Have you ever studied Goethe, Adam? I've always been curious about this, after watching some of your better videos on Tested.
Goethe was an 18th century German polymath, born in Frankfurt in 1749. He died in the small city of Weimar in 1832, after having lived through the Seven Years War, the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. When he was born Germany was still a Feudal confederation of minor aristocratic duchies and independent city states. When he died the first railways and telegraph wires were being laid.
Goethe himself, from 1775 until his death, was the political administrator of a small little state called Weimar-Saxe, situated in the center of what is only today called Germany. The diverse nature of Goethe's interests and occupations during this period represents one of the most profound manifestations of Humanism in the history of ideas.
Goethe, during this time,
1. Worked as administrator of the University of Jena (where Fichte and Schiller taught as professors),
2. He was managing director of the Weimar Theater
3. He taught drawing at its art academy,
4. He was an honorary professor of Botany at Jena,
5. He was Privy Councilor to the Duke, Karl August,
6. He chaired Wiemar's highway, war and mining commissions,
7. He was Weimar Court Librarian
Not only that, but in his leisure he also found time to write one of the most sophisticated bodies of work in the history of literature, one that includes classics like Tasso, Egmont, Wilhelm Meister, and Elective Affinities.
The volume of primary sources about his life, written both by Goethe and those who knew him, makes him probably one of the most well recorded individuals in the history of humanity. I own a volume of letters written about him by those who met him, and it contains letters written by Schiller, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn and William Thackeray, among others. He met Napoleon, saw Mozart preform as a child, and was witness to both the Siege of Mainz and the eruption of Vesuvius.
Goethe knew more than 7 languages. He was a passionate, and accomplished collector of both art and scientific specimens and experiments. Among his immediate contemporaries and associates were the world famous naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, who greatly inspired Darwin, one of the earliest practitioners of what is today called Theoretical Physics, Friedrich Schelling, the founder of modern Anthropology, Gottfried Herder, not to mention Schiller. Since Goethe's death (and life even) figures from Thomas Carlyle, to Nietzsche, to Freud have obsessed over him, both the beauty of his art, as well as the complexities of his development as a human being and what it meant for the history of Mankind as a whole.
Now, I ask if you've ever read him because of how you remind me of him, how Goethean your approach to seeing things is. You share with him a great zeal for collecting, and you have a similar mania for ensuring that your collection is ordered and complete. You also are very aesthetically minded and oriented, you appreciate at once the beauty of both beautiful works of art, as well as, 'beautiful' scientific proofs and engineering solutions. In fact I think I once saw you talking about the necessary relationship between art and science in a video of a talk you gave.
You also have the same tendency to abstract and generalize your own problem solving algorithm. You speak at great lengths about the general way in which you approach your own collecting and building of things, and once you arrive at this principle, you then apply it to everything else that you do and immediately recognize the implications it has for your whole understanding of the world and your own place in it.
Goethe did something similar, in his books. His worldview was extremely dynamical, not only were we machines who were affected and compelled by the world around us, but we were also actors within it who compelled it to change and grow. The give and take of this relationship continued on throughout human history until, like evolution, it reached a complex, dynamic, and every changing harmony.
You can see this readily in his Italian Journey, a book he wrote about his travels through Italy. In it you see his great mind work over, in a way that is at once both scientific, and artistic, the world which he finds himself surrounded by. And you see him shape his own understanding of his environment as if it were a painting and he was Rembrandt. He patiently and cheerfully observes the climate and weather, the geology and topography of the landscape, the various and diverse kinds of plants that grow there, and he connects these things together with the greatest taste and artistry to form a vivid and holistic mental painting of the world. And at the same time, he studies the fine art and architecture of Italy. The greatness of the work is the connection that Goethe makes between these two things, and how he applies what he learns while he's studying to be a painter, to the way in which he scientifically conceptualizes the external universe.
If you'd like to learn something about Goethe there are some very fine books about him. "Discovering the Mind" by Walter Kaufmann, "Conversations with Goethe" by Eckermann, "Lotte in Weimar" by Thomas Mann (which is a very intricate, and somewhat critical, historical novel), "The Disinherited Mind" by Erich Heller, "Culture and Society in Classical Weimar: 1775 to 1806" by W. H. Bruford, "A Study of Goethe" by Barker Fairley, and a great, recent (and still ongoing) biography by Nicholas Boyle called "Goethe: The Poet on the Age"
whatisthematterwithy18 karma
Have you ever studied Goethe, Adam? I've always been curious about this, after watching some of your better videos on Tested.
