Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

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Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau

Bernhard Kuhn

Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

To Judith M. Lewin

Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau

Bernhard Kuhn Union College, USA

© Bernhard Kuhn 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Bernhard Kuhn has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kuhn, Bernhard Helmut, 1969– Autobiography and natural science in the age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau. 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862 – Criticism and interpretation. 4. Romanticism. 5. Science and the humanities. 6. Autobiography. 7. Self in literature. 8. Natural history literature – History and criticism. I. Title 809.9’145–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuhn, Bernhard Helmut, 1969– Autobiography and natural science in the age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau / Bernhard Kuhn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6166-5 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-9615-5 (ebook) 1. Authors – Biography – History and criticism. 2. Autobiography. 3. Natural history in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 6. Literature and science – History. 7. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. Confessions. 8. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. Reveries du promeneur solitaire. 9. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. Aus meinem leben. Dichtung und wahrheit. 10. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Walden. I. Title. PN452.K85 2009 809’.93592–dc22 2009008920

ISbnBN EISbn 978-0-7546-9615-5 (ebk.V)

Contents List of Abbreviations   Acknowledgments    1

vii ix

The Nature of Identity and the Identity of Nature  

1

2 Natural Science and the Self in Rousseau’s Confessions  

23

3

Reveries and the “Re-enchantment” of the World  

43

4

Goethe’s Autobiographical Science  

63

5

Self-Formations: Order and Disorder in Poetry and Truth  

97

6 The Metamorphosis of Thoreau   7

“Prolific Hybrids”: Walden and Thoreau’s Natural History  

115 129

Conclusion  

141

Bibliography   Index  

147 159

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List of Abbreviations Rousseau Botanical Writings Botanical Writings. Trans. Alexandra Cook. Vol 8. The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995. Confessions The Confessions; and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malherbes. Trans. Christopher Kelly. Vol. 5. The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995. CC Correspondance complète. Ed. R. A. Leigh. Vol. 39. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1965. EOL “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Ed. Victor Gourevitch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. First Discourse “First Discourse,” The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Ed. Victor Gourevitch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. OC Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. 5 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1959–. Reveries The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Trans. Charles E. Butterworth. Vol. 8. The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Hanover, N. H.: University of New England, 2000. Second Discourse “Second Discourse,” The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Ed. Victor Gourevitch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Goethe DK HA Hanser

Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher, und Gespräche. Ed. Wolf von Engelhardt, Manfred Wenzel, et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Ed. Erich Trunz. 14 vols. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981. Sämtlicher Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Ed. Karl Richter. 21 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985.

viii

Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters

PU WA KGS

Goethe: The Collected Works. Ed. Victor Lange, Eric Blackall, and Cyrus Hamlin. 12 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Goethes Werke. Ed. Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1902.

Thoreau A Week J1 J2 J4 NH Walden Walden-Norton

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ed. Carl Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Journal, Vol. 1, 1837–1844. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Journal, Vol. 2, 1842–1848. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Journal, Vol. 4, 1851–1852. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” The Essays of Henry David Thoreau, Ed. Lewis Hyde. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002. Walden. Ed. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Ed. William Rossi. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Acknowledgments For their help in all its varieties I would like to thank the following teachers and friends: Claudia Brodsky, Arnold Weinstein, Lionel Gossman, Stanley Corngold, Suzanne Nash, Robert Rehder, Val Vinokur, Rose Réjouis, Harry Marten, Jim McCord, Ed Pavlic, and Kara Doyle. Special thanks go to Princeton University and Union College for their generous intellectual and financial support. I am especially grateful to Ann Donahue at Ashgate Publishing for her initial faith in this project and subsequent patience as it went through the various stages of publication. To my family, I owe a special debt of gratitude. Throughout my life, they have provided me with an intellectually rich and loving atmosphere that has allowed me to flourish. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife Judy, to whom I dedicate this book. Her boundless love and support have made this book possible. I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to reprint in revised form earlier versions of parts of this work: “Self Formations: Order and Disorder in Goethe’s Poetry and Truth,” in From Wordsworth to Stevens: Essays in Honour of Robert Rehder. Ed. Anthony Mortimer. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Reprinted by permission of Peter Lang. “‘A Chain of Marvels’ Botany and Autobiography in Rousseau,” European Romantic Review 17.1 (2006): 1–20. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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Chapter 1

The Nature of Identity and the Identity of Nature

And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.—Emerson, The American Scholar (55)

This is a book about autobiography, natural science, and the unexpected yet profound relationship between them during the Romantic period in Europe and America. Even more, it is a book about how the dynamic interaction between the two discourses challenges the growing division between the humanities and the sciences and refutes the still entrenched thesis of “the two cultures.” The following pages focus on three major figures of the Romantic period: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). Pioneering figures in the emergence of modern autobiography, particularly of a tradition of autobiography whose focus is on the internal development of a singular, highly individualized, unified self, they are also accomplished “men of science”—a fact that may surprise even seasoned readers of Rousseau. What is more, Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau compose their autobiographies during periods in which they are deeply immersed in scientific writing and study. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, their nature writings and autobiographical writings reveal a startling unity that forecloses any radical division between scientific and humanistic approaches to the self and to the world. Spanning the Romantic movement, Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau mark distinctive stages in the growing estrangement of the arts and sciences, from the self-assured epistemic unity of Rousseau’s time, when “men of letters” are expected to be equally well versed in the physical sciences as they are in poetry, to the splintering of disciplines into competing ways of knowing under the pressures of specialization and professionalization in mid-century America. This book thus traces an unfolding drama in which each writer, situated in an intellectual landscape more fractured than the last, seeks to keep together what modern culture is determined to break apart. To read these writers’ life stories and nature works side by side is to grasp both the scientific character of autobiographical writing and the autobiographical nature of natural science. They are not separate or antithetical but mutually constitutive   For an excellent study on the continuing relation of literature, science, and autobiography in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Ender, Architexts of Memory.



Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

endeavors that nourish and interpenetrate one another. How is autobiography transformed by its encounter with natural science? And how, in turn, is natural science transformed by its encounter with autobiography? The tension between complexity and order, variability and fixity, singularity and similarity that structures the discourse of natural science writing also structures that of autobiography. How do these similar concerns map onto and shape one another? Their shared structural features notwithstanding, autobiography and natural science would appear to issue from diametrically opposed impulses. As one critic puts it: “Autobiography is a self-centred business” (Sheringham vii). It is introspective and subjective. Natural science, by contrast, is self-effacing; it is the objective pursuit of the laws that govern the external world. As we shall see, our writers complicate and ultimately upend these characterizations of autobiography and natural science. Despite its attention to precise description and systematic analysis, natural science is a highly discursive practice that foregrounds the experiential and perspectival dimension of the naturalist’s observations. Similarly, though autobiography is the subjective recreation of the private self through memory, desire, language, and imagination, it also must be read as a form of scientific inquiry into the general makeup of the genus homo sapiens. For Rousseau, the Confessions (1766–70) is a “study of man”; for Goethe, Poetry and Truth (1811–33) is an extension of his science of morphology; and for Thoreau, Walden (1854) is “an experiment in the art of living.” Natural science and autobiography refuse to be circumscribed on the one hand by the dictates of a positivistic conception of science, and, on the other, by a poetics of radical subjectivity too often regarded as the defining feature of a Romantic literary culture. As we move from Rousseau to Thoreau, it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle one activity from the other. In Goethe’s Italian Journey (1816–29) or Thoreau’s late natural history essays, for instance, where precisely does one draw the line between natural observation and personal narrative? Intricately intertwined, life writing and nature writing nevertheless retain for these writers their specific identities as distinct ways of approaching the world, the self, and the relation between the two. What makes the intellectual pursuits of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau so moving are their attempts, as I see it, to give expression to the complex relations or web of affinities that exist between the oppositions that structure modern thought—oppositions such as nature and culture, human and nonhuman, self and other, reason and feeling, science and art—and to do so in a way that does not dissolve, overturn, or otherwise collapse these seemingly incommensurable antinomies, but rather keeps them in a state of constant interaction and play. The works of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau are, as we will see, hybrids, heterogeneous mixtures that are at once natural and cultural, real and ideal, subjective and objective, literary and scientific. Their power lies    Sheringham goes on to argue that autobiography is best described as a discourse that demands the presence of an “Other.” Indeed, the relation of the self to the “Other” is the thrust of his work.

The Nature of Identity and the Identity of Nature



in their ability to lead the reader out of the stale abstractions that divide modern consciousness and into the far more interesting territory that lies in between. The connection between our three writers’ life stories and their commitment to the scientific study of nature—so natural and organic for them—is scarcely thinkable for us today. Rousseau’s interlacing of botanical terminology with rhapsodic exclamations of his individuality, Goethe’s scientific analysis of rock and plant formations as he ponders the formation of his own self, Thoreau’s ecstatic fusion of scientific and poetic discourse, all appear strange and incomprehensible to us. It is all too easy to dismiss Rousseau’s prolific writings in botany and chemistry as inconsequential distractions, to smile wryly in response to Goethe’s claim that his greatest contributions were to the sciences, and to view as eccentric Thoreau’s detailed journal entries and late natural history essays in which he measures fungi, counts tree rings, and observes the growth of a wild apple with the precision of a naturalist. Yet, by getting at what appears so odd and disconcerting in these texts and why, we can begin to uncover the vital lines of connection between nature study and self study that remain buried to our modern sensibilities. To this end, I read each writer’s autobiographies and nature writings side by side—as they were written—and trace the ways their language and concerns work upon and define each other. Moving chronologically from Rousseau to Thoreau, I examine all three writers in relation to their specific historical contexts and through the lens of current scholarship in the field of literature and of science. Several key themes immediately come into view: the temporalization of nature and of the self; the move toward an increasingly organic and holistic view of the world; the notion of the naturalist as active participant, as opposed to rigorously detached observer in the Baconian tradition; the cultivation of a sense of awe before the intricate wonders of nature in which the observer is transported outside of himself and able to perceive the subtle interplay between subject and object; and, above all, the connection between personal experience and the experience of nature as constitutive of true knowledge. As Thoreau realizes early on: “The purest science is still biographical” (A Week 362). In the end, what emerges is a story about how natural science and autobiography flourish as flexible discourses that span the humanities/science divide and remake each other in ways that prompt us to redraw the disciplinary maps that obscure the critical relation between nature and human nature, science and art, and toss us into a world of irreconcilable oppositions. Readers may well wonder at the absence of William Wordsworth from these pages—an absence I hope clarifies the unique nature of this study. Over the last fifty years, scholars have unearthed compelling connections between   For scholars in the discourse of literature and science, the term “hybrid” will undoubtedly evoke Bruno Latour and his use of the term in We Have Never Been Modern. I have no intention of claiming the texts of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau as hybrids in the sense rigorously defined by Latour. My interest lies less with developing a Latourian reading than with using the concept loosely to get at what makes the writings of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau so powerful and unique.



Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

Wordsworth’s poetry, including his quintessential romantic autobiography The Prelude, and the scientific theories of his day. During the 1790s Wordsworth could count among his closest acquaintances a number of scientists—among them Erasmus Darwin and Humphrey Davy—who variously challenged the passive, mechanistic models of psychological development espoused by Locke, Hartley, and Condillac. Wordsworth’s scientific acquaintances seek, according to Alan Richardson, nothing less than “the reinvention, along naturalistic, physiological, and ecological lines, of the study of human nature” (67). Variously termed “biological psychology” or “physiological psychology,” this “new biology” emphasizes the dynamic interrelation between the mind and the body, the feelings and the senses, the spiritual and the material that, for Richardson, is crucial to understanding Wordsworth’s poetics and poetry of the 1790s, including the Lyrical Ballads, and especially the 1799 Prelude. Yet, unlike Romantics such as Novalis, Keats, and Schelling, but like Coleridge and Schlegel, Wordsworth was never a practicing scientist. He was intimately familiar with contemporary scientific theories and discoveries; he avidly read the scientific works of his peers; the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, among the most significant documents of British Romanticism, cannot be imagined without the influence of contemporary science. Yet, Wordsworth never performed a single experiment, much less sought to write a work of natural science. His province was that of the poet. Indeed, it could be argued that few thinkers at the time did more than Wordsworth to carve out for the poet a separate sphere elevated above other forms of discourse. With Wordsworth, then, we have a powerful instance of the influence of scientific language and ideas on literature. But the influence vector only goes one way: from science to literature. The story of how scientific discourse transforms and is transformed by literary discourse, is the story I hope to tell. Or to shift the emphasis slightly: it is the story of those counter-cultural thinkers who refuse to be designated as poet or scientist, allowing their work instead to move nimbly between modes of thought and ways of seeing that are increasingly mutually exclusive. The remainder of this introduction sets the cultural and intellectual stage for the central question that animates the book: How is it that the inwardly-directed study of the self can be connected so vitally to the outwardly-directed study of nature? My hope is that when we encounter Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau in the subsequent chapters, we are able to see them as part of a larger counter-cultural movement that seeks to arrive at a more integrated vision of the world. To this end, we will consider first the extraordinary popularity of autobiographical writing and natural science writing during the nineteenth century; second, the scientific dimension of autobiographical writing and the autobiographical dimension of natural science writing; and third, the fault lines that begin to form between the scientific and literary communities during the Romantic era and the ensuing acrimony between the “two cultures” that makes any reasonable discussion about literature and science so difficult.

The Nature of Identity and the Identity of Nature



All the Rage That Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau pursued their autobiographical and scientific projects together would have come as little surprise to their contemporaries. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness a surge of popular interest in both the natural sciences and autobiographical writing. Letters, diaries, journals, travelogues, slave narratives, spiritual narratives, confessions, memoirs: the eighteenth century is rich with innovative forms of self-representation. Adding to the sheer number and profusion of forms is what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson refer to “as the democratization of the institution of life writing”: “More and more people—merchants, criminals, middle-class women, ex-slaves—turned to life narratives as a means to know themselves and position themselves within the social world” (97). The linguistic ferment surrounding the neologism “autobiography” and its synonym “self-biography” serves equally well as a barometer of the popularity and importance of this new mode of writing in the late eighteenth century. As Robert Folkenflik documents, the word first appeared in English in 1786; in German in 1789; and in French in 1836. (As Folkenflik wryly remarks, France is “a more linguistically conservative country” (5).) Clearly, something new was in the making and it needed a name. While the word and its cognates are used sporadically and self-consciously in the final decades of the eighteenth century, they become fully naturalized by the nineteenth century. “Autobiography” establishes itself as the preferred term in English; “Selbstbiographie” [selfbiography] replaces “Lebensbeschreibung” [life description] in German; only in France, where “autobiographie” is viewed as too “English,” does the older term “les mémoires” predominate until the twentieth century. (In a bit of historical irony, the term “memoir” is gradually replacing “autobiography” in current English and American usage, while the French now prefer “autobiographie.”) What all of this linguistic turmoil points to is the belated recognition of the emergence of a new mode of writing that has at its center the story of an individual life as narrated by that individual. It also reflects a cultural anxiety to get a handle on and “discipline” this new literature of the self with its emphasis on the singular and secular subject. As Felicity Nussbaum demonstrates in The Autobiographical Subject, early critics retroactively applied the term “autobiography” to a wide range of subject-centered literary writings in an effort to codify and control the teeming forms of selfrepresentation—a practice that rapidly accelerated with the institutionalization of literary studies in the twentieth century (1–10). In order to do justice to the multiple forms of life writing without denying the specificity of the particular mode of self-inscription practiced by Rousseau, 

 For an understanding of eighteenth century forms of self-representation Nussbaum is essential reading. Spacks remains the best introduction of autobiography in relation to the novel. For the development of autobiographical writing in the American context Shea is invaluable.



Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

Goethe, and Thoreau, I use the term “Romantic autobiography” to designate this new mode of writing. Eugene Stelzig offers a provisional definition of this new genre: As the retrospective self-account of a highly individualized identity posited on a dynamic developmental sense, Romantic autobiography inscribes the specific forms and modes of the writer’s subjectivity in a narrative interpretation and stylized reprise of the past that merges memory and imagination, thought and feeling, inner and outer, into a higher unity of the written self. (15)

I offer Stelzig’s definition in full because it resonates so powerfully with our Romantic triptych’s approach to the self and to the natural world, particularly with its emphasis on the notions of dynamic development and unity, the importance of narrative and language as modes of interpretation, and the dialectical relationship between thought and feeling, inner and outer, memory and imagination. In addition to the “politics of autobiography” so convincingly demonstrated by Nussbaum, what remains clear is the emergence in the later decades of the eighteenth century of an irrepressible desire to write one’s own life story coupled with an equally powerful urge to read about the lives of others. Only the naturalists with their stories of the natural world exerted such a hold on the popular imagination. It is hard to overstate the popularity of nature study during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, George-Louis Buffon, Gilbert White, Erasmus Darwin, William Bartram, Jean Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and Alexander von Humboldt—to name but a few writers—were bestsellers, competing with novels for space on the bookshelves of the literate classes. Even more popular than reading about the natural world, though, was going out into nature to discover new life forms for oneself. Outfitted with little more than a magnifying glass, a guidebook, a stylus for recording data, and a satchel or collecting tin for gathering specimens (destined perhaps for a cabinet of natural curios), the enthusiastic naturalist would set out to collect, describe, identify, and classify the contents of the natural world—whether that world was the familiar countryside favored by the middle-classes or the forbidding and mysterious lands of South America that attracted naturalist-explorers such as Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. The popularity of nature study was such that one could speak of the Great Shell Craze of France in the 1720s; the “limpet fever” that struck the Irish in the 1820s; and the “Pteridomania” or Fern Craze that consumed Britain in the 1850s (Allen 45; Barber 13; Allen 30). The discovery by naturalist-explorers of   For an understanding of the popularity of nature study see Allen, Barber, Nichols, and Merrill. Allen focuses on the social manifestations of the taste for nature study; Barber most fully describes the extent of its popularity; Merrill draws on these scholars and others to offer the most synoptic account of the craze for natural history. Nichols provides the most recent account in a wide-ranging presentation of the long-standing passion for natural history from Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin.

The Nature of Identity and the Identity of Nature



a new type or specimen would lead to a sudden demand for these exotica with prices only the wealthiest collectors could afford. The publication of a book by a renowned naturalist, such as The Aquarium (1854) by Philip Henry Gosse, would be enough to trigger a popular surge in “zoological beachcombing” (Merrill 34). Insects, mosses, seaweed, rocks: no natural object seemed to escape the public eye. The popular appeal of these writings owes much to the accessible style in which they were written. Generally referred to as works of “natural history,” they contain little of the prohibitive scientific vocabulary of mid-nineteenth century biology and chemistry or of the formal mathematical language of seventeenth-century physics. Unlike “natural philosophy,” a form of inquiry that has evolved into what we today refer to as “science,” “natural history” is an inductive approach to nature, that is to say, it proceeds from particular to general, from the observation and description of empirical data to the discovery of general laws. Most natural history works amble about delightfully in the seemingly limitless world of phenomena taking pleasure in noting the multitude of forms that comprise the natural world. While the language of natural philosophy is abstract and mathematical, the language of natural history is descriptive and exquisitely detailed. Natural history is, as Merrill remarks, above all else an aesthetic science (79). Reflecting a renewed awareness of the aesthetic dimension of natural history, Noah Heringman’s study Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History brings together a diverse group of scholars who treat “natural history as a literary practice”(3). In his introduction, Heringman characterizes natural history as a practice that defies traditional disciplinary boundaries and cultivates a mindset that resists a segmented approach to the natural world and to the self: “The increasing and simultaneous popularity of natural history, poetry, and the novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created audiences predisposed to synthesize these now divorced forms in their reading and their actual experience of the natural world” (6). Whether in the coffee-houses, the salons, the marketplace, or the home, conversations flowed freely and easily from one sphere to the other. The guilty pleasure of discussing the confessions of another often merged with prurient observations shared by amateur naturalists on, say, the sporulation of   For the most comprehensive treatment of the history of natural history see Cultures of Natural History, eds. Jardine, Secord, and Spary. Written mainly by historians and historians of science, it can be loosely described as a work of cultural history. The central works on natural history remain Foucault, The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses) and Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte.    The use of these terms is extremely fluid, especially during the period of epistemological unrest that marks the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. However, I believe useful distinctions can be made as long as we keep the rapidly changing intellectual and disciplinary landscape in view. For a more general understanding of the changing use of scientific terms see Bynum, Browne, and Porter, Dictionary of the History of Science.



Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

plants or the arrangement of their organs of reproduction. In sum, the works of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau are emblematic of a much broader cultural mindset that views the literary and scientific realms as coextensive. Between Literature and Science Lurking just beneath the surface of this fruitful interplay between literature and science lies a deep-seated anxiety on the part of “official” culture that aims to keep these realms separate. The anxiety is particularly intense surrounding discussions of autobiography and natural history. Both genres are notoriously difficult to classify. Indeed, their very “unruliness” is arguably a source of their popularity among the general populace. Autobiography and natural history occupy a dangerous position that evades the categories of “literature” and “science” that modern thought, at least since the Enlightenment, has sought to differentiate in the name of a better, more rational, and virtuous society. Their very existence as both literature and science threatens the “project of modernity” as defined by Habermas, whereby the division of culture into three autonomous spheres—science, morality, and art— could ultimately yield “an accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life, that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday social life” (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 9). The resistance of both autobiography and natural history to traditional disciplinary and generic boundaries is reflected in their critical reception from the Romantic period onward. As we shall see, autobiographical writing has historically been of greatest interest to members of the scientific community, while natural histories are most prized by literary and cultural scholars for their aesthetic merits—both visual and verbal. It is easy to forget that autobiography only emerges as a serious object of literary study in the later decades of the twentieth century. Until then, as James Olney remarks, autobiography is “little more than a special variety of biography … a kind of stepchild of history and literature, with neither of those disciplines granting it full recognition as a respectable field for study in itself” (xiii). Instead, as Laura Marcus demonstrates, autobiographical texts have been (and continue to be) most commonly used as scientific documents, storehouses of raw data about individuals, attracting the attention of physiologists, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and, perhaps most disturbingly, eugenicists, among

   Such at least was the dream of the Enlightenment philosophers. Habermas concedes that the Enlightenment effort “to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art governed by its own “inner logic” has failed. It did so, Habermas argues, because the different specialists could no longer communicate with one another. Habermas famously goes on to argue that the project of modernity is not over. It is simply incomplete. (“Modernity versus Postmodernity,” 3–14)

The Nature of Identity and the Identity of Nature



other specialists in the sciences of human life and of the mind. Sociologists, for instance, note with care the development of the “gifted” individual and seek in that person’s story a relation to the development of society as a whole; ethnologists use “exemplary” autobiographies to establish the characteristics that distinguish either a nation or Western civilization in general from a primitive culture. Scientists of the mid- and late nineteenth century go so far as to write their own autobiographies in order to furnish case studies for their fellow colleagues as well as informative documents for the general public about the environmental and hereditary laws that govern the development of the individual (Shumaker 90). There is perhaps no more explicit instance of this application of autobiography than that of Herbert Spencer. A Victorian biologist and sociologist deeply influenced by Romantic thought and a great rival to Charles Darwin, Spencer opens his autobiography with a clear statement of his scientific intent: “It has seemed to me that a natural history of myself would be a useful accompaniment to the books which it has been the chief occupation of my life to write” (vii). Spencer maintains throughout his book that one of its major goals is to demonstrate the applicability of Darwinian theory to the life of the individual. The scientific orientation of autobiographical studies only increases in the twentieth century. The century opens with Anna Robeson Brown Burr’s unabashedly scientific book The Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (1909), the first fulllength study on autobiography for English speakers.10 Burr’s confidence in the explanatory power of science and her disregard for autobiography as anything other than a tool for the psychologist are breathtaking. Recapitulating the tenets of the “ideal autobiography,” Burr writes: “The writer of his own life must remember, that he is making first, a scientific document; second, a piece of literature. If he can do it simply, clearly, vividly, so much the better for him and for us; but he had better make a dry digest than a romantic narrative” (197). The value of studying autobiography as a distinct genre is made clear to the reader in the book’s opening pages: “As one advances in the study of autobiography, as document after document lies before one … the importance to science, the value to psychology, of such a self-revelation of humanity, is brought home to the most unscientific of literary students” (4). Burr’s forceful opinions on Rousseau and Goethe (and Wordsworth) merit a few more words about her approach to autobiography. For Burr, the ideal autobiography is sincere, and in order to be sincere the thinker must be introspective; the ideal autobiography is thus a rigorous self-study    See in particular chapter 2, “Auto/biography: between literature and science” (56– 89). Additional references to the scientific dimension of auto/biographical writing can be found throughout the book. Marcus’ work is an indispensable resource for the scholar of auto/biography. It presents in extraordinary detail the historiography of auto/biographical theory, criticism, and practice from the eighteenth century to the present. 10  Laura Marcus uncovers this interesting nugget in the history of autobiographical criticism. Her comment is followed by a brief discussion of Burr that prompted my own reading of the text (67–74).

10

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and classified somewhat counter-intuitively as both “subjective” and “scientific.” Surprisingly, Burr levels her harshest verdict against Goethe on the grounds that his confusion of sentiment with fact (poetry and truth) renders useless what could have been the most valuable psychological document of the century. Elsewhere she laments his lack of method, his preoccupation with feeling, and concludes, “By his misconception of the value of self-study, Goethe has deprived us of an opportunity to see at work the high powers of a complex, well-balanced modern man, and this is indeed a deprivation” (398). Turning what has become conventional wisdom on its head, Burr praises Rousseau for his sincerity, or at least his sincere attempt to understand himself in all his contradictions and complexity. Burr compares Rousseau to Cardan, the Renaissance autobiographer, whom she views as the type of “scientific” autobiographer who gathers and collates data about his personal life. The words of an anonymous review of Cardan’s autobiography could, according to Burr, apply equally well to Rousseau: “‘He takes the height, breadth, and marks of his person, as a curious traveler would measure the pyramids. A naturalist would thus describe an animal he had never before met with, and never expected to see again’” (91–2; emphasis added). As for Wordsworth, he manages to escape Burr’s analysis intact and would have emerged unscathed were it not for his unfortunate penchant for versification: “The Prelude is unusually clear and convincing upon this crisis in Wordsworth’s case, it may be trusted as if it were not poetry at all, but rather scientific prose” (373). In our own time, autobiographical writing has become fertile territory for cognitive science, a thoroughly modern and naturalistic approach to the study of the mind that includes scholars from a wide range of fields such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, sociology, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. In recent years increasing attention has been brought to bear within the cognitive science community on the primacy of narrative as a fundamental mode by which the mind develops self-awareness and acquires a sense of identity. Narrative is also seen to play a large role in organizing the contents of consciousness, such as conceptual thought, memory, imagination, and the emotions. As a consequence, scientists of the mind have turned increasingly to personal narratives and autobiographies, in short, to the stories we tell about ourselves, as records of the intimate operations of the individual mind, to support, develop, and test their hypotheses. This has led to a focus on what kinds of stories the mind can tell from a neuroanatomical perspective (Cabeza et al.) and from a neuropsychological standpoint (Rubin and Greenberg) as well as to research on the cognitive processes involved in memory formation and memory loss. In a fascinating and quite significant development for the study of autobiography, literary scholars have joined forces with cognitive scientists to produce what is arguably some of the most provocative and multidisciplinary work in contemporary autobiographical criticism. To cite some prominent examples: the journal A/B: Auto/biography dedicated a special issue in spring 1998 to the topic of “Autobiography and Neuroscience.” Harvard University Press followed two years later with Memory, Brain, and Belief, a collection of essays on the relations

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between brain science, memory studies, and self-representation, a third of which focused specifically on autobiography. Three years later Oxford University Press published Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain, in which nearly a half of the essays centered on autobiography. Perhaps more remarkable than the placement of an essay by a literary and autobiographical critic, such as Sidonie Smith, alongside an essay by a neuropsychologist, is the emergence of co-authored works by scholars from different sides of the academic divide. Two examples from “A/B: Auto/biographical Studies” will serve to illustrate my point. The first study, “Madeleines and Neuromodernism,” is an exploration of autobiographical memory in Proust that draws on recent developments in memory studies and neuroanatomy; it is co-authored by a literary critic and a neurologist (Shepherd-Barr and Shepherd). The second example also discusses the issue of memory. Co-authored by an English scholar and a specialist in developmental psychology, “Autobiography and Memory” analyzes the representation of traumatic episodes in autobiographical writing in the context of recent cognitive theories of memory and memory loss (Porter and Reisberg). Much can be said of the recent interdisciplinary work in autobiography studies. For our purposes, what is clear is that autobiography was and continues to be a hybrid genre that refuses to be “disciplined” and by its very existence challenges the divide between the humanities and the sciences. Like autobiographical writing, natural history exhibits a generic and disciplinary flexibility that enables it to span the humanities/science divide. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists from Linnaeus (1707– 78) to Charles Darwin (1809–82) are of diminishing professional interest to twenty-first century scientists, they hold enormous appeal to their peers in the humanities. Charles Darwin—to cite the most contentious, ideologically-charged nineteenth-century natural historian—has attracted a host of critics within the field of literary studies, among them Gillian Beer and George Levine, who read the naturalist’s works as literature, that is to say, by paying close attention to the way language operates in Darwin’s writings. For Beer, this approach reveals among other things the deep influence of Darwin’s writing on the development of the Victorian novel; for Levine, it discloses a thinker whose prose has the power to convey a deeply-felt sense of awe and enchantment before the wonders of the natural world even as that world is emptied of any and all traces of supernatural content. While the decidedly aesthetic approach of Levine may strike some as a form of “wishful-reading,”11 scientific texts in Darwin’s time were read both for their scientific and aesthetic content. The success of any given nature work depended mainly on the author’s descriptive powers and his or her ability to tell a good story. It is in large part for these reasons that late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works such as the Comte de Buffon’s Natural History (1749– 11  Levine goes on to argue that Darwin may even be read as an extension of earlier romantic natural science writing. I generally concur with Levine’s analysis. Similar arguments have in been made by Beer and, more recently, Richards.

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1804, 36 vols.), Gilbert White’s Natural History of Shelbourne (1788), William Bartram’s Travels (1791), Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), and Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos (1845–62, 5 vols.) garnered such acclaim among professional scientists and amateurs alike. It is on these aesthetic grounds that their works continue to be admired today. From William Bartram to Alexander von Humboldt In a survey of natural historical works from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period what becomes clear is the increasing role of the subject in the perception of nature and the coming together of literary and scientific modes of representation. The writings of the quintessential Enlightenment naturalist, William Bartram, and the work of the romantic natural historian Alexander von Humboldt will frame our discussion of this evolving dynamic. Immanuel Kant’s own reflections on natural history emerge as a lynchpin connecting the two periods. In the end, to understand this change is also understand how Romantic culture viewed the projects of nature study and self study as interrelated, interdependent pursuits. William Bartram is usually mentioned in relation to his son John, whose lyrical natural history writings inspired Coleridge and Wordsworth as well as Emerson and Thoreau. Unlike his tempestuous son, the father is generally portrayed as a quintessential, rational Enlightenment naturalist. Guided by Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, he collected, identified, and classified the natural objects around him. His style was simple, matter of fact, precise, and empirical. His concerns as a loyal colonist were eminently practical: identify any “new” plants, take note of any medicinal virtues, and have any “exotic” or exceedingly beautiful flowers shipped back to Europe. This familiar and sober portrait of William Bartram has been redrawn by historian Thomas Slaughter—but with a difference. Looking beyond the published material, Slaughter examines Bartram’s correspondence and discovers a writer of divinely inspired, visionary prose. Expressions of wonder, delight, and awe sit comfortably alongside scrupulous descriptions of plant and animal forms. As Slaughter remarks, Bartram’s natural history “defied any strict division between science and poetry, producing a literature that combines both ways of seeing” (70). On the one hand, we have Bartram the scientist carefully measuring, counting, and recording in his journals and correspondence what he sees in unadorned prose: “a great ridge is ‘a mile steep’; good soil measures ‘three feet deep’; a grove of trees is ‘half a mile broad’; a grassy plain is ‘20 acres’” (quoted in Slaughter 72). On the other hand, we have Bartram the belletrist writing in these same works of the “‘musical howling’” of wolves, “‘enchanting’” prospects, “‘delicate flowers’” and, in his most effusive moments, “‘purling streams and glittering cascades,’” “‘concealed humid bosoms’” and “‘craggy precipices of elevated rock’” (quoted in Slaughter 51–2). While Bartram regards the scientific and aesthetic approaches to nature as distinct (unlike many of the Romantic writers we will examine shortly), he does not view them as incompatible (as we might today).

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Even in the most rigorously empirical works of the period, the sheer abundance of detail betrays the natural historian’s enthusiasm for the visible splendors of the world. The pages overflow with exact notations of the size, shape, weight, quantity, color, and relative position of the minutest features of a specimen’s external parts, whether they be the eyes of the common housefly, the wings of a red ant, or the stamen of a cyclamen. The naturalist’s sense of wonder and aesthetic appreciation is in large part a sign of the continuing influence of natural theology within the field of natural history. To marvel at the natural world is to marvel at divine creation. At the same time, these extrascientific expressions stand on their own as records of the observer’s personal, emotional, and aesthetic experience of nature whose source is not only, or even primarily theological, but humanistic as well. Grounded in facts, natural history includes within its discursive field the experiential and affective dimensions of the naturalist’s encounter with nature. More often than not, however, these experiences play a peripheral or supplementary role. They are there to make nature more palatable, more approachable, more entertaining, more marketable, more human, and more useful. As natural history enters the Romantic age, however, it undergoes a profound transformation that places the subjectivity of the naturalist at the center of a full and truthful knowledge of the natural world. Foucault’s seminal analysis of the discourse of natural history provides a useful point of departure to explore this transformation. In what Foucault refers to as the Classical age (roughly from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth), natural history involves “the nomination of the visible” (The Order of Things, 132). For Foucault, the Linnaean naturalist is only “concerned with the structure of the visible world and its denomination” (161). Even Buffon, Linnaeus’s arch rival, who dismissed the latter’s system of binomial nomenclature as artificial and abstract, can be seen to operate within the same epistemological framework. Buffon opens his monumental, 36-volume Histoire Naturelle (1749– 88) with a description of the enormous scope of the natural historian: “Natural history, taken in all its breadth, is an immense history; it embraces all the objects of the universe” (my translation). The gaze of the natural historian is limited, however, to the outward manifestations of nature. As Buffon goes on to note in his introduction, an examination of nature’s visible exterior is “essential,” whereas a consideration of the interior is dismissed as being “of little importance” (my translation). The classification of natural forms is, according to Foucault, similarly constrained: “The plant and animal are seen not so much in their organic unity, but in the visible patternings of their organs” (161). The limitation is not only spatial but temporal: the naturalist notes only that which is directly observable and thus immediately present to the senses. There is no sense of historical development; no invisible process of change; no past and no future; or, at least, no sense that these temporal dimensions play a determinative role in revealing the organization of the natural world. Instead, there is a vast, endlessly rich, horizontal “domain of empiricity” (158) that stretches out to the farthest reaches of the visible horizon. Natural history is, at least until mid-century, a synchronic science of space.

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During the latter half of the eighteenth century, the historical and intellectual conditions that make the discourse of classical natural history possible cease to exist. Natural history becomes “romantic natural history.”12 This shift finds its most rigorous and perhaps most influential formulation in the writings of Immanuel Kant. In his 1775 summer course on physical geography (a course he had been teaching for nearly twenty years), Kant delivers a new series of lectures on the relation of physical geography to the different races of mankind. In these lectures and their various redactions, Kant sharply distinguishes between two forms of natural history, one a systematic description of nature [Naturbeschreibung] and the other a genetic history of nature [Naturgeschichte].13 Kant opens his 1777 prospectus “Of the Different Human Races” by contrasting the artificial (read: negative) division of race with a natural division. A natural division is based on “the law of common propagation” and “the unity of the reproductive power”; it is also “based on identifying distinct lines of descent that divide according to reproductive relations” (Bernasconi and Lott, eds.: 8; KGS 2: 429). An artificial division is based on nothing other than visible “similarities” between life forms. In an important summation Kant writes, “[The artificial division] has only the intent of bringing creatures under headings; the [natural division] has the intent of bringing them under laws” (8). In a footnote a few pages later, Kant explicitly links Naturbeschreibung with an “artificial division” of nature and Naturgeschichte with a “natural division”: “Natural history would presumably lead us back from the great number of seemingly different species to races of the same species to races of the same genus and transform the presently overly detailed artificial system for the description of nature [Naturbeschreibung] into a physical system for the understanding [ein physisches System für den Verstand]” (13; KGS 2: 434). If Naturbeschreibung is merely an exercise of bringing forms under headings, then Naturgeschichte requires the faculty of understanding, which Kant designates as the faculty concerned with the active process of knowledge acquisition through concepts (such as lineal descent and common propagation). Kant’s lectures register two fundamental changes in natural history at the dawn of the Romantic age that he would develop more fully in the broader context of his later philosophy: the temporalization of nature and the reorientation of the naturalist’s gaze from the immediately visible surface of nature to the invisible realm within. Both changes lead to an approach to the natural world that places the subjective self at its center. In order to see nature as a whole it is no longer adequate to traverse the empirical plain of the visible present; the nineteenth-century naturalist must both travel back in time and explore the vital inner processes beneath the surface to discover nature’s complex unity. Yet to see the past, to see the first appearances of animals and plants, and to relate them through their various historical 12

 I borrow this term, which appears in Heringman and Nichols.   The distinction is first made in Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen zur Ankündigung der Vorlesungen der physischen Geographie im Sommerhalbenjahre 1775,” KGS 2. I thank Phillip R. Sloan for bringing this to my attention. 13

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stages to the present requires that the naturalist leave the comfortable realm of the purely factual and empirical. To grasp the dynamic inner processes of nature and to relate them to their external appearances is possible only when the naturalist moves beyond facts and on to the uncertain terrain of hypotheses, conjectures, and suppositions. For Kant, this is accomplished by embarking upon what he famously describes in the Critique of Judgment (1790) as the “daring adventure of reason” (305). Kant’s muscular rhetoric masks an important epistemological restriction his philosophy imposes upon on the study of nature, namely, that human reason constitutes the absolute limit of our objective knowledge of the world. The true or ideal world underlying all observable phenomena—what Kant terms the noumenal realm or “things-in-themselves”—is forever unknowable. The knowledge we do have of the phenomenal world is inevitably shaped by the conceptual frameworks and categories through which our minds view the world. And the relation of that knowledge to the “world as it is” remains indeterminate. The best we can hope for is that the presuppositions that structure our investigation will be borne out through a rigorous study of nature’s empirical facts and laws. The unavoidable truth, however, is that these preconceptions determine our findings. As James Larson puts it, “The idea of a system of nature did not follow from experience but constituted a presupposition that naturalists applied to experience, and, in a sense, rediscovered there” (173). Kant nonetheless takes comfort in the fact that these presuppositions (such as the structural unity of nature) are ideas that emerge from a mind that is itself biologically based or, in less anachronistic terms, structurally consonant with the natural world it is in the process of perceiving. Kant’s critical philosophy has several major consequences for Romantic thought that bear directly on our study. Insofar as the perceptual apparatus of the human being sets the limits for the possibility of knowledge, the human being is firmly established as the subjective center of knowledge. It is not the mind that conforms to the world, as Kant famously demonstrates in the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), but the world that conforms to the mind. In this sense, the human mind does not passively record but actively creates the world we see around us. Following Kant, Romantic natural historians situate the perceiving subject—the explorer and investigator of nature—at the center of any critical examination of the natural world. Yet, most balk at the limits imposed by the faculty of reason. For Romantic natural historians such as Alexander von Humboldt, reason is simply not enough. To reconstruct the history of nature and to discover the interrelatedness of all its forms—organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman— demands that painstaking observation be supplemented by the emotional responses, subjective impressions, aesthetic judgment, intuitive insight, and informed imagination of the observer. In Humboldt’s scientific writings, such as Views of Nature (1808), the Personal Narrative of a Journey (1814–25) and Cosmos (1845–62), it is his personal experience of nature, indeed his personality, that holds together the particulars of the natural world and shapes them into a complex, harmonious whole. Catching sight of a new and strange landscape, Humboldt is careful to record the temperature, the barometric pressure, the prominent geologic

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and vegetative features as well as his feelings of awe, wonder, delight, pleasure, or fear. Unlike the rapturous effusions of Romantic naturalists such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Jules Michelet, Humboldt’s descriptions accurately record the natural sights before him, while at the same time gently communicating his deeply-felt connection to the natural world as well as a respect for its eternally unfathomable otherness. Two brief passages from Humboldt’s Personal Narrative serve to illustrate his uniquely romantic and scientific approach to nature. Shortly after entering the jungles of the New Andalusia mountains, Humboldt comes across a spring known to be fresh and healthy. Upon drinking from it, he notes simply: “We found the water delicious. Its temperature was only 22.5 C while the air was 28.7 C” (Personal Narrative 81). The first sentence is quietly sensuous and spiritual; the second, meticulously empirical. Together they typify the aesthetic as well as scientific dimension of Humboldt’s gaze. A few paragraphs later, we find Humboldt atop the New Andalusia mountains, looking out at the rocky coast of Araya in a way that at once connects land and sea, wilderness and civilization, aesthetics and science: “With our eyes we traced the sinuosities of this arm of the sea, which has dug a bed like a river between perpendicular rocks stripped of vegetation. This extraordinary view reminded us of the fantastic landscape that Leonardo da Vinci painted in the background of his famous portrait of Mona Lisa” (81–2). From the remote jungles of South America, Humboldt transports us back to the heart of Western civilization, creating similarities and connections where others would see only difference. Note also the combination of active, subjective vision—“With our eyes we traced”—and the detailed, empirical description of the spot Humboldt chooses to observe—“perpendicular rocks stripped of vegetation”—connected by a sensuous, vaguely erotic vision of the sea: “we traced the sinuosities of the sea.” Indeed, these visceral experiences have a way of catching the diligent naturalist off guard, as he would later explain in the Cosmos, allowing him in a moment of wonder to be transported outside of himself, identify with nature, and perceive the “mysterious relations” and “secret analogies” that link the human and the nonhuman together as parts of a beautiful, intricate, and ever-evolving totality whose description remains the ultimate goal of Humboldt’s science (1: 5). Objective, empirical observation blends seamlessly with subjective impressions. To separate the two becomes impossible. And, for Humboldt, that is exactly the point. Objective vision and subjective vision are mutually related, not mutually exclusive. Humboldt gives apposite expression to what he terms his “two-fold point of view”: “In the first place, I have endeavored to present [Nature] in the pure objectiveness of external phenomena; and, secondly, as the reflection of the image impressed by the senses upon the inner man, that is, upon his ideas and feelings” (Cosmos 3: 1). Indeed, the difficulty of clearly demarcating the boundary between self-expression and the exploration of nature testifies to the deep-seated interrelation between nature and human nature that lies at the heart of the project of natural history in the Romantic period and of the writings of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau.

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The Difficult Peace In this study I have sought to avoid some of the dangers that bedevil the study of the relations between literature and science during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. Chief among these dangers are: the adoption of an uncritical nostalgia for an intellectual time that putatively once was and can no longer be—a time, so to speak, before the fall into specialization and disciplinary fragmentation; the related conviction that to recapture the spirit of this pre-lapsarian moment demands what is, in fact, impossible—a thoroughgoing knowledge of the countless disciplines now separated by thickets of specialized knowledge and terminology; a denial of our own “training” within highly regulated and segmented disciplines or “areas of expertise” that shapes, for better and for worse, our understanding of a culture that experiences the growing intellectual divisions of which we ourselves are a product; the imposition of fixed meaning across time and across cultures to the fluid categories of “literature” and “science”; and the reflexive dismissal of the accomplishments (though ever mindful of the grievous damages) intellectual specialization and the sciences have brought to our world and to ourselves. To my mind the greatest danger, however, is the desire to achieve a total knowledge of the world (or at least to lay the foundations for that knowledge) based exclusively on the principles and rules of one’s own home discipline. This simultaneously isolationist and imperialistic approach necessarily excludes or, at the very least, demotes other ways of thinking. One such recent attempt is Edward Wilson’s provocative book Consilience (1998). In a bid to continue the Enlightenment project of unified knowledge for the betterment of humankind, Wilson calls for the linking or “jumping together” (“consilience”) of all modern disciplines, from the physical sciences, the biological sciences, the social sciences, to philosophy, history, and literature, based on the principles derived from modern evolutionary biology. The most notorious instance of this impulse in modern science is the ambition of many theoretical physicists to attain a “Theory of Everything”: a single equation that accounts for the basic nature of all energy and matter. With such a theory, cosmologist Stephen Hawking states that we will be able to read the mind of God (Stengers, Cosmopolitiques 1: 9). The scandal, as Isaiah Berlin writes of the situation of modern science in general, is the “total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge” (328). If we are not careful, Berlin warns, nothing from jurisprudence to the creative arts will escape the rationality of the new sciences. This is precisely the kind of “unification” of the sciences and arts we must guard against (330). The presumptuous and triumphalist tone of a great deal of modern science is arguably an inheritance passed down from its founders during the seventeenth century, notably Francis Bacon, who equates knowledge with power and declares that the aim of the new science is “‘to conquer and subdue [Nature] to her foundations’” and “‘with united forces [turn] against the Nature of Things, to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds and extend the bounds of the

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human empire, as far as God Almighty shall permit’” (Bacon in Midgley 41).14 For Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau, and, indeed, for the Romantics generally, it is Galileo and Newton, their followers, and scientific materialists of all stripes who come to represent what is wrong with modern science: its aggressive attitude toward nature and human nature, its dismissive attitude toward all forms of knowledge acquisition that do not adhere to the standards of the scientific method, and, above all, the extension of its reductionist, atomistic assumptions into other domains, such as politics, psychology, and imaginative literature, where they tend to fail miserably. The Romantic poets, we must remember, are no less guilty of these universalizing impulses so evident in modern science. At the height of European Romanticism, the German Naturphilosophen, with whom Goethe is often falsely allied, seek to unite poetry and the sciences through aesthetics and remake the world. Wordsworth fashions himself as the “chosen son”; Shelley famously declares that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”; and Emerson declaims his belief in the prophetic role of the poet as “seer” and “sayer”: “Poets are thus liberating gods” (The Poet 276). Romantic literature is populated with heroic poets, who, on the wings of imagination, aim to unite that which has been rent asunder. Like Bacon, who in his novel The New Atlantis (1626) conjures up a utopian world ruled by natural philosophers and governed by their principles of experimentation, the Romantics also strive to create a perfect world according to their conceptual categories. One such striking example is Friedrich Schiller, whose On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794–95) theorizes an ideal mode of existence termed the “Aesthetic State” that can only be attained when an individual is able to develop fully his innate aesthetic impulse known as the “play drive” [Stofftrieb]. Once developed the sensuous and rational desires are reintegrated and the individual, freed from the antimonies that divide the modern consciousness, is at last redeemed. As G. S. Rousseau notes, at the very 14

 The controversy surrounding Bacon and his approach to nature has been intense. The uncompromising nature of the debate is, I would argue, symptomatic of the fraught relations between the sciences and humanities today. The most vehement critiques of Bacon have come from feminist circles, notably Sandra Harding, Carolyn Merchant, and Evelyn Fox Keller. Harding, for example, argues “Bacon appealed to rape metaphors to persuade his audience that the experimental method is a good thing” (Whose Knowledge? Whose Science? Thinking from Women’s Lives 43). Merchant equates Bacon’s experimental method with the torture chamber and links his writing to the anti-witchcraft sentiment of his day. The most judicious reader of the three, Fox Keller, notes how the recurrent imagery of sexual domination in Bacon’s writings comes to shape the practice of modern science (Reflections on Gender and Science, see especially 67–88). First published in the 1980’s, these popular works precipitate a violent counter-reaction in the 90’s that comes, to borrow the title of Alan Soble’s 1995 essay, “In Defense of Bacon.” What is so notable about this second wave of books about Bacon is not so much their quality—the works of John Briggs and Peter Pesic, for example, are exquisitely argued and researched—but in the lack of middle ground between them and the earlier works.

