Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition,” a text that was to become particularly important for the German Storm and Stress poets of the early 1770s,1 introduces its approach to originality with the following image: “An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius: it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of preexistent materials not their own.”2 The talent of producing original works is not acquired but constitutive of the artistic genius’s nature. The notion of genius in the sense of “talent” (ingenium) and the notion of being a genius, where genius becomes the distinguishing feature that defines a person’s, work’s, or collectivity’s individuality, appear interchangeably in Young’s text. The more modern use of being a genius probably has been grafted on the term genius from ancient Roman mythology, where it denotes the tutelary spirit watching over an individual. In the case of Young’s concept of the vegetable genius, producer and product are inseparably connected, part of the same living organism. The process of production generates a whole form according to its own laws; the final shape of the product is akin to the nature of the specific organism: it is not dictated or acquired from the outside; it cannot be forced or artificially fabricated; it represents a naturally produced whole.
As Young continues to argue, original and imitation differ not only with regard to their respective mode of production but also in their impact on a beholder or reader: “We read Imitation with somewhat of his languor, who listens to a twice-told tale: Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger; and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land: And tho’ it comes, like an Indian Prince, adorned with feathers only, having little of weight; yet of our attention it will rob the more Solid, if not equally New: Thus every Telescope is lifted at a new-discovered star; it makes Astronomers in a moment, and denies equal notice to the sun” (13). Genuine originality is not just a new fashion, but it is the freedom from all convention and fashion that makes it so striking, beautiful, noble and exotic. The exotic stranger arouses not so much marvel, admiration, pleasure, awe, or approval but, above all, the desire to learn news from a strange land, i.e., the distinctly modern passion of curiosity.3
The fact that the original captures our attention by being so different from all we know does not mean that it can be imported. Young demands local genius. It is when he describes how to overcome the current paucity of originals, for which he blames the intimidating effects of illustrious examples from classical antiquity, that he deploys again the image of the noble stranger. For it is by finding the “stranger within” that one can avoid the damaging influence of powerful examples:
Therefore dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full sort of mind; contract full intimacy with the Stranger within thee; excite, and cherish every spark of Intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull dark mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a body, let thy Genius rise (if a Genius thou hast) as the sun from Chaos; and if I should then say, like an Indian, worship it, (though too bold) yet should I say little more than … Reverence thyself.
(53)
Young’s advice to acquire self-knowledge does not simply mean that one should become familiar with oneself but also that one must actively seek a difference within oneself. The image of the stranger within is part of a set of instructions on how to change one’s self, how to distinguish within oneself a source of originality; in that sense it is part of a technology of the self. The stranger within is the part of the self that needs to be isolated through the process of differentiating that which is merely part of one’s acquired cultural context, fashion, and commonplace from that which is a truer, more authentic self. It is noteworthy that this search for our own, innermost nature is quite different from a Christian examination of conscience. Indeed, Young even draws attention to this: instead of fallen nature in need of redemption, we are advised to seek within an unblemished, pristine nature, and this inner nature is to be worshiped “like an Indian” in a scene that to his contemporary readers must have evoked a scenario of pagan idolatry.
A schematic summary of Young’s figures of original genius highlights the following: the image of the vegetable genius emphasizes the inseparable bond between the individuality of the maker and her or his product, and it opposes the totality and uniqueness of the product of genius to any cultural product, anything pieced together according to recognizable rules, that would provide the recipe for its reproduction or imitation. The image of the stranger within is part of a set of prescriptions on how to become a genius and on how to avoid being merely an imitator. As part of a conscious practice of the self it appeals to a process of separating one’s own inner nature from what is culturally conditioned.
The model of history invoked by Young’s idea of innovation is one of linear, cumulative progress. This is expressed, for instance, when he asks: “Knowledge physical, mathematical, moral, and divine, increases; all arts and sciences are making considerable advance; … these are as the root, and composition, as the flower; and as the root spreads, and thrives, shall the flower fail?” (75). As Bernhard Fabian has shown, Young models his genius on the image of the seventeenth-century scientist à la Bacon when he explains the kind of common benefits to be expected from an increase in original composition with the image of territorial gain: “Originals are, and ought to be great favourites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion” (69).4 In brief, Young’s genius is partly conquistador, partly empirical scientist and inventor.
