In the previous chapter, tracing the conceptualization of the faculty of contemplation, we could see how the appreciation of beauty, to the extent that it was considered an expression of the human capacity to take a disinterested interest, came to be conceived as a universal human feature rather than an acquired taste or marker of social distinction. In this context, especially in the discussion of how the human capacity for taking a disinterested interest was described as the feature that distinguished the human animal from instinct-directed animals, we could also observe the important role played by teleology. And yet, especially in light of the rise of the importance of teleological models during the eighteenth century, their validity was not accepted uniformly across different fields of knowledge and different discursive domains. When teleological models were invoked to fuse or confuse the order of nature and the order of culture, or the domain of the “is” and the domain of the “ought,” there was a possibility of considerable resistance, criticizing this as an abuse of teleology and demanding strict discursive boundaries. In this chapter I will turn to this critical resistance and show how it characterizes an emphatic Enlightenment. I will isolate and highlight two examples of this discourse that call attention to the use of teleological explanations and argue that the inherent purposiveness of natural phenomena, with their appeal to a sense of harmony and beauty, cannot be used to justify human values and moral standards. Instead, as we shall see, this critical discourse would claim the domain of beauty and the aesthetic as its own autonomous domain.
Today Kant’s Critique of Judgment may be the first work that comes to mind when we look for an analysis of what is entailed when we judge something to be beautiful and what it means to attribute purposiveness to natural phenomena.1 However, Kant is by far not the only Enlightenment thinker to reflect on the implications of teleological models of nature in their relationship to our experience of beauty and our aesthetic judgment. Whereas in the case of Kant this critique received its own monograph, in Lessing’s and Goethe’s oeuvre this critique makes its appearance in terms of specific, exemplary interventions in the debate over particular texts. In what follows I will show Lessing’s and Goethe’s highly engaged responses to such texts of their contemporaries, in which teleological models from nature are being smuggled into the moral domain by way of their appeal to beauty. First I will isolate a passage from Lessing’s Laocöon, a work that discusses beauty from a semiotic and media theoretical perspective, then I shall turn to a piece from Goethe’s naturalist writings that discusses beauty from an evolutionary perspective. Although these two pieces are separated by about fifty years and belong to very different discursive contexts, they nevertheless share the same kind of opponent, a teleological discourse that uses the observation of nature with its intrinsic purposiveness as a means of illustrating and justifying human social relations or as a way of installing an anthropocentric cosmology, of situating the human species as the end point and goal of all change in nature.
The concept of nature in the two texts I have chosen to analyze is not the same. Nature in Lessing’s discussion is a stable, more or less static, nature, a nature that has been created by a creator external to it, whose intelligent design can be admired and examined from the point of view of an anatomist, taxonomist, or botanist. Goethe’s text is concerned with nature as a creative force itself. In that the two texts are representative of a major shift that occurred toward the end of the eighteenth century, when the dynamic understanding of nature replaced the predominantly static approach, when natura naturata was replaced by natura naturans and the massive predominantly descriptive and classificatory enterprise of natural history was displaced by the newer life sciences of the nineteenth century. Goethe’s morphological studies both in zoology as well as in botany belong to the newer concern with understanding nature as a generative force, as does the concept of nature and teleology that informs Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was greatly influenced by Blumenbach’s study of polyps and their regenerative capacities. And yet, despite these two very different concepts of nature, as we shall see, what irritates both Lessing and Goethe alike and motivates their vehement intervention is when nature is used to appeal to our sense of beauty and at the same time this invocation of a natural purposiveness and order is used to legitimate social relations, norms, and values.2
In a prominent place of his argument in Laocöon about the difference between the representational possibilities of the verbal arts compared with those of the visual arts, Lessing cites a passage from Albrecht von Haller’s poem “Die Alpen” describing the beauty of a flowering Alpine meadow. For Lessing, the quote serves as an example of a failed poem. It is meant to illustrate Lessing’s argument that description is counterproductive in the verbal arts if the aim is to produce a graphic, vivid effect. Lessing wants to show that, to the extent that they need to be deciphered and remembered, descriptive details encumber the engagement of the listener’s or reader’s imagination and block free and comprehensive access to the overall scene the poem aims to represent. However, Lessing’s choice of this particular passage from Haller’s “Die Alpen,” combined with his devastating criticism, by far exceeds the more technical point about description versus narration that is supposed to be illustrated within the context of his overall argument. What interests me is the fact that the passage Lessing chooses to quote verbatim does not merely engage in detailed visual description, but its description is framed and organized by an extended teleological metaphor of social hierarchy. For Haller compares and moralizes the harmonious order among the manifold Alpine flowers to the well-ordered social hierarchy within a monarchy in the following stanza:
Dort ragt das hohe Haupt vom edeln Enziane
Weit übern niedern Chor der Pöbelkräuter hin,
Ein ganzes Blumenvolk dient unter seiner Fahne,
Sein blauer Bruder selbst bückt sich und ehret ihn.
