Heather I. Sullivan

Ecocriticism, the Elements, and the Ascent/ Descent into Weather in Goethe's Faust

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 uber den Wassern”: “Des Menschen Seele / Gleicht dem Wasser: / Vom Himmel kommt es, / Zum Himmel steigt es, / Und wieder nieder / Zur Erde mus es, / Ewig wechselnd.” 1 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, 2 also have an eye towards the environmental questions of ecocriticism. The essay has three parts that are each informed by a specific scholar. First, I look at Goethe’s “Gesang” in conjunction with his weather essays to see how they relate to the closing scene of the play, putting a particular emphasis on how Goethe explains atmospheric conditions via interactions of the four elements (earth, air,

Ecocriticism, Goethe’s Optics and Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten: Emergent Forms versus Newtonian “Constructions”

Long viewed as an anomalous assemblage of tales formulating either social or aesthetic developments, Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, in fact, presents a sequence of perceptual categories relating to his optics and his exploration of our interface with the physical world around us. From the troublingly inexplicable sounds of the ghost stories through the embrace and renunciation of physical desires to the final, idealized visual spectrum of the Märchen’s colors and lights, the tales’ path explores how physical perception is enmeshed with interpretation. Hence the Unterhaltungen relates to ecocriticism’s interrogation of human- nature environments in that both Goethe and ecocriticism seek to change our perception itself so that we might recognize the “emergent forms” in which we inevitably participate (rather than simply “control” them). Both also seek to comprehend the artificiality of the damaging “constructions” wrought by Newtonian science (according to Goethe) or by the view that the natural world is naught but static material awaiting our “enlivenment.” (HIS)

Unbalanced Nature, Unbounded Bodies, and Unlimited Technology: Ecocriticism and Karen Traviss' Wess'har Series.

While nature is often claimed to be a space of harmonized balance or an antidote to the chaos of the modern world, we need a more grounded assessment of nature as endlessly changing and much less predictable than we like to assume. In this essay, I explore Karen Traviss’ provocative exploration of unbalanced nature and unbounded bodies in her wess’har series with the guidance of two ecocritics who reject the concept of balanced nature, Dana Phillips and Ursula Heise. Additionally, I turn to the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood for insights regarding Traviss’ spurious yet rather standard vision of an unlimited technological panacea. Traviss’ series portrays how the boundaries and limits that we perceive as solid are often much less so than we believe, yet she also reveals—inadvertently, it seems—how easily we blindly ignore other, more solid limits.

The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene

This chapter addresses the challenges of portraying radically altered ecological systems as a human story in an era of global anthropogenic impact, exploring how to combine traditional literary tropes like the pastoral with more recent forms such as climate fiction. The dark pastoral trope builds on the pastoral’s long and rich, albeit problematic, literary tradition featuring human beings in highly aestheticized landscapes and re-contextualizes it within the Anthropocene’s dark drama of floods, earthquakes, storms, nuclear explosions, and climate change. Texts such as Goethe’s Werther, Kleist’s Earthquake in Chili, Storm’s The Dykemaster, Pausewang’s The Cloud, and Trojanow’s The Lamentations of Zeno posit various pastoral moments only to rupture and re-shape them with disasters that nevertheless highlight the human enmeshment with the non-human.

Agency in the Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, and the New Materialisms

