Expressions of the Interior: Physiognomic Knowledge in Lavater, Goethe, and Alexander von Humboldt

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the role of Johann Caspar Lavater’s (1741-1801) physiognomic ideas in shaping the relationship between the natural sciences and aesthetics at the turn of the nineteenth century. Using the examples of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early morphological writing and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse (1806), it makes the case for the importance of Lavater’s »scientific« physiognomy for understanding the discursive- epistemological shift from the sensual empiricism of the eighteenth century to the perception of the invisible around 1800. Far from a direct line of intellectual- historical continuity from Lavater to Goethe and Humboldt, this article contends that the diffuse uptake of physiognomic concepts by exponents of Romantic science gave them a new meaning in relation to the study of ›life‹ and its hidden dynamics as well as with respect to the roles of art and aesthetics in comprehending nature’s ›interior‹.