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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
‘What is important is to understand that every fact is already a theory. The blue of the sky already demonstrates the fundamental laws of chromatics. We should not look for anything behind these phenomena; they themselves are the theory’ Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, n. 575
Because of the density of the aphorism, the quotation above implies more than the words seem to say explicitly. It refers to an apprehension of reality in a poetic and conceptual mode, a vision of the world and humanity opposed to the mechanistic one that emerged from eighteenth century rationalism. Indeed Goethe is a milestone in the history of the themes inherited from ancient traditions and the Renaissance that have in common the project of integrating ‘the science of humankind, the science of nature and a study of the destiny of humanity through the adventure of existence’.
1. Judith Schlanger (1971), Les métaphores de l'organisme (Paris, Vrin), 2nd edition, L'Harmattan 1995, pp. 66-67.
2. The school founded by Aby Warburg is situated in this same environment; characterized by a method which relies on the use of figurative artefacts as historical sources, it aims to establish an art history leading to a Kulturwissenschaft of the type imagined by Burckhardt.
3. Among his works the following have been translated into French: La civilisation africaine (1933) (French translation Paris, Gallimard 1952; Rocher 1987); La mythologie de l'Atlantide (Paris, Payot 1940; Rocher 1993); Le destin des civilisations (Paris, Gallimard 1940); Peuples et sociétés traditionnelles du Nord Cameroun (Stuttgart, F. Steiner 1987).
4. Das religiöse Weltbild einer frühen Kultur (Stuttgart, Schröder 1952) and Mythes et cultes chez les peuples primitifs (French translation, Paris, Payot 1954).
5. Zurich 1941 (French translation, Paris, Payot 1953).
6. Munich/Vienna, Langen/Müller 1985.
7. This explains the emphasis Kerényi placed on what he called the ‘style' running through a civilization, its religion and its art. For him, ‘the style is what remains constant when other things change. That is why everything that perishes takes on, through style, an imperishable significance.' Umgang mit göttlichen Wesen und Gegenwärtigkeit des Mythos, op. cit. Italian translation: Il rapporto con il divino (Turin, Einaudi 1991), pp. 67-68. Compare Jensen's idea that every civilization is ‘unicum' (A. Jensen, Mythes et cultes chez les peuples primitifs, op. cit., p. 46).
8. For example, Frobenius (1933) takes as an epigraph a quotation from Wölfflin: ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', La civilisation africaine (French translation, Paris, Éditions du Rocher 1987, p. 23) and Jensen stresses the need to refocus cultural analysis on the problem of meaning (op. cit. 1954, pp. 46-51).
9. We shall restrict our reference to Irrationalism to one particular aspect, viz. what G. Lukàcs calls ‘the philosophy of life', mentioning especially those writers between 1800 and 1900 who theorized the immediateness of life as the access route to ‘true reality', parting company with the methods of analytical thought and the causal logic that directs the scientific approach.
10. On this notion of ‘existential shock', cf. in particular A. Jensen (1954), p. 73. We may understand this as an experience ranging from the mystical or aesthetic (in any case a-logical) perception of a cosmic order to the representation of this reality in myths, cults and artistic forms.
11. J.G. Herder (1773), Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit; French translation, Une autre philosophie de l'histoire (Paris, Aubier 1964) pp. 167-173.
12. On this subject, the debate between him and Winckelmann (who considered Greece to be the model for the whole of Antiquity) is very significant. In Herder's view, even Greek art and literature were ‘national'. Nevertheless he thought that Greece was a model of that youth or primitive character that was a harmoni ous synthesis of primitivism and self-fulfilment. The fact that we already find reaching its high point in Herder the Greek theme of the myth of Nemesis striking with excessive force is very interesting. The same theme was to play a fundamental part in Frobenius's and Kerényi's as well as Spengler's thought.
13. K. Kerényi links the notion of archetypos, archetype, prototype, etc. with this idea of immediateness. Cf. in particular op. cit. (1985), French translation cit. (1991), p. 128.
14. For a grand description of the origins of civilizations, the development of cultures and their cycles, etc., cf. in particular K. Kerényi (1941) Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie (1941); French translation Introduction à l'essence de la mythologie (Paris, Payot 1953), pp. 38-39. Cf. also L. Frobenius (1940), Le destin des civilisations (Paris, Gallimard), pp. 81-82, referred to in Leo Frobenius 1873-1973. Une anthologie, Preface by Leopold Sédar Senghor (1973) (Wiesbaden, Steiner), pp. 19-63.