The historicist model of genius is most prominently articulated in Herder’s programmatic essay on Shakespeare. Thus he argues that even the oeuvre of such a great artist as Shakespeare will eventually no longer be relevant and accessible:
Sadder and more important is the thought that even this great creator of history and the world soul grows older every day, that the words and customs and categories of the age wither and fall like autumnal leaves, that we are already so far removed from these great ruins of the age of chivalry that … even Shakespeare’s drama will become quite incapable of living performance, will become the dilapidated remains of a colossus, of a pyramid, which all gaze upon with wonder and nobody understands.5
However, Herder’s genius is not only a transitory historical phenomenon, which springs up, blossoms, bears fruit, and then dies away like all natural and deeply historically situated cultural phenomena. For, according to Herder, the genius is also an alter deus in what he produces. The original genius does not merely express the individual character of a historically specific culture; there is no simple continuity between original genius and its historical context. In fact, Herder illustrates the relationship between an original work and its surrounding cultural conditions with the image of the fruit or nut and its shell. The achievement of original genius, according to Herder, lies in the creation of a discrete, perfectly individualized totality out of the historically available material.
Whereas the organic image of the vegetable in Young was used primarily to illustrate the distinction between the radical novelty of an original and the imitation, which is mechanically fabricated according to a known recipe with known ingredients, Herder assigns an additional function to the organicist analogy: it establishes a parallel between the overall teleology of an ever changing nature and the work of art. Thus Shakespeare’s genius consisted in his ability to work with the heterogeneous elements and the apparent chaos of his own world and shape these elements into perfectly individualized wholes. Shakespeare thus seems to approach his contemporary culture like the creator, who alone can oversee the totality of his creation. In other words, the playwright’s intelligent design, which the audience can only assume or stipulate as the cause or controlling instance behind the artwork’s perfect illusion, is what makes the artistic genius into an alternate god:
Step before his stage as before an ocean of events, where wave crashes into wave. Scenes from nature come and go, each affecting the other, however disparate they appear to be; they are mutually creative and destructive, so that the intention of the creator, who seems to have combined them all according to a wanton and disordered plan, may be realized—dark little symbols forming the silhouette of a divine theodicy. … He who embraces a hundred scenes of a world event in his arms, orders them with his gaze, and breathes into them the one soul that suffuses and animates everything; he who captivates our attention, our heart, our every passion, our entire soul from beginning to end—if not more, then let Father Aristotle bear witness: “Creatures and other organic structures must have magnitude and yet be easily taken in by the eye;” and here—good heavens!—how Shakespeare feels the whole course of events in the depths of his soul and brings it to its conclusion! A world of dramatic history, as vast and profound as Nature: but it is the creator who gives us the eyes and the vantage point we need to see so widely and deeply!6
Herder does not claim that the original genius provides the audience with a view, explanation, or justification of the chaos, misery, and injustice in this world. The artist does not supply the blueprint of a theodicy; quite to the contrary, it is the coherence and economy of his artistically shaped play that suggests a controlling point of view, the creator’s position, which can oversee the whole in such an ordering fashion that everything comes naturally, organically together as a distinctly individualized totality. The whole that is produced by the artist is the organized totality of an aesthetic illusion that manages to draw the reader or audience into its imaginary universe.
Herder’s model of Shakespeare’s dramatic genius shows the distinct discursive function that was taken up by the organicist metaphor in the reorganization of the arts and sciences. For Herder not only decouples the product of genius from the professions and crafts that proceed with fixed rules of what constitutes excellence in their practice as Young does; Herder also separates the products of genius from those domains that subscribe to a realist epistemology and a model of progress. All of the fine arts, including architecture, can produce works of original genius, but all the professions, mechanical arts, and the sciences are excluded from the realm of genius production. With Herder we witness a decisive reformulation of originality: original no longer means radically new with regard to what is known within any given tradition, but rather it means radically individualized, uniquely differentiated, organized, and put together. With Herder’s model of the artwork as a quasi-organic totality, we can see what gave rise to the emergence of the secular hermeneutic procedures that were to inform the study of literature and art for a good two hundred years to come, namely all those forms of textual commentary that attempt to do justice to the uniqueness and individuality of the work of art, be they types of close readings, biographical criticism, an analysis of the distinct form as the individualizing deviance from generic patterns or rhetorical conventions, or impressionistic readings that would attempt to bring out the individuality of a work of art by documenting the encounter with the individuality of the specific critic.
