Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, statesman, thinker, philosopher and natural scientist. He is consideded one of the greatest German literary figures of the modern era.
Education
In 1756-1758, young Johann attended a public school. Then his father along with eight tutors taught his daughter Cornelia and her son, providing comprehensive home education: German, French, Latin, Greek, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Italian, natural sciences, religion, drawing. The training program also included playing pianoforte and cello, riding, fencing and dancing.
At the insistence of his father Johann went in the fall of 1765 to study law at the University of Leipzig. He preferred lectures of Christian Gellert, where literary undertakings appeared, to compulsory subjects. In 1771, after defending his thesis, Goethe became a doctor of law.
Career
Though set firmly on the path to poetry, Johann Wolfgang received the post of Licentitatus Juris in 1771 and returned to Frankfurt where with the mixed success he opened a small law practice. Seeking greener pastures, he soon after moved to the more liberal city of Darmstadt. Along the road, Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants’ War. Within the astounding span of six weeks, he had reworked it into the popular anti-establishment protest, Götz von Berlichingen that came out in 1773.
In the spring of 1772 Goethe, still following his father’s scheme, went to acquire some practical legal experience at the highest level, the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire in Wetzlar. Law took up some of Goethe’s time in 1773, but most of it went on literary work, the dramatic fragment Prometheus dates from this period, and on preparing for the private publication of a revised version of Götz in the summer. The years from 1773 to 1776 were the most productive period in Goethe’s life, poems, and other works mainly fragment poured out. His next composition, Die Leiden des jungen Werther in 1774, brought Goethe nearly instant worldwide acclaim. Besides Werther, Goethe composed Die Hymnen (among them Ganymed, Prometheus and Mahomets Gesang), and several shorter dramas, among them Götter, Helden und Wieland and Clavigo both in 1774.
On the strength of his reputation, Goethe was invited in 1775 to the court of then eighteen-year-old Duke Carl August, who would later become Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. As court-advisor and special counsel to the Duke, he took directorship of the mining concern, the finance ministry, the war and roads commission, the local theater, not to mention construction of the beautiful Park-am-Ilm. Six months after his arrival, Goethe was made a member of the ruling Privy Council. Although at first Goethe had few duties beyond accompanying Charles Augustus and arranging court entertainments, he soon began to accumulate more prosaic responsibilities and was, initially at least, motivated by the idea of a reformed principality governed, in accordance with Enlightenment principles, for the benefit of all its subjects and not just of the landowning nobility.
In 1779 Goethe took on the War Commission, in addition to the Mines and Highways commissions, and in 1782, when the chancellor of the duchy’s Exchequer left under a cloud, he agreed to act in his place for two and a half years. This post made him virtually, though not, in fact, prime minister and the principal representative of the duchy in the increasingly complex diplomatic affairs in which Charles Augustus was at the time involving himself. It was, therefore, essential to raise him to the nobility, and in 1782 he became von Goethe and moved into the large house on the Frauenplan that, with only one interruption, was to be his home in Weimar for the rest of his life.
Until 1780 he continued to produce original and substantial works, particularly, in 1779, a prose drama in a quite new manner, Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris). Thereafter, however, he found it increasingly difficult to complete anything, and the flow of poetry, which had been getting thinner, all but dried up. He kept himself going as a writer by forcing himself to write one book of a novel, Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (The Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister), each year until 1785. At first, the plot was transparently autobiographical, but Goethe’s own development gradually diverged from that of his hero, and the novel remained in manuscript during his lifetime. For 10 years Goethe turned away completely from publishing, the last lengthy work of his to be printed before the silence was Stella in 1776.
Goethe was never entirely at ease in his role of Weimar courtier and official. In December 1777, uncertain whether staying in Weimar with increasing responsibilities was compatible with his literary vocation, he set off secretly to the Brocken, the highest summit in the Harz Mountains and the center of much superstitious folklore, and determined that if he could climb it when it was already deep in snow something no one had attempted in living memory he would take this as a sign that he was on the right path. He succeeded and was rewarded with a "moment of serene splendor" and with the poem Harzreise im Winter (Winter Journey in the Harz), which expressed his newfound confidence. In 1779 he decided to mark his 30th birthday and his entry on more serious official duties with a long trip to Switzerland in the company of Charles Augustus. For a second time, he came to the St. Gotthard Pass, where he once more turned away from the road to Italy so as to pursue his duty in Germany, hoping that events would show his life was coherent and he was doing the right thing.
