Goethe and granite

Granite (1968) by Isamu Noguchi (Yorkshire Sculpture Garden)

I have been thinking about Goethe and nature since reading Jason Grove's article on "petrofiction" in the current volume of the Goethe Yearbook. (See my posting on that article.) It strikes me that natural phenomena, e.g., granite, always represented something to Goethe, but it was a stand-in. Thus, my earlier question: did Goethe's heart leap up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky? My answer was no: I do not believe that he was an enthusiast of rainbows or of other natural events. The earth was simply the theater –– the Schauplatz –– of such phenomena, but the production itself stood for something greater, for the workings of so-called Nature. He collected "the rocks of time," as Heather Sullivan put it in a 1999 article in the European Romantic Review, but it was his very collecting activity, with thousands of mineral specimens and rocks stored in neatly labeled boxes, that distinguishes Goethe's interest in the natural world from that of, say, Wordsworth.

Isamu Noguchi (1929) by Winold Reiss

I was led to the image above of Isamu Noguchi's 1968 work Granite after reading a review of a biography of  the Japanese-American sculptor: Listening to Stone by Hayden Herrera. There is a lovely Noguchi Museum in Queens, which I visit at least once a year, visits inspired to some extent by my interest in the subject of Goethe and granite. Noguchi's "aesthetic," especially the simplicity of his works, seems at first glance Japanese-influenced, which can be seen in the gardens in which his works are frequently situated as lone, solitary objects, as in a Japanese garden. At the same time, because of my experience of living in Japan for several years, I always felt that there was something un-Japanese about Noguchi. The review of the biography explained why that is the case. Although his father was Japanese, his mother was a "bohemian" American lady who raised him on her own. And although he spent several years as a child in Japan, he did not grow up there and in fact did not speak "adult" Japanese.

If it speaks to you, it is a metaphor

I have to admit that rocks (like rainbows) do not really "speak" to me. But they clearly spoke to Noguchi, and the reviewer of the biography revealed that it was not Japan that provided Noguchi with inspiration: "It was [Constantin] Brancusi who first revealed to Noguchi the incalculable metaphorical richness of stone, an intuition upon which so much of his subsequent career would be based."

The reference to metaphor reminds me of what Denis Donoghue wrote in his 2014 book Metaphor: "Metaphor, more than simile or metonymy, expresses one's desire to be free, and to replace the given world by an imagined world of one's desiring." This desire is a very modern one, and the more I learn about subjects like ecocriticism, the more I am struck by the influence of Romanticism, by the way that  nature –– the earth –– has become "an imagined world of one's desiring." But did Goethe ever, like Noguchi, "listen to stone"?

Image sources: Nigel Homer; American National Biography; Photius

Goethe and his scribes: addendum

After my previous post on Goethe and his scribes, I came across a delicious image of Voltaire, already dictating as he rises from bed, which I wanted to contrast with Goethe's more decorous procedure.

Goethe dictating to his scribe John

Voltaire Dictating at His House in Ferney, by Jean Huber

Picture credit: AKG-Images UK

Goethe and his scribes

Francesco Clemente, "History of the Heart in 3 Rainbows," from Palimpsest

I have been wanting to post something on Albrecht Schöne’s new book, Der Briefschreiber Goethe. It deserves several posts, but a recent review in Book Forum gives me an opportunity at least to mention it (vorübergehend, let us say, since I will return to it later). The BF review (by Clive Thompson) concerns Palmipsest: A History of the Written Word by Matthew Battles, who is also the author of Library: An Unquiet History.

The reviewer notes that writing has often been associated, “in the West, anyway, with the rise of interiority and the individual … It is by sitting in solitude with our thoughts, pen in hand, that we develop our most profound ideas about society, ethics, and ourselves.” As Battles points out, however, none of the writers in the Western literary tradition sat down in solitude to write. Instead, they dictated, often to slaves (in Greece and Rome).

One of the major benefits of having taught “Great Books” to undergrads while I was in grad school was the chance to read works I might otherwise have bypassed. These included Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates opposes writing on the grounds that it promotes forgetting, in contrast to orality, which encourages memory. As with gossip, however, oral transmission encourages a distortion of the original message, to the point where the original is no longer recognizable. Similarly, the oral transmission of "literature," such as the epics of Homer or other “ancient” writers, produced varying versions. The production of a standard text has been the task of philologists from the time there have been philologists.