In order to conclude the discussion of this second model of originality, I shall turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, paragraphs 46–50, where within an Enlightenment discourse on originality we can find the most thorough reflection on the status of the genius vis-à-vis the different domains of technology and knowledge production and the arts. Moreover, Kant relates the particular kind of innovation that is produced by original genius to an overall understanding of history and nature. Both Herder and Kant are aware of the proximity and distance of their respective understanding of the work of genius to a traditional, theologically informed teleology, namely a theodicy. The mind of the playwright in Herder’s case appears as a virtual illustration of the kind of superior organizing mind that would constitute the mind of the creator. When Kant, however, defines genius as “the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art,”7 he does not even bring into play the issue of intelligent design as the mind behind a complex meaningful totality; rather he invokes nature as a radically generative and innovative force. Moreover, unlike Herder’s model of genius production, Kant’s definition is based on a clear distinction rather than the continuity between nature and culture.
Kant’s definition of genius emphasizes that in the case of original genius the relationship between nature and art is inverted. Whereas normally it is art that gives the rule to nature, in the case of genius it is the other way around. In contrast to the traditional understanding of art as techne, as a set of experientially based rules and prescriptions of the kind we can find in the traditional crafts and technology, we find art as a site of original innovation that is exactly opposed to the traditional, rule-based understanding of art. And yet not everything original is a product of genius. According to Kant, there is also such a thing as “original nonsense.” Although the products of original genius cannot be accounted for by any given set of rules or prescriptions, they must be able to inform the standards by which we create and judge such works. On the one hand, the products of genius do not translate into a continuous tradition or coherent paradigm that could be taught and that would be understood in terms of a model of progress—and here is the rationale for Kant’s exempting scientific discovery and insight, even Newton, from the domain of original genius. On the other hand, works of original genius must inspire emulation, not imitation. They have the capacity to incite the productivity and creativity of other artists across any particular historical context or horizon exactly because they cannot be reduced to any one specific tradition.8
The ability of genius to break away from tradition and the ability of art to cut across tradition and varying historical contexts and thus to incite radical innovation is what interests me in the third model of originality. This aspect of genius is not encompassed by Herder’s historicist model, although, as we have seen, it is crucial to Kant’s. However, it is further elaborated in Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann. I have chosen this much later essay by Goethe, written on the occasion of introducing a posthumous collection of Winckelmann’s letters in 1805, because it allows us to see yet another aspect of the Enlightenment discourse on genius. The essay is of interest for the way it positions genius historically (choosing a well-known Enlightenment figure as a polemic against the Romantics) and pragmatically (with respect to the position of genius in the arts and sciences). For Winckelmann was neither a scientist nor a practicing artist, but a scholar. However, Winckelmann was not just an accomplished scholar operating within the paradigm of Enlightenment antiquarian descriptions of ancient artifacts, but was capable of finding a radically new approach to Greek art. This cobbler’s son from the provinces became the founder of the discipline of art history.
Goethe begins his essay on Winckelmann with a general typology of talent, which distinguishes: 1. Ordinarily gifted persons, who attempt to influence and change the external world in order to form a unity with their surroundings; 2. persons with special gifts, who withdraw from the world in order to create a separate world of their own making; 3. extraordinarily gifted persons, who search to match their particular gift by finding an equivalent in the external world. It is in Goethe’s description of the extraordinary genius that we can glimpse a further development of Young’s figure of the “stranger within.” For the extraordinary endowment of the original genius, according to Goethe, does not consist in any one particular capacity, skill, etc., but in this person’s general, overall relationship to what it means to be human.9 After those general, rather bland claims that an original genius is somehow “humanistically” gifted, Goethe turns to a brief character sketch, which emphasizes above all Winckelmann’s capacity to be happy and to be resilient when faced with misfortune. Despite the miserable circumstances of his youth and early career as a teacher, he did not lose his desire to see the world and travel. Winckelmann’s basic disposition is thus introduced as an example of what it takes to become an extraordinary genius. Goethe then starts the first section of his essay, “Antique Matters” (“Antikes”), with another set of generalizing remarks about what it takes to produce something singularly unexpected (“das Einzige, ganz Unerwartete”). Whereas something extraordinary can be achieved if some faculties unite, the latter, the production of something radically new, demands that all faculties are used in perfect coordination and harmony, an opportunity that Goethe sees we moderns have practically lost, since we have to specialize in order to achieve anything. The ancients, by contrast, were capable of making a difference in their world, for their fatherland and their fellow citizens with all of their talents and all of their forces. What actually happened was of exclusive value to them. By contrast, the modern world can only attach value to what has been thought or what has become an object of sentiment. Through their commitment to living in the present, the ancients were not only capable of enjoying happiness to the fullest; they were equally capable of enduring misfortune and recuperating from unhappy experiences. In mid-paragraph, just after Goethe has asserted this radical difference between antiquity and modernity, he writes: “Such an antique nature, if one can say that of any of our contemporaries, had come back in Winckelmann, a nature that immediately, right at the beginning of his life proved itself by not having been tamed, dislodged or dulled by thirty years of misery, discomfort and pain.”10
In the subsequent subsection, entitled “Pagan Matters” (“Heidnisches”), Goethe proceeds to argue that what he had described in the previous section as an ethos that was particular to the ancient world, an ethos committed to this world and its goods, was only compatible with a fundamentally pagan sensibility: “That kind of self confidence, that active engagement with the present, the pure veneration of the gods as ancestors, their admiration as if they were works of art, the acceptance of fate as omnipotent, a future that with its high valorization of lasting fame made itself again dependent on the present, all these aspects belong necessarily together and form one inseparable unity, they shape themselves into a human being as if intended by nature, such that we can glimpse in the moment of extreme enjoyment and at the lowest moment of sacrifice, even of defeat [Untergang] an indestructable health.”11 In other words, the pagan humanist within is the logical successor of the noble stranger within. A certain disregard for the contemporary morality and conventions allows the genius to cultivate a radically different lifestyle, the resilience from misfortune, a commitment to living in the present and a thoroughly aesthetic attitude toward all things supernatural.