By 1785, however, that hope had worn thin. In that year Goethe withdrew from the Privy Council and his most onerous responsibilities in the ducal Exchequer, with little to show for all his effort and with fundamental reform out of the question. He had become increasingly interested in natural science, in geology, because of his work on the mines, and in anatomy, for the light, it shed on the continuity between humans and other animals. From 1785 onward he was also interested in botany. But these were substitutes for his literary activity, and, though some of the professors in the local university at Jena showed a polite interest, he could not achieve in science the recognition he had won in poetry. He accepted an offer from Georg Joachim Göschen in Leipzig to publish his complete works in eight volumes, but so much was merely fragmentary that he was unsure what, if anything, he would be able to finish. In a state near to despair, he decided to escape secretly to Italy.
On September 3, 1786, Goethe slipped away from the Bohemian spa of Carlsbad and traveled as rapidly as he could by coach to the Brenner Pass and down through the South Tirol to Verona, Vicenza, and Venice in Italy. After finishing the rewriting of Iphigenia, which he was putting into the blank verse before publishing it, and after sitting for what has become his best-known portrait, he decided in the spring of 1787 to move on to Naples, as his father had done before him. As a geologist, Goethe climbed Vesuvius, as a connoisseur of ancient art, he visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. During this tour he drafted some scenes for a drama, Nausikaa, which was never completed but contains some of his most beautiful verse, evocative of the Mediterranean islands and, flitting about them, the almost audible ghosts of Classical antiquity. His return to Weimar in June 1788 was extremely reluctant.
In literary terms the Italian journey had not been a particularly successful time, Egmont had been completed, though with a shift of focus that blurred its political point, and some minor plays had been rewritten and ruined in the process. Almost no lyric poems had been written. His misery at leaving Italy found an outlet in the play Torquato Tasso that was published in 1790. In richly plangent verse but at inordinately untheatrical length, Tasso descends into madness, uncomprehended by the court around him. In old age Goethe acknowledged the closeness of this story of self-destruction to that of Werther.
By his 40th birthday, in 1789, Goethe had all but completed the collected edition of his works, including a revision of Werther, 16 plays, and a volume of poems. The only fragmentary drama it contained was Faust, which he saw no chance yet of finishing and which appeared in print for the first time in 1790 as Faust: Ein Fragment. In the same year, Goethe spent two months in and around Venice, and in the autumn he accompanied Charles Augustus to Silesia and Kraków.
After the remarkable effort of completing his collected edition, Goethe seems not to have known where to go next as a poet. Perhaps by way of compensation for his lack of literary success, he turned to science. In 1790 he published his theory of the principles of botany, Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants, an attempt to show that all plant forms are determined by a process of alternating expansion and contraction of a basic unit, the leaf. A new prose drama, Der Gross-Cophta was a failure on the stage in 1791. As an exercise in political satire and in German equivalents of Classical meters, he put Johann Christoph Gottsched’s prose translation of the medieval stories of Reynard the Fox into hexameters, Reineke Fuchs, written in 1793 and published the following year.
In 1794, Goethe met Friedrich Schiller. The friendship with Schiller began a new period in Goethe’s life, in some ways one of the happiest and, from a literary point of view, one of the most productive, though not all that was produced was of the highest quality. The pair became intimate friends and collaborators and began nothing less than the most extraordinary period of literary production in German history. Working alongside Schiller, Goethe finally completed his Bildungsroman, the great Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1795-96, as well as his epic Hermann und Dorothea in 1796-97 and several balladic pieces. To Goethe’s great sorrow and regret, Schiller died at the height of his powers on April 29, 1805. In 1805 he started preparing a new collected edition of his literary works with the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta and in 1806 Goethe sent to him the completed manuscript of part one of Faust.
On the 14th of October, 1806, Napoleon routed the Prussian armies at the Battle of Jena. Weimar, 12 miles from the battle, was subsequently occupied and sacked, though Goethe’s house was spared, thanks to Napoleon’s admiration for the author of Werther (1774). The period after the death of Schiller and the Battle of Jena was at first a somber one. Goethe endeavored to maintain Weimar’s cultural position by looking for a successor to Schiller as a principal dramatist but failed. In 1808 he met Napoleon during the Congress of Erfurt and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. He became reconciled to Napoleon’s rule, regarding it as a more or less legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Empire, and, in the relatively peaceful interval after the Austrian war against France in 1809, a new serenity entered his writing. A wryly humorous poem on the subject of impotence and marital fidelity, Das Tagebuch was published in 1810 and published the first three parts of his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit in 1811–13.
