Frederick Turner
Why read Goethe now? Or let’s say: “What is wrong with us now, that we might require the help of Goethe?”
Perhaps the most dangerous feature of our times is our inability to speak to each other. That inability takes two forms, both of which have the same root. One is basically social. Everywhere we see cultural suspicions, misunderstandings, and hatreds: East and West, North and South, Muslim and Christian, rich and poor, black and white, native and immigrant, traditional and modern, young and old. The other way in which we dangerously fail to understand each other is ideological: any reader has run across the alienation between science and religion, art and science, technology and environmentalism, business and the humanities, even between disciplines like anthropology and economics, political science and sociology, philosophy and theology.
We became specialists, and, though we knew more and more about the bits of the world, we came to know less and less about the world as a whole. Is it any wonder that once we gave up any attempt to include in one view all the viewpoints and languages and jargons and dialects of the world, we could no longer agree on social, cultural, ethnic, and political issues? If there is no longer a shared language, or even an attempt at one, we stumble along blind to each other, with eyes for only what we have been trained to see; when we bump into each other, we can do nothing but fight.
Mallarmé, the great French poet and arguably one of the fathers of modernism, declared that the role of the poet is “to purify the dialect of the tribe.” Sadly, we ended up purifying a thousand specializations and losing any connection between them and to the human tribe as a whole. Mallarmé was wrong. The work of the great poet is to create a common language that can connect all the thoughts and feelings of the human tribe; a supreme act of adulteration, one might say.
The old Enlightenment consensus—Reason, the Republic of Letters, the language of Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin—did provide a shared language for a while, but it was shared only by the elites and had severe limitations, amply pointed out by the Romantics. The point of view that can transcend the shortsightedness and cruelty of the purified dialects is not just a dry Enlightenment abstraction. It is a made thing, an achievement that combines every aspect of the human being and draws on copious historical wellsprings.
Goethe is both the supreme exemplar of that perspective, that point of view, and the supreme shaper of it into an artistic whole that can serve us still. He is one of that pantheon of the great poets, the mighty adulterators of language who reset the boundaries of what humans can think or do. Their names are clichés: Homer, Vyasa, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and their like. In retrospect, the great poets, adulterators all, often look very much like purifiers, so marvelous is their magic in seamlessly fusing such different fabrics and materials as they choose to weave together. But we should not be fooled. When people first heard the great poets they must have felt a shocking combination of absolute familiarity and appalling strangeness, half exhilaration and half indignation. You can’t put words like that together! It’s gauche, wicked, nastily attractive, embarrassing! Realms that we had kept comfortably apart for reasons of specialization, ethnic or religious prejudice, professional territoriality, avoidance of controversy, moral scandal, or cognitive dissonance were being embarrassingly and dangerously brought into contact. The new whole was more alarming than the sum of its parts.
Goethe’s uncompromising need for a coherent and comprehensive worldview—an idea we now call “consilience”—is an ideal that is both the core of science and the most demanding goal of poetry. It virtually enforced the adoption of a view that was revolutionary, and not just for Germany. It is only now that scholars are beginning to register the shock wave that Goethe produced in the poetry of England and America.
Goethe was faced with a Europe that was already breaking up, not just on the national scale, with the collapse of the unifying ideals of the Holy Roman Empire and Christendom, but in terms of the proliferation of new sciences, disciplines, trades, philosophies, and cults. And so he set out to create a German that would do for the world what Shakespeare’s English did: unify all human visions and passions into one, without denaturing any. His vision makes possible a vocabulary that can include the sciences and technical disciplines; the worldviews of cultures as diverse as those of Italy, Arabia, Persia, India, England, and China; and the whole gamut of religious passion, from defiant atheism through animism, pantheism, polytheism, and Judeo-Christian ethics to a sort of ironic philosophical monotheism of the “All-Father.” His vocabulary spans also the deep history of his own language, and that of the classical languages of Europe, as well as a wide range of social class, regional dialect, and generational patois.
