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Chapter 35 - Goethe and Our Endangered Natural World
- from Part VI - Goethe’s Lasting Significance
- Edited by Charlotte Lee, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- Goethe in Context
- Published online:
- 16 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 23 May 2024, pp 341-349
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Chapter 35 examines Goethe’s awareness of the impact of human activity on the physical environment and his often prescient depictions of damage to natural systems. These are shaped by a range of perspectives and experiences, from Goethe’s work as a civil servant, to his scientific study, to his lifelong passion for nature. The chapter traces two themes in particular that run through his literary work: first, flooding, and second, fire and the destruction of forests. It also examines Goethe’s historical position, between the pre-industrial world and capitalist modernity.
Unexpected Plant Bodies
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 30
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 20 December 2023
- Print publication:
- 13 June 2023, pp 163-170
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EXPLORING PORTRAYALS OF plant bodies in the Age of Goethe is not for the delicate; plants have long functioned as seemingly empty vessels for wild and often absurd assumptions about gender, race, colonialism, slavery and plantations, the materiality or spirituality of human bodies, potential profit, and power. A lthough plants are the basis of virtually all life on Earth, views of their relevance range from being a meaningless and either aesthetic or nearly invisible vegetal backdrop for our animal activities to being our exuberant and enabling older cousins, as per many ancient and nonindustrial cultures. Debates flourished in the nineteenth century and persist even today across the sciences and humanities about whether plants should be viewed mechanistically and instrumentally, or whether they have intrinsic value, any form of intelligence, or even “souls.” The era at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany certainly offers a rich array of views on plant bodies. These include, for example, the colonial/scientific explorations documenting the endless spread of plants across the planet, the expanding coffee houses, the aim of naming and categorizing all vegetal beings (and other lives), the ongoing popularity of greenhouses for the transplanting and growing of “exotic” species and the condemnation of others for being “weeds” or seemingly less aesthetic, and the racist perspectives on the darkness of foreign forests or jungles. Gender misconceptions regarding “passive” plants and clingy, vine-like females deserve more (negative) attention than I can offer here, as do, in contrast, the provocative and promising fairy tale plants that evoke traditional animism. The field of critical plant studies reconsiders the plethora of vegetal imaginings; the 2022 volume, Literaturen und Kulturen des Vegetabilen: Plant Studies—Kulturwissenschaftliche Pflanzenforschung states that such studies “begegnen Pflanzen nicht länger mit der auf Aristotles zurückgehenden Haltung, dass sie in der Hierarchie unter den Menschen und den Tieren stehen und zum Nutzen des Menschen frei verfügbar sind” (no longer encounter plants with the attitude that goes back to Aristoteles, indicating that they [plants] stand in the hierarchy under human beings and animals, and are readily available for the use of humans).2 Such plant visions take on new resonances in eighteenth-century Europe's and Germany's impending modernity, early industrialization, and emergence of plantation/slavery-based capitalism that continues the transformation of agriculture into a mechanized system of soil-and environment-destroying profitability.
The Dark Green in the Early Anthropocene: Goethe's Plants in Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären and Triumph der Empfindsamkeit
- from Special Section on Goethe's Narrative Events edited by Fritz Breithaupt
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- By Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University, James Shinkle, Trinity University
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, Birgit Tautz
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 26
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2019, pp 141-162
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SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, the Anthropocene's global ecological calamities, such as climate change, widespread toxins, and mass species extinction, are occurring on such a vast scale that scholars in environmental studies face significant challenges when seeking to represent and respond to them in a meaningful and fathomable manner. Many academic and activist efforts begin with a relatable base level of “local” or “regional” knowledge that easily fits with the lived experiences of individuals, and then extrapolate from this base to connect the familiar issues to larger national, continental, or global issues. One of our goals with this study of Goethe's botanical writings is to provide an alternative model of various ecological scales that follows the same trajectory of small and “local” to large, “global” views, yet with a significant difference.
Inspired by Goethe, and incorporating insights from both the environmental humanities and contemporary plant sciences, we begin, rather unusually, with plant-scale delineations: that is, we begin, like Goethe, with the “leaf” itself as the small unit of biological, morphological, and ecological form that is part of a plant and so must always be integrated into the larger scale of an individual plant, and then to a forest-level or other multiplant system, and finally, in Goethe's term from his lectures on physics, to the largest level of the enormous “Pflanzen-Ozean.” He envisioned the vast landscape of green life as a “plant-ocean” in which insects are immersed in the same way that fish are immersed in the water of the sea, analogous and related to the “Luftmeer” or “air-ocean” that human beings and other terrestrial animals reside within. The plant- and air-oceans thus delineate large-scale ecological spaces in which we, along with other living beings, exist on the Earth's surface. It also shifts the focus from the “global” of “globalization” away from the human and towards the nonhuman instead; that is, towards the air-ocean and the extensive coverage of the planetary greenery upon which terrestrial life depends. In this joint interdisciplinary essay, we combine our two areas of expertise: contemporary plant science on the one hand, and Goethe studies and ecocriticism on the other.
