While there is little to suggest direct influence on other aspects of his thought, there are certain curious similarities. Both think that ethics should consist in advice for influencing our characters and eventually to making us more perfect individuals. And both hold that happiness means an inner, almost stoically tranquil superiority over the ephemeral troubles of the world.
Yet Goethe only came to read him seriously in the late s, and even then only with the help of Karl Reinhold While he shared with Kant the rejection of externally imposed norms of ethical behavior, his reception was highly ambivalent. The critique of reason was like a literary critique: both could only pale in value to the original creative activity. Goethe considered his scientific contributions as important as his literary achievements. But court life in Weimar brought Goethe for the first time in contact with experts outside his literary comfort zone.
His directorship of the silver-mine at nearby Ilmenau introduced him to a group of mineralogists from the Freiburg Mining Academy, led by Johann Carl Voigt His discovery of the intermaxillary bone was a result of his study with Jena anatomist Justus Christian Loder Increasingly fascinated by botany, he studied the pharmacological uses of plants under August Karl Batsch at the University of Jena, and began an extensive collection of his own.
He has alternately been received as a universal man of learning whose methods and intuitions have contributed positively to many aspects of scientific discourse, or else denounced as a dilettante incapable of understanding the figures— Linnaeus and Isaac Newton—against whom his work is a feeble attempt to revolt. Positivists of the early twentieth century virtually ignored him. Stephenson Plants were classified according to their relation to each other into species, genera, and kingdom.
The problem for Goethe was two-fold. Although effective as an organizational schema, it failed to distinguish organic from inorganic natural objects. And by concentrating only on the external characteristics of the plant, it ignored the inner development and transformation characteristic of living things generally. Goethe felt that the exposition of living objects required the same account of inner nature as it did for the account of the inner unity of a person.
But whereas their versions dealt with the generation and corruption of living beings, Goethe sought the common limitations imposed on organic beings by external nature. But he only fully lays out the position as an account of the form and transformation of organisms in the Zur Morphologi e. In the plant, for example, this determination of each individual member by the whole arises insofar as every organ is built according to the same basic form.
As he wrote to Herder on May 17, Any way you look at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ that one cannot think the one without the other.
Through the careful study of natural objects in terms of their development, and in fact only in virtue of it, we are able to intuit morphologically the underlying pattern of what the organic object is and must become. The morphological method is thus a combination of careful empirical observation and a deeper intuition into the idea that guides the pattern of changes over time as an organism interacts with its environment.
While the visible transformations are apparent naturalistically, the inner laws by which they are necessary are not. To do that, the scientist needs to describe the progressive modification of a single part of an object as its modification over time relates to the whole of which it is the part.
Polarity between a freely creative impulse and an objectively structuring law is what allows the productive restraint of pure creativity and at the same time the playfulness and innovation of formal rules. But rather than a fanciful application of an aesthetic doctrine to the nature, Goethe believed that the creativity great artists, insofar as they are great, was a reflection of the purposiveness of nature.
As with a plant, the creative forces of life must be guided, trained, and restricted, so that in place of something wild and ungainly can stand a balanced structure which achieves, in both organic nature and in the work of art, its full intensification in beauty.
The early drafts of Torquato Tasso begun in the s , for example, reveal its protagonist as a veritable force of nature, pouring out torrential feelings upon a conservative and repressed external world. By the time of the published version in , the Sturm und Drang character of Tasso is polarized against the aristocratically reposed and reasonable character of Antonio.
Only in conjunction with Antonio can Tasso come into classical fullness and perfection. As the interplay of polarities in nature is the principle of natural wholeness, so is it the principle of equipoise in the classical drama. Only from the polarized tension does his drive to self-formation achieve intensification and eventually classical perfection.
At the same time, it was the source of perhaps his greatest disappointment. Like his work on morphology, his theory of colors fell on mostly deaf ears. Thus, while Goethe esteems Newton as a redoubtable genius, his issue is with those half-witted apologists who effectively corrupted that very same edifice they fought to defend. The refraction of pure white light projected at a prism produces the seven individual colors. Pragmatically, this allowed Newton to quantify the angular bending of light beams and to predict which colors would be produced at a given frequency.