Goethe’s color theory inspired Jan Evangelista Purkinje to commence the studies of the eye that gave birth to neuroscience.1 Goethe is known in osteology as the discoverer of the human intermaxillary bone, in botany as the originator of the idea of the Urpflanze, anticipating the work of D’Arcy Thompson,2 and more generally for his concepts of Strebung, Gestalt, and Bildung. Goethe grasped the vocabulary and the core ideas of a daunting range of polymaths that he knew, read, or both. They include the Humboldts, Cuvier, Young, Torricelli, Lavoisier, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Buffon, the meteorologist Luke Howard, Leibniz, Leeuwenhoek, Linnaeus, and Kant. Goethe may be the most recent plausible claimant for the title of last person to know everything.
A large part of Goethe’s poetic magic is performed by his unerring and always elegantly ornamented meter and rhyme. Goethe was as much a virtuoso of meter and rhyme as Mozart was of harmony and counterpoint or Corot of tint and shade. Although he wrote in dozens of metrical forms, and in the Odes invents and then discards free verse a century before its time, he returns always to a perfectly rhymed alternation of feminine and masculine lines, iambic or trochaic, pentameter or tetrameter. He makes infinite variations upon that pattern, from the balladic simplicity of “Wild Rose” to the massive hexameters of “The Metamorphosis of the Plants,” but it’s always there. The music of that alternation is so compelling that he can fit almost any odd combination of words or worlds into it and make them feel as if they always belonged together. Part of it, I believe, is that it is a real dialectic, “masculine” and “feminine” being more than metaphorical terms for lines with heavy and light final syllables. The lines are yin and yang, thesis and antithesis, question and answer.
More specifically, Goethe exploits German’s marvelous facility for inventing compound words. Goethe, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, is notorious for this, but it is not just a stylistic idiosyncrasy but an explicit sign of what Goethe is up to: making a vocabulary that will transcend the ossified categories of a culture that is falling apart.
But for all of Goethe’s metrical and grammatical conjuring tricks and his stylistic control of dissent, his determination to keep all of the vocabularies of Europe (and beyond) in play must imply a larger substantive vision—a philosophy—beyond a mere eclectic ease of expression. That vision cannot but be a challenge to the whole fabric of Western thought to that point. But Goethe is no mere revolutionary: the challenge to his time is not intended to destroy it, but to heal and restore it to its full inherited grandeur, a grandeur partly achieved by the classical Greeks and during the Renaissance. If his poetry reconciles science with religion, art with ethics, political philosophy with mysticism, the humanities with the technical expertise of modern life, it is bound to offend, and here it might be illuminating to try to indicate how and where. The keys are in the multivocality of certain words—Gestalt, Strebung, and, above all, Bildung—and those words themselves, as he uses them, are both a threat and a promise to any established way of thought.
Gestalt, a core concept later explored brilliantly by Carl Jung, is subversive to any purely deductive reasoning: the reasoning of the Enlightenment. Its meaning proclaims that the whole is greater than the parts, that some realities are irreducible, and thus insoluble by any merely reductive scientific method. A true form or Gestalt is not just its elements, but the pattern and dynamic interaction of its elements. But that dynamic pattern is not ineffable and undiscoverable: the word also suggests that there might be a scientifically legitimate way of recognizing synergy and complex organization, in which levels of order can be discerned whose nature is emergent rather than given or timeless. And so the concept itself provides the opening for such ideas as evolution, ecosystem, and even the division of sciences into disciplines, where different levels of order can exist in a nested hierarchy of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and social science. Emergence is today the key idea in many of the sciences (though still challenged by the reductionist-determinist establishment). The universe is not a machine whose perfectly ordered, zero-change state is disordered and decayed by time; rather, the universe is time, becoming, and its life and nature is change. Stable orders of various kinds, including the laws of nature, are created and maintained by that process itself. Chaos naturally gives birth to order, and order provides the tools and vocabulary for further change.