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moment art strives toward autonomy in the face of an increasingly domineering scientific mentality, the Romantics come to view the natural sciences as inferior on the grounds that its practitioners do not take into account taste, refinement, or sensibility—in short, the aesthetic dimension of life (7). In sum, however different these two areas of inquiry may be, they share a common imperialistic drive, with each specialist asserting his or her domain of expertise as foundational and applicable to all other fields of inquiry. For the artist in the above examples, it is aesthetics and the creative power of the imagination that promise to order the world; for the scientist, it is the quantitative approach that leads to the promised land. This imperialist approach results in a climate of mutual distrust, rising tensions, disciplinary protectionism, and a growing system of academic apartheid that have all lasted for nearly three hundred years.15 In the twentieth century, the simmering hostilities and growing feuds finally lead to open warfare. The opening salvo in this war is delivered by C. P. Snow in his now infamous 1959 Rede Lecture. In this lecture he describes a modern world sharply divided between two opposing camps—the humanists and the scientists –whose members could no longer understand each other. Snow is quick to link this bifurcation to a more generalized decline in traditional morals and values, and he is equally quick to lay most of blame on effete “literary intellectuals.” Setting aside the complex reasons behind his disdain for “belletrists,” the reaction against Snow’s lecture, notably from F. R. Leavis, is swift and vociferous. Long since dismissed as a cliché, if not to say a problematic concept (by none other than C. P. Snow himself), the idea of the “two cultures” has such purchase that it continues to shape the discourse of literature and science today.16 By the 1980s the passions driving the “two cultures” conflict seemed to have dissipated. Unpredictability, open-endedness, and uncertainty become reigning concepts in quantum physics; the critical role of imagination, language, and the relative position of the subject in scientific analysis are more readily accepted. In short, the critical concepts of literary discourse and those of scientific discourse share common ground. This brief ceasefire ended dramatically in the 1990s in a series of battles known collectively as the “Science Wars.” In brief, these new attacks pitted postmodern social constructivists, who believe scientists “construct” or “make” the world they investigate, against scientific realists, who insist on the objectivity of their findings. The most spectacular assault came in the form of an article published by physicist Alan Sokal in the highly-regarded, peer-reviewed, postmodern journal Social Text. Sokal later revealed that the article, which argued that no science could be objective, was a prank filled with gibberish and scientific nonsense. The

15  The concepts of “disciplinary protectionism” and “apartheid” I borrow from Midgley (142; 79). 16  For an excellent understanding of The Rede Lecture in its historical context see Collini’s introduction in C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (vii–lxxiii).

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“Sokal affair” gained wide coverage and, though mainstream media has long since moved on, the academic battle continues.17 The tragedy of this state of affairs is that it seems entirely unnecessary. Does disciplinary specialization require disciplinary isolationism and imperialism? Of course not, as the examples of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau, as well as the inspired interdisciplinary research of the last fifty years to which much of my work is indebted, so vividly demonstrate. The truth is that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witness a great deal of interaction and convergence between the fields of literature and science. Literary scholars of the Romantic period have long since revised facile notions of the era as anti-science; philosophers of science and scientists themselves now broadly acknowledge the importance of creativity, imagination, and intuition in their own research and in that of their nineteenthcentury peers. Still, the rhetorical tone surrounding discussions of science and the humanities remains shrill. The loud and persistent voices of intellectual fundamentalism too often silence the more subtle, nuanced arguments of scholars quietly unearthing profound connections between literary and scientific thought and practice during the nineteenth century. Ironically, contemporary scientists have been the most effective both within and beyond academia in communicating the salutary interrelations of human knowledge. In what literary critic Margery Arendt Safir aptly terms the “upscale popularization” of science, prominent scientists have found in commercial publishing a platform to expose to an eager general public their latest discoveries and, more importantly, their views on science as a cultural activity (8). Certainly, this opportunity has been used as a bully pulpit to lionize science, pace Edward O. Wilson and Stephen Hawking. The opposite is also true, however, as is evident in the writings of biologist Stephen Jay Gould, physicist James Ritter, neurologist Oliver Sacks, Nobel Prize-winner, chemist, and poet Roald Hoffmann, and physicist and fiction-writer Alan Lightman (author of best-seller Einstein’s Dreams). These scientific popularizers have allowed those of us who are not chemists, biologists, physicists, or neurologists to bear witness to the wonders of the natural world, which they describe in aesthetic and moral terms as well as with scientific exactitude. The question of how these discoveries relate to other forms of knowledge and other systems of belief is left open; there is no sense of disciplinary hierarchy or epistemological smugness. In many ways, these “upscale popularizers” are much like the enthusiastic nature writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They describe the world with rigor, but also with humility, with a sense of the limitations of human knowledge, and with a curiosity about how other fields of knowledge (aesthetics, religion, history) might offer   When I first drafted this book’s introduction I came across the latest edition of The American Scholar (August, 2006). The cover caught my attention: In big, bold letters (I estimate 72-point font size with a subtitle in 36-point font), I read “BIOLOGY CRUSHES LIT CRIT: If the Theory people bothered to read science, they’d realize just how silly they’ve been.” The catch: the article is written by a professor of English. 17

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them a different perspective that could add to their own knowledge of the world. Above all, they describe the world with a sense of wonder. Alongside these scientific writers, intellectuals from diverse fields have worked to provide the conceptual tools and structures that would allow a discussion of the complex linkages between the sciences and the literary arts to take place. N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, speaks of the “isomorphic assumptions” that link discourses as dissimilar as that of literature and science (Chaos Bound 4); George Levine looks upon science and literature as “modes of discourse” that “work out in different languages the same project” (“One Culture” 3, 7); and Michel Serres deploys the deceptively simple concept of “communication” and “passage,” figured as a voyage, translation, and exchange that takes place within mazes that hinder our passing from one discipline to another.18 Among the many thinkers who have reflected on the relationship between literature and science it is Isabelle Stengers whose work has set the tone for my own study. In her work Cosmopolitiques, Stengers acknowledges and insists that we acknowledge—if we are intellectually honest—that we are in a state of war. We still must talk with our intellectual rivals and, in order to do so, each competing camp has its diplomats. Regarded inevitably as traitors by their own group for speaking with the enemy, they are nonetheless dispatched. And, if the diplomats are good diplomats, they don’t simply list off the demands and requirements of their discipline and then return home. Instead, they listen to the ideas, dreams, and concerns of the other group on their terms and, at the same time, attempt to convey the ideas, dreams, and concerns of their group in their terms. The diplomat-intellectuals then return to their community, to their culture, to their world in order to communicate and translate what has been learned in this strange land. Most often, no progress is made. Still, the conversations continue, and finally, perhaps, one day a common ground is found. They discover to their surprise a new term or concept that helps them see the world through a shared conceptual grid. The terms and concepts that divided or mystified are discarded and a new framework for peace is built. But it is a “hard peace” with sacrifices on both sides and no guarantee that it will last. We must not just tolerate other groups. To tolerate, for Stengers, is to dismiss the other in a condescending manner as quaint, irrelevant, and non-threatening. That is the Siren call of what she terms the “liberals.” Instead, we must learn to view our discipline in a larger context—a “cosmopolitical” context—where other views are placed alongside our own in an “ecology of practices.”19

 This notion is most fully developed in Hermes Vol. 1: La Communication (1968) and Vol. V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (1980). 19   My description of Stengers’ world-view is taken from the first and last sections of her multi-volume work Cosmopolitiques. The sections and pages in question are “La guerre des sciences” (1: 9–88) and “Pour en finir avec la tolerance” (7: 287–390). My description is inspired mostly from the latter. 18

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It is the struggle for the difficult peace that has guided my reading of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau. Some in my group may regard my work with suspicion, when I take the scientific writings of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau seriously and place them alongside their celebrated literary works. The attempt—if not always successful—is rewarding and difficult. So now, ironically, in the spirit of the intellectual-diplomat, I turn to consider someone long considered to be, and falsely so, one of the least diplomatic men of all—Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Chapter 2

Natural Science and the Self in Rousseau’s Confessions

Now [my attraction to botany] is a bizarre thing I would like to explain to myself. It seems to me that if it were thoroughly explained, it could throw some new light on this knowledge of myself I have consecrated my last moments of leisure to acquiring.—Rousseau, Reveries (58)

In the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, otherwise known as the First Discourse (1751), Rousseau offers a sweeping and now infamous condemnation of modern science. Simply put, Rousseau argues that science has led to the corruption of humankind. It is surprising, then, to discover that Rousseau is the author of numerous works on physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, mathematics, and natural history—works, moreover, that the scientific community of his day largely embraced. It would be more unusual, however, for Rousseau, or for any intellectual of the eighteenth century, not to be conversant and active in fields ranging from physics to poetry. Rousseau’s powerful critique of the sciences, so at odds with the eighteenth-century belief in progress, has led most readers to ignore or quietly dismiss his scientific works as trivial and quaint at best, hypocritical at worst. What, after all, can be gained if we consider his outdated works in physics, to take but one example, alongside his works on social theory or education? I would venture a great deal. Activities as different as chemistry and music were part of a shared cultural discourse. (Rousseau studied and wrote works in both fields.) To consider them separately is to erect modern disciplinary walls where none yet existed. Unencumbered by a specialized and exclusionary language, disciplines we now view as unrelated interacted in a much more fluid and dynamic fashion. When we explore the connections between autobiography and botany—two activities that dominate the final years of Rousseau’s life—a surprising picture of 

  The recently published fifth volume of the Pléïade edition of Rousseau’s collected works, which contains selections from his writings on chemistry, geography, astronomy, and mathematics, makes Rousseau’s scientific writings widely available for the first time and the extent of his interest readily apparent. The selections represent only a small portion of his total scientific output. The publication of Rousseau’s complete writings on chemistry in Institutions chimiques (1999) reflects a renewed interest in this long-neglected dimension of Rousseau’s thought. So too does Alexandra Cook’s new translation of Rousseau’s botanical works, included in the same volume as the Reveries in the The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 8.

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the elder Rousseau emerges. The traditional image of Rousseau as solitary recluse and scientific Luddite gives way to a thinker who is more than ever engaged with the world around him and with the sciences of his day. Hardly an escape, the twin endeavors of botany and autobiography provide Rousseau with a way to continue his meditations on the historical nature of society and of the self developed in his earlier works. Through botany, Rousseau advances his own understanding of the complex encounter between the self and the other—in this case, a botanical, scientific other—during a time of profoundly-felt estrangement from what he saw as the increasingly atomized world of his contemporaries. In the botanical writings, Rousseau offers a more organic vision of the world by insisting on the complex interrelation between reason and imagination, the intellectual and the sensuous, the sciences and the arts that for him serves as a basis for any genuine apprehension of the natural world and of the self. This integral vision informs and is informed by his uniquely historical representation of the self in his autobiographical writings. Rousseau’s work in autobiography and botany has generally served to paint a portrait of Rousseau as a lonely figure who immerses himself in the world of plants and in memories of a long-lost, mythical past of happiness and innocence in order to escape from the failure of his historical vision of humankind and its institutions. According to this widely-held view, Rousseau is unable to evade the key contradiction at the heart of his historical dialectic, namely that time is at once what gives birth to man and what assures his dehumanization and alienation. Rousseau can see no better future for himself or for humanity. Resigned to failure, the disillusioned Rousseau takes flight through the imagination to a timeless, atemporal realm in which the self could, at least theoretically, be whole once more. The iconic image of Rousseau, walking-stick in hand, gathering specimens for his herbaria, outfitted with little more than a collecting tin and a magnifying glass, has helped perpetuate this popular notion of the solitary recluse. So too has Transparency and Obstruction, Jean Starobinski’s magisterial work on Rousseau. For Starobinski, Rousseau’s solitary botanizing serves not as a way to bring him in closer contact with the world but to enclose and isolate him further within his own subjectivity (234–8). Flowers are never seen as flowers but as signs of innocence and purity that affirm the innocence and purity of the natural self. Starobinski expresses this view in a striking comparison to that other famous literary naturalist, Goethe: “Goethe wrote the Metamorphosis of the Plants, while Rousseau made ‘pretty herbariums.’ Jean-Jacques was a collector, not a naturalist. And collecting was an occupation, an amusement, not a true form of action. Again, his action does not bring him into contact with the world; he turns inward and drains his own substance” (235). Starobinski’s Rousseau is a thinker arrested at some stage of narcissistic object-relations who desires the absence of all mediation and a return to a state of timeless, pre-reflective innocence.    The neo-Kantian interpretations of Derathé, the conservative reading of Leo Strauss, and the Freudian interpretations of Shklar and especially of Starobinksi have been among the most influential in shaping this view.

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Considered as a whole, however, Rousseau’s autobiographical and botanical works reveal a thinker deeply engaged with the world and with a vision of the world as a complex whole whose ever-changing parts are intimately interconnected and interrelated. Rousseau’s world-view offers an alternative to the increasingly fragmented and alienating historical condition of his contemporaries even as he is the first to recognize this fragmentation and alienation as the modern condition. Rousseau’s understanding of the world is most clearly reflected in the Confessions, the focus of this chapter, where a holistic model of the self is put forward in which sameness is in fact always slightly different and difference is never absolute. Like the naturalist who carefully notes structural analogies and differences between plant forms, the reader of the Confessions is encouraged to discover relations of similarity and difference that appear in the different stages of Rousseau’s life. Rousseau’s historicizing approach to the natural world— his temporalization of nature, his minute study of the dynamic structure and organization of plant forms, his refusal to systematize his findings even while embracing ideas of natural order—shapes his own self-study and description of the changing forms of his developing consciousness in the Confessions. Rousseau’s uniquely historical approach ultimately points the way to a world where self and other, reason and imagination, art and science are understood not as antithetical but as interrelated pursuits. Rousseau as Naturalist The popular representation of Rousseau as Luddite and sentimental worshipper of nature too often obscures the extent to which his works—even those most critical of science—bear the imprint of his scientific interests. In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality or the Second Discourse (1755), Rousseau openly draws on Buffon’s Natural History (1749) to formulate a quasi-evolutionary theory of humankind, while popular climatological theory plays an organizing role in his Essay on the Origin of Languages (1761). In the Social Contract (1762), algebraic and geometric terms are applied to moral categories in order to theorize the network of relations between the citizenry, the government, and the sovereign ruler in a civil society. Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) has even been read in light of Rousseau’s study of mathematics (DeJean 112–90). It is easy to forget the importance attached to the study of science in the pedagogical novel Emile or the palpable pleasure Rousseau takes in studying algebra, geography, and astronomy while at Les Charmettes, one of the rare idyllic periods in his life described in the Confessions. And finally, in the Reveries, Rousseau compares his attempt to recollect and preserve his past memories to that of the botanist collecting and preserving flowers in a herbarium.    For an excellent treatment of Rousseau’s involvement with the scientific community see Hulliung (156–200).

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Rousseau’s involvement in the botanical sciences was extensive and longlasting. His works devoted to the study of plants include a botanical primer in epistolary form entitled “Elementary Letters on Botany” (1771–73), a botanical dictionary, a critical history of botany as a field of inquiry, numerous herbaria, an extensive correspondence on the study of plants, and an attempt to develop an entirely new system of botanical notation meant to rival that of Linnaeus. He could count among his friends revered botanists of the period such as Bernard de Jussieu and Charles Bonnet. Naturalist-explorers named newly discovered plants in his honor, of which Rousseau Simplex Smith and Rousseauxia Chrysophylla are but two examples. After his death, members of the Museum of Natural History designated the weeping willow as Rousseau’s emblem. These are only details to be sure, but they show just how deeply involved Rousseau became in the study of botany and how well regarded he was by his fellow botanists. How can we square Rousseau’s passionate critique of the modern sciences with his active work in the very fields he so thoroughly condemns? Despite his forceful critique of modern science in the First Discourse, Rousseau does not advocate abandoning science as such. He never tires of repeating that there can be no return to an earlier state of human civilization and knowledge. Such a return is not merely impossible, but dangerous: “[T]o burn all Libraries and destroy the Universities and the Academies […] would only plunge Europe back into Barbarism, and morals would gain nothing from it” (50; OC 3: 55). Moreover, science, at least in the abstract, is regarded as a noble pursuit: “Science in itself is very good, that is obvious; and one would have to have taken leave of good sense, to maintain the contrary. The Author of all things is the fountain of truth; to know everything is one of his divine attributes. To acquire knowledge and to extend one’s enlightenment is, then, in a way, to participate in the supreme intelligence” (33; OC 3: 36). The difficulty for Rousseau, and the main point of the First Discourse, is that science, as practiced by man, is not a pure and disinterested inquiry into the nature of things, but a tool inevitably subject to the passions. It divides man from man and man from nature, replaces judgment and knowledge with opinion and prejudice, and leads to the corruption of morals. Though Rousseau offers no solution to the fateful relation between knowledge and corruption, he does suggest, already in his replies to the First Discourse, in the Preface to “Narcissus,” and in a defense of his own apparently contradictory pursuit of knowledge, that science can somehow be used against itself to ameliorate the evil it has already caused. Asserting again the futility of returning humans to their original state of equality and innocence—“their hearts, once spoiled, will be so forever”—Rousseau proposes that “the sciences and the Arts in some measure temper the ferociousness of the 

 The information regarding the plants named after Rousseau, the wreath placed at his tomb, and the weeping willow as an emblem of Rousseau was obtained at a special exhibition in the summer of 1996 at the Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Montmorency devoted to his study of botany and can be found in the exhibition catalogue Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Le philosophe botaniste (1996).

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men they have corrupted” (50; OC 3: 56). In this light, we can read Rousseau’s attention to botany, as well as his involvement in science generally, as an effort— however fraught with contradictions and complications—to put into practice an alternative or oppositional form of “scientific” inquiry. Rousseau’s botany is a science for an age already corrupted by science. Rousseau’s interest in botany is perhaps best understood in relation to his denunciation of pharmacology, the medicinal study of plants. The distinction between botany and pharmacology is, for Rousseau, absolute: “The art of studying plants by the combination of the compounds which compose their substance, the art of determining their true or false medicinal virtues either by always imperfect and deceptive experiment or observation or by still more faulty chemical analysis, has nothing in common with botany” (Botanical Writings: 250; OC 4: 1249). Mirroring his critique of modern science in general, Rousseau views pharmacology as the debasing subordination of knowledge for strictly instrumental gains. The pharmacologist is only interested in the plant’s “medicinal virtues” and not, as he states in the introduction to his botanical dictionary, in “the knowledge of plants themselves” (Botanical Writings: 94; OC 4: 1201). Strictly utilitarian in purpose, pharmacology is correspondingly reductionist in approach. Each plant is broken down into a series of useful properties and compounds which are analyzed and recombined to benefit modern civilization. The plant itself, as a living organic structure, becomes invisible: “[M]edicine has taken possession of plants and transformed them into simples to such an extent that we see in them only what we do not see in them at all, to wit, the pretended virtues it pleases just anybody to attribute to them […] All these charming and gracious structures barely interest anyone who only wants to grind it all up in a mortar” (Reveries 60; OC 1: 1063). The pharmacologist’s view of nature is thus partial in both senses of the word—it is biased and incomplete. By limiting his field of study to those common plants which might benefit humankind, the pharmacologist has, in the words of Rousseau, reduced “the vegetal chain to a series of limited links [de chaînons interrompus]” (Botanical Writings: 93; OC 4: 1201). Botany, by contrast, is characterized as the “pure and disinterested contemplation” of the vegetal world (Reveries 61; OC 1: 1065). The botanist is not concerned about whether a plant might be useful to man, but about the plant world in and of itself. As such, the botanist is attentive to the complex system of relations between plant parts and functions that describe the vegetal world. Above all, the botanist is concerned with the integrity of the plant form, its preservation, and the precise observation of its interrelated physical structures: “[The botanist] leaves the plant the moment the doctor takes over, he observes it in its live state, dead he still studies it by anatomy, he dissects and observes it, but as soon as its form is destroyed and ground in a mortar it is no longer anything to him”    The case for botany as an oppositional form of scientific inquiry is made eloquently in Saint-Amand.   Unless otherwise indicated all citations from Rousseau’s botanical writings are from The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 8.

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(Botanical Writings: 251; OC 4: 1250, emphasis added). Rousseau’s insistence on form echoes the opening lines of the Confessions: “I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent [Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple]” (5; OC 1: 5, emphasis added). As we shall see, Rousseau’s autobiography betrays an acute anxiety that his life will not be understood in context, that the complex configuration of parts that comprise the form he gives his life-story will suffer the same fate as the plants at the hands of the pharmacologists. Only through a careful observation of the intricate relations of similarity and difference between the variously arranged episodes in the Confessions, Rousseau insists, will the formative principle unifying his autobiography be legible. Rousseau’s interest in the form of plants reveals a tension that runs throughout his botanical works, one that will help us better understand the apparent contradiction between nature and artifice that structures his autobiographical writing. In his botanical writings Rousseau often speaks enthusiastically about drying and pressing plant samples for his herbarium in such a way as to preserve their “natural” form. In the above example, we saw Rousseau carefully dissecting an already dead plant, whose form was nonetheless preserved. Yet, in other instances, the notion of form presupposes a principle of unity that is destroyed the moment the plant dies, leading Rousseau to insist on observing plants in their natural, living state as a precondition for any true botanical study. The notion of form as living form is stated nowhere more clearly than in the following meditation on the task of the botanist: The botanist studies in plants their tissue, their shape, their organization, their generation, their birth, their growth, their life, and their death. He can also consider them by their color, their taste, their odor, their flavor, by all the rewards they can offer to the senses; but this is only an analogical and secondary study for clarifying and confirming that of forms; to the eyes of the botanist plants are only organic beings, as soon as the vegetal is dead and ceases to vegetate, its parts no longer have the mutual correspondence which enables it to live and makes it a unity, it is no longer within the scope of the botanist, it is a simple substance, matter, a compound, a dead earth, which no longer belongs to the plant realm but to the mineral. (Botanical Writings: 250; OC 4: 1249–50, emphasis added)

In contrast to the aggressive actions of the pharmacologist, Rousseau’s botanist aspires to a non-intrusive mode of investigation that would simply “clarify and confirm” the plants’ forms and the living “mutual correspondence” of their parts. Throughout Rousseau’s writings, botany is described as a gentle skimming of the surface, a casual contemplation and nomenclature of the visible world requiring no violence or aggression. And yet, much like the pharmacologist, the botanist may dissect and study his objects dead, submitting his specimens to razor-sharp analysis. The difference between Rousseau’s salutary botanical science and the deleterious scientific practice of the pharmacologist appears blurred. Recognizing this difficulty, Rousseau insists on a distinction of quality that for him becomes one of kind between

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the two different approaches to nature: “[W]ould I cut, grind up, crush these roses, this Reseda, this Euphrasia in a mortar; I would destroy these elegant branches, this pretty foliage, I would crush the brilliant and delicate tissue of these flowers[?] No, I will contemplate, I will gather, I will uproot, I will divide, I will dissect perhaps, but I will never crush and destroy the fragile beauties I admire with a stupid and brutal hand” (Botanical Writings: 252; OC 4: 1252, emphasis added). The subtle balancing act required to keep botany separate from the denaturing, destructive practices of modern science is nowhere more evident than in the botanical letters addressed to Mme Delessert and her daughter. Guiding them through a meticulous examination of a plant, Rousseau instructs them to remove the calyx “by delicately tearing” it to reveal the corolla, to remove the petal “gently by the bottom by pinching it lightly by the keel” to reveal the stamen, and “to pass a little pin into two small holes … at the base of the stamen” in order to detach it and the anther “intact” from the rest of the flower (Botanical Writings: 139; OC 4: 1162, emphasis added). Each act of dissection is qualified by an adverb that moderates its intrusive quality; each act of taking apart is accompanied by a concern for keeping the plant (or at least its parts) whole. If Rousseau tells Mlle Delessert to “arm yourself” (Botanical Writings: 151; OC 4: 1180) with a magnifying glass, imagines her zealously “plucking a pile of flowers,” and insists that the botanist have “a blade, a pair of pliers, and scissors for cutting” (Botanical Writings: 251; OC 4: 1250), the gentle tone of the letters and the extreme care Rousseau insists the botanist take mitigate against the notion of violence these terms imply. It is in Rousseau’s description of making a herbarium—specifically the act of drying a plant and fixing it on the page—that the idea of a critical difference between Rousseau’s science and that of his contemporaries is put under the greatest pressure: You arrange your plant, taking great care that all its parts, especially the leaves and the flowers are wide open and spread out in the natural position. The somewhat withered plant, but without being too much so, usually lends itself better to the arrangement that one gives it on the paper with the thumb and fingers. But there are rebels which curl up on one side while one is arranging the other. In order to prevent this inconvenience I have weights, large coins. […] My plant usually finds itself almost completely covered with these pieces which hold it in place. After this one places a second white sheet on the first and one presses it with the hand to hold the plant constrained in the position one has given it. […] Your pile of plants and papers thus arranged ought in be put in the press, without which the plants would curl up. (Botanical Writings: 162; OC 4: 1193–4, emphasis added)

The plant is “withered” but “without being too much so”; it is placed in its “natural position,” though it must be “constrained” if it “rebels.” The description of the herbarium raises a number of issues surrounding Rousseau’s botanical project that will resurface in his autobiographical works. The most vexed of these is arguably the complex relationship between nature and artifice: What is the nature of the

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relation between the plant observed out-of-doors and the dead plant pinned in the herbal book? What does it mean to arrange a plant forcefully into its natural position? In the Confessions as well Rousseau is trying to represent, write, and arrange his past (his now dead blossoms) in its “natural position.” Rousseau’s valuation of the living quality of the object contemplated leads his botanical thought away from the static taxonomic systems of classical eighteenth-century natural history and toward a perception of the dynamic and evolving nature of plant forms that would come to dominate later eighteenthand early nineteenth-century botanical literature. Nature once viewed as static and abstract will increasingly be regarded historically—a conceptual shift with important implications for his understanding of human nature in the autobiographical works. The temporalization of nature in Rousseau’s botanical writings is most marked in his definition of the flower in his botanical dictionary. Instead of viewing the flower as a fixed structure consisting in a set number of parts such as the pistil and stamen (most naturalists identified over thirty distinct features of the flower and debated vigorously over which sections were part of the flower proper), Rousseau locates the essence of the flower in its becoming: “I believe that the general deficiency [in defining the flower] arises from having considered the flower too much as an absolute substance, while it is not, it seems to me, but a collective and relative being … According to this idea, the flower seems to me a transitory state of the part of fructification during the fecundation of the germ” (Botanical Writings: 110; OC 4: 1223, emphasis in original). Rousseau then offers the following working definition of the flower: “The flower is a local and temporary part of the plant which precedes the fecundation of the seed, and in or through which it operates” (Botanical Writings: 110; OC 4: 1224, emphasis in original). Significantly, Rousseau says he does not wish to elaborate except to stress the importance of the word “precede” (“I will only say that the word ‘precede’ seems to me essential”) and to clarify what he means by the terms “in or through which” and “during.” All three terms are underlined in the original text. In the Letters on Botany, Rousseau’s genetic approach to nature is integrated into his botanical teaching. In the second letter, for example, he instructs Mme Delessert and her daughter not simply to analyze the wallflower, but to undertake “the history of our plant”: “[We] must wait until the corolla withers and falls […] and observe then what the pistil becomes” (Botanical Writings: 134–5; OC 4: 1157–8, emphasis mine). Similarly, while studying the composite flowers, Rousseau informs them that in order to really know this class, “it is necessary to follow the flowers from before their opening until the full maturity of the fruit, and it is in the succession that one sees metamorphoses and a chain of marvels which holds every healthy mind who observes them in a continual admiration” (Botanical Writings: 155; OC 4: 1185–6, emphasis mine).   This paradigm shift is given apposite expression in Foucault, The Order of Things, and Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte, as we learned in chapter 1.

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Rousseau does not pursue his ideas on metamorphosis in any systematic or sustained fashion. His casual and scattered references to plants as “organic beings,” living bodies “each of whose parts possesses in itself a vitality,” refute purely mechanistic interpretations of natural phenomena and hint at an incipient vitalism. Yet his statements are more a product of his unwillingness to reduce nature to a set of abstract laws than part of a positive program to reconceptualize the field of botany. Rousseau admired and even championed the taxonomic system and nomenclature of Linnaeus for bringing much needed clarity into the study of plants. Yet he recognized, as did Linnaeus, the limits of any given system of classification. These systems, however useful, should be recognized, he felt, as artificial not natural. Rousseau is critical of those naturalists who are genuinely committed to the development of a wholly “natural” system of classification. For Rousseau, nature cannot be identified with reason, nor fully grasped through analysis. Rousseau may proceed with the meticulous exactitude of the taxonomist, carefully noting structural similarities and differences. Yet, even as he links one form to another for the purposes of identification and distinction, he does not systematize his findings into an unchanging, atemporal taxonomic tableau. He is content to name, observe, and compare parts. By keeping his sights fixed on the natural world and his thoughts away from the establishment of an overarching organizational scheme, Rousseau notes that which escapes and is obscured by the static grid of classical natural history, namely the living, growing, and evolving plant form. It is Rousseau’s focus on the observation of plant forms in succession, his elaboration of a diachronous mode of seeing nature, as well as his refusal to reduce nature to a set of abstract laws, which is most immediately illuminating in an analysis of the autobiographical works he pursued simultaneously. What does Rousseau’s particular notion of a temporalized natural world and his distrust of taxonomic systems bring to our understanding of the Confessions? The Confessions as Natural History For many readers, Rousseau’s Confessions is an attempt (however naïve or deluded) to recover and reveal a timeless, natural self that exists independently of history. History is, at best, the necessary form though which a timelessly subsistent inner self is revealed to the reader. As the story of the Confessions marches inexorably forward in time, there is a persistent narrative undertow which pulls narrator and reader back (but not quite back) to a long-lost, ever-receding, unnamable past of happiness and innocence during which the self was once whole. For other readers, on the contrary, the Confessions demonstrates Rousseau’s understanding of the fundamental historicity of the individual, the notion of human life as an ongoing

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process of change. For these readers the Rousseauean self is constituted in and through time and depicted as a dynamic, changing entity. In short, the Confessions is a genetic account of a human personality in which time matters. The process of narration is, accordingly, not simply a tool through which an autarkic self is imperfectly mediated, but part of the complex, changing personality that the reader comes to grasp. Even his yearning to return to an atemporal state must itself be understood as a product of time and history. The historically-minded interpretations of Rousseau range widely from views of individuality as largely a product of social construction to notions of human nature as the result of a continuous and interdependent evolution of both biology and culture. What they all share, though, is the notion that history is the very stuff of individual personality. Rousseau’s botanical writings shed light on the complex relation between history and (human) nature in the Confessions. In Rousseau’s discussion of botany—particularly his descriptions of the developmental character of natural life forms—it is almost as though he were talking about the Confessions. Rousseau’s instructions to Mme Delessert and her daughter to observe the flower as a series of forms changing over time, to follow the plant’s “chain of marvels,” recalls Rousseau’s own description of his autobiographical project: “There is a certain succession of affections and ideas that modify those that follow them and which one must know in order to judge them well. In order to make the chain of effects felt I apply myself above all to developing the first causes” (146; OC 1: 175, emphasis added). Again, in the opening of the seventh book: “I have only one faithful guide upon which I can count; that is the chain of feelings which have 

  For the strongest arguments on the fundamental importance of history in Rousseau’s thought, see Gossman, “Time and History,” and Horowitz. Gossman stresses Rousseau’s “acute awareness of history as the mode of being of all things” (344). Concerning the Confessions he writes, “The very form of the Confessions … cries out the importance for Rousseau of time—of time envisaged not as that which threatens the unity of personality and shakes the stability of being but of time which is the very substance of the personality and in which alone the meaning and form of reality are to be looked for” (315). Similarly for Horowitz, Rousseau’s notion of individuality is a product and a problem of history: “Man in his inception and his essence is conceived to be a self-transforming creature. Human nature for Rousseau is history, is itself created within the historical process” (52). In his helpful summary of Rousseau literature, Horowitz points out that while a number of critics may acknowledge the role of history in Rousseau’s thought, they insert history into an already ahistorical frame of interpretation or theoretical model: history is either turned into an abstract (teleological, rational) category opposed most often to a reified nature or linked to an ahistorical category such as authenticity, morality, freedom, or truth (1–35). Even Gossman, whom Horowitz considers the critic most sensitive to Rousseau as a thoroughly historical thinker, is faulted with failing to realize that Rousseau’s personal “efforts at transcendence are themselves the object of a theoretical scrutiny based upon their historicity” (45 n13).    See Ellenburg for the social constructivist position and Horowitz for the evolutionary.

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marked the succession of my being, and, by means of them, the succession of events which have been their cause or effect” (233–4; OC 1: 278, emphasis added). Similarly, Rousseau’s insistence that the flower is not an “absolute substance” but a transitory and collective being, and that, correspondingly, its essence lies neither in its constituent parts nor in the totality of these parts, but rather in their temporal succession, echoes his own methodology of self-presentation in the Confessions. Rousseau’s decision to present a history of the self mirrors the gradual move away from a classical natural historical picture of the world to a more modern one in which time is a constitutive force.10 It is worth noting that in these passages Rousseau employs a mechanicalEnlightenment trope, that of the “chain,” to describe the development of the individual. In the eighteenth century the figure of the “chain” was frequently used to invoke Newton’s clockwork universe—an intricate, complex, precisely calibrated piece of machinery unaffected by the vicissitudes of time. Natural philosophers also commonly referred to the cosmos as a “Great Chain of Being”—a view of the universe as a fixed and vast hierarchical chain of creatures stretching down from God through man to nothingness. In his famous study of the concept, Lovejoy remarks that for the eighteenth-century mind the “Great Chain of Being” was “the perfect example of an absolutely rigid and static scheme of things”; it denoted “the static completeness, the orderliness, and coherency of reality” (242; 288). Lovejoy goes on to show that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the gradual temporalizing of the “Great Chain of Being”: the idea of the “chain” no longer suggested an immutable hierarchy or a ready-made cosmological order, but rather a changing world made up of a dynamic and interrelated series of forms evolving over time and best expressed in succession (262-3). Rousseau arguably employs the term “chain” in this new genetic sense. Though we do not yet have in these pages of the Confessions a fully organic metaphor or conception of nature and the self, as is so often the case in Rousseau, standard classical or Enlightenment terminology is pressed into the service of ideas that would come to be associated with Romanticism, in this instance the notion of time as constitutive of a reality that is always in the process of becoming. Rousseau’s desire to study the flower by viewing each of its parts in relation to the others as they develop over time, as opposed to analyzing each part separately, parallels his desire to have the various aspects of his life understood in context and as part of an interrelated and evolving whole. The truth of the self cannot be perceived by examining the isolated actions of that self, such as Rousseau’s false incrimination of Marion (Book 1), his exhibitionism (Book 3), his “incestuous” relationship with Mme de Warens (Book 5), or the abandonment of his children (Books 7 and 8), but in the relation of these facts to the unfolding narrative. In The Neuchâtel Preface to the Confessions, Rousseau writes, “In order to know a character well one would have to distinguish the acquired from what is by nature, to see how it was formed, what occasions have developed it, what chain of secret 10

 For a seminal study on the notion on time in Rousseau see Poulet.

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affections have made it the way it is, and how it changes, sometimes in order to produce the most contradictory and most unexpected effects. What shows itself is only the smallest part of what is; it is the apparent effect whose internal cause is hidden and often very complicated” (586; OC 1: 1149). In order to grasp this “hidden and often very complicated” “internal cause,” the reader is asked to follow the “chain of secret affections” that produces the “apparent effect.” In short, Rousseau must be read in context. Although the task of getting at the primary causes that underlie his actions is probably impossible, as Rousseau himself admits, a sense of the complex and contradictory unity of his character can be gained through an awareness of the text’s myriad patterns of development and change. Taxonomies of Desire Nowhere is this mode of reading more encouraged than in Rousseau’s descriptions of his relationships with women. As though to underline the impossibility of understanding these relations in isolation, Rousseau prefaces the account of his ultimately ill-fated love for Mme d’Houdetot—the first and only woman with whom he claims to have fallen in love—with a scene in which all of the previous women he has desired appear before him in his mind’s eye. Inspired by the idyllic landscape of the Hermitage near Montmorency, the author remembers a youthful adventure with two young women—Mlle Galley and Mlle de Graffenried—in a similar setting: I went on to recall the dinner at the Chateau of Toune and my encounter with those two charming girls in the same season and in places very much like the one I was in at that moment. This remembrance, which was made even sweeter by the innocence that was joined with it, recalled others of the same sort to me. Soon I saw all the objects that had given me emotion in my youth assembled around me, Mlle Galley, Mlle de Graffenried, Mlle de Breil, Mme Basile, Mme de Larnage, my pretty students, and all the way to the piquant Zulietta, whom my heart could not forget. (358; OC 1: 426–7)

Humorously describing the scene before him as “a seraglio of Houris from my old acquaintances,” Rousseau brings together through the faculty of his active imagination a group of women related to one another through a network of affective associations (358; OC 1: 427). Textually, this sleight of time is accomplished in the simplest of ways: their names appear one after the other in a list separated only by a comma. But the comma—as innocent as it appears—places a heavy interpretive burden on the reader. There is no explanation given as to what is so similar or different about these scenes. What after all is the connection between women as different as the austere and regal Mme Basile and the “piquant” courtesan Zulietta? Why is his wife Therese, for whom he professes strong affection and respect, left out of the list? And how do we explain the absence of Mme de Warens, arguably the

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most significant woman in his life and the first with whom he had sexual relations? This difficult task Rousseau leaves entirely up to the reader. The attentive reader, like the attentive botanist, is compelled to return to these flowers of Rousseau’s memory to examine their similarities and differences. The reader feels the need to understand the relationship between these scenes all the more keenly, when Rousseau introduces the story of his affair with Mme d’Houdetot a few pages later. The significance of this particular relationship is ominously foreshadowed two books earlier when he briefly describes their first encounter on the eve of her marriage. Rousseau describes himself as having been charmed by her natural character and familiar demeanor, but he then suddenly shifts out of the comfortable and distancing past-tense narration to inform the reader that she will become the future cause of all the misery in which he finds himself today: “I found her very amiable, but I was very far from foreseeing that this young person would one day bring about my life’s destiny, and would sweep me away, although very innocently, into the abyss where I am today” (290-91; OC 1: 346). Nearly fifteen years later, Mme d’Houdetot reappears in Book 9 as a central character where she becomes the first true love of Rousseau’s life and the cause of his greatest misery. In their second encounter, Mme d’Houdetot rides up to visit Rousseau in the Hermitage, masquerading as a man on horseback (a curious detail which itself recalls other relationships and Rousseau’s own penchant for disguising himself): “I was smitten by the romantic air [of this masquerade], and this time it was love. Since it was the first and only one in my whole life and since its consequences will forever make it memorable and terrible in my remembrance, allow me to enter into some detail on this point” (369; OC 1: 439). The idyllic setting which triggers his memory of the other women in his life has now become the site where he will live out his present relationship with Mme d’Houdetot as well as an invitation to the reader to compare and contrast the different affairs of Rousseau’s past and present. Despite Rousseau’s emphasis on the uniqueness of his relationships, it is first and foremost the points of similarity to his affairs with other women that the reader notices. As with most of his amorous liaisons, Rousseau lives the experience with Mme d’Houdetot as though it were a scene out of a novel. He does not initially fall in love with Mme d’Houdetot. Rather, he is “smitten by the romantic air” of the encounter. In an earlier encounter, he flatly states: “This visit had a little of the air of the beginning of a novel” (363; OC 1: 432). Further on, Rousseau conflates her with the character of Julie from The New Heloise that he was writing at the same time: “I saw my Julie in Mme d’Houdetot, and soon I no longer saw anything but Mme d’Houdetot, but invested with all the perfections with which I had just adorned the idol of my heart” (370; OC 1: 440). His first genuine love is an amalgam of the “real” Mme d’Houdetot and the fictional Julie, a creation of his literary imagination and desire. But this is nothing new. During his horseback ride with Mlle de Galley and Mlle de Graffenried, he fashions himself the romantic hero coming to the aid of two damsels in distress as they try to cross the river. When he drops a bunch of cherries into the bosom of Mlle de Galley during their

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outing and fantasizes that his lips are those cherries, Rousseau narrates the scene as a comic send-up of an episode from the literature of romance. Each affair of the heart in the Confessions, however innocent or guilty, is suffused by a romantic pathos gleaned from his formative childhood readings. The similarities between his relationships are infinitely expandable and illuminating. They include small but significant details that reappear in a variety of scenes, such as the image of a young Rousseau lying prostrate before the knees of Mme de Basile, a posture echoed in the episode with Mme d’Houdetot when he lies before her knees proclaiming his undying love, a pattern of behavior traced back to the spankings he received lying in the lap of Mlle de Lambercier. They also include larger structural similarities: Rousseau invariably finds himself a part of a triangular relationship (“a society of three”) in which he is cast as the child to the indomitable father-figure and the sexualized yet unattainable mother-figure as is the case with Mme de Basile, Mme d’Houdetot, and Mme de Warens. Just as revealing are the differences that emerge between Rousseau’s relationships. The reader may well be forgiven for not believing Rousseau when he declares that with Mme d’Houdetot he has fallen in love for the first time. After all, Rousseau describes himself as being in love—in this instance with Mme de Vulson—already in the opening book: “I abandoned myself with all my heart, or rather with all my head; for it was almost only through it that I was in love, even though I was so to the point of madness, and how my outbursts, my agitations, my rages made scenes suited to convulsing anyone with laughter” (23; OC 1: 27, emphasis mine). And Rousseau’s physiological description of being in love— “[M]y head became cloudy, a dizziness blinded me, my trembling knees could not hold me up, I was forced to stop, to sit down; my whole machine was in an inconceivable disorder, I was ready to faint” (374; OC 1: 445)—bears a striking resemblance to his reaction to Mlle Goton early in the Confessions: “I no longer saw anything; all my senses were disrupted […] I believe that if I had stayed with her for too long I would not have been able to live; the palpitations would have stifled me” (24; OC 1: 28). Rousseau describes every one of his love affairs with such enthusiasm, declaring them all to be “without precedent” or “without peer,” that it becomes difficult to take his statements at face-value. His hyperbolic declarations have a distancing effect: the reader becomes skeptical and attention is drawn instead to the many similarities between his liaisons. Yet each relationship is unique by virtue of the simple fact that it is not the same relationship—whatever commonalities we may observe. It is in this spirit that we can read the opening lines of the Confessions where Rousseau boldly claims that his undertaking has “no precedent” and will have “no imitator” (5; OC 1: 5). Often taken as signs of an egotistical and fanatically self-aggrandizing personality, they can better be read as the simple yet radical assertion of every person’s uniqueness or individuality. Despite the many similarities between his relationships, Rousseau takes great care to delineate as precisely as possible the different forms of “love” he experiences with each woman, creating in effect a

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rich taxonomy of desire. Describing his feelings for Mme de Warens, Rousseau’s language is at once precise and delicate: I will dare to say it; whoever feels only love does not feel what is sweetest in life. I am acquainted with another feeling, less impetuous perhaps, but a thousand times more delightful, which sometimes is joined to love and which is often separate from it. This feeling is not friendship alone either; it is more voluptuous, more tender; I do not imagine that it can take effect for someone of the same sex; at least I have been a friend, if ever a man has been, and I have never experienced it with any of my male friends. (87–8; OC 1: 104)

Rousseau describes his feelings for the voluptuous Mme de Larnage with the same exactitude: If what I felt for her was not precisely love, it was at least such a tender return for the love she showed me, it was a sensuality so burning in pleasure and an intimacy so sweet in conversations, that it had all the charm of passion without having its delirium which turns the head and causes one not to know how to enjoy. (212; OC 1: 253)

Most of the space Rousseau devotes to describing his love affairs is given over to this kind of analytical yet sensitive language that recalls his loving and careful descriptions of the different flowers in his botanical writings.11 To understand Rousseau’s relationship with Mme d’Houdetot and, by extension, to understand Rousseau himself requires the reader to view his affair at once contextually, that is, in relation to his other loves, and, at the same time, purely on its own terms, as a unique and unrepeatable affair of the heart. Classifying the Self If Rousseau’s botanical mode of observation reflects his own approach to exploring and understanding the self, the method of the pharmacologist—the negative other of the botanist—serves as a telling counter-example. “I am an observer not a moralist. I am the botanist who describes the plant. It is up to the doctor to determine its 11

 Rousseau’s descriptions should be differentiated from those found in the libertine novels so popular during the Enlightenment such as Crébillon fils’s Les Egarements du cœur et de l’esprit or Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses. In the libertine novels, reason is cynically employed in an effort to master the rules of seduction and the workings of the heart. What passes as “love” can always be understood and hence manipulated through reason. With Rousseau, by contrast, reason lays no claim to understanding or mastering the emotions. Reason or analysis is but one mode of describing the unfathomable intricacies of the heart.