In what I have isolated as an Enlightenment discourse on originality, we can see three distinct ways of conceiving of originality as stages of a complex and evolving problematic:
1. There is the model of the original genius as capable of producing something radically new. To a certain extent, this concept of originality was conceived in analogy to scientific discovery or invention, especially in its appeal to a model of linear progress. Yet within this paradigm the idea of the original genius’s total disregard for tradition also comes into conflict with the established paradigm, which regulates and proceduralizes the mode of scientific knowledge production. This problem was recognized by Kant when he exempted even Newton from the ranks of original genius.
2. There is Herder’s further elaboration of the organicist metaphor within his radically historicist approach to language and culture. Herder’s model uncouples the products of original genius from any kind of naive epistemological realism. Within his historicist approach, the achievement of original genius does not lie in novelty, but instead in the production of a uniquely differentiated totality. In other words: unique individuality with Herder replaces newness and innovation. Modern, secular hermeneutic approaches to literature, aiming to do justice to the particularity and uniqueness of the literary text, though knowing they would ultimately fail vis-à-vis the unparaphrasable nature of the artwork, need to be understood as directly derived from that model of art and literature.
3. There is the model of original genius that builds on the figure of the stranger within, the model that I tried to illustrate with the aid of Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann. In this model the original genius can be a discourse innovator, an artist, an educator, a politician, or a collector. For at stake here is not the production of a uniquely organized whole, but rather a humanist ethos that finds and enhances in the external world those humanist values it finds within, a heightened understanding of what it means to be human, of accepting the human condition. Goethe explains this ethos as both an embrace of all aspects of experience and a commitment to living in the present, and he marks it as fundamentally pagan as well as fundamentally aesthetic. One last aspect of the figure of the stranger within, an aspect that emerged in Goethe’s appropriation of this figure, is the affirmation of a technique of the self that allows one to be out of sync with the dictates and fashions of one’s time, the affirmation of anachronism as a way of being culturally productive and innovative. In this sense we can see in the stranger within a figure of untimeliness that becomes so important for Nietzsche as a way of escaping an oppressive historicist culture.
Goethe’s concept of the genius went through changes throughout his long career, especially with regard to how he conceived of innovation and originality. Yet there is one important constant as well. Ranging from its first exploration during his Strasbourg friendship with Herder to his later reflections on scientific innovation in the introduction to the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), and the zoological and botanical reflections on change in nature, as well as the autobiographical works of his later life, but also to the essay on Winckelmann, Goethe conceives of the genius as an exceptional personality who stands in an eccentric relationship to his own historical situation. I shall return to some of these concerns in part 2, when I discuss Goethe’s approach to autobiography, and I shall conclude part 1 with an analysis of Goethe’s very early text, the short pamphlet, entitled Von deutscher Baukunst (On German Architecture) from 1772. This exuberant pamphlet of the young Goethe embodies the full range of what is new about the Enlightenment’s approach to genius. Moreover, in the sense that this piece also provides a vivid reenactment of Goethe’s discovery of the beauty of the facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral and in that sense offers what could be called a script for aesthetic contemplation, it brings us back to the claims of chapter 1, namely that we need to look at spiritual exercises and religious contemplation for the cultural practices that were to inform what was new about the conceptualization of aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century.