Goethe was also a cultural force, who argued that the organic nature of the land moulded the people and their customs—an argument that has recurred ever since. He argued that laws could not be created by pure rationalism, since geography and history shaped habits and patterns. This stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing Enlightenment view that reason was sufficient to create well-ordered societies and good laws.

Goethe memorial in front of the Alte Handelsbörse, Leipzig

It was to a considerable degree due to Goethe’s reputation that the city of Weimar was chosen in 1919 as the venue for the national assembly, convened to draft a new constitution for what would become known as Germany’s Weimar Republic.

The Federal Republic of Germany’s cultural institution, The Goethe-Institut is named after him, and promotes the study of German abroad and fosters knowledge about Germany by providing information on its culture, society and politics.

The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives was inscribed on UNESCO‘s Memory of the World Register in 2001 in recognition of its historical significance.^[52]

Goethe’s influence was dramatic because he understood that there was a transition in European sensibilities, an increasing focus on sense, the indescribable, and the emotional. This is not to say that he was emotionalistic or excessive; on the contrary, he lauded personal restraint and felt that excess was a disease: “There is nothing worse than imagination without taste”. He argued in his scientific works that a “formative impulse”, which he said is operative in every organism, causes an organism to form itself according to its own distinct laws, and therefore rational laws or fiats could not be imposed at all from a higher, transcendent sphere; this placed him in direct opposition to those who attempted to form “enlightened” monarchies based on “rational” laws by, for example, Joseph II of Austria or the subsequent Emperor of the French, Napoleon I. A quotation from Goethe’s Scientific Studies will suffice:

We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus…[not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?

— Suhrkamp ed., vol 12, p. 121; trans. Douglas Miller, Scientific Studies

Goethe, Schiller, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Jena, c. 1797

That change later became the basis for 19th-century thought: organic rather than geometrical, evolving rather than created, and based on sensibility and intuition rather than on imposed order, culminating in, as Goethe said, a “living quality”, wherein the subject and object are dissolved together in a poise of inquiry. Consequently, Goethe embraced neither teleological nor deterministic views of growth within every organism. Instead, his view was that the world as a whole grows through continual, external, and internal strife. Moreover, Goethe did not embrace the mechanistic views that contemporaneous science subsumed during his time, and therewith he denied rationality’s superiority as the sole interpreter of reality. Furthermore, Goethe declared that all knowledge is related to humanity through its functional value alone and that knowledge presupposes a perspectival quality. He also stated that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic^{[citation needed]}.

His views make him, along with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, a figure in two worlds: on the one hand, devoted to the sense of taste, order, and finely crafted detail, which is the hallmark of the artistic sense of the Age of Reason and the neo-classical period of architecture; on the other, seeking a personal, intuitive, and personalized form of expression and society, firmly supporting the idea of self-regulating and organic systems. Thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would take up many similar ideas in the 1800s. Goethe’s ideas on evolution would frame the question that Darwin and Wallace would approach within the scientific paradigm. The Serbian inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla was heavily influenced by Goethe’s Faust, his favorite poem, and had actually memorized the entire text. It was while reciting a certain verse that he was struck with the epiphany that would lead to the idea of the rotating magnetic field and ultimately, alternating current.^[53]

Bibliography

Main article: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bibliography

• The Life of Goethe by George Henry Lewes
  
• Goethe: The History of a Man by Emil Ludwig
  
• Goethe by Georg Brandes. Authorized translation from the Danish (2nd ed. 1916) by Allen W. Porterfield, New York, Crown publishers, 1936. “Crown edition, 1936.” Title Wolfgang Goethe
  
• Goethe: his life and times by Richard Friedenthal
  
• Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann
  
• Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
  
• Goethe’s World: as seen in letters and memoirs ed. by Berthold Biermann
  
• Goethe: Four Studies by Albert Schweitzer
  
• Goethe Poet and Thinker by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby
  
• Goethe and his Publishers by Siegfried Unseld
  
• Goethe by T. J. Reed
  
• The Life of Goethe. A Critical Biography by John Williams
  
• Goethe: The Poet and the Age (2 Vols.), by Nicholas Boyle
  
• Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients, by Angus Nicholls
  
• Goethe and Rousseau: Resonances of their Mind, by Carl Hammer, Jr.
  
• Doctor Faustus of the popular legend, Marlowe, the Puppet-Play, Goethe, and Lenau, treated historically and critically.-A parallel between Goethe and Schiller.-An historic outline of German Literature , by Louis Pagel
  
• Goethe and Schiller, Essays on German Literature, by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
  
• Tales for Transformation, trans. Scott Thompson
  
• Goethe-Wörterbuch (Goethe Dictionary, abbreviated GWb). Herausgegeben von der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen und der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Stuttgart. Verlag W. Kohlhammer. ISBN 978-3-17-019121-1
  

See also

• Dora Stock – her encounters with the 16-year-old Goethe.
  
• Goethe Basin
  
• Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe-Gymnasium
  
• W. H. Murray – author of misattributed quotation “Until one is committed …”
  

Notes