Nature’s Limits to Happiness

While Goethe lived outside the struggle for life, outside the competition and contact of practical activity, in the contemplation of nature and art, developed this view — the spectator’s view — which will always be that of the artist and of the thinker, strongly opposed to that of the actor on the stage of human life.

Continuing Goethe and the Intellectual Revolt of Germany,
our selection from German Thought During the Last Two Hundred Years by Karl Hillebrand published in 1880. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Goethe and the Intellectual Revolt of Germany.

Time: 1775
Place: Germany

As to circumstances, which is only another name for fate, he preached and practiced resignation. At every turn of our life, in fact, we meet with limits; our intelligence has its frontiers which bar its way; our senses are limited and can only embrace an infinitely small part of nature; few of our wishes can be fulfilled; privation and sufferings await us at every moment. “Privation is thy lot, privation! That is the eternal song which resounds at every moment, which, our whole life through, each hour sings hoarsely to our ears!” laments Faust. What remains, then, for man? “Everything cries to us that we must resign ourselves.” “There are few men, however, who, conscious of the privations and sufferings in store for them in life, and desirous to avoid the necessity of resigning themselves anew in each particular case, have the courage to perform the act of resignation once for all;” who say to themselves that there are eternal and necessary laws to which we must submit, and that we had better do it without grumbling; who “endeavor to form principles which are not liable to be destroyed, but are rather confirmed by contact with reality.” In other words, when man has discovered the laws of nature, both moral and physical, he must accept them as the limits of his actions and desires; he must not wish for eternity of life or inexhaustible capacities of enjoyment, understanding, and acting, any more than he wishes for the moon. For rebellion against these laws must needs be an act of impotency as well as of deceptive folly. By resignation, on the contrary, serene resignation, the human soul is purified; for thereby it becomes free of selfish passions and arrives at that intellectual superiority in which the contemplation and understanding of things give sufficient contentment, without making it needful for man to stretch out his hands to take possession of them; a thought which Goethe’s friend, Schiller, has magnificently developed in his grand philosophical poems. Optimism and pessimism disappear at once, as well as fatalism; the highest and most refined intellect again accepts the world, as children and ignorant toilers do: as a given necessity. He does not even think the world could be otherwise, and within its limits he not only enjoys and suffers, but also works gayly, trying like Horace, to subject things to himself, but resigned to submit to them when they are invincible. Thus the simple Hellenic existence which, contrary to Christianity, but according to nature, accepted the present without ceaselessly thinking of death and another world, and acted in that present and in the circumstances allotted to each by fate, without wanting to overstep the boundaries of nature, would revive again in our modern world and free us forever from the torment of unaccomplished wishes and of vain terrors.

The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe lived outside the struggle for life, outside the competition and contact of practical activity, in the contemplation of nature and art, developed this view — the spectator’s view — which will always be that of the artist and of the thinker, strongly opposed to that of the actor on the stage of human life. Iphigenie, Torquato Tasso, Wilhelm Meister, are the fruits and the interpreters of this conception of the moral world. What ripened and perfected it so as to raise it into a general view, not only of morality, but also of the great philosophical questions which man is called upon to answer, was his study of nature, greatly furthered during his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the bottom of all the vague longing of his generation for nature he was to solve. It became his incessant endeavor to understand the coherence and unity of nature.

You are forever searching for what is necessary in nature,” Schiller wrote to him once, “but you search for it by the most difficult way. You take the whole of nature in order to obtain light on the particular case; you look into the totality for the explanation of the individual existence. From the simplest organism (in nature) you ascend step by step to the more complicated, and finally construct the most complicated of all — man — out of the materials of the whole of nature. In thus creating man anew under the guidance of nature, you penetrate into his mysterious organism.”

And, indeed, as there is a wonderful harmony with nature in Goethe the poet and the man, so there is the same harmony in Goethe the savant and the thinker; nay, even science he practised as a poet. As one of the greatest physicists of our days, Helmholtz, has said of him, “He did not try to translate nature into abstract conceptions, but takes it as a complete work of art, which must reveal its contents spontaneously to an intelligent observer.” Goethe never became a thorough experimentalist; he did not want “to extort the secret from nature by pumps and retorts.” He waited patiently for a voluntary revelation, i.e., until he could surprise that secret by an intuitive glance; for it was his conviction that if you live intimately with Nature she will sooner or later disclose her mysteries to you. If you read his Songs, his Werther, his Wahlverwandtschaften, you feel that extraordinary intimacy — I had almost said identification — with nature, present everywhere. Werther’s love springs up with the blossom of all nature; he begins to sink and nears his self-made tomb while autumn, the death of nature, is in the fields and woods. So does the moon spread her mellow light over his garden, as “the mild eye of a true friend over his destiny.” Never was there a poet who humanized nature or naturalized human feeling, if I might say so, to the same degree as Goethe. Now, this same love of nature he brought into his scientific researches.

He began his studies of nature early, and he began them as he was to finish them — with geology. Buffon’s great views on the revolutions of the earth had made a deep impression upon him, although he was to end as the declared adversary of that vulcanism which we can trace already at the bottom of Buffon’s theory — naturally enough, when we think how uncongenial all violence in society and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theoretical study he had early turned to direct observation; and when his administrative functions obliged him to survey the mines of the little dukedom, ample opportunity was offered for positive studies. As early as 1778, in a paper, Granite, he wrote: “I do not fear the reproach that a spirit of contradiction draws me from the contemplation of the human heart — this most mobile, most mutable and fickle part of the creation — to the observation of (granite) the oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son of nature. For all natural things are in connection with each other.” It was his life’s task to search for the links of this coherence in order to find that unity which he knew to be in the moral as well as material universe.

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