During fieldwork in Germany for our study Journey into Europe about Islam in Europe, the subject of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest literary figure, frequently came up. At a time when anti-Islamic and anti-migrant sentiment was surging—the popular Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ran on the slogan “Islam is not a part of Germany”—Muslim leaders asked, how can Islam be incompatible with Germany when Goethe himself wrote entire works reaching out to the Islamic world and authored a beautiful poem about the Prophet of Islam? Bekir Alboğa, the head of the largest Islamic organisation in Germany, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) told us that Goethe “wrote a wonderful poem about our Prophet” and was “like a brother to me.” Another Muslim official, Ayşe Aydin, who directed press for DITIB, proudly and dramatically recited versus from Goethe’s Faust, considered the greatest work of German literature, for us when we met her at Cologne’s Central Mosque. She stated, “I am very German!”
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Goethe for Germany, and for Europe as a whole. The most eminent thinkers, political figures, artists, and composers of the continent engaged with and were profoundly influenced by Goethe. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, argued that Goethe is probably the closest a human being can come to the idea of the Übermensch or Superman, that person who realises and fulfils their human potential. Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Franz Liszt all set Goethe’s works to music.
And yet, in other parts of the world including in the United States, Goethe is not very well known. He is often referred to as the “Shakespeare of the German language” to situate his importance. Hollywood’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), for example, was followed by Young Goethe in Love (2010). The comparison between Goethe and Shakespeare, laudatory as it may be, is imprecise. We might not ask so much if Germany has produced a Shakespeare but if anyone has produced a Goethe. While Goethe authored the most famous German poetry, novels, and plays, he was also a groundbreaking scientist working in optics, physics, and biology, a literary, theatre, and music scholar, a painter, and a philosopher. Goethe founded the scientific field of morphology, established the first system of weather stations, discovered the volcanic origin of a mountain, was “an early proponent of the idea of an Ice Age,” came close to the discovery of evolution later posited by Darwin, and has a genus of blazing red flowering plants (Goethea), a mineral (goethite), and a crater on the planet Mercury named after him.[1] There are an estimated 10,000 studies based on Goethe’s scientific works alone.[2] In this, Goethe is more akin to the great polymaths of the Golden Age of Islam such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. Like them, Goethe sought to reconcile reason, science, and philosophy with the divine, religion, and what he called “Nature”—and always in the context of the spiritual Unity of all. He had a natural and unceasing curiosity about the world and a desire to experience it viscerally.
While Goethe may have been unfortunately overshadowed by Adolf Hitler as the most widely known German after the Second World War, the comparison between the two is useful. Both Hitler and Goethe provide us clues to the ontological exploration of the nature of the European continent and therefore Western Civilisation which remains of the utmost relevance. At the heart of Europe and the West, there is the “darkness” which authors like Joseph Conrad wrote about and which Hitler represents. But on the other hand, if we accept that Goethe also represents Europe, there is a Europe of love and lightness. Both Hitler and Goethe raise fundamental eschatological and ontological questions for the definition and identity of Europe. In no other continent are there two such opposed models of philosophy and leadership. It is a stark binary of darkness and light.
The great philosophical polymaths of the Islamic Golden Age like Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes made the argument to their own societies that philosophy and reason were fully compatible with revelation and religion. In Goethe’s case, public moods were going in the other direction. His Europe was in thrall of the Enlightenment, with its focus on reason and science
Today, amid increasingly dire assessments of the global situation and the rise of far-right movements seemingly veering in the direction of the Hitler extreme of the identity polarity, particularly concerning the “Other,” Goethe’s example is essential—not just for Europe and the West, but for the world at large. For us, the authors, Goethe is a great “Mingler,” a person who has reached out to the “Other” in the interests of facilitating human coexistence and dialogue. In his work and life, Goethe stressed a larger human unity and universal humanism. He opened the German and European heart and mind to embrace the world’s cultures and religions, especially those from the East. Of particular note is his embrace of Islamic ideas and philosophies which ranged across his life and which he sought to introduce to Europe in the cause of love and friendship. At the age of 23, he wrote his poem “Mahomet’s Song” in honour of the Prophet of Islam, while at the age of 70 he said he was considering “devoutly celebrating that holy night in which the Quran in its entirety was revealed to the prophet from on high.”[3] Important aspects of his thinking display Islamic, and especially Sufi concepts such as wahdat al-wujud or the Unity of Being. This was all despite the deep and longstanding ethnic and religious opposition to Islam in Europe.
