Goethe's Botanical Writings ; Translated by Bertha Mueller PDF Download

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488504X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Much has been written about the golden youth and the Olympian old age of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, poet; less has been written, however, about Goethe the scientist, who, pursuing independent research in many fields, opposed the professional men of his day with brilliant theories of his own. The educated world, familiar with Faust, Werther, and Wilhelm Meister, is not so generally aware of the scientific achievements of the man who had a genus of plants (Goethea) and a mineral (goethite) named for him who coined and first used the word morphology; who contributed to the understanding of the physiology of color; who rediscovered and described the intermaxillary bone in man, propounded the vertebral theory of the skull, formulated a concept in botanical morphology that persists to this day; who discovered the volcanic origin of a mountain; who established the first system of weather stations; who made the first systematic classification of minerals and was among the first to use the comparative method in biology; and who came unwittingly close to achieving the greatest concept in biology—some say the greatest concept in the thinking of man—the theory of organic evolution and the descent of man. Even in those few cases where subsequent research has proved Goethe’s theories to be wrong, his supporting accumulation of facts has proved extremely valuable to science. Goethe was born at the beginning of a great scientific era. But he was a creative thinker; his was not the analytic mind that emphasized fine differences but the synthetic mind that sensed the unity behind the differences. He was also an ardent lover of nature, possessed of unlimited curiosity. Consequently, as a contemporary observed, "Whatever Goeth looked upon in nature immediately acquired the character of a living experience for him." Most of the material translated in this volume is taken from notes and essays which Goethe published from 1817 to 1824 in journal form. Occupying a central position is the most famous and lasting of his scientific writings, the essay on the metamorphosis of plants—an essay which is today considered "one of the minor classics of botany." One of the most important episodes in Goethe's life was his flight to Italy, where he was delighted by the climate and the luxuriance of the plant life. A fan palm in particular attracted his attention because its leaves seemed to exhibit a complete series of transitions from the simple lance-shaped first leaves to the most complex fan type. "At my request," Goethe wrote in his diary, "the gardener cut off an entire sequence of modifications for me, and I burdened myself with several pasteboard containers in which to carry these treasures around." From this beginning Goethe started to evolve his theory of plant metamorphosis, and he returned to Weimar convinced that he had found the secret. The literary student will find much to interest him in this translation—the poet's own account of his grief and suffering at the hands of misunderstanding friends, and his victory over a threatening neurosis. Such essays as "The History of My Botanical Studies" and "The Fate of My Manuscript" throw much light on the crucial middle period of Goethe's life. During Goethe's lifetime and after, there was a tendency to ignore his scientific accomplishments in the face of his literary works. Many felt that they were almost a crime against his poetry. A few, however, contended that in science lay the center and focal point of Goethe's mental life. Goethe, himself, toward the end of his life wrote, "For more than a half century I have been known as a poet, in my own country and undoubtedly also abroad; or at any rate I have been permitted to pass for one. But the fact that I have busily occupied myself with Nature in all her general physical and organic phenomena, constantly and passionately pursuing seriously formulated studies—this is not so generally known; still less has it been accorded any attention." "Minds like Goethe's," Thomas Carlyle said, "are the common property of all nations; and, for many reasons, all should have correct impressions of them." This translation will enable those not familiar with the German language to gain a direct impression of Goethe's mind as expressed in his botanical writings.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Author: Derek Glass
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 9781904350323
Category : German literature
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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This bibliography was commissioned by the English Goethe Society as a contribution to the celebration in 1999 of the 250th anniversary of Goethes birth. It sets out to record translations of his works into English that have been published in the twentieth century, up to and including material published in that anniversary year. It aims to serve as wide a constituency as possible, be it as a simple reference tool for tracing a translation of a given work or as a documentary source for specialized studies of Goethe reception in the English-speaking world. The work records publications during the century, not merely translations that originated during this period. It includes numerous reprintings of older material, as well as some belated first publications of translations from the nineteenth century. It shows how frequent and how long enduring was the recourse of publishers and anthologists to a Goethe Victorian in diction, a signal factor in perceptions and misperceptions. Derek Glass was putting the finishing touches to the bibliography at the time of his sudden death in March 2004. Colleagues at Kings College London have edited the final manuscript, which is now published jointly by the English Goethe Society and the Modern Humanities Research Association both as a worthy commemoration of Goethes anniversary and as a tribute to Derek himself.

