Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life and Works

Historical studies should generally avoid the error of thinking that the circumstances of a

philosopher’s life necessitate their theoretical conclusions. With Goethe, however, his poetry,

scientific investigations, and philosophical worldview are manifestly informed by his life, and

are indeed intimately connected with his lived experiences. In the words of Georg Simmel,

“…Goethe’s individual works gradually appear to take on less significance than his life as a

whole. His life does not acquire the sense of a biography that strings together external

phenomena, but is rather like the portrait of a singular vastness, depth and dynamism of

existence, the pure expression of an internal vigor in its relation to the world, the

spiritualization of an extraordinary sphere of reality,” (Simmel 2007, 85f).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born August 28, 1749 in Frankfurt, Germany. His father

was the Imperial Councillor Johann Kaspar Goethe (1710-1782) and his mother Katharina

Elisabeth (Textor) Goethe (1731-1808). Goethe had four siblings, only one of whom,

Cornelia, survived early childhood.

Goethe's early education was inconsistently directed by his father and sporadic tutors. He did,

however, learn Greek, Latin, French, and Italian relatively well by the age of eight. In part to

satisfy his father’s hope for material success, Goethe enrolled in law at Leipzig in 1765. There

he gained a reputation within theatrical circles while attending the courses of C.F. Gellert.

And there he gained notoriety for his extracurricular activities at what would become Faust’s

haunt, Auerbach’s Keller. In 1766 he fell in love with Anne Catharina Schoenkopf (1746-

1810) and wrote his joyfully exuberant collection of nineteen anonymous poems, dedicated to

her simply with the title Annette.

After a case of tuberculosis and two years convalescence, Goethe moved to Stassburg in 1770

to finish his legal degree. There he met Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), unofficial

leader of the Sturm und Drang movement. Herder encouraged Goethe to read Homer, Ossian,

and Shakespeare, whom the poet credits above all with his first literary awakening. Inspired

by a new flame, this time Friederike Brion, he published the Neue Lieder (1770) and his

Sesenheimer Lieder (1770-1771). Though set firmly on the path to poetry, he was promoted

Licentitatus Juris in 1771 and returned to Frankfurt where with mixed success he opened a

small law practice. Seeking greener pastures, he soon after moved to the more liberal city of

Darmstadt. Along the road, so the story goes, Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a

noble highwayman from the German Peasants' War. Within the astounding span of six weeks,

he had reworked it into the popular anti-establishment protest, Götz von Berlichingen (1773).

His next composition, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), brought Goethe nearly instant

worldwide acclaim. The plot of the book is mostly a synthesis of his friendships with

Charlotte Buff (1753-1828) and her fiancé Johann Christian Kestner (1741-1800), and the

suicide of Goethe’s friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem (1747-1772). It remains the archetype of

the Sturm und Drang’s elevation of emotion over reason, disdain for social proprieties, and

exhortation for action in place of reflection. Besides Werther, Goethe composed Die Hymnen

(among them Ganymed, Prometheus and Mahomets Gesang), and several shorter dramas,

among them Götter, Helden und Wieland (1774), and Clavigo (1774).

On the strength of his reputation, Goethe was invited in 1775 to the court of then eighteen-

year-old Duke Carl August (1757-1828), who would later become Grand Duke of Saxe-

Weimar-Eisenach. Although Weimar was then a village of only six thousand residents, it was

in the process of a cultural revolution thanks to the foresight and aesthetic vision of Duchess

Anna Amalia (1739-1807), mother of the Duke and matron of the “Court of the Muses.”

Goethe became enveloped in court life, where he could turn his limitless curiosity to an

astonishing range of civic activities. As court-advisor and special counsel to the Duke, he took

directorship of the mining concern, the finance ministry, the war and roads commission, the

local theater, not to mention construction of the beautiful Park-am-Ilm. He was eventually

granted nobility by Emperor Joseph II, and became Geheimrat of Weimar in 1782.

From 1786 to 1788 Goethe took his Italienische Resie, in part out of his growing enthusiasm

for the Winckelmannian rebirth of classicism. There he met the artists Kaufmann and

Tischbein, and also Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816), with whom he held a rather scandalous

love affair until their eventual marriage in 1806.