Here, we would like to discuss Goethe’s ideas concerning human coexistence and reaching out to the “Other.” We will see that Goethe rejects a totalising “Self” and “Other” binary while preserving the integrity of each in the context of the relationship. The Self shapes the Other and the Other shapes the Self and the encounter enriches each. This is a natural process, as Goethe believed we are all connected in the greater loving Unity. That Goethe embraced Islam, figures like the Prophet (PBUH), and great Muslim poets like Hafiz, does not mean that he is any less Goethe, German, and European. Instead, he believed that the East and Islam could help Germans and Europeans become better versions of themselves. Westerners trying to understand life, God, and their place in the world would be greatly helped by learning about the way Muslims understand life, God, and their place in the world. Then, collectively, humanity may move to ever greater heights in love and fraternity. Goethe founded the Western academic field of “world literature” to facilitate such a process. There was no limit for Goethe in seeking inspiration, also drawing from, for example, Chinese poetry and Hindu sources. Goethe authored poems invoking the Hindu “Godhead Kamarupa,”[4] wrote over thirty poems to Hafiz,[5] and dedicated others to Rumi.[6] Like Rumi, Goethe’s oeuvre is an Ocean, and dipping into to it yields jewels of wisdom and vision which may benefit us today—Westerners, Muslims, and the larger world. If we are to make a comparison involving Goethe, then, perhaps it could be as the Rumi of Europe.
The Life of Goethe
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt; his father was a prominent lawyer and politician and his mother was the daughter of the chief administrator of the city. Goethe’s education was typical for his class, including Latin, the Bible, and French. While he wanted to study classical philology at the University of Göttingen, his father’s wishes for him to study law prevailed, and he attended the University of Leipzig. Even then, Goethe’s own interests shone through, and he is described in accounts as only a nominal law student, devoting his time instead to art, science, and literature. Goethe also begins to write poetry and plays during this period. He moved on to finish his studies at the University of Strasbourg, where he met an important mentor, the great German scholar Johann Gottfried Herder, and experienced an intellectual awakening. This awakening particularly concerned literature and poetry which he understood as linked to the development of nations such as the Germans and others—for example, Goethe developed a love of Shakespeare under Herder’s tutelage and hosted Germany’s first “Shakespeare Day.”[7] “Shakespeare Day” was an early example of Goethe reaching beyond his own immediate cultural environment to embrace non-German authors, ideas, and philosophies, which would also include Islam and the Quran.
We should understand the development of Goethe’s thinking about Unity in the context of his engagement with Islam and how he found it in accordance with aspects of the Western tradition, such as Greek influences, which also perceived the world as a unity
In 1771 Goethe returned to Frankfurt with his licentiate in law and settled down to practice, before moving to the city of Wetzlar. It was here where he began his esteemed literary career. He started writing Faust and published two works of tragedy which brought him wide renown. The first was Götz von Berlichingen (1773) about a sixteenth century German soldier and poet, and the second was The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). It was this second work, Werther, in which the title character suffers from unrequited love to the point of suicide, that made Goethe, at the age of 24, instantly famous across Europe. Napoleon carried a copy with him on campaigns and the book became the first German work translated into Chinese. Both these works put Goethe at the vanguard of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), an early Romantic movement in Germany which challenged Enlightenment scientific rationalism by embracing and centring emotional, artistic, and viscerally human experiences.
