Art, Nature, and the Poesy of Plants in the Goethezeit : A Biosemiotic Perspective

Abstract

Sometime around 1800, toward the end of his period of programmatic neoclassicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between and nature. While seemingly in flight front one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen, / Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden (Though art and seem sore disunited / Yet each, before you think, to each is turning).1 Reassured by this apparent reconciliation of and the speaker declares that his antipathy ( Widerwille) (whether to the one or the other or, perhaps, to their apparently antipathetic trajectories) has also disappeared, and he now finds himself drawn equally to both. This bold beginning raises a series of questions, arising in no small part from the multivalence of the very terms nature and which are only partially and indirectly answered in the following stanzas. Nature, as Raymond Williams remarks in Keywords, is perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language, and judging by the lengthy entry in the Grimms' Deutsches Worterbuch, the same can certainly be said fot Natur in German.2 One wonders, then, what conception and dimension of nature is in play here? Art is somewhat less prodigiously polysemous, but it was significantly more so in Goethe's day. While we tend to associate this word primarily with the sphere of aesthetic production, as in the creation of works of around 1800, Kunst, like in English, could also refer to activities that would today be classified in terms of craft. Such crafty arts could also include the experimental techniques deployed by those who had adopted Sir Francis Bacon's novum organon in order to induce nature to surrender her closely guarded secrets.3 What kind of is this, then, that is seemingly so at odds with nature? Why are they in flight from one another? And on what basis, and in what manner, might their apparent reunification be effected?In this essay, I propose to explore these questions from an ecocritical and ecophilosophical perspective. In particular, I wish to reconsider German Romantic-era understandings of the interrelationship of art and from the perspective of the burgeoning new field of multi- and interdisciplinary study that became known in the 1980s as biosemiotics.Biosemiotics entails the examination of those multifarious and multifaceted communicative processes (semiosis) that are intrinsic to the existence and interactions of all living organisms (bios). Discussions of the historical antecedents of biosemiotics not infrequently allude to the legacy of German biology and Naturphilosophie. Prisca Augustyn, for instance, refers to the Romantic Biology or natural organicism of Kant, Goethe, and Schelling that sees as creative force and creation at once, where perfect form is found in plants and animals as in poetry or art, as the bedrock of biosemiotic thought.4 Similarly, Donald Favareau, in his detailed Evolutionary History of acknowledges the importance of German thought in the intellectual milieu of one of the major forefathers of biosemiotics, the German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944), and its legacy in his language.5 Such legacies nonetheless remain underresearched and even appear at times to be a source of concern to contemporary biosemioticians. For example, Tommi Vehkavaraa is at pains to distinguish the account of the continuity between biological life and human mental activity developed by another biosemiotic forefather, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), from that of Schillings Naturphilosophie,6 while science does not even rate a mention in Favareau's Brief History of the Sign Concept in Pre-modernist Science, which appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal Biosemiotics in 2008. …