The Invention of Nature

Goethe was also grappling with these ideas of the Self and nature, of the subjective and the objective, of science and imagination. He had developed, for example, a colour theory in which he discussed how colour was perceived – a concept in which the role of the eye had become central because it brought the outer world into the inner. Goethe insisted that objective truth could only be attained by combining subjective experiences (through the perception of the eye, for example) with the observer’s power of reasoning. ‘The senses do not deceive,’ Goethe declared, ‘it is judgement that deceives.’

This growing emphasis on subjectivity began radically to change Humboldt’s thinking. It was the time in Jena that moved him from purely empirical research towards his own interpretation of nature – a concept that brought together exact scientific data with an emotional response to what he was seeing. Humboldt had long believed in the importance of close observation and of rigorous measurements – firmly embracing Enlightenment methods – but now he also began to appreciate individual perception and subjectivity. Only a few years previously, he had admitted that ‘vivid phantasy confuses me’, but now he came to believe that imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt wrote to Goethe, insisting that those who wanted to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks ‘will never get close to it’.

It was also around this time that both read Erasmus Darwin’s popular poem Loves of the Plants. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus was a physician, inventor and scientist who in his poem had turned the Linnaean sexual classification system of plants into verses crowded with lovesick violets, jealous cowslips and blushing roses. Populated by horned snails, fluttering leaves, silver moonlight and lovemaking on ‘moss-embroider’d beds’, Loves of the Plants had become the most talked-about poem in England.

Four decades later, Humboldt would write to Charles Darwin how much he had admired his grandfather for proving that a mutual admiration for nature and imagination was ‘powerful and productive’. Goethe was not quite as impressed. He liked the idea of the poem but found its execution too pedantic and rambling, commenting to Schiller that the verses lacked any trace of ‘poetic feeling’.

Goethe believed in the marriage of art and science, and his reawakened fascination with science did not – as Schiller had feared – remove him from his art. For too long poetry and science had been regarded as the ‘greatest antagonists’, Goethe said, but now he began to infuse his literary work with science. In Faust, Goethe’s most famous play, the drama’s main protagonist, the restless scholar Heinrich Faust, makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, in exchange for infinite knowledge. Published in two separate parts as Faust I and Faust II in 1808 and 1832, Goethe wrote Faust in bursts of activity that often coincided with Humboldt’s visits. Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by a relentless striving for knowledge, by a ‘feverish unrest’, as he declares in the play’s first scene. At the time when he was working on Faust, Goethe said about Humboldt: ‘I’ve never known anyone who combined such a deliberately channelled activity with such plurality of the mind’ – words that might have described Faust. Both Faust and Humboldt believed that ferocious activity and enquiry brought understanding – and both found strength in the natural world and believed in the unity of nature. Like Humboldt, Faust was trying to discover ‘all Nature’s hidden powers’. When Faust declares his ambition in the first scene, ‘That I may detect the inmost force / Which binds the world, and guides its course’, it could have been Humboldt speaking. That something of Humboldt was in Goethe’s Faust – or something of Faust in Humboldt – was obvious to many; so much so that people commented on the resemblance when the play was finally published in 1808.²