In 1775, Goethe, the literary toast of Europe, made a decision which was perhaps surprising. He accepted the invitation of Duke Karl August of Weimar to assume a state administrative post and serve as the Duke’s chief advisor. He would remain in Weimar for the rest of his life. While he continued his interest in the arts, serving as Minister of Arts and shaping public education, he also had other responsibilities, serving as Minister of War, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Mines. With access to university scientific collections and state resources, Goethe turned his attention to the natural sciences, for example osteology, geology, and botany.
Goethe was able to get away from his many duties to travel to Italy in 1786, and he spent the next two years there. Here he felt rejuvenated in encountering the “foreign,” remarking, “Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.”[8] It is only through contact with the “Other,” Herder believed, that we can know ourselves. As he put it, “Human individuality is a strange thing: it is only during the last year, when I have had to depend solely on myself and at the same time be in daily contact with complete strangers, that I have really come to know my own.”[9]
While in Sicily, Goethe had what we would consider a eureka moment, a sudden onset of awareness which transformed and shaped the rest of his life. In Goethe’s case, it was the awareness that plants were not distinct entities to be rigidly classified and studied in the common empirical manner, but that each plant was a process, of life pursuing a kind of “ideal plant” totally interrelated with its surroundings and expressed in many different ways.
Goethe returned to Weimar, where he was relieved of most of his administrative duties. He went on to establish the Weimar Court Theatre as its director. In the succeeding decades, Goethe published furiously from his base in Weimar, producing numerous works including poetic works such as Hermann and Dorothea (1782-1784), plays including Faust Part I (1808), novels like Elective Affinities (1809), and scientific works such as Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), Contributions to Optics (1791-1792), and Theory of Colours (1810), which challenged Isaac Newton’s arguments for not sufficiently capturing how human beings experience colour. In 1832, Goethe died at the age of 82 in Weimar, shortly after completing Faust Part II.
God, Science, and the Urphänomen
Central to Goethe’s philosophy is the idea of a Divine Unity and what he called the Urphänomen or primary phenomenon. As scholars have argued (see below), we should understand the development of Goethe’s thinking about Unity in the context of his engagement with Islam and how he found it in accordance with aspects of the Western tradition, such as Greek influences, which also perceived the world as a unity.
We can see this in Goethe’s Sicilian eureka moment concerning plants. At the time, the empirical model of scientific observation practiced by scholars like Carl Linnaeus was one of rigid categorisation, in which each entity was seen as a whole type in and of itself. While useful for observing nature, Goethe argued, there is a limit. This is because, as he explained, “all things in nature have a clear relationship to one another.”[10] Even when we are examining something we believe is “an individual, it nevertheless remains an aggregation of living and independent parts...These organisms are partly united by origin; partly they discover each other and unite. They separate and seek each other out again, thus bringing about endless production in all ways and in all directions.”[11] Living things, he elaborated, “appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract…Genesis and decay, creation and destruction, birth and death, joy and pain, all are interwoven with equal effect and weight.”[12] If things appear separate and distinct from each other, Goethe wrote, this is an “illusion” for “One and many are the same.”[13] “All is like, all unlike,”[14] he said—“the particular is the general made manifest under different conditions.”[15] Nature, he affirmed, “has neither core/ Nor outer rind./ Being all things at once.”[16]
Consequently, for a scientist to try to categorise everything individually is impossible, and is like “attempting to drink up the ocean.”[17] Instead Goethe felt it was important to conduct science with a humility in our human limitations and with an awareness of the whole in mind. Goethe stated, “He who has the understanding to declare his limitations is closest to perfection.”[18] Indeed, “Nature forces us to alter our classifications and to defer to her independent working and working of things.”[19] We should be looking for process as much as individual cases, and process takes us to an awareness of unity.
