Chelsea Sights

Goethe Girl and Rick took Loretta and Dick to Chelsea for their last evening in the Big Apple. Not many galleries were open on Thursday evening, but what could be seen was actually pretty good. The paintings by Melinda Hackett (at Charles Cowles Gallery), like the one above, reminded me of the radiolarians on which I posted recently. 

The myriad forms in Hackett's paintings don't have the symmetry of the intricate mineral skeletons found in the ocean depths, as in the beautiful illustration at the left of "Stephoidea" from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904). Still, in their dreamy profusion they are so undersea-like that they also brought to mind a beautiful sonnet by Elizabeth Bishop entitled, simply, "Sonnet." Here is the second stanza:

There is a magic made by melody,

A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool

Heart, that sinks through fading waters deep

To the subaqueous stillness of the sea

And floats forever in a moon-green pool

Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

After our gallery viewing, we marched off to the Village for dinner. All in all it was a good week for the visitors from Louisville.

Be Erhard!

Rick and I took our Louisville visitors to the financial district yesterday, starting with Wall Street. And look at what we saw there, this huge sign for Ludwig Erhard. (Click on picture for larger view.) I bet this is a man no one has thought of for a long time. Well, Goethe Girl was not born yesterday, and he was very much a familiar figure when she was a student in Germany. It is to Ludwig Erhard that the German economic recovery after World War II is attributed. 

Back in those far-off student days, when I was contending with that coal stove (of which I have written) in my small basement room in Marburg, there were signs that Germany was taking off. People spoke then about the "Wirtschaftswunder," or economic miracle, the rapid reconstruction of the economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II.

And here we were on Wall Street, in the year 2009, where it was suggested that the world could benefit from the lessons of the German economic success initiated by Ludwig Erhard, namely, the social market economy. Thus, the promotion, "Ludwig Erhard at Wall Street," which included a lookalike of the portly former economics minister and chancellor wandering in the canyons of the financial district.

No doubt there are lessons that the "social market economy" can offer in the current financial crisis (has anyone thought about not spending for a change? living within our means?), though I am always suspicious when people suggest that America should follow the model of another country. Every country, as Herder reminded us, has its own history, especially its own institutional history, and it is not as easy as the idealists imagine to transplant an idea into a lived reality. True, democracy was transplanted to Germany after World War II (and also to Japan), but the Western world in any case was behind this venture. Not to mention the presence of 250,000 Allied soldiers in Germany. The world was a much different place back then. Fifty years later, the transplanting of Western institutions, as we are learning in Iraq, is much more difficult, and it might even be said that we should not have tried.

I am of two minds. One part of me says, let the Middle East go its own destructive way. Unfortunately, its destructive ways are not limited to the countries within its own geographical scope. We would have to draw up the bridges, so to speak, like a medieval castle a thousand years ago. No, this is the year 2009, and the other part recognizes that the world economies are interconnected. Even if the Middle East itself produces very few of the products that are on the shelves of our supermarkets or on the racks of department stores, the ordinary folks living in the Middle East would like to participate in the economic processes that have brought the West such a good standard of life. Those processes, however, have a long-established institutional structure and legal protection, both of which are lacking in many parts of the world, not only in the Middle East. I'm not sure that Ludwig Erhard would have had a solution for this problem, but I much enjoyed seeing his figure on Wall Street.

Manhattan Scenes

Goethe Girl's sister Loretta and Loretta's husband Dick are visiting from Louisville, so Goethetc. will be neglected to some extent for a few days. Visits, however, mean I also get to look at Manhattan with new eyes. Moreover, Loretta and Dick are great walkers. We put them through their paces yesterday. And when we get home, Rick always prepares something great to eat. Herewith some recent sights.

You don't find these in Louisville!

Live long enough, and this is the future! (There are worse ones!)

Cast-0ff furniture on West 90th Street.

Talking parrot in Riverside Park.

