Birgit Eriksson

Language, Science and Culture—and the Case of Goethe

My aim in this essay is to explore the complex interactions between literature, science and culture. First, I present three different views of the hierarchy between them since the early modem period: one privileging science, another privileging literary culture, and a third conceiving science as both culturally conditioned and important. Taking the third view as my basis, I analyse Goethes writings on nature as a concrete exploration of the interactions between language and science, and discuss the problem of representing living forms in his morphology as well· as in his Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Finally, I argue that Goethes epistemology is influenced by his aesthetic experiences, and I generalize the argument by suggesting that culture and science reciprocally educate each other.