Concerning plants, this means an awareness that life is leading plants along a particular trajectory. What form the plant takes is contingent on a host of factors “from without as well as from within”[20] the organism, including soil, air, light, water, and climate. If we could identify what is at the heart of the process itself, what the organism “wants to be” we would reach a higher understanding of it. This ideal, akin to Plato’s theory of “forms,” is Goethe’s concept of the Urphänomen. For plants, the Urphänomen is the leaf, and for animals (or vertebrates at the least) it is the spine. As he wrote to Herder, “it came to me in a flash that in the organ of the plant which we are accustomed to call the leaf lies the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms. From first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf, which is so inseparable from the future germ that one cannot think of one without the other.”[21] “Empirical observation,” Goethe explained, “must first teach us what parts are common to all animals, and how these parts differ. The idea must govern the whole, it must abstract the general picture in a genetic way. Once such an Urphänomen is established, even if only provisionally, we may test it quite adequately by applying the customary methods of comparison.”[22]
Other terms Goethe uses for the Urphänomen include “God” and “the Divine” and he reported that he was “seeking the divine in herbis et lapidibus [in herbs and stones].”[23] Once one discerns the divine Urphänomen, we can go no further because we have perceived the Unity. As Goethe states, “The highest state of mind we can attain to…is wonderment, and if the primary phenomenon excites wonderment we must be content with that. It cannot give us anything more, and we should not look beyond it for anything more; this is where the line is drawn. But the sight of a primary phenomenon is generally not enough for people. They think there must be more to see, and they are like children who look in a mirror and then turn it round to see what’s on the back.”[24] And because we are talking about God in the Urphänomen, we are also talking about love—for how does a plant grow if not in love? In his poem “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” Goethe writes,
“Love in its holiness
Strives to the highest fruit of the same movement of thought,
Same outlook on things, in harmonic contemplation,
Thus the pair make their bond, and find out a loftier world.”[25]
In “the scent of blossoms and the gentle stirring of a warm breeze,” Goethe wrote, we feel “a being that comes lovingly close to us all.”[26] Plants in their forms display, Goethe stated, “a happy mobility and flexibility, enabling them to adapt themselves to the many conditions throughout the world which influence them, and to be formed and reformed in accordance with them.[27]
Goethe believed that Europeans were in danger of being overwhelmed by more and more complicated knowledge produced by people who were perhaps moving too far in the direction of seeking the divine itself. It was leading people away from an awareness of balance with God and the natural world
It is here where Goethe discerns a kind of evolutionary—he would use the term morphological—process at work. Humans and animals such as apes, Goethe argues, should not be so rigidly separated, because there is much that unites them in the larger Unity. Goethe discovered that a particular bone, the intermaxillary bone, which scientists argued separated apes from humans, was in fact also present in humans. Goethe contended, “man is very closely related to the animals. Unity of the whole makes every creature into that which it is. Man is man as well through the form and nature of his upper jaw as he is man through the form and nature of the tip of his little toe. And thus is every creature only one tone, one hue of a great harmony, which one must thus study in the whole and at large, lest every particular become a dead letter.”[28] Charles Darwin later credited Goethe in his preface to On the Origin of Species for presenting a theory of organism change over time, placing him as one of the key thinkers in the history of evolutionary theory.[29]
Another important point that Goethe makes concerns the human role in science. The human element must not be separated from scientific inquiry. It was not possible for the scientist to have a “God’s eye view” of phenomena from an “objective” position outside of the human being—as we necessarily must engage with the world from our own human perspective. In Goethe’s Theory of Colours, he writes, “Throughout nature, as presented to the senses, everything depends on the relation which things bear to each other, but especially on the relation which man, the most important of these, bears to the rest.”[30] Goethe called carrying out scientific inquiry in this manner “delicate empiricism” and voiced his belief that “You have to be slow and gentle with nature if you want to get something out of her.”[31] Again, we have to remember the unity of all and remind ourselves that the Subject or Self is not separate from the Object or Other. As Goethe argues, “The manifestation of a phenomenon is not detached from the observer—it is caught up and entangled in his individuality.”[32]
Reconciling Reason and Religion
The great philosophical polymaths of the Islamic Golden Age like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes made the argument to their own societies that philosophy and reason were fully compatible with revelation and religion. Some were skeptical, however. These included people with more orthodox religious interpretations, who may have been more inclined to literalism as not wanting to stretch or enlarge the precise bounds of inquiry they believed were presented by revelation and religion. In Goethe’s case, in many ways public moods were going in the other direction. Goethe’s Europe was in thrall of the Enlightenment with its focus on reason and science. Iconic figures like Voltaire strode like a colossus across the continent.
