Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, and natural philosopher, the central figure of his nation’s literature and a working scientist whose interests reached into territory the modern academy keeps at arm’s length. Born at Frankfurt am Main on 28 August 1749 into a prosperous patrician household, he was sent to study law at Leipzig, and there, in 1768, a serious illness broke off his studies and sent him home. The year of convalescence that followed turned him toward books his university curriculum never assigned — and the cast of mind he formed in that room never wholly left him. He spent most of his adult life at the small court of Weimar, where he served as administrator, theater director, and adviser while producing the body of work — The Sorrows of Young Werther, the Wilhelm Meister novels, the lyric poetry, and above all Faust — that made him a European institution within his own lifetime.

Weimar and the public life

The move that fixed his career came in late 1775. Karl August, the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, drawn by the European fame of Werther — the 1774 novel of a sensitive young man’s suicide that had made Goethe instantly notorious and set off a wave of imitation across the continent — invited the author to his court. Goethe arrived in November and never left. He was made privy councillor (Geheimrat) and drawn into the working machinery of a small German state: he sat on the council, oversaw mines and reopened the silver workings at Ilmenau, managed roads and war commissions, and pressed reforms at the nearby University of Jena. From 1791 he directed the Weimar theater, a post he held for more than two decades, premiering on its stage the plays of Friedrich Schiller, whose close friendship from 1794 until his death in 1805 was the most productive literary partnership of Goethe’s life. An Italian journey of 1786–88 had broken the administrative routine and remade his sense of art and nature alike; he returned a classicist, and a man increasingly certain that the study of living form would occupy him as much as verse.

The works of these decades are the spine of German literature. The two Wilhelm Meister novels — the Apprenticeship (1795–96) and the much later Journeyman Years (1821, recast 1829) — gave the German language its model of the Bildungsroman, the novel of a soul’s formation; the lyric poetry, from the early storm-and-stress hymns to the late West-östlicher Divan, set the standard generations measured themselves against. But the work that ran the whole length of his life, begun in his twenties and finished the year he died, was Faust.

The hermetic formation

The esoteric thread in Goethe is real and documented, mostly by his own hand. In his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”), he records that during the long illness of his early twenties he read deeply in alchemical and mystical literature — Paracelsus among others, along with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theosophers whose books circulated in Pietist Frankfurt. The decisive companion of that reading was Susanna Katharina von Klettenberg (1723–1774), a Pietist mystic of his mother’s circle who guided his devotional life and shared his fascination with the old chemistry; he would later draw her portrait as the Beautiful Soul whose confessions form a book of the Wilhelm Meister apprenticeship. Together they worked through Georg von Welling’s vast Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum, a labyrinth of salt, sulphur, and mercury laced with Kabbalah and theology, and the anonymous Aurea Catena Homeri — and Goethe set up a small laboratory at home, attempting with retort and sand-bath the operations the old books described. The vocabulary he absorbed there was the late inheritance of the Renaissance natural philosophy in which alchemy, Christian Kabbalah, and the magic of correspondences had been a single fabric, and behind it the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed Egyptian sage to whom the doctrine of the world as a living, ensouled whole was traced.

That formation did not survive intact into his mature outlook. He became, in many respects, a skeptic of systems and a man of empirical observation, and he narrates the alchemical episode in his memoir with the faint, fond irony of a man describing a youthful enthusiasm outgrown. But the cast of mind left a residue that runs through everything after: a conviction that nature is one moving whole, that its parts answer to one another, and that the right way to know it is to attend to what it shows rather than to take it apart. The operations he had abandoned became metaphors he never stopped reaching for.

Faust

Faust, the work of his whole career, is where the residue is most visible. The scholar who signs a pact with Mephistopheles is a figure drawn from the same sixteenth-century German legend that grew up around the historical magus — the chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten of 1587, later dramatized by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe — and Goethe worked at the material across sixty years. An early draft, the Urfaust, dates from before his move to Weimar, around 1772–75; Faust. Ein Fragment appeared in 1790; the First Part of the finished tragedy was published in 1808; the Second Part, on which he labored to the end, was completed in 1831 and printed in 1832, the year of his death.

He fills the drama with alchemical and Kabbalistic imagery. In the opening night-scene the despairing Faust opens a book of Nostradamus and contemplates the sign of the macrocosm — the emblem of the cosmos as a single interlocking order, the doctrine of correspondence rendered as a diagram — before turning to conjure the Earth Spirit, the Erdgeist, the surging power of nature’s own becoming. In the Second Part Mephistopheles sends him on the strangest of these errands: the descent to the Mothers, the realm of pure forms deep beneath the world, reached by a glowing key, from which Faust must fetch the ideal shape of Helen of Troy. None of this is instruction. Goethe handles the conjuring and the descent as imagery — figures for the artist’s reach toward the archetype, the source from which living shapes arise — not as a manual of operation. Scholarship has long argued over how seriously to take the material: whether it is genuine hermetic conviction or a poet’s command of a rich symbolic inheritance. The more cautious reading holds that Goethe used the imagery as imagery, with a clear eye, without subscribing to its claims; the bolder reading, urged most fully by Ronald Gray, finds the alchemical pattern of death and renewal — dissolution and coagulation, the coniunctio of opposites — structuring the whole arc of the drama from Gretchen’s ruin to Faust’s final ascent.

