Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Life and works

NICHOLAS BOYLE

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832)

Goethe was a statesman, scientist, amateur artist, theatrical impresario, dramatist, novelist and Germany’s supreme lyric poet; indeed he provided the Romantic generation which followed him with their conception of what a poet should be. His works, diaries and about 12,000 letters run to nearly 150 volumes. His drama Faust (1790–1832) is the greatest long poem in modern European literature and made the legend of Dr Faust a modern myth. He knew most of the significant figures in the philosophical movement of German Idealism (though he never met Kant), but he was not himself a philosopher. His literary works certainly addressed contemporary philosophical concerns: Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris) (1779–86) seems a prophetic dramatization of the ethical and religious autonomy Kant was to proclaim from 1785; in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) (1809) a mysterious natural or supernatural world of chemistry, magnetism or Fate, such as ‘Naturphilosophie’ envisaged, seems to underlie and perhaps determine a human story of spiritual adultery; in Faust, particularly Part Two, the tale of a pact or wager with the Devil seems to develop into a survey of world cultural history, which has been held to have overtones of Schelling, Hegel or even Marx. But whatever their conceptual materials, Goethe’s literary works require literary rather than philosophical analysis. There are, however, certain discrete concepts prominent in his scientific work, or in the expressions of his ’wisdom’ – maxims, essays, autobiographies, letters and conversations – with which Goethe’s name is particularly associated and which are capable of being separately discussed. Notable among these are: Nature and metamorphosis (Bildung), polarity and ’intensification’ (Steigerung), the ’primal phenomena’ (Urphänomene), ’the daemonic’ (das Dämonische) and renunciation (Entsagung).

