Over a decade ago, the scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer applied the term “Anthropocene” to describe the current geological era, which they regard as the first era in which large-scale transformations of the earth are driven by human impacts.¹ As Steffen et al. put it in a more recent article, human influence “has become so large and active that it now rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.” In addition to influencing the carbon cycle, they explain, “humans are (i) significantly altering several other biogeochemical, or element cycles...

Sometime around 1800, toward the end of his period of programmatic neoclassicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between “art” and “nature.” While seemingly in flight from one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen, / Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden” (Though art and nature seem sore disunited / Yet each, before you...

Ecology is an eminentlypracticaldiscipline, but the practical dilemmas of the ecological movement—and arguably of the environmental crisis itself—are the consequences of our failure to comprehend the complexity and unity of naturetheoretically. The ecological crisis is first and foremost an epistemological crisis.¹ As Thomas Kuhn has taught us, such crises are potentially revolutionary episodes out of which new paradigms can emerge.² We have also learned from Kuhn that paradigm shifts are rarely sudden events; usually they unfold over decades or even centuries. So it has been with the search for a new paradigm that was inaugurated...

On March 27, 1784, Goethe writes to Johann Gottfried Herder,

Ich habe gefunden—weder Gold noch Silber, aber was mir eine unsägliche Freude macht—

das osintermaxillaream Menschen!

Ich verglich mit Lodern Menschen- und Tierschädel, kam auf die Spur und siehe da ist es. Nur bitt’ ich Dich, laß Dich nichts merken, denn es muß geheim behandelt werden. (WA 4.6:258)¹

[I have found—neither gold nor silver, but what makes me unspeakably happy—

theos intermaxillarein the human!

With Loder I compared human and animal skulls, came upon its trace, and look, there it is. Only, I beg...

The passionate interest in rocks shared by several figures in Goethe’s last novel goes well beyond a child’s amusement or a collector’s enthusiasm. This allure of the inorganic—what the novel refers to asdie Neigung zum Gestein—also suggests an ontologically precariouspropensityof life toward an inorganic state (FA 10:287).¹ Insofar as ecological thinking today widely takes the form of what one ecocritic calls a “‘humiliating’ descent, towards what is rather abstractly called ‘the Earth,’” this unsettling inclination of Goethe’s late work positions him as our forerunner.² Heterogeneous and xenophilic, thisNeigungcontains at least four variant readings...

Celebrating the natural harmony of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water inDie Leiden des jungen Werthers(The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe’s eponymous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with “simple” peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life—at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from—or, more precisely, abstracted from—the...

Es hat im Deutschen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert eine unglückliche Unterscheidung zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation gegeben. Das hatte seinen Grund in der Auseinandersetzung mit Frankreich und dem Misslingen einer Revolution in Deutschland, die nach dem Vorbild der französischen Revolution die Überwindung des Ancien Régime, also der feudalistischen Herrschaftsordnung gebracht hätte. Das nationale Selbstbewusstsein in Deutschland bildete sich infolgedessen im Stolz auf die Kultur, worunter man vor allem Musik, Literatur und Bildung verstand. Davon wurde Zivilisation abgesetzt als die äußerliche Regelung des Lebens durch Politik, Gesellschaftsordnung und Wirtschaft. Obgleich diese Unterscheidung zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation mit guten Gründen kritisiert wurde, möchte...

These two maxims suggest that Goethe’s thinking about and intuition of the world are phenomenologically grounded. They can be read as programmatic statements for his specific kind of phenomenological thinking, evident in his poetry and his natural science and philosophical writings. I suggest reading the first aphorism in the light of the phenomenological shibboleth “Back to the things themselves”² (Zurück zu den Sachen selbst), pronounced by Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement. Similarly, the second aphorism reflects the phenomenological intertwinement of subject and object; it shows how each new experience might widen the faculties of perception, cognition, and...

When Calliope Stephanides, the adolescent intersex protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novelMiddlesex(2002), visits the New York Public Library in search of information about her physical condition, she is struck by the sheer size of the dictionary located at the center of the library’s reading room:

I had never seen such a big dictionary before. The Webster’s at the New York Public Library stood in the same relation to other dictionaries of my acquaintance as the Empire State Building did to other buildings. It was an ancient, medieval-looking thing, bound in brown leather that brought to mind a falconer’s gauntlet....

Literary production is conventionally imagined as a process leading from a more or less private moment of literary composition to the public presentation of the text to an audience or readership, but each of these moments can be a drawn-out process involving several stages toward the text’s publication—in the broader sense of being made public. In the case of Goethe’s poem “Nähe des Geliebten” (Nearness of the Beloved) the moment of composition is well documented and belongs to the compendium of anecdotes surrounding Goethe’s legendary creativity, but the process by which the poem was then made available to the...

World literature does not require that its readers travel; instead, the texts are brought to us, so that we do not need to go out into the world to find them.¹ By the nineteenth century, several generations of academics had already compiled and translated narratives acquired through global exploration. Enlightenment scholars gave precedence to travelogues and memoirs when formulating their own anthropological theories about distant societies.² To be sure, armchair anthropologists were always subject to criticisms from world travelers, yet at the start of the nineteenth century Europeans interested in learning Mandarin, Persian, or Sanskrit were more likely to visit...

Eine entscheidende Frage in der ästhetischen Theoriediskussion um die Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert war die nach der gesellschaftlichen Funktion einer als ‘autonom’ begriffenen Kunst. Welche Stelle in der modernen Gesellschaft konnte der aus ihren traditionellen—ständischen, religiösen, staatlichen—Bindungen herausgelösten Kunst zuerkannt werden? Dieser Frage widmeten sich die Autoren um 1800, also im Umkreis von Spätaufklärung, Weimarer Klassik und Frühromantik mit einem bis heute kaum erledigten Reflexionsaufwand.

Dabei bot die für die soziale Theorie und Praxis des 18. Jahrhunderts bedeutsame Kategorie der Geselligkeit einen zentralen Anknüpfungspunkt. Geselligkeit zielte auf die freiwillige Vereinigung einer überschaubaren Gruppe von Menschen zum...

In der Rezeption des Autors Lenz und seiner Werke stehen sich noch immer zwei Sichtweisen unversöhnlich gegenüber, die ihren Ursprung in unterschiedlichen literarischen Texten haben. Mit seiner ErzählungLenz(posthum 1839) entwarf Büchner ein sensibles Porträt von dem damals weitgehend vergessenen Autor, während Goethe inDichtung und Wahrheit(1812) ein vernichtendes Urteil über seinen ehemaligen literarischen Weggenossen gefällt hatte. Goethe konnte sich als letzter noch lebender ‘Zeitzeuge’ des bereits 1792 Verstorbenen auf eine intime Kenntnis des Autors stützen, Büchner als ‘Nachgeborener’ kannte Lenz nur vom Hörensagen im Freundeskreis und aus der Lektüre seiner Werke, die Ludwig Tieck 1828 herausgegeben hatte....