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Sexual division and the new mythology: Goethe and Schelling

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Abstract

The new mythology for which the German Romantic period called was not envisioned as antithetical to empiricism or experiential/experimental knowledge, but rather as emerging in dialogue with it to form a cultural foundation for such inquiry. Central to the mytho-scientific project were problematic theories of sexual division and generativity that established cultural baselines. This article examines the mythological investments of two influential thinkers of the period—Goethe and Schelling. It then analyzes Goethe’s unique merger of mythological approaches to sex and generation with empirical observation in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It next traces Schelling’s expansion of Goethe’s theories of nature beyond their empirical justifications to develop a metaphysics of sexual differentiation. Finally, the article illuminates Goethe’s final reply to the sexual dynamics of Naturphilosophie at the end of his life, through the analysis of a single poem, “Finding Again,” in the collection God and World. Ultimately and in spite of its empirical commitments, Goethe’s more flexible view of sexual correlations would lose ground to the powerful metaphysical mythology of sexual opposition as both scientific and cultural bedrock.

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Notes

  1. The nexus of mythology, nation, and nature has been viewed with suspicion for the last 75 years as it was read backwards through the lens of Nazi ideology. It lies beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the Romantic relationship to the nation or to politics.

  2. See, for example, Bernd-Olaf Küppers (1992), Iain Hamilton Grant (2006), Dalia Nassar (2010), Bruce Matthews (2014), Jason Wirth (2015), Joan Steigerwald (2019), and Stefani Engelstein (2020).

  3. The dialogue between literature, philosophy, and naturalist research has become a flourishing avenue of scholarship on the period. For just a small selection of resources, see, in addition to the above, Robert Richards (2002), Helmut Müller-Sievers (1997), Engelstein (2008), Jocelyn Holland (2009), Leif Weatherby (2016), and Amanda Jo Goldstein (2017).

  4. The privileged term for this branch of naturalist knowledge is Physik, a word that at the time included not only what we would today call physics, but also the study of physical properties of living organisms; it carried the secondary meanings of medical knowledge and of a medicinal cure. Hence the related words (also in English), physicist and physician (Adelung 1811, pp. 767–768). See “The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism” (1996, p. 3) and Friedrich Schlegel’s “Dialogue on Poetry” (1968, p. 83) for occurrences. It is translated in both cases as physics.

  5. The idea of sexual opposition did not begin with the Romantics, but was on the rise throughout the 18th century. (See, for example, Londa Schiebinger 2004 and Thomas Laqueur 1990.) However, its incorporation reached a new level of systematicity in the literature, philosophy, and science of Romanticism, Idealism, and Naturphilosophie.

  6. On Goethe and Schelling, see in addition to Adler and Nassar, also Margarethe Plath (1901), Dorothea Hölscher-Lohmeyer (1985), Klaus-Jürgen Grün (1999), Katrin Seele (2008), Regina Sachers (2015), Gabe Trop (2013), and John Zammito (2018). The current article is not an attempt to trace influence in one or another direction, but rather to follow an intellectual interaction between two writers who were deeply interested in, and knowledgeable about, each other’s work, and were both invested in similar areas of thought in the service of tracing ideas about sexual division and opposition.

  7. This text was written in Hegel’s hand, but is generally believed to owe much of its thinking to Hegel’s two friends at the Tübinger Stift at the time it was written, Schelling and Hölderlin.

  8. As Joan Steigerwald notes in her discussion of the symbol, for Schelling “Mythology is symbolic in its indifference (indifferenz) of the part and the whole, of finitude and infinitude, or of reality and ideality” (310). For more on Schelling’s intensive late life philosophy of mythology, see Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck (1969) and Edward Allen Beach (1994).

  9. Thomas Pfau notes Goethe’s debt to Ovid’s model of nature-as-process (Pfau 2010, p. 6), as well as to his understanding of the world as composed of things in relation (12–13), and of things as differing within themselves (17). Spinoza’s thought also played a large role in post-Kantian attempts to restore ontological continuity and hence epistemological access to nature.

  10. I am not suggesting that Goethe intended to merge the two pursuits, but rather that he saw them as productively intertwined, as each formulated questions and approaches significant to the other.

  11. This list is taken from the 1811 version of Schelling’s Ages of the World, a work that he never completed although several drafts exist. A source for Gnostic ideas may have been Gottfried Arnold’s easily available Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Arnold 1700), which Goethe reported as a major source of his own esoteric knowledge in From My Life: Poetry and Truth (Goethe 1987, p. 261).

  12. Goethe names a number of the figures on his reading list in Book VIII of Poetry and Truth, including most prominently Georg von Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum and Gottfried Arnold’s Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie vom Anfang des neuen Testaments bis auf das Jehr Christi 1688 (1784) but also Paracelsus and Basilius Valentinus. The annotations in the Hamburger Ausgabe (1966, IX) point out further sources.

