Nature as the Mirror of Spirit: Textual Images of Self and Other in Bettina von Arnim's "Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde." (original) (raw)
2020
According to a popular view Goethe was an "Augenmensch", 1 literally, an "eye person", a mind touched in notable ways by the power of visual images. This descriptor, to which a passage from Faust has added further weight, 2 is useful in that it highlights a prominent aspect of Goethe's sensibility-his response to physical beauty and the strong emotions it arouses, a feature of his early love poetry, and his intellectual interest in the origin and nature of physical light and what can be drawn from knowledge of its effects, such as we find in pithy observations throughout his major works, 3 or, more programmatically, in the Colour Theory, Goethe's quarrelsome disquisition leveled against Newton. We can even go further and see in Goethe's profound, celebratory awareness of the attributes and suggestiveness of the manifestations of physical life an anticipation of the modernity he helped engender, the tendency of the modern to concretize and sensualize images in a visual regime that would speak of the cognitive achievement of canonical vision. The "eye person" Goethe, from this angle, seems thoroughly our ancestor, a visionary who helped loosen the constrictions of medieval Europe, which cleaved perhaps more to the aural sense and, at best, inner sight, and who, in figures such as
Revisited after 65 years an important article by a leading Goethe expert
L. A. Willoughby's article entitled "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry" in Etudes Germanques in 1951 remains even after 65 years the only study ofa cental phenomenon not only regarding Goethe's poetry but the entir age in which Goehe and Romantic poets, bot German and British, lived and worked. The essentially logocentic method employed by Willoughby together with his proposition that the collective unconscious influences the choice and arrangement of words in poetry, suppy the basis for exploring beyond the aegis of Goethe's poetic works and perhaps undestanding them even better as a result.
The Soul of Goethe’s Thought (by Mark Herrbach)
Studia Gilsoniana 9:2, 2020
Goethe’s philosophical writings all ultimately stem from his efforts to understand the creative act, which he experienced as essentially the same in all the various forms of activity he engaged in, the writing of his poems, novels and plays, his scientific investigations, his service to the Weimar state and participation in the life of its court. In contemplating his creative experience, he developed a unique conception of the soul, which this article seeks to analyze.
2021
This essay is about two kinds of reading: physiognomy and hermeneutic phenomenology. Physiognomy is the pseudo-science of reading an individual’s outer appearance, behaviour, and movement to determine inner character and psychology. In the Western tradition of physiognomy, the earliest surviving texts on the subject date back to classical Athens. Physiognomy continued to attract attention throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, but it was Swiss author Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) who brought renewed attention to physiognomy through a series of fragmentary writings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) knew Lavater and encouraged him to write about physiognomy; Richard Gray (2004) has characterized Goethe as the “father of modern physiognomics.” Pioneered by Paul Ricoeur, hermeneutic phenomenology similarly attempts to understand and interpret subjective experience. The primary aim of this essay is to find conceptual intersections between Lavater’s physiognomics and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology. To this end, the first part of this essay will provide close readings of Goethe’s literary works through the theoretical perspectives of Lavater and Ricoeur. In the second part of this essay, I will situate Lavater’s writings in the intellectual context of eighteenth-century philosophers Hume, Kant, and Hegel. In the final part of the essay, I will focus on Eugène Delacroix’s (1798-1863) physiognomic illustrations for his 1828 edition of Goethe’s Faust to argue that physiognomy is an important aspect of Goethe’s writings and aesthetics as well as an integral component to the afterlives and reception of his writings.
Goethe's way of science: A phenomenology of nature
1998
In this article, I argue that Goethe's way of science, understood as a phenomenology of nature, might be one valuable means for fostering a deeper sense of responsibility and care for the natural world. By providing a conceptual and lived means to allow the natural world to present itself in a way by which it might speak if it were able, Goethe's method offers one conceptual and applied means to bypass the reductive accounts of nature typically produced by standard scientific and humanist perspectives. I illustrate this possibility largely through examples from Goethe's Theory of Color (1810). In a recent article, naturalist and wildlife writer Charles Bergman argues that our current intellectual understanding of animals is too often dismissive or reductive (Bergman, 2002, 142). 1 For scientists, he says, the danger is to treat animals, not as autonomous creatures with their own lived constellations of experience, but as Cartesian automatons whose behaviors can be explained by instincts, stimulus-response mechanisms, evolutionary concepts, genetic programming, or some other imposed system of explanation. On the other hand, Bergman also questions many humanists', writers', and artists' understanding of animals, which too often, he says, become little more than "allegories of human fear and desire" or are given up entirely as "radically unknowable beneath human representation" (ibid., 143). He concludes that "Animals are not only texts that we produce. We need an ethos more favorable to animals, more open to the creature as a living presence" (ibid., 146). In this article, I argue that Goethe's way of science, understood as a phenomenology of nature, might be one valuable means for fostering this openness toward the living presence of the natural world, including its animals but also its plants, its terrestrial forms, its ecological regions, its formations of earth, sky and water, its sensual presence as expressed, for example, through light, darkness, and color. The Goethe here to whom I refer is, of course, the eminent German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who also produced a considerable body of scientific work that focused on such aspects of the natural world as light, color, plants, clouds, weather, and geology. In its time, Goethe's way of science was highly unusual because it