Der Blumen helles Gold, in Strahlen umgebogen
Türmt sich am Stengel auf, und krönt sein grau Gewand,
Der Blätter glattes Weiß, mit tiefem Grün durchzogen,
Strahlt von dem bunten Blitz von feuchtem Diamant.
Gerechtestes Gesetz! Daß Kraft sich Zier vermähle,
In einem schönen Leib wohnt eine schöne Seele.
There towers the noble gentian’s lofty head,
Far over the common herd of vulgar plants,
A whole flower people ’neath his flag is lead,
E’en his blue brother bends and fealty grants.
In circled rays his flowers of golden sheen
Tower over the stem, and crown its vestments grey;
His glossy leaves of white bestreak’d with green,
Gleam with the watery diamond’s varied ray.
O law most just that might consort with grace
In body fair a fairer soul has place.3
Literally the last line of this stanza would have to be translated: “A beautiful body is the home of a beautiful soul.” Clearly, this stanza does not merely present the reader or listener with an image of a beautiful flowering Alpine meadow through a descriptive enumeration of the various flowers, their colors, names, and relative position toward each other. For this poem also activates a model of signification in nature, made explicit in its last line with the claim that the beauty of the external body stands for the beauty of the soul. In this assertion that external visible features naturally signify a matching invisible counterpart, presented as a poignant paraphrase of the immediately preceding rather hyperbolic normative claim, “O law most just that might consort with grace,” allegory poses as nature. The convertibility of one claim into the other is based on the assumption that a social and cultural order is grounded in a harmonious order of nature rather than on human artifact and convention. Even the narrative aspect of this stanza—an aspect that Lessing in principle should have affirmed, since according to his theory the narration of action tends to engage the imagination of the recipient far better than mere description—does not rescue Haller’s poem from Lessing’s condemnation. For here the narration does not contribute to rendering the Alpine meadow more vivid. Instead, it operates at the allegorical level in which the herbs and flowers are personified as representatives of a hierarchical social order.
The manner in which Lessing subsequently refers to what he takes to be an utterly unfounded praise of Haller’s passage by the famous Swiss critic Breitinger underscores Lessing’s investment in the critique of this kind of ideologically charged approach to beauty in nature:
How can it have been said, that “the most faithful drawing by a painter would appear weak and dull in comparison with this poetic description”? It remains infinitely inferior to what lines and colors can express on canvas, and the critic who praised it in this exaggerated manner must have looked at it from a completely false point of view. He must have paid greater regard to the foreign ornaments which the poet has interwoven with it, to its elevation above vegetable life, to the development of those inner perfections which external beauty serves merely as a shell, than to this beauty itself and the degree of vividness and fidelity of the picture which the painter and the poet respectively can give us.4
Lessing’s sarcastic paraphrase makes it clear that there is no intrinsic necessity to use the image of a hierarchical social order in conjunction with the description of the Alpine flora. This metaphor doesn’t contribute anything to provide the reader with a unified, vivid image, which alone could make the passage truly beautiful. If anything, according to Lessing, it was Breitinger’s own apparent ideological investment in this feudal image that must have distracted him and made him incapable of paying proper attention to what he actually was feeling and capable of imagining when he read the passage. It had the power to distort the way in which he could process his own experience. For Lessing concludes that whoever claims “that these lines, in regard to the impression they make, can compete with the imitation of a Huysum, must either never have questioned his feelings or else have wanted deliberately to belie them.”5 Note how Lessing invokes access to one’s sentiment as an authenticating control for one’s aesthetic judgment in the same context in which he vehemently condemns the transfer of one’s sense of beauty to the social and moral domain.
