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Between Nanjing and Weimar: Goethe's Metaphysical Correspondences
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 59-88
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Summary
Abstract: This article examines how Goethe places his reading about a Jesuit disputation with a Buddhist monk in seventeenth-century China within the context of German philosophical debates. Goethe immediately draws an analogy connecting Weimar debates between Kantians and idealists to the earlier Nanjing debate about Jesuit and Buddhism metaphysics. His inclination to perceive parallels between philosophy in China and Germany anticipates his later comments to Eckermann about the similarities between the Chinese and European novels that served as the basis for his pronouncements about Weltliteratur (world literature). A careful reading of Goethe and Schiller's letters shows that as a heretical thinker, Goethe was inclined to identify with the Buddhist dismissal of Christian theism; however, the emerging atheism controversy surrounding accusations made against Fichte's lectures at the University of Jena led him to cautiously avoid entering into yet another Enlightenment debate about religion.
Keywords: world literature, Chinese-German relations, Fichte's atheism controversy, Jesuit missionaries in China, analogy, similarity
ON JANUARY 3, 1798, Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote his best friend, Friedrich Schiller, that he had just come across a curious story in an old tome describing a debate held in Nanjing, China during a banquet in 1599 involving a Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and an unnamed Buddhist scholar, who today is identified as the renowned abbot Xuelang Hong’en (1545– 1607). The Jesuit texts refer to him as Sanhoi. Goethe wrote: “Dieser Fund hat mich unglaublich amüsiert und mir eine gute Idee von dem Scharfsinn der Chineser gegeben” (This discovery amused me unbelievably and gave me a good idea of how sharp witted the Chinese are). Typical for the way in which humanists combined friendship, letter writing, and intellectual labor, Goethe promised to send Schiller a handwritten copy of the passage. Three days later, Goethe followed through with his promise and went on to speculate how the Buddhist might have even more wittily turned the tables on the Jesuit Ricci. Rather than agreeing with the Jesuit arguments about the creation of the earth, Goethe takes the heterodox step of siding with the Buddhist—not a complete surprise, as he had resumed working on Faust the previous summer.
The Building in Bildung: Goethe, Palladio, and the Architectural Media
- Edited by Simon Richter, University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 15
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 01 February 2008, pp 57-74
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Summary
Well before photography and electronic networks encircled the planet, there existed a European migratory channel within which architectural images were carried across the Alps by tourists and pilgrims. Moving along well-established pathways, architectural drawings, treatises, and personal recollections operated as a self-replicating network that allowed travelers, once home, to recreate the buildings they so admired abroad. The northern European reception of Andrea Palladio (1508-80), facilitated by the elegant woodcuts and explanations of his Quattro Libri dell'architettura (1570) [Four Books on Architecture] and by the prominence of his buildings in cities and estates between Vicenza and Venice, demonstrates the effectiveness of this pre-modern media circuit. The efforts, first British, then German, to emulate Palladio's villas, palaces and churches constitute one of the most successful examples of pre-modern stylistic proliferation.
Not only did Palladian architecture reproduce itself throughout Europe and North America,it integrated comfortably with other media. For many in the late eighteenth century, Palladian architecture seemed to enhance the production of literary texts, the recollection of foreign adventures and the self-understanding of the modern subject. More than just a backdrop for the idyllic production and reception of literature, Northern European Palladianism was deployed as a technology capable of assisting in the conscious reproduction of experience. Through architectural and imagistic simulation, Palladianism sought both to inspire reminiscences of earlier travels and to encourage their repetition. Stressing the importance of architectural journals, Beatriz Colomina has argued that twentieth-century architecture was constituted within its own photographic representation.