R. H. Stephenson

“Binary Synthesis”: Goethe's Aesthetic Intuition in Literature and Science

Argument This essay seeks to identify the cultural significance of Goethes scientific writings. He reformulates, in the light of his own concrete experience, “crucial turning-points” ( Hauptmomente ) in the history of science – key ideas, the historical understanding of which is vital to present understanding – thus situating his own scientific work at the bi-polar center of the Western scientific tradition, conceived as the dramatic interplay over centuries of two opposing modes of thought. For in his experimentation he recaptures the glimpse of living form gained in aesthetic perception ( Anschauung ), from which such inherited theoretical positions are ultimately derived. At each stage of this process, imagination, in its aesthetic modality, is essential, for it alone reveals the world as it truly is. The literary quality of his writings on nature, as on culture, reveals Goethes stylistic achievement in devising a medium in which the insights gained in contemplation may be so transmitted as to make a similar, imaginative, appeal to his reader – re-enacting the abstract-concrete equilibrium characterizing all aesthetic experience. Matching his style to the subtle, delicate, connectedness of Nature, Goethe recreates the delights of participating in natural creativity. His Janus-faced, scientific-literary, style illustrates “binary synthesis,” the principle that unites Goethes science with his art. Beauty is the normal state. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life ) There can be no such thing as an eclectic philosophy, but there can be eclectic philosophers. But an eclectic is anyone who, from whatever exists and is happening round about, appropriates the things he or she finds congenial to her or his nature; and this context validly includes all that can be called culture and progress in a theoretical and practical sense. It follows that two eclectic philosophers could turn into the greatest opponents if they are antagonistic to one another, each picking out whatever suits him or her in every traditional system of philosophy. (Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Journeyman Years )

Nietzsche and Weimar Aesthetics

Nietzsche’s philosophy, always a site of heated interpretative contestation, owes much to the aesthetic theory of its predecessors, particularly Kant, Schelling, Scho-penhauer, Wagner, but above all Schiller and Goethe. Yet whilst this debt is frequently acknowledged by critics, its implications are even more frequently ignored. Once this ‘perspective’ is restored, however, a fresh coherence and purposiveness may be detected in Nietzsche’s philosophical aesthetics. In Die Geburt der Tragodie (1872) Nietzsche makes constant allusion to Schiller’s concept of ‘aesthetic semblance’, and when he describes the world as being justified ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon’, he is thinking of Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic as a fusion of physical and intellectual experience. Similarly, Nietzsche’s immensely influential ‘polaristic thinking’, in which each term (such as the Apollonian and the Dionysian) is affirmative and exists in its own right, rather than as a negation of the other, is inherited from Goethe. So Nietzsche can be regarded as participating in a ‘perennial aesthetic’. Not only is that aesthetic placed at the heart of Zarathustra’s teaching, but the aesthetic style of Nietzsche’s epic responds to the demand in Die Geburt der Tragodie for an original kind of conceptual art.

The Aesthetics of Weimar Classicism, Ernst Cassirer, and the German Tradition of Thought

Goethes and Schillers classical aesthetics are one of the most important contributions to the ancient tradition of reflection on beauty in art and nature. One feature that marks them out is their opposition to Platonism, their belief that beauty is immanent in and cannot be abstracted from sensible particulars. The importance of Goethes and Schillers contribution was recognized by Ernst Cassirer, whose theory of symbolic forms testifies to a long and deep engagement with Weimar Classicism. Morphological analysis of concepts also reveals traces of Weimar Classicisms aesthetics—even if only on the level of rhetoric—in some perhaps unexpected places in modern German thought.Freuet euch des wahren Scheins, Euch des ernsten Spieles: Kein Lebendiges ist ein Eins, Immer ists ein Vieles. (Goethe, ‘Epirrhema’)