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utility” (OC 1: 1120, my translation). Rousseau’s description—interesting alone in that it explicitly links the autobiographical and botanical—appears to draw a clear distinction, even an opposition, between his task as autobiographer and that of his interpreters. Rousseau will observe himself and record the facts of his (inner) life impartially, while the reader will interpret these facts to determine the subject’s moral worth and usefulness, much like the pharmacologist who analyzes the virtues of the plant. Rousseau’s fantastical image of the autobiographer as auto-botanizing plant playfully points to the difficulty of studying oneself objectively, that is, of obtaining an impartial reflexive knowledge of one’s own subjective being. Yet, it is Rousseau’s analogy of the reader to the doctor that bears most careful consideration. Rousseau’s disdain for doctors is legendary; and his critique of the pharmacologist is, as we have seen, unequivocal. Rousseau’s statement, if not intended ironically, testifies at the very least to his ambivalence about being judged according to a universal code of morality. It is precisely not—or not merely—as an object of the moralist qua doctor that the Confessions asks us to consider the character of Rousseau. True, in the work’s opening paragraph, Rousseau justifies his project through an assertion of its social and moral utility. He offers the story of his life as evidence of the natural goodness of man. In this way, the Confessions can be said to serve a moral and practical purpose. At the same time, the Confessions is in large part inspired by the desire to counter the more limited and distorting view of the conventional moralist, who judges actions and effects without considering their deeper causes. The Confessions, in its sheer complexity and unruliness, defies any interpretation that would reduce Rousseau’s life to a set of abstract moral principles. The reader-as-pharmacologist, concerned above all with the worth or utility of Rousseau’s character, is consequently blind to the complexity of that character. The “chain of marvels” is reduced to a series of “limited links,” if not just a collection of abstract, unrelated qualities and contradictory assertions. Rousseau’s refusal to reduce his actions to any single explanatory system is reflected in the conspicuous absence of any universalizing theories of plant growth or development in his botanical writings. Rousseau was well versed in epigenesis and preformation—the two major forerunners of modern evolutionary thought— yet his focus remained on the intricate patterns of similarity and difference in the vegetal world. He saw these patterns by viewing plants successively or by observing a single plant in the process of growth. The particularly historical character of the Confessions, it seems to me, lies not with any single narrative model of development but in the endless lines of correspondence and difference that can be traced from one episode to another. True, any complex text can be said to escape the logic of a given narrative or explanatory system. The Confessions, however, explicitly thwarts readings that would circumscribe it according to a system of causality with any strict predictive or determinative value. Accidents, both trivial and consequential, play a key role in the unfolding of the narrative. Just as man’s remove from the hypothesized state of nature in the First Discourse is attributed to an unknown accidental cause, Rousseau’s revolution in thought, his intellectual conversion in Book 8,

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is traced to the chance reading of the question posed by the Academie de Dijon in the Mercure de France on his way to visit Diderot in prison: “All the rest of my life and misfortunes was the inevitable effect of that instant of aberration” (295; OC 1: 351). His thought is not presented in the first instance as a necessary consequence or product of previous intellectual development, but as a “sudden inspiration” (575; OC 1: 1135). Similarly, at the end of the first book, Rousseau imagines an entirely different course his life might have taken—one of peaceful obscurity and simplicity—had he not had the bad fortune of being apprenticed to M. Ducommun. In other instances, Rousseau presents his actions as inexplicable and entirely out of character, as is the case when he impulsively steals money from M. de Francueil (33; OC 1: 39). Rousseau speaks often of the “aberrations,” “strangeness,” and “inconsistency,” of his character and stresses the apparently contradictory logic of many of his actions with phrases such as “Who would believe?”, “If one thought that […] one would be mistaken,” “If one were to predict that […] one would be wrong” (Confessions 18, 19). As Christopher Kelly notes in a comparison of the notion of development in the Confessions to that of Hegel: “The process Hegel promises to reveal is a gradual development, a systematic movement from stage to stage. The process of Jean Jacques’ life is an alternation between one passion and another, with a more fitful development of these passions” (46). The foregrounding of chance, it is important to stress, does not authorize a reading of events as random in nature, of a life whose meaning is determined by accident. Writing on the development of language in the Essay on the Origins of Language, Rousseau specifies: “This progress is not fortuitous or arbitrary, it is linked to the vicissitude of things” (198; OC 5: 383). The fact of progress need not lead to a determination of a life governed by design. Language, he goes on to say, changes according to humankind’s needs, while those needs are changed by the development of language. It is this unpredictable interaction, which Rousseau terms “the vicissitude of things” that governs the narrative logic of the Confessions. The dynamic and ultimately indeterminative relation between a changing world and Rousseau’s intricate personality is the subject of the Confessions: “While going back this way to the first traces of my sensitive being, I find elements which, although they sometimes seem incompatible, have not failed to unite forcefully to produce a uniform and simple effect, and I find others, in appearance the same, which through the concurrence of certain circumstances have formed such different combinations that one would never imagine there was any relation between them” (16; OC 1: 18). Critics have read the Confessions in relation to a number of narrative models: the Biblical story of the Fall (Raymond, Launey); the Ovidean myth of the Four Ages (Lejeune); and Rousseau’s own historical anthropology as formulated both the Second Discourse and Emile (Lejeune, Kelly). Each of these narratives seems to me curiously inoperative when read against the Confessions. Certainly, parallels can be found that are often illuminating. Yet, the text does not ask to be read according to these external models and even discourages readers from doing so. The task of the reader as formulated in the Confessions is at once more

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straightforward and more difficult. Like the naturalist, who attentively observes the smallest details of plant forms seeking points of similarity and difference in order to arrive at a larger understanding of the plant system as a whole, the reader of the Confessions is asked to relate and differentiate the successive forms of Rousseau’s internal life by attending to the minutest details that the text reveals. Thus, Rousseau’s recollection of the fly that gently rests on his hand while he recites a lesson in Bossey in the first book the Confessions invites comparison with the fly “always in movement” that he follows “in all its flying about” at the Island of St. Pierre in the work’s closing pages (537), as does, on a different level, the story of his rescue from death by his aunt while an infant in Book 1 with his rescue later in life by Mme de Warens in Book 4. “A rough but palpable example,” Rousseau writes referring to the conspiracy against him and his attempt to get at its source, “of the importance of the slightest details in the exposition of facts whose secret causes one seeks, in order to discover them by means of induction” (492; OC 1: 588). Rousseau’s attention to detail in the Confessions is often read in relation to a desire to return through language and memory to an idealized past: by lingering over the minutiae of everyday life he recaptures past moments of happiness. One thinks, for instance, of the description of the Lambercier home in Bossey from which the earlier example of the fly is taken: I see the maid or the valet working in the room, a swallow coming in the window, a fly alighting on my hand, while I was reciting my lesson: I see the whole arrangement of the room in which we were; M. Lambercier’s study on the right, an engraving representing all the popes, a barometer, a big calendar, raspberry bushes which, from a very elevated garden into which the house sank toward the back, shaded the window, and sometimes came inside. (18; OC 1: 21)

The use of the present tense (“I see […] I see”) marks the passage off from the surrounding past-tense narrative making the scene more immediate, while the listing of details slows down the forward movement of the story prolonging the happy memory. Rousseau’s attention to detail need not, however, be seen exclusively in terms of a yearning to recover a lost past. The botanist’s exquisite attention to detail, his concern for the empirical particulars of plant forms is directed by a positive desire to explore and discover the natural world. In the same way, we can see Rousseau’s recollection of the particulars of his life—from the pleasurable memories of Bossey to the anguished recording of his growing sense of isolation—as part of an ongoing effort to understand the self. The task of Rousseau the autobiographer is not only one of recuperation but also of neverending self-exploration and self-discovery through writing. The temporalization of nature is especially important because nature is so often seen as the timeless refuge of the solitary. Rousseau’s positive description of botany on the idyllic Island of St. Pierre challenges these primitivist and transcendental interpretations and shows Rousseau’s engagement with nature to be part of an effort

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to realize a state of joyful existence within this world. Rousseau’s renunciation of a naïvely sentimental relation to nature is evident in his dismissal of those who “have only a stupid and monotonous admiration at the sight of all these treasures of nature” (537; OC 1: 641). The treasures of nature are not accessible to modern humans through mindless and effortless gaping, but rather through an informed type of looking, one mediated by the powers of the intellect. Nature, however, is not thereby reduced to Reason, to an abstract grammar of forms. The awareness of the complex organization of the plant that constitutes the structural relations between the thousands of plant forms overwhelms the mind of the viewer and leads to an experience of marvel unavailable to the ignorant: “Their organization carries away only those who already have some idea of the vegetal system” (537; OC 1: 641). It would be wrong to see the intellect as a means of achieving a fusion of self and world, an escape into a totality that history cannot by definition provide, or as a return through aesthetics to a non-differentiated state of perfect identity with nature akin to that of “l’homme sauvage.” This is clear from the similarity between Rousseau’s critique of the ignorant, uneducated observer above and his negative description of “l’homme sauvage” in the Second Discourse: “All Knowledge that requires reflection, all knowledge acquired only by the linking of ideas and perfected only successively, seem to be altogether beyond the reach of Savage man for want of communication with his fellows” (194; OC 3: 199). Botanizing places Rousseau in a happy state within history that balances knowing and feeling while keeping both faculties distinct and simultaneously present: “I was […] at that point of knowing little enough about it so that everything was new to me and enough so that I was able to feel everything” (537; OC 1: 641). Nature, on the Island of St. Pierre, is the subject of an intelligence which views its contents serially, over time. By historicizing nature in this way, Rousseau regards nature not as a retreat into a state of timelessness, but as a site where he can observe the endlessly changing relations and combinations created in the world. In the act of comparison, the botanist is transported outside himself in a moment of wonder in which he identifies with the natural world around him.12 The Confessions is predicated on a similar notion of comparison. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau describes the process which leads from comparison through identification to self-knowledge. The similarity to the botanical process is unmistakable; one need only substitute “plant” for “idea” to have almost identical statements: “Reflection is born of compared ideas, and it is the multiplicity of ideas that leads to their comparison. He who sees only a single object has no comparison to make […] as a new object strikes us, we want to know it, we look for relations between it and those we do know; it is in this way that we learn to consider what is before our eyes, and how what is foreign to us leads us to examine what touches us” (306; OC 5: 92). Primitive man is denied the ability to know himself because he is unable to see outside himself: “Never having seen anything 12  For an illuminating essay on the nature of comparison during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods see Brodsky Lacour.

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but what was around them, [the first men] did not even know that; they did not know themselves.” It is only “by transporting ourselves outside of ourselves; by identifying ourselves with the suffering being,” in other words, through pity, that modern man can know himself (307; OC 5: 93, 92). Rousseau differentiates this positive mode of comparison from its negative form in which humans, motivated by the negative passions, judge others according to their relative worth and only for their own benefit. We may read the Confessions according to a similar logic. In the Confessions, the intricate system of analogies and differences, the multiple threads of cause and effect the reader is asked to follow, produces a sense of wonder akin to that of the naturalist before nature. Imperceptibly overcome by the complex organization of the character of Jean-Jacques, the reader momentarily abandons amour-propre, is transported outside of himself, recognizes the “me” of the text as himself, in short, discovers the self in the other or, more precisely, the self as the other. Rousseau describes the moment of self-recognition—the ultimate goal of the Confessions—as dependent upon an initial recognition of another with whom the self is compared: I have resolved to cause my readers to make an additional step in the knowledge of man by pulling them away, if possible, from that unique and faulty rule of always judging someone else’s heart by means of their own; whereas on the contrary, even to know one’s own it would often be necessary to begin by reading someone else’s. In order for one to learn to evaluate oneself, I want to attempt to provide at least one item for comparison, so that each can know himself and one other, and this other will be myself. (585: OC 1: 1149)

Comparison, the cornerstone of botany, becomes the means to self-knowledge. Of Rousseau’s autobiographical works, it is of course the Reveries and not the Confessions that are the most deeply saturated with a consciousness of botany. Structurally, thematically, even stylistically the Reveries are informed by his pastime. What does its increased role in the final years of his life and in his final autobiography tell us about his developing understanding of the private and social self? Is his deepening involvement in the world of plants a sign of a general retreat from the world of man, or, as the following chapter will argue, a strategy of engagement, a method of continuing his reflections on the nature of the social and historical individual? It is to these questions that we now turn in our reading of the Reveries.

Chapter 3

Reveries and the “Re-enchantment” of the World

I am crazy for botany—it just gets worse every day. I have nothing but hay in my head, I am going to become a plant myself one of these mornings, and I am already taking root in Motiers.—Rousseau to d’Ivernois, 1 August, 1765

The Reveries are generally read as the farewell text of a disillusioned and dejected thinker who has taken leave of the world to live in solitude. In many ways, the Reveries are regarded as the mark of Rousseau’s failure to communicate his true self to his readers and to society at large in the Confessions and later in the Dialogues. Indeed, to read the Reveries as vitally engaged with the social and political world is to read Rousseau’s final autobiography against its own explicit and repeated declarations to the contrary. In the opening sentence of the work Rousseau announces his condition of absolute detachment from the human world: “I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself” (Reveries 3; OC 1: 995). Despite his self-described, naturally social disposition, he has, in his own eyes, been cruelly “proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement” of his enemies (3; OC 1: 995). Resigned to his position as social outcast, Rousseau sets out to answer the chief question that will animate the Reveries: “[D]etached from them and from everything, what am I?” (3; OC 1: 995). His solitary condition is here and throughout the Reveries   The critical literature on the Reveries as an escape from his historical thinking is vast. Of particular note and influence in this regard is Starobinski and, in the Englishspeaking world, Cranston, The Noble Savage (1991) and The Solitary Self (1997). Barguillet offers another good example for French readers of the escapist approach to the Reveries supported by close textual analysis. For English readers, see Barbour and Davis. Barbour places Rousseau within a long tradition of solitary thinkers which includes Thoreau, while Davis provides a solid, philosophically-minded close reading of the Reveries as exilic fiction. The opening sentence of the fifth chapter in Davis is emblematic of this critical position: “The Reveries of the Solitary Walker is Rousseau’s autobiographical account of his exile from civilization to a life of solitude and of the unexpected contentment that results from this exile, a contentment elsewhere characterizing only man in the state of nature” (89). In fairness, the complex dialectic between solitude and society put forward in the Reveries is recognized in Davis. The analysis always returns, however, to a belief in the Reveries as a work of a thinker disengaged from the historical world. O’Neal, The Nature of Rousseau’s Rêveries: Physical, Human, Aesthetic (2008) promises a more historically-minded reading. 

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recast as a form of liberation from the world of convention and artifice that will enable him to obtain in peace a truer knowledge of himself. Yet, no sooner does he announce his quest to understand himself “detached from them” does he concede the necessity of first going through “them” to understand himself: “Unfortunately, that inquiry must be preceded by a glance at my position. This is an idea I must necessarily follow out in order to get from them to me” (3; OC 1: 995). Far from bracketing off the social world, Rousseau has in the very first paragraph of his “solitary” work reasserted the dynamic interplay between the individual and the social that animates his entire corpus. Much like the Reveries, Rousseau’s botanizing is regarded as the innocent pastime of the solitary individual. Yet, the study of plants in Rousseau’s day was above all a social enterprise. Rousseau most often ventured into nature with a guide, a companion, or a small group of fellow nature enthusiasts; he frequently took the lead in organizing group excursions whose participants included a mixture of close friends, casual acquaintances, celebrated naturalists, and local inhabitants. Rousseau’s botanical activity also led to an extensive correspondence with recipients including Linnaeus, the most celebrated naturalist of his day; the Duchess of Portland, who owned the largest and arguably most important botanical collection in England, rivaling that of the British Museum; Malherbes, a major government ally of the philosophes; and Mme Delessert, to whom the “Elementary Letters on Botany” are addressed. Rousseau regularly exchanged botanical books and herbaria with a vast network of acquaintances spanning mainland Europe and England who shared his fascination of plants. Far from isolating Rousseau from the world, botany brings him into closer contact with a wide-ranging group of individuals. In this way, botany points to a desire to fashion an alternative social community, existing apart from the civil society Rousseau roundly condemns, and whose members are united by a shared passion—the disinterested and genuine love of nature. The world of botany is a reflection of the ideal type of human association Rousseau envisages in his other works. Botany emerges as a key method of “re-attaching” the solitary thinker of the Reveries to the world from which he has been proscribed, enabling him to meditate further upon the complex dynamic between the self and society. In a reversal of Max Weber’s famous declaration that science has led to a generalized “disenchantment of the world,” botany serves to “re-enchant” Rousseau with a world he had thoroughly abandoned. As Rousseau meticulously observes and describes the plant forms before him he is overcome by a sense of wonder and delight. As we shall see, botanical language, in all its strangeness and unfamiliarity, acquires an incantatory power that mesmerizes Rousseau and allows him to 

  In the first group belong figures such as Abraham de Pury, Pierre Du Peyrou, Rousseau’s chief literary executor, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; in the second, Count D’Escherney and Charles Zinzendorf; and in the third, Abraham Gagnebin, Jean-Antoine D’Ivernois, and Bernard de Jussieu, botanist at the Jardin du Roi and developer of one of the most influential systems of botanical nomenclature in Rousseau’s time.

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recapture the magical qualities of the world that everyday discourse had concealed. Etymologically, the verb “to enchant” means to “sing upon” from the Latin incantere. At their best the Reveries combine the language of feeling and sensation with the language of botany to produce a new song that charms and delights both reader and writer as it seamlessly merges poetry and science and communicates an increasingly organic, holistic view of the self and the world. Looking first at the Reveries’ description of itself as a botanical text and then at the botanical texts as linguistic experiments that avoid the divisive and alienating discourses of contemporary society that separate the self from the other, the intellectual from the sensuous, and the sciences from the arts, we are in a position to consider in a new light the celebrated descriptions of nature in the Fifth and Seventh Walks as part of a larger effort in Rousseau’s final years not to escape history but to imagine and to communicate in a new language that combines the scientific and the poetic the possibility of a less alienating and fragmented future for the individual and for humankind. Barometers, Opticons, and Herbaria In the Reveries botany is portrayed, above all, as a joyful pursuit free from the anxiety that plagues Rousseau and modern man. The botanist walks through nature in a casually unsystematic and haphazard fashion, guided, it would seem, only by pleasure: “I would spend my afternoon wandering over the Island searching right and left for plants, sometimes sitting down in the most cheerful and solitary nook to dream at my ease and sometimes on terraces and knolls to let my eyes wander over the superb and breathtaking view of the lake and its shores” (Reveries 44-5; OC 1: 1044–5). The verb “to wander [errer]” occurring here twice, is frequently used to describe the activity of the botanist: “[The botanist] walks about, wanders freely from one object to another” (64; OC 1: 1069). The Reveries are presented in similar terms. Much like the carefree rambling of the botanist, Rousseau sets out to wander freely from one memory or “état d’âme” to the next: “I will say what I have thought just as it came to me and with as little connection as the ideas of the day before ordinarily have with those of the following day”; “I leave my head entirely free and let my ideas follow their bent without resistance or constraint” (7; 9; OC 1: 1000, 1002). Rousseau attributes this discursive freedom to the “profound indifference” he has for the opinion of others: “I write my Reveries only for myself” (8; OC 1: 1001). The Reveries are not, however, without form. They are not the “shapeless diaries” Rousseau at times describes (7; OC 1: 999). Similarly, Rousseau’s botanist does not just amble about aimlessly, but regularly stops to examine in detail the complex objects that capture his attention. Each walk, taken on its own, is a carefully organized and composed set-piece, but on subjects, that as Rousseau would have it, just happen to cross his mind. Much of the Reveries consists of intricately structured arguments defending the author’s project, his

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life, and his retreat from society, and includes meditations on issues central to his thinking, such as the relation between truth and fiction (Fourth Walk); duty and inclination (Sixth Walk); and being and appearance (Eighth Walk). At the same time, these walks are not related to one another in any logical narrative order; there is no story being told in the traditional sense of the term. The ten walks embody this mixed quality, resembling the modern essay in its coupling of rigorous argumentation with a loose organizational principle governed by a more personal, idiosyncratic perspective. In some respects Rousseau’s description of the writer-botanist, with his professed self-sufficiency, good nature, and dilatory writing and herborizing style reminds one of the attributes of “l’homme sauvage,” who, governed only by desire, “wandered in the forest without industry … without any need of others of his kind and without desire to harm them” (First Discourse 157; OC 3: 159–60). Of course, primitive man, unlike the writer-botanist, is incapable of thoughts and ideas (however fleeting) or feelings of joy and pleasure (whether aesthetic or physical). In other respects, the writer-botanist, with his fascination with differentiation, classification, structure, and form, recalls to mind the qualities of modern man, especially that of the scientist. Viewed in this light, the Reveries are a highly-charged amalgam of the features characterizing primitive man and modern man. It is as though Rousseau no longer sees these differing states as mutually exclusive or even as antagonistic. Rousseau’s work in the Reveries is to bring together, through writing, what, according to his own earlier historical anthropology, cannot be brought together: a pre-social, pre-historical state of being with the social and historical condition of modern man. The Reveries’ appeal lies in its mixing of modes of being that he (and we) have elsewhere kept separate. The Reveries’ insistence on its status as a work of nature and its rejection of the world of books, even when it is itself a book, nicely highlights his attempt to undermine the simple separation of nature and society and of primitive man and civilized man, as he searches for a better future situation for humankind. Rousseau’s work studiously avoids conventional forms of composition. The Reveries consist of “leaves [feuilles]” not “pages”; there are “walks [promenades]” instead of “chapters.” There is no clear beginning or end: the first sentence points to a previous sentence and the last walk remains incomplete. The familiar points of reference—book, reader, author—are eschewed, just as the “depressing papers” and “the heap of old books” remain packed away while Rousseau fills his study with flowers and plants (43; OC 1:1044). The Reveries are to be a work of nature, not of art or artifice. Yet, Rousseau rarely goes into nature without a satchel of books, a writing implement, and paper for taking notes or sketching the carefullyinspected flowers encountered on his walks. The botanical expeditions and projects are undertaken with a rigor Rousseau disingenuously denies to the Reveries in the name of pleasure. If the Reveries are a work of nature, it is of a nature carefully examined and explored by a mind judiciously employing the faculties of reason and understanding. The curious figure cut by Rousseau as a writer filling his study with flowers and plants and as an amateur naturalist exploring nature with all the

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accoutrements of the writer unsettles the opposition between nature and artifice. In so doing, Rousseau forecloses the possibility of interpreting the Reveries as the idle daydreams of a solitary figure who simply longs for a return to a pre-social, pre-historical, wholly natural state of being. The rejection of systematic thought in the Reveries, one should note, does not usher in its opposite. It leads, instead, to a different type of presentation, one that registers the subtle variations in thought and sensation and suggests a genetic account of the individual: “Such a unique situation surely deserves to be examined and described … To do so successfully, it would be necessary to proceed with order and method; but I am incapable of such work, and it would even take me away from my goal, which is to make myself aware of the modifications of my soul and of their sequence” (7; OC 1: 1001). In order to examine and describe his condition Rousseau refuses order and method—passwords for the abstract and analytic Cartesian approach—in favor of a more fluid and descriptive style. Rousseau compares his approach to that of a scientist taking daily measurements of the changing atmospheric conditions. “I will apply the barometer to my soul, and these measurements, carefully executed and repeated over a long period of time, may furnish me results as certain as theirs” (7; OC 1: 1001). The analogy to the barometer is telling. The barometer is a piece of technology used to describe and record shifting weather patterns. Though the meteorologist presupposes a set of basic laws governing the weather, the interaction of these laws is assumed to be beyond the scope of any particular explanatory system. Instead, the meteorologist proceeds inductively, recording patterns of similarity and difference, in order to arrive at a more general model of the weather’s behavior. The same might be said of the operation of the autobiographical subject in relation to itself as object of knowledge. Yet even this course is not fully embraced by Rousseau. No sooner is the analogy made, than he qualifies his comparison, believing the method of the meteorologist to be too reductive and too systematic: “But I do not extend my enterprise that far. I will be content to keep a record of the measurements without seeking to reduce them to a system” (8; OC 1: 1001). The tug-of-war between a mode of writing that simply and faithfully records the variety and complexity of the natural world and one that seeks to order, identify, and name what is observed is similar to the tension so evident in Rousseau’s interest in botany. At the same time that Rousseau accepts, even enjoys, the sense of order and fixity that the taxonomic systems provide and the patterns they reveal, he resists them as being too static, inflexible, and reductive to capture the dynamic and singular quality of the objects under inspection. This tension is most apparent in the implicit comparison drawn between the herbaria and autobiographical writing in the Reveries. Reflecting on the usefulness of his writings, Rousseau offers the following description of the Reveries: If in my later days as the moment of departure approaches, I continue—as I hope—to have the same disposition as I now have, reading them will recall the delight I enjoy in writing them and causing the past to be born again for me will,

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so to speak, double my existence. In spite of mankind, I will still be able to enjoy the charm of society; and decrepit, I will live with myself in another age as if I were living with a younger friend. (9; OC 1: 1001)

Rousseau describes the function of the herbarium in almost identical terms: All of my botanical jaunts, the diverse impression of the place in which the objects which struck me were located, the ideas that place brought forth in me, the incidents which were mingled with it, all of that has left me with impressions which are renewed by seeing the plants I had looked for in those very places … [N]ow that I can no longer roam about those happy regions, I have only to open my herbarium, and it soon transports me there. The fragments of the plants I collected there suffice to remind me of that whole magnificent spectacle. This herbarium is for me a diary of plant excursions which permits me to begin them again with a renewed pleasure and produces the effect of an opticon which paints them anew before my eyes. (67; OC 1: 1073)

The dried words on the page and the dried specimens in the herbarium recall to Rousseau’s mind past moments of his life. Artfully arranged, both “texts” have been said to function as “mnemonic signs” (Starobinski 280). But what exactly do these signs serve to recollect? The reading of the Reveries recalls “the delight I enjoy in writing them” (8; OC 1, 1001; emphasis added). Far from evoking a previous state of idealized immediacy, the very composed and carefully arranged Reveries recall to Rousseau the pleasure he takes in composing and arranging his life. In a similar fashion, the botanical text transports Rousseau back to the joys of herborization (it is “a diary of plant excursions”) and not to a state of idyllic communion with nature. In this way, the texts are not mnemonic counters for an experience wholly external to an already recollecting and representing consciousness and outside of history. On the contrary, flipping through the pages of the Reveries and those of his herbaria recall to Rousseau a moment that was itself carefully and meticulously composed. In a revealing analogy, Rousseau compares the effect the herbarium produces to that of an optique, a popular eighteenth-century optical device, which consisted of a box with an adjustable mirror and a magnifying lens through which one looked   For an illuminating discussion on the paradox in the Reveries of narrating moments of total self-sufficiency and perfect happiness that by their very essence would seem to lie beyond language see Hans-Jost Frey, 145–58. I thank Professor Stanley Corngold for this reference.    For reasons given below (note 5) there is no translation of “optique” into English. Translators have generally opted for the vague term “optical device.” In an effort to designate more specifically the instrument indicated in the text, the recent University Press of New England scholarly edition uses the word “opticon”, deriving it from the actual word “stereopticon.” To avoid confusion, I have simply retained the French term throughout. 

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at a print inserted into the side of the instrument. An early form of the stereoscope, it enabled one to view an object from multiple perspectives. While the stereoscope eventually allowed a single image to be given the impression of solidity (by viewing an object from two slightly different points of view corresponding to the positions of the two eyes), the optique was thought to allow the viewer to gain an enhanced perception of the full reality of the object by presenting that object from multiple viewpoints. These serial images would presumably resolve themselves into a sense of an integrated whole in the mind of the viewer. The parallel to the herbarium, in which each page contains a particular plant carefully arranged in different perspectives and whose pages taken together show the formal relations existing between different plant species, and the parallel to the Reveries, in which each walk presents the distinct but interrelated forms of an individual consciousness, is unmistakable. In all three cases—that of the optique, the herbarium, and the Reveries—a sense of wonder and joy is achieved through the representation of a previous representation, whether this be the re-reading of the Reveries, the perusal of the herbarium, or the viewing of a plate through an optique. The paradoxical lesson all three examples point to is the difficult notion that the true nature of the objects under investigation can be better perceived through this process of double representation than in their supposedly original, natural state. The old Enlightenment opposition of nature and artifice is undermined and a more complicated sense of their interrelationship is put forward. The comparison of the optique, the herbarium, and the Reveries recalls a key argument made in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, which in turn sheds light on the genetic underpinning and social dimension of Rousseau’s autobiographical project. Rousseau opens the Essay demonstrating the superiority of the visible signs and gestures employed by the ancient civilizations to the speech and words of contemporary civil society. Summing up his argument, Rousseau remarks: “[O]ne speaks much better to the eyes than to the ears” (249; OC 3: 377). Rousseau then proceeds to qualify his argument in a way that complicates, if not reverses, his earlier assertion: “However when it is a question of moving the  The Grand Larousse de la langue française gives the following eighteenth-century definition of “optique”: “Boîte dans laquelle on regardait, à travers une lentille grossissante des estampes redressés par un miroir incliné.” For an understanding of the functioning of the “optique” the Encyclopédie is invaluable. See in particular the figures contained in Planches I–VI for “Optique” listed under the general category “Mathématiques.” Since optical technology was progressing rapidly in Rousseau’s time, we cannot be sure exactly what type of instrument Rousseau was using. We only know that his device was superseded by the stereoscope invented around 1850. There were, however, numerous earlier permutations of the stereoscope. The rapid obsolescence of Rousseau’s device is indicated by the uncertainty by which it has been translated and the more general connotations that the word “optique” retains in the French. My understanding of the “optique” was aided by the kind assistance of Professor Charles Gillispie.    The definition of “stereoscope” is adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. 

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heart and inflaming the passions, it is an entirely different matter. The successive impression made by discourse, striking with cumulative impact, succeeds in arousing in you a different emotion than does the presence of the object itself which you take in all at one glance” (250; OC 3: 377). Gestures, he goes on to argue, are sufficient for creatures that only convey physical needs, while words are required to convey feelings and passions which even the “presence of the object” cannot arouse. According to Rousseau’s historical anthropology, it is first through the expression of feeling that the human being is born: “Here [around the well] the first festivals took place; feet skipped with joy, an eager gesture no longer proved adequate, the voice accompanied it with passionate accents, pleasure and desire merged into one and made themselves felt together. Here, finally, was the true cradle of the peoples, and from the pure crystal of the fountains sprang the fires of love” (277–8; OC 3: 406). The modern human being, however, has gradually (and inevitably) replaced the passionate speech of the Golden Age with an abstract, analytic form of language that, while clear, concise, and efficient, is “frigid and monotonous” and no longer speaks to or for the heart of the human being (265; OC 3: 392). By implicitly comparing the effect of the poetic prose of the Reveries, the optique, and the herbarium to the first human language, Rousseau signals a desire to speak outside of or beyond the alienating language of contemporary society. Yet, by using products of modern science (the optique and the herbarium) to make his comparison, Rousseau also signals an equally keen desire not to return nostalgically to a hypothesized original language whose reality is, as Rousseau himself admits, only heuristic. Instead, the language of the Reveries, as we shall see, is a language of feeling and reason, analysis and synthesis, form and formlessness, science and poetry. It is, in short, a modern language written for modern man (or future man) that counters the alienating, merely instrumental, utilitarian speech that for Rousseau threatens our humanity and has turned conventional language into empty gesture. Linguistic Experiments In one of his earliest reflections on autobiographical writing, Rousseau states, “For what I have to say it would be necessary to invent a language as new as my project” (The Neuchatel Preface in Confessions 589; OC 1: 1153). Rousseau’s project, he goes on to explain, will be to communicate to the reader the truth of his individuality undistorted by the lies and false accusations leveled against him by his enemies. The challenge for Rousseau lies in his conviction that this “truth” is not to be revealed in his external actions but in the internal movements   Here again we encounter the trope of “succession,” recalling those instances in the Confessions analyzed in the previous chapter, where Rousseau puts forward a genetic account of human identity.

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of his soul. This affective truth cannot, he believes, find its proper expression in the language of exteriority and appearance employed by contemporary civilized society. Of course, Rousseau cannot just simply invent a new language ex nihilo. It is Rousseau, after all, who feels most keenly the dynamic relation between human nature and language: language is transformed by the evolving needs of human nature, while, at the same time, human nature is transformed by the evolving forms of language. The two historical processes are intimately and irremediably intertwined. Insofar as Rousseau views himself as a spokesperson for an alternative vision of the world and as an exemplar of a better human nature, his autobiographical writings can be seen not merely as works of self-revelation but of personal and political transformation. To invent a new language is, for Rousseau, a potentially revolutionary act; the autobiographies are in essence high-stakes linguistic experiments aimed at the formation of a more virtuous citizenry; and perhaps no work is more experimental than the Reveries, a work often cited as one of the touchstones of the literary age of Romanticism. A strikingly similar concern for language unites Rousseau’s botanical works. As he writes in the introductory section for his botanical dictionary, the main impetus behind his botanical writings is “to create … a new language for Botany” (Botanical Writings: 97; OC 4: 1206, emphasis added). These botanical endeavors, as we have seen, are diverse in character, including herbaria, a botanical dictionary, a botanical primer, and a new system of botanical notation. Taken together, these works can be interpreted as a series of linguistic experiments loosely corresponding to the various stages in the history of language as sketched out in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. Dividing human history into three epochs, that of the savage, the barbarian or herdsman, and civilized man, Rousseau relates these social states to specific forms of language: “The depiction of objects suits savage peoples; signs of words and propositions, barbarian peoples, and the alphabet, civilized peoples” (257; OC 3: 385). The herbarium closely approximates the object-focus of the savage peoples; Rousseau’s highly original pasigraphy, the hieroglyphics or ideograms of the barbarian peoples; and the dictionary, the alphabetic language of the civilized peoples. Botany is clearly not just the study of plants but a meditation on language systems and the social forms to which they correspond. Following the course of Rousseau’s linguistic experimentation yields a number of surprises, which, in turn, sheds light on his search for a “new language” of self in the Reveries. As the botanical dictionary as well as the botanical correspondence and    See Cook, “Rousseau and the Languages of Music and Botany” for a compelling analysis of the relation of these two discourses and their radical “newness.”    Worth considering in this light is Gasbarrone, “Blindness or Oversight? A Closer Look at Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Botanique” (especially 7–9). As the title suggests, the focus remains on the Dictionary. Yet, in the course of the article a relation is established between Rousseau’s various botanical language systems and the social systems presented in his political writings. For an especially engaging consideration of Rousseau’s botanical works as works concerned above all with language see Sartiliot.

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primer reveal, Rousseau was fascinated by nomenclature and taxonomic systems of classification. Yet, how does one square his evident passion for the scientific and technical language of botanists with his disdain for the cold, calculating, analytic language of modern society? Nothing, it would seem, could be further from the figural origins of language than Linnaeus’s or Jussieu’s systematics.10 And yet, if we listen to Rousseau, there is a certain poetry and beauty to be found in the language of the botanist: “These words [of the botanist] are nonetheless all Greek or Latin, expressive, short, sonorous, and by their extreme precision even form elegant constructions” (Botanical Writings: 97; OC 4: 1206). The words “expressive,” “sonorous,” and “elegant” are precisely those adjectives Rousseau uses throughout the Essay on the Origin of Languages to describe the idealized, passionate language of the Golden Age. Rousseau views the botanist’s use of Greek and Latin words in a positive light: these words are closer in time to the birth of language; they recall the grandeur of the Greek polis and the Roman Republic venerated in Rousseau’s political work; and they remain at a great distance from what he sees as the ornate, rhetorical flourishes of his own time. The brevity and clarity of scientific language stands in marked contrast to the mannered discourse of Rousseau’s own time. Botanical discourse, far from constituting the telos of the inevitable historical progression (or degradation) of language from its figural origins to an abstract algebra only able to contain the ideas of reason, stands as a testament to the possibility of a new, reinvigorated language able to recover in a new form what has been lost in the language of contemporary society. Rousseau’s botanical correspondence, herbaria, and dictionary overflow with the names of plants and seeds often indicated by their Latinate binomial names as though these somewhat foreign and mysterious words contain an incantatory force everyday language cannot convey. In his botanical correspondence Rousseau frequently pauses to consider the botanical terms on the page, ruminating not just upon their origin and significance but upon the very texture of language itself, with words such as Saxifrage granulata, Veronica Chamaedrys, Ranunculus Acris, Chrysanthemum Leuxanthemum, Malva rotundifoli (Botanical Writings: 165–9; CC 39: 163). His correspondence occasionally turns into lengthy lists of the names of the plants he has gathered on a particular expedition (see, for example, the “Letter to the Duchess of Portland” in Confessions 185–8). This linguistic exuberance is best demonstrated in the botanical letters to Mme Delessert. After taking unmistakable pleasure in meticulously naming the various specialized structures, such as the floret, the bifid, and siliqua of a particular plant genus, Rousseau unleashes a veritable torrent of plant names, and in so doing conveys a sense of joy and passion that he seeks to share with his correspondent. The   Indeed, Derrida in Of Grammatology refers to Rousseau’s use of botanical language as the “the catastrophe of the catastrophe” (148). If it was a catastrophe for Rousseau, according to Derrida, to have culture or civilization supplement an always already deficient nature, it is the ultimate catastrophe when nature as botany becomes the supplement of society. 10

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aromatic plants, such as “oregano, marjoram, Thyme, wild thyme, basil, Mint, hyssop, Lavender,” are compared with the foul-smelling “Stachys, Ironworts, Horehound” and the odorless “Snapdragon, toad-flax, Eyebright, lousewort, yellow rattle, broomrape, ivy-leaved toad-flax, round-leaved toad-flax, digitalis” and the scented “Scrophularia” (Botanical Writings: 142: OC 4: 1168). Rousseau’s casual mixture of colloquial, regional, and scientific terminology in this letter highlights his fascination with the language of botany and not just with the plants themselves. Rousseau lingers over these names—as have I—because it is perhaps the best way to convey his sense of the magical quality of the words used to name plants. Botany is for Rousseau just as much a celebration and discovery of language as it is of the natural world. Rousseau’s example points to a kind of science that could potentially lead to a “re-enchantment” of the world and of the self for a people living in an increasingly secularized and technological society. Viewed in this light, Rousseau’s linguistic experiments all end in disappointment. Rousseau abruptly stops work on his dictionary, dissatisfied with its dry language; he abandons his elaborate pasigraphy because, according to his good friend and admirer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, they “appeared to him as nothing but skeletons” (Etudes de la nature 263; translation mine); and he disposes of many of his painstakingly assembled herbaria, referring to them disparagingly as that “miserable collection of herbs” [miserables herbailles] (265; translation mine). Even his botanical letters to Mme Delessert are fraught with anxiety about the inadequacy of his descriptions and the constant possibility of miscommunication and misidentification. A moving exchange of letters between Rousseau and Malherbes written around 1771 (distinct from the Letters to Malherbes written a decade earlier) points to the consequences—personal and political—of this apparent failure. In the opening letter Rousseau presents Malherbes with a herbarium as a token of their friendship and time spent together herborizing in the countryside near Meudon. The herbarium becomes an unambiguous synechodotal marker of their shared experience together. The central topic of these letters is the creation and exchange of herbaria. Malherbes sends plants from his estate to Rousseau to name, classify, and organize in a herbarium, which Rousseau then sends back to Malherbes. Rousseau also sends Malherbes various flowers he has collected near his residence in Paris for his inspection. It as though these two men were using plants as words to communicate their friendship and the pleasure they shared in the countryside. But they “write” not only to preserve a past moment of their lives, but also to continue their friendship and shared passion despite the distance separating them. The exchange is all the more poignant in that both philosophes speak from a position of political exile. In a sense, their botanical correspondence is a sort of indecipherable, coded message, beyond the reach of the censors and impossible to counterfeit. The botanical exchange also points to the possibility of a shared vision through empirical description: “[I]t seems to me that one of the great charms of botany is, in addition to seeing by oneself, that of verifying what others have seen; to give, on the testimony of my own eyes, my assent to the fine and just

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observations of an author seems to me a real delight” (Botanical Writings: 233; CC 39: 37). In this way, social theory—grounded in a meeting of the minds—finds its way into the plant world. Rousseau’s consternation is understandable, then, when Malherbes inexplicably sends the herbaria back: “You are sending back to me, Sir, the dried plants I had the honor and pleasure of passing along to you at different times. I understand nothing of this return” (Botanical Writings: 240: CC 39: 187). The consequences of Malherbes’s faux pas is a reaffirmation of the generalized state of mutual incomprehension and alienation that for Rousseau characterizes the modern world: “I should have known for long a time that we do not understand each other as well about anything as I thought previously in the simplicity of my heart” (Botanical Writings: 241: CC 39: 187). The direct communication of the passions ultimately fails Rousseau in this moving exchange. The identification of plants does not lead to self-identification or to the identification of the self with others—the central goal of his autobiographies and the touchstone of his social theory. While nominally failures, the botanical forays testify to Rousseau’s ongoing desire to reflect upon the social world. In Rousseau’s grandest linguistic experiment—the Reveries—he arguably succeeds where botanical language alone failed him. Specifically, it is in those passages where Rousseau contemplates nature most intently, using a compelling mixture of sentimental and scientific language, that he begins to fashion a new language of self through which he articulates a more organic and holistic approach to the world. Ocular Recreation Rousseau’s most sustained reflections on botany in the Reveries and that work’s most poetically innovative passages occur in the Fifth and Seventh Walks. Often singled out as those sections of his autobiography most given over to the description of what constitutes happiness, these two walks recall with fondness his time spent on the island of Saint Pierre, his self-described idyllic refuge from society. For many readers, it is in these pages that Rousseau, having fully despaired of the course history has taken, finally takes leave of his age and retreats into the world of nature to effect a proximate return to a place before time and before history when the human was once whole. A close look at Rousseau’s nature descriptions, however, reveals a thinker engaged more than ever in understanding the human as a social and historical being and formulating a positive philosophy of existence for himself and for others in this world. In the Seventh Walk Rousseau explains that he first turned to botany as a distraction, as a means of suppressing the negative passions aroused in him by the “society of wicked men” (62; OC 1: 1066). “It is the means of not letting any germ of revenge or hatred spring up in my heart; and, given my destiny, to still find delight in any amusement, it is surely necessary to have a natural temperament quite purified of all irascible passions” (58; OC 1: 1061). Though Rousseau, as he relates it, could in the vigor of youth willfully disengage his mind from negative thoughts

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and enter into a joyful state of reverie “on the wings of imagination [sur les ailes de l’imagination],” this very same faculty, in his old age and under the weight of the perceived conspiracy against him, threatens to produce the opposite result: “In my reveries I even had to fear lest my imagination, frightened by my misfortunes, might finally turn its activity to this side and lest the continual sentiment of my troubles, gradually constricting my heart, crush me at last with its weight” (58–9; OC 1: 1062). Guided by instinct, Rousseau silences his troubled imagination and focuses his attention on the natural world around him: “In this condition an instinct which is natural to me, making me flee every depressing idea, imposed silence upon my imagination and, fixing my attention upon the objects which surrounded me, made me consider in detail for the first time the spectacle of nature which until then I had hardly contemplated except in mass and in its wholeness” (59; OC 1: 1062). Rousseau’s particularizing gaze immediately and inexplicably leads to a perception of the harmony of nature, which, in turn, produces an overwhelming sense of joy: “The more sensitive a soul a contemplator has, the more he gives himself up to the ecstasies this harmony arouses in him” (59; OC 1: 1062). Botany, thus, not only purges the negative passions, but in a second movement, becomes a source of the positive passions. Similarly, the faculty of imagination, which, undirected, earlier threatened his happiness, is now its cause: “I delighted in this ocular recreation” (59; OC 1: 1063). The troubled imagination of the unhappy exile is replaced by the playful, creative imagination of the naturalist relating forms. In his moment of pure joy, the contemplator of nature re-enters the state of reverie that threatened to elude him earlier, and he identifies with “the immensity of this beautiful system of beings” (59; OC 1: 1063). The moment of identification is not, however, one of pure unselfconsciousness. It is not a return to some imagined precognitive, undifferentiated, “natural” state, for it is not with nature that the contemplator identifies, but with the system of nature. Far from simply existing within nature he feels himself to be part of the complex, interacting, and interrelated whole. What is more, the experience of wholeness is tempered by a sense of loss; note the negative terms in which the experience is couched: “Then, all particular objects elude him; he sees and feels nothing except in the whole” (59; OC 1: 1063). The observer of nature immediately feels the need to return to a more a particularizing vantage point: “Some particular circumstance must focus his ideas and close off his imagination for him to be able to observe the parts of this universe he was straining to embrace” (59; OC 1: 1063). Identity is to be found in the continuous movement of his consciousness from the part to the whole and back again. What is perhaps so remarkable and unexpected in Rousseau’s encounter with nature is that the happiness he achieves there is so deeply involved with its cognitive apprehension. A curious but happy association between the passions and reason, the sensitive and the intellectual, is revealed through botany. The paradoxical relation of these two supposedly incompatible modes of being is captured in Rousseau’s description of botanizing on the Island of Saint Pierre:

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Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism Brilliant flowers, diverse colors of the meadows, fresh shady spots, brooks, thickets, greenery, come purify my imagination … My soul, dead to all great impulses, can no longer be affected by anything but perceptible objects. I no longer have anything but sensations, and now it is only by them that pain or pleasure can reach me here-below. Attracted by the cheerful objects which surround me, I consider them, contemplate them, compare them, and eventually learn to classify them; and now I am all of a sudden as much a botanist as is necessary for someone who wants to study nature only to find continuous new reasons to love it. (63–4; OC 1: 1068)

Sense-perception passes into conceptual thought; what Rousseau might well call “sensuous objects” are transformed into “intellectual objects.” The cognitive apprehension of nature, in turn, leads to an experience of joy. The figure of the botanist challenges the modern separation between feeling and reason: he studies nature in order to find more reasons to love nature. In his own way, the botanist reclaims/rediscovers for the modern age the basic relation between the sensitive and the intellectual domain that for Rousseau accompanied the dawn of consciousness and the birth of man. This bringing together of the sensuous and the intellectual goes hand in hand with a bridging of scientific and poetic language in the Reveries. Writing of a botanical walk taken near Neuchâtel, Rousseau begins his description in a heavily dramatic tone, employing tropes that would come to be associated with Romanticism and Gothic literature. I was alone; I went deep into the winding crevices [anfractuosités] of the mountain; and passing from wood to wood and boulder to boulder, I arrived at a retreat so hidden that I have never seen a more desolate [sauvage] sight in my life. Black pines [De noirs sapins] were interspersed with prodigious beeches, several of which had fallen from old age and become interlaced with each other, thereby closing off this retreat with impenetrable barriers. The few openings left from this somber enclosure gave on to nothing but perpendicularly cut boulders and horrible precipices [roches coupées à pic et d’horribles précipices], which I dared to look over only by lying down on my stomach. (65: OC 1: 1070–71)

The description—a celebrated early example of the affective fallacy—reflects less the state of the natural world than Rousseau’s own anguished interior landscape, his experience of painful alienation from the world. It is filled with dark, gloomy, and forbidding terms; the heavy vocalic sounds in “noirs,” “sauvage,” “sombre,” and “horribles,” and the sharp consonants in words such as “anfractuosités” and “coupées a pic” evoke his melancholic and anguished state of mind. In a bid to short-circuit the nightmare created by his troubled imagination, he turns to botany and botanical language to bring his mind back to the natural world around him. Almost magically, the landscape is transformed into a charming, peaceful refuge:

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There I found the Dentaria heptaphyllos, the Cyclamen, the Nidus avis, the big Laserpitium, and some other plants which charmed and absorbed me for a long time. But imperceptibly dominated by the strong impressions of the surrounding objects, I forgot botany and plants. I sat down on a cushion of Lycopodium and mosses and began to dream more at ease thinking that I was in a refuge unknown to the whole universe where persecutors would not unearth me. (65–6; OC 1: 1071)

As unfamiliar as the botanical terms might be to the reader, they are as well known to Rousseau as they are to the many other botanical amateurs of the day. He knows the plants by name; they appear to him as familiar acquaintances. No longer alone, he is among a community of long-time friends. In an astonishing reversal, poetic language brings him only the despair and alienation he discovered in civil society, while scientific language offers him solace, even happiness. The literally fascinating effect of the plants on the mind of the viewer is reproduced textually through the insertion of Linnaean taxonomy: the Latinate terms force, at the very least, a pause in the narrative flow, fixing the attention of the reader in much the same way as that of the botanist on his walk. As we saw in Rousseau’s botanical writings, these scientific terms acquire an enchanting, mesmerizing power. In a sense, Rousseau rediscovers the passionate origins of language not through poetry, but through the scientific language of botany. Language itself then seems to fall away as the intense concentration required of the botanist induces a state of forgetfulness in which Rousseau’s mind is filled uniquely with the impressions emanating from the surrounding objects. We should be careful not to mistake Rousseau’s state of forgetfulness for a kind of mystical union with the natural world. Just after Rousseau tells us that he forgets botany and the individual plants, he writes that he “sat down on a cushion of Lycopodium.” Botany is never forgotten, as the term “Lycopodium” makes so clear. What is more, his moment of forgetting is marked by a confluence of poetic and scientific discourse. The term “cushion [oreiller]” is drawn from a hackneyed pastoral register that nostalgically looks backward to Rousseau’s hypothesized Golden Age, while the term “Lycopodium” is standard textbook botanical terminology that epitomizes modern scientific language. It is the unexpected connection of these two words, taken from entirely different linguistic registers, at the very moment of Rousseau’s happy reverie that is so noteworthy. As we saw earlier, Rousseau argues in the Essay on the Origin of Languages that the first language of man was “figurative” and “lively”; it was a “language of poets” able to express the passions. Since then language has become more analytic and precise, in short, more scientific; it is a “language of geometers.” What it has gained in clarity and precision, it has lost in force and passion (265; OC 3: 392). Rousseau’s experience in nature expresses not so much a nostalgic desire to return to this Golden Age of passionate speech; instead it hints at a new form of language in which the poetic and the scientific are no longer at odds but part of a more holistic approach to the world and to humankind.