Although Goethe had first met Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) in 1779, when the latter was a

medical student in Karlsruhe, there was hardly an immediate friendship between them. When

Schiller came to Weimar in 1787, Goethe dismissively considered Schiller an impetuous

though undeniably talented upstart. As Goethe wrote to his friend Körner in 1788, “His entire

being is just set up differently than mine; our intellectual capacities appear essentially at

odds.” After some years of maturation on Schiller’s part and of mellowing on Goethe’s, the

two found their creative spirits in harmony. In 1794, the pair became intimate friends and

collaborators, and began nothing less than the most extraordinary period of literary production

in German history. Working alongside Schiller, Goethe finally completed his Bildungsroman,

the great Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6), as well as his epic Hermann und Dorothea

(1796-7) and several balladic pieces. Schiller, for his part, completed the Wallenstein trilogy

(1799), Maria Stuart (1800), Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), Die Braut von Messina (1803)

and Wilhelm Tell (1804). To Goethe’s great sorrow and regret, Schiller died at the height of

his powers on April 29, 1805. Of their collaboration’s historical importance, Alfred Bates

commemorates, “Schiller and Goethe have ever been inseparable in the minds of their

countrymen, and have reigned as twin stars in the literary firmament. If Schiller does not hold

the first place he is more beloved, though Goethe is more admired,” (Bates 1906, 11: 75).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died on March 22, 1832 in Weimar, having finally finished

Faust the previous year. His famous last words were a request that his servant let in “more

light.” The prince of poets, Goethe was laid to rest in the Fürstengruft of the Historischer

Friedhof in Weimar, side by side with his friend Schiller.

2. Philosophical Background

The Kultfigur of Goethe as the unspoiled and uninfluenced genius is doubtless over-

romanticized. Goethe himself gave rise to this myth, both in his conversations with others and

in his own quasi-biographical work, Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1833). About his study of

the history of philosophy, he writes, “one doctrine or opinion seemed to me as good as

another, so far, at least, as I was capable of penetrating into it,” (Goethe 1902, 182). Albert

Schweitzer, usually even-handed in his attributions, writes, “Goethe borrows nothing from

any of the philosophies with which he is in contact. Thanks, however, to his conscientious

study of the thought of others, he attains an ever clearer grasp of his own ideas,” (Schweitzer

1949, 70).

Goethe’s way of reading was neither that of the scholar seeking out arguments to analyze nor

that of the historian curious about the ideas of the great minds. No disciple of any particular

philosopher or system, he instead borrows in a syncretic way from a number of different and

even opposing thought systems in the construction of his Weltanschauung. And whenever

particular subjects could not be put to practical use, Goethe’s attention quickly moved on. In a

rather telling recollection, Goethe characterizes his philosophy lectures thusly, “At first I

attended my lectures assiduously and faithfully, but the philosophy would not enlighten me at

all. In logic it seemed strange to me that I had so to tear asunder, isolate, and, as it were,

destroy, those operations of the mind which I had performed with the greatest ease from my

youth upwards, and this in order to see into the right use of them. Of the thing itself, of the

world, and of God, I thought I knew about as much as the professor himself; and, in more

places than one, the affair seemed to me to come into a tremendous strait. Yet all went on in

tolerable order till towards Shrovetide, when, in the neighborhood of Professor Winkler's

house on the Thomas Place, the most delicious fritters came hot out of the pan just at the hour

of lecture,” (Goethe 1902, 205). Philosophy apparently held just slightly less interest than

good pastry. Notwithstanding this estimation, indelible philosophical influences are

nevertheless discernible.

For many intellectuals in Goethe’s generation, Rousseau (1712-78) represented the struggle

against the Cartesian mechanistic world view. Rousseau’s elevation of the emotional and

instinctual aspects of human subjectivity galvanized the traditional German Wanderlust into a

far reaching cry to ‘return to nature’ in terms of a longing for pre-civilized society and pre-

Enlightenment efforts to harmonize with rather than conquer nature. Goethe felt this unity

with nature keenly in his Sturm und Drang period, something equally evident in Werther’s

desire for aesthetic wholeness and in his emotional outbursts. From 1784 to 1804, there is a

notable decline in enthusiasm for Rousseau’s privileging emotion over reason, though never

an explicit rejection. Some scholars attribute this to Goethe’s participation in the sorts of civic

bureaucracies that Rousseau so lamented in modern life. But it is clear that there are

philosophical reasons besides these practical ones. Goethe’s classical turn in these years is

marked by his view that the fullest life was one that balanced passion and duty, creativity and

regulation. Only through the interplay of these oppositions, which Rousseau never came to

recognize, could one attain classical perfection.

