J. W. Goethe and C. G. Carus: On the Representation of Nature in Science and Art

Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), scientist (doctor of medicine and surgeon) and painter, corresponded with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) for some ten years, in particular between 1818 and 1828, when they exchanged not only letters and essays but also paintings and curious objects, including optical devices and drawings with commentaries about roots, bones, fossils, and other natural phenomena.¹ In the following, I argue that there was an understanding and deep connection between them, which persisted until Goethe’s death in 1832. In this, my reading differs from that of Stefan Grosche. While his research on the Goethe-Carus connection is pathbreaking, Grosche mistakenly argues that there was a break in their relationship in the middle of 1831 (“Zarten Seelen,” 99). But as I will show, the strength of Carus’s lasting attachment to Goethe is evident in a series of publications that appeared after Goethe’s death² and in his artworks, including a series of six works in charcoal that were inspired by Goethe’s Faust and completed after 1851.³

The correspondence between Goethe and Carus not only is of biographical value for both individuals but also provides important material for a more accurate assessment of how Goethe and Carus approached the representation of nature in art and in science. In the following, I will investigate their respective approaches to science and their writings on the visual, color, and painting. I will also discuss Goethe’s changing relationship to Romanticism and Goethe’s and Carus’s views on the relative merits of music, painting, and poetry and on the relation between art and psychology. I conclude with an analysis of some paintings that Carus produced shortly after Goethe’s death and presented in his honor.

Goethe and Carus on Science

Goethe and Carus shared an intimate personal and intellectual bond, based on their keen interest in morphology and a love of observing nature in process. Both conducted research in botany, zoology, and geology, and both believed that nature is always changing. They believed that nature preserves energy by transferring it from one life-form to another via metamorphosis. Carus was keen on exploring links between plants and animals. Elaborating on Goethe’s work, he considered the consequences of the concept of metamorphosis for human biology, which, in turn, impacted not only his theoretical stance but also his practice of medicine.⁴ Much research has been done on Goethe’s concepts of types and of related species and on his idea of an archetypical plant (“Urpflanze”) in the context of literature, botany, and biology, but there is little on how these concepts affect our understanding of leaves (botany), vertebrae (zoology), and, ultimately, as Carus suggests, the whole human body (medicine).

Friedrich Schlegel famously stated, “Alle Kunst soll Wissenschaft, und alle Wissenschaft soll Kunst werden. Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein” (All art should become science, and all science should become art. Poetry and philosophy should become one).⁵ This aphorism captures not only the project of the early Romantics but, to a considerable extent, also that of Goethe himself. In his study of science and philosophy in the age of Goethe, Robert J. Richards portrays Goethe as a genuine scientist of a new order in tandem with the Romantics, who favored organic principles over mechanistic understandings of nature, thereby moving away from thinkers such as Descartes, Newton, Hume, and Kant, who applied mechanism to both the inanimate universe and the living world. Richards also documents in detail that Goethe was not against Romanticism, as has long been assumed and as he may have believed himself, but in fact shared many of the Romantics’ aesthetic and scientific innovations.⁶

Goethe was in frequent contact with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a professor of medicine at Göttingen and a leading anthropologist and expert in comparative anatomy, and with the poet and scholar Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). As Richards points out, Herder and Goethe shared a “cautious Newtonian rendering of the concept of Bildungstrieb” (226), a notion that Herder had introduced. It was...