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The subsequent interruption of Rousseau’s daydream by the noise of a “stocking mill” is commonly read as the undesirable disruption of a primitivist idyll by civilization. Rousseau’s description, however, tells a more complex story.11 The dreamer’s initial reaction to the factory is one of joy; he is happy to find himself among men when he thought himself alone. But just as suddenly Rousseau’s joy is replaced by sadness; the pleasant images of being in society give way to those of the conspiracy against him. Rousseau does not, however, retreat into his previous fantasy, but laughing at his own predicament, offers a third reverie, this time a picture of Switzerland as a unique and desirable “mixture of wild nature and human industry” (67; OC 1: 1072). In his correspondence Rousseau comments upon the “bizarre mixture” he perceives in Switzerland: One finds church steeples among the firs, herds of sheep among heaps of stone, factories among the cliffs, workshops built on raging torrents. This strange mixture has an unknown something about it that is animated, alive, that breathes liberty and well-being, and that in countries where it is found will always offer a unique spectacle of its kind, but one made only for eyes that know how to see [des yeux qui sachent voir]. (CC 15: 48; translation mine).

What is so “bizarre” is the apparent compatibility of what elsewhere seems so incompatible: the natural and the cultural. Rousseau’s Swiss reverie is the product of a nascent ecological imagination.12 The products of nature and those of man exist in harmony. The informed gaze directed upon Switzerland (“eyes that know how to see”), one that is able to perceive the mixture of nature and culture and the beauty of that mixture, recalls the type of looking the reader of the natural world and of the autobiographical is asked to adopt. Rousseau’s informed looking tries to make visible the mutual relationship between human nature and physical nature, self and other, sense and reason, science and poetry, as well as the possibility of their more perfect alignment. Viewing Rousseau in this proto-ecological fashion sheds light on the Fifth Walk, a section that has often perplexed readers, containing as it does some of Rousseau’s most “romantic” effusions alongside his most sustained scientific and precise botanical descriptions. Expressions of his apparent desire to escape the bounds of the physical world follow upon sensuously rich and lovingly precise

11  For a compelling reading of this scene see Gasbaronne, “From the Part to the Whole: Nature and Machine in Rousseau’s Rêveries.” 12   Arguably one of the earliest environmental writers, Rousseau’s work has not found its way into the canon of eco-literature. To the best of my knowledge, Katz, Marcel Schneider, and Pelt are the only critics who engage the notion of Rousseau as environmental writer in a sustained fashion. Rousseau’s “Letter to Voltaire”, in which he refutes that author’s analysis of the Lisbon Earthquake in relation to Providence, is an excellent starting point for considering Rousseau as a precursor to the environmental movement.

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renderings of that world. In a sense, the Fifth Walk soars at the same time that it remains the most “grounded” of Rousseau’s reveries. This particular quality of Rousseau’s work is perhaps nowhere more vividly captured than in his description of botany as one of his greatest joys. The conjoining of pleasure with painstaking observation, expressions of delight with botanical nomenclature and scientific terminology is breathtaking: Nothing is more singular than the raptures and ecstasies I felt with each observation I made on plant structure and organization, as well as on the role of the sexual parts in sporulation, which was then a completely new system for me. I was enchanted to distinguish generic features of which I previously had not the slightest idea and to verify them on common species, while waiting for rarer ones to offer themselves to me. The forking of the two long stamens of the Self-heal, the spring of those of the Nettle and the Pellitory, the explosion of the fruit of the Balsam and the pod of the Boxwood, a thousand little games of sporulation which I observed for the first time, filled me with joy and I went around asking whether one had seen the horns of the Self-heal plant like La Fontaine asking whether one had read Habakkuk. (43; OC 1: 1043)

Few descriptions of nature in Rousseau’s œuvre are more erotically charged and nowhere is his pleasure so directly the product of a mind that carefully differentiates, compares, and names. Note how Rousseau takes particular joy in verifying commonalities between plant forms as though his perceived failure to point out shared qualities between himself and all members of human society elsewhere were compensated for in the botanical world. The botanical realm is a foil for a social order not yet realized. Desire, elsewhere deflected and distorted, is, in the botanical world, realized in the circuit that moves ceaselessly between “ecstasy” and observation. This movement is crucial to understanding Rousseau’s general relation to nature. Rousseau’s description of botanizing does not build to a crescendo in which the state of ecstasy or rapture is the end-goal. Instead, each observation leads to a state of rapture, and each state of rapture is immediately followed by a return to the world of sensations where the process begins again. Botany is not for Rousseau an activity through which he escapes the temporal. On the contrary, it is here that Rousseau lives the connection between the self and the world most fully. What do we make, then, of Rousseau’s powerful desire for a “simple and permanent state,” which he views as “supreme felicity” (45; OC 1; 1046)? Rousseau famously describes this wished-for atemporal state several pages after his botanical rhapsody: But if there is a state in which the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself on entirely and to gather its whole being into, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future; in which time is nothing for it; in which the present lasts forever without, however, making its duration noticed and without

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any trace of time’s passage; without any other sentiment of deprivation or of enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear, except that alone of our existence … he who finds himself in it can call himself happy … Such is the state in which I often found myself during my solitary reveries on the Island of St. Pierre. (46; OC 1: 1046)

At first glance, Rousseau clearly appears to use nature as a way to escape time. The described state “without duration” and “without any trace of succession” is indeed akin to that of the “homme sauvage,” a figure standing before history who exists in an eternal present and is, as Rousseau writes in the Second Discourse, “wrapped up entirely in the feeling of its present existence” (143; OC 3: 144). Yet Rousseau speaks in the above passage from the Reveries of the feeling of “our existence.”13 The use of the first person plural is crucial for it signals an awareness of others, and, as a consequence, a self-awareness foreclosed to the “homme sauvage” for whom subject and object cannot yet be differentiated. The sentiment of his own existence presupposes an awareness of the existence of others. Rousseau thus evokes a state that places him neither before nor beyond history, but at the very beginning of history, at the dawn of consciousness itself where the basic relation between self and other, the senses and the intellect is constituted.14 This reading notwithstanding, the passage remains unmistakably imbued with a desire for rest, for tranquility; in short, for eternity. Yet, no sooner is this desire expressed than a competing desire for movement emerges to counter the fear of absolute stasis that a transcendence of time would presumably bring: “Without movement, life is only lethargy […] An absolute silence leads to sadness. It offers an image of death” (47; OC 1: 1047). Rousseau’s described state “without duration” and “without any trace of succession” should be read, then, as Rousseau cautions us to read the rest of his work—in context—for this seemingly “timeless” moment is, in the end, itself a point in time, a single moment in a shifting and living consciousness. The Reveries, taken as a whole, are comprised of a collection of moments. Unlike the Confessions which conceive the moments of life in chronological relation to one another and according to a complex network of cause and effect, the Reveries focus on the shape of the moments themselves. Like Rousseau the botanist, who is interested above all in the structure of each plant he encounters, Rousseau the autobiographer focuses his attention in the Reveries on the forms of consciousness as they present themselves to him in the process of writing. Each modification, each relation delights him in the same way as do the “the forking of the two long stamens” and the “thousand little games of sporulation” witnessed 13

 The presence of the third person plural in Rousseau’s reverie is also noted in OC 1: 1799 n. 2. It is taken as an indication that Rousseau possesses a degree of selfconsciousness. 14  This difference is stated concisely in O’Neal, “The Perceptual Metamorphosis of the Solitary Walker”: “Rousseau is less a natural man than a man in nature” (98).

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during his botanical expedition (43; OC 1: 1043). And just as Rousseau’s reaction upon viewing these natural wonders is to run back to the small society on the Island of St. Pierre to ask if they too have seen them, the text, despite its emphasis on solitude, reaches out to a community of readers asking them to identify and identify with the detailed forms of a consciousness in perpetual motion. By focusing on the structure of plants, Rousseau’s botany is able to steer a course between a teleological view of nature and a modern scientific one. The former would inevitably look beyond the object to God or any other transcendent principle, while the latter would look through the object to the useful properties and compounds that comprise the plant. Rousseau’s method remains resolutely on the surface, on the plane of the visible, in the sensuous here-and-now trying to determine, however problematically, what the plants are in and of themselves. In this way, Rousseau’s botanical enterprise sheds light on the nature of the autobiographical. Like the plant, the individual is not to be subsumed under the aegis of some supernatural order or analyzed into mere physical matter. Only by viewing the self as an entity developing in time and history can the nature of that self be given expression and the possibility of a better future for the human be imagined. Goethe’s Rousseau Rousseau’s botanical works find one of their greatest admirers in Goethe. Goethe writes about Rousseau’s scientific projects at length, a fact all the more noteworthy given his near total silence on the remainder of Rousseau’s work, especially the autobiographical.15 In his own scientific writings, Goethe goes so far as to cite Rousseau as one of the more important influences in his own approach to nature (Goethe’s Botanical Writings 155–61). Two competing portraits of Rousseau as botanist reveal Goethe distancing himself from his putative guide in ways that shed light on his own scientific project, in particular his desire to demonstrate the essential interrelationship between a literary and scientific approach to the world and the self. In a statement originally written during Goethe’s stay in Naples in 1787, which was published largely unchanged thirty years later in the Italian Journey (1816), Goethe contrasts his own sympathetic, yet methodical and precise approach to nature with the merely sympathetic approach of Rousseau: Sometimes I am critical of Rousseau and his hypochondriacal affliction, and yet I am beginning to understand how so finely organized a mind could be put into disarray. If I did not feel in such great sympathy with natural things, and if I did not see that in this apparent confusion there are a hundred observations which 15  For the most complete account of Goethe’s comments on Rousseau see Hammer (32–50). For an analysis of Goethe’s comments on Rousseau’ autobiographical writings see Stelzig (137–48).

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Goethe offers this already clichéd portrait of Rousseau as the sickly romantic and overly sensitive nature lover even though he was well familiar with his botanical studies and their careful attention to comparison and classification, having already enthusiastically recommended them to Duke Karl August for these very reasons (Hammer 37). One year after this critical assessment of Rousseau, Goethe offers a very different and much more favorable portrait of Rousseau: An intellect such as [Rousseau’s], which felt impelled to prescribe law and order to nations, must inevitably arrive at the conclusion that such a great diversity of forms in the boundless world of plants would be unthinkable without a fundamental principle [Grundgesetz], be it ever so concealed, to restore uniformity [Einheit]. (Goethe’s Botanical Writings 157; HA 13: 157)

Here Goethe’s Rousseau is a methodical and systematic naturalist: he prescribes “law and order” believing that a “fundamental principle” governing all of nature will ultimately disclose the basic “uniformity” underlying the teaming diversity visible on the surface. Goethe’s impossible double characterization points directly to the tension that animates his own scientific pursuits and to the growing and ultimately insuperable tension between scientific and humanistic modes of apprehension during the nineteenth century. In his scientifically-minded writings, Goethe is wary of becoming either the sentimental worshipper of nature who loses himself in the flux of nature or the inflexible scientist who reduces nature (and human nature) to a set of abstract laws. It is to this end that Goethe works to establish a mode of scientific inquiry and writing attuned to the dynamic relation between objective and subjective experience, the order of things and the ordering mind. It is to Goethe’s efforts that we now turn.

Chapter 4

Goethe’s Autobiographical Science

Nowhere did one want to concede that science and poetry could be compatible. One forgot that science developed out of poetry. One did not consider that, after a shift in time, the two might meet again at a higher level, on good terms, and to their mutual benefit.—“Schicksal der Druckshaft,” Morphologishe Schriften (HA 13)

Shortly after beginning his formal scientific studies in 1781, Goethe writes enthusiastically about his plan to start work on “a novel about the universe [ein Roman über das Weltall]” (WA 4.2: 232). The ambitious nature of Goethe’s project is not just a reflection of his own monumental poetic vision; it is also representative of a scientific culture that believed it could know and describe the phenomenal world in its entirety. Kant’s Universal Theory of the Heavens (1755), Buffon’s Epochs of Nature (1778), and Humboldt’s Cosmos: A Physical Description of the Universe (1845–62) nicely instantiate this belief. This grand vision does not die in the nineteenth century. The currency in our own time of what modern theoretical physicists sanguinely refer to as a “Theory of Everything,” a theory that would fully explain and link together all known physical phenomena, testifies to the continuing belief in science’s power to offer a unifying and totalizing picture of the world. What we no longer believe is that the novel can be the vehicle for realizing these Promethean dreams. To write a novel today is to embark on an imaginative endeavor that lies outside of the realm of objective scientific inquiry and truth. No one expects the same type of knowledge from a novel as from a scientific work. Yet, when Goethe began his studies, literary and scientific forms of expression did not yet inhabit mutually exclusive epistemological domains. By writing a novel, Goethe does not necessarily sacrifice or render secondary the scientific value and systematic rigor of his account of the universe. Still, to undertake a novel as opposed to a natural history of the universe was already in the late eighteenth century a provocative gesture that put pressure on the ideal of an exact and definite account of the natural world by drawing attention to the role of imagination and subjective perception in even the most empirically rigorous depictions of that world. Goethe’s projected novel marks the beginning of a life-long search to find an aesthetic form capable of giving proper expression to what he believed was the objective and subjective dimension of all observation, one that would balance the empirical evidence of observation with the body that experiences and the creative inner faculties that organize our encounter with the natural world. Looking at the 

 Unless otherwise indicated all translations from the German are mine.

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results of this fifty-year search, which range from traditional scientific treatises to epic Lucretian nature poems, reveals that Goethe’s writings become increasingly autobiographical in form and content as he takes into ever greater consideration the role of the subject in any act of perception. This path would lead his final scientific work to become his first truly autobiographical work—a memoir of his career as a scientist. For Goethe, all scientific truth was ultimately autobiographical. From Buffon to Lobachevsky: Science in the Age of Goethe When considering Goethe’s science it is instructive to keep in mind the swiftly changing scientific landscape that forms the intellectual backdrop of his long life. In 1749, the year of Goethe’s birth, Buffon had just published the first three volumes of his 36-volume best-seller, Histoire naturelle; Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed his prize-winning essay for the Academy of Dijon, answering the question, “Has the progress of the sciences and the arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?”; and Linnaeus was completing his Philosophia Botanica and Species Plantarum, the twin capstones of his brilliant career. Geology and biology, arguably the two most important branches of scientific knowledge in the early nineteenth century, had not yet been invented. Eighty-three years later, in 1832, the year of Goethe’s death, Charles Darwin had just set out on the voyage of the Beagle, the five-year tour around the world that provided the inspiration and data for his revolutionary work The Origin of Species; Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist whose work served as a bridge between 18th-century Linnaean taxonomic systems and 19th-century evolutionary theories, died; Charles Lyell’s influential book The Principles of Geology had just been published; a nonEuclidian geometry, elaborated by the Russian mathematician Lobachevsky and intended to challenge Kant’s belief in the a priori status of the categories of time and space, had just been introduced in the West; and the science of biology celebrated its thirtieth birthday. This selective tabulation can only hint at the profound changes that form the tumultuous background of Goethe’s developing thought. Very broadly, the history of science from the eighteenth century onward is marked by the increasing dominance and eventual hegemony of the mathematical and abstract approach over the descriptive and discursive and the concomitant flushing out of the ethical, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic categories from a rigorously-pursued science. When   Partially in reaction to this trend, countless pseudo-sciences emerged early in the nineteenth century, such as that practiced by the German Naturphilosophen, which stressed the spiritual, mystical, and transcendental aspects of nature and generally held raw empirical data in disdain. Whether Goethe (who vehemently rejected the practitioners of natural philosophy) should ultimately be classified in this latter camp is a subject of intense, often heated debate in scientific and literary communities, with prominent (mostly German) modern scientists such as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Werner Heisenberg assessing

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Goethe entered the world of science, he did so, as one historian of science remarks, “in the company of miners, hunters, foresters, noblemen, poets, and intellectuals … [where] taste and knowledge and science and poetry were socially united in a pleasant and congenial manner, reflecting in a sense the style of Rousseau’s approach to nature” (Fink 31). Throughout Goethe’s life this society was under increasing pressure from an emerging class of professional scientists who largely dismissed the work of these diverse people as dilettantish at best. (In fact, the word “scientist,” used to denote this professional group, came into being only in 1834.) Experiment gradually replaces experience as the chief means to a scientific apprehension of the natural world. The period in which Goethe was active as a scientist saw the ever-sharpening division of the natural sciences into two distinct and methodologically opposed realms—Naturlehre, on the one hand, which included the mathematically based disciplines of physics, chemistry, and optics, and Naturgeschichte, on the other, which included the descriptive fields of geology, botany, and zoology. (The French would refer to these two divisions as “physique générale” and “physique particulière,” highlighting the abstract character of the former and the empirical character of the latter.) Gradually, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, disciplines previously contained within the domain of natural history succumbed to the mathematical-physical model of scientific inquiry. At the time when Goethe was engaged in scientific research, however, the ongoing battle between the two approaches was intense. Diderot’s provocative prediction in his essay “Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature” (written shortly after Goethe’s birth) that natural history, under the mantra of “experience,” would usurp the dominant position held by mathematics in the natural sciences, is symptomatic of the adversarial intellectual positions of the day. Through this perspective, Goethe’s notorious Theory of Color [Farbenlehre] (1807/8), which examines the moral and physiological effects of color and describes colors qualitatively, can be interpreted as a daring attempt to wrench the study of optics, a science placed squarely by Newton on one side of the divide, into the opposing realm of natural history. Within the field of natural history itself, the most significant intellectual development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the

Goethe favorably. For an understanding of past and current reception of Goethe’s work as scientific see Amrine and Zucker, “Postscript.”   The urgent need for a term to designate the students of science is described in the entry under “scientist” in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.: “We are informed that [this lack of term] was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings in the last three summers … Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term …; savants was rather assuming …; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sociologist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable.”

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temporalization of man’s conception of nature. As the old, fixed hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being that had dominated man’s conception of his place in nature since Aristotle fell apart under the weight of empirical evidence, theorists rushed in to establish new relations between man and animal, man and nature, man and man, past and present. A host of historical, dynamic theories such as uniformitarianism, progressionism, catastrophism, vulcanism, neptunism, as well as Goethe’s own theory of morphology, strove to replace the spatial, atemporal taxonomic tableau of classical natural history as exemplified by Linnaeus’s static classificatory system. Narrative thus replaces description as the chief tool for writing the natural world. Just as the novel and the works of natural history were converging in their shared interest in techniques of emplotment, the “hard sciences” such as physics were moving away from the conjunction of the arts and sciences. The preponderance of Goethe’s scientific writings (1790–1820) is composed in the productively contested period in thought bounded on either side by Linnaeus and Darwin. Of particular interest is the narrowing of aesthetic possibilities for the presentation of scientific findings during Goethe’s lifetime. Wolf Lepenies offers the reception-history of Buffon’s voluminous Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804) as a model of the changing relations between literary and natural scientific writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Buffon’s centrality to Goethe’s own thinking makes Lepenies’ argument worth restating here. According to Lepenies, Buffon was the last scientist who could base his scientific reputation on the literary quality of his much-admired descriptions, as scientific content was still inseparable from the literary form in which it was presented. For Buffon and his early admirers in the Ancien Régime, the rational, ordered, and rhythmically balanced style of his prose offered a fitting representation of the rationally ordered world he sought to describe. The union between literary form and scientific content began to unravel rapidly during Buffon’s lifetime, however. Increasingly, his works were referred to pejoratively as “scientific novels” and his prose was seen as “stylized and pompous.” Although today we have become aware of the empirical inaccuracies of Buffon’s works, his contemporaries based their criticism chiefly on stylistic grounds. Thus Buffon became the first scientist whose reputation was undone by the excessive literariness of his prose. Throughout the nineteenth century, Buffon was revered as a great stylist by writers such as Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert, yet ridiculed as a scientist. Goethe’s correspondence with the literary critic and amateur scientist Johann Merck concerning Buffon’s Epochs of Nature perfectly captures Goethe’s and his generation’s ambivalence concerning the relationship of literary form to scientific 

  As mentioned in chapter 1, the temporalization of nature has been extensively documented in two major works of European cultural history, namely Foucault, The Order of Things and Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte.   The following analysis draws upon the introduction to Lepenies’ Die Drei Kulturen and from the chapter “Die Speicherung wissenschaftlicher Traditionen in der Literatur: Buffons Nachruhm” in his Autoren und Wissenschaftler im 18. Jahrhundert.

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writing. In his first commentary on Buffon’s work, Goethe adamantly rejects the appellation “novel” employed by critics of Buffon: “Buffon’s Epochs of Nature are quite impressive. I insist upon this and can’t endure it when someone says it is just a hypothesis or a novel. No one should say anything against him to me in particular, except he who can create a greater and more complete whole” (April 7, 1780, WA 4.4: 202). Six months later Goethe once again writes to Merck and, after mentioning, for perhaps the first time, his plan to write a universal natural history, he proceeds to embrace the very term “novel” as a description of Buffon’s work: I am convinced that one sole great man, able to traverse the entire globe whether by feet or by spirit, after many attempts and with the proper tools, could once and for all recognize and describe to us this peculiarly interrelated globe, something that perhaps Buffon has in a certain sense already done, and that is why the French, the German-French, and the Germans say he has written a novel, which is well said, since the honorable public only knows the extraordinary through the novel. (April 7, 1780, WA 4.4: 202)

Albeit with a touch of irony directed at the reading public, Goethe champions the novel as the only form capable of communicating the extraordinary quality of the empirical content of recent scientific research. Two years later Goethe distances himself from Buffon’s Epochs. However, unlike other critics of the French naturalist, who attack his work’s literary mode, Goethe reaffirms the discursive path Buffon has taken while finding that more recent data has rendered the work obsolete: “Everyday I see more clearly that we will have to follow Buffon’s path, but we will have to depart from the epochs that he establishes. It seems to me that this matter is becoming increasingly complicated” (November 1782, WA 4.6: 84). Alexander von Humboldt echoes Goethe’s uncertainty concerning the general relationship between literary and scientific modes of expression when he embarrassingly disowns his early scientific “tale” [Erzählung],“Vitality, or the Genius of Rhodes” (1795). Fifty years later, in his preface to Cosmos (1845), by contrast, he mounts a passionate defense of the affinity between the spheres of natural investigation and poetry, arguing that scientific accuracy and completeness are not at all incompatible with a “picturesque animation of style.” Humboldt goes so far as to express his hope that Cosmos not only be classified as a scientific work but also have the “honor of being regarded as a literary composition.” Arguing that    The novel was by no means the only literary genre available to scientific writers. Versified science, such as Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, was an established and respected didactic genre early in Goethe’s life; by the nineteenth century, however, the divergence between the epistemological goals and rhetorical modes of poetry and science had become so great as to render science in verse aesthetically unbearable.    “In the work on the Cosmos … I have endeavored to show … that a certain degree of scientific completeness is not wholly incompatible with a picturesque animation of style” (Cosmos 1: 1).

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“descriptions of nature ought not to be deficient in a tone of lifelike truthfulness,” he revives Buffon’s assumption of a unity between style and scientific truth (Cosmos vii-ix). The “increasingly complicated” appearance of “the matter” was thus not Goethe’s perception alone, but it is to Goethe’s uniquely complex responses to this problem of the proper form of scientific inquiry that we now turn. The Language of Nature and the Heart In contrast to the aesthetic variety of Goethe’s scientific production, which included verse, novel-fragments, aphorisms, diary and travel entries, essays on scientific method, and unconventional scientific treatises, Goethe’s science considered generally reveals a strong architectonic unity. Despite their divergent subject matter and dates of composition, each of Goethe’s scientific writings is governed by a common, though evolving, set of principles and assumptions. Central to these is the working premise that all material phenomena, organic as well as inorganic, are law-governed variations upon ideal types or prototypical processes. All plants, Goethe hypothesizes, can be derived from the Urpflanze, all animals from the Urtier, all rocks from granite, and all colors from the Urphänomen. The laws governing these derivations from the ideal are valid, he argues further, not only within a specific sphere or portion of nature but throughout all of creation. In his later scientific writings, Goethe designates what he considers the two universal laws that determine the particular manifestations of all natural phenomena. Interestingly, the laws he names themselves designate dynamic processes: polarity [Polarität] and intensification [Steigerung]. In a typically Goethean fashion, the two are defined as distinct but ultimately interrelated, almost indistinguishable processes: [Polarity] is a property of matter insofar as we think of it as material, [intensification] insofar as we think of it as spiritual. Polarity is a state of constant attraction and repulsion, while intensification is a state of ever-striving ascent. Since, however, matter can never exist and act without spirit, nor spirit without matter, matter is also capable of undergoing intensification, and spirit cannot be denied its attraction and repulsion. (PU 12: 6; HA 13: 48)

Divisions, for Goethe, are necessary to our cognitive apprehension of reality; they are artificial, however, in that they obscure the dialectical unity of nature as Goethe conceives it. In each field of scientific inquiry the laws of polarity and intensification assume particular modalities. In botany, intensification is described as the growth of the plant from seed to blossom as it ascends toward the sun; in geology as the crystallization of minerals; in anatomy as the increasing complexity, specialization, and differentiation of bodily structures and their functions; and in chromatics as the saturation and condensation of color to achieve, for instance, pure red or

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pure blue. The highest level of achieved intensification is positively valorized as the fullest, most perfect, and transparent representation of the “archetype.” We should understand “archetype” here in its particularly Goethean sense (more fully elaborated below) as a concept that describes neither an ideal nor a real world, but rather the realm bridging these two, usually distinct, worlds. If intensification is then viewed along a vertical axis of ascent and descent or, what Goethe would call perfection and nullification, polarity can best be viewed along a horizontal axis as the productive interplay of opposing material forces. Thus, in botany Goethe speaks of the expansion and contraction of leaf forms; in anatomy of the expansion and contraction of the vertebrae; in mineralogy of the compression and decompression of rock forms; in chemistry of the acidification and deacidification of basic chemical compounds; and, most famously, in his color theory of the interaction between light and dark. In one of Goethe’s final scientific works, “The Spiral Tendency in Vegetation” (1834), he uses the figure of the upward moving spiral to describe the mutually creative interaction between intensification and polarity governing the entire natural world. The universalist grammar of Goethe’s scientific language was in no way exceptional for the age. Goethe fully participates in what Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, refers to as “the rhetoric of reduction” dominating scientific discourse of the period, according to which the diversity of nature masks an underlying unity and harmony and complexity gives way to a simple set of universal rules (33). As Goethe relates it in one his conversations with Eckermann: “That is exactly what makes nature great, that she is so simple” (Eckermann 24). Why, then, did Goethe find it so difficult to develop a suitable language and aesthetic form based on this elemental grammar? Goethe would have little trouble representing the laws of intensification and polarity, which act upon what Walter Benjamin would refer to as the domain of observable appearances [Erscheinungen] (as opposed to the domain of apprehensible archetypes [Urbilder]). Unlike the physicists’ abstract mathematical laws, which describe the natural world in terms of numbers and quantifiable concepts such as pressure and mass, Goethe’s laws are qualitative and correspond more closely in form and content to the physical reality perceived by the naked eye. Thus, the phenomena of polarity can be witnessed everywhere in nature, from the regular contraction and expansion of leaf forms along a plant stem to the beating of a heart. Similarly, evidence of the process of intensification can be found in the existence of longitudinal fibers lining the stems of plants and the exterior layer of bark encasing the trunks of trees, both of which serve to permit vertical growth. Goethe would refer to these supportive structures as “spiritual staffs,” highlighting the synthesis of spiritual and material in which the very form of the bark and of the fibers convey the notion of upward striving. The most striking example of    This distinction is made in Benjamin’s essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. This essay contains an important interpretation of Goethe’s scientific work, with which I take shall issue in the course of the following pages.

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the confluence between natural form and scientific law is provided by Goethe’s description of the human skull as a metamorphosed vertebra: the arched or curved shape of the skull is said to arise out of a natural inclination to emulate the shape of the heavenly firmament. Such already figural observations lend themselves to both linguistic and pictorial media. Goethe’s meticulously detailed anatomical sketches and notes, for instance, portray through the detailed juxtaposition of various bone parts their subtle interrelatedness: each structure in the diagrams is linked to the other through a combination of polarity (expansion and contraction) and intensification (increasing complexity). The two processes offer Goethe a syntax for representing the visible, natural world. Yet, for Goethe, the ultimate limit of our knowledge and, hence, of his science, is fixed not by our ability to witness and describe the specific material manifestations of the universal laws of polarity and intensification but rather by our capacity to perceive the archetypal form that underlies and constitutes the basis of each particular empirical instantiation [Spezification]. While we may be granted unbidden, intuitive glimpses of these elementary forms and processes, the central objective of Goethe’s science is to reach this archetypal realm methodically, to move rigorously and systematically from what Goethe would call the “empirical phenomena” to the “pure phenomena” (PU 12: 25; HA 13: 25). Unlike other contemporary notions of type, Goethe’s archetype is located not in some inaccessible, transcendental space outside of time and hence outside of nature, nor at the beginning of time in the form of a primordial germ, as many natural historians believed, nor at the terminus of some grand historical process. Instead, the Goethean archetype is located in the present, in the world, at this moment, readily accessible to anyone who knows how to look properly. It is through this informed seeing that the archetype reveals itself to the viewer. The crux of the matter lies, of course, in learning how to look at the world correctly. Goethe’s texts on science are not so much scientific treatises as they are manuals on how to see; they do not represent the archetype through words or images, but show us how, going into nature we can perceive it. In all of his scientific writings, Goethe teaches the reader to view each natural object not as a static whole but rather as part of a continuous series of forms changing over time; the archetype, while not isolable or perfectly embodied in any one instance, reveals itself instead in the commonality of each of the forms when compared with one another. This necessitates, on the part of the viewer, what Frederick Amrine aptly describes as “synchronic seeing” (“The Metamorphosis of the Scientist” 197). Thus the archetype is both ideal and real—ideal because it is never revealed in any one particular instance, yet real because it manifests itself in and through the successive variations or permutations in form. Put in different terms, the archetype is not merely a creation of the subjective consciousness, a figment of the creative imagination, or an Idee as Schiller would understand it; nor is it a single    See HA 13: 168, 207 for Goethe’s anatomical illustrations and HA 13: 61 for his botanical illustrations.

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verifiable and isolable phenomenological fact that can be pointed to in nature. Goethe’s scientific writings constantly attempt instead to negotiate this space between subject and object wherein the archetype reveals itself; each aesthetic form Goethe employs aims to evoke this elusive meeting point between internal and external experience. How to represent the archetype is of central concern to Goethe. Can the archetype be directly represented? Or can one only convey the experience of the archetype? Is the archetype or the experience of the archetype best rendered in poetic or scientific discourse? For Benjamin, Goethe’s scientific production is a result of a failure to realize “that only in the domain of art do the ur-phenomena— as ideals—present themselves adequately to perception, whereas in science they are replaced by the idea, which is capable of illuminating the object of perception but never of transforming it in intuition” (315). Yet, the ideals of art and the ideas of science Benjamin would keep separate are precisely conjoined in Goethe’s thought. For, despite a coherent architectonics Goethe’s project is predicated upon a concept whose ontological ambiguity gives rise to formal and linguistic experimentation. As we shall see, Goethe never arrives at one satisfactory articulation of the relationship of the scientist/subject to the archetype; instead the various modes of expression, or Vorstellungsarten as Goethe would call them, can be said to highlight different aspects of this complex, ever-evolving relationship. “Body and Soul in Stone and Mountains” Goethe’s 1784 chapter-fragment “On Granite” represents his first attempt to relate the results of his scientific (specifically, geological) findings to the public. Intensely lyrical, the work was nonetheless intended as the beginning of an informative treatise and does in fact convey the central notions and aims of his geological research. Goethe’s central project was to uncover a regular pattern or principle of order behind the apparent confusion of rock forms. Like many contemporary mineralogists, Goethe assumed that the chief mechanism of rock-formation was to be found in the process of crystallization in which rock forms precipitated as crystals out of a primal liquid of which the original deposition was granite. The work begins in a relatively objective and distanced fashion. Goethe opens in a style reminiscent of the classical natural historians by providing the reader with some historical information about the term granite and the mineral’s past uses. Underlying this background information, however, is the subjective belief in the mineral’s noteworthiness and nobility, principally its ability to inspire great works of art such as the Egyptian sphinxes and statues of Memnon. As the opening paragraphs proceed, the subjective tone becomes more prominent: granite is valorized as “das Höchste und Tiefste”; and, with a grandly dramatic pathos, Goethe writes: “It lies unshakably in the deepest bowels of the earth; its ridges soar in peaks which the all-surrounding waters have never risen to touch” (PU 12: 131; HA 13: 254).

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This mode of romantic description mixed with scientific theory builds to a crescendo when the narrating voice suddenly changes to the first person and declares granite to be its new muse: I do not fear the accusation that a contrary spirit has led me away from my consideration and depiction of the human heart, the youngest, most diverse, most fluid, most changeable, most vulnerable part of creation, and has brought me to the observation of the oldest, firmest, deepest, most unshakable son of nature. I may be forgiven my desire for that sublime tranquility which surrounds us when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature, vast and eloquent with its still voice. (PU 12: 132; HA 13: 255)

After inviting the reader to follow along on this new poetic journey, the narrator directly addresses granite: “Filled with these thoughts I approach you, the most ancient and worthiest monuments of time” (PU 12: 132; HA 13: 255). What follows can perhaps best be characterized as a lyrical soliloquy in prose form. As the narrator stands “high atop a barren peak,” he is granted a moment of unmediated contact with the origin and essence of the world: Here you stand upon ground which reaches right down into the deepest recesses of the Earth; no younger strata, no pile of alluvial debris comes between you and the firm foundation of the primal world. … [T]he inner powers of the Earth seem to affect me directly with all their forces of attraction and movement … I feel the first and most abiding origin of our existence. (PU 12: 131–2; HA 13: 255–6)

The narrator’s primal vision is immediately threatened, however, by the intrusion of temporality. As he gazes down upon the valley’s inhabitants “who have built their happy homes on the debris and ruin of error and opinion” (PU 12: 132; HA 13: 256), the narrator envisions the history of the earth from Genesis as a process of increasing destruction and irremediable distancing from all primeval origins. The narrator’s moment of unmediated contact with nature is broken by his awareness of this negative history: I return from these far-reaching thoughts and view the very rocks which have brought exaltation and assurance to my soul by their presence. I see their bulk shot through with cracks, here rising straight up, there askew, sometimes sharply layered, sometimes in formless heaps as though thrown together. At first glance I am tempted to exclaim: ‘Nothing here is in its primal, ancient state; everything is ruin, chaos, and destruction!’ (PU 12: 133; HA 13: 257)

The dramatic shift from sublime ecstasy to chaotic despair in the narrator’s relation to the landscape unmistakably echoes the transformation of nature in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) from a “lovely valley” into “an all-consuming, devouring monster” as the hero loses all hope of winning Lotte’s affections (PU 11: 37).

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Moreover, the language of death, destruction, and chaos is remarkably similar in both visions. Yet, unlike the doomed Werther, the narrator of “On Granite” is rescued from his vision by retreating from nature and returning to the world of scientific books in his study and to a thoroughly objective prose. Through the examination of mineralogical data and the study of numerous geological theories, the narrator proposes to prove the existence of what he intuitively felt—the presence of the “eloquent and still voice” of the “most unshakable son of nature” beneath the apparent chaos of the current landscape. In other words, in a bid to recapture his moment of unmediated contact with the “origin” of nature broken by the perception of human habitation and history, the narrator seeks to supplement and support his original, “primal” experience with scientific analysis. During the next two summers Goethe would return to the Thuringian Forest and to the Harz Mountains, the sites which inspired “On Granite,” accompanied by G. M. Kraus, Weimar’s resident artist, who produced sketches of the various rockformations, and J. C. W. Voigt, a mining and mineralogical expert, who served as Goethe’s scout and land surveyor. The short essays and notes which resulted from these excursions and whose contents range from empirically detailed descriptions of rock forms to brief, rhetorically objective, narrative snippets tracing the development of granite through the ages can be read as failed attempts to complete the project announced in “On Granite.”10 What does begin to emerge from these assorted documents is the ambiguous ontological status that granite and, eventually, other archetypal phenomena would hold in Goethe’s science and the subsequent representational difficulty these phenomena would pose. For Goethe, granite is everywhere present, from the depths to the heights of the earth; it constitutes the limit of our knowledge (“the deepest level that is known to us”) and it is the basis for all other rock forms (DK 25: 311). Despite its ubiquity, however, granite remains difficult to identify and to describe correctly. Tellingly, the piece “On Granite” ends with a list of derivative minerals that have been mistaken for real granite. Whether “pure” granite actually exists or is an idealized rock-type remains unclear. Granite is seen by Goethe to consist of three elements—quartz, feldspar, and mica—held together by no other intervening element. Later Goethe would insist that granite itself neither contains nor is contained by these basic elements—“‘kein Continens und Contentum’”— but rather is somehow the ideally balanced integration of all three components (qtd. in Fink 18). All rock forms would then be interpreted as variations upon this ideal proportion.11 10

 These essays may be found in HA 13: 258–303.  Neil Ribe most accurately describes the curious status of granite in Goethe’s scientific writings: “Granite is characterized, according to Goethe, by a perfect balance among its three component minerals, quartz, feldspar, and mica … the metamorphosis of granite occurs when one of its components becomes dominant, giving rise to a whole series of transition forms … The balanced diversity of the granite in mineralogy may be seen as an elementary threefold polarity, a kind of geological Urphänomen upon which the multiplicity 11

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Goethe never develops these fragmentary documents into the treatise on rock formation which he announces at the end of “On Granite.” In the following section we will consider the first instance in which Goethe does succeed in translating his empirical research into a formal scientific treatise by looking at his botanical work The Metamorphosis of Plants [Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen] (1790). How Goethe incorporates the notion of the archetype which lies on the threshold between subjective experience and objective reality into the format of a systematic, rigorously empirical scientific genre will be our main concern. “The Plant is always only leaf” Despite Goethe’s prolific research and writing in botany, geology, and anatomy throughout the 1780s, The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) is his first published scientific work.12 Initially rejected after an unfavorable preliminary review by a professional botanist hired by Goethe’s publisher Göschen, the treatise, once published elsewhere, was warmly received in professional scientific circles in spite of initial skepticism issuing from the author’s previous renown as a literary writer. The most negative reviews came not from the traditional scientific community but rather from the adherents of Schelling’s romantic Naturphilosophie who regarded Goethe’s work as excessively empirical and disappointingly vague when it came to hypothesizing about the life-force [Bildungstrieb] that governed plant growth.13 Despite continued debate surrounding the scientific value of Goethe’s nature studies, his treatise generally conformed to the standards and expectations of the scientific establishment in late eighteenth-century Germany. In marked contrast to the pathos of “On Granite,” The Metamorphosis of Plants is rigorously objective in tone and style. The paper is organized into eighteen sections, one hundred and twenty-three numbered paragraphs, and employs a traditional taxonomic nomenclature. The growth of one annual plant (specifically the dicotyledonous angiosperms) from seed to flower to fruit to seed again is methodically examined. The chief goal of the treatise is to demonstrate that the of rock forms is elaborated through metamorphosis” (qtd. in Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” 202). 12   Although Goethe did previously write a scientific paper in 1786 on his discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man, this work was never published. Moreover, Goethe never finalized his manuscript which contained several passages in the first-person relating the personal events which led to his discovery. While its tenor does remain objective and its mode thoroughly empirical, the paper lacks “a methodical theoretical framework by which to interpret his observation,” as Nicholas Boyle notes in Goethe: The Poet of the Age (1: 349). Had his work been published, it would most likely have been ignored or rejected by the scientific establishment. 13   Schelver’s letter to Schelling dated November 7, 1803 is a case in point. The letter is cited in DK 24: 939.

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individual sections of the plant—the stem-leaves, the stem, the calyx, the flowerpetals, the flower’s stamen and pistils, the fruit, and the seed in the ground and in the fruit—are in fact different manifestations of a single organ, the leaf. Whether Goethe refers to an ideal or real leaf remains unclear throughout. Toward the end of the treatise Goethe summarizes his attempt: We have sought to derive the apparently different organs of the vegetating and flowering plant from one organ; i.e. the leaf [dem Blatte] normally developed at each node. We have likewise ventured to find in the leaf form a source for the fruits which completely cover the seed. (PU 12: 96, §119; HA 13: 100, §119 emphasis original)

Goethe achieves his aim first by arranging the individual plant forms in a continuous series ranging from the dormant seed to the blossoming flower or to the ripened fruit, and then by describing each particular plant form as a modified “leafform [Blattgestalt]” according to the dynamic laws of polarity (expansion and contraction) and intensification (refinement and nullification), otherwise referred to as the process of metamorphosis. Thus, the germinating seed is described as a contracted, less refined leaf; the calyx (the circular arrangement of sepals underneath the flower, initially enclosing it in a green bud), as a contracted, more refined leaf; and, the flower-petals, as an expanded, more refined manifestation of the calyx. This regular oscillation between expanding and contracting forms in tandem with a continual upward-movement culminates in the production of pollen or, in some species, the seed enclosed in the most expanded form of the leaf, the fruit, at which point the cycle begins again. Although Goethe was continually occupied with the notion of an Urpflanze in his botanical studies, the term disappears entirely from the treatise and is replaced by a potentially more confusing one. Yet, by adopting that term—“leaf”—Goethe avoids creating the impression that the archetype existed only in the past and that all present plant forms are derivations of a lost form. This theory, known generally in the eighteenth century as epigenesis, would condemn the archetype to nonexistence in so far as man could never know it or, more correctly, experience it directly in the present. Also, by employing a term specific to the plant as a point of comparison Goethe avoids the necessity of positing a model-form or idealtypical organ which, to exist, would have to be equally representative of each form and thus identical to no particular form. For Goethe, such an archetype would be a metaphysical phantom existing in an idealized space equidistant from each individual plant form but attached to no form in particular. Instead, by using the leaf as a standard measure, the plant is seen and compared exclusively in terms of itself, using no outside point of reference. Therein lies the great originality of Goethe’s treatise. The term “leaf” clearly places the archetype within the sphere of empirical phenomena as a non-abstractable entity unable to exist or even be conceived of outside of or apart from material, sensuous reality.

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At the end of the treatise, however, Goethe reveals that his use of the term “leaf” has only been a matter of convenience; he cautions that the actual, empirical leaf should not be understood as the primary or originary term in the series—the flower or seed or any other plant form could have served equally well as a reference point. Then pointing to the inadequacy of his terminology, Goethe adds: Here we would obviously need a general term to describe this organ which metamorphosed into such a variety of forms, a term descriptive of the standard against which to compare the various manifestations of its form. For the present, however we must be satisfied with learning to relate these manifestations both forward and backward. (PU 12: 96–7, §120; HA 13: 101, § 120)

By indefinitely deferring the assignation of a name to the entity which is the cornerstone of his entire treatise, Goethe points to the true reality of the plant’s archetypal form and to the true subject of his scientific project. To name something is in some sense to fix it, to render it static. Instead, Goethe’s archetype or Blatt or general term is not revealed in any one particular form, but rather in the movement between forms, or, to be more precise, in the movement we are thinking when we connect one form in the series to the other. In contemplating a plant we cannot actually see the movement between forms; rather we must in a sense create or intend this movement through our faculties of understanding and imagination. By telling us to view the metamorphic series of plant forms in both directions (“both forward and backward”), Goethe clearly wants this movement to be considered not only as a natural process, but as an intellectual, intentional, even creative activity. Goethe promotes his particular method of seeing through his descriptive techniques and mode of presentation. In the treatise, the seed or flower-petal or calyx are never described in and of themselves, but rather as forms in transition, continually in the process of becoming something else. The focus of the descriptions is on the dynamic relations between forms, not the fixed qualities of each individual form. Through the uninterrupted narrative of plant growth and the dramatic language of expansion, contraction, and intensification, Goethe tries to create the impression of movement and encourage the reader to view each form as a temporary, fugitive stage (arrested through the faculty of understanding) in a process of continual change and endless transformation.14 Goethe writes in a later, introductory essay to the treatise: “Thus in setting forth a morphology, we 14

  Nineteenth-century art historian Heinrich Wölfflin uses the phrase “impression of movement [Eindruck der Bewegung]” to describe the effect produced upon the mind when viewing baroque architecture. As distinct from the proportional relations of classical architecture, the irregular and dynamic forms of the baroque give rise to the illusion of motion. See in particular Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien. The parallel between Wölfflin’s description of the baroque and my own characterization of Goethe’s morphology was brought to my attention by Claudia Brodsky Lacour, whose article “‘The Impression of Movement’: Jean-Racine,

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should not speak of structured form or if we use the term we should at least do so only in reference to the idea, the concept, or to an empirical element held fast for a mere moment of time. When something has acquired a form it metamorphoses immediately to a new one” (PU 12: 64; HA 13: 54). As one modern critic of Goethean science puts it (in a slightly different context): “… narration can give the illusion of growth and development and, therefore, provide a more realistic description of organic development than can schemes of classification and analysis” (Fink 65). Often employing the form of direct address, Goethe urges the reader to look ever more closely and carefully at the plant. Extremely attentive to the language in his treatise, Goethe frequently uses the verb “belauschen” to characterize this careful mode of observation. In German, the verb not only means “to look precisely” but also “to eavesdrop,” highlighting Goethe’s unobtrusive methodology and belief in a separate language of nature which the scientist must learn to hear, a language described by the constant, dynamic, yet carefullyregulated metamorphosis of forms. Goethe’s scientific treatise, then, through its specific word-choice, carefully targeted descriptions, and dramatic narrative, seeks to guide the imaginative faculty of the reader into a new method of seeing, a method which must be supplemented by the reader’s active, reconstructive participation. Eight years after the publication of The Metamorphosis of Plants Goethe rewrote the treatise as a classical elegy, essentially translating the contents of his scientific work into poetic form. What relation does the elegy bear to the treatise and to the scientific content Goethe seeks to convey? Is the elegy to be interpreted mainly as a popularization of Goethe’s scientific theories? Or does the aesthetic form of the elegy relate some essential scientific content the treatise could not? More generally, what role does Goethe envision for the domain of art in terms of furthering the ultimate goal of his science, namely the adequate representation of the archetypal realm to perception? The next section addresses these questions in terms of both the botanical elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and the later, less well-known, zoological elegy, “Metamorphosis of Animals.” From The Metamorphosis of Plants to “The Metamorphosis of Plants” In the same year as the publication of “The Metamorphosis of Plants” (1798), Goethe, along with Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the artist Heinrich Meyer, and the philologist Friedrich August Wolff, founded Propylean, an artistic and cultural journal conceived as the standard-bearer for Weimarian classical aesthetics. A chief aim of the journal was to disseminate scientific knowledge to the artistic community in the belief that the artist needed to possess a basic understanding of how nature works in order to properly represent the works of nature. (That Architecte” brings to light Wölfflin’s important conceptual distinction between Renaissance and baroque architecture. My remarks on Wölfflin are drawn from Brodsky Lacour.