15. Here we recall Herder's famous reference to the chain of being, from stone to crystal, from crystal to metals, etc., up to human beings, where the chain stops: cf. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1783); French translation Idées pour la philosophie de l'histoire de l'humanité (Paris, Aubier 1962), p. 81. We find the same notion taken up by Franz Boas, who grew up in the same intellectual climate that gave rise to the German historico-cultural school and so to historical morphology, but also more generally by American cultural anthropology, for which culture is understood as a bio-psychic whole. Cf. Marvin Harris (1969), The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell), especially chapters ix (‘Historical peculiarity: Franz Boas’) and x (‘Around Boas’). Cf. also George Stocking (1968), Race, Culture and Evolution (Chicago, Free Press), and especially chapter vii ‘From physics to ethnology'.
16. Kerényi wrote that it was as if in human plasma there was already ‘a spiritual element, the imperiousness of the spiritual', an element that he said corresponded to the Païdeuma as Frobenius understood it. Cf. in particular Kerényi (1953), op. cit., p. 37.
17. On this anti-reductionist principle, also understood as critical of a certain form of evolutionism, cf. Kerényi (1991), op. cit., pp. 22-25.
18. In this connection we recall A.W. Schlegel, who contrasted the clock, which is activated by a mechanism foreign to itself, with the solar system, which, like the true work of art, is activated by a force that is of its very nature. Cf. for this passage L'absolu littéraire (Paris, Seuil 1978), pp. 346-347.
19. On the antagonism between the concept of ‘civilization' and that of ‘culture' in European nineteenth-century culture, and on the use of this antithesis in the process of the construction of German cultural identity, cf. N. Elias (1973), La civilisation des moeurs (Paris, Calmann-Lévy); J. Strabonski (1983), ‘Le mot civilisation', in Le temps de la réflexion, n. 4, pp. 13-51; L. Dumont (1991), L'idéologie allemande (Paris, Seuil); E. Terray (1994), Une passion allemande (Paris, Seuil).
20. German historical ethnology, born in reaction to evolutionism's generalizing models, sought out the indi viduality of a culture by first situating it geographically, then possibly moving its boundaries outwards as research uncovered the extent in space of certain significant elements of the culture. The kind of cultural phenomena noted in this work of individuation included (in particular in F. Ratzel's work) craft tech niques, the shapes of utensils, the materials used, etc. So German ethnology came to be situated more and more explicitly at the culturalist end of spectrum: Ratzel's Völkerkreise (ethnic circles) led on to the Kulturkreise (culture circles) theorized by Bernhard Ankermann (1859-1915) and Fritz Graebner (1887-1934). However, a split occurred within this strand where in 1898 Frobenius, then 25, had been the originator of the theory of cultural cycles (a theory that was finally systematized in 1904 by Ankermann and Graebner). Frobenius gradually distanced himself from the historico-cultural school, criticizing its methods for being too mechanistic, and founded his own school in Frankfurt. It aimed to concentrate in particular on the spiritual aspects of culture, thus linking with the Romantic Germanic tradition whose spokesman had been the German F. Max-Muller in the field of the comparative history of religions. Cf. Dario Sabbatucci (1991), Sommario di Storia delle religioni (Rome, Il Bagatto), pp. 98-100.
21. His arguments are very similar to Cuvier's and Goethe's morphologico-naturalist discourse, in particular in the latter's The Metamorphosis of Animals. Cf. ‘Der Ursprung der afrikanerischen Kulturen', in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, XXXVII (1898), pp. 88-89. A systematic account of the debate between L. Frobenius and his disciples in Graebner and Ankermann's historico-cultural school, as well as in Father Wilhelm Schmidt's in Vienna, can be found in Adolf Jensen's book Das religiöse Weltbild einer frühen Kultur (Stuttgart, 1948). The break with the theory of cultural cycles was to become open in an article by Frobenius himself in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie XXXVII, p. 88, where he states: ‘I admit that today this work partly causes me a certain unease; it contains many errors, and the best thing would be to have the courage to acknowledge them oneself: Pater peccavi.'