Author: David Lowe
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 1584204850
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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The poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to wait many years before he was able to travel south to Italy, "the land where the lemon trees bloom." He had gained success in several fields, but he had a sense of being trapped and confined and felt a need for light. Italy would give this to him in a number of ways. Taking as their basis Goethe's Italian Journey, the authors of this fascinating and unusual study explore how Goethe's experience of Palladio's architecture influenced his view of the relationship between art and nature in general and, in particular, helped him form his understanding of metamorphosis, leading to his discovery of the "archetypal plant." In his carefully written account of his travels, Goethe seems to oscillate between experiences of architecture and experiences of nature. In nature, he searched for the "archetypal plant," the essential form whose metamorphosis through time would produce the plant we see in its cycle from seed to fruit. In the art and architecture of antiquity and in Palladio's classical reformulation of it, he tried to understand the purpose and function of artistic creation. Until now, no one has put these two together. David Lowe and Simon Sharp show for the first time how these seemingly unrelated subjects are related--how the living geometries and volumes of harmoniously proportioned buildings, the "great idea" of architecture, can lead to the intuition of similar principles in nature. David Lowe and Simon Sharp have worked together for twenty-one years. One of their first projects was the recreation of Goethe's Italian Journey. They have given numerous workshops and presentations on the subject in the U.S. and U.K., including The British Museum, the German Embassy, and the Edinburgh Festival. This is must-reading for anyone interested in Goethe's ideas on plants and metamorphosis.

Author: Tracy Chevalier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135314101
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1032

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This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies

Author: David Seamon
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791436813
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Examines Goethe's neglected but sizable body of scientific work, considers the philosophical foundations of his approach, and applies his method to the real world of nature.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262013096
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Goethe's influential text, newly illustrated with stunning color photographs. The Metamorphosis of Plants, published in 1790, was Goethe's first major attempt to describe what he called in a letter to a friend “the truth about the how of the organism.” Inspired by the diversity of flora he found on a journey to Italy, Goethe sought a unity of form in diverse structures. He came to see in the leaf the germ of a plant's metamorphosis—“the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms”—from the root and stem leaves to the calyx and corolla, to pistil and stamens. With this short book—123 numbered paragraphs, in the manner of the great botanist Linnaeus—Goethe aimed to tell the story of botanical forms in process, to present, in effect, a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants. This MIT Press edition of The Metamorphosis of Plants illustrates Goethe's text (in an English translation by Douglas Miller) with a series of stunning and starkly beautiful color photographs as well as numerous line drawings. It is the most completely and colorfully illustrated edition of Goethe's book ever published. It demonstrates vividly Goethe's ideas of transformation and interdependence, as well as the systematic use of imagination in scientific research—which influenced thinkers ranging from Darwin to Thoreau and has much to teach us today about our relationship with nature.

Author: Matthew Charles
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350013951
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Widely regarded as one of the foremost cultural critics of the last century, Walter Benjamin's relation to Modernism has largely been understood in the context of his reception of the aesthetic theories of Early German Romanticism and his associated interest in avant-garde Surrealism. But this Romantic understanding only gives half the picture. Running through Benjamin's thought is also a critique of Romanticism, developed in conjunction with a positive engagement with the philosophical, artistic and historical writings of J. W. von Goethe. In demonstrating the significance of these Goethean elements, this book challenges the dominant understanding of Benjamin's philosophy as essentially Romantic and instead proposes that Goethe's Classicism, conceived as the counterpoint to Romanticism, permits a corrective to the latter's deficiencies. Benjamin's Modernist concept of criticism, it is argued, is constituted in the movement between these polarities of Romanticism and Classicism. Conversely, placing Goethe's Classicism in relation to Benjamin's practice of literary criticism reveals historical tensions with Romanticism that constitute the untimely – indeed, it will be argued, cinematic – Modernism of his work. Adopting a transcritical approach, this book alternates between Benjamin and Goethe in relation to the experiences of colour, language and technology, assembling a constellation of philosophical and artistic figures between them, including the writings of Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Deleuze, Koselleck, Klages, and the work of Grünewald, Marées, Klee, Turner, Hulme, Eisenstein, Tretyakov, and Murnau.

Author: Dennis Patrick Slattery
Publisher: Fisher King Press
ISBN: 1926715772
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story is a both a theoretical as well as interactive book on the nature of personal myth. Its intention is to offer participants who wish to explore further the terms and structure of their personal myth over 80 writing meditations that are spread throughout 9 chapters in order to guide the readers-writers on a pilgrimage into the deepest layers of their personal myth.