After an exchange of letters early in 1821, Goethe was so pleased by the sensitivity of Hegel's reflections on a concept central to his own thought that he sent Hegel a gift of an opaque wine glass, with the dedication:

This vignette, tongue-in-cheek though it is, points to an enduring meeting of minds between the two thinkers, which can be detected in the most surprising places. The parallels between Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (1819) and the fundamentals of Hegel's thought have never been remarked upon, even though they are remarkable. My purpose here is to draw out those similarities, to listen beyond the apparent differences in the voices of these two thinkers to the internal resonance between their ideas.

Goethe and Hegel corresponded intermittently for some two decades, and there was significant mutual respect, even admiration, between them. Hegel was outspoken in his defense of Goethe's Farbenlehre, which had been harshly received, and he was deeply influenced by Goethe's theory of morphology. Goethe, for his part, valued Hegel's unique mind, and commented on more than one occasion on Hegel's sensitivity to his own ideas. Of course, they remained profoundly different thinkers. It goes without saying that Goethe did not share Hegel's conception of Geist, and that he did not seek, as Hegel did, to develop an all-encompassing philosophical system.