1 Life and works

Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, then a self-governing free city within the Holy Roman Empire. His father lived off his capital and his mother was the daughter of the city’s principal official. He studied law in Leipzig, where he met J.C. Gottsched, the literary reformer and interpreter of Leibniz, and then in Strasbourg, where he met J.G. Herder, who opened his eyes to the merits of folk poetry and Shakespeare. Goethe’s first great literary success was the Sentimentalist novel in letters, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774). Its story of a young intellectual who falls in love with a married woman and commits suicide made him a European celebrity. The mid-1770s were a period of great fertility for Goethe, and in about 1773 he began Faust, the work which was to occupy him throughout the rest of his life. In 1775 he accepted an invitation from the young Duke of Weimar, a sovereign prince, to visit his court and then to become a Privy Councillor of the duchy. Goethe did not return to Frankfurt and remained permanently in the Weimar administration. At first he had a heavy load of official work and his responsibility for the (unproductive) Weimar silver mines led him to an interest in geology and other branches of natural history. In 1782 he was ennobled, becoming ’von Goethe’, but his literary powers seemed to be languishing. However, after he had spent a sabbatical period from 1786–8 in Italy (where he met the aesthetician K.P. Moritz), the Duke allowed him to concentrate on writing and on managing the Weimar theatre. A fragmentary version of Faust was published in the first authorized edition of his collected writings (1787–90), which also contained some other noteworthy plays, such as Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), Egmont and Torquato Tasso (believed to be the first tragedy with a poet as its hero), and the first collection of his lyric poems. In 1790 he published a brief general theory of botany, Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants).
Already in 1776 Goethe had arranged for Herder to come to Weimar as the head of the Lutheran Church in the duchy, and in 1789 he recommended Friedrich Schiller for a chair in history at the local university of Jena. After his return from Italy, Goethe became increasingly involved in the affairs of the university, paying particular attention to the appointments in the natural sciences and in philosophy, where he followed a policy of encouraging young talent and especially the new Kantian school (already established in Jena by Reinhold). He had some part in the successive appointments of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and after he had established a close friendship in 1794 with Schiller, who was just completing the major aesthetic essays of his Kantian period and with whom he undertook various joint editorial ventures, Goethe spent as much time in the university world of Jena and in the circle of Romantic writers centred on F. Schlegel as in the court world of Weimar. During this period he published a long novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship), which had been in the making for twenty years, and his interests in natural history were displaced by a passion for the theory of colour, of which he had become convinced Newtonian optics gave a perversely false account (see Colour and qualia). His reactions to the French Revolution, which threatened to overturn the world he had grown up in, were expressed in the play Die Natürliche Tochter (The Natural Daughter) (1803). From 1799 Schiller’s mature plays provided the Weimar theatre with the centrepiece of a programme for raising theatrical and literary standards throughout Germany, but the German Romantic movement was already well under way and Goethe’s Italianate and Hellenizing tastes already seemed old-fashioned. In 1805 Schiller died, and the following year Napoleon put an end to the old German order and the Holy Roman Empire itself at the battle of Jena. The university of Jena had already begun to decline with the controversial departure of Fichte and then Schelling, and after a period of closure could not recover its position as a centre of philosophical innovation.
Goethe marked the new epoch in his life that began in 1806 by marrying Christiane Vulpius, with whom he had lived since 1788 and who had borne him several children, of whom only one survived infancy. (Having ceased to be a communicant Christian at the age of 21, Goethe gave his refusal to undergo a church ceremony as his reason for postponing marriage so long.) 1806 also saw the completion of Faust. Part One, though publication was delayed until 1808. Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) (1809) was a kind of reckoning with a decade of Romantic culture, and in 1810, after a long gestation, Zur Farbenlehre (On the Theory of Colour) appeared. Much of the next ten years Goethe devoted to autobiographical writings, notably Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) and Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), but from 1814 to 1817 there came a remarkable resurgence of lyric poetry, in imitation of the medieval Persian poet Hafiz, West-östlicher Divan (The West-Eastern Divan). A more sober atmosphere prevailed after the death of Christiane in 1816, and Goethe began to publish, rewrite and reinterpret his earlier studies in natural science. He remained hostile to the Christianizing tendencies in Romantic literature and art, resisted Schelling’s proposed election to a chair in philosophy in Jena in 1816, since Schelling wished to combine it with a chair in theology, and favoured instead the appointment of Fries. Schopenhauer and his mother, who had settled in Weimar, were both close friends at this time.
For twenty years Goethe was a regular visitor to the Bohemian spas. At the age of 74, when in Marienbad, he proposed marriage to Ulrike von Levetzow, then 19 years old, and on being refused by her family gave up travelling and spent the last nine years of his life in Weimar preparing the final collected edition of his works. A stream of visitors – including Victor Cousin and Hegel – kept him in touch with European culture, and his list of correspondents – Byron and Carlyle among them – became immense. His last works, in which the theme of renunciation is increasingly prominent, show a concern with problems of world-historical dimensions: the nature of education and culture, the relation of America and Europe, the impending industrial revolution, ’world-literature’ (Weltliteratur, a term he invented) and the preservation of humane values in a changing world. In addition to rounding off his autobiographical works he wrote a sequel to his major novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering), and in his last five years wrote most of Faust. Part Two, which was not published until after his death. At his own suggestion, many aphoristic remarks scattered among his papers were collected together as his Maximen und Reflexionen (Maxims and Reflections) and published posthumously by his amanuensis J.P. Eckermann, whose Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life) were described by Nietzsche as ’the best German book there is’.

