Year Four in Weimar Begins

Goethe and Carl August in conversation

Wilhelm Bode, in his book Goethes Leben im Garten am Stern, notes at the beginning of the chapter entitled "Das vierte Jahr: November 1778 to November 1779" a change in the circumstances of Goethe's status in Weimar. He begins by writing that three years earlier the consensus in Weimar would have held that Goethe was not qualified to occupy the office of privy councilor. By the end of 1778, however, his friends might have asked whether he wasn't too great and too good (zu groß und zu gut) for the job. His tasks, as he writes, were to deal always with petty men with petty goals. And indeed, in the month of December 1778, Goethe gives voice in his diary to his feelings about the office. The entries are so long that I gave up Tweeting  them and have decided to summarize here some of his thoughts in the final days of 1778. They show him coming to terms with the new situation. He is coming down to Earth after having been regarded as a "Genie" and realizing what he has got himself into.

On December 14, for example, after reporting about a fire at the school, he mentions a conversation with Carl August about "politics and laws" (Pol. und Gesezze) and notes that they had different notions about the matters. He continues that he may not speak his own opinions. They would be easy to misunderstand and might then be dangerous. There then follows a passage in which he reflects on the difficulty of bettering incorrigible human evils and circumstances. (Paste in Google translate, if necessary.)

[man] verliert die Zeit und verdirbt noch mehr statt dass man diese Mängel annehmen sollte gleichsam als Grundstoff und nachher suchen diese zu kontrebalanciren. Das schönste Gefühl des Ideals wäre wenn man immer rein fühlte warum man's nicht erreichen kann.

On December 15 he writes that he is spending time in architectural drawing in order to distance himself. Then there follows an interesting comment. It seems that while speaking with his friend Knebel about society's disorders (Schiefheiten). the conversation came to a discussion of how his own situation looked from outside. "From outside," he emphasizes, then goes on:

Wenn man mit einem lebt soll man mit allen eben, einen hört, soll man alle hören. Vor sich allein ist man wohl rein, ein andrer verrückt uns die Vorstellung durch seine, hört man den dritten so kommt man durch die Parallaxe wieder aufs erste wahre zurück.

With only the evidence of the diary, it is hard for me to say (although maybe a reader will have a different take on this) whether he is indicating what Knebel has said, or whether this last is Goethe speaking his own opinion. What follows, however suggests that Knebel is giving him some insights into the situation of the privy council itself, as von Fritsch, who was not happy when Goethe was elevated to the council, is mentioned.

The entries for 1778 conclude with this lapidary sentence: "New grievances grow daily and never more so than when you think one has been taken care of" (Es wächsen täglich neue Beschwerden, und niemals mehr als wenn man Eine glaubt gehoben zu haben).

Image credit: Goethe Was Here

Goethe as Thinker? Goethe as Scientist?

To what extent do the above terms apply to Goethe? Consider the first. It can’t be denied that Goethe was a thinker in the sense of a person who did a lot of thinking. The proof is in his writings, as well as in reports of conversations with contemporaries. But if we consider some of the thinkers of his age and the influence they had during their lifetime — e.g., Kant, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot — Goethe cannot be said to have belonged in such company.  Kant and Hume were both philosophers and created philosophical systems, while the influence of the three Frenchmen was in the realm of ideas in the service of contemporary social and political life. In his lifetime Goethe came to occupy an important cultural and literary position, but he wasn’t a “thinker” in that class. It was only after his death in 1832 that he was portrayed as oracular, when he began to be regarded as an important thinker, but the content of the oracles has been changeable. “Goethe, for instance, can’t be pinned down the way one can “Kafkaesqe” or “Orwellian.”

Goethe’s scientific interests were in the field of natural science, which encompassed fields we today identify as botany, geology, paleontology, zoology, and so on. In monasteries in the Middle Ages there was already extensive collections of plants, and this continued in the Renaissance with scholars documenting animal, insects, plant life and all manner of earth forms. Some important natural scientists in Goethe's lifetime were the Count de Buffon, Charles Bonnet, and Albrecht Haller. One of the greatest natural scientists of Goethe’s era was his friend Alexander von Humboldt. As Wikipedia puts it, natural science is less experimental than it is observational.

Goethe had use of laboratories for his scientific researches, including that of the well-established one at the court in Gotha, where he was a favored visitor. But for Goethe, the eyes were important, the perception of what was before our eyes, not the “unseen” elements that make up the building blocks of modern-day science. “Gegenständliches Denken” was his own term for describing his intellection. Thus, the difference between natural science and what have become the modern scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, and their continuing branchings and flowerings into the present. Goethe was adamantly opposed to what is called such “system building,” and thus immediate predecessors in respect of science were not Euler, Lavoisier, Herschel, or Priestly. Instead, Goethe is part of a long and venerable transmission that includes such observers as Aristotle and extending to Charles Darwin and beyond. 

There are dozens of articles on the internet regarding Goethe as a scientist, so the above is as minimal as I can make things.

The questions in the title of this post are prompted by two recently published articles by Michael Saman, one in the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 27 [2020]), the second in German Quarterly (vol. 94, 4 [2021]). Saman quotes Tzvetan Todorov to the effect that while “Goethe himself had expected his scientific writings to have their most lasting impact on the study of nature, they instead ‘have fallen into oblivion’ in that area, and, ‘since the 1920s, [...] have found an ever-increasing echo among literary scholars, psychologists, and anthropologists, such that one could say that out of all of Goethe’s intellectual legacy, it is precisely his writings on nature that have most strongly influenced the specialists in culture!” Thus, Goethe as thinker.

Saman investigates this influence on the discipline of “social science,” in particular in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp. Lévi-Strauss is best known for his studies in anthropology, and Propp for his work on folklore. And while both these men assembled amazing collections of empirical data, just as do practitioners of natural science, it is not from the tangible bones of the earth and the flowers of field. It is human behavioral practices that constitute the “data.”

While Saman stresses that Lévi-Strauss, like Goethe, had no interest in being a philosophical thinker, the “science of the concrete” that unites them still uses the word science if science means ultimate the representation of something abstract, say, types. Propp, who knew Goethe’s scientific writings well, also spoke of “laws” that were equally valid for the realms of nature and human creativity and “that can be investigated with similar methods.” In Lévi-Strauss we are dealing with what has become known as “structuralism,” whereas Propp’s method is “formalism.” Both present, not “a mere descriptive catalogue of so-called facts” (Saman quotes sociologist Sverre Holm here who calls Goethe a model for social science) but also “types,” “structures” and the like, which are not visible to the naked eye.  Goethe, after all, in his botanical research, sought to discern “the relations that unify” the facts on the ground.

Saman’s articles are well written (distinguishing them from much scholarly writing) and I liked reading his attempt to distinguish structuralism and formalism and the account of the scholarly feud between Lévi-Strauss and Propp. For my part, I have always found structuralism off-putting — I find it ultimately abstract — whereas Propp’s system strikes me as a literary scholar as intuitively of interest. I feel the same way of a similar proponent of formalism, André Jolles, to whom I earlier devoted a blogpost. Reading traditional tales with Propp or Jolles in mind, I find that the reading is enriched.

As I mentioned in my review in the Times Literary Supplement of a book by Stephen Bollmann, there is much interest of late in the “Green Goethe,” I think it is more apt to place Goethe here in the domain of natural science. So, in that respect there can be no doubt that Goethe qualifies as both thinker and scientist.

Image: Semantics Scholar