Goethe expresses this idea not only explicitly in poems like “The Metamorphosis of the Plants,” “The Metamorphosis of the Animals,” “Refinding,” and “World Soul,” but also implicitly in earlier pieces like “The Artist’s Evening Song” and “On the Lake.” But his sense of “organic form,” as Coleridge put it in his defense of Shakespeare, is there in every one of his poems, in their integrity and synergetic self-reference. Goethe ruefully points out how hard this is to achieve in his sonnet on the sonnet form:
The Sonnet
To practice a revived artistic kind
Is an expected, holy obligation:
You too may follow the prescribed dictation,
As step by step it regulates your mind.
For what you loved was how the form confined
In limits the wild spirits’ agitation;
However violent their inclination,
The work would find its shaped and proper end.
So I’d in artful sonnets like to fettle
With rhyme and measure eloquent and limber
Whatever my emotion gave to do;
For this, though, I can’t comfortably settle,
Loving to hew things from a single timber,
And otherwise would sometimes have to glue.
Notice how, in his artistic mastery, he has perfectly fitted his apology for his metrical imperfections into the strict Petrarchan metrical form. (It was I, the translator, who had to “glue” with the half-rhyme.)
As with Gestalt, the inscape3 and subtle internal synergy of natural beings and genuine human creations, the idea of Strebung—striving, inclination, tendency, proclivity, effort—undermines older top-down conceptions of nature. Natural beings, animate and perhaps even inanimate, contain strivings, affinities, a rage for order, an order that rages. Why should desire, so pervasive among humans and animals, have been suddenly injected into an indifferent universe? Why shouldn’t its more primitive versions have existed always already in matter, energy, and light, as he insists in “World Soul” and “Ur-Words: Orphic”? What makes desire a less worthy candidate for cosmic primacy than time and space? Desire is active: Faust’s reinterpretation of the beginning of the Gospel of John is: “In the beginning was the act.” In “The Metamorphosis of the Plants,” he speeds up the emergence of the leaves and flowers to show how urgently, how pruriently, the plant desires its last ejaculation of blossom. Anyone who has cruelly pinched off the flowers of a basil plant, and who has seen in the next few hours how quickly and with what frustration it throws out new leaves to muster the energy for sexual replacements, will know what he means.
God, for Goethe, is not the external puppet master pulling the strings of natural action: God is the internal urge of the action itself, its joy in making, its impatience and seeking. “Striving” in both German and English is related to strife; to strive is to compete, even to fight, but with the specific sense of a higher goal that transcends the fight itself. Goethe’s work (especially considering the bloody Napoleonic times in which he lived) is remarkably free of fights, battles, and violence; like Darwin, he sees that the great competition is over not who is going to be the best destroyer, but who is going to be the most successful creator, cooperator, lover, contributor, who will best shape an ecosystem that will ensure survival. For Goethe, as for Teilhard de Chardin (the great French evolutionist and theologian) le milieu divin, the divine environment, is not stasis but becoming; what is eternal is not a fixed form but an unresting drive toward form, toward forms more beautiful, synergetic, and profound in meaning.
In insisting on the validity of striving, Goethe is questioning other more comfortable styles of life. Strebung can be used socially as a term of contempt. The bourgeois striver is despised by the aristocrat, who never needs to break a sweat and needs no ambition. The aspiring artist is a figure of pity. The anxious and curious philosophical seeker is looked down on by the man of sure faith. The guilty sinner, still striving for redemption, who has at least had the courage to break the rules, is damned by the complacent moralist, who has not had the inner fire and juice to be tempted. Goethe sees self-improvement, ambition, effort, skeptical curiosity, emulation, and the battle against failure as the supreme virtues; Faust is redeemed by them.
