German Romanticism and Science

The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter

Jocelyn Holland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135850166
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Situated at the intersection of literature and science, Holland's study draws upon a diverse corpus of literary and scientific texts which testify to a cultural fascination with procreation around 1800. Through readings which range from Goethe's writing on metamorphosis to Novalis's aphorisms and novels and Ritter's Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist, Holland proposes that each author contributes to a scientifically-informed poetics of procreation. Rather than subscribing to a single biological theory (such as epigenesis or preformation), these authors take their inspiration from a wide inventory of procreative motifs and imagery.

1
Introduction

If we return to the field of philosophy and consider evolution and epigenesis once more, then these seem to be words with which we only hinder ourselves.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, MA 12:101)¹

Everything indicates that the essence of procreation is absolutely to be sought more deeply than in the mere laws of matter.

(Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente, n. 504)²

According to Karl Ernst von Baer, it was a combination of luck and scientific practice that led him to identify the mammalian ovum in 1826, an important step in unveiling the secret of human procreation:

Sonderbar! dachte ich, was muss das seyn? Ich öffnete ein Bläschen und hob vorsichtig das Fleckchen mit dem Messer in ein mit Wasser gefülltes Uhrglas, das ich unter das Mikroskop brachte. Als ich in dieses einen Blick geworfen hatte, fuhr ich, wie vom Blitze getroffen, zurück, denn ich sah deutlich eine sehr kleine, scharf ausgebildete gelbe Dotterkugel. Ich musste mich erholen, ehe ich den Muth hatte, wieder hinzusehen, da ich besorgte, ein Phantom habe mich betrogen. Es scheint sonderbar, dass ein Anblick, den man erwartet und ersehnt hat, erschrecken kann, wenn er da ist. (Von Baer, Selbstbiographie, 311)

Strange! I thought, what must that be? I opened a vesicle and carefully lifted that little fleck with the knife into a watch glass filled with water, which I then brought under the microscope. As I took a look at it I jumped back as if struck by lightning, for I clearly saw a very small, precisely formed yellow yolk orb. I had to recover before I had the courage to look again, for I was worried that a phantom might have deceived me. It seems strange that the sight of something which one has expected and longed for can cause a fright when it is finally there.

This passage in von Baer’s autobiography moderates the thrill of an electrically-charged epiphany with a healthy dose of skepticism. Is the vision which causes him to leap back from the microscope a mere trick of the light or a legitimate scientific discovery? Fortunately, the latter: the “phantom” of the mammalian ovum, which had long haunted theories of procreation without being confirmed, was no ghost. Von Baer, with a nod to the earlier observations of William Cruikshank and others, can take his credit for revealing the “discovery of the true state of the generation of mammals, including humans.”³

The state of the unknown can be as thrilling as the moment of revelation, often more so. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, despite an abundance of theoretical explanations and empirical data, the mystery of procreation remained unsolved and European fascination with the topic had reached a peak. If the physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is to be believed, procreation was the secret of the day, “the most basic object of research for inquiring minds.”⁴ He speaks for the masses with his delicately posed question, “What goes on inside one creature when it has given itself over to the sweetest of all impulses and now, made fecund by another, should give life to a third?”⁵ Blumenbach’s question, which governs his treatise On the Formative Drive and the Process of Procreation,⁶ captures the fundamental enigma which had preoccupied mankind ever since the first procreating pair stared in astonishment at its own offspring like a second divine creation.⁷ His conviction that procreation was one of the most important unsolved questions of his time was echoed by many of his contemporaries, including Franz von Baader, Lorenz Oken, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, much like the original man and woman in Blumenbach’s mythological account, marveled at the ability of human birth to approximate the divine. For Humboldt, the emergence of life, though relying on material which is already there, nonetheless remains “ein unergründliches Geheimnis” (an unfathomable secret).⁸ Any initial appearance of gender neutrality is deceptive. Humboldt differentiates very clearly between male and female roles in the process of procreation.⁹ Both he, Blumenbach, and their contemporaries were well aware that a significant portion of procreation’s mystique derives from the “secrets of the females,” a subject which for Blumenbach spanned the classical Greek philosophy, the “carnal” books that heated the theological debates of the Middle Ages, and later debates.¹⁰ Or, in Kant’s laconic formulation, “man is easy to investigate, woman does not reveal her secret.”¹¹

Not only in science is procreation a matter of inquiry around 1800. Literature has its own penchant for secrets, and the writers of German Romanticism conduct their own investigations. Johann Wilhelm Ritter muses in his fragment collection that “everything indicates that the essence of procreation is absolutely to be sought more deeply than in the mere laws of matter,”¹² and Friedrich von Hardenberg, writing under the pen name Novalis, speculates on the “mysticism of this operation” between body and soul.¹³ My study poses questions about procreation as basic as Blumenbach’s. How do we account for procreation as a discursive phenomenon? What patterns, tendencies, and distinctive rhetorical features characterize this discourse? Is there a particular perspective or literary response to this scientific and cultural enigma which could be described as a poetics of procreation?¹⁴ Implicit in these questions is the assumption that the study of the literary text, not bound to any single line of inquiry, is uniquely situated to assess the interdisciplinarity of the phenomenon. ‘Procreation’ around 1800 extends beyond a narrow set of physiological questions to include all processes of generation. I have therefore chosen as case studies three authors whose literary writing is shaped by diverse scientific interests which, taken together, are as far-reaching as the problem of procreation itself: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter. In each case, the writing on procreation is determined by the scientific knowledge of the individual in question. No matter how far afield they export procreation from the original context of species generation, there are certain narrative challenges inherent to writing about it. My study is therefore concerned with a very basic problem: how literary genres integrate processes of generation into narrative form. The questions which arise as Goethe, Hardenberg, and Ritter address this problem relate to the accuracy of theoretical language in relationship to the mutability of a living organism, the temporality of generation, and the narration of life (i.e., narrating the processes of evolution and emergence). These case studies are by no means homogeneous: they do not subscribe to a particular theory of procreation, nor do they emerge from a unified philosophical system or scientific agenda. This diversity of background allows a study of procreation to contribute to an understanding of how scientific theorems are received in literary texts around 1800. I pursue this line of inquiry in the following study by demonstrating how the three writers all engage procreation as a narrative and linguistic phenomenon.