Lessing’s choice and discussion of the passage from Albrecht von Haller, especially in combination with the example of perfectly acceptable descriptive poetry that he subsequently quotes, calls attention to the political and philosophical stakes that are involved in a sign system that claims to be based naturally in a meaningful order of nature in distinction to a sign system that makes it the distinguishing marker of human language that it operates primarily with arbitrary signs. Immediately following the Haller discussion, Lessing returns to the semiotic paradigm underlying his aesthetic theory, as if to clarify his rejection of the Haller passage. He reminds his reader that, due to its use of arbitrary signs, the depiction of visual detail in poetry is, of course, possible. It merely does not yield the effect of beauty, which can only be achieved if the arbitrary signs of language are used such that they can be deciphered in an effortless manner that makes them appear natural. Then, instead of leaving it at that, Lessing continues to say one might make an exception in the case of didactic poetry, where the attention to detail might have to override the attention to the overall effect. And thus Lessing generates an argumentative context for quoting two brief passages from Virgil’s Georgics, one describing with some detail the features of a cow, the other a foal. These descriptions are to highlight those didactic details that help in selecting the best animals for breeding.
The passage from Virgil’s didactic poem, affirming human intervention in the order of nature through artificial selection, thus represents the strongest possible contrast to the approach to nature and beauty exemplified by the Haller passage. Whereas beauty according to Haller’s poem is part of a teleological natural order, which signifies to man the way things are and should be, even with regard to a social order and hierarchy, beauty in the Virgil passage is in the eye of the beholder who chooses to select an animal that promises to serve his own purposes, whether it is beautiful, as in the case of the little foal, or whether not, as in the case of the heavy, stout, and quite ugly cow, who nevertheless promises to be useful for breeding.
Lessing dwells on the contrast between the Haller and Virgil passage because it allows him to reflect on the advantages of insisting on the strict separation of nature and culture, because his aesthetics and poetics ultimately claims the superiority of poetry over painting, which implies the artificial production of “nature.” According to Lessing, the verbal arts and poetry are graphic or painterly not by simply imitating the visual arts. Unlike painting, poetry does not naturally, or automatically, preside over a repertoire of natural signs. The signs of poetry are the conventional, arbitrary signs of human language. Thus it is only the artistic or poetic use of language, as opposed to the common use of language, that can “naturalize” the repertoire of artificial signs such that the representation appears to be natural and impress the recipient with an effortless access to the signified.
Lessing’s choice of Haller’s famous poem and his vehement criticism of it far exceed his ostensible goal of illustrating how a poem is unsuccessful when it aims to depict a beautiful natural scene by way of description. Beyond this specific, more technical, point, Lessing’s engagement with this particular poem also reflects on the far more extensive implications of two respective philosophies of language and their respective poetics and aesthetics. Haller’s poem, with its commitment to a semiotics of resemblances, grounded in a teleological order of nature, is contrasted with Lessing’s own argument, grounded in a semiotics of representation that argues for an aesthetics and poetics that takes responsibility for art and culture as a deliberate intervention in nature.
As already mentioned, the Goethe piece I will focus on belongs to an entirely different context. It is about eight pages long and was published together with his other scientific writings about botany, anatomy, and changing forms in nature in 1822 under the title “Fossiler Stier” (Fossilized bull). It has been very little discussed or noticed by Goethe scholars or historians of science, although it is one of the relatively few texts in which Goethe directly addresses the teleological implications of species change in the animal realm. Goethe engages with a fellow paleontologist’s claim that species change is motivated by the animal’s trend to adapt to life as a domesticated animal.