Although educated in a basically Leibnizian-Wolffian worldview, it was Spinoza (1632-77)

from whom Goethe adopted the view that God is both immanent with the world and identical

with it. While there is little to suggest direct influence on other aspects of his thought, there

are certain curious similarities. Both think that ethics should consist in advice for influencing

our characters and eventually to making us more perfect individuals. And both hold that

happiness means an inner, almost stoically tranquil superiority over the ephemeral troubles of

the world.

Kant (1724-1804) was doubtless the most famous living philosopher of Goethe’s youth. Yet

Goethe only came to read him seriously in the late 1780s, and even then only with the help of

Karl Reinhold (1757-1823). While he shared with Kant the rejection of externally imposed

norms of ethical behavior, his reception was highly ambivalent. In a commemoration for

Wieland (1773-1813) he asserts that the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/7) is “a dungeon

which restrains our free and joyous excursions into the field of experience.” Like Aristotle

before him, Goethe felt the only proper starting point for philosophy was the direct experience

of natural objects. Kant’s foray into the transcendental conditions of the possibility of such an

experience seemed to him an unnecessary circumvention of precisely that which we are by

nature equipped to undertake. The critique of reason was like a literary critique: both could

only pale in value to the original creative activity. Concerning Kant’s Kritik der praktischen

Vernunft (1788), Goethe was convinced that dicta of pure practical reason, no matter how

convincing theoretically, had little power to transform character. Perhaps with Kant’s ethics in

mind, he wrote, “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is

the most difficult thing in the world.” And “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing

is not enough; we must do.” On the other hand, a letter to Eckermann of April 11, 1827,

indicates that he considers Kant to be the most eminent of modern philosophers. And he

certainly appreciated Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) for having shown that nature and

art each have their ends within themselves purposively rather than as final causes imposed

from without.

Influenced in part by Herder’s conception of Einfühlen, Goethe formulated his own

morphological method (see below). More the Kantian than Goethe, Herder’s belief in Über

den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) that language could be explained naturalistically as a

creative impulse within human development rather than a divine gift influenced Goethe’s

theoretical work on poetry. And the trace of Herder’s claims about the equal worth of

historical epochs and cultures can still be seen in the eclectic art collection in Goethe’s house

on Weimar’s Frauenplan.

3. Scientific Background and Influence

Goethe considered his scientific contributions as important as his literary achievements.

While few scholars since have shared that contention, there is no doubting the sheer range of

Goethe’s scientific curiosity. In his youth, Goethe’s poetry and dramatic works featured the

romantic belief in the ‘creative energy of nature’ and evidenced a certain fascination with

alchemy. But court life in Weimar brought Goethe for the first time in contact with experts

outside his literary comfort zone. His directorship of the silver-mine at nearby Ilmenau

introduced him to a group of mineralogists from the Freiburg Mining Academy, led by Johann

Carl Voigt (1752-1821). His 1784 discovery of the intermaxillary bone was a result of his

study with Jena anatomist Justus Christian Loder (1753-1832). Increasingly fascinated by

botany, he studied the pharmacological uses of plants under August Karl Batsch (1761-1802)

at the University of Jena, and began an extensive collection of his own. He grew dissatisfied

with the system of Linnaeus as an artificial taxonomy of plants, considering it “a shade of a

great harmony, which one must study as a whole, otherwise each individual is a dead letter,”

(Letter to Knebel, 17 November, 1784).

There is a passionate ambivalence about Goethe’s scientific reputation. He has alternately

been received as a universal man of learning whose methods and intuitions have contributed

positively to many aspects of scientific discourse, or else denounced as a dilettante incapable

of understanding the figures— Linnaeus and Isaac Newton—against whom his work is a

feeble attempt to revolt. Goethe’s scientific treatises were neglected by many in the nineteenth

century as the amateurish efforts of an otherwise great poet, one who should have stayed

within the arena that best suited him. Positivists of the early twentieth century virtually

ignored him. Erich Heller claims Goethe “made no contribution to scientific progress or

technique,” (Heller 1952, 7). On the other hand, some of the great scientific minds have

expressed enthusiastic respect and even approval of Goethe’s contributions, among them

Helmholtz, Einstein, and Planck (Cf. Stephenson 1995).