As a scientist himself, Goethe was certainly not arguing against science. It was instead a need for balance and the necessity of preserving a respect and reverence for Nature and the divine that concerned him. Goethe’s arguments are full of caution for humanity to not throw off the balance too far and allow a narrowly conceived reason and science to eclipse the divine. This desire he linked with the human ego, which believes that it is “all about me.” When we look at weeds, for example, Goethe observed, we see them as unwelcome and accord them a negative connotation, but from the perspective of “Nature” weeds are “children of universal Nature, cherished as much by her as the wheat he carefully cultivates and values so highly.”[33]
When man looks at nature, Goethe said, he has a desire to “bring what he finds there under his control.”[34] While reason “aspires to the divine,” it is not possible for it to actually equate with the divine.”[35] Goethe discerned that “we find professional men of science who are so full of book-learning and theories that they have forgotten how to look and listen. These people quickly become bound up in themselves.”[36]
Goethe believed that Europeans were in danger of being overwhelmed by more and more complicated knowledge produced by people who were perhaps moving too far in the direction of seeking the divine itself. It was leading people away from an awareness of balance with God and natural world, making life more and more “artificial and complicated.”[37] Modern society was growing too fractured and “atomistic,” Goethe felt.[38] He spoke against what he called the “hydra of empiricism” and the “gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic torture chamber.”[39] There were endless schemas humans were coming up with to explain and master Nature on their own terms. These attempted to fit Nature into conceptual boxes humans came up with, but which bore little relation to how Nature actually functions. The idea of a “Natural System,” for example, Goethe argued, is “a contradiction in terms. Nature has no system; she has, she is life and its progress from an unknown centre toward an unknowable goal.”[40] The reality was that “no man has the capacity for making a definitive presentation of any subject whatsoever.”[41]
Goethe contended, speaking of such desires in man to master Nature, that before long it is inevitable that “these objects will thrust themselves upon him with such force that he, in turn, must feel the obligation to acknowledge their power and pay homage to their effects.”[42] Goethe’s views are captured in Faust, in which the protagonist, an academic, makes a pact with the Devil in pursuit of god-like knowledge, thus transgressing the limits of humanity with tragic results. Goethe’s Faust was the prototype for the title character in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), which adopts this message of warning for a Europe obsessed by science. Other Goethe works on this theme include his poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1797), which was later animated and popularised by Disney in the United States.
Through his scientific and literary works, Goethe provides Europe and the world with a model of how they may right and restore the balance between religion and reason. Goethe shows how we can remain at the cutting edge of scientific learning and push forward towards new horizons of discovery without bringing destruction on ourselves. He seeks to preserve our human wonder at what the sciences and fields of inquiry like mathematics can achieve, while also reminding us what they cannot. While “One hears that only mathematics is certain,”[43] Goethe states, “Mathematics cannot eliminate prejudice, prevent wilfulness, or resolve partisan differences.”[44] He called for sciences such as physics to be carried out with love, remarking, “Physics…must use all its powers of love, respect, and reverence to find its way into nature and the sacred life of nature.”[45] The key once again is an awareness of the Unity of Nature and the divine and to respect our place within it.
Goethe and Islam
Following our outline of some of Goethe’s main ideas and themes, let us move now to his interaction with and interest in Islam, which is remarkable and persisted his entire life and career. As such it is an important influence on him and we can gain further insights into Goethe’s thinking and philosophic and religious outlook on matters such as the Divine Unity by examining this relationship.
