Flora Unveiled

(backadmin) #1

440 i Flora Unveiled


Goethe’s wide- ranging intellect and engaging personality to make him his privy counselor.
After seven years in the Weimar court, Goethe was so highly esteemed by Karl August that
he was granted noble status, allowing him to insert “von” before his surname. In a letter to
a mutual acquaintance, the philosopher Gottfried Herder provided a jaw- dropping list of
Goethe’s official duties at Weimar:


He is ... privy councilor, president of the chamber, president of the war council, over-
seer of buildings and mines, and also director of plaisirs, court poet, orchestrator of
beautiful festivals, of court operas, of ballets, of masks, of writing, of art, etc., direc-
tor of the drawing academy, in which during the winter he holds lectures on osteol-
ogy, and himself, principally, the first actor, dancer, and, in short, the factotum of the
house of Weimar. ... He has become a baron.^35

The only portfolio Herder seems to have omitted was minister of agriculture. To keep up
with his duties, Goethe became a voracious reader of philosophical, scientific, and techni-
cal works in addition to scholarly writings on music and art. The more administrative and
cultural responsibilities he took on, the greater the scope and depth of his readings.
However, Goethe was first and foremost a prolific literary genius. He first gained atten-
tion in 1773 as the author of the play Götz von Berlichingen, which was loosely based on the
memoirs of a sixteenth- century German Imperial Knight who lost one arm in battle and
had it replaced by a prosthetic constructed of iron. Goethe’s Götz epitomized the Romantic
hero, a free spirit who died tragically rebelling against the stultifying and deceitful laws of
society. If Götz brought Goethe notoriety, his next work, the sentimental romantic novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), brought him instant celebrity and spawned an inter-
national cult of lovelorn, suicidal youth. However, his greatest masterpieces remain his epic,
two- part drama Faust and his piercingly beautiful lyric poetry, which inspired lieder by
Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, and Mendelssohn.
Goethe’s primary scientific focus was on living organisms, especially plants. Over his
lifetime he investigated many subjects in the natural sciences, but his work on plant mor-
phology was arguably his most lasting and original contribution. He was especially inter-
ested in the morphology of leaves and flowers, and he was familiar with the researches of
Camerarius, Koelreuter, and Sprengel on pollination, although he rarely, if ever, cited their
work. As noted earlier, his reticence may have been due in part to persistent doubts he enter-
tained about the sexual theory, doubts that had their origin in nature philosophy.
The key reservations that Goethe and many nature philosophers continued to have about
the sexual theory were twofold:  first, its failure to integrate the process of sexual repro-
duction with the entire life cycle of the plant; second, its overemphasis (according to their
lights) on experimentation rather than on the philosophical principles guiding develop-
ment. Goethe viewed the process of “metamorphosis” as a continuum in which develop-
ment proceeded according to a set of rules. These rules were philosophical in nature rather
than mechanistic, having a closer affinity to Platonic idealism than to the laws of chemis-
try or physics. Because nature philosophers had for the most part abandoned traditional
Christianity in favor of a pantheistic view of the universe, no model of plant reproduc-
tion would be complete in their eyes without a spiritual component. Although Goethe as

Free download pdf