The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Goethe’s Fundamental Geological Principle

[ 1 ] People very often look for Goethe where he certainly cannot be found. Among many other things, this has happened in the evaluation of the poet’s geological research. But more than anywhere else, it is necessary here that everything Goethe wrote about specific details take a back seat to the grand intentions from which he proceeded. Above all, he must be judged here according to his own maxim: “In the works of man, as in those of nature, it is actually the intentions that are most worthy of attention” [“Sayings in Prose”; Natw. Schr., Vol. 4, Part 2, p. 378] and “The spirit, from which we act, is the highest” [Apprenticeship Years VII, 9]. It is not what he achieved, but how he strove for it that serves as a model for us. This is not a doctrinal position, but rather a method to be shared. The former depends on the scientific means of the time and may become obsolete; the latter sprang from Goethe’s great intellectual disposition and endures, even as scientific tools are perfected and experience expands.

[ 2 ] Goethe was introduced to geology through his work at the Ilmenau mines, to which he was officially assigned. When Karl August came to power, he devoted himself with great earnestness to these mines, which had long been neglected. The first step was to have experts thoroughly investigate the causes of the mine’s decline, and then to do everything possible to revive operations. Goethe assisted Duke Karl August in this effort. He pursued the matter with the utmost vigor. This often took him to the mines of Ilmenau. He wanted to familiarize himself thoroughly with the state of affairs. He visited Ilmenau for the first time in May 1776 and returned there many times thereafter.

[ 3 ] In the midst of this practical concern, he now became aware of the scientific need to gain a deeper understanding of the laws governing the phenomena he was able to observe. The comprehensive view of nature that was taking shape in his mind with ever-greater clarity (see the essay “Nature”; Natw. Schr., Vol. 2, p. 5 ff.) compelled him to explain, in his own terms, what was unfolding before his eyes.

[ 4 ] Here, a trait deeply rooted in Goethe’s nature immediately comes to the fore. He has a fundamentally different need than many researchers. While for the latter, the main focus lies in the understanding of the individual, and while they are usually interested in an ideal structure or a system only to the extent that it aids them in observing the individual, for Goethe the individual is merely a stepping stone toward a comprehensive overall understanding of existence. We read in the essay “Nature”: “She lives in her children alone, and the mother, where is she?” We find the same striving—not merely to recognize what exists immediately, but its deeper foundation—in *Faust* (“Behold all active power and seed”). Thus, what he observes on and beneath the earth’s surface becomes for him a means of penetrating the mystery of the world’s creation. What he wrote to Duchess Luise on December 23, 1786—“The works of nature are always like the first spoken word of God” [WA 8, 98]—inspires all his research; and what can be experienced through the senses becomes for him a scripture from which he must read that word of creation. In this spirit, he wrote to Mrs. von Stein on August 22, 1784: “The great and beautiful scripture is always legible and indecipherable only when people seek to project their petty notions and their narrow-mindedness onto infinite beings...” [WA 6, 343] We find the same tendency in *Wilhelm Meister*: “But if I were to treat these very gaps and cracks as letters, were to decipher them, form them into words, and learn to read them completely, would you have any objection?”

[ 5 ] Thus, from the late 1870s onward, we see the poet tirelessly striving to decipher this text. His aim was to work his way up to a perspective in which what he saw as separate would appear to him in an inner, necessary connection. His method was “one of development and unfolding, by no means one of compilation and classification.” It was not enough for him to see granite here, porphyry there, and so on, and simply to string them together based on external characteristics; he sought a law underlying all rock formation, which he need only hold in his mind to understand how granite here and porphyry there must have come into being. He moved from the distinguishing features back to the common ground. On June 12, 1784, he wrote to Mrs. von Stein: “The simple thread I have spun for myself guides me beautifully through all these subterranean labyrinths and gives me a clear overview even amid the confusion.” [WA 6, 297 and 298] He seeks the common principle that, depending on the various circumstances under which it comes into play, produces one type of rock—this one—at one time, and that one—at another. Nothing in experience is a fixed point for him upon which one can rest; only the principle, which underlies everything, is such a point. He is therefore always striving to find the transitions from one rock to another. After all, these transitions allow one to recognize the underlying intent and the tendency toward formation much better than the product formed in a specific way, where nature reveals its essence only in a one-sided manner, and indeed often “strays into a dead end with its specifications.”

