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  • The Sublime,"Über den Granit," and the Prehistory of Goethe’s Science
  • Elizabeth Powers

His scientific pursuits and writings have merited Goethe a place in histories of science in the eighteenth century,1 and there is a great body of scholarship that documents his work in various scientific fields.2 Recent studies, part of a wider reevaluation of the development of science in Europe in the eighteenth century,3 have greatly assisted our understanding of the intellectual and sociological milieu in which Goethe's scientific pursuits took place and have largely erased the image of Goethe as a dilettante. Alongside studies of contemporary science in his various poetic works4 are those investigating the conceptual basis of Goethe's scientific thinking, thus amplifying "what connections he drew between art and the careful observation and assessment of the natural world."5 Recent investigations have also focused on the interpenetration of philosophy, science, and art.6 A general consensus exists that the literary pursuits and the scientific ones cannot be separated,7 and few contemporary scholars would agree with Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), who argued that Goethe would have done better to follow the advice the mathematician Clairant gave to Voltaire, namely, to leave science to those who were not also great poets.8

Nevertheless, largely absent in these studies is an investigation of what Hermann von Helmholtz, writing in 1853 in connection with Goethe's morphological works, characterized as the "dichterische Richtung geistiger Tätigkeit."9 In considering what, exactly, is poetic about Goethe's science, I am interested in the specific influence of aesthetics, including literary conventions, on the shape or substance of the science. An exception, addressing precisely this issue, again in connection with Goethe's theory of morphology, is The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, by Robert A. Richards, a far-ranging study reaching from the young Goethe to Charles Darwin's Romantic affinities.10 Stressing the effect of personal and intimate entanglements on art, science, and philosophy, Richards claims that nature exercised "erotic authority" over Goethe and that each of his relationships with a woman "became a passional means by which he explored the aesthetic and the universal in nature, yielding with each encounter...a different modality in his art" (326). An important theme of this study is "the deep emotional and aesthetic connection between Goethe's experience of female forms—in literature and in life—and his ideal biological structures" (396). Thus, in Sicily, while Goethe contemplated "the lovely [End Page 35] Nausicaa" in Palermo's public gardens, the notion of the Urpflanze erupted into his meditations (395). For Richards, this combination of "[b]eautiful nature, a beautiful woman, and the primal plant" (397) is an example of "the erotic power of nature" to transmute into an artistic force and realize beauty in another medium (400). Richards uses a felicitous term to describe the result of this interplay, namely, "artistic instantiation" (400).11

Wolf von Engelhardt, in Goethe im Gespräch mit der Erde, attempts something similar, probing the links between the poetic oeuvre and geology, the field of Goethe's first scientific endeavours.12 Engelhardt, a geologist himself as well as editor of the sections of the Leopoldina edition of Goethe's scientific writings devoted to the earth sciences, is in a favorable position to launch such an attempt. This impressive edition has advanced so far as to offer all scholars, scientist and non-scientist alike, a definitive resource, with essential commentary, for investigating the interpenetration of Goethe's literary activities and his scientific work.13 In particular, this edition makes possible an evaluation of the relationship between the two prior to the period with which most investigations of this relationship begin, namely, the Italian journey of 1786.

In this connection I would like to offer some speculations concerning what might be called the prehistory of Goethe's scientific pursuits, in particular the influence of the aesthetic category of the sublime, evident in the 1772 essay "Von Deutscher Baukunst," on the formation of Goethe's scientific views. The sublime, like the cathedral at the center of that essay, resists measurement, thus presaging Goethe's later disapproval...

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