In terms of his own identity, the clue we have to understand Goethe is not to try to work out whether he had converted to Islam or not—although he did write that he “does not reject the suspicion” that he may be a Muslim[46]—but to assess his love for the Prophet of Islam, which as any Muslim will tell you is the gold standard and the yardstick to measure Islamic identity. Goethe is imbued with the spirit of Islam. That is apparent from the poem he dedicated to the Prophet, who he described as an “extraordinary man.”[47] His love and affection seen through his awe are clearly evident. We believe it is not reading too much into Goethe to link his interest in Islam to his worldview characterised by an awareness of a larger, loving Unity of the divine and Nature in which all beings are a part. This was also the conclusion of the Goethe scholar Katharina Mommsen, who wrote, “It was this doctrine of the Oneness of God, of His uniqueness, that Goethe always valued most highly, and when we speak of this poet’s relationship to Islam we will have to recognise this doctrine of the unity of God as the main source of Goethe’s indebtedness.”[48] In support of her argument, Mommsen cites Goethe’s statements like this one on the Prophet: “Mahomet…raises himself to God, the One, the Everlasting, Unlimited, to whom…all limited glorious beings owe their existence.”[49]
When Goethe first encountered Islam as a young man, prior to writing and publishing early works such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe identified with Islam and its Prophet on a deep level as Islam accorded with what he instinctively felt and believed.[50] In 1772, at the age of 23, Goethe read the Quran and wrote his poem in honour of the Prophet. The poem is infused with energy, vitality, and passion, as Goethe draws on the metaphor of the Ocean in conveying the Prophet’s mission. The account traces the outlook of the great religious teacher—in our case the Mingler—as they go on a journey of awareness and perspective, from the micro to the macro, from the particular to the universal, from the individual brook and stream to the Ocean of Unity. While Goethe does not compare himself to the Prophet or any other great religious leader or prophet, it is not a stretch to see that he is hoping that he himself can attempt to rouse and orient his countrymen in precisely this direction. Here is Goethe on the Prophet of Islam:
“See the rocky spring,
Clear as joy,
Like a sweet star gleaming!
…
like determined leader,
Hurries all his brother streamlets
Off with him.
…
Add their waters. Now he rolls
O’er the plain in silvery splendour,
And the plain his splendour borrows;
And the rivulets from the plain
And the brooklets from the hill-sides
All are shouting to him: ‘Brother,
Brother, take thy brothers too,
Take us to thy ancient Father,
To the everlasting ocean,
Who e’en now with outstretched arms,
Waits for us,—
…
‘Come ye all, then!’—
Now, more proudly,
On he swells; a countless race, they
Bear their glorious prince aloft!
On he rolls triumphantly
…
Cedar houses bears this Atlas
On his giant shoulders. Rustling,
Flapping in the playful breezes,
Thousand flags about his head are
Telling of his majesty.
And so bears he all his brothers,
And his treasures, and his children,
To their Sire, all joyous roaring,
Pressing to his mighty heart.”[51]
In a letter to Herder the same year he wrote this poem, Goethe states that “I would like to pray like Moses in the Quran: Lord, make room in my narrow breast.”[52] This allusion to a verse in the Quran’s 20th Surah captured Goethe’s desire for the loosening of his tongue and to help unleash his creativity.[53] Goethe also began studying Arabic, and we have Goethe’s writings in Arabic from this period recording Quranic verses which he identified with. They capture Goethe’s emerging worldview of a Divine Unity, including on the “oneness and goodness” of God and “The rising and setting of the sun are the Lord’s and wherever you turn, there is God’s countenance.”[54] He also noted Quran (13:8), “every people has been given a teacher for its instruction,” and he repeated this and similar verses throughout his life, giving us an insight into Goethe’s thinking about the “Other.” He told a young scholar later on, for example, “What God says in the Quran is true: We have never sent a prophet to any people, except in its own language.’”[55]
Of the Quran itself, for those wishing to study and understand it, Goethe cites the Dutch scholar Jakob Gohl, who wrote, “The principal aim of the Qur’an seems to have been to bring together the adherents of the three discrete religions prevailing at that time in populous Arabia, who for the most part lived and mingled with one another.”[56] Goethe describes the Quran as a “sacred book” which “arouses amazement” and “will remain supremely effective for all time to come.”[57] Goethe captures the unity of Islam which transcends our own individual egos and perspectives in this verse: “How foolish that everyone praises his own opinion in what pertains to him. If Islam means submission to God, we are all living and dying in Islam”[58]
(to be continued)
[1] Charles J. Engard, “Introduction.” In Goethe’s Botanical Writings. Translated by Bertha Mueller. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1952), p. 3; Douglas Miller, “Introduction.” In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies. Edited and translated by Douglas Miller. (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), p. ix.