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ancient Greek artists had intuitively or “naïvely” incorporated these laws into their artwork was a given.) The strong link between scientific knowledge and aesthetics is set out in Goethe’s introduction to the journal: The human form cannot be thoroughly understood by merely observing its exterior. We need to expose what is inside, distinguish the parts and note their relation; we must be aware of variations, learn to recognize action and reaction and know the hidden, inert, fundamental elements. Only then can we actually perceive and imitate the beautiful, unified whole which moves before our eyes with the rhythmic grace of waves. Thus, observation reaches perfection in knowledge. (PU 3: 82; HA 12: 43)

Goethe’s new aesthetical ethics are unequivocal: “We can compete with nature only if we have learned, at least to some degree, how she goes about creating her works” (PU 3: 82; HA 12: 44). To this end, Goethe had intended to contribute his own scientific findings to the journal. The journal, however, was short-lived (the tide of German romanticism was sweeping over the intellectual landscape); only three issues were published; and Goethe’s promised scientific essays to the artistic community were never written. In this context, Goethe’s metamorphosis elegies, particularly “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” can be read as inversions of the journal’s hypothesized theorem relating scientific knowledge and artistic practice: if scientific truth can guide artistic practice, a work of art which has successfully incorporated this knowledge into its structure can, in turn, convey or reflect scientific truth. Goethe’s own statements concerning the elegies support this interpretation. In a letter accompanying the botanical elegy, Goethe indicates the potential of metrical form to represent natural laws or, rather, our apprehension of these laws: “Enclosed you will find an attempt at representing the experience of nature, if not poetically then at least rhythmically” (HA 1: 600, emphasis added). Indeed, the alternating rhythm between the shorter, tighter pentameter and the more expansive hexameter within the poem’s elegiac distiches mimics the contraction and expansion of leafforms. Likewise, the elegy’s infinite metric variation, achieved by the shifting caesura and fluctuating syllable count in each line, is analogous to the diversity of leaf-forms, while the continually recurring distich, with its fixed foot-count, provides an underlying pattern similar to the “Blatt.”15 Additionally, the process of intensification is conveyed through the elegy’s dramatic narrative drive. Like the treatise, the poem methodically traces the development of the plant from leaf to flower. Yet, instead of detailing the morphological similarities between each plant form, the elegy concentrates more on the productive dynamic between an upward-striving, living organism and the alternately constraining and enabling external, environmental forces which act upon the plant. Empirical detail gives 15   Other critics have remarked on the poem’s formal embodiment of natural laws. See in particular G. Müller.

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way to a sharper focus on pure movement. The succinct account of the transition from stem-leaves to the calyx is exemplary of this shift: Only now it attains the complete intended perfection Which, in many a kind, moves you to wonder, admire. Many jagged and ribbed, on a lusciously, full-fleshed surface, Growth so lavishly fed seems without limit and free. Forcefully here, however, will Nature step in to contain it, Curbing rankness here, gently perfecting the shapes. (PU 1: 156–7, l. 29–34)16

The narrative drive is defined here by the movement from “Vollendung” (“perfection”) to “Vollkommnere,” a term which can best, though awkwardly, be translated as “higher perfection.” In the scientific text, the progression from leaf to calyx is described simply as a state of increasing refinement and complexity of form. In the elegy, this progression is described by a rhetorical dynamic set in play between a vocabulary of sensuality (“lusciously,” “lavishly”) and political liberalism (“free,” “without limit”) on the one hand, and absolutism (“forcefully”) on the other, a metaphoric language which replaces the carefully neutral semantic register of the treatise. Obscured in the treatise, this nexus of conservative political ideology, classical aesthetics, and scientific theory comes to the surface in Goethe’s elegy. In a time of enormous political and social upheaval, Goethe sought to discover an elemental law governing change. If underlying the apparent chaos of nature a principle of order could be revealed, Goethe reasoned that society, viewed as a product of natural processes, could also be understood in these terms. Just as the plant’s ceaseless upward-striving energy needs to be restrained and contained by external forces, so too the forces rapidly changing the political and social scene need to be shaped “benevolently” by the strong hand of a leader (such as Napoleon) lest anarchy prevail, as the example of the French Revolution had shown Goethe. Analogously, Goethe believed that his own creative energy would dissipate unless it was harnessed by the formal rules of classical prosody—rules which he interpreted as imitative of the laws governing the natural world. Significantly, Goethe’s greatest scientific production roughly coincides with the greatest moments of political upheaval in Europe and personal crisis: the metamorphosis of plants was drafted during the French Revolution and the writer’s trip to Italy, the color theory during the July Revolution, and his writings on morphology just after the Napoleonic invasion of Weimar and the death of his wife.17 Moreover, “The Metamorphosis of Plants” was written during the same year as both The Roman Carnival, a sociological-poetic depiction of Italian society, and his paper 16   All future references to the two metamorphosis poems will be from this bilingual edition and will include line numbers only. 17   Karl Löwith makes an astute analysis of the parallel between scientific production, political turmoil, and personal crisis in Goethe’s life in From Hegel to Nietzsche 225.

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on classical aesthetics, “Simple Imitation, Manner, Style.” While the poem thus suggests a complex nexus of politics, science, aesthetics, and personal crisis, it is important, in the context of our analysis, to note that the highly-charged figurative language driving the poem’s narrative, as well as the rhythmic quality of its verse, combine to invoke the universal natural laws of which the poem simultaneously speaks. The most significant difference between the elegy and treatise, however, lies not in the retranslation of the scientific content into a more poetic medium, itself amenable to political interpretation, but in the framing of the botanical material by an address to the poet/scientist’s “beloved.” Women, usually of the noble and uppermiddle class, along with children, were traditionally regarded as the main audience of didactic verse. The aim was chiefly pedagogical (through the popularization of complex scientific data) and moral. Goethe plays upon this tradition, I will argue below, to enlarge the scope of his botanical theory to incorporate extra-scientific realms of experience (i.e., personal, social, political) within its interpretive field. Ultimately, and most importantly, the scientist as viewing subject will be reconsidered not as objective bystander but as active participant within the natural and, by analogy, social processes he seeks to describe. “The Metamorphosis of Plants” opens on an intimate tone: “Overwhelming, beloved, you will find all this mixture of thousands,/ Riot of flowers let loose over the garden’s expanse” (155; l. 1–2). Assuming the dual stance of reassuring teacher and lover, the narrator then offers his botanical theory as a remedy to the overwhelmed beloved, an approach which will transform the “barbaric noise” and the “riot of flowers” into a harmonious chorus. (Note again the implicit political dimension in Goethe’s presentation.) The poet does not volunteer a new nomenclature or linguistic set of symbols to elucidate the botanical scene: “Dear friend, how I wish I were able/ All at once to pass on, happy, the word that unlocks” (155; l. 8–9). Instead, the language of nature—“the holy runes of the goddess” (159; l. 67)—is revealed through the poetic narration of the plant’s development: “Growing consider the plant” (155; l.10). Once the botanical student has learned to read nature’s language properly, the narrator reveals that this process can be extended to encompass the entire natural world, including man: Look, beloved, once more on the teeming of so many colors, Which no longer may now fill with confusion your mind. Every plant now declares those eternal designs that have shaped it, Ever more clearly to you every flower-head can speak. Yet if here you decipher the holy runes of the goddess, Everywhere you can read, even though scripts are diverse: Let the caterpillar drag along, the butterfly busily scurry Imaging man by himself alter the pre-imposed shape. (157–9; l. 63–70)

The jump from plant and animal to man is as sudden as it is intriguing. While man also participates in the same fundamental process of metamorphosis (no matter

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how diverse or different the “script” may at first appear), he plays a part in this process through his own amenability to imaging: “Imaging man by himself alter the pre-imposed shape” (emphasis added). This line can be read in two ways. Goethe either intends that man is capable of effecting the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly in his mind, that is to say, he is capable of imagining and understanding it, or, more compellingly, that man is capable of transforming his own or any determined form he perceives through the formative process of his intellect and the figurative power of language. The final ten verses realize this latter figurative potential. The poet beseeches his beloved to look upon their relationship in the same way she has considered the garden. In so doing, the poet suggests a relation between the processes of the natural world and the world of man. Like the plant, their relationship is presented in stages, beginning with the “seed of friendship” and culminating in the “consummate fruit, [the] marriage of minds” passing through “acquaintance,” “habit,” “friendship,” “love,” and “love, our holiest blessing [die heilige Liebe]” (159; l. 70–80). The intensifying element, alternately termed “force” or “power” for the plant, becomes “love” in the human sphere. Through the displacement of scientific vocabulary onto social relations, the poet not only enacts a scene of seduction, but offers his scientific theory as a model for interpreting human behavior and desire. For the modern reader, the analogy between the flowering of the couple’s love and that of the plant may appear ornamental; considered in the context in which the poem was written, however, the rhetorical move is quite innovative. In “The Love of Plants,” the erotically charged section of Erasmus Darwin’s scientific poem The Botanic Garden written less than a decade before Goethe’s elegy of 1790, Darwin goes out of his way to dissociate floral reproduction from human sexuality, adding pedantic and staid footnotes to the verses describing the union of the stamen and pistil in order to explicitly discourage such an association. Darwin’s gesture was not ironic. Didactic verse in the eighteenth century largely attempted to “reconcile the findings of modern science and natural philosophy with Christian theology” (Nisbet 103).18 Its chief aim was to insure that the moral, ethical, and spiritual dimension of the scientist’s work was preserved. Darwin’s work perhaps best embodies the moral tension involved in studying a natural world that does not conform in the least to the conservative social ideals and precepts of the society which supports the research. Goethe’s poem is gloriously free from this moral dilemma. The poem views love as a noble and spiritual force and the union of stamen and pistil is not presented in the salaciously suggestive and sexually repressed language of Erasmus Darwin, but rather in a celebratory language which pays tribute to the creative and natural processes which are at work throughout nature. Goethe’s second elegy “Metamorphosis of Animals” (1806) further extends the figurative reach of Goethe’s scientific theory. Unlike the elegy on plants, the 18   Nisbet’s article details the influence of Darwin’s The Botanic Garden upon Goethe’s own didactic verse, specifically “The Metamorphosis of Animals.” My reading of Goethe’s poem alongside that of Darwin is indebted to him.

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zoological elegy is addressed to a general community of educated readers. Lacking the intimate tone of the botanical work, “Metamorphosis of Animals” soberly and prosaically details the principles of Goethe’s zoological theories, focusing on the relation of form to external, environmental forces. Toward the end of the elegy, however, the natural laws are suddenly recast in moral and political terms. This shift is highlighted by a turn to a more intimate and personal form of address: May this beautiful concept of power and limit, of random Venture and law, freedom and measure, of order in motion, Defect and benefit, bring you high pleasure; gently instructive, Thus the sacred Muse in her teaching tells you of harmonies. (PU 1: 162–3, l. 50–53)

The second-person pronoun (used only once previously and appearing here twice in one couplet and frequently in the closing twelve lines) compels the reader to consider the natural laws as they apply to his or her own situation. After establishing this personal connection, the poet grandly extends the scope of such a “concept” to encompass the moral, political, artistic, and economic spheres of mankind: Moral philosophers never attained to a concept sublimer, Nor did men of affairs, nor artists imagining; rulers, Worthy of power, enjoy their crowns on this account only. (54-6)

Goethe’s empirically grounded and rigorously deduced zoology is suddenly extended to the entirety of human activity. The poem then concludes with an implicit disavowal of Goethe’s earlier poetics and a turn to a new scientifically centered aesthetics: Stand where you are, be still, and looking behind you, backward, All things consider, compare, and take from the lips of the Muse then, So that you’ll see, not dream it, a truth that is sweet and is certain. (59–61) [Hier stehe nun still und wende die Blicke Rückwärts, prüfe, vergleiche, and nimm vom Munde der Muse, Daß du shauest, nicht schwärmst, die liebliche, volle Gewißheit.]

The verb “to dream” in the last line is a translation from “schwärmen,” a clear marker for sentimentalist poetics. It is replaced by a poetics that is simultaneously governed by ancient aesthetic models (“looking behind you, backward”) and modern scientific techniques (“prüfe,” “vergleiche”). Implicit in Goethe’s extension of his scientific thought to all aspects of life is the inclusion of the scientist within this model: the scientist, like the objects that surround him, must be viewed biographically, as an entity whose true character is revealed in the process of becoming and whose views and assumptions are shaped by the world in which he operates. Man, whether as amateur botanist or

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professional scientist, philosopher or writer, statesman or citizen, is subject to the same laws that govern the objects he seeks to study. The gerund in the poet’s bidding to his lover, “Growing consider the plant,” can be directed toward the observer as well as the observed phenomenon. For Goethe, the notion of a subjectivity detached from itself and from time is as inadequate as the Linnaean taxonomic system which seeks to organize the natural object-world into a fixed, unmoving, hierarchical grid. For Goethe, the scientist and the world encounter each other as historical, dynamically evolving subjects and objects, each governed by the same laws. Through this new understanding of subject and object, Goethe would seek to reconcile experience, defined as knowledge derived from an active participation in events, with the empirical data of experimentation. This reconceptualization of the scientist as purposefully involved observer, first broached in the two elegies, increasingly insinuates itself within Goethe’s scientific thinking and becomes a central component of his most extensive scientific work, the Theory of Color. Colores imaginarii, Ocular Spectra, and Goethe’s Theory of Color The sine qua non of Goethe’s Theory of Color is the basic identity or continuity between observer and observed—a relationship expressed poetically in the introduction to his treatise, itself a translation of Plotinus: “Were the eye not of the sun,/ How could we behold the light? [Wäre nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,/ Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken?]” (PU 12: 164; HA 13: 324).19 Goethe goes on to describe the relation between light and the eye in a prose which freely mixes scientific terminology with a biblical tone, two authoritative discourses whose union combines to lend a certain primacy and unassailability to Goethe’s notions: “From among the lesser ancillary organs of the animals, light has called forth one organ to become its like, and thus the eye is formed by the light and for the light so that the inner light may emerge to meet the outer light” (PU 12: 164; HA 13: 323). By the end of the sentence, the more symbolic significance of light is exploited to point toward an even deeper line of connection between man and nature, observer and observed. Repeatedly Goethe associates the inner-workings of consciousness with the outer-workings of nature. Through a sort of pseudophysiological explanation, Goethe identifies a basic link between the faculty of imagination, that is, our ability to produce images through our “inner-eye,” and the objects we perceive through our “outer” or physical eye:

19

 The German verse is Goethe’s translation of a poem by Plotinus (c. a.d. 204–270). Goethe translates these lines slightly differently when he includes them as an epigraph to a later paper on color. The translation is as follows: “Wäre nicht dein Auge sonnenhaft,/ Wie könnt’ es je die Sonn’ erblicken?” (HA 12: 671). Note the stronger parallel between “sonnenhaft” and “die Sonn’” as well as the more intimate tone of address.

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As the above passage makes clear, the eye is conceived of as a threshold space where subject and object, self and nature, inner nature and outer world, are united. The centrality of the “attached” observer, his status as participant in the production of color, is also conveyed through the formal organization of the treatise. The Theory of Color begins with a presentation of “physiological colors” by which Goethe means those colors produced in the eye as after-images, dreamimages, and optical illusions. Dismissed by scientists as “colores imaginarii” and “ocular spectra,” these “fleeting” and “transitory” colors are, Goethe asserts, the “basis for [my] entire theory” and “evidence of the living interaction between [color’s] inner nature and the outer world” (PU 12: 168). For Goethe, these colors are foundational because they originate in the eye and hence are the most immediate to the subject. After this opening section, the treatise extends outward, away from the subject, to what are termed the “physical colors” (those produced by optical media, such as a prism), and then on to the “chemical colors” (the permanent colors which belong to the object itself, independent of the observer); at this point, the treatise moves back inward and, in the final section, returns to the subject and its relation to color, but, as Douglas Miller remarks, on the “higher level of feeling, esthetics, and symbol where color may become creative.”20 This dynamic structure of the upward-spiral evident in the structure of the Theory of Color is identical to the motion described by the plant in the botanical treatise and elegy. The formal architecture of the color treatise thus tacitly echoes the natural processes it describes. Goethe’s strategy is clear: as in the Metamorphosis of Plants, he seeks to lead us to that heightened perception of nature which discloses the archetypal realm by encouraging a mode of cognition that reflects the rhythms and processes of the natural world through a carefully structured reading experience. What is new here, however, is the explicit involvement of the subject in this schema. Nature and natural observer are intertwined. Yet, if man is considered part of the very laws he wishes to comprehend, as the elegies and the treatise on color make clear, how can he hope to gain an objective and reliable perspective from which to deduce the laws that govern life?

20  The above analysis of the structure of color theory draws on Miller’s invaluable introduction to the English translation of Theory of Color, PU 12: xiii.

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For Goethe, the subject’s ineluctable involvement within the processes of nature constitutes the precondition for any real scientific knowledge of the world. The epistemological boundaries of modern science are defined precisely by the shared qualities uniting man and nature: We perceive light, to restate Goethe’s axiom quoted above, only because our eyes are made of light. Likewise, man is able to perceive the archetypal forms shining through empirical reality because he is governed by the same processes which determine the archetype’s physical manifestations. As Erich Heller has argued, Goethe views the detached perspective of the modern scientist as too subjective: by positing a self that stands outside of nature, the modern scientist, according to Goethe’s logic, denies the primary correspondence between subject and object—a correspondence which is the only true basis for objectivity (24). Objective thinking, as Goethe defines it in his essay “Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase,” is precisely that type of cognition which does not separate itself from the object, but rather seeks to think with and through the object: the German “gegenständliches Denken,” which can be translated as “concrete thinking” or literally as “object-like thinking,” best foregrounds the distinction between the detached perspective of the modern scientist and the “attached” perspective of the Goethean scientist. Unlike the traditional scientist who hopes to explain the world as it is from the outside, Goethe seeks to give voice to our experienced situation within it. Moreover, Goethe sees a fatal methodological flaw in separating ourselves from nature, namely the danger that the raw data and empirical results of separate experiments and observations could be linked together in a system of explanation which does not conform to the order of the natural world but rather to some clever model created by an ever-resourceful mind. The creative consciousness of even the most attentive observer, Goethe argues, tends to superimpose its own design upon nature in its rush to find meaning and order. For Goethe, Newton is exemplary of this overly-subjective approach: [Newton] goes astray, and in a crucial fashion. First, he finds his own theory plausible, then he rushes to convince himself of it, before he realizes what laborious gimmicks will be required to implement the application of his hypothetical aperçu by means of experience. But he has already publicly presented it, and now he doesn’t fail to muster all his mental dexterity to push his thesis through, while proclaiming to the world, with incredible boldness, that the whole absurd business is absolutely true. (HA 14: 143)21

Goethe’s approach should not be mistaken for a mystical one in which the subject loses itself in the flux of nature; rather, Goethe insists that the scientist vigorously retain his self-awareness and capacity for critical reflection and self-examination while actively participating in the processes of nature. As Goethe writes in the preface to his color theory, “The ability to [develop a theory of what we have seen] 21

  My thanks to Peter Heinegg for this and the following unpublished translations.

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with clarity of mind, with self-knowledge, in a free way, and (if I may venture to put it so) with irony, is a skill we will need in order to avoid the pitfalls of abstraction and attain the results we desire, results which can find a living and practical application” (PU 12: 159; HA 13: 317). It is easy, as Goethe’s characterization of Newton demonstrates, to become detached from nature: our innate tendency to hasten toward all-embracing theories, terminologies, and explanatory systems, our need to lay hold of and control the objects under our gaze, our natural envy of others, our impatience and desire for success all conspire to take us off course.22 In order to prevent this, Goethe champions a cognitive flexibility modeled on the processes of nature itself: “If we wish to arrive at some living perception of nature we ourselves must remain as quick and flexible as nature and follow the example she gives” (PU 12: 64; HA 13: 56). Indeed, as Amrine notes, Goethe’s ideal methodology as elaborated in his various scientific essays is organized according to a morphological model (“The Metamorphosis of the Scientist” 189). Like the movement of polarity apparent in nature, the scientist’s thinking should strive to move continually and freely between idea and experience, hypothesis and empirical data, synthesis and analysis, general and particular, law and exception to the law, never resting at either pole. The ideal state of conscious connectivity is aimed at by constantly and rapidly oscillating between the two antipodal states of selfless immersion in and critical detachment from nature. And like the movement of intensification, the scientist’s mind progressively refines its perceptual and cognitive powers through this dynamic, productive interaction. As Goethe writes, the scientist will discover, in the mutual interaction between man and nature, “a potential for infinite growth through constant adaptation of his sensibilities and judgment to new ways of acquiring knowledge and responding with action” (PU 12: 61; HA 13: 53). Newton’s “failure,” as Goethe sees it, is his inability to move flexibly between theory and empirical fact: Newton is described in the Theory of Color as inflexible and rigid (“erstarrt” and “unbiegsam”) in his adherence to his masterhypothesis and in his unwillingness to consider light in anything other than a purely abstract, mathematical approach. Newton’s theoretical framework or mode of perception excludes the physiological, aesthetic, and even moral dimensions of color phenomena from the realm of experience. For Goethe, experience, viewed as a personal encounter with and participation in the natural world, is most complete, open, rich, and thereby truthful when it is structured according to processes analogous to those found in nature. The experience of nature, which Goethe attempts to inscribe within his scientific works and which he later theorizes in natural, morphological terms, becomes the subject of the most substantial part of the Theory of Color, the section entitled “Materials for a History of Color Theory.” Instead of tracing the major advances and discoveries that constitute the history of optics, Goethe focuses on 22  These dangers are described in detail by Goethe in his essay “The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object” (PU 12: 11–17).

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the individual scientists themselves. Goethe’s narrative consists mainly of a series of short biographical sketches of major scientific figures arranged chronologically from Antiquity to the present. By foregrounding the life of the scientist and not simply his particular contribution, Goethe hopes to show the extent to which theories and hypotheses are products of extra-scientific factors such as the historically unique social, political, cultural, and economic environment in which an individual works as well as that individual’s personality, relation to inherited tradition, and intellectual interests. Thus Goethe writes of Descartes: “‘The life of this excellent man, like his teaching, can hardly be understood unless at the same time we also think of him as a French nobleman’” (HA 14: 101). Similarly, Roger Bacon’s contributions can only be fully conceptualized as a product of the dual influence of a conservative Christian culture and the progressive social and political ideals embodied in the Magna Carta signed the year before his birth (HA 14: 58–66). The scientist’s character or personality also plays an important role for Goethe, as the example of Newton shows: “Newton was a well-organized, healthy, good-tempered man, without passionate desires. His mind was of a constructive nature, in the most abstract sense; therefore higher mathematics was given to him as the means through which he sought to build his inner world and to master the outer one” (HA 14: 171). In some instances—Kepler provides a typical example—the force of character could be so determinative as to counter all other external influences: “When one compares Kepler’s upbringing to what he became and achieved one is astonished and convinced that true genius can overcome all obstacles” (HA 14: 99). In the history of science, Goethe discerns two distinct scientific personalities or types, represented by Plato and Aristotle respectively. In Plato, Goethe sees the tendency toward abstraction, formalization, and the resulting idealization of the world of natural phenomena, whereas in Aristotle, who is described as a “master builder” man and an “arranger of materials” Goethe sees the tendency toward empiricism and materialism. Plato’s character determines his approach: [Plato] dives into the depths, more to fill them with his essence than to explore them. He moves toward the heights, longing to participate once again in his origins. Everything that he says relates to the one eternally … Good, True, Beautiful … (HA 14: 53–4)

Newton is characterized as a kind of seventeenth-century counterpart to Plato in his predisposition to superimpose an abstract, ideal model, originating in his mind, onto nature; the Aristotelian mode of thought also resurfaces in the seventeenth century in those scientists whom Goethe describes as “collectors of experiences” (HA 14: 143). Indeed, it is tempting to read Goethe’s history of science as a narrative governed by the dynamic interplay between the Aristotelian and Platonic tendencies. Goethe himself describes his project in these terms: “Thus, we are now left with the duty to demonstrate to the friend of nature and history how in modern times the beliefs of Plato and Aristotle could once again be raised up, repressed,

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utilized, completed or mutilated” (HA 14: 56). Moreover, in the introduction to the historical section on color theory, Goethe describes the general movement of scientific progress as a spiral. Clearly, a morphological view of the history of science suggests itself with each particular stage of development viewed as a permutation of the polarity described by the Aristotelian and Platonic tendencies. As one critic writes concerning Goethe’s view of scientific progress: “Innovation for Goethe consists … in the refinement and transformation of inherited thought; and not in a scienza nuova, coming out of nowhere …” (Stephenson 37). Numerous critics arguing for an organic, natural interpretation of “Materials for a History of Color Theory” have sought to map Goethe’s developmental theory of morphology onto his history of science.23 Mediated tradition and immediate experience, abstraction and empiricism, mechanism and dynamism: these binary oppositions have variously been cited as the productive tensions that propel science forward in Goethe’s history, analogous to the natural law of polarity. Yet, what emerges most forcefully in a reading of the historical section is not the presence of some overarching historical process or systematic, rational plan linking the individual biographies together. Indeed, Goethe describes his history at one point as “a labyrinthian garden” (HA 14: 58). If there is a structure it is subordinated to the story of the individual struggling to achieve understanding—an understanding both limited and enabled by the incredibly complex, ultimately incommensurable, matrix of forces (social, intellectual, and so forth) which intersects with the individual’s life and whose association with the individual and his innate character or predilections results in a particular hypothesis or mode of perception. The focus of Goethe’s narrative is more on the socio-psychological development of the individual and the very human context in which discoveries are made and not on the inexorable forces of history. As Goethe writes, “The weak thread that continually runs through the sometimes so broad fabric of knowledge and science down through the ages, even the darkest and most muddled ones, is stitched by individuals” (HA 14: 49). By highlighting the extra-scientific influences upon our perception of the natural world, Goethe does not, I would argue, draw us into a hopeless state of epistemological relativity; instead he promotes, through the extensive biographical and cultural material, an acute awareness of the extent to which our apprehension of nature is mediated by external factors, and, in so doing, fosters that ironic self-awareness which he sees as necessary to achieve the fullest, most objective experience of the natural world. Goethe’s historical relativism is not a rejection of the scientific project per se; rather, it forces science to acknowledge its rootedness in the world in which we all engage. To be sure, Goethe’s history of science is to a large extent self-serving: by casting doubt on Newton’s approach to nature, Goethe creates a space for his own brand of science. In fact, the “History of Color Theory” concludes with Goethe’s own autobiographical sketch, seemingly announcing by its ultimate position the imminent ascendancy of a Goethean theory 23   See Fink for a detailed exposition of the various attempts that have been made to read Goethe’s history of science morphologically.

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of color. Indeed, Goethe’s final major scientific publication, “The Morphological Notebooks,” which appears shortly after “Theory of Color,” has been read, and rightly so, as an attempt to foster a community of like-minded or at least favorably inclined young scientists who would move forward along the path blazed by Goethe. Instead of pursuing this argument, which reveals a Goethe supremely confident in the merits of his own science and naïvely optimistic as to its future reception, I would like to focus on “The Morphological Notebooks” as the final expression of a science which insists upon the primacy of the individual’s directly felt and lived experience of nature as the only secure route to an understanding of the objective laws governing the world. In “The Morphological Notebooks” the experiencing self is no longer simply a component of or supplement to scientific work, but its organizing principle. From Science to Autobiography By any standard, literary or scientific, “The Morphological Notebooks” is a strange collection of writings, and yet also strangely representative of Goethe’s science as a whole, capturing both in form and content the diversity as well as the immense range of his scientific work.24 Published over an eight-year period, from 1817 to 1824, the journal contains work written as early as 1784, published and unpublished, as well as material composed expressly for the journal itself; writings from over a forty-year period are placed together in no apparent chronological or narrative order. Each volume contains not only individual scientific treatises and their supporting theoretical essays, but also lyric poems, elegies, didactic verse, aphorisms, letters, diary entries, Goethe’s reviews of other scientists’ works, excerpts from those scientific works, and even other scientists’ reviews of Goethe’s works. Additionally, each field of Goethe’s scientific inquiry is given ample representation. The volumes cover his writings on botany, zoology, meteorology, mineralogy, geology, anatomy, physiology, and chromatics; they also include Goethe’s thoughts on the sciences in which he intentionally did not indulge, such as physics, astronomy, and mathematics. The notebooks contain some of Goethe’s most well-known and often-cited “theoretical” or “methodological” essays such as “Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase” and “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject.” Also included in the journal are the majority of Goethe’s poems taken as indications of his scientific-minded poetics, such as the two elegies on the metamorphosis of plants and animals, as well as “Primal Words. Orphic,” “One and All,” “You must, when contemplating nature.,” “In Honor of Howard,” 24

  The German “Hefte” is difficult to translate properly. I alternate between the word “journal” and “notebook” depending on the context. While the term “journal” captures the periodical nature of the work but falsely suggests a diary, “notebook” better captures the looser organizational structure of the work.

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and “Now in his name who made himself creation.,”—to name only the more prominent examples. And, of course, there are the scientific works, which include Goethe’s paper on the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man (Goethe’s one uncontested contribution to modern science), the essays on comparative anatomy, the major treatise on the metamorphosis of plants, and a host of smaller papers. Most often, these works are studied in isolation. The context in which they were published (most for the first time) has been largely ignored.25 Not surprisingly, given the journal’s wild diversity of content and form and its chronological range, Goethe cautions the reader not to view these collected writings as a “finished literary work” and disavows all pretense of aesthetic unity— “Conceived individually from alternating points of view, under the influence of contradictory states of mind, written down at different times, [the essays] could not possibly form an integrated whole” (“Excursus,” Goethe’s Botanical Writings, 240; “Zwischenrede,” Hanser 12: 93). Goethe is speaking specifically of his theoretical essays, yet his argument easily extends itself to the poems and aphorisms scattered throughout the journal’s pages. Interestingly, Goethe uses a similar argument to justify the repetitiveness of the edited version of the Italian Journey. In fact, much of Goethe’s literary work, most particularly Wilhelm Meisters Journeyman Years, that is contemporaneous with the scientific journals appears to be predicated upon an apparent formlessness of composition and stylistic heterogeneity which obscures, yet gives rise to, a deeper sense of unity or higher order of connectivity. Indeed, while there may be no obvious aesthetic or structural unity to the work, Goethe’s motley journal has one common denominator: Each essay, poem, or aphorism is related to a specific moment or period in Goethe’s life; each scientific revelation and the resulting works, scientific or literary, are placed in the context of Goethe’s life and experiences. The journal’s subtitle—“Experiences, Observations, Conclusions, Together with Events from my Life”—makes this unifying feature explicit. Minute autobiographical references fill the pages, carefully relating, for instance, the circumstances that led to Goethe’s discovery of botany, the fortuitous 25   Two useful pieces dealing specifically with these writings in the context of the journals are Neubauer’s introduction to the twelfth volume of the Hanser edition of Goethe’s collected works and Dorothea Kuhn, “Das Prinzip der autobiographischen Form in Goethes Schriftenreihe ‘Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie.” There is also an excellent chapter devoted to the journals in the context of the evolving relationship between autobiography and science in Goethe’s œuvre in Koranyi, Autobiographik und Wissenschaft im Denken Goethes. In general Koranyi’s work considers the relationship between autobiography and science in Goethe and, thus, bears comparison with my own argument. Koranyi sees Goethe’s autobiographical writings emerging out of his intense engagement in the sciences. The critical neglect of the scientific journal is due in large part to the fact that the journal was never republished as part of Goethe’s complete works. Instead the various parts of the journal were most often classified according to generic categories and grouped accordingly. In 1989, the Carl Hanser Verlag published the first modern edition of Goethe’s complete works to stay true to the original ordering. Accordingly, all references to the notebooks will be taken from the Hanser edition.

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encounters with people who influenced his scientific ideas, and even the particular circumstances of a scientific paper’s publication. Before presenting “In Honor of Howard” and the two metamorphosis-poems, for example, Goethe explains at length the specific events, personal and intellectual, that precipitated their composition. Where there is no specific autobiographical marker, either within an individual text or surrounding that text, as in several of the lyric poems, there remains a sense that the work is related to a specific and unique individual whom the reader has come to know in the more autobiographical sections. Whereas the traditional scientist consciously effaces his presence in order to present the objective and unbiased results of his experimentation, Goethe purposely relates the objective content of his scientific research to the particulars of his life. While the appellation “autobiographical” may be a useful term to describe the minute references to the particular meetings, chance encounters, and unique occurrences that form the colorful background to Goethe’s scientific pursuits, it should be used with caution. Goethe never employed the term “autobiography,” nor is there any evidence that he was familiar with it. As I noted in this book’s first chapter, the word only comes into use in Germany around the end of the eighteenth century. Under the heading “Autobiographie” Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon claims that Herder is the first German intellectual to use the term in a published work. A literary product of the Enlightenment, the autobiography is a loosely conceived genre whose only formal dictate is that the author recount his own life in a more or less complete and chronological fashion from his birth to the present. Instead of “Autobiographie” Goethe uses the word “Lebensereignisse” which translates somewhat clumsily to “life’s events or occurrences.” Distinct from the literary form of autobiography, the term “Lebensereignisse” carries with it no formal preconditions (no matter how relaxed these conventions might have been), no presumption of comprehensiveness or chronological ordering. The stress in Goethe’s word choice is simply on life and the events which make up that life. Moreover, whereas the author of an autobiography traditionally recounts his life as a progressive development or Bildung toward the enlightened perspective of the narrative present, Goethe expressly eschews this structuring principle: “An almost impossible task confronts anyone seeking to depict the phases, thousands in number, leading to a purer, freer state of self-awareness. Here [in the notebooks] there can be no talk of stages of development, only of wrong turns, twisting roads, hidden ways, and finally of the unintended jump, the energetic leap which takes us to a higher level of understanding” (PU 12: 21; HA 10: 542). If the autobiographical markers were intended to impress a certain historical character upon the project, as Goethe often stated, they simultaneously reject any notion of a straightforward, progressive history of scientific discovery and enlightenment. Indeed, Goethe’s individual scientific development as conveyed in the notebooks is best characterized through the image of the “labyrinthian garden” which Goethe employed to depict the trajectory of scientific progress in the “The History of Color Theory.”

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The autobiographical sections and references serve a function beyond that of depicting Goethe’s struggle to achieve scientific insight into the natural world. The autobiographical format was chosen after years of equivocation. Throughout the 1790s, the decade of his greatest and most extensive scientific work, Goethe could not resign himself to a particular form in which to present his findings. The works examined in this chapter, particularly The Metamorphosis of Plants and the Theory of Colors, constitute only a small portion of Goethe’s total scientific production. The vast majority of his writings remained unpublished, including the paper on the intermaxillary bone, the celebrated lectures on osteology given at Jena in 1795, as well as numerous less significant essays on geology and mineralogy. The near destruction of his scientific papers during an attack on Weimar by Napoleonic forces provided the catalyst needed to prompt Goethe to publish his works: Had the hour of danger just past not brought home to us the value of the written record, I would never have been tempted to entrust my views on nature to this fragile vessel on the ocean of opinion. Therefore let what I often dreamt of as a book when I was filled with the high hopes of youth now appear as an outline, as a fragmentary collection. (PU 12: 61–2; HA 13: 54)

In place of what is a clear reference to the abandoned “Novel of the Universe,” that grand historical narrative of the world, Goethe substitutes a fragmentary, loosely organized, open-ended collection of papers—a form more appropriate to the scientist’s own changing, incomplete, and adapting knowledge of the world. Goethe’s reluctance to publish is not rooted primarily in his dissatisfaction with the fragmentary form of the journal, but in his general suspicion of the written word as an adequate form of representation of the world of natural phenomena. As Goethe warns in the journal, “Words and signs are nothing compared to observation that is alive and certain” (Hanser 12: 473). And in a similar vein, Goethe cautions the reader: “He who beholds the phenomena will often extend his thinking beyond it (i.e. to the archetypal level); he who merely hears about the phenomena will not be moved to think at all” (PU 12: 307; HA 12: 434). Indeed, the Theory of Color contains some of Goethe’s most significant elaborations on the role of language in science. In an idiom reminiscent of modern linguistic theory, Goethe writes on the figurative aspect of all scientific language: How difficult it is, though, to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word … We are insufficiently aware that a language is, in fact, merely symbolic, merely figurative, never a direct expression of the objective world, but only a reflection of it. This is especially true when we speak of things … things we might call activities rather than objects … They cannot be held fast and yet we must speak of them; hence we look for all sorts of formulas to get at them, at least metaphorically. (PU 12: 277; HA 13: 491–2)

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After conceding the inevitable necessity of transforming our apprehension of natural phenomena into language, Goethe goes on to list a series of common formulas used to “get at” nature; they are the metaphysical, the mechanical, the mathematical, and the moral. While recognizing the virtues of each method, Goethe also identifies their particular shortcomings. He then envisions an ideal mode of representation best described as the composite of all possible formulas: “However, the scientist might make conscious use of all these modes of thought and expression to convey his view of natural phenomena in a multifold language. If he could avoid becoming one-sided, and give living expression to living thought, it might be possible to communicate much that would be welcome” (PU 12: 277; HA 13: 492, emphasis added). By opening himself up to all possible formulas for describing observable phenomena, the ideal scientist, according to Goethe’s conception, allows the archetypal processes or forms underlying these phenomena to reveal themselves in their varying aspects: the metaphysical can reveal their power, the mathematical their formal perfection, the empirical their ceaseless creative adaptability, and the moral their “delicate” character. For Goethe, we need to use all of our faculties or senses (moral, conceptual, sensual, imaginative, and spiritual) to obtain the clearest possible perception of the archetypal realm. Correspondingly, we need to adopt a multi-layered descriptive style which incorporates all of these aspects. Goethe’s scientific journal, with its formal treatises and lyric poems, theoretical essays and personal letters, philosophical speculations and empirical data, can be read as an attempt to “give living expression to living thought” by employing such a “multifold language.” The botanical treatise on plant metamorphosis, the accompanying elegy, and the subsequent philosophical pieces and maxims each express in different descriptive styles the various dimensions of the writer’s encounter with and reflection upon natural phenomena. In an important sense, however, the journal was a failure. It remained a “fragmentary collection” and not the book Goethe had dreamt of in his youth. Goethe, himself, recognized this failure, referring to the final volumes disparagingly as constituting a “baroque diversity” (Hanser 12: 837). Nonetheless Goethe continues to contemplate the possibility of a truly objective language that would be commensurate with nature. In seeking to depict the paradoxical dynamic of nature’s fixed but ever-changing forms—a notion that lies at the heart of his morphological science—Goethe envisions a mode of representation modeled on musical notation: Comparison between the tones, which are by nature always progressing, and the equal temperament, which is constricted into the octaves. This actually makes possible, for the first time, a truly radical higher music, in defiance of nature. We would have to bring in a technical lecture. A symbol system would have to be set up! But who is to achieve that? And who would acknowledge what had been achieved? (Hanser 12: 295)

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The interaction between the simultaneously occurring, yet opposing forces of differentiation and specificity are compared to musical notes and octaves respectively: each note is distinct and identifiable by its regularity of vibration, yet can be harmonically related to one of the other seven fundamental notes in any octave. Goethe, of course, never succeeded in creating a symbolic system that would “protect nature” by adequately imitating its processes. Yet the creation of such a language always remained a goal. Early on Goethe called for the development of a descriptive style which would incorporate what he saw as the fundamental characteristics of the natural world. This mode of representation employed in conjunction with the full use of our mental powers would enable us to train methodically several of our senses at once upon an object revealing it in all of its richness: If we are thoughtful and strong enough to approach our object, behold it and handle it, with a simple, yet all-encompassing, lawful yet free, lively yet regulated descriptive style; if we are in the position to penetrate to the certain and unambiguous Genius of creative Nature, with the complex of our mental powers, which we care to call genius, but which often creates ambiguous effects, several senses in one could work upon the tremendous object: then something would come into being with which we, as human beings, could be pleased. (Hanser 12: 203)

In the context of this particular quote, which is taken from the osteological lectures, Goethe is challenging scientists to develop a language that is able to engage our abstract and empirical faculties simultaneously. Elsewhere Goethe hints at a language that reconciles other seemingly opposed faculties. He speaks, for example, of a “delicate empiricism [eine zarte Empirie]” (PU 12: 306; HA 12: 435), thus merging the moral and the sensual. Goethe also speaks of the possibility of a “precise sensory imagination [exacte sinnliche Phantasie]” to guide the scientist, thus combining the precision of the physicist with the concreteness of the empiricist and the imaginative faculty of the poet. In the absence of a “lawful yet free, lively yet regulated” language which would allow us to engage all of our senses when considering an object, Goethe can be seen to substitute a variety of languages each highlighting different ways the archetype reveals itself to his senses at different moments of his life. The autobiographical references give coherence, however tenuous, to the disparate contents and discourses of the journal by providing a common point of reference to which they are anchored. Yet, in another sense, their role is more than structural. Considered as another descriptive style in Goethe’s “multifold language,” the autobiographical sections communicate the most essential aspect of Goethe’s apprehension of the archetypal realm—namely the archetype as lived experience. This personal perception of nature is the unassailable foundation upon which all of Goethe’s scientific investigation is built:

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Thus, my nature studies rest on the pure foundation of experience. Who can take away from me the fact that I was born in 1749, that I (to skip over a great deal) faithfully taught myself from the first edition of Erxleben’s Naturlehre . Who can take away from me the secret joy I feel when I am aware that, thanks to constant, careful effort, I have myself come close to more than a few great, earthshaking discoveries, that their appearance burst forth, as it were, from within me; and I now clearly saw right before me the few steps that I had failed to take in my obscure research. (Hanser 12: 264–5)

As the modern German physicist, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker notes on Goethe’s relation to modern science, Goethe wanted to convey not only the results, the raw data generated from his geological and botanical expeditions, but “the ecstasy of the moment” of scientific observation and discovery itself, “this joyful collecting,” the basic “inclination to collect and classify.” Goethe wanted to communicate how he himself experienced nature and thereby impel others to recognize the validity and primacy of their own experiences. “How many pieces did he himself pry loose from a rock with the geologer’s hammer! How many flowers and trees did he observe on his travels, grow at home,” Weizsäcker writes, “How did the phenomena of color spring at him with his every glance into nature … Not the delighted eyes alone took in the abundance: In walking, riding climbing, and swimming his body experienced nature” (97). In less effusive terms, we could say that Goethe insists on the embodied nature of the experiencing self. For Goethe the process of scientific investigation was as important as, and in fact inseparable from, the subsequent findings of the investigation. It is this complete, joyful, undetached, yet objective experience and the “unrelenting effort” to grasp nature at its highest level which Goethe seeks to capture in his ultimately autobiographical science. And, as we shall see in the following chapter, the principles of his scientific vision come to shape Goethe’s ultimate autobiographical work—Poetry and Truth.

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Chapter 5

Self-Formations: Order and Disorder in Poetry and Truth

The older I become, the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.—Goethe to Zelter, November 9, 1829

The title of Goethe’s major autobiography, Poetry and Truth, playfully, even provocatively, alludes to his self-study, and to autobiography generally, as a necessarily indissoluble mixture of the objective and the subjective, fact and fiction, science and imagination. Truthfulness, the assumed veracity of the narrator’s account of his own life, is for many readers the essential requirement for defining a text as autobiographical and setting it apart from imaginative fiction. Once the authenticity of the narrator’s account is called into question, the possibility of a positive aesthetic reception appears to vanish. Goethe was well aware of the provocative nature of the title of his autobiography. In his correspondence he writes that he hopes the title will foster doubts in his readers’ minds about any easy relationship between autobiography and truth (HA 10: 641). The title is all the more unsettling given that the relationship between “poetry” and “truth” was undergoing a dramatic change at the time. In the eighteenth century, poetry is regarded as truth embroidered by fiction designed to please the reader. All art is viewed as imitation, and the least transparent form of imitation is poetry. As M. H. Abrams points out, the logical antithesis of poetry in this scheme is history (The Mirror and the Lamp 89). Poetry depicts the typical, the general, the timeless, while history represents the unique actions and events of the past. By the nineteenth century Romantic theorists turn the relationship between poetry and truth on its head. Poetry now represents truth, but a higher truth, which non-figurative language is able to describe only partially. The logical opposite of poetry becomes science, which claims to represent the truth, but for Romantic writers does so only partially. Scientific materialists, who a century earlier thought they had cornered the market on the truth and cast poetry as false or trivial at best, found themselves cast as mere empiricists whose works could not capture the essential truth that only poetry could. 

  Note the fury which accompanied the revelation that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1995), the story of his Jewish childhood experience in a concentration camp in World War II, was a fabrication. James Frey was excoriated on national television for betraying the trust of his readers, when it was revealed that his autobiography A Million Little Pieces (2003) was partially fictional.

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With these issues swirling in the background, Goethe offers his “half-poetical, half historical treatment of events” to his readers and proposes to structure his lifestory according to the laws governing his science of morphology (PU 4: 17; HA 9:10). Recent critical attention has been brought to bear on the question of whether Goethe’s notion of organic metamorphosis provides an adequate conceptual framework for his own self-presentation and for his understanding of the individual as thoroughly historical in nature. For some readers, Poetry and Truth, and to a certain extent Goethe’s entire autobiographical corpus, can be fruitfully read in terms of the developmental principles that emerge from his scientific thinking. For others, the organic model, while perhaps applicable to the earlier portions of the autobiography, ceases at some point to account for the complexity of the text and the life it describes. The terms of this debate, and the debate itself, reveal fundamentally different ideas about the nature of the self that lies at the heart of what has often been regarded as the first fully modern autobiography. Broadly speaking, those who argue for the continuity of the developmental model in Poetry and Truth present the autobiographical subject as an ever-changing entity that participates in a dynamic, yet deliberate and regulated process of selfformation or Bildung in the context of an ever-changing outside world. Implicit in this infinitely complex process is an underlying order—an order that can be located in the natural and social world as well as in the self. Underpinning this order is a fundamental humanist belief in the individual with all of his energy and striving [Streben], talents and force, agency and activity, consciousness and volition. In the aesthetic sphere, this order presents itself as the sense of unity in Goethe’s lifestory despite the text’s multiple narrative threads and formal heterogeneity. In an opposite reading, Poetry and Truth is not so much a story of Bildung but of the eventual failure of Bildung to supply an adequate model of human development. Critics speak, for example, of “the suspension of metamorphosis as a representational principle” maintaining that “metamorphosis comes to a standstill in the third and fourth part of Poetry and Truth” (Schnur 64; 91). In this view, Goethe’s confident narrative of progressive development, self-realization, and self-determination within a lawful universe is undone in the latter portions of the work by a growing awareness of the overwhelming, incomprehensible, 

  Weintraub best represents this line of thinking. For more modern interpretations see Jannidis and Seitz.   For the most up-to-date presentation of this school of thought see Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe. Niggl offers the most comprehensive overview of the evolving opinions on this issue. Also invaluable are Craemer-Schroder, Jeßing, Michel, Perloff, Schnur, Stern, and Witte.   Thus we may read the following in Trunz: “Alle autobiographischen Schriften bilden eine große Einheit, weil sie ein Abbild von Goethes Leben in seiner Einheitlichkeit sind … Das autobiographishe Werk als Ganzes ist daher vielformig and zugleich einheitlich” (624). Similarly, Stelzig speaks of the “larger coherence and unity behind Goethe’s seemingly disparate and discontinuous writings” (170).

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uncontrollable, and, above all, capricious and disorderly forces at work within us and the outside world giving shape to our lives. This particular brand of negative determinism—at once biological and environmental—Goethe calls “the daemonic” [das Dämonische]. An additional, and perhaps more fundamental, challenge to the self-assured model of Bildung is posed by Goethe’s concept of resignation or renunciation [Entsagung]. In the fourth and final part, written mainly in the last years of Goethe’s life and concerning his love for Lili, the aging poet seems to acknowledge the limits placed on the full development of one’s potential and desires before the demands and constraints of historical and social realities. Taken together, the twin concepts of the daemonic and of renunciation seemingly unravel the complex narrative tapestry woven in the earlier sections. An aesthetic of complex unity gives way to one of increasing fragmentation and uncertainty as evidenced by Goethe’s motley autobiographical productions and his belated return to Poetry and Truth. Mediating between both interpretive traditions, I will argue that Poetry and Truth is animated throughout by a tension between form and formlessness, wholeness and fragmentation, determinism and self-determination, purpose and chance; and that this irresolvable, yet productive tension is the very subject of his autobiography and constitutes what for Goethe was the basic experience of the modern subject. Goethe’s morphological science does not seek to resolve this tension, but rather attempts the more difficult task of sustaining it. The self is both constant and ever-changing; the world is filled with both patterns and disorder. Poetry and Truth can be seen as an evolving attempt to present in narrative form the dynamic relationship between the self and the world without succumbing to an autonomous, transcendent notion of subjectivity, on the one hand, or a materialist, socially constructed notion, on the other.  Goethe’s attempt to achieve this careful balance is framed by principles derived from his work in the natural sciences.