Bildung is the combination of Strebung and Gestalt within a developing human personality: the striving is toward form; the form is the product of past striving and the ground of further striving. In nature, the general form of that striving is expressed in the German word Entwicklung, dear to Goethe, usually translated today as “evolution.” We are now familiar with the strange attractors of nonlinear dynamical systems and chaotic self-organization, with those amazing foliate forms that we see in the Mandelbrot set and other fractal visualizations. We are the new Platonists, able now to trace and mathematically model with some accuracy the ideal forms of nature, though we find those forms not in the timelessness of Plato’s geometrical idealizations and generalizations, not in their stillness, but in the heart of motion and time. But Goethe in many ways got there before us: his Urpflanze, his archetypal leaf, is none other than a strange attractor, the always-not-quite-achieved goal of a nonlinear dynamical system, unmistakable in its style but highly variable and differentiated in its physical instances. And the Entwicklung of a human person is his Bildung.
Goethe’s conception of evolution was much like that of his contemporary Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829), in that it included the idea of “soft inheritance,” that is, the biological inheritance of individually acquired characteristics. This idea was later roundly rejected by the Darwinians, who maintained that the only way an individual could contribute to its species’ evolution was by either giving birth to offspring or dying without them and not passing on its inheritance. Differential rates of survival over many generations would do the heavy lifting of sorting out beneficial survival traits from deleterious ones.
But Goethe and Lamarck (and Schelling, Goethe’s protégé, who had similar views) may have been closer to the truth than evolutionists have believed until the last couple of decades. It now appears that genes can be turned on or off through mechanisms like methylation or phosphorylation, and that the patterns of “off” and “on” genes are controlled by regulatory genes or even by mysterious processes in the nongenetic bulk of the DNA sequence. Those control and regulatory systems are themselves highly sensitive to both the experiences and the actions of the individual to which they belong, and thus the actions and experiences of an organism can change the organism itself. How you live your life—what choices you make, what training or education you take on, what places and states you explore—can actually change the action of your genes in generating your body and mind, and thus transform you even if your basic complement of genes does not change at all. You can play the genetic cards you’ve been given in the order and combinations you choose, and you don’t have to play all the cards in your hand.
The big point is that such self-transformation, the pattern of genes that are turned on or off, is inheritable. We can to a limited extent pass down our experience biologically to our offspring, and they to theirs. The genes do not change, but their expression can, quite decisively. This means that the Strebung of one generation, in enduring or acting, doing or suffering, is passed on to the future; that inheritance might in turn very strongly affect how good an individual’s chances of having or not having offspring would be. Freedom—literal self-determination—now becomes an essential part of the work of species-making and species survival. The individual is not a mere pawn or puppet, but a player. Such a process, multiplied across a whole gene pool, can massively accelerate the rate by which differential survival can alter the frequency of the genes and thus the species itself.
There is an important literary implication in Goethe’s belief that we are not just the passive products of our biological heritage, but active self-determining participants in the advance of our species. If, as seems likely, scientists of our own time are now endorsing the truth of this observation, perhaps it behooves us to consider whether Goethe’s view of the human condition may be more appropriate than those of the many writers, modern and postmodern, who have assumed that we are basically the puppets of our genetic inheritance and passive victims of history. Our Strebung can create our Gestalt, and the process can result in Bildung. The future is in our hands, not fate’s or chance’s—or in those of our “race.”
For Goethe culture is nature by other means, second nature, and nature is the culture of the beings that preceded us and exist around us. Poetry is fast evolution; evolution is slow poetry. Nature is not, so to speak, on a single track into the future, and neither are we. We certainly are pressed by our past inheritance, driven by urges and desires, but how we choose and combine them determines not only our immediate actions in the moment but also what kind of being we will be in the future. Time is branchy, and we can take at any moment one branch rather than another. An act or deed—in German, Tat—is not just an event or a result, but a cause in itself. “Im Anfang war die Tat.”4 And this freedom to choose is not a strange unnatural or supernatural supervention into a world that is otherwise a deterministic machine (as existentialists of various stripes have maintained) but a property of nature itself in its own branching and self-tracing path. Human intention is just as determinative of the world as are physical laws; the physical laws may have emerged earlier in the generation of the world, but that causative latecomer, human intention, can itself move mountains or, like Faust’s great sea walls, hold back the ocean itself by harnessing those very laws.