2 Goethe and the philosophers

The philosophical orthodoxy prevailing at all German universities in Goethe’s youth was the Wolffian version of Leibnizianism, and throughout his life it is possible to find in his literary and scientific works characteristically Leibnizian traits: in a conversation of 1813 he expressed a preference for ’the Leibnizian term’ monad as a description of ’the ultimate primal components of all beings’ (see Leibniz, G.W. §§4,5). None the less it was long fashionable to regard Spinoza as the main philosophical influence on Goethe, despite Goethe’s own admission that Spinoza – whom he found ’abstruse’ – had an effect on him like Shakespeare and Linnaeus, that is, he showed him the way he could not himself follow. A fragmentary essay of 1784–5, dubbed by its editors ’Studie nach Spinoza’ (’Spinozan Study’) has little in it that is certainly Spinozan and much that is probably Leibnizian.
Asked by Eckermann in 1827 who was pre-eminent among the modern philosophers, Goethe replied ’Kant…without any doubt’. He first sought help from Reinhold in studying the new system in 1789, and made an attempt at reading the first Critique. In 1790, immediately after its publication, he made a careful study of the Critique of Judgment, which he ever after regarded as Kant’s most important work, particularly the ’Critique of Teleological Judgment’ (see Kant, I. §12). In 1794, when his closer acquaintance with Schiller was only beginning, he read Fichte’s first systematic writings and could summarize them to their author’s entire satisfaction (see Fichte, J.G.). Goethe was aware of, and to a great extent accepted, the Copernican revolution which founded the Idealist period of German philosophy – no one in the world of learning, he wrote in 1805, could ignore it with impunity.
From 1797, after Schiller had turned back to drama, Schelling and F.I. Niethammer were Goethe’s main informants about contemporary philosophical developments, and for a while it seemed to Goethe that Schelling might be the man to heal the division between mind and nature which the new philosophy had opened up. Despite some admiration for J.W. Ritter, however, Goethe’s attitude to ’Naturphilosophie’ was consistently sceptical. He had less personal contact with Hegel than with Schelling, but had a high opinion of his character and abilities. Given the rapidly changing nature of scientific understanding, though, he doubted whether it was prudent for Hegel to incorporate so much empirical material into his philosophy, and objected to Hegel’s continual recourse to the categories of the Christian religion (see Hegel, G.W.F. §8). Goethe thought world history ’the most absurd thing there is’, but his relations with Hegel in the last years of his life were genial.