After the overthrow of Napoleon’s dominion by allied troops at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, Goethe, who had conspicuously failed to share in the nationalist fervour of the German Wars of Liberation, was asked to write a festival play for the king of Prussia to celebrate the allies’ achievement. He obliged with Des Epimenides Erwachen in 1815, but the play shows that his feelings about the great victory were ambiguous. He had to be pleased that the Treaty of Paris signed in 1815 provided for the works of art looted from Italy to be returned, but he was no friend of reaction, whether political or cultural. The Holy Alliance, a loose organization of Europe’s most repressive rulers formed in 1815 ostensibly to promote Christian principles in political affairs was as little to his taste as the Christianizing art of the new school of Nazarene painters, and he felt that the values he esteemed had been better served in other times and places. Alienation from the modern age is the undertone in all his work of this period, which branches out in three very different directions.
First, in his autobiographical writings, he took up in 1813 the story of his journey to Italy and Sicily in 1786–87 and made of it an apology for an anti-Romantic view both of art and of Italy, eliminating all the uncertainty and inconsequentiality of the actual events and stylizing the journey into a supremely self-confident tour of the Classical world (Italiänische Reise, which takes the story only as far as his final departure from Naples). Second, in 1814 Goethe accepted an invitation to visit the Neckar region and the Rhineland in western Germany, where his hosts, the brothers Boisserée, had amassed a great collection of medieval art from destroyed and secularized churches, some of it documenting the beginnings of oil painting. Goethe was overwhelmed by the art of color in this collection, particularly by what he took to be the work of the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, and expressed a new appreciation of medieval and Christian culture in several major essays, Kunst und Altertum am Rhein, Main, und Neckar (1816, Art and Antiquity on the Rhine, Main, and Neckar, and Sankt-Rochus-Fest zu Bingen (1817, Feast of St. Roch in Bingen). He also approved of the plan to complete the unfinished cathedral in Cologne according to the rediscovered original drawings. But his friends did not immediately appreciate that Goethe might recognize a past achievement but still not think it a suitable ideal to inspire the contemporary artist.
Third, just before leaving for western Germany, Goethe made a literary discovery, a translation of the medieval Persian poetry of Hāfez. He started to write a verse of his own in the style of the translation. In Frankfurt he met Marianne Jung. Goethe and Marianne took to writing each other love poems in the Hāfez manner and continued to write them, both after Goethe had returned to Weimar and when he visited Frankfurt again in 1815. Out of this game grew a new collection of lyric verse, of which the hybrid, self-consciously pseudo-Oriental quality was acknowledged by Goethe in its title, Westöstlicher Divan, which was published in 1819. In 1817, he abandoned a third visit to the Rhineland, and later, in the same year, he was resigned from the post of director of the Weimar theatre and his final surrender of the Frankfurt citizenship that he still nominally retained. After 1817 only very few poems were added to the Divan, which was published in 1819. In 1818 Goethe resumed his summer visits to Bohemia. Goethe returned to Weimar, drafting in the carriage the poem Elegie (Elegy), which he later made into the centerpiece of Trilogie der Leidenschaft (1827, Trilogy of Passion).
The period until 1823 was one of tidying up at the end of life. But there was no decline in Goethe’s energies. He completed another collected edition with Cotta, began some more-impersonal autobiographical memoirs, Tag- und Jahreshefte (1830, Journals and Annals), wrote a vivid account of his military experiences in 1792 and 1793, Campagne in Frankreich, Belagerung von Mainz (1822, Campaign in France, Siege of Mainz), rather hastily finished off The Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister and brought out many of his earlier, hitherto unpublished scientific writings in a new irregular periodical, Zur Naturwissenschaft Überhaupt (On Natural Science in General). He also took up a new scientific interest, meteorology.
Goethe stayed in Weimar and its immediate surroundings for the rest of his life. It was a final stage of renunciation, an acknowledgment of the reality of passing time and strength and life. But it was also a time of extraordinary, indeed probably unparalleled literary achievement by a man of advanced age. Partly in order to secure the financial future of his family he prepared a final collected edition of his works, initially in 40 volumes, the Ausgabe letzter Hand (Edition of the Last Hand). In the course of this huge task, he rewrote and greatly extended The Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister (1821 and second edition in 1829). He wrote the fourth section of his autobiography Poetry and Truth, completing the story of his life up to his departure for Weimar in 1775, he compiled an account of his time in Rome in 1787–88, Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt (1829, Second Sojourn in Rome) and above all he wrote part two of Faust, of which only a few passages had been drafted in 1800.
