The Duality of Goethe’s Materialism

The term materialism is rarely associated with Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832). Our most current specialized bibliography of secondary works on his oeuvre, the Goethe-Bibliographie of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, includes only four entries for the combined search “Goethe” and “Materialism/us,” none of which focusses on Goethe’s philosophical position, and the comprehensive MLA International Bibliography yields not a single result on these combined subjects. The Germanistik Online Datenbank, seminal for scholarship in German literature, yields only a handful of broadly-focussed studies, with scant consideration of materialism, and the exhaustive Goethe-Wörterbuch which records all individual instances of the 90,000 words in Goethe’s astounding textual vocabulary lists just one use of the word “Materialismus” in the 143 volumes of Goethe’s complete works, and this in the casual comment “the French renounced materialism and ascribed more spirit and vitality to the early ages.” The sole occurrence of the word “Materialist” here is in the banal definition “Colonial products and spice merchants. Paper bags that the ‘materialist’ blows up before he puts tobacco or coffee in them.” Goethe did, however, use the words “Materialität,” “Materie,” “materiell” and derivatives of these often in his oeuvre, more than four hundred times according to the dictionary’s editors, including many brief references to aspects of science and the physical world, particularly the fields of physics, electricity, magnetism, light, and colour, though with only occasional brief connections to the philosophical thought of his age. It is not through the scholarly investigation of Goethe’s literary works that his contribution to the concept of materialism can be understood, but rather through works by others on the history of philosophy. Here he left an indelible mark, which is rarely taken into account and appreciated by literary scholars who generally see him as an anti-materialist, an author whose literary works are rich in symbolic allusion and spirituality, an immaterialist one could easily say. The following essay makes the case that literary scholars have generally neglected Goethe’s contribution to the exploration and understanding of the philosophical terms materialism and immaterialism, and it attempts to address this by describing his philosophical reception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then traces Goethe’s understanding of materialism as derived from the ancient Greeks and his clash on that subject with the French materialist Encyclopédistes. It discusses then how Goethe’s reassessment of Newton’s theory of optics led him to an uniquely dualistic approach to materialism, combining it with immaterialism, which has maintained its importance even within the context of recent discussions of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The essay concludes with examples of the functioning of this dualistic concept of materialism and immaterialism in Goethe’s literary works. It is important first to set Goethe’s place in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse on the history of philosophy. Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1865), a durable classic with a seventh edition in 1902, has been translated more than once into English, famously in 1877 by Ernest Chester Thomas (1850–92) as The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance, with a third edition introduced by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in 1925. The excellent index to this translation refers to Goethe a surprising sixteen times, putting him among the frequently cited authors in Lange’s book. These sixteen references relate to a variety of Goethe’s writings and intellectual relationships, including his poetry (1: 33), discussions with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805; 2: 28, 142, 236), his opposition to the French Encyclopédistes (2: 96, 108, 148–50), his essays on painting (2: 108), his …