3 Some Goethean ideas

A poem Goethe wrote in 1826 ends:
What greater gain can a human being have from life than that God-or-Nature should reveal herself to him? – how she dissolves firm material into spirit; how she firmly preserves what spirit has produced.
(1988: 1, 367)
Goethe early became familiar with the Spinozan tag ’Deus sive natura’, and throughout his life ’Nature’ was to him an expression of what is most perfect and most worthy of veneration. The content of the concept changed considerably: at first, in Rousseauist manner, it was an antithesis to the ’artificial’ and was referred to an almost personal, creative and arbitrary power; later, as Goethe’s scientific studies began, Nature was distinguished from the human world by being ’unfeeling’, an impersonal repository of passionless order, contrasted with the turmoil of human emotions; later still, once Goethe had absorbed the implications of the Kantian revolution, he regarded the works of the human mind, which to his contemporaries seemed to transcend Nature, as, rather, her supreme product. In so far as this is the position of what Fichte called a ’realist’, Goethe could be said never to have deviated from a Kantian belief in the independent reality of things in themselves, though, as he remarks in the essay ’Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie’ (’Influence of Modern Philosophy’), his views appeared to Kant’s disciples to be ’an analogy of Kantian conceptions, but a strange one’.
The most important single concept in Goethe’s understanding of natural processes was that of ’metamorphosis’. (The term ’formation’, ’Bildung’, probably borrowed from J.F. Blumenbach, is largely synonymous, but more indeterminate and multivalent.) Early in his botanical studies Goethe gave up the notion that all plants could be related to an ideal type, or ’primal plant’ (’Urpflanze’), and substituted for it the notion that all vegetable shapes could be understood as the consequences of an ordered but unending series of transformations of a single fundamental organ, called ’the leaf’. An attempt to transfer this concept to vertebrate zoology was abandoned in 1795, under the influence of Kantian criticism, but Goethe’s name remained associated with ’metamorphosis’ – seen as an early form of evolutionary theory – in nineteenth-century biological textbooks. In Goethe’s later years this (Leibnizian) conception of transformation in accordance with an innate rule was associated with two concepts for which he was particularly, though not wholly, indebted to Schelling: ’polarity’ (Polarität) and ’intensification’ (Steigerung). Not only is polar opposition held to be fundamental to the natural order (in colour theory, for example, the opposition of blue and yellow), but through ’intensification’ opposites have a tendency to transform themselves jointly into a third term on a higher level (in colour theory: red).
However, at least from the time when he began reading Kant, Goethe thought of science not simply as speculation about the order of things, but as the attempt to understand human experience. Natural science was not concerned with an unobservable, mathematically constructed substratum to things (as Newton’s optics seemed to imply), but with the material offered to us in and by our senses. The theories of natural science simply sought to make explicit an order already implicitly present in our observations. Experiments therefore were not devices for confirming or disproving hypotheses, but were the very material of science, and should consist of a large series of observations arranged so as to manifest all aspects of the phenomenon concerned. The ultimate constituents of our knowledge (never completely isolated in practice) are therefore ’primal phenomena’ (Urphänomene), which are utterly simple manifestations to our senses of what is, and of which no explanation is possible (for any explanation would take us away from our senses into a merely imagined world). An example of the approach to such a ’pure’ or ’primal’ phenomenon would be the revelation of colour when a prism is held up against a boundary between light and dark.
Writing to Hegel, Goethe called the ’primal phenomena’ ’daemonic’ (dämonisch), which he later glossed as meaning ’which cannot be resolved by the understanding or the reason’. In the Kantian terms of this definition, the ’daemonic’ is identical, therefore, with things as they are in themselves. The word, however, which has been the subject of much scholarly controversy, is also applied to personal individuality, especially when strongly marked, and to the operations of chance, of an unfathomable providence (benign or malign) and of some animals (notably, bats and parrots). Although therefore Goethe might at first sight seem to share Hegel’s principle that the noumenon is present to us in our experience, he also clearly refuses to identify the noumenon with our own spirit and insists that it is something given: human experience – and so human history – is not to be interpreted simply as the realm of the rational. The achievements of Hellenic civilization, for example, are extraordinary gifts of good fortune, not part of some inevitable process – not least because that might imply that their loss was inevitable too. But for Goethe the combination of ethical and sensual perfection in the Greek world can always in principle be recovered in uncovenanted moments of fulfilment, of which works of art are the principal monuments. Our normal lot, of course, is to do without such fulfilment, and to suffer our deprivation, and the absurd disorder of most of what is called world-history, in a spirit of renunciation (Entsagung). But that is the mirror-image of our tacit but never abandoned hope that the perfect order will one day be restored.

Bibliography

1. List of works
2. References and further reading

List of works

Goethe’s main works have been mentioned in the text, and most, it will be plain, are at least indirectly relevant to philosophy. The following is a selection of non- or semi-fictional works of more directly philosophical interest (the titles are often editorial, and may be misleading).

Goethe, J.W. von (1887–1919) Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen (Weimarer Ausgabe), Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. (Other, more fully annotated, editions exist, or are in progress, but this is, and is likely to remain, the only historical-critical edition. It is available on CD-ROM as Goethes Werke auf CD-ROM, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995, supplemented by Goethe’s conversations and the letters not included in the edition of 1887–1919.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1988) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988. (A popular students’ edition, with commentary. Volume 14 has a comprehensive bibliography; for Goethe and philosophy, see 618–19. Four volumes of selected letters, and two of letters to Goethe, are uniform with the works.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1983–9) Goethe: Collected Works, Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp Publishers Inc., Suhrkamp Edition, 12 vols. (An extensive collection of modern translations, with some notes, and including two volumes of essays, maxims and scientific writing.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1772) ’Brief des Pastors zu *** an den neuen Pastor zu ***’ (’Letter from the pastor of *** to the new pastor of ***’), in Goethe (1988), vol. 12, 228–39. (Theology of toleration.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1784) ’Über den Granit’ (’On Granite’) in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 12, 131–4. (Goethe’s geological study.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1784–5) ’Studie nach Spinoza’ (’A Study Based on Spinoza’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 12, 8–10. (Goethe’s theory of knowledge.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1790a) Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants), in Goethe (1983–89), vol. 12, 76–97. (Goethe’s principal work on botany.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1790b) ’Versuch einer allgemeinen Vergleichungslehre’ (’Toward a General Comparative Theory’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol.12, 53–6. (His first attempt at a general morphology.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1792) ’Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt’ (’The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 12, 11–17. (Titled in 1823; despite the title the thinking is almost pre-Kantian)