4. Morphology, Compensation, and Polarity

In Goethe’s day, the reigning systematic botanical theory in Europe was that of Carl Linnaeus

(1707-1778). Plants were classified according to their relation to each other into species,

genera, and kingdom. As an empirical method, Linnaeus’s taxonomy ordered external

characteristics — size, number, and location of individual organs — as generic traits. The

problem for Goethe was two-fold. Although effective as an organizational schema, it failed to

distinguish organic from inorganic natural objects. And by concentrating only on the external

characteristics of the plant, it ignored the inner development and transformation characteristic

of living things generally. Goethe felt that the exposition of living objects required the same

account of inner nature as it did for the account of the inner unity of a person.

Goethe believed that all living organisms bore an inner physiognomic ‘drive to formation’ or

Bildungstrieb. In his “First Sketch of a General Introduction into Comparative Anatomy,

Starting from Osteology” (1795), Goethe discussed a law binding the action of the

Bildungstrieb, that “nothing can be added to one part without subtracting from another, and

conversely,” (Goethe 1961-3, 17: 237). This notion of ‘compensation’ bears a likeness to the

laws of vital force put forward by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) and Carl

Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765-1844) in the early 1790s. But whereas their versions dealt with the

generation and corruption of living beings, Goethe sought the common limitations imposed on

organic beings by external nature.

Whereas his earlier romanticism considered nature the raw material on which human

emotions could be imparted, Goethe’s studies in botany, mineralogy, and anatomy revealed to

him certain common patterns in the development and modifications of natural forms. The

name he gave to this new manner of inquiry was ‘morphology’. No static concept,

morphology underwent its own metamorphosis throughout Goethe’s career. Morphology is

first named as such in Goethe’s notes of 1796. But he only fully lays out the position as an

account of the form and transformation of organisms in the 1817 Zur Morphologie. He

continued to publish articles in his journal “On Science in General, On Morphology in

Particular” from 1817 to 1824. Goethe’s key contention here is that every living being

undergoes change according to a compensatory dynamic between the successive stages of its

development. In the plant, for example, this determination of each individual member by the

whole arises insofar as every organ is built according to the same basic form. As he wrote to

Herder on May 17, 1787:

It has become apparent to me that within the organ that we usually address as ‘leaf’ there lies

hidden the true Proteus that can conceal and manifest itself in every shape. Any way you look

at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ that one cannot

think the one without the other. […]With this model and the key to it, one can then go on

inventing plants forever that must follow lawfully; which, even if they don’t exist, still could

exist…

Goethe’s morphology, in opposition to the static taxonomy of Linnaeus, studied these

perceptible limitations not merely in order to classify plants in a tidy fashion, but as instances

of natural generation for the sake of intuiting the inner working of nature itself, whole and

entire. Since all organisms undergo a common succession of internal forms, we can intuitively

uncover within these changes an imminent ideal of development, which Goethe names the

‘originary phenomenon’ or Urphänomen. These pure exemplars of the object in question are

not some abstracted Platonic Idea of the timeless and unchanging essence of the thing, but

“the final precipitate of all experiences and experiments, from which it can ever be isolated.

Rather it reveals itself in a constant succession of manifestations,” (Goethe 1981, 13: 25). The

Urphänomen thus offer a sort of “guiding thread through the labyrinth of diverse living

forms,” (Goethe 1961-3, 17: 58), which thereby reveals the true unity of the forms of nature in

contrast to the artificially static and lifeless images of Linneaus’ system. Through the careful

study of natural objects in terms of their development, and in fact only in virtue of it, we are

able to intuit morphologically the underlying pattern of what the organic object is and must

become. “When, having something before me that has grown, I inquire after its genesis and

measure the process as far back as I can, I become aware of a series of stages, which, though I

cannot actually see them in succession, I can present to myself in memory as a kind of ideal

whole,” (Goethe 1947ff, I/10: 131).