  Niggl and Perloff go so far as to regard the “daemonic,” which Perloff characterizes as the “mysterious, irrational principle … [that] controls our destinies” (280), as the structural principle of the entire work. While most critics view the “daemonic” as a repudiation of Goethe’s organic conception of life, Stelzig views it as a “supplement,” arguing that “it does not constitute a rejection per se of the developmental paradigm but a re-situating of it in a larger framework” (165). For Stelzig, it is only with Goethe’s ideal of renunciation that the developmental model is contradicted. Cautioning us to view the fourth book of Poetry and Truth as a product of an entirely different and distinct epoch in Goethe’s life and thinking, Boyle views the last section as a product of the elder poet’s notion of renunciation, while the first three books spring from a different view of history (“Geschichtsschreibung und Autobiographik” (163–72)).    As such, Poetry and Truth can be placed in dialogue with similar efforts by Goethe’s contemporaries such as Diderot, Kant, and Schiller, as well as present-day meditations in fields as diverse as neuropsychology, environmental science, literary theory, and philosophy that seek to move beyond notions of modern identity grounded in the Cartesian opposition between self and world.

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Shaping Poetry and Truth Goethe’s autobiographical and scientific projects are grounded in a shared principle: the impossibility of viewing their respective objects of study as abstract and hence isolable entities. Instead, any object properly conceived must be presented temporally—within time and history. To recall an example taken from chapter four, Goethe directs the readers of his botanical treatise, The Metamorphosis of Plants, to view the plant not as a static whole divisible into constitutive parts, but as a series of forms developing over time. By following the growth of a single plant as it progresses from dormant seed to blossoming flower, the viewer will become aware that what was perceived initially as individual plant parts—the stem-leaves, the calyx, the flower’s petals, stamen and pistils—are in fact permutations or variations upon the same form. Goethe would occasionally refer to this modelform as the Urpflanze. As we have noted, the term is potentially misleading for it seems to posit an ahistorical and atemporal entity. The Urpflanze is, however, neither ideal nor real; it cannot be found in any one instant in nature. Instead, it is in and through the movement of ever-changing forms and the viewer’s perceived relations between them that the Urpflanze is given expression. This elusive phenomenon finds its counterpart throughout the natural world and is variously referred to in general terms as the Urbild (archetype) or the Urphänomen. Extending Goethe’s notion of archetypal phenomena into the autobiographical sphere, we might say that the self Goethe seeks to inscribe—his individuality, his character, in short, the autobiographical subject—can best be perceived as a polymorphic entity in constant transformation, a being or life-force in perpetual becoming. Goethe’s character can never be isolated and named; it does not lend itself to abstract summation, classification, or analysis. Instead it must be narrated as a ceaseless transformation of a series of living forms. The sense of an enduring, timeless self—what Goethe variously referred to as an individual’s Grundwahre, Entelechie, Streben, or Charakter—can only be given through the passage of time and is itself historical. What is more, the development of these objects of study, be they a plant or Goethe himself, cannot be considered in isolation from the changing world they inhabit. Instead, they must be seen as part of a complex network of dynamic, mutual interaction. In his plant studies, Goethe speaks of “a double law” through which we come to know the plant—the law of the plant’s inner nature and the law of the outside world. For the plant, the outside world is, broadly considered, the natural environment. For the autobiographical subject, the outside world is a much more complex realm of history that describes the eighteenth-century German world in which Goethe grew up. 

  For excellent introductions to Goethe’s scientific works see the collection of essays in Amrine, Zucker, and Wheeler, eds., Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal as well as those in Seamon and Zajonc.    “Ein doppeltes Gesetz” – the term comes from an early work on plant studies entitled “Vorarbeiten zu einer Physiologie der Pflanzen” in DK 24: 357.

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There is perhaps no richer cultural history of eighteenth-century Germany than that of Goethe’s Poetry and Truth. In the process of telling the story of the first twenty-six years of his life—from his childhood in the imperial free city of Frankfurt in 1749 as the son of a wealthy, upstart burgher to his departure for Weimar in 1775 as a renowned German poet—Goethe presents the reader with a vivid and detailed picture of the times. There is virtually no realm of activity—social, political, religious, cultural, economic, private, or public—that lies beyond the book’s scope. The narrative traverses class and social boundaries almost as easily as it shifts subject matter, allowing us a glimpse into the lives of princes as well as of street-children. Goethe’s description in the opening chapter of his all-encompassing and open-eyed walks as a boy through the marketplaces, the factories, the shipping yards, the cloisters, the graveyards, the outbuildings, and the government buildings of Frankfurt can be seen as a microcosm for the work as a whole. Goethe describes the social, political, religious, philosophical, as well as literary worlds in such vivid detail throughout Poetry and Truth as a consequence of taking the notion of a truly reciprocal interaction between self and the outside world seriously. This relationship is given paradigmatic expression in Goethe’s preface to Poetry and Truth: For the chief goal of biography appears to be this: to present the subject in his temporal circumstances, to show how these both hinder and help him, how he uses them to construct his view of man and the world, and how he, providing he is an artist, poet, or author, mirrors them again for others. But something nearly impossible [ein kaum Erreichbares] is required for this, namely that the individual know himself and his century—himself, as a constant entity in the midst of all the circumstances, and the century, as a force pulling him along willy-nilly, directing and developing him to such an extent that one may well say he would have been quite a different person if born ten years before or after, as far as his own cultural development and his effect on others are concerned. (PU 4: 17; HA 9: 9)

For Goethe, the story of an individual cannot be told apart from the story of his century for both exist intra-dependently, each giving shape and form to the other simultaneously. The exigencies of Goethe’s theory to know the self and the world in their full relation—what is referred to above as the “kaum Erreichbares”—threatens to collapse any coherent developmental principle according to which the text and the self might be organized under the weight of interrelated and interdependent details. There is a real question in reading Poetry and Truth whether the text describes the regulated formation of a subject, Goethe’s Bildung or Entwicklung, or whether it fails in the end to rein in and give shape to what Goethe call elsewhere “the million-fold hydra of the empirical world” (quoted in Boyle, Goethe 546).

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Poetry and Truth eschews any simple attempt at narrative recuperation. True, the reader progresses in a more or less chronological fashion from Goethe’s birth in 1749 to his move to Weimar twenty-six years later. Yet the syntax of the master plot of Goethe’s development from a youth in Frankfurt to a mature and established artist is obscured by a number of factors. The influences of the external world upon Goethe are so abundant and varied that it becomes difficult to distinguish the extent to which the events and details related are symbolical, and are thus to be read within the logical scheme of his development, or primarily realistic, selfsufficient details of a world which Goethe seeks to portray in its fullness. In other words, the sheer density of detail, the irreducible concreteness of experience, fails at many points to dissolve itself readily into a meaningful configuration of facts. No matter how the reader arranges or understands the events that determine or shape Goethe’s life, there are facts and events which fall outside and overwhelm any single causal system of interpretation or organization. The principle of dynamic interaction between self and world is evident in the work’s opening pages. Goethe’s birth—and near death—at the hands of an unskilled midwife, which he only survives, Goethe tells us, because he is born under the fortunate sign of Jupiter and Venus, not only presumably affects the poor child, but precipitates a series of reforms leading to the appointment of an official birth-assistant and the regular instruction of midwives in Frankfurt. After this straightforward sequence of “Wirkung” and “Rückwirkung,” the narrative quickly opens itself up to a seemingly limitless number of fields of influence and a multiplicity of plots such that it becomes impossible to disentangle cause from effect or trace any continuous line of development. The influence of the outside world upon the self and conversely the influence of the self upon the outside world become quickly incalculable. The myriad thematic centers of the novel, moreover, often appear to be related to one another in a purely contiguous fashion. For instance, the story of Goethe’s relationship with Frederica winds through books ten to twelve and the full trajectory of their relationship from initial encounter to final separation thematically links these three books together. Yet, this love plot is not narrated in a continuous manner. Rather, it is interrupted by episodes in Goethe’s cultural and artistic development while in Alsace, including his encounter with Herder, his new-found admiration for Shakespeare and corresponding rejection of French literature as a dramaturgical model, his encounter with the aesthetic of Sentimentalism, his deep contemplation and reflections upon the cathedral in Strasbourg, his studies in law and science, and the composition of his first major literary success, The Sorrows of Young Werther. As readers, we search for some underlying connection between these events and his evolving relationship with Frederica, some order lurking behind the kaleidoscopic narrative. We search if only because Goethe insists in the preface to Poetry and Truth upon the interrelatedness, the internal coherence of his story. Yet Goethe never draws these lines of connection, but instead passes effortlessly and largely without warning from one realm of activity to another. The transitional sentences, when they exist, are most often cursory and casual. There

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is a sense that these different domains constitute part of a common network of mutual interaction, but that the relations of one to another are supremely complex, if not incomprehensible, lying seemingly beyond our faculty of understanding. As a result, we can never be certain whether these relations exist or not. This epistemological uncertainty accompanies every reading of Poetry and Truth. The reader is in essence left to sketch in or intuit the possible lines of connection. This leads to a multiplicity of interpretations and threatens to collapse any consistent story of Bildung. In the middle of the eleventh book, at a moment when the young Goethe must make critical and interrelated decisions concerning his choice of profession, his place of residence, his place in society, and his relationship with Frederica, the narrator highlights the ultimately unknowable and hence unpredictable nature of our lives: “There are few biographies that can depict an individual’s progress as being pure, calm, and steady. Our lives, like the context in which we live, are an incomprehensible mixture of freedom and necessity. Our desires proclaim in advance what we will do under any set of circumstances. These circumstances, however, control us in their own way” (PU 4: 355; HA 9: 478). The actual relation of freedom and necessity threatens to elude even the retrospective gaze of the storyteller. The stylistic heterogeneity of Poetry and Truth also contributes to a sense of irregularity or disorder on the narrative level. The text consists of anecdotes, travel reports, dialogues, diary entries, novellas, fairytales, and idylls, to name the most prominent forms. Though these are all held more or less together by an evenness of tone, the presence of such a diversity of styles and forms lends a disjointed, disparate, unbalanced, even irregular quality to the text. As a consequence, individual sections of Poetry and Truth, such as “The New Paris: A Boyhood Fairy Tale” or the account of the coronation of Joseph II, are often studied independently from the work as a whole. A related factor complicating any attempt to decode the narrative syntax is the prominent role chance plays in determining the outcome of Goethe’s life-story. In the opening of the thirteenth book, Goethe tells of a critical moment in his education when he wavers between concentrating his efforts on becoming an artist or a writer. Unable to decide by any rational means, he throws his pocket knife into the river (in a creative variation on the typical coin-toss) and according to whether he can see the knife enter the water or whether his view is obscured by the overhanging willow trees, his fate will be decided. Complicating the reader’s and Goethe’s interpretation of the event is the ambiguous outcome of the action: the trees obscure the knife’s plunge, but the splash from the knife is clearly visible above the branches. In the end, Goethe decides to interpret the event as unfavorable to his painterly pursuits, but the larger philosophical point is clear: chance (external circumstances) and desire (internal drive) combine to determine the particular form and direction of life in an ultimately unknowable, unpredictable manner. In the draft preface to the third part of Poetry and Truth, Goethe foregrounds the role chance has in determining the particular shape an individual takes in life. Here Goethe refers to the planned fourth book which, as he sees it, will describe

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a period of limitation and thwarted development: “In the next epoch to which he must run, the blossoms fall off, not all coronas produce fruit, and when they do, they are unimpressive, grow slowly, and maturity tarries. Yes, how many fruits fall before they are ripe through various accidents, and then the pleasure, that one believes already in hand, is thwarted” (HA 9: 854, my translation). Critics have seized precisely on this sentence as evidence of Goethe’s abandonment of the morphological model in the writing of Poetry and Truth, despite his continued use of the botanical metaphor. Yet, Goethe’s morphology describes a pattern of growth which lies along a continuum between total self-determination and absolute determinism and in which chance plays an important role. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the role of chance in determining the shape of Goethe’s life can be found at the conclusion to Poetry and Truth. Having decided to renounce his love for Lili, which would have meant a settled, secure bourgeois life in Frankfurt, and choosing instead to accept the invitation to Weimar, Goethe is forced to reconsider his decision when the promised carriage fails to appear. After waiting over a week and hearing nothing, Goethe consents to his father’s wish that he instead travel to Italy and sets out on his journey, stopping in Heidelberg for sentimental reasons attached to Lili, to pay a short visit to Mlle Delph, their confidante. The short visit quickly lengthens as Mlle Delph actively seeks to direct the course of Goethe’s life by involving him within her network of friends, influencing the purpose and itinerary of his visit to Italy, and encouraging his budding affection for Miss von Wrede, daughter of the Head Forester of the region. The elaborate plans of Mlle Delph, who, the reader is told, likes to leave nothing to chance, produce the opposite of their intended effect. The delay of Goethe’s departure to Italy allows the missing chariot to catch up with Goethe before he leaves Heidelberg and to whisk him away to Weimar rather than to Italy despite Mlle Delph’s protestations and his father’s thwarted wishes. In this way, perhaps one of the more significant turns in Goethe’s life, one that leads him to the court of Carl August, to Charlotte von Stein, and eventually to the birth of German Classicism, hinges on the improbable series of chance events leading up to his departure. The influence of chance in shaping Goethe’s life-story in this final scene and throughout Poetry and Truth is counterbalanced by what Goethe refers to at the end of his autobiography as the “daemonic” [das Dämonische]—a force potentially more disruptive and unpredictable in its effects than chance. What the daemonic is precisely remains a matter of some question both for Goethe and his interpreters. The term appears frequently in Goethe’s later writings in a wide variety of contexts with often irreconcilable definitions. Goethe specifies that    For the various definitions of the daemonic see HA 10: 649. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe describes the daemonic as something which “manifests itself only in contradictions”: “It was not divine, for it seemed irrational; not human, for it had no intelligence; not diabolical, for it was beneficent; and not angelic, for it often betrayed malice. It was like chance, for it lacked continuity, and like Providence, for it suggested context. Everything that limits us seemed penetrable by it, and it appeared to dispose at will over the elements

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while the daemonic may present itself in both corporeal and incorporeal matter, it is to be most feared in man where it appears as “an enormous strength” and exercises “incredible power” over others. Goethe alludes to his own knowledge of such grand, irresistible figures—Napoleon undoubtedly among them—who appear “suffused in a daemonic glow” (PU 5: 598; HA 10: 175). Something akin to what Denis Porter describes as “a profound, coherent will, underneath consciousness and the conscious will which eludes the grasp of the mind” (49), the force and inscrutability of the daemonic call into question the narrative logic according to which Goethe’s life story is constructed. Goethe’s growing awareness of the daemonic principle at work in his life compels him (along with his readers) to question his own understanding and account of his life at critical junctures. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Goethe’s account of his departure for Weimar. Is Goethe’s decision to prolong his stay with Mlle Delph, and thus allow for the late arrival of the charioteer, a result of pure happenstance or that of a greater force directing the course of Goethe’s life? This force can be seen to determine the larger movement of Goethe’s life: for example, his decision not to marry Lili or, earlier, Frederica. The power of the daemonic is not absolute, however. It is still open to influence by the random occurrences of the outside world. Goethe’s daemonic drive or will, as it inflects his desire to become a major German writer, may not lead him to spend his life in the Alsatian town of Sessenheim with Frederica (a decision which would have condemned him to a rural existence far away from the major currents of contemporary literary culture), but it might have led him to Italy already in 1775 where his life and poetic production would have undoubtedly taken an entirely different form and direction. The daemonic may give a general direction to his life, but there is no pre-ordained plot, no inevitable, ineluctable, and ultimately predictable outcome that can be deduced from the text.10 There is instead a set of possible or probable narrative outcomes. Contingency and complexity coexist with Goethe’s desire, will, and innate character in a definite yet ultimately unpredictable relation. Poetry and Truth ends with the lines taken from Goethe’s newly finished play “Egmont” when the hero rides off in a horse-driven chariot: Child! Child! no more of this! As though whipped on by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time run off with the flimsy chariot of our destiny, and nothing is left for us to do except grasp the reins with courage and composure and divert necessary to our existence, to contract time and expand space. It seemed only to accept the impossible and scornfully reject the possible. This essence, which appeared to infiltrate all the others, separating and combining them, I called daemonic, after the example of the ancients and others who had perceived something similar” (PU 5: 597; HA 10: 175). 10   Of course, the reader knows, as does Goethe, the specific outcome of the narrative from the very beginning. This is the condition of all autobiography. Yet Goethe’s “thick descriptions” of the world and his situation within it countervail against any rigid developmental pattern.

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The words of Egmont transposed as Goethe’s passionate response to Mlle Delph’s artfully-presented arguments in favor of remaining, capture the ambivalent balance of forces that guide Goethe’s own life. The “invisible spirits” can be interpreted simultaneously as the subconscious, daemonic energy within Goethe (his desire to become a great German writer) and the uncontrollable, incalculable external forces that pull his life along willy-nilly (the confluence of events that lead to the appearance of the carriage to Weimar). The figure in the chariot embodies Goethe’s conscious and hence noble effort to rein in and gain some measure of control over the shape his life will take. Though we as readers and Goethe as narrator know the events which ensue and the path that Goethe’s life takes, there is no sense or foreshadowing in the text of any definite, inevitable outcome. On the contrary, the final book ends on a note of uncertainty, openendedness, and suspense. In the present of narration Weimar remains an unknown and indeterminate variable in Goethe’s life, an event which could take his life in an almost infinite number of directions. When we step back from Poetry and Truth, however, patterns and structures begin to suggest themselves, emerging out of the dense mist of detail, if only to disappear again into the vast and ever-mobile cultural and social panoply that comprise the narrative landscape. These patterns, as I will show, broadly correspond to the developmental laws suggested by Goethe’s morphological science, and it is in the relation of these laws to the irrepressible “messiness” of the text that the true nature of the autobiographical self is made visible. The Endless Spiral If Goethe’s science visualizes each object in nature as a series of continuous forms, then these forms are related to one another according a set of self-regulating laws. The two major laws that govern the metamorphosis of forms are known as “polarity” [Polarität] and “heightening” [Steigerung] and appear throughout Goethe’s scientific writings. Polarity describes the alternating horizontal expansion and contraction of forms, while heightening describes the refinement and increasing complexity of these forms along a vertical axis. These actions, though conceptualized separately, occur simultaneously, and the resulting figure is that of an upwardly moving spiral.11

11   Though present throughout Goethe’s scientific writings, the notion of spiral forms is first fully articulated in one of Goethe’s latest writings from 1829-31 entitled “The Spiral Tendency in Vegetation” (PU 12: 105-10; HA 13: 130-48).

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As several critics have noted, Poetry and Truth is filled with spirals.12 The overarching narrative movement of Poetry and Truth resembles a helical structure. The first five books alternate between Goethe’s life at his father’s home in Frankfurt and the ever-widening circumference of his exploration of the city as he advances from childhood to adolescence. The succeeding fifteen books take Goethe to Leipzig, Strasbourg, Darmstadt, Weltzer, Cologne, Switzerland, to the border of Italy, and finally to Weimar, each time returning to Frankfurt before setting off on the next excursion. The movements away from his home are invariably described as an expansion [Ausweitung] of the self into the world which is then followed by a necessary contraction [Zusammenziehung] or withdrawal of the self. Each return is precipitated by an overextension or near overextension of the boundaries of the evolving self, most often symbolized by Goethe falling gravely ill and more generally conveyed through a sense of barely manageable diffusion, disintegration, and confusion. Each return to Frankfurt then involves the integration of the new experiences from his life in relation to his previous understanding of self, which in turn affords Goethe a new, “higher” perspective from which to observe the progress of his life. Goethe’s artistic, cultural, political, religious, and moral development can be plotted along similar spiral structures. Following the thread of Goethe’s development as a writer, for instance, we become aware of an alternating pattern of production and destruction (he literally burns his previous writings) and a heightening awareness of his social responsibility as a writer. As a youth in Frankfurt Goethe first uses his talents for mischief by writing false love letters to his friend’s conceited acquaintance. After this amusement runs its course, these same friends convince Goethe to employ his writerly talents for profit by composing wedding and funeral poems for clients which are then published in the local newspaper. Finally, and again at the request of his friends, Goethe uses his writing skills and his social position to draft a petition recommending a fellow he has only met once, and who turns out to be of questionable moral integrity, to his grandfather for a middle-rank position in the government, claiming this man as his protégé. These misuses of his talents are punished at the conclusion of the first part of Poetry and Truth and gradually give way to a growing realization of the higher purposes to which he must dedicate his skills, ultimately that of establishing a national German literature and becoming its leader. Trunz traces the evolving relationship between Goethe’s natural talents and his increasing sense of duty as a writer over the course of his entire autobiographical œuvre. Goethe first becomes aware of the inevitable social repercussions of his writing (obliquely through the effect of the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther); in the Italian Journey Goethe actively seeks to assimilate the poetic greatness of the Ancients to create a worthy, lasting literature for Germany; in the Campaign in France 1792 and the 12   See especially Trunz and Weintraub. For a concise description see Saine, “Introduction,” Poetry and Truth (Part Four). Indebted to these readings, my interpretation differs in its focus and conclusion.

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Siege of Mainz, Goethe strengthens, distracts, and morally fortifies the soldiers in time of war through his storytelling; and in the Annals Goethe reflects on the role of the literary and the writer not simply in relation to German culture, but to culture viewed more broadly, to world culture (Trunz 629). As Goethe reflects on the development of his religious sensibilities over the course of his first twenty-six years a similar, helical pattern of contraction, expansion, and refinement emerges: In the course of the biographical recital, we have seen in detail how the child, the boy, and the youth tried to approach the metaphysical by various paths, first affectionately looking to natural religion, then attaching himself lovingly to a positive one, next testing his own abilities by withdrawing into himself, and at last joyously yielding to the universal faith. (PU 5: 596–7; HA 10: 175)

In addition, his intimate relationships with women are presented as a spiral. Each of his succeeding relationships from Gretchen to Lili and including Lucinda, Emily, Frederica, and Lotte is presented as a higher, more spiritual form of the previous one, though each individual relationship develops or progresses internally as well. Goethe’s “thoughtlessly nurtured youthful affection” for Frederica contrasts with his relationship with Lili, which passes beyond sensual love and passion to intellectual love, a true meeting of the minds: “My relationship to her is as that of a person to a person, as a beautiful, loveable, educated daughter; it resembled my earlier relationships, but was of a higher sort” (PU 5: 535; HA 10: 94). Given the sexual conventions of the time, Goethe’s paternal affection for Lili should be read as a form of compliment, however problematic; she is viewed no longer primarily as a sexual object, but as an intellectual subject, however unequal this relationship may in fact be. Stylistically, Poetry and Truth is also governed by the principle of Steigerung or refinement. The narrative voice is gently ironic, distant yet not detached, superior yet not all-knowing. While the older Goethe narrates his life from the vantage point of a more mature, refined state of development or sensibility, he does not write from the stable perch of a self having attained its essence. On the contrary, he speaks as a self that is still becoming, still changing in the world, and, most importantly, as a self that will never and can never achieve full realization. There is no perfect end-state, no moment of plenitude, no absolute moment of privileged narration. The spiral is a spiral without end, “eine Schraube ohne Ende” (PU 6: 334; HA 11: 417). Moreover, unlike the confessional genre, embodied in St. Augustine and carried into the modern age by Rousseau, there is no radical moment of revelation or transformation, no quantum leap of understanding that divides the present self from the past self. The younger Goethe remains a vital part of the older Goethe regardless of the distance separating them. Narrative irony in Poetry and Truth is palpable, but not negative. That is to say, it does not disqualify the past, but incorporates it within a continuum connected to the present moment of narration.

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These stylistic features point to a distinction of Goethe’s notion of spiral development. Teleologically driven, Goethe’s spiral thought nonetheless insists on the impossibility of ever fully reaching an end-state or telos. The “Schraube ohne Ende” designates an infinitely regressing end-point, which the individual always seeks but never attains. For Goethe fulfillment would mean stasis and ultimately death. As Goethe sees it, the full realization of character, potential, or talent is inconceivable because the individual can never be divorced from the particular, finite, material world he inhabits. The perfect manifestation of an individual’s character could only take place in a non-existent timeless world. There is thus no single, most perfect manifestation of Goethe’s potential. Instead, there is a limitless range of possible external expressions dependent on the particular set of circumstances surrounding the individual. As Poetry and Truth’s rich description of the outside world demonstrates, Goethe’s individuality is given form and definition through an array of unique historical conditions—conditions which simultaneously enable and limit the expression and development of that character. The question for Goethe is to what extent and in what ways the conditions of late-eighteenth century Germany hindered and/or promoted the development of the multiple facets of his innate character, thereby giving them external expression. Thus far in our discussion of the narrative’s spiral tendency we have noted its generally progressive character, its movement upward to ever higher levels of refinement and self-realization. The idea of renunciation [Entsagung] that emerges in part four seems to contradict the picture of progressive development articulated in parts one to three. The fourth part opens with the proclamation “that we must renounce” (PU 5: 523; HA 10: 77; emphasis in original). Indeed, that proclamation announces the major thematic of renunciation, anticipating the story of Goethe’s passionate love affair, engagement, and break-up with Lili that comprises the dramatic core of this section. But renunciation need not be read as the negation of the theory of progressive development, but as part of its very structure. For example, the awareness of self-limitation, whether imposed internally or externally, is a recognition by the mature individual of his necessary relation to a natural and social world. Thus, Goethe’s renunciation of his love for Lili should be seen in the context of his previous renunciations of his desire for Gretchen, Lotte, and Frederica. Similarly, his realization that his true talent found its fullest expression in poetry rather than philosophy or art is a recognition of his talents as well as his limits. Perhaps his most amusing renunciation is the cutting of his hair while a student in Strasbourg, symbolizing his acknowledgment of social convention. Tellingly, in the draft preface to part three in which he speaks of the yet to be written fourth book, Goethe describes what will be a period of limitation, setbacks, and disappointments using a botanical analogy. M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, established the spiral as an archetypal pattern of development in Romantic philosophy and literature (1837). Though Goethe is briefly mentioned as a representative of this model of development, his notion of helical growth as instantiated in Poetry and Truth

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differs in subtle and important ways from that of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel— Abrams’s chief examples of Romantic spiral thought. For Goethe, the spiral model of growth cannot be generalized beyond the individual or applied to our notions of the history of the world or to the history of mankind. The individual can strive to realize his innate character or drive, but in no way can the abstract forces of history or the general development of mankind be modeled in these terms. In Poetry and Truth this is illustrated nicely. Though Goethe aims to give order and purpose to the movement of his life, there is no such attempt made in relation to the external world. The world changes and changes the individual; the individual may even change the world. Yet, it is impossible to discern any telos, any purpose that motivates the overall movement of history. One might say that Goethe seeks to give coherence to his life despite the incoherence of the events of the outside world. The French Revolution, the July Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon, the incipient industrialization of German society, the leveling effects of democracy—these were, for Goethe, evidence of history’s failure to manifest any order or purpose. Tellingly, Goethe’s treatise on the metamorphosis of plant forms studies the development of a single plant and does not venture to offer a model for the development of plants in general. Just as unthinkable for Goethe would have been a description of the history of mankind, instead of the individual. It is significant that Goethe’s notion of spiral development does not require that he relate all of his experience. On the contrary, and following the logic of his botanical thinking, he can be seen to exclude expressly those events interpreted as “accidental” and resulting in “monstrous” deviations from the natural unfolding or blossoming of the self. These moments of “Wahnsinn” or “Verrückung” would presumably distract the reader from following the correct course of Goethe’s development. Just as the plant, in each successive stage of its development, refines its ability to receive fluids which are purer and less coarse, and thereby achieves a higher, more complex form, so too the older Goethe, the writer of Poetry and Truth, in looking back upon his life is able to filter out the coarser, disruptive, incongruent memories of his past which threaten to undo his narrative. Another important difference in Goethe’s elaboration of his spiral notion of development is the explicitly anti-romantic rhetoric in which it is couched. Goethe’s story of his life does not begin in an idealized state in which self and world are united. There is no lost primal innocence or self-unity, no sense of alienation or desire to attain a higher mode of original unity; there is likewise no nostalgia, no yearning for completion, or Heimweh.13 Instead, there is an evergrowing complexity, refinement, and articulation of a self that would appear fully present to itself at every point of the spiral. 13

  True, Goethe returns to Frankfurt after each movement of expansion. Yet Frankfurt is never presented, nor does it ever become, an idyllic locus in which Goethe hopes to attain a privileged mode of consciousness in which self and world are reunited. Frankfurt remains a site where Goethe gathers together and concentrates his energies, a stage on a never-ending journey, not a final destination.

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Goethe’s construction is a precarious one, however. If we remember that the shape of the general narrative is described by an upwardly-moving spiral, it is important to note that the movement of the spiral contains within itself the possibility of dissolution. The tightly balanced centripetal and centrifugal forces, forces of desire and chance that give the spiral its form, are constantly in tension and in danger of being upset. As Goethe warns: The idea of metamorphosis deserves great reverence, but it is also a most dangerous gift from above. It leads to formlessness; it destroys knowledge, dissolves it. It is like the vis centrifuga, and would be infinite if it had no counterweight; here I mean the drive for specific character, the stubborn persistence of things which have finally attained reality. This is a vis centripeta which remains basically untouched by any external factor. (PU 12: 43; HA 13: 35)

The moments of “Ausweitung,” or centrifugal movement, in Poetry and Truth threaten to overwhelm the young Goethe as the description of his student days in Leipzig shows. The vast amount of experience and knowledge Goethe acquires in Leipzig promises to enlarge the boundaries of the self, but also poses the danger of an overextension and collapse of these boundaries, leading to a loss of identity. This danger is counteracted in the young Goethe by a strong “drive for specific character,” in others words a strong will or Entelechie, which pulls him back from the brink of directionless dissolution. This sense of limits is emblematized in his decision not to go to Italy while on his trip through Switzerland described in the penultimate book. Sitting on a mountain footpath leading down to Lombardy, Goethe is strongly encouraged by his traveling companion to make the descent: “The trek down through these gorges must be splendid and effortless, and they open up near Bellinzona, what a joy that will be! The monk’s words made the islands of Lake Maggiore come alive in my mind again. Every since Keyssler’s Journeys … the temptation is too much for me. Surely you feel the same way?” He continued: “You are sitting at the right spot, where I stood once before but lacked the courage to take the leap downward.” (PU 5: 577–8; HA 10: 149)

Goethe is sorely tempted, yet he is acutely aware that this “leap downward” would be too much and too early in his stage of development. As Goethe looks down into Italy, he reflects: Lombardy and Italy lay before me as something entirely foreign, Germany as something familiar, lovable, full of pleasant local prospects. And let it be confessed: the element which had totally encompassed me for such a long time and been the basis for my whole existence remained quite indispensable, and I dared not step outside its confines … I rose quickly to escape this steep perch, not wanting to be pulled into the depths by my friend. (PU 5: 577; HA 10: 150)

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Goethe will of course eventually make the trip to Italy, but at this stage in his life, in 1775, he leads the reader to believe that he would have lost his bearings in an inassimilable, unreadable, all-too-foreign landscape and culture, at a time when he was still painfully struggling to come to terms with his decision to renounce Lili in favor of the possibility of realizing his aspirations involving the formation of a national German literature. For the moment, Italy constitutes a dangerous temptation that threatens to throw the creative self into dissolution. The image I have given of Poetry and Truth’s spiral structure is still a bit too neat. Poetry and Truth is filled with spirals but they are asynchronic. They overlap, slowing down, speeding up, occasionally overtaking the others only to be overtaken further in such a way that the impression of an overall helical construction is threatened. It is also hard, if not impossible, to separate one line of development from another. Goethe’s artistic education is, for instance, inextricably bound up with his social and religious education. And if there are spirals, there are also spirals within spirals. While in part one we can discern a general movement of expansion in the first four books followed by a sudden concentration or withdrawal into the self in the fifth book when the young Goethe oversteps his bounds (societal, poetic, ethical) and is punished by his father, this basic pattern is already in place within the first book alone. As we have seen, the narrative begins in Goethe’s “Vaterhaus,” moves out into surrounding neighborhoods in Frankfurt as the young Goethe explores the city for the first time, and then returns to the (newly rebuilt) house in the last third of the book. In the opening pages of Poetry and Truth there is a telling moment in the description of Goethe’s home in Frankfurt. Describing the odd structure of his house, Goethe writes: “A circular staircase led to disconnected rooms, and the floor levels were so uneven that steps had to be put between them” (PU 4: 21; HA 9: 17). A small detail, to be sure. Yet it serves as a mise-en-abîme of the narrative structure of Poetry and Truth: helical, but unevenly, awkwardly, precariously so. Goethe, we might say, is carefully and creatively building steps leading from one disconnected, uneven room to the next, while trying to avoid creating an oversimplified, overly symmetrical structure. Disorderly Order, Orderly Disorder Contrasting portraits of Poetry and Truth emerge depending on one’s focus. One alternately sees order or disorder. A sense of chance, the incalculability and unpredictability of the vast outside world, and the protean nature of the self dominate one picture. A relatively stable, though highly complex, pattern and governing order characterize the other. Neither portrait suffices on its own; the truth lies in their somewhat contradictory, mutual coexistence. Goethe’s morphological laws not only allow for both order and disorder, form and formlessness, identity and difference to coexist, but, in fact, they demand it. Goethe’s scientific modeling of the self is not purchased at the expense of a dynamic and variable identity. On the

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contrary, the application of the morphological laws within the autobiographical sphere specifically aims to integrate the changing self and the changing world in which it operates within a structurally coherent but supple and flexible system. Coherence is not equivalent to reification. The moments of structural unity in Poetry and Truth and the open-ended, disjointed quality of much of the text are not mutually exclusive, contradictory styles held in opposition. Instead, these two elements proceed simultaneously through the narrative, the one or the other moving into the foreground depending on the reader’s shifting perspective. In the end, Goethe’s work in the natural sciences provides him with a model for conceptualizing and representing the self that is uniquely historical and dynamic. Much as Goethe in the scientific writings views the development of a natural object in terms of an interplay between internal and external forces, so too, he traces his own growth as a dynamic encounter between self and society, freedom and necessity, desire and the limits imposed on desire, however complex and unknowable these relationships may be. In fact, the lines of cause and effect, event and repercussion are less the focus of Poetry and Truth than the simple fact of becoming and the concomitant aim of representing a self in the process of continual change and transformation. The text encourages the reader to fill in the spaces between scenes so overflowing with the fullness of the phenomenal world and riven with shifting desires and motivations that the lines connecting them are tantalizingly indistinct. The autobiographical self, then, is made most visible through the impression of movement created upon the mind of the reader through the textual strategies deployed in Poetry and Truth. The fundamental ontological ambiguity that drives Goethe’s scientific writing—is the ultimate object of study real or ideal?—also animates his autobiographical endeavor. The elusive self is located in the complex interplay between self and world, biology and history, character and circumstance, poetry and truth described by the ever-mobile and intricately related forms constituting Goethe’s morphologically inspired autobiography. For Goethe, science is, at its highest level, not only a method of discerning the universal laws that govern the natural world but the also the entire field of human activity. Thoreau goes a step further. For Thoreau, science is more than a means to an end—an approach that aids the thinker on the path toward self-understanding and self-realization. As we shall see in the next chapter, the study of the self and the study of nature are one for Thoreau. With the exception of his political essays, Thoreau’s compositions are at once those of an autobiographer and of a student of nature. The two facets of his work are inseparable, and, like the different parts of an organism, they cannot be separated without destroying the whole. This is not to say that Thoreau does not struggle between the two interests, or that they are ever fully reconciled in his writings. As we shall see, Thoreau’s life and work are defined by this tension. Yet, in his best prose, he achieves a fusion of opposites that is part of an entirely new poetics in which mental and natural processes are fully identical.

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Chapter 6

The Metamorphosis of Thoreau

The purest science is still biographical.—Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (362)

Celebrated in its time as a monumental work by an already hypercanonical writer, Goethe’s Poetry and Truth finds a sharp, acerbic critic in Henry David Thoreau. In his first full-length work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau rejects Poetry and Truth as “the story of a city boy” (327). For Thoreau, Goethe’s autobiography is that of an over-cultivated, bourgeois artist who forsakes nature and his natural poetic genius to live comfortably in the city of Weimar. Thoreau summarily dismisses Goethe with one of his favorite rhetorical weapons, the pun: “He was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred” (328; emphasis in original). Thoreau’s relation to Goethe is complicated by his earlier celebration of his writings, both literary and scientific, and the extent to which those writings exert an influence on Thoreau, extending from the earliest Journal entries in 1837 to the late natural history essays of the 1860s. Thoreau’s complex relationship to Goethe will provide an opening that enables us to grasp how Thoreau radically expands and democratizes Goethe’s approach to nature and to the self in order to imagine a fully organic vision of the world. As Thoreau writes in Walden: “Nothing is inorganic” (307). Thoreau and Germany Thoreau’s interest in Goethe is best understood as part of a deeper fascination with German literature shared among all New England Transcendentalists. As Robert Richardson remarks: For Emerson and the circle of liberal intellectuals around him, Kant and Fichte were simply more important than Locke or Hume or the Scottish Common Sense school in philosophy; Goethe and Novalis were more important than Wordsworth or Keats in literature, and the work of Herder, Coleridge (himself strongly influenced by German thought), and Schleiermacher was more important in theology than Jonathan Edwards and the American Puritan tradition. (27)

The success of the American publication of Germaine de Staël’s Germany in 1814 is a harbinger of the central role German Romanticism would come to play in New England. The new-found enthusiasm for German thought is captured by the

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extensive cultural exchange of the period: in 1815, George Ticknor, founder of the Boston Public Library and future professor of belles-lettres at Harvard, and Edward Everett, eventual university president, matriculate at the Georg-AugustUniversity of Göttingen. They are followed by a steady flow of students and scholars, including George Bancroft, who later met and wrote on Goethe, Joseph Cogswell, future Harvard librarian and bibliographer, and George Henry Calvert, eventual Chair of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at the University of Baltimore. In all, over two hundred Americans attended German universities between 1815 and 1850, more than half of whom would go on to teach at American institutions of higher education (Frank et al. 229). The general enthusiasm for German culture is reflected in the numerous translations of the period, which included works such as Friedrich Schlegel’s History of Literature, Ancient and Modern in 1818, which Thoreau repeatedly read while at Harvard, Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry in 1833, and Heine’s The Romantic School in 1836. American literary journals and magazines also began to devote more space to German material. Articles on Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Novalis, Schiller, and the state of German literature in general appeared in venues such as The North American Review (edited by Everett), The Christian Examiner, and the transcendentalist publication The Dial (1844). The excitement provided by the new German literature and philosophy is most palpable in the proliferation of reading clubs that are reminiscent of the literary salons of late eighteenth-century Berlin and Paris. The most famous of these gatherings is, of course, the “The Hedge Club,” later named the “Transcendental Club,” to which Thoreau was invited by Emerson in the summer of 1837. In all of these ways, German thought, and with it Goethe, lie at the heart of much of New England life of the period. It is out of this intellectual ferment that American Transcendentalism, as set forth by writers like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and, of course, Henry David Thoreau, takes shape. German thought does not thrive to the exclusion of other traditions. Thoreau’s eclectic reading list while at Harvard points to the diversity of thought that characterizes the period. An avid student of the classics, Thoreau read Homer, Virgil, and the Stoics. He encounters various strains of idealism as mediated by French, English, and American writers: Cousin, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson in particular. He studies Locke, Hume, and Paley; he develops a taste for Oriental   For a concise and especially vivid overview of the role of Germany in American culture see Gura, American Transcendentalism, esp. 21–45. Also invaluable is Frank, Essmann, and Mueller-Vollmer, The Internationality of National Literatures in Either America.   For a complete account of Thoreau’s reading see Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (1988). A list of his reading while at Harvard College can be found in Cameron, Emerson the Essayist (191–208).   The best introduction to Transcendentalism in its full European intellectual context is Walls, Seeing New Worlds (15–52).

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literature and an instinctive dislike of the strictures of Puritanical thought as transmitted by Jonathan Edwards. Even with this wide range of writings, German literature and philosophy remain the central source of inspiration for the development of American intellectual independence and reform. While impossible to reduce to a simple set of propositions, German thought generally attracted American intellectuals with its celebration of nature as emblematic of the structure of the human spirit and of the individual as a self-aware, independent agent. It is these twin pillars of German idealism that would so fascinate Thoreau. Thoreau’s first encounter with German culture and thought comes while still a student at Harvard, where he studies German language for over two years, attends lectures on German literature given by Longfellow, and settles on a regular course of readings in German philosophy and theology. His most serious and sustained engagement with Germany comes through Goethe. Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship provides Thoreau with his first window onto Goethe’s literary world. By the fall of 1837, he reads Torquato Tasso and the Italian Journey in the original, comments on and translates portions of these works in his Journal, and benefits from the lively discussions fostered by Fuller’s rendering of Tasso and Conversations with Goethe. Thoreau goes on to read Poetry and Truth, Elective Affinities, as well as the scientific works, On the Metamorphosis of Plants and Theory of Color, all the while translating Goethe’s verse, an activity that would engage him throughout his life. If we are to judge from Thoreau’s writings, however, Goethe fades from view after the publication of A Week in 1849, where Goethe is roundly criticized. After A Week, Thoreau never mentions Goethe again. Yet, in Walden, the late natural history essays, and the Journal, Goethe remains a palpable presence. How should we interpret Goethe’s conspicuous absence? Before addressing this question we need to understand the more explicit role he plays in Thoreau’s earlier prose, an issue to which we now turn. The Open-Eyed Traveler In the pre-Walden Journal entries and other early writing such as “Natural History of Massachusetts” (1842) and A Week, Thoreau’s meditations on the figure of the poet and scientist reveal a writer assiduously engaging and creatively recasting Goethean thought for his own purposes. In the third entry of his Journal, begun shortly after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau considers Goethe’s classical play Tasso. Celebrated as the first play with a poet at its dramatic center, Goethe’s Tasso tells the story of a young poet’s forbidden and unrequited love for Princess  His reading from this period includes Asma’i’s Antar, A Bedouin Romance and the Persian romance “Wamik and Asra.”    For the influence of Germany and Goethe on Thoreau see Richardson, Henry David Thoreau (27–31, 153–9). For an extended reading of Goethe’s influence on Thoreau see McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist (69–90). 

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Leonora. Unable to reconcile the imperatives of the heart with the demands of courtly society, Tasso becomes alienated from his aristocratic patrons and descends into a state of madness. Tasso’s fatal flaw lies in his unwavering belief in an ideal world in which desire and the object of desire perfectly correspond, a world his poetry seeks to give expression. Upon his deathbed, Tasso embraces his rival—the worldly, practical, and grounded Antonio—signaling a recognition of his own folly. Tasso’s poignant failure sets the stage for Goethe’s objective and classical poetics whose ethos of self-mastery and self-culture proves critical to Thoreau. Thoreau’s early interest in Tasso also reflects his fear of an impotent and irrelevant Romantic poetics even as it expresses his desire to hold onto an idealistic conception of the world. Thoreau opens his Journal entry of October 25, 1837 with a meditation on the passing of winter to spring as a source of poetic inspiration and its link to the rebirth and rejuvenation of the self: “[Spring] appears and we are once more children; we commence again our course with the new year” (J1: 6). Thoreau follows with a quote from Tasso, in which he too reflects upon the vernal scene: “The flowers look kindly at us from the beds with their child-eyes—and in the horizon, the snow of the far mountains dissolves into light vapor” (6). Taken on its own, the quote is a rather unremarkable instance of Tasso’s yearning for a lost Golden Age. In the context of the Journal, however, it can be read as part of Thoreau’s strategy to relocate the source of poetic inspiration from a mythical, ahistorical realm to the natural historical, conveyed here through the cyclical pattern of the seasons. The most important consequence of this shift is that the poet need no longer lament some long-lost idyllic state, but instead search the ever-shifting forms of the here and now for its subject. Tellingly, Thoreau frames the quote from Tasso by linking the passing of winter to the shedding of his old self and the growth of a new identity: mental and natural processes are from the start intimately linked in Thoreau’s writings. “Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another … So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth … If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak, but pines and birches, or perchance weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth” (5). Thoreau’s vision is even at this early stage resolutely anti-teleological; development may lead to “pines and birches” or just as likely “weeds and brambles.” It is above all lawful change that Thoreau seeks to embrace and ultimately express in his writings, a change that finds its reflection in the surrounding natural world. Less than two months after Tasso, Thoreau turns to Goethe’s Italian Journey, a work that offers him an early model for learning how to look at the natural world and understand its relation to the perceiving subject. After translating several passages from Goethe’s account of his journey through Italy during a time of personal and aesthetic crisis, Thoreau comments: [Goethe] is generally satisfied with giving an exact description of objects as they appear to him, and his genius is exhibited in the points he seizes upon and illustrates. His description of Venice … is that of an unconcerned spectator,

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whose object is faithfully to describe what he sees … It is this trait which is chiefly to be prized in the book—even the reflections of the author do not interfere with his descriptions (J1: 16; Dec. 12, 1837)

Goethe’s genius, as Thoreau sees it, lies in his ability to select objects from the entire field of phenomena and to describe those objects “faithfully,” that is without allowing external reflection to distort his perceptual grid. For Thoreau, it is by remaining “unconcerned” that Goethe is able to view the world without lapsing into an all-consuming subjectivity, on the one hand, or an alienated objectivity, on the other. To be “unconcerned” is not to be indifferent. Rather, it is to be relaxed and at ease, and, as a result, open to experience. Throughout the Italian Journey, Goethe describes himself as an open-eyed traveler: “I make sure to keep my eyes open all the time and let the sights impress themselves on me deeply” (PU 6: 100; HA 11: 122). Thoreau is careful not to mistake Goethe’s approach for a form of Lockean sensationalism in which the object world leaves its imprint on a receptive but passive mind. To see with “eyes open” requires, as Goethe notes, “considerable effort” (PU 6: 100; HA 11: 121). This effort promises both knowledge of the world and, through that knowledge, self-knowledge: “I was making this remarkable journey not to deceive myself but to become acquainted with myself through objects” (PU 6: 41; HA 11: 45). Goethe leaves Germany a figure near death, yet, in his careful contemplation of the “eternally classical” Italian landscape, is given new life (PU 6: 190; HA 11: 233). In the wake of his brother’s sudden death and without a stable career or clear poetic voice, Thoreau goes to Walden Pond in summer of 1845 in a similar state of despair. In part with Goethe as a model, Thoreau is able to turn to nature as a source for spiritual renewal and transformation. Thoreau is especially drawn to the materiality and physicality of Goethe’s vision. Thoreau’s reverence for facts—“The fact will one day flower out into a truth” (J1: 19)—owes a good deal to Goethe. In his typically witty idiom, Thoreau comments, “[Goethe] jogs along at a snails [sic] pace, but ever mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens above him—His Italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and macaroni, but a solid turf-clad soil” (J1: 30). This “solid turfclad soil” serves as a salutary antidote to Emerson’s lofty, ethereal idealism that for Thoreau too often looks through objects, not at them. Goethe takes simple yet profound pleasure in noting the natural objects themselves, a gaze filled with wonder at the sensuous particulars that constitute the world: “Here I found my first starfish and sea urchins washed up on the shore. A lovely green leaf, like the finest vellum, but also some remarkable detritus: mostly the usual particles of limestone, 

  Another salient example among Goethe’s many descriptions of himself as an openeyed traveller: “Now, as is my fashion, I am very quiet and just open my eyes wide, very wide, when it all becomes too much for me” (PU 6: 153; HA 11: 186). Here, Goethe is able to overcome the subjective emotion that threatens his very personhood by adjusting his vision and letting the objects assert their own objective reality.