Nature and the “Dark Pastoral” in Goethe’s Werther
- Edited by Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 22
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 27 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 115-132
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Introduction: The Dark Pastoral in Relation to Dark Ecology and the Anthropocene
CELEBRATING THE NATURAL HARMONY of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe's eponymous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with “simple” peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life—at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from—or, more precisely, abstracted from—the urban sites where the authors of such poems and tales inevitably write and where, apparently, corrupted wealthy sophisticates rage political and economic battles. Yet according to ecocritic Terry Gifford, the pastoral trope is actually not so one-sided and simplistic; this literary form encompasses complex, often ironic tensions, including the primary oppositions between the (gritty) urban and the (garden-like) rural, between the always already lost “Golden Age” and a messier present time, between myth and history, and between an overtly artificial “utopia” and concrete “realism,” as well as the intentional acknowledgment that the green vision is hyperbolic yet precisely therefore able to provide a social critique through artifice. Even the pastoral's common insistence on avoiding all mention of politics can function as a form of critique, with its utopian, conflict-free zone inevitably suggesting the opposite, much in the way that a utopia can describe a “no-place” that critiques what actually is. The pastoral tensions in these polarities resonate all the more powerfully because they cannot be bridged; their mythic nostalgia can reveal stark contrasts in social, political, chronological, and, most significantly for ecocriticism, ecological terms.
However, the pastoral's capaciousness may not be broad enough to encompass the rupture documented in Goethe's novel through Werther's radical shift from a foundation of agrarian harmony to the unstable grounds of destructive storms and flooding. This shift parallels the text's move out of Werther's solipsistic letters and into a multiplicity of voices describing his downfall.
Faust's Mountains: An Ecocritical Reading of Goethe's Tragedy and Science
- from Part I - First Forays: Mountain Exploration and Celebration from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century
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- By Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas
- Edited by Sean Ireton, University of Missouri, Caroline Schaumann, Emory University
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- Book:
- Heights of Reflection
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2012, pp 116-133
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Ecocriticism's environmental perspective views human beings, bodies, and culture as participants in ecological interactions and exchanges with the rest of the energetic and material world, including both biotic and abiotic forms. This ecocritical essay assesses how Goethe portrays Faust's mountain experiences in both part I and part II (1808, 1832) of the tragedy as engagements with physical matter rather than with spiritual inspiration. Indeed, by using ecocriticism to study Goethe's science as the context for the play, we see that Faust's many mountains are more than a setting; they actively destabilize his — and our — assumptions about “passive matter” and recontextualize human endeavors in their physical environment. Faust's mountains inspire the desire to “ascend,” but they also offer a glimpse into the massive geological changes occurring through deep time even as they radically alter the climatic systems of the biosphere on a daily basis. In other words, scientists in the Age of Goethe recognized that the apparent solidity of mountains is actually a short-term illusion; mountains instead embody and enact climatic and geological flows in which we human beings are not the only active forces. Goethe's Faust documents such issues, though this is often overlooked in readings celebrating human ingenuity and action as the supreme, spiritual, and/or modern force shaping our world for the “better,” regardless of so-called “collateral damage” such as murder, colonialism, piracy, and the final putrid swamp. In contrast, viewing the tragedy through ecocriticism and Goethe's science offers a possible environmental stance acknowledging humanity's position within these many physical processes rather than as transcendental beings who dominate at whim and without long-term costs.