The morphological method is thus a combination of careful empirical observation and a

deeper intuition into the idea that guides the pattern of changes over time as an organism

interacts with its environment. Natural observation is the necessary first step of science; but

because the senses can only attend to outer forms, a full account of the object also requires an

intuition that apprehends an object with the ‘eyes of the mind’. Morphology reveals, “the laws

of transformation according to which nature produces one part through another and achieves

the most diversified forms through the modification of a single organ,” (Goethe 1961-3, 17:

22). While the visible transformations are apparent naturalistically, the inner laws by which

they are necessary are not. They are, in Goethe’s word, dämonisch, apparent intuitively but

unable to be explicated more concretely by means of the understanding.

Whereas Linneaus’ taxonomy only considered the sensible qualities of the object, Goethe

believed a sufficient explanation must address that object in terms of organic wholeness and

development. To do that, the scientist needs to describe the progressive modification of a

single part of an object as its modification over time relates to the whole of which it is the

part. Considering the leaf as an example of this Urphänomen, Goethe traced its

metamorphosis from a seed into the stem, then leaves, then flowers, and finally its stamen or

pistil. This continuous development was described by Goethe as an ‘intensification’ or

Steigerung of the original form.

The oppositional tension between the creative force and the compensatory limitations within

all living things exemplifies the notion of ‘polarity’ or Polarität. In his 1790 essay, “The

Metamorphosis of Plants,” Goethe represented the intensification of a plant as the result of the

interaction between the nutritive forces of the plant and the organic form of the primal leaf.

Polarity between a freely creative impulse and an objectively structuring law is what allows

the productive restraint of pure creativity and at the same time the playfulness and innovation

of formal rules. Polarity also plays a marked role in Goethe’s Farbenlehre (see below), as the

principle of interplay between light and darkness out of which the Urphänomen of color is

exhibited. “With light poise and counterpoise, nature oscillates within her prescribed limits,

yet thus arise all the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are presented to us in

space and time,” (Goethe 1970, xxxix).

Goethe’s theories of morphology, polarity, and compensation each have their roots in his

dramatic and poetic writings. But rather than a fanciful application of an aesthetic doctrine to

the nature, Goethe believed that the creativity great artists, insofar as they are great, was a

reflection of the purposiveness of nature. After all, “masterpieces were produced by man in

accordance with the same true and natural laws as the masterpieces of nature,” (Goethe 1961-

3, 11: 435–6). Goethe’s classicism features a similarly polarized intertwining of the unbridled

creativity of the artistic drives and the formal rules of technique. As with a plant, the creative

forces of life must be guided, trained, and restricted, so that in place of something wild and

ungainly can stand a balanced structure which achieves, in both organic nature and in the

work of art, its full intensification in beauty. As the work of the botanist is to trace the

morphology of an individual according to an ideal Urphänomen, so does it fall to the classical

author to intensify his characters within the contextualized polarity of the plot in a way

simultaneously unique and yet typical. The early drafts of Torquato Tasso (begun in the

1780s), for example, reveal its protagonist as a veritable force of nature, pouring out torrential

feelings upon a conservative and repressed external world. By the time of the published

version in 1790, the Sturm und Drang character of Tasso is polarized against the

aristocratically reposed and reasonable character of Antonio. Only in conjunction with

Antonio can Tasso come into classical fullness and perfection. As the interplay of polarities in

nature is the principle of natural wholeness, so is it the principle of equipoise in the classical

drama. Polarities are also visible in Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahr (1795-6). Again in marked

contrast to an earlier version of the text, in the final version Wilhelm’s romantic love of art

and theatre is now just one piece of his coming-into-himself, which requires its polar

opposite: the restraint inculcated within a conservatively aristocratic society. Only from the

polarized tension does his drive to self-formation achieve intensification and eventually

classical perfection.

5. Philosophical Influence

Goethe’s general influence on European culture is gargantuan. In 19th century Germany

alone, authors like Heine, Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck, Hoffman, and Eichendorff all owe

tremendous debts to Götz and Werther. Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain,

Kurt Tucholsky, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and too many others to name have since paid

tribute to the master from Weimar. Composers like Mozart, Liszt, and Mahler dedicated

works to Goethe’s drama, while Beethoven himself mused that the greatest musical

accomplishment possible would be a perfect musical expression Faust. Goethe’s ideas have

truly launched a thousand ships upon their cultural and intellectual expeditions.