Goethe was an 18th century German polymath, born in Frankfurt in 1749. He died in the small city of Weimar in 1832, after having lived through the Seven Years War, the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. When he was born Germany was still a Feudal confederation of minor aristocratic duchies and independent city states. When he died the first railways and telegraph wires were being laid.
Goethe himself, from 1775 until his death, was the political administrator of a small little state called Weimar-Saxe, situated in the center of what is only today called Germany. The diverse nature of Goethe's interests and occupations during this period represents one of the most profound manifestations of Humanism in the history of ideas.
Goethe, during this time,
Not only that, but in his leisure he also found time to write one of the most sophisticated bodies of work in the history of literature, one that includes classics like Tasso, Egmont, Wilhelm Meister, and Elective Affinities.
The volume of primary sources about his life, written both by Goethe and those who knew him, makes him probably one of the most well recorded individuals in the history of humanity. I own a volume of letters written about him by those who met him, and it contains letters written by Schiller, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn and William Thackeray, among others. He met Napoleon, saw Mozart preform as a child, and was witness to both the Siege of Mainz and the eruption of Vesuvius.
Goethe knew more than 7 languages. He was a passionate, and accomplished collector of both art and scientific specimens and experiments. Among his immediate contemporaries and associates were the world famous naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, who greatly inspired Darwin, one of the earliest practitioners of what is today called Theoretical Physics, Friedrich Schelling, the founder of modern Anthropology, Gottfried Herder, not to mention Schiller. Since Goethe's death (and life even) figures from Thomas Carlyle, to Nietzsche, to Freud have obsessed over him, both the beauty of his art, as well as the complexities of his development as a human being and what it meant for the history of Mankind as a whole.
Now, I ask if you've ever read him because of how you remind me of him, how Goethean your approach to seeing things is. You share with him a great zeal for collecting, and you have a similar mania for ensuring that your collection is ordered and complete. You also are very aesthetically minded and oriented, you appreciate at once the beauty of both beautiful works of art, as well as, 'beautiful' scientific proofs and engineering solutions. In fact I think I once saw you talking about the necessary relationship between art and science in a video of a talk you gave.
You also have the same tendency to abstract and generalize your own problem solving algorithm. You speak at great lengths about the general way in which you approach your own collecting and building of things, and once you arrive at this principle, you then apply it to everything else that you do and immediately recognize the implications it has for your whole understanding of the world and your own place in it.
Goethe did something similar, in his books. His worldview was extremely dynamical, not only were we machines who were affected and compelled by the world around us, but we were also actors within it who compelled it to change and grow. The give and take of this relationship continued on throughout human history until, like evolution, it reached a complex, dynamic, and every changing harmony.
You can see this readily in his Italian Journey, a book he wrote about his travels through Italy. In it you see his great mind work over, in a way that is at once both scientific, and artistic, the world which he finds himself surrounded by. And you see him shape his own understanding of his environment as if it were a painting and he was Rembrandt. He patiently and cheerfully observes the climate and weather, the geology and topography of the landscape, the various and diverse kinds of plants that grow there, and he connects these things together with the greatest taste and artistry to form a vivid and holistic mental painting of the world. And at the same time, he studies the fine art and architecture of Italy. The greatness of the work is the connection that Goethe makes between these two things, and how he applies what he learns while he's studying to be a painter, to the way in which he scientifically conceptualizes the external universe.
If you'd like to learn something about Goethe there are some very fine books about him. "Discovering the Mind" by Walter Kaufmann, "Conversations with Goethe" by Eckermann, "Lotte in Weimar" by Thomas Mann (which is a very intricate, and somewhat critical, historical novel), "The Disinherited Mind" by Erich Heller, "Culture and Society in Classical Weimar: 1775 to 1806" by W. H. Bruford, "A Study of Goethe" by Barker Fairley, and a great, recent (and still ongoing) biography by Nicholas Boyle called "Goethe: The Poet on the Age"
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