (OGT 38). The contrast merely implied in ‘The Concept of Criticism’ between the differing character of intuition in the Romantic and the Goethean theory of experiment can therefore be made explicit. To the extent that the concept of experiment in Early German Romanticism involves the dissolution of the absolute difference between subject and object, this nonetheless takes place within the context of knowledge, specifically the self-knowledge of pure form of thinking itself. The intuition that Benjamin discovers in Goethe’s tender empiricism, however, is that of an objective thinking which concerns itself not with knowledge but an “experienceability” or “perceptibility” of the pure contents of the object. This distinction is useful for clarifying the claim made by several recent commentators that it is phenomenology that provides the ‘conceptual language able to describe
Goethe’s
way
of
science
accurately’.53
Whilst
Edmund
Husserl’s
phenomenological project arises in response to the same scientific problematic which receives paradigmatic expression in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, his proposal to ‘go back to the “things themselves”’ proceeds with a very different intention from Goethe’s. Husserl’s late essay on The Crisis of the European Sciences clearly shares with Goethe’s project what has been described as a ‘deep mistrust of the mathematization of nature’ which is countered through ‘a patient, participatory presence to phenomena’ in which ‘the fullness of the world reveals itself in new and surprising ways’.54 But Husserl’s ‘essential
53 David Seamon, ‘Goethe, Nature and Phenomenology: An Introduction’, Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, ed. David Seamon & Arthur Zajonc, (New York, SUNY, 1998), p.1. 54 Eva-Maria Simms, ‘Goethe, Husserl, and the Crisis of the European Sciences’, Janus-Head, 8, 1, (2005), p.163. This similarity is perhaps most apparent in Husserl’s notes on The Crisis of the European Sciences from the mid-1930s, where his characterization of the phenomenological method appears to borrow Goethe’s own morphological description of the essential plant structure. ‘All objective consideration of the world is consideration of the “exterior” and grasps only “externals,” objective entities’, Husserl argues, before opposing to this a ‘radical contemplation of the world’ which is a ‘systematic and pure internal consideration of the subjectivity which “expresses” itself in the exterior’. Husserl compares this to the problem of grasping the unity of a living organism, and seems to draw on Goethe’s own morphological account in the Metamorphosis of Plants when he describes a method ‘in