BLINDHEIT UND TAKT IN GOETHES WAHLVERWANDTSCHAFTEN

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the eighteenth century, the German word ‘Takt’, in the first instance a synonym for the sense of touch and a musical term, adopts the figurative meaning of psychological and aesthetic sensitivity. Within a few decades, ‘tact’ then turns into a philosophical term for an intuitive form of empirical judgement that comes to bear in social intercourse as well as in the arts and sciences. In Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften tact is a property of the female characters Charlotte and Ottilie, in whose actions it manifests itself literally as a sense of touch and rhythm. Aesthetic sensitivity, however, is not sufficient to hinder the fatal course of events: in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, tact is inseparably tied to blindness.