It is noteworthy that Goethe does not paraphrase his opponent’s anthropocentric model of species change, which he sets out to refute. Instead, he lets the fellow paleontologist, a certain Mr. Körte, speak in his own voice, providing an extensive citation of a recent article of his. Mr. Körte’s projected speech situation, which is thus brought into relief for Goethe’s reader, is quite remarkable. For it allows us to witness the juxtaposition of the precise description of the anatomical details of the respective bovine skulls, on the one hand, and rather value-laden teleological speculation and anthropomorphic projections and personalizations:
They are lying in front of me like two documents, the one of the archaic steer provides a testimony to what nature had intended from eternity onwards; the one of the bullock provides a testimony of how far nature has succeeded in its efforts so far.—I am looking at the powerfully massive archaic bull, his colossal horn kernels, his deep sunk forehead, his eye-sockets built far towards the side, his flat, narrow hearing chambers … By comparison one should look at the larger eye-sockets of the newer skull which are placed more towards the front … The expression of the newer skull is more thoughtful, more willing, more good-natured … Between the archaic bull and the modern bullock are thousands of years, and I imagine how throughout those thousands of years the ever increasing animal desire to see towards the front eventually changed the position and shape of the eye-sockets of the archaic skull; how the desire to hear more easily, more clearly and from a further distance led to the hearing chambers of that species becoming larger and more concave towards the interior … I imagine how the archaic bull could roam through unlimited spaces and how the thicket of archaic wilderness had to succumb to his raw force; how by contrast the bull of today enjoys rich, well ordered pastures and well formed vegetation; I can comprehend how gradually through animal training today’s bull got used to the joke and to be fed in the stable, how his ear was lead to listen and obey the wonderful human voice, and how his eye got used to and inclined to the upright posture of the human form. The archaic bull existed before the human being, at least before the human being was there for it. Being in contact with and taken care of by the human being has certainly heightened the archaic bull’s organization. Culture has refined, i.e. tamed this unfree animal that lacked reason and was dependent on assistance into a bullock that would eat while chained and in a stable, that would be on the pasture herded by a dog and tolerate to be led by a stick and a whip.6
The guiding distinction in Körte’s argument and the criterion for the animal’s “refinement” and “nobility” consists in the contrast between an animal whose sensory organs, eyes, and ears appear far removed and relatively independent from a relatively small brain and an animal for whose sensory organs the connection to the brain appears very close, for whom the brain seems to operate as a central organ. To this distinction Körte adds a developmental trajectory that seeks the causes of change in nature’s desire to adapt an individual species ever more to human purposes.
Goethe’s own approach to change in nature has no place for this kind of an anthropocentric functionalism. One might even wonder why Goethe would bother to engage with this rather inconsequential hobby paleontologist. Goethe’s position is clear from many of his other morphological writings. He refrains from privileging one species and subordinating the goal of development under the purposes and intentions of that species. Thus Goethe pointedly formulated in an earlier piece:
The singular cannot be a model for the whole and this is why we must not try to find a model for the totality in the individual case. Classes, genres, species and individuals are related to the law like individual cases; they are contained by it but they are not able to provide the blueprint of the law. The human being with its high degree of organic perfection, in fact exactly because of having attained this high degree of perfection is the last to be taken as a norm or measure for the other, less perfect animals. No creature, neither in its species, nor in its relative position to others should be studied and described in those terms one must take recourse to as soon as one focuses exclusively on the human being.7
According to Goethe, each animal species remains its own telos, and the overall goal consists in an ever increasing biodiversity rather than the advantages of the human race. So why does he bother to cite Körte and devote an entire essay to this discussion?
Goethe’s article on the fossilized bull, however, does not argue against Körte’s anthropocentric teleology on those general grounds. Nor, via highly selective quotation, does he even engage Körte’s religiously inspired form of physico-theology. Instead, Goethe’s argument proceeds, on the one hand, by providing counterexamples to Körte’s arguments and, on the other hand, by introducing an entirely different teleological model, one that involves an argument about aesthetics and beauty in nature. By looking at a whole range of hoofed animals, both wild and domesticated, Goethe demonstrates that the relative specialization of the sensory organs and the related size of the brain are not signs of an animal’s increasing degree of domestication, since these characteristics can be found in both contemporary wild as well as domesticated species.8 The conclusion to be drawn from this is, of course, that the causes of change in nature are entirely unrelated to the needs of the human species.