To return to writing itself, which is the subject of Palimpsest (how I love that word: I must bring it into my spoken vocabulary), writing originally served commerce and statecraft, of “tallying just what was in the coffers of the state and the grandiose one of expressing the might of rulers.” Scribes thus wrote “at the king’s bequest.” On the other hand, as I remember from grade school so many years ago, it was Phoenicians, early tradesmen par excellence, who originated the script that is the basis of our alphabet.

Writing for purposes that were purely literary, on the other hand, was “a victory.” Thompson quotes the Canadian poet and translator Robert Bringhurst: “Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.”



And Goethe? As we know, he preferred to dictate, not only his literary works, but also his correspondence. The letters discussed in Schöne’s volume (there are nine “case studies”) were subject to much thought, though interiority as we understand it was not at issue. Rather, it was process of coming up with the correct rhetorical strategy for the person being addressed. His earliest letter to the 16-year-old Ludwig Ysenburg von Buri, dated May 23, 1764, when Goethe was 14 years old,  displays “heitere Souveränität … über das rhetorische Instrumentarium.”

Moreover, as Schöne adds in a footnote, this early letter in which Goethe presents his case for entry into the "Gesellschaft derer Arcadier zu Phylandria,” was not, aside from the signature, in his own hand. The scribe was Johann David Clauer. Goethe's father was the guardian of this mentally ill man, who was in any case a “Dr. jur.” He resided in the Goethe family home for 30 years, during which time he took dictation and also executed written documents for Goethe’s father. In several essays on Goethe, I have stressed that rather than drawing on his own “experience,” he was calling on established literary forms when he drafted his literary works, just like all poets before the 18th century. Goethe's genius, I have always thought, lay in disguising his literary forefathers, but in dictating to an amanuensis (another great word I have to make more use of) he was following in a venerable tradition.

Picture credits: Schirn Kunsthalle; Jonnie Miles/Getty Images; Crystal Links

Goethe in Chinese

This morning, while canvasing the internet for Goethe images, I came across an article in the Global Times (scroll down to read) dated March 15, 2015, with the following report: "A specialist team at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) will translate the complete works of German writer Johann Wolfgan von Goethe into Chinese.

 All of Goethe's novels, poetry, dramas, memoirs, autobiography, letters, diaries, treatises and literary and aesthetic criticism will be translated into 40 to 50 books containing around 30 million Chinese characters. 
"

I have not yet seen any reports in German newspapers. 歌德

According to the article, "one group of experts" will be responsible for the translations, including annotations, and will be under the direction of Wei Maoping, dean of SISU's School of Germanic Studies and the program's director. Here is a link to an interview with Professor Wei, who published in 1999 A History of Chinese Influence on German Literature. He is also an editor of the journal Literaturstraße.

"Goethe" in Chinese characters: 歌德

Penultimate thoughts on Goethe and environmentalism

I say "penultimate," because I am sure I will chime in on this subject again. Here I simply want to mention one of the main reasons why I am out of sync with "environmental humanism" and the like. This discipline, such as it is, is an outcome of the present climate debates, in particular the role of humans in causing damage to the earth. I do not deny that humans have in some sense ravaged the earth, but I find that something like human hubris is in play in attributing planetary change to humans. What is next? The cosmos?

Climate variation factors

I know that I am in very small company, but when I am told that 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous” (actually it was President Obama who use that expression), I respond: “Well, in 1600, 98 percent of scientists pilloried Galileo for claiming that the sun did not move around the earth.” Really, doesn’t anyone get suspicious when everybody is of the same opinion? There is something hypnotic about that 97 percent figure, endlessly replayed.

Among thinking people there really is a difference of opinion on global warming. For instance, a poll of members of the American Meteorology Society found only 52 percent agree that humans are the cause. I know, I know: figures can be manipulated for any outcome, but the following quote, to be found on the Geological Society of America website, might cause people to stand back a bit from the claim that humans are so powerful: “Modern society struggles with the implications of climate change and now ponders if humans actually alter climate. Anthropocene forces us to consider the implications of sending the Earth system into a completely new domain driven by our actions. Does humanity operate on such a grand scale that we drive Earth processes in ways that overshadow tectonic, climatic, and eustatic processes?”

While Kate Rigby asserts that there is a divide between science and the humanities that obscures our current perilous situation, scientific researchers are part of the same social environment in which we all live. They depend on society for their justification and relevance. They have hit pay dirt, publication-wise, with the concept of human-induced environmental change. This is not surprising, as the modern world is in many respects scarey, and the public is simply bombarded by the media with scares: vaccines, GMOs, the toxins in crayons, and so on. Color me skeptical.