If we are free in this sense of self-determining, and if, as Goethe strongly feels, that free spontaneity is the most important part of a human being, then the base of religious morality must be radically shifted. Not that morality should be overthrown, but rather it must be made to fit a new foundation: not obedience but freedom. There is still sin, but the sin is not to transgress but to imprison. The new consilience he demands, in which moral rules cannot be allowed to remain separate from biological and physical science and the new philosophy of a dynamic world that is implied by it, requires a critique of traditional sexual morality. And it is, of course, sex where we see best the wild riskiness and driving energy of physical life in its free creative and generative adventure, sex that is the battleground where Goethe meets the old prescriptions and proscriptions. His poem “The Bride of Corinth” is a searing indictment of sexual repression. It ruthlessly diagnoses the psychological sickness that leads a parent to sacrifice her own child to a cold creed that is a comfort to the weak. Both Freud and Nietzsche surely paid attention.
Goethe’s poetic vocation of consilience thus led him to wrestle with the God of his times. Though the wrestling match begins with his early adventures in the world of sexual love, so triumphantly celebrated in such poems as “Maying,” “Welcome and Farewell,” and “Wild Rose,” its defiance of religious authority is only implicit there and has not yet spread to other areas of contention. Why, Goethe begins to ask, does there have to be only one divine economy? Struck by the beauty of the Greco-Roman pantheon and the humaneness of a world where different kinds of fate can be chosen according to the god to whom one makes sacrifice, he begins to challenge the hegemony of monotheism. His poem “Take This to Heart” epitomizes this strategy.
Still, and always, Goethe keeps the notion of the “All-Father,” but the conception is variously separated from the abstract infinite moralistic punisher of standard eighteenth-century religion. The Father becomes one of many gods, he is Romanized or Hellenized or Islamized, he has a thousand names, and most of all he becomes the heart and soul of natural forces, not their enemy and censor. Like Blake and Nietzsche, Goethe transvalues divinity; Urizen, “Your Reason,” is deposed and replaced by Los, the spirit of energy and imagination who is always implicit in the Fall and the loss of paradise—a paradise to be replaced by a creative process, by Bildung.
What comes next is Goethe’s denial and refutation of theodicy, the justification of suffering in the divine economy. He especially objects to suffering as a divinely just punishment for disobedience. Suffering, rather, is the accompaniment of aspiration to godhead. And Goethe presents his All-Father with a choice: be our striving, our power against fate, our friend and co-conspirator in the siege of Heaven, or be the cold and demanding authority figure and take the risk of being overthrown or at least exposed as morally inferior to Your creations. Perhaps Goethe on balance gives God the benefit of the doubt and takes Him on as a friend and potential equal, especially in the West-East Divan poems. But this must mean that Mephistopheles is His accomplice, His double agent.
When the traditional theological language is put under such radical stresses and transformations and becomes a play space for speculation rather than a secure deposit of faith, the language itself becomes complex and ironized. In “Divinity,” the balance is especially complex and rich:
But Man alone
May do the impossible:
He makes distinctions,
Chooses, judges;
He can to the moment
Grant permanence.
He alone may
Reward the good,
Punish the evil,
Heal and save
All that’s in error,
Use and connect.
And so we honor
Those the undying ones
As if they were human
Acting in great things
As the best man in small things
Does, or desires to do.
Noble humanity,
Be good and merciful!
Create untiringly
The useful, the righteous,
Be for us an image
Of those guessed beings!
