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

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

Goethe and Environmentalism

Volume 22 of the Goethe Yearbook arrived in the mail last week. The editors of the Yearbook, as in volume 20 (on Goethe's lyric poetry), are devoting a part to a special subject, in the case "Goethe and Environmentalism." It is edited by Luke Fischer and Dalia Nassar, two scholars whom I have not yet met but who are both at the University of Sidney in Australia. A glance at the notes to their introduction to this special section of the Yearbook indicates that they have already published much on the subject of Goethe and environmentalism.

I will probably discuss the introduction and the articles in at least two posts. But let me preface things by some notes I made as I was traveling by bus to Newark Airport several weeks ago. It is hard to believe when traveling that stretch of highway that New Jersey is known as the Garden State. My thoughts concerned how this "landscape" would fit in with the aesthetic categories of Beauty or the Sublime. Bodmer had a category called "das Ungestüme," or "the turbulent," but it referred to forces that have a calamitous effect on humans and are beyond their control or understanding. An example would be the Lisbon earthquake. The sublime in nature, in contrast, is something we can come to understand.

Pulaski Skypike

Unlike those categories, the New Jersey turnpikes do not represent natural phenomena. Everything is the result of practical human activity, not of natural beauty or sublimity. To an eye accustomed to make aesthetic distinctions, the highway environment can only be regarded as ugly. There seems to be no orderliness, just a hodgepodge of railroad tracks, warehouses, abandoned tire cemeteries, toll booths, advertising signs right and left and overhead (auto dealers, Burger King, and McDonalds, Toll Booth Ahead) and of course cars, cars, cars and trucks, trucks, trucks speeding forward at 80 miles per hour. The purpose of most of the activity is commercial, and many people today, if they are not outright wanting to abolish commercialism, prefer their commercial environment to be gentrified, like the center of an imagined New England town.

A billboard you can smell

The activity on the turnpikes is too grossly commercial, without seemingly any appeal to our higher faculties, in particular our feeling for beauty. And commercialism, as we know, contributes to the degradation of the environment. But if we use our reason, as Kant urged us to do, we also come to recognize that all that commercial detritus is part of a great economic machine that also provides us with the goods and services we need for our lives.

The above as a preface to my own thoughts on environmentalism, which I too often find to be the newest version of an old phenomenon, Zivilisationskritik. Stay tuned.

Photo credits: Porlier Outdoor Advertising Company; Tom Kaminski/WCBS 880; North Jersey.com