My take-away: more caution in claiming that Goethe would be a precursor of environmental humanism.

Photo credit: Meteorologyclimate.com

Goethe and Environmentalism

Did Goethe's heart leap up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky? Such questions came to mind as I read “Art, Nature, and the Poesy of Plants in the Goethezeit: A Biosemiotic Perspective.” Such is the title of Kate Rigby’s contribution to Goethe and environmentalism in the current Goethe Yearbook.

Rigby opens with some lines from a Petrarchan sonnet Goethe wrote in 1800 (why not quote the entire sonnet?) about the relationship of art and nature, but her real interest is the current field of biosemiotics, and in particular its precedents in Goethe and Schelling (or “Weimar and Goethe”). It draws on the work of linguist Thomas Sebeok –– a name I never imagined I would ever hear again. I took a course with him back in the Stone Age, when I was an undergraduate at Indiana University.

Her discussion of the premises of biosemiotics (another word my spell check does not recognize) is both clear and fascinating, even if resembles scholastic disputations of the Middle Ages. The paragraphs might have been numbered. This is how it goes: All animate life communicates with its environment, through the senses, with humans distinguishing themselves principally via “total semiotic freedom,” i.e., spoken language. The acquisition of language has led to a loss of “naturality” and thus alienation from the animate world in which we have our existence and to the belief that we are superior to the rest of creation. Do I need to repeat it? We are back at the the anthropocene delusion.

The gist of course is that humans are no different, naturally, from the “lowest” form of animate life. Several 18th-century thinkers held a similar view. Rousseau comes to mind, not to forget La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius. (Goethe, as he wrote in Dichtung und Wahrheit, was repelled by this view of the world.) La Mettrie had studied medicine, and his notion that there existed no real difference between humans and animals was based on his findings that sensory feelings were present in animals and plants. He was in no sense a “Romantic” in his view of humans, and biosemiotics is not the same old materialism of, for instance, Holbach. In the meantime we can peer right into the interstices, so to speak, of organisms, but already in  Schelling’s lifetime a purely mechanistic or atomistic view of humans was passé.

I do not wish to denigrate “Naturphilosophie.” It is part of the history of ideas, and it has produced some solid evaluations (Richards, Beiser). But it is an intellectual realm that I have never been able to enter. That said,  Naturphilosophie made a bit more sense (if that is the right term) after I finished Rigby’s article. In fact, it made clearer to me the entwined human and natural world of Die Wahlverwandtschaften (which Rigby does not discuss), reflected not only in the surface narrative but also in Goethe’s language.

Naturphilosophie seems to have built on advances in scientific examinations of matter that dispelled the purely mechanistic view of matter and that suggested something more dynamic in the organization of matter. But I can’t see how dynamism, as in the production of poetry, can be put under a microscope. Art, as in Goethe’s poetry, can capture our feeling (or intuition) of “hidden interconnectivities” between natural processes and our mental capacities. The "modern constitution of knowledge," characterized, as Rigby writes, by a rupture between scientific and humanistic disciplines, seems to formulate what is inherent in humans ab initio: the instinct to separate from nature and to use it instrumentally. We would not be human if we did not do so.

Certainly early humans “listened” to the “language” of nature, which must have been very audible to them, but it was always an instrumental listening. Their lives depended on paying attention, and most of us have certainly lost that ability. There is no state, however, to which humans can return as humans. It may happen that, like Noah's fellow humans, we will be punished for our poor stewardship of nature, but punishing suggests a final authority, a theological view that I can't imagine my fellow scholars accepting.

Environmentalist's vision of the future

To return to my question: did Goethe’s heart leap up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky? I think not. It made him reflect on “Nature,” but did he revel in the natural world? The poetry that we associate with his early genius is saturated with nature imagery, but he would go on to turn his back on the sentiments of that period. I am fully aware of the effects of seasonal affective disorder, but I must say that my heart also does not leap up at the sight of the rainbow. When the first spring arrived after Rick’s death, it was only with intellectual curiosity that I noted the rebirth of the flowers and the cherry blossoms in Central Park. I admired the beauty of the natural world, especially the order that it manifested. None of this consoled me; only friends could do that. What I did notice is that Kant's observations on aesthetic judgment pre-occupied me. It is not surprising that I am a scholar of the Enlightenment, not of the Romantic period.