Morphology and the archetypal leaf

His scientific work carries the same ambiguity into a different key. Against the analytic, dissecting method of his day he pursued what he was the first to call morphology: the study of living form as a developing whole, governed by an underlying type from which the visible parts unfold. The most famous fruit of it was the Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (the Metamorphosis of Plants) of 1790, with its claim that all the organs of a flowering plant — sepal, petal, stamen, the rest — are transformations of a single archetypal leaf, expansions and contractions of one form moving through a sequence of stages. The plant, on this reading, is not a machine assembled from parts but a single gesture caught in successive moments; in his journal Goethe called the leaf the true Proteus, hiding and revealing itself in every vegetal shape. Behind the particular plants stood the Urpflanze, the archetypal plant — the type itself, which he half-expected to find growing somewhere and half-knew he carried in his own seeing.

The status of that type was exactly the point at issue between him and Schiller. When Goethe sketched the Urpflanze and described it as something he had seen with his own eyes, Schiller answered that it was not an experience but an idea — the Kantian objection that the type is a regulative concept the mind brings to nature, not an object nature presents. Goethe replied, with some satisfaction, that he was glad to have ideas without knowing it and to see them with his own eyes. The exchange marks the fault line of his whole science: he refused the separation of the perceiving mind from the perceived form, holding that disciplined attention could read the idea in the phenomenon rather than imposing it from outside. He extended the same intuition to anatomy, arguing for an archetypal vertebrate plan and, against the consensus of his day, for the presence of the intermaxillary bone in the human upper jaw — a small correct prediction that vindicated the method in one place at least. The morphological notebooks (the Hefte zur Morphologie, 1817–24) gathered the program into a science of formative process, of Bildung, that anticipated much in later developmental biology even where its metaphysics fell away.

The Theory of Colors, against Newton

His most combative scientific undertaking set itself directly against Isaac Newton. The Zur Farbenlehre, the Theory of Colors of 1810 — a work in three parts, didactic, polemical, and historical, the longest single thing he ever wrote — insisted that color arises at the boundary between light and darkness rather than from the decomposition of white light. Where Newton’s Opticks had passed sunlight through a prism and resolved it into a spectrum, treating white as a compound and the colors as its hidden constituents, Goethe held white to be simple and indivisible, and the colors to be born wherever light and shadow meet at an edge — yellow on the light side, blue on the dark, the spectrum a phenomenon of borders. The polemical section parses the Opticks line by line in fierce terms; the work’s foundation is what he called the Urphänomen, the primal phenomenon, the irreducible appearance behind which the investigator should not try to reason. As physical optics this was wrong, and was known to be wrong in his own lifetime — Newton’s account holds, and Goethe’s prismatic experiments do not overturn it. As a phenomenology of perceived color, an attempt to describe what the eye actually does at a threshold, it kept its admirers: Schopenhauer built on it, Turner painted from it, and Wittgenstein returned to it in his Remarks on Colour. Goethe himself prized the Farbenlehre above all his poems, and the misjudgment is of a piece with his strength — a refusal to let the abstraction stand in for the seen thing, carried past the point where the abstraction happened to be right. The deeper quarrel was not with Newton alone but with the whole program of mathematizing nature that ran from Galileo forward — the conviction that the measurable, decomposed quantity is the real and the perceived quality a mere effect in the observer. Goethe staked everything on the opposite order: the seen quality is the phenomenon, and the number is the abstraction drawn off it.

Scholarship and reception

The recovery of Goethe’s esoteric formation as a serious object of study belongs largely to the twentieth century. The landmark work is Ronald D. Gray’s Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge University Press, 1952; reissued 2010), which traced the alchemical reading of his youth through the imagery of Faust and the structure of the scientific work, and argued that the formation shaped him for life rather than being shed with his other enthusiasms. Antoine Faivre, who did more than anyone to make Western esotericism an academic field, set Goethe within “The Germanic Contribution: Naturphilosophie and Theosophy” in Access to Western Esotericism (State University of New York Press, 1994), where the doctrine of living nature is read as a late, secularized flowering of the theosophical current that ran from Boehme through the Pietist circles of Goethe’s youth. Wouter Hanegraaff’s Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006) gives the figure his place in the reference apparatus of the field. The primary texts of the science — the morphological writings, the Farbenlehre — are gathered in the great Weimar edition, the Sophien-Ausgabe, on which Goethe’s later editors labored at the archive that still bears his name.

The afterlife divided along a fault as old as the work itself. The Romantics took him up as the poet of a living, ensouled nature: the Naturphilosophie of Schelling drew on the morphological intuition, and the English reception that ran through Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the visionary kinship felt by William Blake carried a Goethean sense of organic form into a different language. Across the Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson made Goethe one of his Representative Men, the chosen type of the writer, and read in him the self-reliant seer of nature’s law. A century later Aldous Huxley returned to the Farbenlehre’s phenomenology of the seen as a witness against a science that explained the world by explaining the color out of it. The most consequential editor of the scientific writings was Rudolf Steiner, who as a young man prepared Goethe’s natural-scientific works for Kürschner’s Deutsche National-Litteratur in four volumes between 1883 and 1897, supplying introductions to the botany, zoology, geology, and color theory — work that won him a place at the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar from 1888. On the morphological idea of a living thinking adequate to living form he later built much of the spiritual science that became the movement he founded, and he named its headquarters at Dornach the Goetheanum.

How much of all this Goethe would have endorsed is uncertain. He was a man who had handled the hermetic material early, set most of it down, and kept what served his eye — and the keeping is what the later readers came back for.

→ In the library: Rudolf Steiner: Early Works

→ Related: William Blake · Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Hermes Trismegistus · Paracelsus · Mephistopheles · Alchemy · Kabbalah · Rudolf Steiner · Isaac Newton · Renaissance Natural Philosophy · Galileo Galilei · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Aldous Huxley