Philosophically, the lineage is comparatively more defined.

In his mature years, Goethe was to witness the philosophical focus in Germany shift from

Kant to the Idealists. But by the early 1800s, Goethe was too convinced of the worth of his

own ideas to be much influenced by what he considered philosophical fashions. Despite his

proximity to and considerable influence at the University of Jena, Goethe had little positive

contact with Fichte (1762-1814), who arrived there in 1794. Neither Fichte’s Pecksniffian

sermonizing nor nearly illegible compositional style would have endeared him personally to

the poet. Goethe’s more ambivalent attitude toward Schelling (1775-1854) vacillated between

an approval of his appreciation for the deep mysteriousness of nature and an aversion to his

futile attempt to solve it by means of an abstracted and artificial system. Schelling’s

Naturphilosophie, like Goethe’s morphology, views nature as a constant organic development.

But where Goethe saw polarity as an essential part of growth, Schelling understood dualities

generally as something to be overcome in the intuition of the ‘absolute’.

Goethe’s relationship with Hegel (1770-1831) was both more direct and more influential.

Most overtly, Hegel’s logic draws upon Goethe’s conception of metamorphosis. A letter from

Hegel to Goethe on February 20, 1821 reads:

The simple and abstract, what you quite aptly call the archetypal phenomenon, this you put

first, and then show the concrete phenomena as arising through the participation of still other

influences and circumstances, and you direct the whole process in such a way that the

sequence proceeds from the simple determining factors to the composite ones, and, thus

arranged, something complex appears in all its clarity through this decomposition. To seek out

the archetypal phenomenon, to free it from other extraneous chance surroundings — to grasp

it abstractly, as we call it — this I consider to be a task for a great spiritual sense for nature,

just as I consider that procedure altogether to be what is truly scientific in gaining knowledge

in this field.

For Hegel, famously, a natural object has achieved its greatest perfection when it brings forth

its full implicit content in explicit conceptual representation. Because the intellectual world

ranks higher than the material, a phenomenology of the whole must observe the gradual

unfolding of all possible logical forms from mere sense certainty through the self-recognition

of consciousness to absolute knowing. To no small degree, Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s lifeless

schematism of the understanding was foreshadowed by Goethe, who wrote, “Reason has to do

with becoming, understanding with what has become. The former does not bother with the

question, ‘what use?’; the latter does not ask ‘whence?’. Reason takes pleasure in

development; understanding wishes to hold everything fixed so that it can exploit it,” (Goethe

1907, 555). Hegel’s formulation of Begriff, which designates the inner plan of the

development of an object, was not wholly unlike Goethe’s Urphänomen (see below). The

Hegelian dialectic, as an unveiling the movement of the concept would then correspond to the

morphology. The problem, for Goethe, was that Hegel’s attempt to articulate wholeness began

by the analysis of the logical concept of Being in the Logik and by the sublimation of the

sense-certain observation of natural objects in the Phänomenologie, which for Goethe

unjustifiably overlooks precisely that which it was the task of science to understand: the

development of the natural forms of life, of which the mind is certainly a central one, but

indeed only one example. As Goethe writes in a letter to Soret on February 13, 1829, “Nature

is always true, always serious, always severe; it is always right, and mistakes and errors are

always the work of men.” Similar to his critique of Kant, then, Goethe accused Hegel of

creating a grand and abstract system to explain a phenomenon which in both ordinary life and

in scientific observation could simply be assumed. Nature presents itself to the

epistemologically reflective and to the naïve equally and without preference.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788-1860) mother Johanna became fast friends with Goethe and his

lover Christiane Vulpius when she moved to Weimra in 1804. His sister Adele was the

lifelong confident of Ottile Pogwisch, who married Goethe’s and Christiane’s son Auguste.