Picture credits: UNSW; Elias Schewel; Environmental Humanities Utah; The Vendor

Independence Day

My friend Cynthia Farrell Johnson is an artist, who also makes lovely greeting cards. I include one of her images for this occasion. As is always the case with Goethe, what he said about freedom is  contextual and, in toto, conflicting. For the Fourth of July, however, one might consider the following from Faust II:

Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muß!

More on Goethe and environmentalism in succeeding posts.

Forget the Age of Aquarius

Markgrafenstein in den Rauener Begen (2012) by Lars Gabyrssch

Just let me get something off of my chest before I start talking about Jason Groves’ article “Goethe’s Petrofiction: Reading the Wanderjahre in the Anthropocene” in the special section on Goethe and environmentalism in volume 22 of Goethe Yearbook. The word “anthropocene” (interestingly, my spell check does not recognize the term) makes me gnash my teeth. We already have a good geological term for when humans first appear in the geological record: Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979, Man in the Holocene), as in Max Frisch’s wonderful novel. “Anthropocene” carries connotations of human damage to the environment, as in “ecological serial killers.” Clearly the term is meant to “formalize” human-induced environmental change.

Okay, that is off my chest. Let me turn to Jason Groves’ article, which is the first I read in this section because it is on Goethe and geology, which was also a subject of an article of mine that appeared in the GYb in 2008.  Goethe’s earliest scientific writings, from 1784–85, were on granite, and I analyzed the essays in connection with the aesthetic category of the sublime. And though I did gnash my teeth over the word “anthropocene,” Jason’s essay is really first rate and only minimally disfigured with un-ecological writing.  Jason (whom I have not met, but since I am sure we will meet in the future I take the liberty of referring to him by his first name) takes Goethe’s explorations in geology into the 19th century and links the Wanderjahre with so-called erratic blocks with which Goethe was familiar, “large, ostensibly displaced boulders that were known to litter parts of Thuringia, Prussia, and Mecklenburg.”

Markgrafenstein mid-19th centry

From the 1820s Goethe received samples of these boulders from one of his many correspondents. The Markgrafenstein, near Brandenburg, particularly interested him. This was a 700-ton granite boulder that he discussed in his 1828 essay “Granitarbeiten in Berlin.” It turns out to be a “1.2 billion-year-old boulder from a Scandinavian outcroppping.” Clearly no one, especially not Goethe, knew of its age, but as Jason writes “it was widely surmised to be an important piece of evidence in the history of the earth.” Goethe’s own geological adviser J.C.W. Voigt had already ventured to suggest that such displaced blocks gave evidence of an early Ice Age.

"Spaltung"

(Click on all pictures to see them enlarged. The following pictures here show, as described in the essay, the the labors of master builder Christian Gottlob Cantian, stone masons, and others to to shave off a 75-ton fragment that was carted to the Altes Museum in Berlin and polished into a "Granitschale." It still stands there today. The black-and-white images are from Dieter Kloessing.)

"Verladung"

 This very suggestive piece of scholarship proceeds not from the premise that the earth is powerless against the depredations of humans. Nigel Clark (and other “critical voices”) is quoted to the effect that that “whatever ‘we’ do, … the planet is capable of taking us by surprise.” Thus, ”the various environmental disasters associated with the Anthropocene [are also] evidence of ‘our susceptibility to the earth’s eventfulness’ rather than just the earth’s susceptibility to human eventfulness.” In turn, Goethe’s interest in erratic granite blocks “evinces an openness to the planet’s inherent instability and thus to human vulnerability.” I immediately wrote in the margin that Goethe did not like instability, and it struck me that Jason did not deal with this issue sufficiently. Was it a case of Goethe being drawn to something that frightened him?

"Aufstellung"

 I won’t harp on this, however, because the essay is a wonderfully rich reading of the geological formations that appear in the Wanderjahre. Not only is the novel about itinerant humans, but it is also full of wandering “erratics” of a non-human type, especially in the 1829 version. The novel is set in a “neue, bewegliche Welt,” full of “interpolated tales of foolish pilgrims, displaced laborers, and emigrants to America.” But, as Jason writes, “Inhuman things also wander.” Throughout the novel, the earth does not appear simply as a monolith, but instead in the form of animated, active, transitory fragments. As he notes, drawing on Wolf von Engelhardt, stones and rock formations, when appearing as predicates, are never static or passive. Instead the verbs  are always active and reflexive: zeigen sich, verwandeln sich, erzeugen sich, and so on. “In this drama of things, mineral agents take humans as accusative objects: they address us, they come together to make formations.”

