It will be argued that Goethe’s concept of Zusammenhang offers an alternative to competing theories of part to whole that accounts for the emergence of complex structure with a minimum of metaphysical presuppositions. At the same time, it will open certain literary and theoretical texts to philosophical readings, including his essays on comparative anatomy and two of his novels: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809 Elective Affinities). 8 Without denying such influences altogether, this entry assumes the irreducibility of Goethe’s nexus concept to any single school. And while both have had an unmistakable influence on subsequent intellectual currents, they remain to a large extent misunderstood-not least because of the tendency to assimilate his ideas to more orthodox philosophical positions, whether Platonism, Spinozism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, or mysticism. Goethe’s unique concept of Zusammenhang allowed him to articulate a highly original theory of organic formation as well as a highly original concept of the work of art. 7 For Goethe, part and whole are both coeval and coevolutionary, preceded-if priority must be established-only by previous iterations of their relationship. 6 In the context of art, Goethe’s nexus concept makes a definitive break with the Aristotelian primacy of the whole over its parts that had been assumed by philosophical aestheticians from the late baroque to the romantic period. In the context of biology, this implies a rejection of the teleological Bildungstrieb (formative drive) postulated by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1789 to explain the growth and reproduction of organic life, along with the taxonomical system introduced by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) in 1735, which erected static divisions between the kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species of the natural world. 5 The difficulty presented by Goethe’s concept of Zusammenhang is that the relation of part to whole that it describes cannot be reduced to either of these terms: although the whole can be said to condition its parts (as in a system), it does not precede, but emerges from their combination (as in an aggregate). Following Kant, these thinkers generally held that there were only two ways in which parts could hang together in a whole: as a system, in which an idea of the whole precedes its parts and their connection or as an aggregate, in which the parts precede the whole to which they add up. Goethe’s heterodox use of Zusammenhang not only sets him apart from the philosophical tradition he drew on, but also from the early Romantics and Idealists, who were likewise responding to Kant’s philosophy. 3 Although the rationalist idea of the world as a nexus rerum ( Zusammenhang der Dinge, nexus of things) was rendered obsolete by the subjective turn inaugurated by Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781 Critique of Pure Reason), it survived within his system in modified form, and from there conditioned Goethe’s reflections on the relation of part to whole. 1766): “ Der Zusammenhang, die Verbindung und Verknüpfung (nexus) ist das Prädicat, vermöge dessen Etwas entweder der Grund, oder das Gegründete, oder beydes zugleich ist” (The predicate by virtue of which something is either ground or consequence, or both, is the nexus). The situation is not helped by English translations, which, failing to recognize the word as a terminus technicus, render it variously as “connection, coherence, nexus, pattern, context, structure, complex, interrelatedness, connectedness, and interconnection.” 2 However, Zusammenhang had a clearly defined meaning in the early eighteenth century, when the word was introduced into philosophy as the German equivalent of the Latin nexus, most prominently through Georg Friedrich Meier’s translation of Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (1739, trans. 1 This is due in part to its ubiquity in contemporary German and in part to a shift in philosophical discourse that has taken place over the last two centuries. ‘hanging-together’) is no longer recognized as a philosophical concept. With few exceptions, the word Zusammenhang (nexus, connection, coherence, context lit.
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