Our current era has been termed the Age of the “Anthropocene,” or the human-inflected geological era. This essay addresses the implications of human impact on the Earth as a form of “radical reality” by addressing the broad spectrum of human and non-human agency. The analysis follows a three-step process: it begins with an introduction to the new materialisms and distributed agency in contrast to Howard Tuttle’s notion of “radical reality” based on human consciousness. It then explores the agency of nature’s “vibrancy” in the debate occurring early in the Anthropocene (during Goethe’s lifetime) between “vitalism” and “mechanism.” Finally, I use this context to explore Goethe’s optics as a view that, like the new materialisms, is grounded in the interactivity of human and non-human energies. I juxtapose Tuttle’s notion of radical reality with the new materialisms via Goethe in order to explore the broader implications of human and non-human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Goethe offers convenient access into the Anthropocene with surprisingly prescient insights into what we now see as ecological enmeshments within nature’s systems. We are in the Age of the Anthropocene, or the human-inflected geological era, as the Nobel Laureate in atmospheric chemistry, Paul Crutzen, announced in 2000.1 Since then, many scholars have adopted the term to describe the scientifically traceable impact of human activity across the entire planet since the Industrial Revolution. With such wide-spread traces and changes attributable to human beings, our actions loom ever larger and our agency to guide our future seems ever more profound. Debates rage concerning whether we should engineer the globe intentionally to counter the damage, or to try to work within the parameters in which we have evolved along with our co-species and thus limit our impact. The sway of human activity on reality seems ever more radical. Yet, at the same time, thinking “globally” means that our actual individual agency appears diminished, particularly when compared to traditionally humanist assumptions of a selfdetermining rational individual. Hence we face the complex dilemma of navigating between the vast collective impact of human beings as a species on the surface of the earth and climate and an acknowledgement of our limited individual agency in the scale of these circumstances. In addressing this striking disparity of scale in the context of our ecological enmeshment, I consider our agency as a “distributed” force; that is, it 1 Cf. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011). not so much driven by singular individuals making well-considered choices, but rather by a plurality of interactions and impulses from very large groups and a multitude of discourses, other beings of all kinds and on many scales, and, also, by our physical and cultural environments. Indeed, “matter” itself has an “agentic capacity” that influences our daily choices. We exist within the movements and meshes of living and non-living energies, from viruses and bacteria to weather and economics, even while our talents for technology and cultural constructions have shifted the planet’s flows and climate. Agency in the age of the Anthropocene is complex and kaleidoscopic, distributed and global. This understanding of agency is one of the framing theses of the “new materialisms” for which reality emerges from the combined energies of vibrant matter (from quantum level to the cosmic), bodies, things, and cultural discourses. To carry out this study, I examine the works of an author writing at the Anthropocene’s dawn, one who expresses the shifting views on the bodymind-environment interface at the time when the radical planetary changes that we are now experiencing broadly were beginning to gain velocity: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Goethe, in fact, spoke of modernity’s increasing speed as “veloziferisch,” or devilishly fast. He is also acclaimed as the exemplary author of the modern, self-determining subject who creates his own destiny. From Werther to Faust, his literary figures stride through history and their eponymous texts creating worlds and their futures. Or at least that is the standard account of Goethe as major German author and shaper of cosmopolitan European modernity. In contrast to that view, I suggest that Goethe’s vision – as we note when viewing both his science and literature together – documents figures who may believe that they choose their own fates yet actually engage in reciprocally determining exchanges with their companions and their physical surroundings in a manner best described as distributed agency. In other words, Goethe presents human reality as an enmeshment within historical culture, local communities, global interactions, and, not to be forgotten, multiple scales of natural forces. Discussing how these entanglements among culture, physical nature, and intellectual worldbuilding interact as part of human “reality” presents a challenge for studies of the environment and the human being alike. In this essay, I address the question of the “physically” radical reality of the age of the Anthropocene as documented in the new materialisms, and compare it to the “mentally” radical reality of human consciousness proposed by Howard Tuttle and explored in this volume.2 Tuttle writes that the composition of reality is inevitably altered by the presence of our conscious2 Howard Tuttle, Human Life is Radical Reality: An Idea Developed from the Conceptions of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset (New York: Lang, 2005). ness perceiving and shaping itself and its surroundings. I juxtapose these types of radical reality through the lens of agency: who and what has it, how or if it can be directed, and what agency in the age of the Anthropocene means for humanity’s “radical reality.” In his Human Life is Radical Reality, Tuttle explores how reality and the very matrix of our existence is impacted by human consciousness. As human subjects, we are always (only) within the range of our consciousness, though we extend our “reality” outwards, and so shape ever more of our environment accordingly. Tuttle declares radical reality to be the idea that in order for something to be real for human beings, it must somehow appear with and be kept in view of at least one human life. Ortega’s claim that it is the destiny of human beings to ‘humanize the world’ is neither an anti-environmental notion nor an anthropocentric one. Human beings cannot avoid understanding circumstances in terms of the nature and understanding they actually possess. Even the idea of a non-anthropomorphic environmentalism is in fact a humanization of circumstances by human life itself. We cannot avoid imparting meanings and values that are not human meanings and values. (Tuttle, p.178) Tuttle labels our perspective as inevitably human, in that we can see the world only through our own eyes and cultural systems. It is not just our frame that is altered in the contact, but reality itself is shaped in both directions by our “humanizing.” Tuttle’s concrete assessment of human reality as being human shares with mechanistic views a belief that we human beings can escape our frame – bodily, material, ecological – and “transcend.” Tuttle’s radical reality is the human ability to have a “voluntary, transcending construction” that is different from our “biological nature” (Tuttle, p.141). Tuttle thus maintains the difference between human reality and the rest of physical reality: The issue here is the distinction between our life as a voluntary, transcending construction, as radical reality, and our life as our biological nature. Our historical and fabricated being and our biological being are not identical. Our selftranscending and historical being is a denaturalized existence which cannot be discerned by exclusive reference to our anatomy, sensations, or physiology [...]. While our biological existence, of course, is a necessary condition of our life as embodied, it is not a sufficient condition to explain our life as radical reality, and it is not anything radically real. Our human being is both natural and extranatural; we are thus ‘ontological centaurs.’ Our body, of a given and fixed nature, does its work automatically, through biological laws of growth and decay, but our extra-natural life as radical reality is not given ready-made or realized according to laws; it is achieved in historical time, an existence which accumulates and fabricates itself toward its own future. (Tuttle, p.141) Tuttle maintains a line between our “biological existence” and our “selftranscending being,” something I question through both Goethe and the new materialists. Certainly, our reality is “achieved in historical time, an existence which accumulates and fabricates itself toward its own future,” yet unlike Tuttle, I follow the new materialist’s assertion that this type of existence is pervasive in matter’s widespread creative forces in many forms (Tuttle, p.141). In fact, there is increasing evidence that “reality” is more a cacophonous and creative symphony of co-emergence including the tones from both mind and matter. As John McCarthy writes in his 2006 discussion of Goethe and complexity theory in Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe-Nietzsche-Grass): “Perhaps the creative act alone is real. Perhaps all principles of reality are ultimately derivative of the one principle of creative convergence and divergence of inner and outer spaces, of matter and mind.”3 It is significant, therefore, that Tuttle prevaricates most promisingly, despite generally maintaining the problematic dichotomy of “human biology” versus “transcendent ability,” when he emphasizes the requirement of “relations” that allow the existence of the two things related: significantly, there is therefore no “I,” or human subject, without its world. We may see the worl