"The Biedermeierweltwunder" by Johann Erdmann Hummel

I recommend the essay for its detail and for its excellent use of a variety of sources. It demonstrates the insight into Goethe’s poetic work that can be had when considering it in connection with his scientific explorations. In this connection, this volume of the GYb also offers a review by Astrida Orle Tantillo of the Goethe Handbuch supplement Naturwissenschaften.

Aside from the lack of resolution concerning Goethe’s fascination with erratics vis à vis the volatility of the earth, there was another issue that might be further explored. I interpret somewhat differently a passage Jason quotes from the final section of the novel, part of the discussion of  contemporary theories of the earth’s formation. “A few quiet guests,” as Goethe calls them, seem to ruminate about a time of immense glaciers, when masses of primeval rock slid down from on high and huge blocks of rock were transported by means of floating ice. This passage appears as the epigraph of Jean de Charpentier’s Essai sur les glaciers of 1841; for Charpentier, student of Swiss glaciers, they were “milestones in the discovery of former ice ages.” But might it not be the case that the passage is exactly about what Nigel Clark suggested, and that the guests were drawing on a deep human memory of the "earth's eventfulness," a period of volatile instability, in the face of which "human eventfulness" counted as nothing?

Image credits: Lars Gabrysch;  The Economist; Dieter Kloessing

Goethe and Environmentalism

Let me start out with something we can all agree on: Goethe was “exceptionally concrete and sensitive to environmental phenomena.” This appears on page 11 of the introduction to the special section on “Goethe and Environmentalism” in volume 22 of the Goethe Yearbook. I would also agree that Goethe “was deeply aware of interrelationships in the natural world and the ultimate unity of nature,” and I can understand the desire to describe him “as a proto-ecologist.” The same can be said of dozens if not hundreds of nature writers, especially in England, in the 18th century, but I suppose that Goethe is of particular interest because he lived long into the 19th century, into the age of industrialization and of applications of technology deriving from new scientific methods. In other words, he lived long enough, if not to see, certainly to imagine the effects of the latter on the natural world, and here I also include humans.

Of course, a “deep awareness” of the unity of nature and of the natural world around us is not something that modern science is based on. Thus, Goethe in his own time was not recognized as a scientist by what we would now call real scientists. According to the authors, however, Goethe’s approach to nature (not really well defined in the intro) has become increasingly relevant in the past three decades because the “environmental crisis” we now face “is not simply a crisis of nature, but also, and even more fundamentally, a cultural crisis …” Thus, the goal of environmental humanities is to bring “Goethe’s approach to science” to bear and to help bridge the gap between (as per C.P. Snow) the “two cultures.”

Science gets the details, but ignores the big picture

 It is hard to see how that might be accomplished as “Science” itself has no view of the unity of nature. It studies the epiphenomena of “Nature,” without making any claims about the big picture. It is somewhat odd, however, but certainly a little refreshing to read that scholars now accept a reality beyond texts. There is really a “Real” out there, not just a construct of our imagination. Thus, environmental philosophy and ecocriticism seek to revive “‘nature’ as a theme of inquiry and … [to consider] the biosphere as an extra textual reality that is nevertheless intertwined with textual construction.” Ecology is both a model and metaphor for “the interconnectedness of all beings.” This sounds practically pre-Socratic or Platonist.

I see a big confusion in the use of the term “nature.” For environmentalists, nature seems to be the earth, the “natural,” yet non-human world, but the earth is different from “Nature” or “Reality.” Science is not the problem as it is the insights that inventive people have drawn from scientific discoveries. It is not so much the case that “modern science itself is technological in character and based on attitudes of controlling and dominating nature” as that scientific practice has led to practical applications that, indeed, lead to the domination of “nature,” or, better, the earth. Thus, the sights along the New Jersey turnpike that I mentioned in my last post.

These sights are repugnant to many of us in the modern world. I would include myself here, but I tend not to take an aesthetic view –– in the sense of moral view –– of the problem, which is the stance of environmentalists. An aesthetic view holds that everyone should think like me, thus the connection between aesthetics and morals in the modern world. (I find this already presaged in Kant, but more about that later.)  Morals, however are something that have gone out the window in the past few decades. Thus, what kind of philosophical grounding can be given for demanding a “moral,” caring approach to the earth? Goethe may have imagined that everything was interconnected, but on what basis do environmental humanists base such a claim, aside from an aesthetic one?

More to come.

Picture credit: Jenny Keller