[ 6 ] It is a mistake to believe that one has refuted Goethe’s method by pointing out that modern geology does not recognize such a transition of one rock into another. Goethe never claimed that granite actually transforms into something else. What is granite is a finished, complete product and no longer possesses the inner driving force to become something else of its own accord. But what Goethe was seeking—and what is precisely lacking in modern geology—is the idea, the principle that constitutes the granite before it has become granite, and this idea is the very same one that underlies all other formations. So when Goethe speaks of one rock transitioning into another, he does not mean an actual transformation, but rather a development of the objective idea, which takes shape into individual formations, now retains this form and becomes granite, then again forms another possibility from within itself and becomes slate, and so on. Goethe’s view in this field is not a vague theory of metamorphism, but concrete idealism . However, that rock-forming principle can only come into its full effect, with all that it entails, within the entire body of the Earth. Therefore, the history of the Earth’s formation becomes the central concern for Goethe, and every individual element must be subsumed under it. What matters to him is the place a rock occupies within the Earth as a whole; he is interested in the individual only insofar as it is part of the whole. Ultimately, the mineralogical-geological system that appears correct to him is the one that recreates the processes within the Earth, showing why this particular rock had to form in this place and that one in another. Occurrence is the decisive factor for him. He therefore criticizes Werner’s doctrine—which he otherwise holds in such high esteem—for classifying minerals not according to their occurrence, which provides insight into their formation, but rather according to random external characteristics. The perfect system is not created by the researcher, but by nature itself.

[ 7 ] It should be noted that Goethe saw in all of nature a great realm, a harmony. He asserts that all natural things are animated by a tendency. Therefore, anything of the same kind had to appear to him as governed by the same laws. He could not accept that geological phenomena—which are, after all, nothing more than inorganic entities—are driven by different forces than the rest of inorganic nature. The extension of the laws governing inorganic processes to geology was Goethe’s first geological achievement. It was this principle that guided him in explaining the Bohemian Mountains and the phenomena he observed at the Temple of Serapis in Pozzuoli. He sought to introduce principle into the lifeless Earth’s crust by conceiving of it as having arisen through those laws that we constantly see at work before our very eyes in physical phenomena. The geological theories of [James] Hutton and Elie de Beaumont were deeply repugnant to him. What was he to make of explanations that disrupted the entire natural order ? It is trite to hear so often the phrase that Goethe’s calm nature contradicted the theory of uplift and subsidence, etc. No, it contradicted his sense of a unified view of nature. He could not reconcile it with the laws of nature. And it is thanks to this sense that he arrived early on (as early as 1782) at a view that professional geology would not reach until decades later: the view that fossilized animal and plant remains are in a necessary connection with the rock in which they are found. Voltaire had still spoken of them as “plays of nature” , because he had no inkling of the consistency inherent in the laws of nature. Goethe could only find a thing comprehensible in any given place if a simple, natural connection with the thing’s surroundings could be established. It is also this same principle that led Goethe to the fruitful idea of the Ice Age (see “Geological Problems and an Attempt at Their Solution,” Natw. Schr., Vol. 2, p. 308). He sought a simple, natural explanation for the occurrence of granite masses spread over vast areas far apart. He had to reject the explanation that they had been hurled there during the tumultuous upheaval of the mountains located far inland, because it derived a natural fact not from the existing, active laws of nature, but through an exception to those laws—indeed, a departure from them. He assumed that northern Germany once had a general water level a thousand feet high during a period of extreme cold, that a large part of the region was covered by an ice sheet, and that those granite boulders were left behind after the ice melted. This provided a view grounded in known laws that we can empirically verify. It is in this assertion of a general natural law that Goethe’s significance for geology is to be found. How he explains the Kammerberg, or whether he was correct in his opinion regarding the Karlovy Vary spring, is irrelevant. “The point here is not to impose an opinion, but to share a method that everyone may use, as a tool, in their own way...” (Goethe to Hegel, Oct. 7, 1820 [WA 33, 294].)