22. This direction had two consequences. On the one hand, in Germany, the true subject of ethnological research became identified with Kultur as a historical way of being a particular ethnic group. Thus its problematic developed in perfect harmony with that of the historical sciences. On the other hand, by placing its methods among the historical sciences - and by claiming for these sciences a different status from the natural sciences - from the outset German ethnology rejected evolutionist anthropology's typo logy relating to the evolutionary phases of a unique culture, defending the idea of the irreducible variety of historical cultures.
23. First everything was sacred, then ‘at a mad pace we went down an increasingly profane road': Leo Frobenius (1933), op. cit., French translation (1987), pp. 59-60. Cf. also Le destin des civilisations, op. cit., note 15, p. 82. A. Jensen expresses similar sentiments. Cf. in particular Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern (Wiesbaden, 1951), p. 70.
24. ‘My science of civilization holds that the ongoing development of human civilization is a third kingdom (Reich). Civilization is organic, essence, language and history.' In La civilisation africaine (Paris, Éditions du Rocher 1987), p. 37.
25. Thus a writer such as E. Hahn could declare (in Demeter und Bubo, Leipzig 1897 - but also in Die Entstehung der Pflugkultur, Heidelberg 1909, pp. 182-185, and in Von der Hacke zum Pflug, Leipzig 1919, pp. 77-80) that the origin of technical and economic expressions was religious, and that the use of tools and inventions for utilitarian or profane purposes merely attested to a stage that was historically secondary, eventually derived from an initial stage when rite and myth ruled the life of human societies.
26. It could be said that this concept expresses culture in its potential state. The relationship between the products of culture and the païdeuma, as Frobenius conceived it, could be transposed into the opposition between noumen and phenomonen or potential and actual. Cf for example Leo Frobenius, Païdeuma, no. 1 (Frankfurt), p 158, cited also in K. Kerényi and C.G. Jung (1941), Introduction to the Essence of Mythology, in collaboration with C.G. Jung, French translation by Payot 1993, p. 7, note.
27. The science of religions itself aims to return to the original ‘relationship' (Umgang) with the divine, based on an lived experience rather than an intellectual attitude. Cf. in particular K. Kerényi (1985, op. cit., Italian translation 1991, cit., p. 28.
28. Cf. a sample list in ‘Présentation' from Danièle Cohn (1993) to Écrits d'esthétique (Paris, Éditions du Cerf), pp. 7-8.
29. On Karl Philipp Moritz's systematization of Romantic aesthetics, see his Le concept d'achevé en soi et autres écrits (1785-1793), introduction by P. Beck (Paris, PUF 1995). Cf. also the work of T. Todorov, who introduced this insufficiently known writer to a French audience before his work was translated from German; see particularly chapter vi (‘La crise romantique’) in Todorov's book (1977) Théories du symbole (Paris, Seuil).
30. K.P. Moritz (1785), Sur le concept d'achevé en soi, in op. cit. (1995), note 26, p. 83.
31. K.P. Moritz (1788), Sur l'imitation formatrice du beau, in op. cit. (1995), note 26, p. 157.
32. For this notion of imitation and ‘creative formation' in Moritz, see in particular ibid., p. 149.
33. This explains the importance of what he calls ‘first moment of welling up'. Cf. ibid., p. 159.
34. K.P. Moritz (1785), Sur le concept d'achevé en soi, in op. cit. (1995), p. 84, where he also elaborates on what he understands by internal and external purpose.
35. K.P. Moritz (1788), La signature du beau, in op. cit. (1995), note 26, p. 177.
36. On this topic, see characteristic statements in Danièle Cohn (1993), op. cit., note 25, p. 23.
37. Dilthey says that several characteristic signs, several parts or functions are interconnected in this ‘type'. These features, which together form the ‘type', are in a reciprocal relationship with each other such that the presence of the one implies the presence of the other, and variations of the one imply variations of the other. By the same author, cf. Écrits d'esthétique (cited in note 25), p. 45. See also, by the same author, Théorie des conceptions du monde (Paris, PUF 1946), in particular the chapter: L'art, la religion et la philosophie.
