With goethe we have before us a strange situation in which the most significant German autobiographer is also a decided opponent of every contemplative act that is directed solely at one's own self.1 Goethe writes about this aversion in an 1823 essay, in which he wanted to thank the natural scientist Heinroth for a sympathetic assessment of his (Goethe's) own scientific thought: “I hereby confess that that seemingly noble task “know thyself” has always sounded suspicious to me, like a ruse on the part of secretly allied priests, who wanted to confuse man with unattainable demands and to lead him astray, away from activity in the outer world to a false inner tranquility. Man only knows himself,