Ecocriticism, the Elements, and the Ascent/Descent into Weather in Goethe's Faust
- from Special Section on Goethe and the Postclassical: Literature, Science, Art, and Philosophy, 1805–1815
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- By Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University
- Edited by Daniel Purdy
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 17
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 14 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 15 January 2010, pp 55-72
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The ostensibly religious and ethical significance of Faust's final ascension after his death tends to distract, if not blind, readers to other possible implications of that upwards movement and to the idea that he may continue and return “back to earth.” The assumption that heavenly powers reward Faust leads to the claim that Goethe's tragedy validates the quest of “land developers” or those who would strive regardless of the consequences. I propose, in contrast, that we read Faust's “final” ascension alongside Goethe's weather essay, “Witterungslehre 1825,” and thereby note that this upward motion is not necessarily “final” at all but rather part of the circulation of the elements driven by their polarities to create weather patterns flowing upwards and downwards. Goethe describes just such a pattern in his “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern”: “Des Menschen Seele / Gleicht dem Wasser: / Vom Himmel kommt es, / Zum Himmel steigt es, / Und wieder nieder / Zur Erde muß es, / Ewig wechselnd.” Faust's earthly remains travel, in fact, through the same three layers of air, “die Luftregionen” that he describes in the weather essays. And since such flows “zum Himmel,” also come “vom Himmel” as part of inevitable polarities, he shall also likely return “wieder nieder.” When understood within the context of Goethe's science and this poem, the tragedy appears less a final affirmation of Faust's skills as “modern developer” than a portrayal of elemental forces in whose flows we exist. Failure to appreciate and conceptualize their patterns allows us to be swept away all too easily into Mephistophelean land grabs, exploitation of other people and life forms, and the seductive promise of sex, power, and the rapid access to “fire-driven” energy forms. Whether Faust succeeds in diverting the powerful interactions of the four elements and their atmospheric perturbations or rather is swept away in their flows is hence a significant question to ask of the closing scene of Goethe's “final masterpiece.” The answer, typically Goethean, is a little of both.
My efforts here to revisit Faust in terms of Goethe's science, and so to join the work proposed by Astrida Orle Tantillo, also have an eye towards the environmental questions of ecocriticism. The essay has three parts that are each informed by a specific scholar.
J. M. van der Laan, Seeking Meaning for Goethe's Faust. London: Continuum, 2007. 202 pp
- from Book Reviews
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- By Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University
- Edited by Daniel Purdy
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 17
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 14 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 15 January 2010, pp 379-380
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Faust lives on, as J. M. van der Laan demonstrates in this monograph that sweeps through the ages from antiquity to postmodernity with a breath-taking audacity not unlike Goethe's own claim to bridge three thousand years in his play. The book first surveys Faustian themes and formats from the earliest chapbook versions to the wealth of literary manifestations, cinematic and musical renditions, and multi-media events. With that context in place, van der Laan then launches an insightful study of Goethe's two-part tragedy highlighting the tensions of the text in ethical and scientific terms alike. He demonstrates that Goethe's Faust goes head-on into debates that still—or, perhaps, even more so— resonate today in the early twenty-first century. These include such issues as the ethical and practical implications of our quest for knowledge, including whether technology is our magical savior or our destructive master, and, whether the “control” of nature is the human domain or our environmental demise. The play's intense offerings lie in its resemblance to the universe: the Faust texts “constitute just such a system [like Stuart Kauffmann's chaotic molecules that develop into complexity], a site at the edge of chaos where order and disorder, stasis and dynamism, consistence and inconsistence meet and interact” (127). Even as van der Laan demonstrates the scientific potential of this play that inspired such thinkers as those who developed chaos theory, Mitchell Feigenbaum and Albert Libchaber, he also clarifies that Faust simultaneously reveals the potential terror and exploitation of the applications of scientific knowledge in technology: “Only in the technological experience does Faust find meaning and satisfaction, but what he actually achieves once again is not true, but what can only be called false, meaning. After all, the story closes with Faust lost in illusion. What meaning does he actually find?” (106). Van der Laan continues with the problem of the Faustian illusion by suggesting that we, like Faust, may pursue knowledge yet actually determine far less than we believe. This he formulates both in the theological terms of good works versus divine grace, but also via complexity theory's exploration of order and chaos in the universe.
Seeing the Light: Goethe's Märchen as Science—Newton's Science as Fairy Tale
- from Special section on childhood edited by Anthony Krupp
- Edited by Simon J. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 14
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 19 February 2007, pp 103-128
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Introduction: A Fairy Tale of Science Written in the “Symbols” of Nature
Light permeates Goethe's enigmatic 1795 Märchen, appearing in such manifold forms and reflections that it may come as a surprise that it refers rather straightforwardly to, well, light. Most interpretations of this tale begin with disclaimers about how its opulence renders it luminous with meaning and yet ultimately and intentionally opaque; I begin instead with the assertion of clarity. The play of light in this text mirrors many aspects of Goethe's critique of Newtonian optics. While the lights of the fairy tale may also reflect scores of ideas including the shine of poetry or aesthetics, the Schein of Schiller's Ästhetische Briefe, the enlightenment, theater lights, and the French Revolution described in its framing tale, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, their primary role is to highlight, as it were, the role of light in the perception and interpretation of phenomena. Light in Das Märchen is the concrete, scientific topic with which Goethe was obsessed for much of his career, through which he felt he had accomplished far more than in any of his literary works, and on which he was actively working during the writing of his fairy tale. Goethe sees light as a complex problem whose very nature, as well as our mode of perceiving it, must be completely reassessed. Rather similarly to discussions in phenomenology and contemporary physics, he believed that perception and nature are not two separate subjects but rather always connected.