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Idealism and Asexualism j 459

459 459

21. Cited in Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, p. 218.


22. Kant, I.  (1790/ 1908), Critique of Judgement, in Biology, trans. E.  B. Wilson, Columbia
    University Press, p. 9.


23. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.
    24. Ibid.


24. Kant’s premise that beauty is the “purpose” of art was discarded by many in the twentieth
    century. In her book, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th- Century Art (2001), Wendy
    Steiner quotes the Peruvian poet Mario Vargas Llosa as follows: “Contemporary aesthetics has
    established the beauty of ugliness, reclaiming for art everything in human experience that artis-
    tic representation had previously rejected.”


25. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.


26. Source unknown.


27. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.


28. The younger Schiller (1759– 1805), who was trained as a doctor but took up writing instead,
    had admired Goethe and Rousseau as a student. Goethe and Schiller became acquainted in 1789,
    but became close friends around 1794 after Goethe’s return from Italy. Both lived in Weimar
    and were the seminal figures of the literary movement known as Weimar Classicism.


29. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.


30. Eschenmayer, K.  (1801), Spontaneität  =  Weltseele oder über das höchste Princip der
    Naturphilosophie. Zeitschrift für Speculative Physik 2:1– 68. (Cited in Richards, The Romantic
    Conception of Life.)


31. Nadler, S. (1999), Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge University Press.


32. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1797), On the World Soul.


33. Williams, J. R. (1998), The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography. Blackwell, p. 5.


34. Johann Gottfried Herder to Johann Georg Hamann ( July 11, 1782). Cited by Richards,
    The Romantic Conception of Life, pp. 355– 356.


35. See Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, p.  326. Schiller, for reasons of his own,
    apparently did not appreciate the positive inspiration, as well as the angst, Goethe derived from
    his many relationships with women.


36. Dichtung und Wahrheit (pt. 2 bk6), in Sämtliche Werke 16: 250– 254. Cited by Richards,
    The Romantic Conception of Life, p. 331.


37. Cited by Stelzig, Eugene L. (2000), The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and
    Goethe. University of Virginia Press, p. 203.


38. Cited by Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, p. 358.
    40. Ibid.


39. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Frau Charlotte von Stein, May 1, 1776, in Mandelkow,
    Robert, ed. (1988), Goethes Briefe (Hamburger Ausgabe), third edition, 4 vols. C. H. Beck, I: 213.


40. Cited by Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography, p. 205.


41. Goethe, J. W., Zur Morphologie. Verfolg (WA vi, 348); cf. Bildungstrieb (WA vii, 7I– 72);
    cited by Wells, G. A. (1967), Goethe and the intermaxillary bone. British Journal for the History
    of Science 3: 348– 361.


42. Wells, Goethe and the intermaxillary bone.


43. von Goethe, J.  W. (1784), Über den Zwischenkiefer des Menschen und der Tiere.
    Handschriftlich, mit Tafeln, M_ rz 1784; ohne Tafeln 1820 zur Morphologie, Band I  Heft
    2: “Dem Menschen wie den Tieren ist ein Zwischenknochen der obern Kinnlade zuzuschreiben”;