Goethe and the Orient world: on the worldview universals of the culture

Increased attention to the eastern culture and eastern worldview is caused by the apparent importance of the dialogue between East and West, whose influence on the further development of the world culture in general and the universal worldview is no longer in doubt. Of particular interest in this regard is the "eastern" part of the heritage of the world culture classics, which depicted the most important historical moments of the process of spiritual interaction between East and West. In the history of humankind there are thinkers and poets, in whose works the souls of the East and the West are truly united and really form a whole. On the eternal journey of the West to the East one of those was Goethe, a classic of the World Culture. The appearance of a person with such a spiritual level in the history of humankind itself is the evidence of not only the millennial dialogue of Eastern and Western cultures, but also about the primordial unity of East and West, eternally forming a whole - the Unity of Culture. Goethe's personality, creativity, and the philosophical and poetic quest open up the opportunities for deep reflection about the intimate spiritual relationship of the West and the East, and the interest shown to it - about the intellectual communication of the European, Russian and Eastern thinkers. Goethe consciously appealed to the East throughout his long life. His attention was attracted by the Jewish antiquity, the Arab East, Persia, China, India. However, a deep bond of Goethe's poetic world with the world of the East is due not only to this serious interest in the Eastern culture, which is evident throughout his entire career. The uniqueness of Goethe, his fundamental difference from other Western thinkers is that he had an inborn "eastern" poetic perception of the world. The united "eastern" Goethe's text is composed of the poetic cycles like "West-Eastern Divan", "God and World," "Sino-German Seasons and Hours" and prose "Israel in the Desert", "The Persians", "The Arabs". All together it expresses the essence of his philosophy of life creation, is a call to comprehend the Unity of Culture and the higher spirituality that pervades the Universe. Goethe takes the Universal Unity of Humankind as deeply personal in the real sense, i.e., the intimate, sacred. The language of his poetry stores the "eastern" wisdom of the poet's soul, the memory of the earliest revelations of the East. The conceptosphere of his "Eastern" heritage is formed by the semantic unity of conceptual universals: Soul of the World - Unity - Creation of the World - Love - Truth - Joy - Eternity - Nature - Eternal Femininity -Beauty. And these are, in fact, the common cultural worldview universals, accumulating all the historically stored spiritual experience of the humankind since the ancient times as a whole, turning the human mind to the origins, universals of the World Cultures, the source and the origin of which is the Oriental Soul.

Keywords

Authors

References