is premised on the conviction that science and the arts are constantly
influencing one another in the way we conceive the world and formulate our
questions as we investigate it from various vantage points: empirical
investigation, philosophical interrogation, mythical explanation. Our purpose is
not to conflate these diverse sets of subdisciplines, but rather to draw
attention how they frequently go hand in hand. The main text in the course will
be Goethe's masterpiece, Faust. Parts I and II (1831), which occupied his
creative attention for more than sixty years. It thus mirrors the cultural,
historical, and scientific developments from ca. 1770 -1830. A second literary
text, Goethe's novel, Elective Affinities (1809), will be included since
it was modeled on chemical and botanical phenomena. Collateral readings will be
drawn from science, alchemy, the history of art, and philosophy to elucidate the
numerous allusions in these two works and to deepen the student's understanding
of the two central texts, Faust. These auxiliary readings will range from
Goethe's own Nature, The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject, On
Granite, Toward a Theory of Weather, The Spiral Tendency in Plants, excerpts
from The Metamorphosis of Plants and from Theory of Color to
Newton's Optics, E.F.Chladni's acoustically produced figures, Sir
Humphrey Davy's experiments with electrolysis, Carl Linnaeus's studies in
taxonomy, and Darwin's Origins of Species.
interest in science dates from the mid 1980's when, as minister of mines in the
Duchy of Saxony‑Weimar, he began his geological studies. These later
expanded to include meteorological investigations (esp. cloud formation),
optics, color theory, morphology, and evolutionary theory. His historical
studies on science reached back to Greek antiquity and pointed forward to 19th‑
century evolutionary theory. Goethe considered his Theory of Colors, in
which he took issue with Newtonian optics, to be his greatest achievement.
students will write three short papers of 3-4 pages on assigned topics (one of
which will be derived from a group study project), write a mid-term examination
and submit an expanded research project in written and/or visual form (topics
and length to be discussed with the instructors).
University honor code obtains throughout.