Goethe, J.W. von (1795) ’Plato als Mitgenosse einer christlichen Offenbarung’ (’Plato as Party to a Christian Revelation’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 3, 200–3. (Against Christian exclusivism.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1798a) ’Einleitung in die Propyläen’ (’Introduction to the Propylaea’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 3, 78–90. (Art theory in a historical context.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1798b) ’Erfahrung und Wissenschaft’ (’Empirical Observation and Science’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 12, 24–5. (His theory of ’empirical’ and ’pure’ phenomena.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1799) ’Der Sammler und die Seinigen’ (The Collector and his Circle), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 3, 121–59. (Aesthetic theory in a fictionalized form.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1805) ’Letzte Kunstausstellung. 1805’ (’Final Art Exhibition, 1805’) in Goethe (1887–1919), part 1, vol. 36, 265–7. (Retrospect on Weimar art competitions.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1817) ’Geistesepochen’ (’Stages of Man’s Mind’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 3, 203–4. (Goethe’s philosophy of history.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1817–20) ’Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie’ (’The Influence of Modern Philosophy’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 12, 28–30. (Goethe’s assessment of the influence on him of contemporary philosophers.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1827) ’Nachlese zu Aristoteles’ Poetik’ (’On interpreting Aristotle’s Poetics’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 3, 197–9. (Goethe’s interpretation of ’catharsis’.)

Goethe, J.W. von (1828) ’Erläuterung zu dem aphoristischen Aufsatz "Die Natur"’ (’A Commentary on the Aphoristic Essay "Nature"’), in Goethe (1983–9), vol. 12, 6–7. (General theory of Nature – the essay ’Die Natur’ (’Nature’) is not by Goethe but by G.C. Tobler.)

References and further reading

Boyle, N. (1991) Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Volume One: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790), Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Includes the historical and philosophical background.)

Bruford, W.H. (1962) Culture and Society in Classical Weimar: 1775-1806, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Good accounts of Herder, Schiller and Fichte, as well as Goethe.)

Goethe-Jahrbuch (1994) Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. (Papers read in 1993 at the 73rd Congress of the International Goethe Society, which together constitute the most comprehensive study of Goethe’s thinking about history.)

Heller, E. (1952) The Disinherited Mind, Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes. (Classic essays on Goethe’s place in the modern German tradition.)

Molnár, G. von (1993) Goethes Kantstudien, Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. (Facsimiles and analysis of all Goethe’s marginalia to the First and Third Critiques.)

Nisbet, H.B. (1972) Goethe and the Scientific Tradition, London: Institute of Germanic Studies. (Particularly useful on Goethe’s view of Bacon.)

Rabel, G. (1927) Goethe und Kant, Vienna: privately printed, 2 vols. (A very thorough, if slightly obsessional, compilation, regrettably under-used by later writers.)

Reed, T.J. (1984) Goethe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Excellent summary account of life and works.)

Wells, G.A. (1978) Goethe and the Development of Science: 1750–1900, Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhoff. (A Darwinian-rationalist critique, which is extremely well-informed, both about the science and about Goethe’s writings.)