Steiner


Goethe


Schiller

Goethe Type/Schiller Type
A distinction, originally made by Rudolf Steiner, between two  contrasting styles of Romantic consciousness. In "Where is Fancy Bred?" Barfield incorporates the polarity into his own theory of the poetic mind.

For the Goethe-type, "Phantasie is something which is so to speak given to him without effort on his part, as part and parcel of his waking experience." Or to put in Steiner's words (which Barfield quotes) "With them contemplation of sense-reality turns of itself, so to speak, into pictures of fancy." "For Goethe," and for Goethe-types, as Barfield shows in "Man, Thought and Nature," "when the poet contemplates Nature, it is nothing less than Nature herself contemplating herself, and rejoicing in what she sees" (RCA 235).

The Schiller-type, on the other hand, "is impelled, as it were, into the realm of Phantasie out of the working of his own will and conscience." As Steiner puts it Schiller-types "out of inner love for an idealist world-outlook, vigorously convert their outlook-through-the senses into forms of fancy" (RM 85). The Schiller-type faces a "quandary," however: "His Phantasie-bilder are not given to him by Nature herself. He has to make them. But Phantasie-bilder cannot be 'made'; if they are, they have no real content in them. They must grow" (85).

"It is," Barfield demonstrates, "a salutary reflection for the contemporary isolation in which the consciousness soul of man has its being . . . to recall that the rebirth of the ego through imagination is a matter of vital concern, not only to the individual man in whom it occurs, whether he be of the Goethe-type or the Schiller-type, but to the whole vast company of Heaven and Earth" (RM 92).

This can all be represented schematically as follows:

See in particular "Where is Fancy Bred?" (RM 79-92).