Goethe seems to have solved at least part of his problems with religion by radically compounding it with science. Natural evolution is not for him a refutation of divine creation but its explication and concrete enactment. Language in the absence of a timeless, supernatural, and infinite God need not fall apart (as I believe the Deconstructionists implied); rather, it regains a power it lost when God was translated out of nature. Language becomes one with the creative force of evolution, which continues in human history, in human creativity, and—especially—in poetry. Science’s need to change the meanings of words and make up new words led the way. In Goethe’s lifetime, over thirty new elements were discovered, isolated, and named. Goethe gloried in the newly emerging vocabularies of botany, anatomy, and climatology, as we may see in such works as “The Metamorphosis of the Plants” and “In Honor of Luke Howard.” Adam’s task of naming is also God’s.
It is religious miracle that Goethe objects to, not simply on Spinoza’s ground that its definition is self-contradictory, but because he finds nature itself so miraculous that any such intervention into it would be crass and despicable, a lie, a cheat. What is taken to be the supernatural is in his view a vulgar escape hatch from reality; for him, the true supernatural is an inherent element in all process and becoming, in time itself. Goethe’s many demons and spirits and gods and naiads are all, like those of the Greeks and Romans, part of Nature itself. Nature “supernatures” itself anyway, in every moment, by generating out of all the possible futures the one it chooses, creating new reality all the time. Blinded by custom, we cannot be properly amazed, and we look elsewhere for a tawdry amazement. For Goethe, Nature is all the revelation we need; the scriptures of the religions can be beautiful poetry, to be freely retranslated, as Faust does with the Book of John, according to our growing wisdom. But they are not literal truth, and their fictive miracles are symbols of mysterious natural processes.
Goethe is tactful, however, and respects the feelings of believers. Faust’s conversation with Gretchen, with its definitely comic overtones, is a good example of Goethe’s own gentle quizzing of the faithful:
MARGARETE:
… Do you believe in God?
FAUST: Love, who can say
“Yes, I believe in God”?
Ask the priest and wise man, and what they
Will answer sounds like mockery
Of her who asks the question.
MARGARETE:
So you don’t believe?
FAUST:
Oh, sweet-faced innocent, don’t misconceive!
Who can name Him,
Who can claim Him,
Saying “I believe”?
Who presume
To say “I don’t believe”?
The all-containing,
All-sustaining,
Does He not embrace, sustain
You, and myself, and Him?
Above, does not the sky arch high,
Below, the firm earth steadfast lie?
Do not the friendly stars eternal rise,
Do we not see each other, eyes in eyes?
And do not all things strive
Toward your head and heart,
And do not all things weave
Themselves with everlasting secrecy,
Seen thus unseen, into your closest intimacy?
Fill up your heart with this,
And when your feelings overflow with bliss
Name it as you wish by any name whatever!
Luck, call it! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name to call it!
Feeling is all—
A name is but sound and smoke,
Clouding the glow of heaven.
MARGARETE:
This is all well and good.
It’s what the priest says, more or less,
Except the words are rather different.
For all Goethe’s daring intellectual adventures—with their continuing reverberations into the present—his ideas are not dry logical stalks but engorged growing shoots, bursting into flower. He is as passionate a poet as he is a philosophical or scientific one. For him, moral freedom is not a negative affair of rational choice and tolerance and unamazement but a plunge into a state of huge moral and existential risk, an adventure of the spirit.
So the comprehensiveness, the adulteratedness, of Goethe’s poetic vocabulary extends to that much more ancient, contextual, action-oriented, profound, and survival-based form of thinking that we call emotion. Rhetoric is the discipline of putting that rich form of thinking into words. Goethe shows how persuasion can happen when poetry extends its vocabulary to include all the points of view of the language community, and we are enabled to speak to each other’s whole being—hearts, minds, bodies, and all.
1. See Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience by Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek in collaboration with Jiří Hoskovec (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), 1–2 and passim.
2. See Morphogenesis: Origins of Patterns and Shapes, eds. Paul Bourgine and Annick Lesne (New York: Springer, 2011), 295.
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for the inner form and energy of a natural entity.
4. “In the beginning was the act.” Faust translating the Book of John.