Professor von Engelhardt, your 670-page book “Goethe as a Natural Scientist in the Opinion of 19th Century Scientists and Doctors” was recently published. You are the editor of the book. What inspired you to do this work?
I have been studying Goethe and his relationship with science and medicine around 1800 for decades. During my research, I noticed that the German and international reception of Goethe as a natural scientist in the natural sciences and medicine of the 19th century was not dealt with in research, with a few exceptions. This prompted me to address this reception and to document it with selected texts, some of which were found in remote locations. The 670 pages are due to the abundance of remarkable essays.

Who is this volume aimed at?
The work is aimed at Goethe researchers, historians of science and medicine, and anyone interested in Goethe’s contributions to the natural sciences and medicine.

What criteria did you use to select the articles?
The 48 essays by scientists, many of whom were members of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, are intended to provide a representative international impression of the reception of the natural sciences and medicine in the 19th century. For reasons of space, I had to dispense with extensive monographic presentations, which I mention in the detailed introduction, and which are listed in the complete bibliography of 240 texts.

The volume contains texts in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Why did you decide on the original languages?
I wanted to give an authentic impression in the languages that Goethe also understood. In addition, this approach allows foreign quotations to be cited directly from the texts and referenced bibliographically. Nowadays, anyone who wants translations can easily do so using the appropriate software.

© SUB Göttingen Cod. Ms. Lichtenberg VI, 44.

Goethe considered his theory of colors, symbolized in the color wheel, to be his most important work.

Which texts would you recommend to the reader in a hurry? 
For readers in a hurry, I would particularly recommend the articles by Carl Gustav Carus (first published in 1843), Hermann von Helmholtz (1853), Rudolf Virchow (1861), Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1882) and Ernst Haeckel (1882) – all of whom were members of the GDNÄ. Among the foreign texts, the remarks of Ernest Faivre (1859), François-Louis Hahn (1883), François-Jules Pictet (1838) and John Tyndall (1880) deserve special attention. The chapter on the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley is also very impressive – he was awarded an honorary membership of the GDNÄ at the 1877 meeting in Munich. Huxley opened the first issue of the now internationally authoritative science magazine Nature, published in 1869, with Goethe’s Aphorisms on Nature (see margin). 

Intermaxillary bone, theory of colours, archetypal plant: the naturalist Goethe was involved in an impressive number of scientific topics. How did this come about? 
Throughout his life, inorganic and organic nature, its phenomena, processes and developments were of great interest to Goethe – as such, but also in connection with science, art and human life. “Experience, observation, conclusions – connected by life events” – this is how he described his method in natural research. For Goethe, colours are not only mathematical and physical phenomena; for him, they also have ethical, psychological and cultural-historical meanings. The phenomenon of metamorphosis applies to plants and animals: “The doctrine of metamorphosis is the key to all signs of nature,” as stated in a posthumous text called Morphology. Goethe also published numerous scientific-theoretical writings, including The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject or Inventing and Discovering or Analysing and Discovering. Goethe’s scientific writings comprise eleven volumes in the Leopoldina’s critical scientific edition. 

Goethe was a poet and a naturalist: did the one influence the other? 
Despite all the differences, of which Goethe repeatedly reminds us, the connection between the two, or rather the four cultures, was extremely important to him. What is meant here is the cultures of the natural sciences, the humanities, the arts and life. This connection can be seen in both Goethe’s scientific and literary texts, as well as in his autobiographical writings Poetry and Truth or Italian Journey. One literary example is the novel The Elective Affinities, which corresponds with contemporary chemistry in both title and content and interprets the relationships between elements in analogy to the relationships between people. However, Goethe explicitly points out that people have the freedom and responsibility to resist sensual attractions. In his Theory of Colours, Goethe developed numerous ideas about the theory and practice of colours in painting. And the law of the primal plant, as Goethe recognised in Italy, “can be applied to everything that lives”.

© Frithjof Spangenberg, Illustrationen & Kommunikationsdesign

The illustration shows a sheep’s skull with a clearly visible intermaxillary bone (front right). This was the subject of a heated dispute between Goethe and the GDNÄ founder Lorenz Oken.

To what extent was Goethe a child of his time as a natural scientist?
Goethe was very knowledgeable about the natural sciences and medicine of his time. He was influenced by the state of science, maintained connections with many natural scientists and physicians of the time, but also considered the historical development of the sciences and individual researchers of the past. The Theory of Colours is a prime example: Goethe dedicated an entire book to it, describing its history from antiquity to the present day. 

How did Goethe’s contemporaries react to his work?
As can be seen in the present work, the spectrum of reactions among scientists and physicians of his time and up to the present day was diverse and varied according to scientific discipline. The reactions in physics were extremely critical. There was approval in geology, botany and anatomy. According to Nees von Esenbeck, member of the GDNÄ and president of the Leopoldina from 1818 to 1838, Goethe was the first to organise the plant world according to “scientific principles” and to introduce it philosophically. Overall, Goethe the naturalist made a strong impression on his contemporaries. It would be necessary and informative to compare this with the reactions in the humanities and arts from the 19th century to the present day – a task I would like to leave to other researchers. 

What was Goethe’s relationship with the GDNÄ?
Goethe took an interested and approving part in the meetings of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, founded in 1822, and wrote a study of the GDNÄ that was not published in his time but was later printed several times. He particularly welcomed the new research society’s aim of bringing scientists into personal contact, while noting that its members were not the “least bit” like him. In his speech at the Berlin conference in 1828, Alexander von Humboldt referred to Goethe as a “patriarch of patriotic fame”, whose literary creations did not prevent him from “plunging the researcher’s gaze into the depths of natural life”. 

What was Goethe’s relationship with Lorenz Oken, the founder of the GDNÄ?
The relationship was ambivalent on both sides. A plagiarism dispute between Goethe and Oken triggered the discovery of the cranial vertebra, which Oken described in a publication in 1807 and also sent to Goethe. He was very impressed by the study. He invited Oken to Weimar and supported his appointment to the University of Jena, for which Oken was extremely grateful. In 1823, Goethe claimed the discovery for himself in the Heften zur Morphologie (notebooks on morphology). He said that he had made the discovery in 1790 on the basis of a sheep skull found on the dunes of the Lido of Venice, and although he did not publish it, he reported on it several times in letters from Italy to Germany. Many scientists participated in the controversy and repeatedly took Oken’s side. In other areas, Goethe and Oken were quite close. Despite differing political views and although he described the ban of Oken’s journal Isis in Thuringia, Goethe called the GDNÄ founder “genius”. 

Do you still perceive an interest in Goethe as a naturalist today?
A new interest can be observed in the present, especially in Goethe’s theory of colours. There are attempts to understand Goethe’s research, observations and views in this area in the context of his holistic understanding of nature, which contrasts with the objective or experimental-statistical concept of science in modern times. This is very evident in Goethe’s psychological-cultural interpretation of colours, which is usually neglected by physicists, and in his concept of metamorphosis and morphology in the organic sciences.

To what extent can Goethe contribute to a growing together of cultures in science and art?
Goethe’s significance undoubtedly also lies in his contribution to overcoming or, better said, alleviating the separation of the two or four cultures. Goethe was particularly concerned with a mutual connection and communication between these cultures, which is a challenge for natural sciences and medicine. Conversely, however, the arts and humanities would also have to recognise their scientific basis or dependence on nature – arguably an even greater challenge. Goethe describes how worthwhile the effort can be: “It is a pleasant business to explore nature and oneself at the same time, without harming either nature or one’s mind, but rather to balance the two through gentle reciprocal influence.”