That frequency could be calculated simply by accounting for the distance between the light source and the prism and again the distance from the prism to the surface upon which the color was projected. But by reducing the thing itself to its perceptible qualities, the Newtonians had made a grave methodological mistake.
The derivative colors produced by the prismatic experiments are identified with the spectrum that appears in the natural world. But since the light has been artificially manipulated to fit the constraints of the experiment, there is no prima facie reason to think that natural light would feature the same qualities.
One young woman, a Weimar courtier named Christel von Lassberg, drowned herself in the River Ilm with a copy of the novel in her pocket.
Goethe must have felt much as one might imagine J. What kills Werther is not disappointed love but toxic self-centeredness, subjectivity run wild. Whether he is enjoying the sublimity of a landscape or the company of Charlotte, Werther is always really only involved with himself, his own ideas and emotions. The fatal complication of his illness is pride. Werther is not just miserable but proud of his misery, which he takes as proof that he is exceptionally sensitive—finer than the world that disappoints him.
Having identified himself with the universe, he finds that when he is unhappy the universe becomes a prison. Werther, on the other hand, is never ready for action, because he has no momentous deed waiting to be performed. In this, he is a more modern figure than Hamlet, who, after all, was summoned by a ghost. Werther, like us, gets no help from the other world in directing his steps in this one. In fact, the book became scandalous for its resemblance to real people and events.
The crucial difference between Goethe and his creation was that the poet found a way out of his labyrinth. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe finished none of the major literary projects he had in hand—he was too busy with paperwork. Instead of remaining focussed on his own passions and desires, he subdued his mind to the discipline of the objective, of work and responsibility.
He turned toward objectivity in other ways as well, particularly in his study of science. But, while he failed to overthrow the Newtonian understanding of optics, Goethe found in science a necessary distraction from self. At the same time, he developed a conception of nature that provided an alternative to the mathematical and spiritless mechanism that the Enlightenment seemed to offer. In this way, science performed something like the office of religion, turning Goethe into a kind of modern, rational pagan.
Ten years of office work, of literary projects left incomplete, finally took their toll. In , in a spirit of adventure characteristic more of a young poet than of a middle-aged civil servant, Goethe abruptly threw aside his work and left Weimar without telling friends and colleagues where he was going.
He was thirty-seven. In , Goethe sent his manuscript of color theory to his publisher, and the next year he sent the completed Faust I. However, war with Napoleon delayed its publication for two more years: in , Napoleon routed the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena and took over Weimar. The period post-Schiller was distressing for Goethe, but also literarily productive. In , he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor by Napoleon, and began warming up to his regime.
However, Christiane died in , and only one son survived to adulthood of the many children she birthed. By this time Goethe was getting old, and turned to setting his affairs in order. Despite his age, he continued producing many works; if there is one thing to be said about this mysterious and inconsistent figure, it is that he was prolific. He finished his four-volume autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, , and finished another collected works edition.
In , just before he turned 74, he met and fell in love with the year-old Ulrike Levetzow; she and her family declined his marriage proposal, but the event prompted Goethe to compose more poetry.
In , Germany celebrated the 80th birthday of its most renowned literary figure. In , despite withstanding the news of the deaths of Frau von Stein and Karl August a few years prior, Goethe fell seriously ill upon hearing that his son had died.
He recovered long enough to finish Faust in August , which he had worked on throughout his life. A few months later, he died of a heart attack in his armchair.
Nevertheless, some common misconceptions remain. For his part, Goethe did promote the careers of many Romantic thinkers and other contemporaries, including Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, among others.
Goethe lived during a time of intellectual revolution, in which the themes of subjectivity, individualism, and freedom were taking the places they have today in modern thought. His genius can be said, perhaps not to have single-handedly started such a revolution, but to have deeply influenced its course. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Had there been twice so much, he could have used it as well.
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