[2] Mark Riegner, “Horns, Hooves, Spots, and Stripes: Form and Pattern in Mammals.” In David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, eds., Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 179.
[3] Katharina Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” The Muslim, vol. 4, no. 3, 1967, p. 12.
[4] A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), p. 262.
[5] Wilson, Goethe, p. 263.
[6] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan. Translated by Eric Ormsby. (London: Gingko, 2019), p. 119.
[7] J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey. Translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), p. 135.
[8] Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 135.
[9] Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 404.
[10] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies. Edited and translated by Douglas Miller. (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), p. 132.
[11] Goethe’s Botanical Writings. Translated by Bertha Mueller. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1952), p. 24.
[12] Goethe, Scientific Studies, p. 304.
[13] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 214.
[14] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections. Translated by Elisabeth Stopp. Edited by Peter Hutchinson. (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 83.
[15] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p. 76.
[16] Goethe, Scientific Studies, p. 38.
[17] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 227.
[18] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p. 150.
[19] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 100.
[20] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 83.
[21] Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 363.
[22] Andy Blunden, “The Germ Cell of Vygotsky’s Science.” In Carl Ratner and Daniele Nunes Henrique Silva, eds., Vygotsky and Marx: Toward a Marxist Psychology (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), p. 133.
[23] Carl Hammer Jr., Goethe and Rousseau: Resonances of the Mind (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), p. 162.
[24] Goethe quoted in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life. Translated by Allan Blunden. (London: Penguin Books, 2022), p. 266.
[25] Dalia Nassar, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) p. 268, note 37.
[26] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p. 109.
[27] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, pp. 161-162.
[28] Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 375.
[29] See Charles Darwin, “An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species.” In The Origin of Species: The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 16. Edited by Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016), pp. xiii-xxi; Robert J. Richards, “Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution?” In Joel Faflak, ed. Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 219-238; Matthew Bell, “Introduction.” In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Essential Goethe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. xxviii-xxix.
[30] Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake. (London: John Murray, 1840), p. 75.
[31] Goethe quoted in Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, p. 233.
[32] Goethe, Scientific Studies, p. 307.
[33] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 82.
[34] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Essential Goethe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 977.
[35] Goethe quoted in Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, p. 264.
[36] Goethe quoted in Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, p. 466.
[37] Goethe quoted in Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, p. 573.
[38] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p. 157.
[39] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p. 55.
[40] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 116.
[41] Goethe’s Botanical Writings, p. 225.
[42] Goethe, The Essential Goethe, p. 977.
[43] Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, p. 176.
[44] Goethe, Scientific Studies, p. 310.
[45] Goethe, Scientific Studies, p. 310.
[46] Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 152.
[47] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.” In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan. Translated by Eric Ormsby. (London: Gingko, 2019), p. 365.
[48] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 18.
[49] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 18.
[50] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 15.
[51] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Poets and Poetry of Europe: With Introductions and Biographical Notices (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, Chestnut Street, 1845), pp. 295-296.
[52] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 15.
[53] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 15.
[54] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 16.
[55] Mommsen, “Goethe’s Relationship to Islam,” p. 16.
[56] Goethe, “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan,” p. 367.
[57] Goethe, “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan,” pp. 367, 369.
[58] Goethe, West-Eastern Divan, p. 165.