Goethe’s Art of Nature

For Goethe, Hamburger (1975) argues, art was a second nature, an extension of nature in a symbolic form essential to the human task of adapting one’s self to the world. Science also could be viewed as the evolution of a cultural form directed at the understanding of nature and our place within it. The customary distinction we employ is to describe the former as a matter of feeling and the latter as an affair of reason; soul and precision. Goethe’s perspective, on the other hand, is to respect the distinct directions of the two whilst suggesting that each must obey the underlying unities of form and progression that are inherent in the being of nature itself.

His Science, Morphology, is the study of the development of form, its advent into being as life-forms. Similarly, the poetic imagination creates symbolic reflections of the mind’s engagement with life as it is lived. In each case form is its function, allowing the unity of the useful and the beautiful. Thus, Goethe had no problem in responding to a contemporary analysis of emerging cloud forms with a cloud poem! But we would fundamentally misunderstand Goethe if we limited the requirement for form and progression to the practice of Art and Science; these may well be the means by which we refine our way to an end, but we must find that requirement in our own lives for it to be fully realised. This is how he states the task in his poem, Nature and Art:

Nature and Art, they go their separate ways,
It seems; yet all at once, they find each other.
Even I no longer am a foe to either;
Both equally attract me nowadays.

Some honest toil’s required; then phase by phase,
When diligence and wit have worked together
To tie us fast to Art with their good tether,
Nature again may set our hearts ablaze.

All culture is like this: the unfettered mind,
The boundless spirit’s mere imagination,
For pure perfection’s heights will strive in vain.

To achieve great things, we must be self-confined:
Mastery is revealed in limitation
And law alone can set us free again.

The success of the imagination, Goethe says, is its achievement of form. The “self-confined" of Luke’s (2005) translation is sich zusammenraffen in the original German - a drawing together (of experiences) in oneself to express a whole. It is this capacity to place a limit to the change and diversity of life through the abstraction of significant form, the task of both Science and Art, which “can set us free again”.

Goethe talks of these endeavours as a game, referring to the organised playfulness of artistic expression and scientific experiment. But his method also requires the preliminary act of a concentrated attention towards the object of concern. Such attentiveness should be guided as far as possible by the nature of the object itself. If we begin by setting aside our preconceptions, the character of the object itself may lead to an intuition of its wholeness which may then be further refined. I have argued earlier that there is nothing obscure about this approach.

It can be thought of as skill acquired within the practice of a discipline by which you acquire a sense of the interrelatedness of parts - not an explicit theory but a perspective allowing you to understand how what appears at first to be fragmented, chaotic, diverse, is in fact the beginning of a coordinated whole. This is the starting point of a morphology which seeks to trace the development of form, the appearing of being both in nature and in symbolic representation. In this respect Goethe’s outlook may be described as a genetic phenomenology, the tracing of forms inherent in an unprejudiced view of the whole quality of something.

There is also a sense in which his approach anticipates the idea of the "open system” of modern systems theory. He argues that the development of form occurs within a polarity of forces. This polarity is evident both in the natural world - up and down, far and near, hot and cold, life and death - and also within the sphere of human understanding - inner and outer, the real and the ideal, and so forth. Whereas the reality of the physical and natural oppositions can be readily accepted as constituting the unity of the world, our symbolic oppositions have continued to support innumerable warring factions when their underlying, metaphorical unity has remained unrecognised.

Their imaginative force has halted, abandoned, as it were, "to set in stone”. The equitable life for Goethe is one of practical reason whereby response, sensitive to circumstance, keeps the imagination alive. There are times when virtue itself must be exercised with discretion. Your well-being may even require the abandonment of an achievement, a move to a further outlet for your imagination to exercise itself, a sacrifice of what is past for the sake of what may be: the slogan "die and become” was Goethe’s advice which he dutifully followed in the stages of his own life. We would be mistaken, however, to view these qualifications as merely a strategy for survival. The requirement for balance within development enhances the range and complexity of our constructs and complements that progression of form in which the world beyond us becomes a satisfying inwardness.

Goethe’s ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’ suggests, and I think confirms, that only the poetic imagination can do justice to this transformation of the outer into the inner world:

Uber Allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Sphrest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde,
Ruhest du auch.

Now stillness covers
All the hill-tops;
In all the tree-tops
Hardly a breath stirs.
The birds in the forest
Have finished their song.
Wait: you too shall rest
Before long.

Goethe’s German captures precisely the movement of stillness ‘down’ from the hills through the tree-tops and the now quietened birds beneath, then to the wanderer who has merely to wait patiently to receive the rest that nature endows. There is a rhythm of descent which the best English translation cannot capture: “ist Ruh" and “sphrest du kaum einen Hauch" when spoken suggest a downwards movement from their preceding lines, as does the poet’s insertion of the “e” in separating the two syllables of “Voglein”. In addition, “Ruh" and “Ruhest", “Hauch" and “auch" mimic the sound of a fading breeze.

We find in this poem an example of Goethe’s often remarked “objectivity”. The focus is upon the unfolding of natural events and their co-incidence with the human condition. There is no Romantic striving; rather we are told: just look, just wait. It is the concurrence itself which evokes our thoughts and feeling. But in looking and waiting we cannot be simply an open book on which nature writes. Our “subjectivity” must be such as to exercise our availability: it must contain the potential for the appearing of the form of its realisation.

This is how the poem calls out to us to respond. Wilkinson (1962) points out that Goethe uses the term ‘Gehalt’ to signify the “import" of a poetic meaning, the true content or inner value of the form. Our response to nature and to the poem that mirrors nature must depend then on the latent presence of this value. Clearly, therefore, this insight would not be grounded on an exclusively objective observation of events leading only to statements of fact, and we must conclude that Goethe’s objectivity is also a subjectivity; or, better, that the opposition between the two has no mandate in his poetry in which the formal and material aspects of both the natural and symbolic worlds are mutually supportive: the guiding idea of form is embedded in the material world of nature and at the same time in the sensuous quality of symbolic expression.