Empirical psychology and classicism: Moritz, Schiller, Goethe

Abstract

WEIMAR CLASSICISM AND THE GERMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL TRADITION The classicism of Moritz, Schiller, and Goethe was the main channel through which eighteenth-century psychology fed into the nineteenth century in Germany. This might seem a strange claim. It is often argued that Goethe's classicism was a reaction against the ‘pathological’ Storm and Stress. His negative attitude to Werther in the 1790s is well known. Hans-Jurgen Schings has argued that Schiller's classical aesthetics belonged to the rationalist tradition of criticism of melancholy. In his review of Burger's poems Schiller claimed that melancholy was not a proper subject for poetry. The reality is more complex. In a letter to Schiller of March 1801 Goethe wrote that empirical psychology was ‘where we poets are in actual fact at home’. Moritz, Schiller, and Goethe came – more or less independently, but via a similar route – to the view that classicism was a cure for melancholy. Moritz and Goethe identified closely with Rousseau, whose Confessions began to appear in 1782. Around this time Moritz began to compile his autobiography, which eventually fed into the psychological novel Anton Reiser and the project of a journal of psychological case histories. Goethe began to experiment with biographical and autobiographical modes in the early 1790s, after befriending Moritz in Rome. Schiller's experiments in empirical psychology in the 1780s were prompted by the psychology taught at the Karlsschule by J. F. Abel.