  13. Goethe’s account was written more than 40 years after the original experiences, but whether or not the ideas in it accurately reflect those of his 20-year old self, it is a useful syncretic account of the reading he names, filtered through his late-life sense of his early commitments to these ideas.

  14. These terms were central to Schelling by 1800. Schelling had already built his natural system around polarity in On the World Soul (1798), and in the First System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), he referred to both the rise and fall of intensities in ways that adapt Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s sets of interdependent paired qualities (Kielmeyer 1993). If Goethe’s self-understanding of his project absorbs Schellengian language in hindsight, the language is nonetheless apt for the 1790 Metamorphosis of Plants, and this treatise served as an explicit inspiration to Schelling in these early publications, as Dalia Nassar among others has shown.

  15. The rarity of self-pollination was first demonstrated three years after the publication of Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants by Christian Konrad Sprengel in Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen (1793). This impressive work of observation laid out for the first time the necessity, rather than just the occasional accidental occurrence, of external mechanisms such as insects and wind for plant pollination. Sprengel also noticed that the male and female organs of hermaphroditic plants matured at different times, protecting the plant from self-pollination (262). Goethe disapproved of Sprengel’s portrayal of nature as an agency capable of deploying one organism for a purpose external to it (Goethe 2000, Letter 5061 to August Batsch (2/26/1794)). In his 1795 novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, Goethe still has the character Augustin attempt to defend incest with his sister through an appeal to the self-pollination of the innocent lily (Goethe 1989b, p. 357).

  16. For more on Goethe’s rejection of both sides of the epigenesis-performation debate in favor of metamorphosis, see in particular, Stefani Engelstein’s Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse 26–31. See also Goldstein’s Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life 79–81.

  17. Dahlia Nassar gives a helpful formulation of the Urpflanze as “this generative or developmental unity—the plant in transformation—that is the archetypal plant” (309).

  18. Astrida Tantillo notes that what arises from the anastomosis is not only a seed but also “a special moment in time” (72) which is the spiritual reunion of the male and female halves of the plant (Tantillo 2002).

  19. We will return to the concept of Anschaulichkeit below.

  20. See Holland’s insightful discussion of Goethe’s acknowledgment of the insufficiency of any single word to reference a “variously metamorphosed organ” 35, 49–50.

  21. In this correspondence, Goethe’s understanding of reproduction bears a greater resemblance to the older one-sex model rather than the newer two-sex model outlined by Thomas Lacquer (1990) as the definitive shift in this era. Schelling, as we will see, sets up the sexes as oppositional in a way Goethe does not.

  22. Goldstein documents Goethe’s still more striking turn to non-sexualized generativity late in life, 91–95.

  23. As I have argued elsewhere, Goethe in his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, explores the repercussions of grafting through the eye for notions of individuality and identifiable generations, and figures the complications of grafting and asexual reproduction through the eye in the character Ottilie. See Engelstein (2008), 39–48.

  24. Tantillo catalogues a number of ways in which the treatise lays out a scientific process of creation that parallels that of its object of study (72–74).

  25. Near the end of the treatise, Goethe explains that he could have chosen the word for any organ along the metamorphological series since no one form is privileged (1988, 96–97). The comment refers the choice of Blatt to a realm outside of plant morphology, such as this point of connection with human authorship. Goethe also expresses a wish for the fruitfulness of his endeavors (94), and notes the alternating growth of botany as a field as expansive and centralizing (1988, 81–82; 1966, XIII 75).

  26. See Pfau as well for the importance of the eye in Goethe’s phenomenological approach to gaining knowledge of the natural world as an active engagement (8–9). See also Holland on the relationship between viewer and phenomenon, 39–42 and Klaus-Jürgen Grün (1999, p. 87) for the reciprocity of organ and natural phenomenon.

  27. Erscheinung, which Miller translates as phenomenon, could also be translated as appearance and entails a connotation of visibility.

  28. Nassar argues for the flow of influence from Goethe to Schelling in the period of Schelling’s composition of the Erster Entwurf. Goethe read the Erster Entwurf and spent a week going over the text of its Introduction with Schelling before its publication (Nassar 311). Nassar points to Goethe’s influence on Schelling’s thinking about metamorphosis, the existence of a Grundtypus, and the coincidence of the idea and the product in nature. Adler traces the bidirectional exchange of ideas over a longer period in both his (1995, 1998) articles.

  29. The concept of a world soul goes back to Plato’s Timeaus, with which Schelling was intensely engaged around the time of composition. Grün comes to a similar conclusion that Schelling universalizes Goethe (p.88), but focuses on Goethe’s theories of color and light.

  30. Schelling illustrates this point through the growth of the plant (1976, 221) but generalizes.

  31. Schelling, like Goethe, was also impressed by Kielmeyer’s “Reihe der verschiedenen Organisationen” lecture, in which the sequence of organisms has already become temporal. For Schelling, however, the sequentiality remains an ideal or logical one.