Goethe and Ernst Haeckel

I recently posted on a Victorian "scientific materialist," John Tyndall, who, like his friend Thomas Carlyle, was a Goethe enthusiast. Goethe was a great poet, but it was his reach into so many areas of human life, especially science, indeed the seeming comprehensiveness of Goethe's vision, that must have impressed the Victorians. By the mid-19th century scientific exploration of the earth and empirical science had come up with some pretty astonishing results. Scientific men and women, too, were figuring out all the secrets of material life, in the process demystifying God's creation. As for the spiritual side of things, well, there was literature, and who better to provide inspiration than Goethe? For instance, his poem "Prometheus," in which indeed man is shown pushing God aside.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was another famous Victorian, who also was much influenced by Goethe and by German Romantic writers. Yes, he was actually Prussian, but I think it's fair to extend the term to intellectual figures like Haeckel, who has so much in common with famous Victorians like Charles Darwin. Indeed, it was Haeckel who explained "Darwinism" to the world, in his book Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1868), which was a bestseller in English as The History of Creation (1876).

I have mentioned before on this blog Robert Richards' book on German "Romantic science." Richards has also written a biography cum intellectual history entitled The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. I have not had a chance to look at it yet, but Steven Marx recently drew my attention to Haeckel, who is the subject of the film Proteus, an animated documentary that explores the 19th-century's engagement with the oceans and the undersea world. Haeckel's name is particularly associated with the microscopic life form known as radiolarian, one-celled creatures with intricate mineral skeletons found in every ocean. They exist in unimaginable numbers -- about 6,000 varieties have been identified -- and the decaying bodies form an ooze that covers the sea bottom. Remains of radiolarians date to the beginnings of the Cambrian period, ca. 530 million years ago. I include one of Haeckel's illustrations of radiolarians here, but others can be found in Kunstformen der Natur or, in English, Art Forms in Nature.

I thought the use of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in Proteus a bit far-fetched and indeed not even really applicable, but the film nicely brought together the polymathic endeavors of the 19th century, in this case Haeckel, Darwin, and the 70,000 nautical-miles journey of the Challenger Expedition of 1872-76. The report of the Challenger expedition included catalogues of 4,000 previously unknown species. The publication of its results has been described as "the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries."

As the film Proteus points out, another mammoth Victorian project in this same period was the laying of a transatlantic telegraph cable, the work of another amazing Victorian, Cyrus West Field, an American businessman.

 

The Challenger expedition discovered that the deepest part of the world's oceans was the Mariana trench, which is also the deepest natural location of the earth's crust.

Haeckel, according to Richards, detected "archetypal structures" as the basic forms of different animal groups, forms that could be comprehended only by the mind's eye: Anschauung, as Goethe called it. Haeckel believed, however, that the essence of such forms could be rendered by the artistic hand, and it is the very beauty of his own paintings that made Haeckel's many books so popular.

Haeckel was also something of a controversialist, up to our own day. Even though his works were banned by the Nazis, biologists like Stephen Jay Gould have claimed that Haeckel's works contributed to their racial theories. More on that another time.

Goethe Überall

Whenever I pick up a book I find myself consulting the index to see if there is an entry for "Goethe." It is an indication of his influence that Goethe is so frequently cited, say, in a book I just chose randomly from Rick's bookshelf, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (1982), by Ernst Mayr, which leads off the discussion on Naturphilosophie with Goethe. It's a reminder of how many areas of thought Goethe worked in. In a recent post on Sylvia Townsend Warner I mentioned finding in her correspondence with the writer and New Yorker editor William Maxwell letters between them in which they discussed Wilhelm Meister. But even in books that have no immediate reference to Goethe's own pursuits, Goethe himself still resonates. For instance, in Escapism by the cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan (a writer in whom I like to dip for escape as well as for wonderful insights), one finds Goethe embedded in a discussion of human anxiety: "History can make unbearable reading because it exposes the extent and weight of misery among humbler folk. As to the individual life, even the favorites of the gods, such as Tolstoy or Goethe, claim that they have known few moments of genuine happiness."

Goethe is still a touchstone, though sometimes as a product of the past or maybe only as a catch phrase rather than a figure of continuing relevance. I was reminded of this by a collage entitled "Frankfurt" (at the top of the post) by the artist Maureen Mullarkey in which she utilizes a scrap from the spine of an old edition of Goethe's works. The work is in an exhibition of her collages at the Kouros Gallery in Manhattan, in a show entitled, appropriately enough, "Gutenberg Elegies": all the works in the show are made from scraps of old books.