Finally, as if to sum up his critique of Körte’s anthropocentric teleology, Goethe introduces a new set of observations. Goethe remarks that the long horns of the prehistoric bull were strictly nonfunctional, of no good use for the bull whatsoever because they were bent sideways. Their only raison d’être was their beauty, as if to illustrate William Hogarth’s argument about the line of beauty, which says that beauty consists in an irregular spiral. Then, after Goethe has situated beauty in a cosmic order not centered around the human animal, Goethe proceeds to conclude his argument against Körte’s teleology by pointing out how man’s cultivating efforts were inspired by natural beauty, that primitive man was attracted to the hoofed animals not merely for their usefulness but for their beauty—moreover, until this day farmers would artificially correct the horns of those animals born with certain deformities. And, as if to drive home the point about biodiversity both as the direction of ever changing forms in nature and as one aspect of a purely nonfunctional observation of nature, one that would give rise to aesthetic pleasure, Goethe places a quote from a commentary on Virgil’s Georgics at the end of his essay, which distinguishes three different kinds of cows exclusively with regard to the shape and direction of their horns.
By way of this quote, which functions like an envoi, Goethe signs his article as a pagan and decidedly this-worldly intervention in its critique of a Christian inspired physico-theological approach to nature. Goethe even gives a separate heading to this final quote: “Vorläufiges aus dem Altertum,” which can mean that we can find precursors or a preliminary/unfinished sketch in antiquity. Goethe thus additionally marks his critique of Körte’s teleology as a critique of a linear model of progress. He attributes to classical antiquity the power to aid us in breaking out of our contemporary frame of mind. His quote seems to suggest that in classical antiquity there was a noteworthy ethos of appreciating beauty for its own sake, just for the pure pleasure of it, without didacticism and without any other utility. This attitude toward beauty would be the perfect cure for the contemporary frame of mind and would allow us to gain a different sense of direction. At this point Goethe has transformed the focus of his scientific essay, namely the question how we understand change in nature and what alternative we have to a religiously inspired teleological model, into a model that argues for biodiversity as the engine and goal of change, as something that provides the source of purely aesthetic enjoyment rather than religious edification.9
Both Lessing’s and Goethe’s texts are very different in their focus and their overall concerns. Nevertheless, each author’s turn to aesthetics involves a critique of teleology when discussing beauty in nature. Moreover, and this is the most important aspect of Lessing’s and Goethe’s interventions, they both criticize their opponent’s uses of teleology through their rhetorical strategies. Albrecht von Haller describes the flora of an alpine meadow as if it were a naturally grounded allegory of social hierarchies, and Körte describes the direction of species change by personifying nature’s desire to be better suited to human interests and then by narrating species change through a focalization that animates and personalizes anatomical change. In either case, the criticism operates at two levels, in terms of a spirited argument along semiotic lines, in the case of Lessing, and in view of concrete counterexamples, drawn from the comparison of wild and domesticated animals, in the case of Goethe, at the textual, rhetorical levels. They both provide extensive quotes of the exact articulation of their opponent, quotes that put their opponent’s confusion of the nature/culture distinction into stark relief, and they both insert a citation from classical antiquity to depersonalize their intervention and to shift the discussion toward a more general terrain that reflects on the relationship between nature and culture as it has been concretely and metaphorically worked out in the domain of agriculture and husbandry. When Lessing and Goethe turn against what they characterize as ideological abuses of teleology, as abuses of the fusion of nature and culture, they do so in order to claim that very same territory for aesthetics and poetics as a separate, autonomous domain. Whereas, as we have seen in this chapter, this demand for aesthetic autonomy is to shield the aesthetic realm from moralistic and ideological appropriations, even, or especially, when it comes to beauty in nature, and assert the difference between the order of culture and the order of nature, when it comes to actual artistic production, something quite different from the appreciation of beauty, nature plays an altogether different role. For in that latter case, as I will show in the following chapter, nature as a creative force provides the model for radical innovation and sets the original artist apart from the merely skilled technician.