The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Goethe's Basic Geological Principle

[ 1 ] Goethe is very often sought where he is not to be found at all. Among many other things, this has happened in the assessment of the poet's geological research. Much more than anywhere else, however, it would be necessary here for everything Goethe wrote about details to take a back seat to the great intentions from which he proceeded. He must be judged here above all 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" ["Proverbs in Prose"; Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd section, p. 378] and "The spirit from which we act is the highest" [Lehrjahre VII, 9]. It is not what he achieved, but how he strove for it that is exemplary for us. It is not a matter of a doctrine, but of a method to be communicated. The first depends on the scientific means of the time and can become obsolete; the latter has emerged from Goethe's great spiritual disposition and endures, even if the scientific tools are perfected and experience expands.

[ 2 ] Goethe was led into geology through his occupation with the Ilmenau mines, to which he was officially obliged. When Karl August came to power, he devoted himself to this mine, which had long been neglected, with great seriousness. First of all, the reasons for its decay were to be examined in detail by experts and then everything possible was to be done to revive the operation. Goethe supported Duke Karl August in this endeavor. He pursued the matter with the utmost vigor. This often led him to the mines in Ilmenau. He wanted to familiarize himself with the state of the matter. He visited Ilmenau for the first time in May 1776 and then many more times.

[ 3 ] In the midst of this practical concern, he now had a scientific need to get closer to the laws of the phenomena he was able to observe there. The comprehensive view of nature, which worked its way up to ever greater clarity in his mind (see the essay "Die Natur"; Natw. Schr., 2nd vol., p. 5 ff.), forced him to explain what was unfolding before his eyes in his own terms.

[ 4 ] A peculiarity deeply rooted in Goethe's nature immediately becomes apparent here. He has an essentially different need than many researchers. Whereas for the latter the main thing lies in the knowledge of the individual, whereas they are usually only interested in an ideal structure, a system, to the extent that it helps them to observe the individual, for Goethe the individual is only the point of passage to a comprehensive overall conception of existence. We read in the essay "Nature": "It lives in nothing but children and the mother, where is she?" We find the same striving to recognize not only what exists directly, but also its deeper foundation, in Faust ("Look at all power and seeds"). Thus, what he observes on and below the earth's surface becomes a means for him to penetrate the mystery of the formation of the world. What he wrote to Duchess Luise on December 23, 1786: "The works of nature are always like a first uttered word of God" [WA 8, 98], animates all his research; and the sensually perceptible becomes the scripture from which he has to read that word of creation. With this in mind, he wrote to Frau v. Stein on August 22, 1784: "The great and beautiful writing is always legible and only indecipherable when people want to transfer their petty ideas and their narrowness to infinite beings..." [WA 6, 343] We find the same tendency in "Wilhelm Meister": "But if I now treated these very cracks and fissures as letters, had them to decipher, formed them into words and learned to read them completely, would you have anything against it?"

[ 5 ] So from the end of the seventies onwards, we see the poet constantly striving to decipher this writing. He strove to work his way up to such a view that what he seen separately appeared to him in an inner, necessary context. His method was "the developing, unfolding, by no means the compiling, organizing one". It was not enough for him to see the granite here, the porphyry there, etc., and simply line them up according to external characteristics; he strove for a law that underlay all rock formation and which he only needed to hold up in his mind in order to understand how granite had to be formed here and porphyry there. He went back from the distinctive to the common. On June 12, 1784, he wrote to Frau v. Stein: "The simple thread that I have spun for myself leads me through all these subterranean labyrinths quite beautifully and gives me an overview even in the confusion." [WA 6, 297 and 298] He seeks the common principle which, depending on the different circumstances in which it comes into play, sometimes produces this type of rock, sometimes that type of rock. For him, nothing in experience is a fixed point on which one can stand still; only the principle that underlies everything is such a principle. He therefore always endeavors to find the transitions from rock to rock. From them, the intention is to recognize the tendency of formation much better than from the product formed in a determined way, where nature only reveals its essence in a one-sided way, even often straying into a dead end with "its specifications".