The Dark Pastoral: Goethe and Atwood

ABSTRACT The Anthropocene challenges the humanities to find means of representing and analysing our fossil-fueled practices that have spread industrial particulates over the entire globe, changed the climate, and reshaped landscapes into a “new nature.” In this essay, I propose the “dark pastoral” as an analytical trope, examining two framing texts from the Anthropocene: Goethe’s landmark 1797 pastoral German epic, Hermann and Dorothea, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the first installment of her MaddAddam trilogy which ends with a surprisingly pastoral flourish. At the early phases of the Anthropocene (as it is defined by Paul Crutzen, at least), Goethe creates an epic pastoral whose materiality points darkly towards the impending modernity of capitalism. Atwood’s, postapocalyptic versions of a damaged yet rejuvenating Earth directly dramatise the Anthropocene’s destruction while ending with a “new” pastoral that relies on an almost total obliteration of humanity: these are dark pastoral visions.

Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature. (Goethe—Nietzsche—Grass) (review)

Konzept des Pluralismus plädiert wird: Im Gegensatz zum Relativismus benötigt er ein “objektives Korrelat,” mit dessen Hilfe sich die Echtheit und der Grad der vertretenen Werte ausmachen läßt. Es gibt viele Wege von Kulturen zu ihrer Vervollkommnung, aber nur einen Prüfstein: die Humanität. Keine Kultur, kein einzelner Mensch kann sie je ganz erreichen; für jeden bleibt sie eine Herausforderung, die vor Überheblichkeit schützt. Der Kenntnisreichtum der Studie von Anne Löchte ist verbunden mit der differenzierenden Darstellung der Details und den moderaten Urteilen über Herders Ideen und Thesen der Forschung. Mit Arbeiten, die Aussagen Herders allzu rasch verallgemeinern, um fragwürdige Thesen zu stützen (wie etwa im Fall von Finkielkraut, Welsch oder Peitsch) geht sie allerdings zu Recht scharf ins Gericht. Gerade deshalb hätte man sich an manchen Stellen noch mehr Genauigkeit und Entschiedenheit gewünscht: Gibt es nicht auch bei Herder schon einen Unterschied zwischen Zivilisation und Kultur? Ist das Verhältnis von Kultur und Humanität nicht auch dialektisch zu sehen: Kultur schafft Humanität und Humanität treibt neue Stufen der Kultur hervor? Muß man bei Herder nicht doch von einem Universalismus von Anfang an sprechen und damit seiner Begründung der Menschenrechte für alle Völker folgen? Manche Widersprüche würden sich ausräumen lassen, wenn man das Spiel der Fiktionen bedenkt, das Herder betreibt, wenn er (wie z.B. in den Briefen) Quellen zitiert, historischen und erfundenen Figuren das Wort erteilt, als Herausgeber auftritt oder ein Gespräch fi ngiert. Herders Texte unterscheiden sich genau darin von den philosophischen Abhandlungen seiner Zeit, daß er auch ästhetische Mittel stilsicher verwendet. Lösen nicht gerade Widersprüche in Dialogen die Forderung von Humanität ein, auch vom Anderen her zu denken? Zu überlegen ist auch, ob der zentrale Begriff der Humanität nicht besser als Prozeß zum Ziel allgemeiner Glückseligkeit denn als Summe konkreter Inhalte gelingender Menschlichkeit bestimmt werden könnte. Insgesamt aber ist erstaunlich, wie eine Dissertation mit ihrem Bemühen um Genauigkeit so viele Fragen aufwerfen kann. Sie zieht nicht nur die Summe aus der umfangreichen Forschung und eigener Textanalyse zu einem hochkomplexen Problem, sondern gibt Anstöße zum “Fortdenken,” wie Herder es verlangt. Das führt dann sicher zu der Frage der Aktualität der Ideen, deren Antwort sich Anne Löchte noch zugunsten der Historizität versagt, wenn auch diese Ambivalenz an manchen Stellen hinter der Argumentation aufscheint.