The year 1829 brought celebrations throughout Germany of Goethe’s 80th birthday. It also brought the first performance in Weimar of part one of Faust. Goethe assisted with the rehearsals but did not attend the performance. Goethe fell seriously ill but recovered. He still had work to do, and only in August 1831, when, shortly before his 82nd birthday, he sealed the manuscript of part two of Faust for publication after his death, Faust: Part Two came out in 1832.
Views
Although Goethe was educated in a basically Leibnizian-Wolffian worldview, it was Spinoza (1632-77) from whom he adopted the view that God is both immanent with the world and identical with it. While there is little to suggest a direct influence on other aspects of his thought, there are certain curious similarities. Both think that ethics should consist of advice for influencing our characters and eventually to making us more perfect individuals. And both hold that happiness means an inner, almost stoically tranquil superiority over the ephemeral troubles of the world.
With Kant he shared the rejection of externally imposed norms of ethical behavior, his reception was highly ambivalent. Like Aristotle before him, Goethe felt the only proper starting point for philosophy was the direct experience of natural objects. Kant’s foray into the transcendental conditions of the possibility of such an experience seemed to him an unnecessary circumvention of precisely that which we are by nature equipped to undertake. The critique of the reason was like a literary critique, both could only pale in value to the original creative activity. Concerning Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), Goethe was convinced that dicta of pure practical reason, no matter how convincing theoretically, had little power to transform character. Perhaps with Kant’s ethics in mind, he wrote, "Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do." On the other hand, a letter to Eckermann of April 11, 1827, indicates that he considers Kant to be the most eminent of modern philosophers. And he certainly appreciated Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) for having shown that nature and art each have their ends within themselves purposively rather than as final causes imposed from without.
Influenced in part by Herder’s conception of Einfühlen, Goethe formulated his own morphological method. More the Kantian than Goethe, Herder’s belief in Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) that language could be explained naturalistically as a creative impulse within human development rather than a divine gift influenced Goethe’s theoretical work on poetry. And the trace of Herder’s claims about the equal worth of historical epochs and cultures can still be seen in the eclectic art collection in Goethe’s house on Weimar’s Frauenplan.
In Goethe's opinion, the scholastic philosophy had by the frequent darkness and apparent uselessness of its subject- matter, by its unseasonable application of a method in itself respectable, and by its too great extension over so many subjects, made itself foreign to the mass, unpalatable, and at last superfluous. Goethe considered his scientific contributions as important as his literary achievements. Goethe’s Farbenlehre challenged what was then and among the general public still remains the leading view of optics, that of Isaac Newton. Goethe’s guiding criticism of Newton concerned his ostensibly artificial method. His alternative relies upon his ideas of morphology and polarity. Just as the study of a plant had to proceed from the empirical observation of a great variety of particulars in order to intuit the Urphänomen that was common to all of them, so too should a Farbenlehre proceed from as great a variety of natural observations as possible.
Whereas Newton universalizes from a controlled and artificial experiment, Goethe thinks, it is useless to attempt to express the nature of a thing abstractedly. Effects we can perceive, and a complete history of those effects would, in fact, sufficiently define the nature of the thing itself. The colors are acts of lights, its active and passive modifications: thus considered we may expect from them some explanation respecting life itself. These ‘acts’ of light reveal the same coordinate tension found in the rest of the polarized nature. A light beam is no static thing with a substantial ontological status, but an oppositional tension that we perceive only relationally. Through careful observation of their interplay alone do we apprehend color.
As defined by Goethe, color is an elementary phenomenon in nature adapted to the sense of vision; a phenomenon which, like all others, exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union, by augmentation and neutralization, by communication and dissolution: under these general terms its nature may be best comprehended. The color arises from the polarity of light and darkness. Darkness is not the absence of light, as both Newton and most contemporary theorists believe, but its essential antipode, and thereby an integral part of the color.
The philosophy, in Goethe's opinion, had, by the frequent darkness and apparent uselessness of its subject-matter, by its unseasonable application of a method in itself respectable, and by its too great extension over so many subjects, made itself foreign to the mass, unpalatable, and at last superfluous. But it is nothing exceptional for a philosopher to disdain the character of what is passed along under the name philosophy by professional academics.
Quotations:
"The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone."
"As to what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it but that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors, of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many."
"Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."
"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings."
"Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image."
"Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen."
"Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words."
"The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become."