[ 6 ] It is a mistake to believe that Goethe's method has been refuted by pointing out that modern geology does not recognize such a transition from one rock to another. Goethe never claimed that granite actually changes into something else. What is once granite is a finished, completed product and no longer has the inner driving force to become something else of its own accord. But what Goethe was looking for is precisely what is missing in today's geology, that is the idea, the principle that constitutes granite before it has become granite, and this idea is the same that underlies all other formations. So when Goethe speaks of a transformation of one rock into another, he does not mean an actual transformation, but rather a development of the objective idea, which forms itself into the individual shapes, now holds on to this form and becomes granite, then again forms another possibility out of itself and becomes slate, and so on. Goethe's view in this area is not a wild theory of metamorphosis, but concrete idealism. However, this rock-forming principle can only come to full fruition with everything that lies within it in the entire body of the earth. Therefore, the history of the formation of the earth's body is the main thing for Goethe, and each individual element must be included in it. What matters to him is the place a rock occupies in the earth as a whole; the individual is of interest to him only as a part of the whole. In the end, the mineralogical-geological system that traces the processes in the earth, that shows why one thing had to form in this place and another in that place, appears to him to be the correct one. The occurrence becomes decisive for him. He therefore criticizes Werner's doctrine, which he otherwise reveres so highly, for arranging the minerals not according to their occurrence, which gives us information about their origin, but rather according to accidental external characteristics. The perfect system is not made by the scientist, but by nature itself.

[ 7 ] It should be noted that Goethe saw a great realm, a harmony in all of nature. He asserts that all natural things are animated by one tendency. What is therefore of the same nature must appear to him to be conditioned by the same law. He could not admit that in geological phenomena, which are nothing more than inorganic entities, other driving forces are at work than in the rest of inorganic nature. The extension of the inorganic laws of action to geology is Goethe's first geological act. It was this principle that guided him in explaining the Bohemian mountains and the phenomena observed at the Serapis temple in Pozzuoli. He sought to introduce principle into the dead crust of the earth by conceiving it as having been formed by those laws which we always see at work before our eyes in physical phenomena. The geological theories of [James] Hutton and Elie de Beaumont were inwardly repugnant to him. What was he to do with explanations that break through all natural order? It is banal to hear so often the phrase that Goethe's calm nature was contradicted by the theory of lifting and lowering, etc. No, it contradicted his sense for nature. No, it contradicted his sense of a unified view of nature. He could not fit it into the natural. And it was thanks to this sense that he arrived early on (as early as 1782) at a view that specialist geology would only reach decades later: the view that fossilized animal and plant remains are necessarily related to the rock in which they are found. Voltaire had spoken of them as plays of nature because he had no idea of the consequences of natural law. Goethe could only find a thing in any place comprehensible if there was a simple natural connection with the surroundings of the thing. It is also the same principle that led Goethe to the fruitful idea of the ice age (see "Geologische Probleme und Versuch ihrer Auflösung", Natw. Schr., 2nd vol., p. 308). He was looking for a simple, natural explanation for the occurrence of granite masses spread over large areas. He had to reject the explanation that they had been hurled there during the tumultuous uprising of the mountains located far back in the country, because it did not derive a natural fact from the existing, effective laws of nature, but from an exception to them, indeed an abandonment of them. He assumed that northern Germany once had a general water level of a thousand feet when it was very cold, that a large part of it was covered by a sheet of ice, and that those granite blocks remained in place after the ice had melted. This was a view based on known laws that we could experience. Goethe's significance for geology is to be found in this assertion of a general law of nature. How he explains the Kammerberg, whether he was right in his opinion about the Karlsbad Sprudel, is irrelevant. "We are not talking here of an opinion to be asserted, but of a method to be communicated, which everyone, as a tool, may use according to his own way..." (Goethe to Hegel Oct. 7, 1820 [WA 33, 294].)