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but also serpentine, jasper, quartz, breccia pebbles, granites, porphyries, types of marble, glass of green or blue color” (PU 6: 151; HA 11: 182). For Thoreau, too, the naturalist’s approach produces a sense of child-like wonder: “A very meager natural history suffices to make me a child—only their names and genealogy make me love fishes. I would know even the number of their fin rays—and how many scales compose the lateral line” (J1: 109). Thoreau’s longed-for scientific identification of fish quickly leads to a general identification with the piscine world: “I fancy I am amphibious and swim in all the brooks and pools in the neighborhood, with the perch and bream, or doze under the pads of our river amid the winding aisles and corridors formed by their stems, with the stately pickerel” (109). Thoreau’s scientific meditations imperceptibly lead into a gentle reverie where the division between perceiver and object of perception quietly dissolves. The bond between self and nature is described here and elsewhere in the early Journal in terms of friendship and sympathetic fellowship: “I am wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook—Methink I have need even of his sympathy—and to be his fellow in a degree” (109). In the Italian Journey, we find a similar if more restrained and distant connection to the outside world. Goethe’s sense of wonder produces “a feeling of companionship with the object and leads to a purer sense of its worth” (PU 6: 123; HA 11: 151). For Goethe, this companionship is an extension of his ethic of self-cultivation or Bildung. So, too, for Thoreau, the power of science at its highest level is a moral one: “The laws of nature are science but in an enlightened moment they are morality and modes of divine life” (J1: 468). True science is “con-science,” scientia, a moral knowledge (J2: 144). Arctic Pines and Banyan Trees: A Natural History of Thoreau’s Massachusetts The notion of “sympathy” lies at the core of Thoreau’s understanding of what constitutes the ideal scientist. In his first full-length essay, “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” a review for the Dial of the state’s recently completed scientific survey, Thoreau writes “The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, feel, better than other men … We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy” (NH 2). A direct attack on the Baconian mode of scientific inquiry, the essay both celebrates and criticizes the efforts of the surveyors. On the one hand, Thoreau admires the survey’s attention to detail. (After all, Thoreau was himself employed as a surveyor.) Testifying to the fullness of the natural world, books of natural history offer Thoreau a quiet “thrill of delight” as well as an “accession of health” (3). More than restorative elixirs, natural history writing also enlarges Thoreau’s awareness of self: “Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom … Nature will bear the closest inspection … she has

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no interstices; every part is full of life” (6). The fullness of nature is greeted as a joyful emblem of the fullness of human nature. Thoreau’s admiration of the survey is far from equivocal, however. “These volumes deal much in measurements and minute descriptions not interesting to the general reader, with only here and there a colorful sentence to allure him, like those plants growing in dark forests, which bear only leaves not blossoms” (22). Thoreau does not critique the authors’ attention to facts, but rather their lack of attention to what he calls “facts of importance” (22). The surveyors are not disinterested observers; instead, they are guided by the directives of the legislature to seek what is merely useful in nature. As a result, they “inspect” rather than “behold” the natural world (22). The distinction is critical for Thoreau, for it captures the essential attitude of the observer. Rather than rush to provide a complete catalog of the natural world, Thoreau’s scientist is more deliberate: “We must look a long time before we can see. Slow are the beginnings of philosophy” (22). For Thoreau, this type of looking demands a total engagement of the body and the spirit with the surrounding natural world, and it is this vigorous approach that allows the philosopher-scientist to discern the basic laws that govern all phenomena. Thoreau’s dual focus on empirical observation and sympathetic immersion in “A Natural History of Massachusetts” is of a piece with his belief in the unity and lawfulness of the universe. Juxtaposing his experience of the woods in Massachusetts with the account given in the state’s scientific survey, Thoreau writes, “I am struck with the pleasing friendships and unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves” (NH 19). The equation of leaves and lichen leads to an extended lyrical meditation in which all aspects of nature become lawful variations upon the leaf, a notion he will famously develop in the penultimate chapter of Walden to describe the moment of his spiritual rebirth. Thoreau begins with the description of a winter scene where forms of ice suggest the shapes of leaves in summer: Every tree, every shrub, and spire of grass, that could raise its head above the snow was covered with a dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer dress. Even the fences put forth leaves in the night. The centre, diverging, and more minute fibers were perfectly distinct, and the edges regularly indented. These leaves were on the side of the twig or stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them. When the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingled merrily as they were brushed by the foot of the traveler, and reflected all the hues of the rainbow, as he moved side to side. (NH 20)

Thoreau then links the processes of crystallization and vegetable growth:

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Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism It struck me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the same order, on the other. (20)

In a final move, Thoreau breathlessly extends his observation to encompass the entire natural world. Leaves are like “coral and the plumage of birds.” The “melting frost on the window” resembles “waving grain,” “towering palms and wide-spread banyans,” and “arctic pines stiff frozen” (20). With its cascading imagery, Thoreau’s vision could be viewed as a celebration of national unity. One can see in the palm trees and banyan trees images of Florida, in the waving grains an emblem of the Midwest, and in the frozen pines a picture of New England. Thoreau’s ambition is more expansive, however. His vision of unity is not limited to the American landscape, but embraces the entire world, both real and imagined. After all, these are “arctic pines”; the banyan tree is native to India. In other moments, the leafcrystals resemble “pictures of oriental scenery” or ostrich-feathers and fairy-rings (21, emphasis added). By the end of his fantastical meditation, Thoreau has indeed wandered far afield from his original purpose to review the surveyors’ report of Massachusetts. Instead, he has offered his own catalogue of nature’s wonders— wonders that could not be perceived by the more limited, because utilitarian, view of the state surveyors. Thoreau’s description owes much to Goethe’s notion of the primordial plant as sketched in The Metamorphosis of Plants and the Italian Journey. Nothing in either of these works, however, suggests the prose found in “A Natural History of Massachusetts.” Goethe’s vision is much more restrained, both rhetorically and conceptually. On one level, Goethe’s claim could scarcely be more sweeping: he has discovered the principle of change that animates all of nature. But these laws can only explain change within an individual organism; they do not account or allow for change from one organism to another. Goethe’s hierarchal understanding of nature is predicated on a strict division between the various realms of nature. According to legend, Goethe chastises a young follower for letting his imagination run ahead of natural fact when he excitedly claims to see a morphological similarity between the frost on the window pane and the leaves in the forest. No such limit holds for Thoreau. Indeed, it is the sacred role of poet as “seer” to perceive the hidden correspondences between all aspects of nature and bring them to light. The Economy of the Universe Thoreau returns to the idea of the leaf when he arrives at Walden Pond and composes the first draft of A Week, the narrative of his boat excursion in 1839

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with his brother John, whose death three years later haunts the text. Reflecting on the New England landscape, Thoreau describes nature as “a vast manufactory of leaves—the leaf is her constant cipher. It is grass in the field … it flutters on the oak,—it springs in the mould on a jar—and in animal, vegetable and mineral—in fluids and in crystals—plain or variegated—fresh or decayed it acts how large a part in the economy of the universe” (Johnson, A Natural Harvest 7). The image of the leaf as cipher recalls Emerson’s description in Nature of “man’s condition” as “a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put” (7). For Thoreau the solution to the riddle is the law of metamorphosis. It emerges as the principle that governs and relates all manifestations of nature from birth to life, from the organic to the inorganic, within the vast “economy of the universe.” Viewed in the context of his grief for his brother John, the reflection on the leaf can be read as an attempt to understand his own personal loss within nature’s larger economy. Thoreau conveys the full revelatory scope and power of the leaf as he concludes his meditation: “Whatever Coleridge thought of Tasso’s having chosen the last remaining topic for an epic poem in the Delivery of Jerusalem—I think his critic was right who thought one could write an epic to be called the leaf” (Johnson 72). In the final version of A Week, published four years later in 1849, Thoreau removes the leaf passage and inserts numerous passages that are explicitly critical of Goethe. Despite these critiques, A Week is arguably the most Goethean of Thoreau’s texts. In particular, it shares a strong affinity with the Italian Journey, a work Thoreau had recently read in the original. Both works are framed as voyages of a self in crisis. Casual and meandering in form, mixing philosophical discussion, natural description, and personal anecdotes, drawing on journal notes, letters, and other miscellanea, the narratives chart a course of rebirth and renewal by maintaining an atmosphere of cool, calm, objective serenity that soothes the inner despair that had threatened to consume them. In A Week, the river is invariably characterized as “gentle,” “pleasing,” “secure,” “fertile,” and “innocent” (193)— adjectives Goethe employs liberally in the Italian Journey. There are no great dangers, passions, or exaggerations. Instead there is a sense of quiet, restrained exhilaration, as when Thoreau ascends Saddleback Mountain or Goethe reaches the summit of Vesuvius. In a passage typical of the work’s tranquil mood, Thoreau reflects on his situation as he begins the return voyage to Concord, “All the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it around the falls” (317). At its core, A Week is about learning how to steer a course in life that maintains this

  For a complete copy of the First Draft of A Week as well other textual variants of A Week see Johnson, A Natural Harvest.    This particular quote is also in Richardson (157).   On the similarity between A Week and Italian Journey see McIntosh (69–90), Richardson (156–9), and Walls (34).

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attitude of “equipoise” and assuages the “secret violence” (his sorrow over his brother’s death) that racks his being. Goethe and Thoreau seek this state of equanimity by attending to the myriad and wondrous particulars of the natural world. In a passage that resembles Goethe’s meticulous descriptions of the Roman populace, A Week opens with a paean to nature that includes an extended (nearly four-thousand-word) catalogue of fish in the Concord River. The virtue of such a description, as Thoreau relates it, is that it “enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature” (26). The descriptions are products of a keen and sympathetic eye: “As you stand thus stooping over the bream in its nest, the edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from the head, are transparent and colorless” (28).10 The bream or Pomotis vulgaris, as Thoreau also knows it, is the object of an aesthetic gaze that reveals the underlying unity of nature: “It is a perfect jewel of the river, the green, red, coppery, and golden reflections of its mottled sides … [are] in harmony with the sunlit brown and yellow pebbles” (28). This unity has its source in what Thoreau terms the “fish principle of nature,” or “the fertile law itself,” in other words, the generative principle that animates all of nature (25). This irrepressible and universal force— the fish spawn “on the tops of mountains, and the interior plains” (25)—begets a world where there is no death, no end, no despair, but instead, health and a corresponding happiness. Situating themselves within a world brimming with activity and change, Goethe and Thoreau are able to discover the larger laws or patterns that shape the natural world and themselves. For Goethe, the governing principle is that of metamorphosis, which he later applies to his own development: just as the parts of a plant are modified leaves, the different aspects of our lives are variants of the self whose stages are marked, in Goethe’s terms, by varying degrees of refinement or perfection. In A Week, Thoreau expands this principle: leaves are not merely like selves, they are selves in that both the leaf and the self are linked together according to a rigorous science of correspondence that describes real (not merely fanciful) relations. The leaf and the self are kindred beings in that they are part of an interrelated, interactive, and evolving system. In broadening Goethe’s concept of metamorphosis, Thoreau opens up a space where human and nonhuman can be understood as bound together by a common law. In so doing, he fashions a protoecological view of the world. Thoreau’s poetic innovation can be best understood through his pointed critique of Goethe in A Week.11 We first encounter Goethe in the work’s third 10

  Note here Thoreau’s characteristic style. The fish is described in natural historical terms (dorsal, caudal) and in Transcendental terms (transparent, colorless). The former asserts the fish’s materiality, the latter its ideality. Thoreau’s prose resists both categories even as it seamlessly weaves the discourses of natural history and poetry together. 11   See Paul (210–11) and Tauber (155–7) for strong analyses on Thoreau’s critique of Goethe in A Week.

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chapter, “Monday.” Thoreau considers the position of the American intellectual: “To the American Reader, who, by the advantages of his position, can see over that strip of the Atlantic coast to Asia and the Pacific … the comparatively recent literature of Europe often appears partial and clannish” (142). From this vantage point the achievements of Goethe are recast: “Even Goethe wanted that universality of genius which could have appreciated the philosophy of India, if he had more nearly approached it” (143). Several remarkable things are going on here. Thoreau is not only reorienting American literature away from Europe but also defining it in relation to the literature of the world. What is more, Americans, by virtue of their geography, are in a unique position to appreciate and benefit from these transnational and transhistorical currents. Finally, the passage brings to the surface a generalized anxiety about European influence—especially English and German—that the enthusiastic tenor of Thoreau’s prose usually elides. It is in this context that Thoreau is able to characterize Goethe as a thinker who dwells merely in the realms of practical understanding as opposed to universal contemplation. Thoreau sharpens his critique of Goethe in “Friday,” the book’s final chapter. There are two types of writers, Thoreau asserts: the genius, whose work is inspired, above criticism, and sacred, and the poet, whose work is a product of the intellect, therefore subdued, measured, and lacking in inspiration (366). For the poet, the pen “leaves a thin varnish or glaze over its work” (376). Thoreau concludes: “The works of Goethe furnish remarkable instances of the latter” (376). Thoreau’s positive descriptions of the genius are notable for their Goethean overtones. At one point he describes the genius as “daemonic,” a term he borrows from Poetry and Truth (328). At another point, he characterizes the ideal art forms as “rude, “massive,” “rough,” and “unhewn”—qualities most often associated with Goethe’s work. In these ways, Thoreau’s continuing anxiety of influence manifests itself. Thoreau’s most involved and conflicted encounter with Goethe occurs in the book’s penultimate chapter, “Thursday.” Interpolating material from his earlier Journal entries on the Italian Journey, Thoreau celebrates Goethe as a poet of the “actual”: “A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry” (325). Thoreau warmly describes the Italian Journey as a work of “moderation” and “wisdom” that bespeaks a character of “hearty-good will” that is never critical of another (32). In an abrupt and ironic about face, Thoreau switches tone and offers a brusque critique: “Goethe’s whole education and life were those of an artist. He lacks the unconsciousness of the poet” (327). Thoreau associates the term “artist” with artifice and with the artisan who can, at best, merely imitate the products of nature. Thoreau describes Wilhelm Meister, Goethe’s story of artistic development, as “a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well,” while Poetry and Truth is simply the story of a “youth [who] studied minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession” and of a “man [who] aimed to secure a rank in society which would satisfy his notion of fitness and respectability” (327). Coming from Thoreau, for whom nature was sacred, little could be said that was more damning. Thoreau’s verdict is clear: “Nature is hindered” (327). Goethe’s artistic efforts are consequently incomplete.

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In a subtle act of misdirection, Thoreau inserts, without commentary, a lengthy passage of natural description from the Italian Journey, the work he had earlier praised. A cursory reading of the selection shows nothing notable about the passage except for its odd location in Thoreau’s discussion. The scene is, appropriately enough, a description of the flowing of the river Tees and its shore. The qualities that Thoreau always admires in Goethe are manifestly present: “‘[E]verything is so closely planted one to another, that you think they must choke one another,— vineyards, maize, mulberry-trees, apples, pears, quinces, and nuts. The dwarf elder throws itself vigorously over the walls’” (330). This is a landscape of sensuous detail and desire. Goethe’s ultimate point of reference, however, is not nature but art: “‘[I]t reminds one of the loveliest pictures of art … Everything forms a living, animated Heinrich Roos’” (330, emphasis added). The scene Goethe describes, with “‘the women’s tufts of hair bound up, the men’s bare breasts and light jackets, the excellent oxen,’” is for Thoreau an imitation of an imitation (330). It is a product of Goethe’s cultural education, not his natural imagination. Of course, Thoreau’s own descriptions of nature are deeply informed by his own cultural knowledge. As readers have noted, Thoreau creatively adopts techniques of contemporary landscape painters to create his nature scenes. 12 Still, the contrast Thoreau wants to draw is clear. Goethe can only see nature in terms of the artificial culture that has hindered his education and that Thoreau seeks to escape. Thoreau brings his rivalry with Goethe to a climax when he turns away from the Tees and directs his gaze back to the Merrimack River. In his description, Thoreau articulates a new poetics. Note how all of the categories that structure Goethe’s world dissolve in Thoreau’s description: Thus we ‘sayled by thought and pleasaunce,’ as Chaucer says, and all things with us seemed to flow; the shore itself, and the distant cliffs, were dissolved by the undiluted air. The hardest material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the long run it does. Trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the surface. And in the heavens there were rivers of stars and milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour. (331)

The operative word in the passage is “flow.” Heaven and earth, mind and body, river and self: they all flow together to form a whole governed by the same law. In the opening sentences this union is only apparent: the verb “to seem” appears 12

  See Schneider, “Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting” for a study of Thoreau’s nature description in relation to the techniques of contemporary landscape painting. Schneider also draws connections between Thoreau’s nature scenes and the new visual technologies of the periods such as the panorama and stereorama (67–88).

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two times. As the passage progresses, “to seem” is replaced with “to be” and the separate spheres of being are united through the images of “rivers of stars,” “rivers of rock,” and “rivers of ore,” all of which ultimately resolve into “our thoughts.” The repetition of “rivers” conveys the sense of a common law structuring the world, while the preposition “of” joins those categories we usually keep separate. Thoreau does not, however, lose himself in this unifying vision. “We are central still,” Thoreau asserts (331). Though we are parts of a larger cosmic whole that includes the rocks, rivers, and stars, only the perceiving consciousness is able to uncover and give expression to this basic reality. Such moments of revelatory intensity, in which the dualities of thought that map the world dissolve, fill the pages of A Week. For some readers, these poetic passages sit uneasily alongside the discursive sections on literary, political, historical, philosophical, and religious matters that comprise the majority of the text.13 For others, the heterogeneous subject matter and its seemingly haphazard presentation mask a deliberately structured and wholly original organic work of art.14 However we approach A Week, it is useful to think of digression as the narrative’s organizing device.15 The text digresses much like Thoreau’s boat follows the ebbs and flows of the twisting river. Indeed, Thoreau warns the reader accustomed to a work with clear forward motion: “The reader who expects to float down stream for the whole voyage, may well complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea” (103). His book is not one “which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill-stream.” Nor does it contain “long stringy slimy sentences [which] are of that consistency that they naturally flow and run together” (103). We are reminded of Montaigne’s autobiographical Essays, in which he made a virtue out of his work’s rambling structure. We are also reminded of Rousseau. The casual, apparently natural style of the Reveries is consonant with a mood of dolce far niente and a state of consciousness that seeks to rediscover the lost Edenic world of his past. So too, Thoreau’s digressive prose lets the narrator linger for a little while longer in the world as it was before his brother’s death, before the Fall. Unlike Rousseau, however, Thoreau’s digressions are not smooth; the text is filled with “nauseating swells” and “choppings.” Thoreau’s “rougher” digressive style places demands on the reader to link together the text’s disparate  For a contemporary reading of A Week along these lines see Schneider, Henry David Thoreau (26–33). In his reading, A Week is the work of a young writer yet to achieve the success of Walden. “The balance between life and art that [Thoreau] achieved in Walden,” he argues, “is suggested but not realized in A Week” (26). 14  This more positive reading of A Week begins with Matthiessen and is expanded upon in Paul’s influential reading of A Week. Paul mounts an inspired defense of A Week as an organic work of art whose disorderly exterior masks a complex underlying unity—one that is different from but no less successful than that achieved in Walden (191–233). The most triumphant readings of A Week include Hovey, Buell, and Sayre as noted in Johnson’s “Historical Introduction” to the text in A Week (433–500). 15   For Paul the text’s digressive quality is a mark of its organicity. 13

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elements from the soaring philosophical meditations to the detailed empirical observations. Whether we view A Week as an artistic “success” or not, digression emerges as a key strategy for placing the separate elements that comprise the life of the mind and that of nature into relation with each other. Toward the end of A Week, the man of science embodies the hope that these seemingly disparate elements can be held together. As David Robinson argues, the naturalist emerges as a “figure of reconciliation who can bring together superficially opposed modes of intellectual endeavor” (74). Reaching the canal above Middlesex, Thoreau idealizes his “old friend” the locksman who is also a “lover of the higher mathematics”: “It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands” (361). Thoreau’s recollection prompts a meditation on the qualities of the ideal scientist: “The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one. Few detect the morality in the former, or the science in the latter” (361). Scientific truth is, in Thoreau’s formulation, another form of moral truth. In this sense, Thoreau writes: “The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical” (362). Thoreau moves beyond the claim that all science is rooted in experience. The life the scientist leads is itself an expression of the very truth he seeks. To separate the two is to discover neither. In the following chapter, we will read Walden as Thoreau’s ambitious attempt to realize the ideal of the naturalist as figured in A Week through a unique hybrid prose that blends the subjective idealism of the poet and the objective empiricism of the scientist.

Chapter 7

“Prolific Hybrids”: Walden and Thoreau’s Natural History

There is nothing inorganic—Thoreau, Walden (308)

Published in 1854, Walden is Thoreau’s imaginative re-creation of his experience at Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived for roughly two years, from July 4, 1845 to September 1847. Compressed into one year and organized loosely around the seasonal cycle, Walden is a story of liberation from the anxieties and false progress of materialistic life; an exploration of the realms of consciousness and experience obscured by the everyday; and, ultimately, the account of a second birth, the emergence of a more mature, transformed self, integrated within the natural world. The opening paragraph of Walden announces a text that will inhabit a middle ground between the dualities that map our world: When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hand only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. (3)

Despite the repeated use of the first person, the narrator insists on his connection to society through geographical markers. He is at pains to delineate his location between civilization (Concord) and nature (“a mile from any neighbor”). He also makes clear the written dimension of his nature experience by alluding to those sections he wrote after his stay. Critics have come to see Walden as a space that weaves together the categories of thought and experience that we tend to keep separate. As critics have recently commented, Thoreau’s text is “a border zone under constant negotiation: not a no-man’s land between warring parties but more like the cambium of a tree, the vital interface that does not separate but bonds and generates the inner wood and the outer bark” (Petrulionis and Walls 242). The pertinent question remains how these bonds are generated and the stakes involved. Our interest will be in the way Thoreau weaves together the discourses of natural history and Transcendentalist thought to articulate a more holistic sense of the self at a time of intellectual fragmentation. This merging of science and autobiography is best seen as part of a larger project that undermines dualistic modes of apprehension as intellectual prison-houses that constrain our beings and entrap us in “lives of quiet desperation” (8).

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Walden is structured around a series of oppositions that the text playfully undermines at every turn. Thus, the chapters are linked together in a sequence of paired opposites: “Reading” and “Sounds”; “Solitude” and “Visitors”; “The Bean-Field” and “The Village”; “The Ponds” and “Baker Farm,” and so on. These pairs can be broadly associated with binary structures. For instance, the pair “Reading” and “Sounds” corresponds to nature/culture; “Solitude” and Visitors” to individual/society; “The Bean-Field” and “The Village” to life in nature/life in society; “The Ponds” and “Baker Farm” to idealism/materialism. But things are a good deal more complicated than this static, schematic presentation suggests. Let us take the example of “Reading,” a chapter that focuses on the value of the fine arts, which is set against “Sounds,” a chapter that focuses on the sounds of nature. In the opening sentence of “Sounds,” Thoreau undermines the traditional hierarchy between nature and culture by insisting on their interrelationship: “But while we are confined to books … we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard” (111). As he urges us to “read” the spiritual significance of nature, Thoreau also subtly complicates the relationship between literal and figurative. What exactly is this language “without metaphor”? And what is its relation to the language of Walden? As we listen to the chanting of the whippoorwills, the “hoorer hoo” of the owl, and the trump of bullfrogs, the hierarchy between oral and written language becomes unsettled (123–4). For this language “without metaphor” is, in fact, a highly stylized, self-consciously literary language. The “u-lu-lu” of the screech owls is “truly Ben Jonsonian” (124); the bullfrogs are likened to “ancient winebibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake” (126). At the same time, the sounds of culture, notably of the train, are associated with nature: the whistle of the train is “like the scream of a hawk” and the coming and going of the engine is “like the beat of a partridge” (115; 114). By describing so-called natural phenomena in cultural terms and cultural artifacts in the language of nature, Thoreau creates a network of associations between both realms that undercuts their differences. The tension between nature and culture resolves itself in two images in the chapter. The first is Thoreau’s description of an echo in the woods from a town 

 This reading based on the analysis of Walter Harding.   Walter Benn Michaels interprets Walden and the chapters “Reading” and “Sounds,” in particular, from a deconstructive paradigm. For Benn Michaels, Thoreau’s use of binary opposition undoes any sense of relation between the opposing terms and forces us to choose between one or the other. “In the movement from ‘Reading’ and ‘Sounds,’ the literal and figurative do not coexist, they are not seen as complementary; rather the arguments Thoreau gives in support of the one take the form of attacks on the other” (146). Far from seeing Walden as promoting a vision of convergence, Michaels’ interpretation has the paradoxical effect of reifying the categories Thoreau sought to blend in the name of an ethics of reading that values choice and independence. We are, for Benn Michaels, free insofar as we are allowed to choose which prison cell we would like to inhabit. 

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bell: “The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely the repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of nature; the same trivial words and notes sung by a woodnymph” (123). The distinction between the sounds from the town and the sounds of nature becomes inoperative: the echo is “the voice of nature,” and the sound of the bell takes on a renewed natural, cultural, even mythical resonance. The second instance comes at the end of the chapter, where Thoreau imagines a “once wild Indian pheasant” that could somehow be “naturalized without being domesticated.” The creature, Thoreau writes, “would soon become the most famous sound in our woods” (127). A clear metaphor for the poet, Thoreau’s creature inhabits a space on a continuum between nature and culture, civilization and wilderness. Its merely hypothetical status hints at what the text has yet to achieve and what Thoreau hopes to find during his sojourn at Walden Pond. Walden is filled with images that open up liminal spaces between seemingly incompatible oppositions. For instance, there are the “prolific hybrids” such as the fabled “winged-cat,” the union between a wild marten and a domestic cat (233); the skater-insects and water-bugs (Gyrinus) moving on the pond surface between water and sky (186); and the Merlin hawk that “did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks” (316). When Thoreau goes out to “raise” beans, he describes the bean-field as “the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field” (158). The bean-field prefigures the central image of the book, the pond: “[A field of water] is intermediate in its nature between land and sky” (188). Thoreau conveys this particular quality of the lake through the poetic figure of apposition: “Sky water” (188). Thoreau also uses apposition to join the narrator’s mind with Walden: “the lake, my serenity” (129). The text is rich with playful poetic devices that unsettle assumed boundaries. In one of the more celebrated passages, the narrator notes the lake’s “dimpling circles” and then redirects our gaze to the “circling dimples” made by fish and insects. Thoreau’s inversion, accomplished by transforming each noun into its respective gerundive form, blurs the division between noun and verb, fact and action, material and ideal, to assert a more fundamental reality in between. In the first two-thirds of Walden the persona of the Yankee—comic, cranky, self-righteous—points up the falseness of his contemporaries’ world view. The prose is filled with invective, satire, irony, puns, parody—all poking fun at the materialistic culture to which nineteenth-century Americans have become captive. In the final third of Walden, a different style predominates. The Yankee gives way to the poet-naturalist. The focus is less on satire and more on nature description. The prose is highly lyrical; the tone affirmative; the mood introspective and meditative; the style is also noticeably scientific. Thoreau’s lyric description of the water-skater’s dimpling on the pond surface is accompanied by notations of exactly when and where the insects last appear before winter (189). In “HouseWarming,” Thoreau notes the beauty of the ice-bubbles on Walden Pond and then catalogues the precise dates that the water first freezes over each year (249). In

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“Spring,” a dramatic description of the annual cracking of the ice is accompanied by the matter-of-fact notation of the different dates the ice begins to recede each year at Walden. And, of course, the joyous embrace of the pond as a symbol of the self in “The Pond in Winter” is interwoven with a meticulous survey of the depth of Walden Pond with a cod-line and stone. As Robert Sattelmeyer notes in his study of the different versions of Walden, Thoreau added the majority of the passages that blend scientific and poetic discourse after 1852. Though Walden underwent seven revisions, its composition generally took place in two phases, the first between 1846 and 1847, while Thoreau was still at Walden, and then between 1852 and 1854 (“The Remaking of Walden” 58). The year 1852 marks a pivotal moment in Thoreau’s relation to science. Richardson stresses the importance of this moment by directing us to Thoreau’s own description of the period as “my year of observation” (quoted in Richardson, Henry David Thoreau 269). In addition to various scientific works ranging from brain science to zoology, Thoreau reads Linnaeus. More than anything else, Linnaeus inspires Thoreau to embark on what would become a life-long endeavor, namely, the systematic cataloging of all the plants in town and their descriptions at different stages of the year in changing climatic conditions. The Journal, which had been up to this point a miscellany of observations on subjects ranging from art to politics to nature, was now turning into a book that would form the basis for an ambitious natural history project, one Thoreau was never able to complete but whose direction critics have sought to intuit through his late work, such as the unfinished Wild Fruits, essays such as “Autumnal Tints” and “Wild Apples,” and the Journal itself. Thoreau, then, actively revises and expands Walden at the same time as he immerses himself in nature study. Emerson offers us perhaps the most lively description of Thoreau with his new-found scientific enthusiasm. The selection is worth quoting at length, for it gives us a clear sense of how closely enmeshed his activities were with his identity: Under his arm [Thoreau] carried an old music book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trowsers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. (327 in Walden-Norton)    The following discussion of Thoreau and Linnaeus is developed from Richardson 269–72.   Indispensible starting points for any discussion on Thoreau’s later Journal writings are William L. Howarth, The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer, and Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal. For an excellent introduction to Thoreau’s natural history see Hoag and Rossi as well as Sattelmeyer in Henry David Thoreau: The Natural History Essays.

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Emerson’s Thoreau resembles the hero of Walden who seeks “to adventure on life now” (15) and “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life (91): he climbs trees, wades in pools, braves scrub-oaks; his body is like armor. Emerson goes on to describe Thoreau sitting so still that the animals mistake him for the stone he is sitting on. He feels himself like a hound or panther, Emerson adds (328). Thoreau is fully identified with nature. This is the selfsame Thoreau who spends the other parts of the days writing Walden. To imagine Thoreau engaged with nature in such a physical way when we contemplate Walden helps us better appreciate what it means to say that the activities of the naturalist and the poet are conjoined. In a journal entry from 1852, Thoreau makes clear both the difficulty and undesirability of keeping separate the discourses of science and art: I have a commonplace book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant,—perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind,—I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all. (J4: 356, emphasis in original)

The book of poetry in the final line is almost certainly, as Charles Anderson suggests, the text of Walden (110). Three descriptive moments exemplify Thoreau’s strategies for merging the scientific and poetic: the description of the shifting colors of Walden in the work’s central chapter, “Ponds”; the surveying of the pond in “Pond in Winter”; and the account of the fantastical “sand foliage” in the penultimate chapter, “Spring.” It is to these three attempts to conjoin the scientific and the aesthetic that we now turn. Perspectives from the Pond A few paragraphs into “Ponds,” Thoreau proposes a close description of Walden. He notes the precise length, circumference, and area of the pond; he also takes care to provide the varying height of the surrounding hills. In other words, Thoreau proceeds in the mode of the surveyor. He then turns his attention to the varying colors of the lake: “All our Concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand” (176). Unlike the surveyor who provides fixed coordinates, the naturalist views color as a matter of perspective, of perception. But it is not just a question of near and far. Thoreau looks at the Concord waters “from a hill-top,” “from a boat, “on its surface,” “from a glass,” “in clear weather,” “in stormy weather,” “in   For an excellent analysis of the narrator of Walden as surveyor, naturalist, and settler see Burbick 59–82.

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summer,” and “covered with snow” (176–7). The changing colors are a result of a limitless number of environmental factors, among them the time of year, the time of day, the aspect of the sky and the quality of the atmosphere, the depth of the pond, the purity of its water, and its relation to the land around it. The colors it produces are correspondingly rich and varied: “dark slate,” “light green,” “dark green,” “vivid green,” “yellowish,” “darker blue,” “light blue,” “vitreous greenish blue” and “colorless” (176–7). As the narrative pivots around the pond, Thoreau provides a representation of his shifting perception over time and space. In this way, the methodology of the surveyor provides a record of Thoreau’s personalized experience in nature. In the middle of Thoreau’s naturalistic description of Walden Pond, the prose takes a decidedly Transcendental turn: “Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both” (176). Thoreau’s symbolism is clear: blue corresponds to the heavenly, the spiritual, the ideal; green to the earthly, the material, the real. The Transcendental outlook and the naturalistic outlook are not, however, set in opposition. In the context of the passage, it is simply one more perspective from which to view the pond. The dynamic range of Thoreau’s perspectivism contrasts with the more static use of color imagery in A Week: “Our boat,” Thoreau writes, “[is] painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence” (15). Thoreau concludes his meditation on Walden’s colors from the perspective of the poet: “[T]his water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo” (177). Thoreau’s description effectively undermines any easy hierarchy between nature and art, natural and unnatural. While the body of the bather seems to contaminate the purity of the water—it is “unnatural,” “distorted,” and “monstrous”—these qualities are also a product of nature and are worthy of artistic contemplation. Thoreau’s visual perspectivism replicates what might be called his rhetorical perspectivism. In any given scene, Thoreau switches easily and rapidly from one discursive mode to another in a dizzying proliferation of discourses. At the start of one sequence, Thoreau’s description resembles that of a natural history: “Ducks and geese frequent [the pond] in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, kingfishers dart away from its coves, and the peetweets (Totanus macularius) ‘teter’ along its stony shores all summer” (185). As the narrative unfolds, Thoreau turns to the language of landscape 

 Thoreau uses a similar technique when he describes the different sounds of nature in “Winter Animals.” Depending on the time of winter, the amount of snow, and the temperature, different animals would make themselves known in different numbers. Thoreau’s descriptions are largely the results of successive observations of his surroundings made during his two-year stay at Walden.

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painting: “The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills … [F]or the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it” (186). From there the description turns to a highly stylized, almost parodic, vision of the Transcendentalist theory of correspondence: “[A lake] is earth’s eye: looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows” (186). (This is Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” in all its splendor.) The discursive shifts in Walden take on a number of different patterns. For instance, “Brute Neighbors” opens with a naturalistic description of the winter wildlife (we witness the activities of mice, a phoebe, a partridge, an otter, a raccoon, a wood-cock, turtle-doves, and red squirrels). The chapter then shifts to a locus classicus of natural history writing—an epic battle between a red ant and a black ant—which Thoreau observes by “[h]olding a microscope “(230). Attention then turns to the fantastical aspects of natural history, such as the accounts of “winged cats” which “according to naturalists … have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat” (233). Completing the move from material to spiritual nature through naturalistic, archetypal and fantastical loci, Thoreau concludes the chapter with his playful, but futile chase of the loon across the pond, a symbolic dramatization of his quest in Walden. This proliferation of perspectives and discourses reveals the complexity of Thoreau’s engagement with nature and makes it impossible to regard him simply as Transcendentalist, naturalist, autobiographer, or poet: he is all of these at once. Surveying the Self Thoreau’s next extended descriptive encounter with the pond occurs in “The Pond in Winter,” a contemplative, restorative chapter whose mood and character are finely attuned to the rhythm of the season. The chapter, which opens in the stillness of a winter morning, is poised between the rich, reassuring nighttime sounds of “Winter Animals” and the cracking, booming, explosive sounds (and sights) of “Spring.” Thoreau’s account of his meticulous survey of Walden Pond during the winter of 1846 takes center stage. He frames his project as an effort to establish the depth of what is thought to be a bottomless pond. Other groups have tried to sound the bottom but failed. One group proceeds with “watery eyes” but shies away “from fear of catching cold in their breasts.” The other group uses a weight that is too heavy and a rope that is too thick “in a vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness” (285). Sly references to the Transcendentalist and materialist approach to nature, respectively, Thoreau’s anecdotes position his own effort as a middle way between poetry and science. What strikes readers of this section is the painstaking exactitude of Thoreau’s descriptions, their insistent empirical and quantitative character. This dimension

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of his project is captured in a map of Walden he inserts into the text. The map notes the exact area of the pond (61 acres, 103 rods), its circumference (1.7 miles), its greatest length (175.5 rods), and its greatest depth (102 feet). (Thoreau adds that the greatest depth is actually 107 feet since the pond has risen five feet since his observations.) The map is drawn on a scale of 1/1920 or forty rods to an inch and includes over seventy depth markers (in fact, he took more than a hundred soundings); it also situates the lake in relation to his cabin, the railroad, some neighboring hills, and the prime meridian (286). How are we to interpret this detailed description of the pond? On the one hand, we might view this entire episode as parodic—a wonderful, fanciful conceit that critiques strictly empirical accounts of nature as woefully inadequate. On the other hand, the details, so lovingly rendered, convey an unmistakable familiarity, even intimacy, with the landscape. They look back to the descriptions in “A Natural History of Massachusetts” even as they look forward to the empirically-minded, post-Walden natural history essays and journal entries. Is there a way out of this interpretative bind? Readers’ puzzlement increases when Thoreau discovers in his findings a natural law, which he immediately extends into the realm of ethics: “[I found] that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth … [W]hat I observed of the pond is no less true in ethics … [D]raw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors … and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character” (289, emphasis in original; 291). As Thoreau moves confidently from measuring nature to taking the measure of humankind, we are caught off guard. To be sure, to link the natural and moral sphere is a thoroughly Transcendental move. But the precision and exactitude of Thoreau’s survey often seem to heighten the contrast between the discourses of science and art. In bursts of rhetorical brio, Thoreau would have readers take the leap between realms, even when the conceit seems strained. But this is a risk Thoreau deems worth taking. The consequence of not doing so is to remain beholden to the status quo: “[W]e are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part … are conversant only with the bight of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them” (292). Thoreau’s empirical/transcendental survey of the pond is best read, then, as an effort to break apart the false categorical barriers that divide humanity from itself and prevent its full realization. Thoreau ends his account of surveying the pond with an image that points to a renewed faith in the power of aesthetics to merge the scientific and poetic, the natural and supernatural, and to lead to a higher state of self-awareness and being. The image is the result of cutting holes in the ice for sounding: When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider’s web, what you may call ice-rosettes. … [S]ometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a

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double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hillside.” (293)

The “dark figures” result from the blending together of man’s activity (cutting the holes) with the processes of nature (the freezing, the rain, and the refreezing). The ice-rosettes announce a new aesthetics that will achieve its most dramatic expression in Thoreau’s final encounter near the pond in the book’s penultimate chapter “Spring.” In the Laboratory of the Artist Described by one critic as a “verbal fireworks display” and a “literary extravaganza” (Bigelow 11), the description of the melting sand by the railroad cut is rightly viewed as the culmination of Thoreau’s spiritual development, the moment in which he achieves his patiently sought-after resurrection after a long winter of meditation and reflection. It is also the most original poetic moment in Thoreau’s writing. Nothing in Thoreau’s earlier writings or in the earlier scenes from Walden, or arguably American literature for that matter, can quite prepare its readers for what is to come. With its flamboyant analogies, its rhetorical extravagance, its imaginative exuberance, it strikes the reader with all the suddenness of the booming of the ice earlier in the chapter as spring announces its arrival. It is all, of course, recognizably Thoreauvian: with its fanciful etymological punning, its wry humor, its playfulness, and its analogical structure. Yet, the sheer length of the passage (over fifteen hundred words), its sustained effusiveness, and its endless succession of analogies—each more unrestrained and extravagant than the next—succeed in stretching language and the creative imagination to the breaking point, giving the vision a forward velocity that fuses realms of existence habitually regarded as separate. The passage begins in a matter-of-fact tone but quickly turns ecstatic as Thoreau considers the shifting forms of flowing sand and clay. They are “like lava,” he at first suggests, “bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.” Soon, his own prose becomes “like lava,” overflowing with analogies and bursting with tropological excess: As [the sand] flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the lacinated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. (274)

  There exists a vast secondary literature on this scene. See in particular Bigelow, West, Saucerman, and Boudreau.

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Sappy leaves, vines, lichens, coral, leopards’ paws, birds’ feet, brains, lungs, bowels, excrement: these seemingly unrelated images are joined together by what Leo Marx refers to as “the analogy-perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the human mind” (390). “Man is an analogist,” Emerson declares in his Transcendentalist manifesto Nature (19). Though only the beginning of Thoreau’s observation of the sandbank phenomena, the reader is already aware, if only through the repeated use of the word “or,” that this process of correspondence is endless and all-embracing. And, indeed, the passage continues in a kind of associative freefor-all: the image of “excrement” leads to the etymological pun “grotesque,” which Thoreau uses in its original sense of “grotto” to figure both a sort of “architectural foliage” and “a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light,” thus playfully linking civilization and nature, the natural with the unnatural (305). It is, of course, language—literary language—that serves as the medium in and through which this unity is made visible. When Thoreau speaks of the “lacinated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens” we have the sense that the analogy is established in concert with language itself. Thoreau employs his hard-won scientific knowledge and language to aesthetic affect. The liquid l joins “lacinated, “lobed” “thalluses,” and “lichens”; “imbricated,” and “lacinated” are rhythmically and sonically paired; even the plosive k joins “imbricated” with the subject of the phrase “lichen.” In short, science is poetry. But poetry is more than just science, it is nature itself. Thoreau’s description turns the Transcendental notion of language on its head. If, for Emerson, “Words are signs of natural facts” (Nature 17), for Thoreau, words are natural facts. As he looks down at the sandbank, the internal workings of language reflect the workings of the world and its inhabitants: Internally, whether in the globe or animal body it [the sand foliage] is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (λείβω, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λοβος, globus, love, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with a guttural l behind it, pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. (306, emphasis in original)

With an exhilarating mixture of pseudo-philology and fanciful puns, Thoreau gives expression to the interpenetration of the human, the world, and the word. The ludic quality of Thoreau’s prose—so evident in the above passage—carries with it the danger of unraveling his aesthetic vision. At points, the description wavers uncomfortably between the fantastical and the absurd. “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” (307). This short, pithy question is the catalyst for an extended and fanciful meditation on the relation between the human and the earth:

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The ball of the human finger is a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. … Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with lobe or drop. The lip (labium from labor (?)) laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. (307–8)

Images of the human chin, cheek bones, brow, face, and fingers round out Thoreau’s extraordinary description. While the sheer audacity and scope of Thoreau’s reverie could be said to fuse, on some level, human and nature, on another level, it highlights the precariousness of his revelation. In the chapter “Ponds in Winter,” Thoreau writes, “I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol” (287). What if it were not? Would Thoreau’s vision collapse around him? Is there really a relation between the material world and the spiritual world? Or is it simply arbitrary? Thoreau conveys something of this uncertainty by prominently placing a question mark where he stalls midway through his philological speculation. But this line of questioning misses the larger point. The process that Thoreau observes in nature is about excess, overflow, and rupture. Thoreau looks out at the “foliaceous mass” and sees the creator “still at work, sporting on this bank, with excess energy strewing his fresh designs about” (306). The world was not finished in six days; there was no rest; the world is constantly “transcending and translating itself,” as is Thoreau (306). In one grand gesture, Thoreau overthrows both the providential theory of divine creation and the positivist view of the earth as inert, putting in their place an organic conception of the universe in which everything is interrelated and alive. “Nothing is inorganic,” he triumphantly declares near the end of his observation of the sandflow. “The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book … but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth” (309). Significantly, it is not the poet but the poet-scientist who realizes this vision. Looking over the scene, Thoreau stands “in the laboratory of the Artist” (306, emphasis added). Drawing on several years of careful study at the pond, Thoreau discovers on the hillside “illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf” (308). The reference to Goethe’s principle of the leaf is clear and so is its explanatory power. Throughout the sandbank passage Thoreau evokes Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis to structure his vision: “The atoms have already learned [the] law [of the vegetable leaf] and are pregnant by it” (306); “The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype” (306); “The whole tree is but one leaf ” (307). The final line is a virtual citation from Goethe’s “On the Metamorphosis of Plants.” Lawrence Buell rightly characterizes the sandbank passage as “a playful-grandiose Goethian allegory of life as metamorphosis”    See Sattelmeyer, “The Remaking of Walden” (442). As we learn from Shanley in his “Historical Introduction” to Walden, Thoreau’s observations were also drawn from his stay at Staten Island in 1843 (365).

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(133). And, indeed, Thoreau extends Goethe’s theory to encompass all of reality in a way that his earlier attempts in “A Natural History of Massachusetts” and A Week only tentatively explored. But here, on the expansive palette of the sandbank, the principle of lawful change allows Thoreau to gather together all the diverse facts both of his imagination and of nature and understand them as part of a dynamic, interrelated whole. Only through the dual perspective of the poet-scientist is he able to express his insight that the phenomenon on the sandbank describes not only nature’s mutability and openness but his own as well. The creative forces expressing themselves in nature, from the inorganic to organic, are identical to the creative forces that animate Thoreau in his life and his life-writing. The poetscientist, who appeared as a figure of reconciliation at the end of A Week, reappears and makes good on his promise to offer a vision that reaches past the separate truths of poetry and science, Transcendentalism and empiricism, faith and fact. In the course of this study, Thoreau has emerged as the culminating figure in the powerful European interpretive tradition traced in the book’s earlier sections. For Thoreau, the exploration of nature and the exploration of the self are one. Not merely twin pursuits, they are identical pursuits that refuse to be treated separately. In Walden, Thoreau not only bridges, but achieves a synthesis— however provisional—between reason and imagination, empiricism and idealism, the literal and the figurative; in short, between the poetic and the scientific. He achieves this synthesis through a metaphorically exuberant and extravagant prose—“extravagant” here in the Thoreauvian sense meaning “out of bounds” (extra vagant)—a prose that in recognizing no boundaries effectively erases the dividing lines between the disciplines and different modes of thought. This grand vision attains its dramatic apotheosis in the celebrated description of the melting sandbank in the book’s penultimate chapter “Spring.” If these moments are fleeting in Walden, Thoreau’s later, more subdued and empiricallydriven natural history writings such as “Autumnal Tints” and The Dispersion of Seeds mark the beginnings of an attempt to move beyond Romanticism and to achieve more quietly, but no less powerfully, a sustained vision of the unity of the self and the unity of that self with the world. While these later natural history essays have in recent years finally received the critical attention they deserve, it is salutary to rediscover in the earlier Thoreau, as we have done, a thinker already seeking ways to bridge the divide between literature and science.

Conclusion Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau are frequently included among the seminal figures in the emergence of modern autobiography as a literary genre and, more generally, in the development of Western intellectual and literary thought. Given the prominent status of The Confessions, Poetry and Truth, and Walden in this version of literary history, it is surprising to note the relative paucity of studies that treat the writers comparatively. What have we learned in bringing these writers together through their shared interest in the natural sciences? Let us first consider the relation of Rousseau and Goethe. In studies on the rise of autobiography as a literary genre, there are almost invariably chapters devoted to Rousseau and to Goethe respectively. Yet, in such accounts, Rousseau and Goethe are seen not in relation, but rather in opposition to one another, representing two distinct and divergent trends of autobiography. Rousseau’s autobiographies, focused so intensely, some would say obsessively, on the internal life of the mind, are often viewed as remarkably modern and prophetic in their anticipation of the increasingly self-conscious, inwardly-directed character of post-Enlightenment culture. Rousseau thus emerges as a precursor to modern autobiography as personal history or confession, directed less toward the public than the private self. Goethe, on the other hand, with his more expansive, extroverted, outwardlydirected style, his attention to the historical circumstances in which he lived, and his avoidance of what he deemed excessive self-reflection, marks off a different path for autobiography: one that foregrounds the relation between the individual and the world, and thus aligns itself more closely with the modern memoir in its emphasis on historical and cultural circumstances. Depending on one’s perspective, then, Goethe’s autobiographical works are viewed either as an ideal model for autobiography understood as an exploration of the dynamic relation between self and world, while Rousseau’s works, with their “excessive” contemplation of self, are less mature, fully-realized works; or, in the reverse interpretation, Goethe’s autobiographies, with their lack of self-reflexivity and apparently more comfortable, less alienated relation to the world, are consigned to



  In his recent work on Rousseau’s and Goethe’s autobiographies, Stelzig also takes note of the relative absence of studies treating both authors together. I would extend his observation to include Thoreau. There are almost no studies linking Rousseau and Thoreau. By contrast, the relation of Goethe to Thoreau is more fully explored. In the latter instance, however, the focus is rarely on Thoreau as autobiographer.