But for the young Arthur, due in part to an unavoidable clash of personalities, the established

Goethe had little patience. Goethe recognized his intelligence early on, but declined to

provide him a letter of recommendation to the university at Göttingen and offered him only a

tepid letter of introduction to the classicist Friedrich August Wolf in Berlin. Schopenhauer’s

dissertation, however, interested Goethe very much. In the winter of 1813-4, Goethe and

Schopenhauer were engaged in extensive philosophical conversation concerning the former’s

anti-Newtonian Farbenlehre (see below), out of which grew the latter’s Über das Sehen und

die Farben in 1815. When Schopenhauer sent him the manuscript in the hopes of a

recommendation, he grew impatient with the elder’s reticence to take his efforts sufficiently

seriously. In truth, Schopenhauer’s work largely revealed Goethe’s as a failed attempt to

overcome Newtonian visual theory, a fact which wounded Goethe deeply. Goethe followed

Schopenhauer’s career with interest, however, and generally praised Die Welt als Wille und

Vorstellung. It remains a question, though, whether Goethe ever read the book carefully since

scant reference to its ideas can be found.

Like that of his Erzieher Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) relationship with Goethe’s

thought was deeply ambivalent. Nietzsche often admired Goethe as emblematic of a healthy,

fully-formed individual. Goethe is said to be “the last German for whom I feel reverence,”

(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” section 51). Nietzsche’s

early contention that the tragic age of culture began only with the fortuitous interaction of the

Apollonian and Dionysian drives bears a similarity to Goethe’s classical understanding of art

as a tensional polarity between the blindly creative will and the constraint of formal rules. Yet

Nietzsche takes Goethe to task for having invested too much in Winckelmann’s attribution of

‘Heiterkeit’ to classical antiquity and thereby for having ignored its deeply irrational

underside. Moreover, Nietzsche’s ontology, if indeed he had one, is like Goethe’s in its

rejection of static atomic substances and in its attempt to conceive an intrinsically agonistic

process of becoming as the true character of the world. Similar, too, to Goethe’s

‘intensification’ principle, Nietzsche’s notoriously ambiguous ‘Will to Power’ characterizes

the dynamic process by which entities ‘become what they are’ by struggling against

oppositional limitations that are at the same time the necessary condition for growth. Due to

this shared ontological outlook, Goethe and Nietzsche both thought contemporary science was

constricted by an outdated conception of substance and, as a result, mechanistic modes of

explanation should be reformulated to account for the dynamic character of nature. Despite

these commonalities, Nietzsche jettisoned Goethe’s Bildungstrieb for an overarching drive–

not to expression or growth within formal constraint—but for overcoming, for power.

Finally, Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) claim that things which cannot be put into propositional

form might nevertheless be shown bears a family resemblance to Goethe’s formulation of the

daimonisch. But where Wittgenstein removes the proverbial ladder on which he ascends to his

intuitions about the relation between logic and the world, thereby reducing what cannot be

bound by the rules of logic as nonsensical, Goethe believed he could communicate what were

admittedly ineffable Urphänomene in a non-propositional way, through the feelings evoked

by drama. There is, moreover, a distinct similarity in Goethe’s and Wittgenstein’s views on

the proper task of philosophy. Its aim, for both, can never be accomplished, once and for all,

by means of ‘the right argument’. Argumentation, explanation, and demonstration only go so

far in their attempt to unravel the mysteries of the world. “Philosophy simply puts everything

before us; it fails to deduce anything,” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 126).

Philosophy’s role in our life should guide us to be reflective people, ever ready to critique

inherited dogmas, and always ready to revise our hypotheses in light of new observations.

Goethe, through his ceaseless energy, limitless fascination with the world as it was presented

to him, and his perpetual willingness to test his convictions against new evidence, carries a

timeless appeal to philosophers, not because he demonstrated or explained what it meant to

live philosophically, but because, through the example of the course of his life, he showed it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Translation

The West-Eastern Divan is the last great cycle of poetry which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1749-1832) worked on. It was first published in 1819, then again in an expanded edition in

1827. While Goethe's first poetry cycle, the Römische Elegien, was strongly influenced by the

writer's interest in classical antiquity, theDivan was stimulated by Goethe's discovery of

a Divan by the Persian poet Hafis, whom he had read in the translation by Joseph von

Hammer-Purgstall in 1814. For most modern readers, the title Divan conjures up images of

Arabian couches and love poetry, but the word is primarily used in Persian to describe an

assembly of people. Figuratively, it is used for a collection of poetry or other literary writings.

