Man as a Drunken Town-Musician

The sciences are on stage again. ¹ This self-referential assertion is less trivial and less timeless than it sounds.

Not knowledge, but science could certainly only have existed since the Greek vowel-alphabet connected an alternating interface between the elements of letters and the elements of nature. As Jesper Svenbro has shown, what for the ionian philosophers of nature arose out of itself in fact only arose from writing. Therefore, everything which can be called science must be able to appear as text. The elements, whether Heraclitus' or Mendeljew's, are first given only in the sign of their names, and thus in Latin they have become 'data.'

Yet this basic relation between knowledge and writing has been so deep-seated that it has scarcely reappeared. Almost in the same historical moment when Galileo directed all modern physics to the reading of that book which Nature was supposed to have written herself in geometric or, subsequently, algebraic signs, the modern novel and modern theater stepped in as evidence that modern readers and spectators enjoy the effects of those fictions most of all when they are altogether free of science. Not only the age of Goethe, but first and foremost the one to whom this age owes its name bears eloquent witness to that effect, despite his love for mother nature and her open secrets. Goethe claimed that the intuition of nature could only take place however as far or as much as fortunate eyes were able to intuit and to see. Still, that elementary technique of culture common to all sciences, called mathematical codification, remained forbidden.

When, in 1826, Karl Friedrich Naumann, one of the founders of modern crystallography, sent his latest publication from Leipzig to Goethe, one of the most ambivalent thank-you notes ever written was drafted in Weimar: "the important document sent to me by Your Honor," wrote the aged Goethe with the usual bureaucratic ceremony, "arrived at a good moment, and I immediately read it with great pleasure repeatedly up through page forty-five. At this point, however, I am standing at the limit which God and nature wish to define for me as an individual. I am dependent upon word, language and image in the truest sense, and completely incapable, to act in any way whatsoever through signs and numbers, with which the most talented spirits make themselves easily understood." ²

On that January day in 1826, the aged Goethe did not read any further for reasons which Francesca and Paolo, or Lotte and Werther could never have dreamed of. At the first mathematical symbol, the first "quanitity," as it is later called in the letter to Naumann, his reading came to a halt. Through "signs and numbers," as they do not belong to alphabetical language, the reader saw himself robbed of all "qualities" with which "God and nature" were supposed to have endowed his "individuality": "Word, language and image in the truest sense." This is how German poetry, when it called out its own three media by their proper names, completely forgot the fact that it too was always already over its designated limit. A "page 45," together with the printed page number, is not only part of Naumann's crystallography, it can also be found in Goethe's Faust. It therefore does not help very much to privilege the operations of literature over those operations due to which the sciences are not only able to codify their own methods, but also their results and thus parts of the so-called nature.

Concepts of the text that stress a pure alphabetics while discarding its numerics (to take up Derrida's attack upon a supposedly europe-wide phonocentrism and reformulate it somewhat more technically), have revenged themselves bitterly on their authors. Goethe had to pay a price for choosing a true German university professor as the tragic hero almost for the first time in the history of German theater. In addition to that, and according to his...