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an earlier, almost pre-modern period less relevant to our own to which Rousseau’s works speak more directly. Whatever our orientation, the study of autobiography would appear to be structured in such a way as to position Rousseau and Goethe in opposition, making any comparative study mainly negative or contrastive rather than relational and mutually illuminating. I hope to have shown over the course of this study that a reconfiguration of Rousseau’s and Goethe’s works in relation to each other is possible the moment one considers autobiography as a fundamentally interdisciplinary enterprise existing on a continuum with psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and the other human sciences. What almost immediately comes into view is these two authors’ deep interest in the natural sciences precisely during the period of their most intense autobiographical activity. From an interdisciplinary vantage point, what might have once been considered a curious literary-historical fact (if considered at all) is transformed into a matter for critical scrutiny. The question—what do Rousseau’s and Goethe’s scientific interests have to do with their autobiographical writings?—may now be posed in a serious fashion. Considering Rousseau from within this interdisciplinary framework and in relation to Goethe has several important consequences. As his involvement, however conflicted and contradictory, in the natural sciences makes clear, Rousseau cannot simply be seen in opposition to the philosophes; casting him, as so often happens, as an anti-philosophe obscures his important relation to Enlightenment thought. Indeed, Rousseau’s genetic account of nature and of the self, his interest in the flux and changing shape of the material world, allies him much more closely with Diderot and his philosophy of dynamic materialism than otherwise might be expected—he is, so to speak, plus frère, qu’ennemi. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach, insofar as it reveals the thoroughly historical character of his thinking, rescues Rousseau from psychoanalytic and existential schools of interpretation that would see his autobiographical writings as naïve, and ultimately, failed attempts to recover some “natural” or “authentic” self whose existence lies before or beyond time and language. Similarly, Rousseau’s botanical writing, so often viewed as a strategy for escaping from the inevitably tragic outcome of his historical dialectic by effecting a retreat into a timeless natural state is shown to be quite the opposite. With its emphasis on time and metamorphosis, as well as the relations between forms, Rousseau’s botany is not an escape from but an extension of his historical thinking; botany is not a dead-end pursuit, but a lynchpin connecting his earlier social and political writings to his later autobiographical works. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, interpretations structured around questions of Rousseau’s good or bad faith, his “sincerity” and “honesty”—categories founded on the notion of a division between nature and artifice—are challenged by his botanical writings

  The former view is argued most persuasively in Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, while the latter view finds classical formulation in Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography.

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that so actively seek to abolish if not the distinction then at the least the opposition between the reified concepts of nature and culture. Our perspective on Goethe too has shifted. We can no longer discount, as does Benjamin, Goethe’s scientific works as imperfectly realized attempts to represent the “archetype” to experience, something that can only be intuited in the domain of art. The absolute division or difference between art and science that Benjamin insists on in his analysis is precisely the opposition Goethe seeks to undermine. Instead, Goethe’s scientific works exist along a continuum with his literary works, engaged in a similar process of giving aesthetic expression to the “archetypal reality” that lies somewhere between objective and subjective experience. In this way, his vast array of scientific endeavors from color theory to botany are fundamentally related to his autobiographical writings and, more generally, to his literary writings. Far from reductive, Goethe’s morphological approach allows for and even demands complexity so that the true nature of the encounter between self and world—that is, an encounter between two historical, dynamically-evolving entities each determined in some way by the other—be given adequate expression. Once the full complexity of the Goethean “archetype” is understood, moreover, it becomes possible to debunk the simplistic image of Goethe as the bête noire of so much modern critical theory where he is positioned as the conservative defender of Bildung, the Ideal, Perfection, the State, and the Global at the expense of a new world of multiplicity, variability, difference, and the local. What such criticism misses and what this study hopes to have shown is that Goethe is a surprisingly modern figure in his attachment to the multiplicity of complex and detailed forms, to the variability and density of the local site, and in his suspicion of the Absolute, the metaphysical, the teleological, and theological. What makes him even more modern, I suggest, is his attempt, in the face of this bewildering complexity, to intuit a pattern, or better, a series of shifting patterns, a network of relations, however fleeting and provisional, in the aesthetic domain and to hold this in constant tension with the demands of the local. Poetry and Truth, moving as it does between having a sense of narrative unity and a much more open-ended, disjointed quality, between form and an almost vertiginous sense of formlessness, nicely brings this dialectical process into view. When we turn to consider the relation of Goethe to Thoreau, what strikes us most are the similar concerns that animate their works. Both insist upon the active role of the subject in observation, but at the same time, reject the notion that their findings are imaginative fantasies ungrounded in material reality. To a large extent, their works seek to bridge the chasm separating the outside world and the subjective mind by developing a trained perception that is able to give proper expression to the situation of the experiencing subject within nature. Their   Perhaps the most prominent example in this mode is Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “Too much Hegel and Goethe” (269) is their rallying cry as they brand Goethe a “State thinker” (356), the General against whom Kleist and Hölderlin rebel.

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reverence for natural facts is paired with an appreciation of these facts as personal experiences. Both Goethe and Thoreau wish to restore a common ground between poetry and science through perception and an informed imagination. For Goethe this new mode of perception develops into the theory of metamorphosis. Thoreau dramatically expands Goethe’s notion of metamorphosis to encompass all forms of life, human and non-human. From the earliest Journal entries to the climactic scene in Walden, Thoreau enlarges Goethean metamorphosis to formulate a more fully organic and ultimately ecological perception of the world in which all of its parts are interrelated and interdependent. Thoreau’s writing can also be viewed as an extension of Rousseau’s historical approach to nature and the self. Walden Pond is not a pastoral retreat, but like Rousseau’s Island of Saint Pierre, a site of engagement with the world. The two iconic images of the solitary refuge and the Hermit at Walden Pond, in their juxtaposition, resonate together to reveal all of their falseness. The turn to nature in both Rousseau and Thoreau is a moral enterprise—an exercise in social and political theory as well as personal philosophy. More generally, their works are meditations on the nature of time and loss. In A Week, Thoreau learns to see the loss of his brother John within nature’s larger economy. For Thoreau, birth and death are not opposed processes but dialectically linked. In an important sense, his brother’s death gives birth to Thoreau’s present life. Loss is transformed from curse to gift. So too loss yields an unexpected gain for Rousseau. The end of the timeless Golden Age in which the self is whole generates a historical mode of thinking that explores the possibility of a better course for humankind—one that avoids alienation and fragmentation. Walden ends with the birth of a Golden Age. Unlike, its Greek mythological counterpart, Thoreau’s age of peace and happiness exists in time—a time measured by the rhythms of nature. So too Rousseau’s quest is not to return through time to recover an idyllic self, but to discover the fullness of the present self in a rich historical outlook of social, political, and human development in harmony with nature. Our gain is greatest when we see all three figures together. By adopting a transatlantic approach that connects Thoreau to his European predecessors, we are able to understand Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau as part of a vital tradition uniting the modern self and the natural world. They explore the relation of self and world not by adopting a scientific or an aesthetic approach, but by refusing to see the two approaches as mutually exclusive. This refusal to choose any one angle of vision is given most dramatic expression in Thoreau. With Rousseau and Goethe, we could still speak about autobiography and natural science writing as separate endeavors, even while noting the ways in which the two pursuits were intimately related and mutually transformative. Thoreau’s writing, however, collapses the boundary separating life writing and nature writing, prompting a redrawing of the disciplinary maps that have guided us for so long. It makes little sense to speak of Walden as autobiography or nature writing; it is both. In fact, it is more than both. It is satire, pastoral, adventure story, philosophical fiction, historical critique, and moral guide. To label Walden as one genre or the other is to divide the text

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from itself and to work against a major aim of the book: namely, to convey a less fragmented vision of the world. All of these disparate generic elements are brought together under the all-encompassing gaze and voice of the poet-naturalist. For all the differences that distinguish the scientific projects of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau, all are, as we have seen over the course of this investigation, characterized by an approach that seeks to understand reality as a series of forms in a state of constant transformation. The task of the naturalist, for Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau, is in a sense double: first, to note and describe with as much precision as possible the intricate and detailed forms of the natural world; and, second, to relate these forms to one another through an intellectual and imaginative act of comparison and contrast. In this dialectically-linked process, natural objects are, properly considered, objects of perception; that is to say, objects whose nature is at once subjective and objective. For each writer, what emerges is an acute awareness of the role of the subject in observation as well as the influence of the world on the observer. A strikingly similar approach and set of concerns guide all three authors’ understanding of autobiography. The task of the autobiographer can also be viewed as double: first, to record in detail the variety and multiplicity of events (internal and external) of a developing consciousness; and, second, to relate these forms to one another in a meaningful, though ever-shifting pattern. The autobiographical text is the result of this dialectical process, the space where the true nature of the self as objective and subjective entity can be most fully realized, just as the experiment constitutes for the scientist the medium through which the relation of self and world is most successfully realized. Far from prescriptive or reductive, this vision of autobiography demolishes false boundaries between a natural, pretextual self and an artificial, constructed self; a remembered self and a remembering self; an objective, “transcribable” self and a subjective self always located in the onward-rushing present, unable to gain a proper perspective. Autobiography is the space where the ontological ambiguity of the self finds a home. In this view, the autobiographical text is neither a set of disconnected, partially-, and imperfectlyremembered events, nor a rigidly organized and codified narrative structure; it is instead a kaleidoscope, a collection of beautiful forms (kalos + eidos), which is to say a variegated, changing pattern, rearranging itself upon each successive inspection. It is in this way, in this uniquely complex and dynamic vision of the self, the world, and the text, as well as the relations between them, that Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau—despite all of the important differences so evident in their writings—are part of a decidedly new and revolutionary historical worldview that unites science and literature.

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Index

“A/B: Auto/biographical Studies” 10, 11 Abrams, M. H. 97, 109–10 abstraction 3, 7, 13, 30, 31, 32, 38, 41, 47, 50, 52, 64, 65, 69, 86, 87, 88, 100, 110 accidents 38, 39, 104, 110 action 24, 28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 50, 86, 97, 103, 106, 131 aesthetic dimension 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 19 aesthetic gaze 124 aesthetics 18, 19, 20, 66, 77, 78, 79, 80, 136, 137, 138 and science 82 affective fallacy 56 agency 98, 117 algebra 25, 52 alienation 24, 25, 50, 56, 57, 110, 119 Allen, David E. 6 Alsace 102 ambiguity 71, 103, 113, 145 ambivalence 66, 106 America 1, 115–117, 125, 131 American literature 116, 125 Amrine, Frederick 70, 86 analogy 38, 47, 48, 65n., 80, 81, 109, 138, 137, 138 analysis 31, 47 anatomy 68, 69, 70, 89, 90, 92 Anderson, Charles 133 animals 12, 13, 68, 82, 131, 133, 135 ants 135 aphorisms 90 appearance 46 archetype 69, 70–71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 84, 85, 93, 100, 143 as lived experience 94 spiral as 109 Aristotle 87, 88 art 2, 7, 8, 18, 19, 25, 71, 97, 126, 133, 143 ideal 125

and nature 134 and scientific knowledge 77–8 artifice 28, 29, 46, 49, 125, 126, 142 artificial system 14, 31 artists 18, 19, 77, 107, 125, 139 associations 130, 138 astronomy 25, 89 atemporal state 24, 31, 32, 59, 60, 66, 100 audiences 7, 80 see also readers; viewers autobiographical studies 10–11 autobiography 1, 28, 58, 60, 61, 88–9ff., 94, 113 and archetype 100 and botany 23–4, 32, 37–8, 47–8, 95 dialectical nature of 145 interdisciplinary approach 142 modern 141 and nature writing 144 popularity of 8 Rousseau and Goethe compared 141–2 scientific nature of 1–2, 3, 8, 95, 129 terminology 5, 91 and truth 97 awe 3, 11, 12, 16 Bacon, Francis 17, 18, 120 Bacon, Roger 87 Bancroft, George 116 banyan tree 122 Barber, Lynn 6 Barbour, John D. 43n. Barguillet, F. 43n. barometer 47 Bartram, John 12 Bartram, William 6, 12 bean-field 131 beauty 52, 58, 123, 128, 131 becoming 30, 33, 100, 113 Beer, Gillian 11

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being 46, 54, 100, 127, 136 Benjamin, Walter 69, 71, 143 Berlin, Isaiah 17 Bigelow, G. 137 Bildung 91, 98, 99, 101, 103, 120, 143 binary structure 130 biography 8, 87, 88, 101, 103, 128 biology 4, 15, 32, 64 birds 122, 131, 132, 137, 138 birth 24, 28, 56, 64, 102, 123, 144 body 4, 63, 68, 139 Bonnet, Charles 26 books 46 border zone 129, 131 Bossey 40 botanical dictionary (Rousseau) 26, 27, 30, 51, 52 botanists 52, 56 botany 3, 12, 25, 26, 41, 42, 54, 57, 59, 68, 69, 74ff., 89, 104, 109, 142 and autobiography 23–4, 90, 95 enlargement of 80 new language for 51, 93 and pharmacology 27, 28, 37, 38 social nature of 44 boundaries 8, 16, 101, 107, 111, 131, 140, 145 Boyle, Nicholas 101 Buell, Lawrence 139 Buffon, George-Louis 6, 11, 13, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68 Epochs of Nature 67 Natural History 25, 66 Burr, Anna Robeson Brown 9–10 Calvert, George Henry 116 Cardan, G. 10 Carlyle, Thomas 116, 117 Cassirer, Ernst 69 categorical barriers 136 causes 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 55, 60, 113 centrifugal forces 111 centripetal forces 111 “chain” 32, 33, 34, 38, 66 chance 39, 99, 103, 104, 111, 112 change 32, 33, 34, 39, 41, 70, 76, 79, 98, 100, 110, 118, 122, 140

Channing, William Ellery 116 chaos 73, 79 character 87, 100, 109, 110, 136 chemistry 3, 23, 69 Christian theology 81 cipher 123 civilized man 46 civilization 129, 131 classical literature 116 classification 13, 26, 31, 52 clay 137, 138 cognition 84, 85 cognitive science 10 Cogswell, Joseph 116 coherence 94, 102, 110, 113 Coleridge, S.T. 4, 12, 115, 116, 123 collecting 24, 95 colors 65, 68, 69, 84–9, 133–4 “physiological” 84 community 21, 44, 57, 61, 77, 78, 82, 89 see also scientific community comparative studies 141, 142 comparison 41, 42, 47, 141ff., 145 complexity 2, 10, 38, 47, 68, 69, 70, 79, 98, 105, 106, 110, 135, 143 composition 48 concepts 14, 15, 19, 21, 55, 56, 71, 77, 98, 106 confessions 5, 7, 108, 141 connections 3, 16, 20, 23, 57, 59, 83, 102, 103, 120, 129 consciousness 10, 25, 55, 60, 61, 83, 98, 105, 127 contemplation 55, 76 context 3, 14, 19, 21, 28, 33, 34, 77, 81, 82, 87, 88, 90, 94, 103, 104, 109, 123, 134 contingency 105 contraction 75, 78, 106, 107, 108 contradictions 10, 24, 27, 28, 39, 104n. contrast 2, 14, 27, 28, 35, 61, 67, 68, 126, 134, 136, 142, 145 control 86, 103, 106 Conversations with Goethe 117 Cook, Alexandra 23n., 51n. correspondence 12, 26, 29, 30, 44, 52, 53, 66 corruption 26, 27

Index counter–cultural thought 4 Craemer–Schroder, S. 98n. Cranston, M. 43n. creativity 20, 76, 81, 140 Critique of Pure Reason 15 crystallization 121 cultural artifacts 130 culture 2, 8, 17, 20, 21, 32, 58, 108, 116, 126, 141, 143 and nature 130–31 sounds of 130, 131 Cuvier Georges 6, 64 daemonism 99, 104–5, 125 Darwin, Charles 9, 11, 64, 66 Darwin, Erasmus 4, 6, 81 Darwinism 9 data 8, 10, 85, 93 Davis, Michael 43n. Davy, Humphrey 4 de Jussieu, B. 26 de Larnage, Mme 34, 37 de Saint-Pierre, B. 53 de Warens, Mme 34–5, 36, 37, 40 death 28, 60, 73, 109, 144 decay 118, 123 Delessert, Mme 29, 30, 32, 44, 52 Delph, Mlle 104, 105, 106 Derathé, R. 24n. Derrida, J. 52n. Descartes 87 description 7, 13, 38, 59, 65, 73, 76, 119, 121, 124, 126, 131, 135 multi-layered style 93, 94 of Walden Pond 133–4, 136 desire 2, 37, 46, 59, 60, 81, 103, 111, 113, 126 despair 54, 57, 72, 119, 123, 124 destruction 72, 73, 107 details 40, 101, 102, 119, 120, 126, 136 determinism 99, 104 development 30–31, 38, 39, 78, 91, 98, 100, 107, 118 laws of 106 personal 107 theories of 98–9 see also Bildung d’Houdetot, Mme 34, 35, 36

161

diachronous mode 31 Dial, The 116, 120 dialectics 6, 24, 68, 142, 143, 144, 145 didactic poetry 81 Diderot 65, 142 difference 16, 25, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 47, 80, 110, 112, 130, 143, 145 digression 127–8 diplomats 21, 22 disciplines 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 17, 20, 21, 23, 140, 142, 144 discourse 1, 2, 3, 4, 13–14, 19, 21, 23, 50, 52, 57 blending of 130, 132, 133, 134, 136 discovery 6, 7, 53, 90, 91, 95 see also self–discovery discursive modes 134–5 disorder 99, 103, 112 dissection 28, 29 dissolution 111, 112 divine creation 13, 139 division 1, 8, 12, 14, 17, 65, 68, 120, 122, 131, 140, 142, 143 doctor 38 dualities 127, 129, 130, 140 see also oppositions duty 46 dynamic forms 25, 30, 68, 84, 93 dynamic process 98, 100, 102, 113, 141, 142 earth 138 echo 131 Eckermann, Johann P. 69 ecology 58, 124, 144 economics 82 ecstasy 59, 72, 95, 137 education 112 Edwards, Jonathan 117 effects 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 42, 48, 57, 60, 65, 94, 104, 113 elegies 78–83, 89, 93 form of 78 elements 73, 78, 81, 128 Emerson, R. W. 12, 18, 115, 116, 119, 123, 132–3, 135, 138 emotions 10, 13, 15, 50, 95

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empiricism 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 40, 53, 63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 74, 75, 77, 83, 85, 86, 93, 94, 121, 128, 136 emplotment 66 enchantment 44, 45, 53 English language 5 Enlightenment 8, 12, 17, 33, 49, 91, 142 entities 75, 76, 98, 100, 143 environmental forces 58, 78, 82, 100, 134 epigenesis 75 epistemic unity 1 epistemology 13, 15, 63, 85, 103 equipoise 133, 134 essays 46, 89, 90, 93, 115, 120, 127, 132, 136, 140 ethnologists 8, 9 Europe 125 Everett, Edward 116 evil 26 evolution 31, 32, 33, 38 evolutionary biology 17 excess 137, 139, 141 exchange 21, 44, 53, 116 existence 18, 48, 54, 60, 72, 137, 142 expansion 75, 78, 106, 107, 108, 112 experience 3, 13, 15, 65, 71, 75, 80, 83, 85, 86, 95, 110, 111 see also personal experience experiment 65, 83, 85, 145 explanatory system 38 external experience 48, 50, 71, 109 external forces 78, 79, 82, 87, 88, 102, 103, 106, 113 external nature 2, 13, 15, 16, 100, 110, 120, 138, 143, 145 extra-scientific factors 80, 87, 88 extravagance 137, 140 eye 83, 84, 95, 118, 124, 135 facts 10, 38, 86, 97, 102, 119, 121, 131, 133, 144 faculties 94 feeling 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 45, 50 fellowship 120 Fichte, J. G. 110, 115 fiction 46, 97, 144 see also novel; poetry figurative language 80, 81, 92, 130, 140

Fink, Karl J. 65, 77 fish 120, 124, 131 fixity 2, 47 “flow” 126 flowers 24, 29, 30, 32, 33, 53, 75 Folkenflik, Robert 5 force 33, 57, 69, 72, 81, 88, 104, 105, 111, 113, 124, 140 formlessness 99, 111, 112 forms 27, 28, 32, 41, 46, 50, 68, 70, 75–7, 78, 79, 82, 99, 112, 121, 123 development of 100, 106 transformation of 145 Foucault, M. 7n., 13, 30n. fragmentation 17, 25, 45, 74, 92, 99, 129, 144 France 5, 6 Frankfurt 101, 102, 104, 107, 110n., 112 Frederica 102, 103, 105, 108, 109 freedom 79, 82, 103 Frey, Hans-Jost 48n. friendship 120 French Revolution 79, 110 fulfillment 109 Fuller, Margaret 116, 117 Gasbarrone, L. 51n. gaze 124, 131 generative principle 124 genetic approach 14, 30, 32, 33, 47, 49, 142 genres 8, 11, 91, 108, 144 geography 25, 129 geology 64, 68, 71, 73, 89, 92 geometry 64 German literature 107, 112, 115, 116, 117 German philosophy 116, 117 Germany 5, 91, 101, 108, 109, 110 and America 115–17 gestures 50 God 33, 61, 139 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832) 1, 3, 9, 10, 18, 24 autobiography 88, 89ff., 91–2, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101–6ff., 113 birth 102 and botany 74–7ff., 80ff., 90, 95 and Buffon 67

Index compositional methods 90, 92 methodology of 85–6, 95 modernity of 143 and nature 61, 72–3 poetics of 82, 89, 118 and publication 92 relationships 102, 104, 108, 109 and Rousseau 61–2, 141–2 and science 63–4, 66, 68ff., 74, 89ff., 113, 143 and Thoreau 115, 117, 122, 123ff., 143–4 and Transcendentalism 115, 116 Works: “Egmont” 105–6 Italian Journey (1816–29) 2, 61, 90, 107, 117, 118–19, 120, 122, 123, 125 “Metamorphosis of Animals” (1806) 81–2 Metamorphosis of Plants, The (1790) 74–7, 92, 100, 117, 122 “Metamorphosis of Plants, The” (1798) 77, 78–81ff., 139 “Morphological Notebooks, The” 89–95 and autobiography 91–2 “On Granite” 71–4 Poetry and Truth (1811–33) 2, 95, 97–113 autobiography in 101–6, 107ff. dialectical process 143 interpretations of 98–9, 103, 112 narrative 101, 102–3 self and world 101, 102, 107 structure of 107, 112 style 103, 108–9 Thoreau and 115, 117, 125, 139–40 Sorrows of Young Werther 72, 102, 107 Theory of Color (1807/8) 65, 83–9, 92, 117 Torquato Tasso 117–18 Wilhelm Meisters Journeyman Years 90, 117, 125 Golden Age 50, 52, 57, 118, 144

163

goodness 38 Gosse, Philip Henry 7 Gossman, L. 32n. Gould, Stephen Jay 20 granite 71–2 Great Britain 6 Greeks 52 growth 3, 28, 38, 68, 69, 74, 76, 77, 79, 86, 100, 104, 109, 110, 113, 118, 121–2 Habermas, J. 8 Hammer, C. 61n. Hanser 92, 93 happiness 24, 31, 40, 41, 48, 54, 55, 57, 124, 144 Harding, Sandra 18n. Harding, Walter 130n. harmony 55, 58, 69 Harvard University 116, 117 Hawking, Stephen 17, 20 Hayles, N. Katherine 21 health 124 Hegel 39, 110 “heightening” 106 Heine, H. 116 helical structure 107, 108, 109, 112 Heller, Erich 85 herbaria 25, 26, 29, 47, 48, 52, 53 Herder, J. G. von 91, 102, 115, 116 Heringman, Noah 7 hidden cause 44 hidden correspondences 122 hierarchy 30, 43, 76, 122, 130, 140, 144 history 8, 24, 25, 30, 31, 32, 41, 46, 52, 54, 60, 61, 70, 72, 88, 91, 97, 98, 109, 142, 144 and purpose 110 and self 113, 141 history of science 64–5, 87–8, 91, 100 Hoffmann, Roald 20 holism 3, 25, 45, 54, 129 horizontal axis 69, 106 Horowitz, A. 32n. Hulliung, M. 25n. human being 50, 54 see also man

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human nature 3, 4, 16, 30, 32, 51, 58, 121, 139 human races 14 human sciences 142 humanists 19, 98 humanities 1, 3, 11 Humboldt, Alexander von 6, 12, 15–16, 67–8, 77 Cosmos (1845–62) 12, 15, 16, 63, 67, 68 Personal Narrative of a Journey (1814–25) 15, 16 humor 137 hybrids 2, 11, 128, 131 hypotheses 15, 86 ice 132, 136–7 ideal 18, 40, 44, 69, 70, 71, 73, 86, 87, 93, 113, 125, 131, 134, 143 ideal scientist 93, 120, 121, 128 ideal types 68, 71, 75 idealism 116, 118, 119, 128, 130, 140 ideas 15, 16, 41, 71, 77 identification 54, 55 identity 6, 10, 55, 112, 132 loss of 111 imagery 48, 68, 70, 80, 94, 101, 122, 123, 130, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146, 148, 149 imagination 2, 6, 10, 15, 19, 20, 24, 25, 34, 55, 63, 76, 137, 140, 144 and”inner eye” 83 and representation of nature 94 and truth 97 imaging 80 imitation 97, 126 imperialist approach 18, 19 impressions 15, 16, 48, 57, 76 incoherence 110 India 125 individuality 1, 3, 6, 32, 36, 100, 109 individuals 5, 8, 9, 18, 31, 88, 90, 91, 98, 101, 109, 110, 117, 141 and society 130 inductive approach 7, 40 influence 4, 11, 13, 61, 87, 88, 90, 91, 102, 104, 105, 115, 125, 145 inner processes 14, 16, 50, 83, 100

innocence 24, 26, 31 insects 7, 131 inspiration 39, 64, 117, 118, 125 integration 73, 107, 113 intellect 41, 56, 76, 80 see also mind; reason intellectuals 21, 125 intensification 68, 69, 70, 75, 78, 81, 86 intentionality 76 interaction 100, 101, 102, 103 interdependence 12, 32, 101, 144 interdisciplinary approach 11, 20, 142 intermaxillary bone 90, 92 internal cause 34 internal development 1, 40, 113, 138, 145 internal experience 50, 71, 102, 103, 108, 141 interpretation 6, 38, 98, 103, 112, 136, 141, 142 introspection 2, 9, 131 intuition 15, 20, 71 invective 131 irony 67, 86, 88, 108, 125, 131 Italy 79, 104, 105, 107, 111, 112, 118 Jessing, B. 98n. Johnson, Linck C. 123 journals 12, 89–90ff., 93, 115 joy 46, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 95 Kant, I. 14–15, 63, 115 Katz, Eve 58n. Keller, Evelyn Fox 18n. Kelly, Christopher 39 Kepler 87 knowledge 3, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 41, 63, 83, 111, 119 and corruption 26 limits of 70 Koranyi, S. 90n. Kraus, G. M. 73 Kuhn, Dorothea 90n. Lamarck, Jean 6 landscape 15, 16, 123 landscape painting 126, 135

Index language 2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 50–54, 56, 57, 77, 79, 80, 93, 94, 130, 131, 137, 138 see also scientific language; words Larson, James 15 Latin names 52, 57 Launey, P. 39 laws 2, 7, 14, 15, 62, 68, 69, 78, 79, 82, 84, 86, 121, 124 of natural forms 106 leaf forms 69, 75–6, 78, 79, 121 leaves 121, 122–3, 124, 138, 139, 140 Leavis, F. R. 19 Leipzig 111 Lejeune, P. 39 Lepenies, W. 30n., 66 Levine, George 11, 21 lichen 121 life 31, 32, 60, 93, 144 life narratives 5, 98, 103 life writing 5, 91, 144 life-force 100 light 83, 85, 86 Lightman, Alan 20 Lili 99, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112 liminal space see border zone limits 15, 20, 31, 70, 104, 109, 111, 113 linguistic experiments 51 Linnaeus, Carl 6, 11, 12, 13, 31, 44, 52, 64, 66, 132 literal meaning 130, 140 literary critics 11, 12 literary culture 2 literary scholars 10 literature 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 18, 56, 107, 125, 143 and natural history writing 11, 66 and science 20–21, 63, 66–7, 140 lived experience 94–5 living expression 93 living form 28 Locke, John 4, 116, 119 loss 55, 111, 123, 144 love 36, 37, 56, 81, 99, 102, 108 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 33 Löwith, K. 79n. Lyell, Charles 12, 64 lyricism 71, 72, 121, 131

165

McIntosh, J. 117n. Malherbes, D. 44, 53, 54 man 2, 24, 26, 38, 41, 45, 46, 56, 80, 81, 84, 110, 123, 144 and nature 81, 83, 85, 136, 137 map 135–6 Marcus, Laura 8, 9n. Marx, Leo 138 Massachusetts 120, 121 materialism 18, 87, 97, 99, 119, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 139, 142 mathematics 7, 25, 64, 65, 69, 86, 89, 93, 128 matter 68, 69 Matthiessen, F. O. 127n. maxims 93 meaning 85, 102 measurement 136 mechanical mode 93 medicine 27, 38 meditations 24, 28, 46, 51, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128, 134, 137, 138, 144 memory 2, 6, 10, 11, 35, 40, 110 memory studies 11 Merck, Johann 66, 67 Merrill, Lynn L. 6n., 7 Merrimack River 126 metamorphosis 30, 31, 70, 76, 77, 80, 90, 98, 110, 111, 123, 124, 139, 142, 144 elegies 78, 89 metaphor 79, 104, 128, 140 metaphysical mode 93, 143 meteorology 47, 89 method 47, 61, 76, 77, 85, 86, 134 metrical form 78 Meyer, Heinrich 77 Michaels, Walter Benn 130n. Michel, C. 98n. middle way 129, 135 Miller, Douglas 84 mind 4, 10, 15, 55, 62, 80, 87, 90, 119, 126, 128, 131, 133, 138, 141, 143 mineralogy 69, 71, 73n., 89, 92 modern science 17–18 modern society 50, 52, 53 modern thought 2, 3, 8, 141, 143 modes of expression 71, 93

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moments 60 Montaigne 127 moral description 93, 94 moral knowledge 120 morality 8, 20, 25, 26, 38, 64, 65, 81, 82, 107, 108, 128, 136, 144 morphology 2, 66, 76, 78, 86, 88, 98, 99, 104, 106, 143 and self 113 movement 60, 61, 76, 79 multiple perspectives 49 musical notation 93–4 myth 138 Napoleon 79, 92, 105, 110 narrative 5, 6, 10, 31, 38, 39, 77, 78, 80, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106 process 32 structure 102–3, 112, 113 voice 108 narrator 31, 72, 73, 80, 103, 106, 127, 129, 131 natural forms 69–70, 75–6, 106 natural history 2, 3, 6, 7, 30, 65, 66, 115, 120, 134 aesthetic dimension 12, 13, 66 discourse of 13–14, 129 and humanities 11, 66 popularity of 7, 8 and Transcendentalism 129, 134 writing 120, 132, 135, 140, 144 natural laws 82, 106, 136 natural phenomena, representation of 93, 94, 130 natural philosophy 7, 81 natural processes 76, 79, 81, 84, 113, 118, 137 natural science 6–7, 8, 19, 25, 58, 99, 113 and autobiography 1–2, 3, 129, 142 discourse 130, 132 division of 65 and morality 81, 128 and poetry 132, 133, 135, 144 natural theology 13 naturalists 3, 12, 13, 14, 41, 42, 120, 128, 135, 145 and poetry 131, 133 popularity of 6, 11

nature 2, 5, 6, 14, 26, 40–42, 61, 62, 73, 77, 78, 80, 123, 125, 143 and artifice 29–30, 31, 49, 134, 142 and culture 130–31 empirical approach 7 form of 28 fullness of 121 harmony of 58 inner and outer 84 and man 81, 83, 85, 86, 117, 118, 121 and morality 136 and poetry 138 self and 118, 120, 140 and society 46, 130 sounds of 130–31 subject and 84–5 temporalization of 3, 14, 25, 30, 40 unity of 68, 124 nature writings 1, 11–12, 80, 126, 135 popularity of 6–7, 8 and self study 3 necessity 103 negative determinism 99 negative emotions 55, 56, 58, 72, 107, 111 neuroanatomy 10, 11 neuropsychology 10, 11 New England 116, 122, 123 Newton, Isaac 65, 85, 86, 87 Nichols, Ashton 6n., 14n. Niggl, G. 98n., 99n. Nisbet, H. B. 81 nostalgia 17, 24, 110 nouns 131 Novalis, G. F. 4, 115, 116 novel 7, 11, 35, 63, 67 nullification 69, 75 Nussbaum, Felicity 5, 6 objectivity 2, 16, 38, 62, 63, 73, 74, 85, 93, 97, 119, 145 objects 3, 41, 47, 49, 61, 71, 82, 83, 84, 85, 94, 100, 118, 119, 120, 145 observation 7, 59, 63, 69, 70, 92, 121, 128, 145 observer 41, 70, 77, 83, 84, 121, 145 Olney, James 8 O’Neal, John C. 43n. ontology 73, 113, 145

Index open-endedness 19, 92, 113, 140, 143, 145 oppositions 2, 3, 38, 69, 88, 94, 97, 99, 113, 130, 131, 140, 141, 142, 143 optics 65 optique 48–9 order 2, 19, 25, 33, 47, 59, 61, 62, 79, 85, 98, 99, 102, 110, 112 organicism 3, 13, 24, 31, 54, 98, 115, 139 organization 13, 25, 28, 31, 41, 42, 46, 59, 84, 89, 102, 120 osteology 92, 94 other 2, 21, 24, 25, 42, 53, 54, 60 outcomes 105, 106 overflow 139 paradox 48n., 49, 55, 93, 130n. parody 131, 136 participation 3, 77, 80 particulars 15, 40, 91, 119, 124 parts 13, 16, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 100 passions 26, 37, 39, 42, 50, 54, 55, 57, 81 past 31, 40, 75 patterns 13, 38, 47, 71, 78, 99, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 118, 124, 135, 143, 145 Paul, S. 124n., 127n. Pelt, Jean-Marie 58n. perception 70, 71, 86, 93, 120, 134, 143, 144 perfection 18, 35, 41, 48, 69, 78, 79, 93, 109, 122, 124, 143 Perloff, Marjorie 98n., 99n. personal experience 3, 15, 80, 82, 91, 94, 95, 144 personality 32, 39, 87 perspective 133–4, 135, 140 Petrulionis, S. H. and Walls, L. D. 129 pharmacology 27, 28, 37, 38 philosophes 44, 53, 142 philosophy 93, 116, 117, 128, 142 physical geography 14 physical reality 69 physics 17, 19, 23, 63, 65, 66, 89 pictorial sketches 70 plants 12, 13, 14, 24, 25, 26, 27ff., 40, 41, 45, 49, 68, 69, 74–5, 90, 132 development of 30–31, 38, 81, 100, 110

167

form of 28, 74, 78, 79 and human life 61 names of 52–3, 57, 59, 74 primordial 122 Plato 87, 88 pleasure 45, 46, 59 plots 102 poet 125, 128, 134 as naturalist 131, 133, 145 as scientist 139, 140 as seer 122 poetic inspiration 118 poetry 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 18, 45, 50, 52, 56, 57, 58, 63, 67, 72, 80, 89, 90, 91, 93, 107, 109, 125, 127, 133, 136, 138 and natural forms 78 and science 132, 135, 144 and truth 97, 98 polarity 68, 69, 70, 75, 86, 88, 106 politics 79, 80, 82 pond 131, 133, 135 as symbol of self 132 popular science 20 Porter, Denis 105 Portland, duchess of 44, 52 positivism 2, 4, 139 postmodernism 19 power 17, 81, 82, 93, 105, 123 Prelude, The 4, 10 pre-modern autobiography 142 pre-social man 46, 47, 50, 60 presuppositions 15 primeval origins 72 primitive man 41–2, 46 private self 2, 141 professionalization 1, 65 progress 39, 49, 62, 74, 76, 91, 98, 101, 139 progressive development 79, 96, 101, 108, 109, 110 of individuals 112, 113, 117, 118 narrative 119 Propylean 77–8 prose 10, 11, 12, 50, 66, 72, 73, 83, 113, 117, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140 prototype 68, 139 Proust, M. 11

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psychoanalysis 142 psychology 4, 9, 10, 18, 142 puns 115, 131, 137, 138 purpose 99, 110 quest 135 rapture 59 rationalism 8 Raymond, M. 39 readers 35, 38, 39–40, 42, 58, 61, 77, 80, 82, 102, 113, 136 reading clubs 116 reality 69, 70, 75, 76, 113, 127, 131, 134, 140, 145 realization 108, 109 reason 2, 15, 24, 25, 31, 41, 46, 50, 55, 58, 140 rebirth 128, 129, 131, 133 reconciliation 81, 83, 94, 113, 118, 128, 140 reductionism 18, 27, 31, 47, 143, 145 refinement 19, 75, 79, 86, 88, 106, 108, 109, 110, 124 reified concepts 32n., 143 relations 16, 24, 25, 27, 28, 41, 49, 66, 71, 76, 97, 100, 103, 124, 130, 142, 143, 145 relativism 88 religion 108 renewal 129, 133 renunciation 99, 109, 112 representation 71, 73 ideal mode of 93, 94 representational principle 98 return 107, 112 reverie 55, 57, 58, 120 rhetorical style 20, 52, 73, 79, 81, 115, 122, 134, 136, 137 Ribe, Neil 73n. Richardson, Alan 4 Richardson, Robert 115, 117n., 132 Ritter, James 20 Robinson, David 128 rock forms 71, 73 romances 35, 36 Romanticism 2, 4, 12, 13, 15ff., 18, 33, 56, 78, 109, 140

German 115 and natural history 14 and poetic truth 97 “Romantic autobiography” 6 Rousseau, G. S. 18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78) 1, 3, 9, 10, 18, 64, 127 and autobiography 25, 28, 31–2ff., 51, 58, 61 and botany 24, 25, 26, 27–31, 32, 37–8, 40, 42, 44, 45–50, 51ff., 57, 59–61, 62, 142, 143 compared with Goethe 141–2 elegies 78 linguistic experiments 50–54 and nature 40–41, 54, 55, 57, 58–60 and science 23, 25, 26–7, 142 and society 43–4, 47, 54, 59 as solitary 24, 40, 43, 47 and Thoreau 144 and time 59–60 and women 34–7 worldview 25, 43, 59 Works: Confessions (1766–70) 2, 28, 30, 31–7ff., 50, 60 and context 34 narrative models 39 relationships 34–7 self in 31–2, 33, 42 world-view of 25 “Elementary Letters on Botany” (1771–73) 26 Emile 25, 39 Essay on the Origin of Languages (1761) 25, 39, 41, 49, 52, 57 First Discourse (1751) 23, 26, 38, 46 Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) 25, 35 Letters on Botany 30 Reveries 23, 25, 27, 42, 127 and botany 45–50ff., 54, 57–61 detachment of 43–4 experimental nature of 51 structure of 45–6 Second Discourse (1755) 25, 39, 41, 60

Index Social Contract (1762) 25 Rousseau Simplex Smith 26 Rousseauxia Chrysophylla 26 rules 79 rupture 139 Sacks, Oliver 20 Safir, Margery Arendt 20 Saine, T. 107n. Saint Pierre, island of 54, 55, 60, 61, 144 sand 137, 139, 140 satire 131, 144 Sattelmeyer, Robert 132, 139f. Schelling, F. W. J. 74, 110 Schiller, Friedrich 18, 77, 116 Sclegel, Friedrich 116 Schneider, Marcel 58n., 126n., 127n. Schnur, H. 98 scholars 7, 8, 10, 11, 20 scholarship 3, 7 science community 8, 10, 23, 74 “Science Wars” 19 sciences 1, 3, 4, 8, 17, 23, 45, 89, 92 and aesthetics 82, 133 moral nature of 120 and poetry 63, 67, 97 popularization of 20 see also natural science scientific culture 63 scientific investigation 95 scientific knowledge 85 and art 77–8 scientific language 56, 57, 59, 92 scientific laws 69, 70 scientific method 17, 18, 120 scientific writings 1, 3, 7, 74, 80 contemporary 20 literary quality 66–7 scientists 8, 19, 20, 46, 47, 65, 71, 80, 145 and autobiography 8–9, 91 detachment of 85, 86 ideal 93, 120, 121, 128 lives of 87 and poetry 139 social context of 82–3 seasons 118 self 2, 3, 6, 14, 24, 31, 40, 41, 42, 59, 61, 84, 85, 98, 129, 140

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development of 100, 124 division in 1 and external world 98, 100, 101, 102, 107, 113, 140, 143 integration of 113 and natural cycle 118 and nature 120, 132, 140 opposed views of 99, 145 and other 25, 54 private 2, 141 and society 44 and time 32, 33 unified 1, 129 self-awareness 10, 85, 88, 91, 117, 120, 136 “self-biography” 5 self-cultivation 120 self-determination 98, 99, 104 self-discovery 40 self-expression 16 self-knowledge 41, 42, 86, 119 self-realization 98, 108, 109 self-representation 5, 11 sensation 45, 47, 56, 59, 119, 119 sense-perception 56, 93, 94 sensuality 79, 81, 94, 126 sentiment 10 see also feeling serenity 133, 134, 141 series 76, 100 Serres, Michel 21 sexuality 81 Shea, Daniel B. 5n. Shelley, P. B. 18 Sheringham, Michael 2 shifting forms 47, 60, 113, 118, 133, 134, 137, 143, 145 Shklar, Judith N. 24n. Shumaker, W. 9 signs 48, 92, 138 similarity 2, 14, 16, 25, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 47, 78, 122 sincerity 9, 10, 142 singularity 2, 5 Slaughter, Thomas 12 Smith, sidonie 11 Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia 5 Snow, C. P. 19

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social construction 32, 99 social context 87 social convention 109 social processes 80, 81 social responsibility 107 social theory 54 society 9, 24, 25, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 53, 59, 82, 98, 101, 129, 130 sociologists 8, 9 Sokal, Alan 19 sounds 130–31, 135 space 13, 47, 74, , 80, 81, 85, 94, 98, 123, 129, 130, 134, 139, 141, 144, 155 Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer 5n. specialization 1, 17, 20 species 14 Spencer, Herbert 9 spirals 69, 84, 88, 106–12 archetypal 109 asynchronic 112 spirit/spiritual 68, 69, 119, 121, 130, 134, 135, 137, 139 Spring 118, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140 Starobinski, Jean 24, 43n., 48 Stelzig, Eugene 6, 61n., 98n. Stengers, Isabelle 21 Stephenson, R. H. 88 stereoscope 49 Stern, M. 98n. Strasbourg 102, 109 Strauss, Leo 24n. structure 25, 27, 30, 41, 45, 84, 91, 94, 106, 107, 130, 131 style 66, 67, 68, 80, 93, 103, 108–9, 113 subject 3, 5, 15, 71, 80, 83, 84, 85, 98, 99, 100, 101, 143, 145 subjectivity 2, 13, 14, 16, 38, 62, 63, 83, 85, 97, 99, 119, 143, 145 succession 32, 33, 38, 60 supernatural 136 surveyors 120, 121, 133, 134 Switzerland 58, 107, 111 symbolism 84, 94, 102, 132, 134, 135, 139 sympathy 120, 121 synthesis 140 Tasso 117–18, 123 taxonomy 31, 37, 47, 52, 57, 66, 74

teleology 61, 109, 118, 143 telos 109 temporal dimension 3, 13, 14, 25, 30, 33, 40, 59, 72 tension 2, 28, 47, 62, 81, 88, 99, 111, 113, 130, 143 texts 8, 34, 38, 40, 42, 48, 61, 70, 101, 106, 113, 127, 129, 131, 145 theories 85, 86, 87 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62) 1, 3, 12, 18, 113 and Goethe 115, 117, 118–20, 122, 123ff., 139–40, 143–4 influences on 115, 116–7 multi–faceted nature of 135, 144 and natural history 132, 134–5, 144 poetics of 118, 126 and Rousseau 144 and science 128, 132 Works: “Autumnal Tints” 132, 140 Journal 115, 117, 118, 120, 132 “Natural History of Massachusetts, A” 117, 120–22, 136 Walden (1854) 2, 115, 117, 121 aims of 129 composition of 132 discursive shifts in 134–5 language of 130, 131 mixing of genres in 144–5 sandbank description 137–8, 139 science and poetry in 133 structure 130, 131 Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A (1849) 3, 115, 117, 122–4, 134 critique of Goethe in 124–5 digressive nature of 127–8 “Wild Apples” 132 Wild Fruits 132 thought 6, 38–9, 47, 55, 56, 76, 93, 140 Ticknor, George 116 time 24, 31, 32, 33, 41, 59, 60, 61, 70, 100, 101, 109, 134, 142, 144 see also temporal dimension

Index timeless world 24, 31, 40, 41, 60, 97, 100, 109, 142, 144 tradition 1, 3, 80, 87, 88, 140, 144 Transcendentalism 115, 116, 134, 135, 136, 140 and natural history discourse 129 transformation 4, 13, 72, 76, 80, 100, 113, 119, 145 transition 79 tropes 33, 50n., 56 Trunz, E. 98n., 107–8 truth 10, 13, 15, 46, 50, 68, 128 and autobiography 97 and poetry 97, 98 “two cultures” 1, 4, 19 uncertainty 15, 19, 67, 99, 103, 106, 139 understanding 76, 88 unity 1, 6, 13, 17, 28, 34, 63, 68, 69, 98, 99, 110, 113, 121, 122, 124, 127 universal laws 68, 69, 80 universalism 38, 125 universe 33, 63, 98, 121, 123, 139 universities 116 unpredictability 19, 112 Urpflanze 68, 75, 100 utilitarianism 27, 38 utopianism 18 variability 2, 143 verbs 131 vertical axis 69, 106 violence 29 viewers 70, 76, 77, 80, 100, 120, 121 vision 16, 72, 73, 95, 119, 122, 127, 138, 139, 140, 145 vitalism 31 Voigt, J. C. W. 73

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Walden Pond 119, 129, 131–2, 144 close description of 133–4, 136 Walls, L. D. see Petrulionis, S. H. and Walls, L. D. wandering 45 Watson, Julia see Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia Weimar 73, 77, 79, 92, 101, 102, 104ff., 115 Weintraub, K. J. 98n., 107n. Weizsäcker, C. F. von 95 White, Gilbert 6, 12 wholeness 55, 99, 127 wilderness 131 will 105, 111 Wilson, Edward 17 Winter 118, 121, 132, 133ff., 137, 139 Witte, B. 98n. Wolff, Friedrich August 77 Wölfflin, Heinrich 76n., 77n. women 34–7, 80, 102, 104, 108, 109 wonder 12, 13, 16, 21, 41, 42, 44, 49, 120 words 50, 51, 52, 53, 70, 89, 92, 138 Wordsworth, William 3–4, 9, 10, 12, 18 world 2, 25, 41, 59, 70, 83, 84, 99, 109, 120, 125 and observer 145 self and 98, 100, 101, 102, 107, 113, 140, 143 unity of 122, 140 writer-botanist 46–7 writers 125 writing 48, 60, 107, 120, 129 Yankee persona 131 zoology 82, 89, 132