  32. Schelling repeats the language of opposed classes or sexes in the First Outline (von Schelling 2004, p. 42). At the time, the expression “opposite sexes” was not in use in English and it is still not in use in German.

  33. While this emphasis on opposition in the real may open the door to ideal unity, we will turn below to the way sexual division comes to structure the very nature of existence itself for Schelling.

  34. The unfinished Ages of the World texts bear a great similarity to the Philosophical Investigations and also code the division within the eternal, first being as a sexual division in similarly problematic ways. However, the emphasis on this sexual division is less blatant than in Philosophical Investigations, and the Ages of the World text omits the gendered language in referring to its own reception that distinguishes the Philosophical Investigations.

  35. Georg von Welling also refers to an Ungrund, but while Goethe’s youthful cosmogony bears a great resemblance to that of Welling, whom he mentions studying in Poetry and Truth (255–256). Schelling’s is clearly more indebted to Böhme. See Paola Mayer (1999) and Cyril O’Regan (2001, 2002) S. J. McGrath (2006), and Robert Brown (1977).

  36. Steigerwald identifies the lack of grounding as the central problem uniting Schelling’s philosophical systems and sees in Schelling’s formulations of this never-absolute-grounding, ‘the space of play of the copula” between real and ideal (320).

  37. The Gnostics and Böhme countered the fallen state of sexual division with the androgyny of Adam, Christ, and the original denizens of Heaven.

  38. Only one new poem was published for the first time in the collection, namely “Entoptic Colors.” For a thorough account of which poems were collected, where else they had previously appeared, and how the collection was altered by various editors after Goethe’s death, see Leif Ludwig Albertsen (1987).

  39. Interpretations of the collection as Naturphilosophie go all the way back to Margarethe Plath (1901). For recent investigations, see Seele, Sachers, and Adler (1995, 1998). For discussions of individual poems in connection with Schelling, see in particular Gabe Trop and Dorothea Hölscher-Lohmeyer.

  40. For readings of the poem in its original context in West-östlicher Divan, see David Bell (2007), Friedrich Harrer (2007) and Caroline Sauter (2018). For readings that focus on Naturphilosophie, see Adler (1995, 1998) and Seele.

  41. Translated by Miller as “return to itself” (1988, 156). The reflexive works both as “itself” and “each other.”.

  42. The “Ground” in the poem is a strong echo of Schelling and through him of Böhme. The “play of colours” clearly relates to Goethe’s own work with color, and the allusion to rosy dawn or “Morgenröte” has generally also been read in this context. However, while Goethe grants significance to red in his theory, he puts no emphasis on the dawn specifically. In contrast, Aurora, oder Morgenröte im Anfang is the title of Böhme first and best known book, where the dawn heralds both individual salvation and the second coming (“the time of reunion of that which was lost [die Zeit der Wiederbringung, was verloren ist]” (Böhme 1955, p. 105)). Morgenröte also makes a prominent appearance in Welling, although in a nearly opposed context. For Welling, Lucifer is the “son of rosy dawn” (96), God’s first and originally majestic creation, who emerges from God’s desire for self-revelation (96-103). If we remember that in Goethe’s own version of cosmogony, which was indebted to Welling, Lucifer was responsible for matter, an allusion to Lucifer at this stage of creation in the poem would not be far-fetched. Associating love in particular with Lucifer does seem an ironic wink at the material, however.

  43. I will not be able to fully address all of these allusions and recurrences within the scope of this article, but will at least gesture towards their relationship to the poem’s interpretation.

  44. Unless a modification is indicated, I use throughout the text Ormsby’s translation of West-Eastern Divan (Goethe 2019, p. 239/241). Given the poem’s brevity, I will dispense with parenthetical page citations.

  45. See Adler (1998) 95–96 for more on sound in the poem.

  46. The word is that associated with God’s injunction “Let there be…” and has already occurred in the poem at the moment of cosmic creation. The interpretation of a pregnancy would also make sense of the dropped quotation marks between the first and second occurrence of the word—the second rendition of “Es werde” would not be a performative utterance, but an act of birth. Tantillo notes that the creation of desire along with the dawn ushers in a phase of creation in which separations are not doomed to permanence, but always hold out the possibility of reunion (26). Other critics such as Bell have generally seen the final verse as indicating a form of reunion that exists beyond the physical realm and persists even in bodily separation, hence assuaging the anxiety related in the first verse that poisons the present with worries about future loneliness.

  47. “Finding Again” was not one of the poems written by Willemer. See the annotations in (1966), II 590–611.

  48. See my own recent argument about Goethe’s position in this arena (Engelstein 2017, pp. 87–124).

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Engelstein, S. Sexual division and the new mythology: Goethe and Schelling. HPLS 42, 39 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00331-0

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