The Invention of Nature

Goethe was captivated, reporting to his friends how much he admired the young man’s intellectual virtuosity. It was telling that Humboldt’s presence in Jena coincided with one of Goethe’s most productive phases in years. Not only did he join Humboldt in the anatomy tower but Goethe was also composing his epic poem Hermann and Dorothea and returning to his theories on optics and colour. He examined insects, dissected worms and snails and continued his studies in geology. His days and nights were now occupied with work. ‘Our little academy’, as Goethe called it, was very busy. Wilhelm von Humboldt was working on a verse translation of one of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies which he discussed with Goethe. With Alexander, Goethe set up an optical apparatus to analyse light and investigated the luminescence of phosphor. In the afternoons or evenings they sometimes met at Wilhelm’s and Caroline’s house but more often assembled at Friedrich Schiller’s house on the market square, where Goethe recited his poems and others presented their own work until late at night. Goethe was so exhausted that he admitted to almost looking forward to a few peaceful days in Weimar ‘to recover’.

Alexander von Humboldt’s pursuit of knowledge was so infectious, Goethe told Schiller, that his own scientific interests had been woken from hibernation. Schiller, though, worried that Goethe was being pulled too far away from poetry and aesthetics. All this was Humboldt’s fault, Schiller believed. Schiller also thought that Humboldt would never accomplish anything great because he dabbled in too many subjects. Humboldt was only interested in measurements and, despite the richness of his knowledge, his work displayed a ‘poverty of meaning’. Schiller remained a lone, negative voice. Even the friend he confided in disagreed: yes, Humboldt was enthusiastic about measurements but these were the building blocks for his wider understanding of nature.

After a month in Jena, Goethe returned to Weimar but quickly missed his new-found stimulation and immediately invited Humboldt to visit. Five days later Humboldt arrived in Weimar and stayed for a week. The first evening Goethe kept his guest to himself but on the next day they had lunch at the castle with Karl August followed by a big dinner party at Goethe’s house. Goethe showed off what Weimar had to offer: he took Humboldt to see the landscape paintings in the duke’s collections, as well as some geological specimens that had just arrived from Russia. Almost every day they went for meals at the castle, where Karl August invited Humboldt to conduct some experiments to entertain his guests. Humboldt had to oblige but he thought the time spent at court was utterly wasted.

For the next month, until Humboldt’s final departure from Jena, Goethe commuted between his house in Weimar and his rooms in the castle in Jena. They read natural history books together, and went out for long walks. In the evening they shared meals and reviewed the latest philosophical texts. They now often met at Schiller’s newly bought Garden House, just outside the city walls. Schiller’s garden was bordered by a little river at the back where the men sat in a small arbour. A round stone table in the middle was laden with glasses and plates of food but also with books and papers. The weather was glorious and they enjoyed the mild early summer evenings. At night, they could only hear the gurgling of the stream and the song of the nightingale. They talked about ‘art, nature and the mind’, as Goethe wrote in his diary.

Schiller (left) with Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe in Schiller’s garden in Jena (Illustration Credit 2.3)

The ideas they discussed were engaging scientists and thinkers across Europe: the question of how to understand nature. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought vied for dominance: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists tended to believe that all knowledge came from reason and rational thought, while the empiricists argued that one could ‘know’ the world only through experience. Empiricists insisted that there was nothing in the mind that had not come from the senses. Some went so far as to say that at birth the human mind was like a blank piece of paper without any preconceived ideas – and that over a lifetime it filled up with knowledge that came from sensory experience alone. For the sciences this meant that the empiricists always had to test their theories against observations and with experiments, while the rationalists could base a thesis on logic and reason.