I first encountered Maureen Mullarkey through her columns in The New York Sun, the now defunct conservative New York daily, which had the best arts and literary writing of any New York newspaper (and that includes The New York Times). It was via the Sun that Rick and I would read of the openings in Chelsea to which the Sun devoted so much coverage. We met one of the former publishers of the Sun at Maureen's opening. When we lamented the Sun's demise, he said it would take only $20 million to start it up again. Surely there must be something in the Stimulus package for that!

Maureen, by the way, is also a wonderful painter. I like this portrait of a rather androgynous figure. It has a Weimar Republic quality to it (in contrast to the Goethe-period Weimar). I look forward to a show of her paintings.

Goethetc. on the Net

I was contacted a month or so ago by Isabel del Rio, the cultural editor of a bilingual (Spanish-English) cultural magazine called Yareah. Each issue of the on- and off-line magazine focuses on a single topic. Recent issues, for instance, were devoted to James Joyce's Ulysses, the Niebelungenlied, and 1,001 Nights. The May issue was to be on Romanticism/ Romanticismo, and I was asked if one of my Goethetc. posts could be included. Actually, I have not yet posted on Goethe as a Romantic, but apparently the world considers Goethe one. The magazine's contents are drawn from websites and blogs. Besides my post on Goethe and America, another one of Yareah's pages in this issue was on The Sorrows of Young Werther ("Amor y Muerte: Goethe") by Alberto [!] Javier Maidana, an Argentinean. As Alberto writes: "La asociación de amor y muerte es una caracteristíca del romántico. Werther es romántico y como tal el amor atrae como sentimiento puro. Pero no alcanzará la armonia en el amor. El ama el amor por el amor mismo." He adds this quote from Novalis: "Todas las pasiones terminan en tragedia, todo lo que es limitado termina muriendo, toda poesía tiene algo de trágico." So have the literary Germans been Hispanicized.

There are small essays on Novalis and Hoffmann as well as on Byron and the other usual suspects in this issue, written by many young bloggers. All the bloggers (including Goethe Girl) are pictured with small thumbnail-sized photos.  One of my favorites among the contributors is the Chinese teacher pictured here, who contributed an essay to Yareah on the differences between American and European Romanticism. His name is Zhang Huaming who, judging from his biography, has never left China. More power to him.

An Eminent Victorian on Goethe's Color Theory

"It might be thought that Goethe had given himself but little trouble to understand the theorems of Newton and the experiments on which they were based. But it would be unjust to charge the poet with any want of diligence in this respect. He repeated Newton's experiments, and in almost every case obtained his results. But he complained of their incompleteness and lack of logical force. What appears to us as the very perfection of Newton's art, and absolutely essential to the purity of the experiments, was regarded by Goethe as needless complication and mere torturing of the light."

Rick, the scientist in our family, has been studying Goethe's scientific works for a while now. Indeed, when Amazon delivered my copy of Robert Richards' book on "romantic science" in Germany, it was a year before I had an opportunity to read it. As a physicist, however, Rick is more interested in Goethe's work on optics, in particular Die Farbenlehre, the so-called color theory. Thus, he recently brought to my attention the work of the eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893), from whom the above quotation is taken.

The British Dictionary of National Biography describes Tyndall as "physicist and mountaineer." According to his obituary in the Times of London on December 5, 1893, "Although not the first to reach the summit of the Matterhorn, he was intimately associated with the early attempts on that remarkable mountain." A peak near the Matterhorn is named after him.

As an impecunious young man Tyndall went to Marburg, where he attended lectures on experimental and practical chemistry in the laboratory of Robert Bunsen and on mathematics and physics with C.L. Gerling and K.H. Knoblauch. He graduated doctor of philosophy in 1850, after two years, an achievement that seems to have been par for the course among some Victorians. In 1851 he went to Berlin and did diamagnetic research in the laboratory of Gustav Magnus and became acquainted with many German scientists, including Helmholtz.

