Goethe on Style

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Goethe discussed both the meaning of the morphotype and the philosophy of art with Schiller, and the type became associated with aesthetic conceptions of style and the ideal in art.¹⁹ As Goethe put it, a person accustomed to strictly logical thinking might find it hard to accept that an 'exact sensory imagination' might exist, but art was unthinkable without it.²⁰ Goethe discussed its implications for art in an essay on style of 1789, where he wrote that style was the highest level of artistic expression: 'Style is based on the profoundest knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as we can recognize it in visible and tangible forms.'²¹ In fact, just as deep insight into form in nature revealed the typical—that is, the ideal in the actual—so art at the level of style was also a visible representation of the typical or ideal.²²