The aim of this paper is to explore some marine metaphors in the german thought from Leibniz to Goethe, with the intention to indicate how certain aesthetic ideas (the conception of soul, language, artistic creation and the dialectic relation between form and content) acquire development and importance to a new enlarged vision of human being, not more determinated by the understanding, but by unconscious and affective elements. The investigation search ideas from Leibniz, Winckelmann, Herder, Goethe and Kant.
aesthetics; german philosophy; Goethe's time; literature; art; philosophy