It was also in 1851 that he began a friendship with T.H. Huxley. In 1853 Tyndall was chosen professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, which made him a colleague of Faraday. If those weren't famous friends enough, he and Thomas Carlyle were also friends, and it was at Carlyle's instigation, according to Tyndall, that he decided to undertake an investigation of Goethe's color theory, which appeared as a two-part essay in Popular Science Monthly (vol. 17) in 1880. It begins by drawing attention to his hesitations concerning the color theory:

My reverence for the poet had been awakened by the writings of Mr. Carlyle, and it was afterward confirmed and consolidated by the writings of Goethe himself. But there was one of the poet's works, which, though it lay directly in the line of my own studies, remained for a long time only imperfectly known to me. My opinion of that work was not formed on hearsay. I dipped into it so far as to make myself acquainted with its style, its logic, and its general aim; but having done this I laid it aside, as something which jarred upon my conception of Goethe's grandeur.

Tyndall thus decided to abandon the "Farbenlehre" and to look up to Goethe "on that side where his greatness was uncontested and supreme." In May of 1878, however, Carlyle paid him a visit. "He was then in his eighty-third year, and looking in his solemn fashion toward that portal to which we are all so rapidly hastening." As a "farewell gift," Carlyle presented him with "the two octavo volumes of letter press and the single folio volume, consisting in great part of colored diagrams," that Goethe had sent to Carlyle in June 1830.

By 1880 Tyndall (pictured here in a portrait by George Richmond), along with Huxley and Charles Darwin, were the most famous scientists in Britain, and Tyndall is in fact associated with the same scientific materialism. Some of his scientific work touches on areas of Goethe's interest. For instance, the "Tyndall effect" concerns the scattering of light particles in the atmosphere. Among the research cited by the Dictionary of Scientific Biography are Tyndall's efforts to verify the high absorptive and radiative power of aqueous vapor and to explain the selective difference of the atmosphere on different sounds.

 Like Goethe, Tyndall seems to have been interested in practical matters. His investigations on sound, for instance, attempted to establish efficient fog signals upon British coasts.  Also in a sense replicating Goethe is Tyndall's The Glaciers of the Alps (1860), based on his measurements of glaciers of Switzerland.

For anyone interested in Goethe's color theory, Tyndall provides the most lucid of introductions as well as an analysis, from the point of view of a scientist, of where Goethe went wrong. He truly grappled with Goethe's way of thinking, and comes to a conclusion with which many of us can identify: "I can not even now say with confidence that I fully realize all the thoughts of Goethe. Many of them are strange to the scientific man. They demand for their interpretation a sympathy beyond that required or even tolerated in severe physical research." He gives full credit to Goethe's industry ("The observations and experiments there recorded astonish us by their variety and number"). He goes right to the center of Goethe's thinking and to his missteps.

This question of turbid media took entire possession of the poet's mind. It was ever present to his observation. It was illustrated by the azure of noonday, and by the daffodil and crimson of the evening sky. The inimitable lines written at Ilmenau ["Über allen Gipfeln/ Ist Ruh'/ In allen Wipfeln/ Spürest du/ Kaum einen Hauch"] suggest a stillness of the atmosphere which would allow the columns of fine smoke from the foresters' cottages to rise high into the air. He would thus have an opportunity of seeing the upper portion of the column projected against bright clouds, and the lower portion against dark pines, the brownish yellow of the one and the blue of the other being strikingly and at once revealed.

As long as Goethe remained in the region of fact, Tyndall finds that his observations are of permanent value, "but by the coercion of a powerful imagination he forced his turbid media into regions to which they did not belong, and sought to overthrow by their agency the irrefragable demonstrations of Newton." In the end, "his turbid media entangle him everywhere, leading him captive and committing him to almost incredible delusions."

Tyndall finds it natural that such a singular "character" as Newton would have arrested Goethe's attention and that he must "add it" to a theory of Newton. And here, according to Tyndall, "the great German is at home," prefacing his sketch of his rival's character "by reflections and considerations regarding character in general. Tyndall concludes that the ethical image Goethe draws of Newton --  "vehement persistence in wrong thinking" -- may perhaps coincide with Goethe himself.

I think this provides some flavor of the great Tyndall. He was among the great popularizers of science in the Victorian era. (The illustration at the top of the post is one of his experimental apparatuses for showing that sound is reflected in air at the interface between air masses of different densities.) Tyndall's popular lectures were published as Fragments of Science for Unscientific People. Something of the character of the man can be seen from the fellowships he endowed for students at three American colleges after his lecture tours in the U.S. in 1872-73.