38. W. Dilthey (1942), Introduction à l'étude des sciences humaines (Paris, PUF), pp. 25-28.
39. Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, 30 March 1831, quoted in W. Dilthey (1993), op. cit., note 25, p. 18.
40. W. Dilthey (1993), op. cit., note 25, p. 54.
41. I. Kant (1789), First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement, French translation (Paris, Vrin 1997), pp. 61-63.
42. I. Kant (1790), Critique of Judgement, French translation (Paris, Vrin 1993), p. 297.
43. In emphasizing the affinity between his views and Kant's, set out in the Critique of Judgement, Goethe even states: ‘I found my most contradictory interests coming together and meeting, the products of art treated in the same way as the products of nature.' In Werke: Kommentare. Register, 13 (Hamburg 1981), p. 27. Cf. also Ernst Cassirer, Goethe und die Kantische Philosophie (French translation, ‘Goethe et la philosophie kantienne' in Rousseau, Kant, Goethe (Paris, Belin 1991), pp. 98-100) as well as Jean Lacoste (1997), Goethe, Science et philosophie (Paris, PUF), p. 218, and Danièle Cohn (1999), La lyre d'Orphée (Paris, Flammarion).
44. I. Kant (1790), Critique of Judgement, French translation (Paris, Vrin 1995? See 41), p. 301.
45. Oswald Spengler refers to a quite characteristic passage in a statement Goethe addressed to Eckermann concerning the action of the divinity in the ‘living' but not in the ‘dead' (quoted in Le déclin de l'Occident, French translation (Paris, Gallimard 1976), p. 61).
46. The revival of interest in morphology shown in recent years by history and the epistemology of the human sciences has uncovered a series of interesting links, particularly in anthropology and sociology, between these fields and the tradition of idealist morphology. On this topic, cf. C. Severi (1988), ‘Structure et forme originaire', in Les idées de l'anthropologie (Paris, Armand Colin), pp. 117-150, and J. Petitot (1999), ‘La généologie morphologique', in Critique, no. 620-621 devoted to Claude Lévi-Strauss, January-February, pp. 97-122.
47. Goethe said that biology would not be a true science if it could not infer the general from particular. On this precise point, cf. Ernst Cassirer (1995), op. cit., p. 153. Cf. also Jean Lacoste (1997), op. cit., pp. 15-87.
48. Cf. ‘Principles of Philosophy discussed in March 1830 at the Royal Academy of Sciences', in Naturwissen schaftliche Schriften, Weimar edition, vol. VII, pp. 189 et seq.
49. J.W. Goethe (1887-1919), Die Skelette der Nagetiere, in Wissenschaftliche Schrifte, VII (Weimar), p. 253.
50. J.G. Herder (1774), op. cit., Italian translation Ancora una filosofia della storia per l'educazione dell'umanità (Turin, Einaudi 1981), p. 38.
51. In this type of relationship to knowledge, neither deduction nor induction is involved, since the cognitive ideal depends first of all on intuition. Cf. in particular ‘Zur Farbenlehre' (historical section), in Naturwissen schaftliche Schriften (Weimar 1887-1919), vol. III, p. 236. It is interesting to note the resemblance between these ideas, later taken up by Dilthey himself in connection with the historical process, and the arguments used in anthropology by C. Geertz to define the concept of ‘dense description'.
52. Referring to this concept, which is used by Goethe in relation to vegetable forms, Judith Schlanger (1995) says this about O. Spengler's morphological approach (but what she says could be applied equally to all those speaking for cultural morphology): ‘Spengler sees in peoples and national styles, not the actors but products of culture, replacing the pathos of a people with the pathos of a culture. Culture is the primary phenomenon […] it is an Urphänomen, in the sense in which Goethe's philosophy of nature intended that concept.' Op. cit., p. 160.
53. O. Spengler (1917), Le déclin de l'Occident, French translation (Paris, Gallimard 1976), pp. 35-38.
54. Thus Spengler felt justified in stating: 'All methods of understanding the universe can in the final analysis be called “morphological”', and he looked forward to the advent, in the human sciences, of a ‘scientifically regulated physiognomy', cf. ibid., pp. 16 and 108. Cf. also note 59, p. 19, on what he expected from future historical research.
55. L. Frobenius (1933), op. cit., note 4, p. 32.