Interest in the Orient had intensified over the years, Orientalistik (Oriental Studies) had

become a regular subject taught at universities, and Goethe, now in his sixties, felt

rejuvenated and stimulated by the impulses he perceived this new kind of literature to have on

his own work. In order not to alienate those readers who were not yet familiar with the Orient,

its mores and literary traditions, Goethe appended a second part to the West-Eastern Divan,

namely the Noten und Abhandlungen zu besseren Verständnis des West-östlichen

Divans (Notes and Queries for a Better Understanding...). In this part he comments on terms,

places and historical figures, as well as on the literature, religion, and history of a region

which, at that time, was only known to a few travellers and aficionados. It is in

these Noten where we can also find a short passage dealing with translations, and although

Goethe's Divan is not a translation of Hafi's Divan, we can understand why his discussions of

the difficulty of literary translations involving texts from extremely different cultures also

puts the Nach-Dichter (re-worker) into a favorable light: precisely because he did not attempt

to merely translate, but instead tranfers and adapts ideas and insights from one culture to

another.

Goethe's distinction between the three levels—or epochs—of translation runs contrary to the

hierarchies in translation we are used to working with today. Goethe favors an exact rendering

of meaning, form, images, and style from one language to the next, not at the expense of the

receiving one, but rather for its enrichment! He finds translations which attempt to convey

spirit and style of the original work by using equivalents of syntax and idiom (the French

School) of only limited value, and he allows the free/prose adaptation, which conveys the

spirit but has to alter style, structure, grammar, and idiom of the original only as a first

"reading help."

Walter Benjamin, in "The Task of the Translator," refers to Goethe's Noten as "the best

comment on the theory of translation that has been published in Germany."1At the same time

he praises Rudolf Pannwitz who echoes Goethe in Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur:

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language

happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign

tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go

back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image,

and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign

language.2

Ultimately, Goethe endorses the "interlinear version," literally a translation written between

the lines of the original, to gain access to the full contents (style, meaning, structure, idiom).

One hundred years later Benjamin follows the same path, for, in his opinion, "the translation

must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear version, in which literalness and

freedom are united" (82).

In an interdisciplinary context and for corporatists, Goethe's ideas on the translatability of

texts (which he took for granted) and cultures will still provide a welcome stimulus for further

discussion. The Noten und Abhandlungen have not appeared in English before, so this will be

the first translation of "Translations." The German text is based on Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, Goethes Werke, 7. Band (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1888) 235-239, with some

minor adjustments modernizing spelling and punctuation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s translation theory

It is possible to summarize the theoretical approach of Goethe on translation in three

main points:

1. Translation is the process which deals with conveying the unity of the thought.

2. Translation is the imitation or even copying of the original text in the target language with a

different group of signs.

3. Translation is not only taking out the meaning of the original text, it is the process of

conveying the rhetoric, wording styles, and rhythmic elements in the text at the same time.

It can be deduced that Goethe does not leave aside the artistic elements in the translations of

the texts; instead he props that the unity of the text from the thought and originality aspects

should be reserved totally if possible.

In the article Goethe deals with…

In the first period of translation readers get familiar with the target culture in their own terms.

The example pointed was that of Luther’s German Bible where the foreign matter entered the

daily lives.

In the second phase the translator tends to enter a foreign consciousness and then reconstruct

it in his own expressions assimilating it in his system. This phase is called ‘parodistic’ by

Goethe.

The translator enriches himself in this phase but does so by staying within the limits of his

own sensibility.

In the third phase which is regarded as the highest there was a perfect identity between the

source language text and target language text.

The translator did not have to be taken for the original, but could exist in his own right.

Goethe's distinction between the three levels—or epochs—of translation runs contrary to the

hierarchies in translation we are used to working with today.

Goethe favors an exact rendering of meaning, form, images, and style from one language to

the next, not at the expense of the receiving one, but rather for its enrichment!

He finds translations which attempt to convey spirit and style of the original work by using

equivalents of syntax and idiom (the French School) of only limited value, and he allows the

free/prose adaptation, which conveys the spirit but has to alter style, structure, grammar, and

idiom of the original only as a first "reading help.“

Walter Benjamin, in "The Task of the Translator," refers to Goethe's Noten as "the best

comment on the theory of translation that has been published in Germany.

References

http://www.othervoices.org/2.2/waltje/

http://www.anukriti.net/pgdts/course422/ch5e.html

https://www.goethe.de/en/

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc20.html