The discourse on procreation around 1800 unites theoretical models with phenomena far removed from the physiologists’ dissecting tables, and integrates them into dramatically different contexts. For example, scholars have shown how the language of procreation was appropriated into theories of creative genius current in this period. Wilhelm von Humboldt equated genius with “the intellectual force of procreation.”¹⁵ Even Fichte’s subject philosophy, usually associated with an absolute, self-positing ego, is cast in a new light when early Romanticism visualizes its dialectical reasoning as a dynamic, gendered process. Goethe, Novalis and Ritter stand out for extending the reach of what one might call “procreative language” into new, unforeseen directions. They use it to describe natural and artificially induced phenomena ranging from galvanism and chemical combustion to magnetism and planetary motion. Seventeen years before Mary Shelley completed her novel about a human body electrified into life, Ritter already fantasized that if animal magnetism “is merely a play of procreative forces, then they must, collected with batteries, work wonders, for example really fertilize through mere touch.”¹⁶ Hardenberg speculates that the galvanic chain is a model for how body and soul connect in the procreative act. In Goethe’s poetic vision, the fundamental scientific practice of observing the living phenomena of nature is reconceptualized as procreative. Just as species generation relies naturally on the human body for the labor of reproduction, so, for the Romantics, the ‘tools’ of the human senses and intellect are consciously wielded for a procreative act, the production of ideas.

INTERDISCIPLINARY PROCREATION

The widespread attention granted to procreation can be connected to a general historical trend in the development of the sciences. It is well-documented that in Britain, Germany, and on the European continent as a whole around 1800, those fields of study which today we think of as the natural sciences were rapidly diversifying.¹⁷ New areas of chemical and electrical research began to emerge within the universal science of physics, and biology as a field of inquiry was introduced around this time, but they would only be codified into discrete disciplines after the turn of the century. Before then, the boundaries between different fields of scientific thought were remarkably porous, in the sense that techniques of experimentation and scientific terminology had not yet reached the point of specialization which would preclude the wide dissemination of ideas. The same is true for rigorous distinctions between literary and scientific writing. The secret of procreation not only fueled scientific programs and intense scholarly rivalry, it is also central to Romantic literature’s fascination with scientific topics. Dietrich Engelhardt comments that those who study this era of scientific history will always be led towards “general reflections” “on the essence and operation of the natural sciences, on the responsibility of the natural scientist (Naturforscher) toward nature and society, over the relations of the natural sciences to art, theology, and philosophy.”¹⁸ In the writing on procreation, the interests of literature and science coincide with the greatest intensity.

The early “interdisciplinarity” of the language of organic generation, its pervasiveness in the arts and sciences around 1800, seems to be anticipated by those same physiological theories which raised the burning question in the first place. These theories conceptualized procreation as the most general force of living organisms. For both Blumenbach and his student Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, a single supreme force in living organisms was responsible for procreation and growth and even had the ability to replace damaged limbs. This “force of reproduction” as described by Kielmeyer was “the most general force and the one spent on organisms to the greatest degree.”¹⁹ In the 1793 work which established his reputation as a physiologist, titled Ueber die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte unter einander […] (On the Relations of the Organic Forces amongst Each Other), Kielmeyer also expresses his astonishment over the “wealth of shapes” which the force of reproduction acquires under the hands of nature: “Here it comes to light in an immense volume of the body, there in little points which our eye can scarcely still touch and distinguish with light, here it appears eternally uniform, there in the shape of a changeable fairy.”²⁰ Kielmeyer’s description plays with the notion of a reproductive force that hovers at the intersection of the seen and the invisible, the empirically graspable and the fantastic. Drawing upon Herder’s Ideen für die Philosophie der Menschengeschichte (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, 1784–91), Kielmeyer also connects physical procreation to the realm of ideas. He observes an inverse relation between the procreation and the force of sensibility. Whereas less developed organisms tend to have larger numbers of offspring, man, as the most developed species, is distinguished by few offspring but an abundance of “intellectual” progeny: his ideas (Vorstellungen). From the sense of wonder Kielmeyer expresses at the force of reproduction as a protean creature at work throughout the entire organism, it is a small step to the analogical thinking of German Romanticism, which expands the conceptual reach of procreation even further. Just as for Kielmeyer and others the force of reproduction is central to all organic processes of the body, a more generalized understanding of procreation is central to an early Romantic interest in connecting different branches of scientific thought and considering them in relation to the poetic. Just as procreation is the mystery of the day for the scientific community, it also enables the Romantics to test and expand their analogical thinking and study of the arts and sciences.

THE SCIENTIFIC DEBATE

Throughout the eighteenth century, the secret of procreation was embedded within a tangle of scientific observations, religious doctrine, and superstition. Blumenbach, writing in 1791, laments that after centuries of research, the question of human procreation has led to more false paths than any other field of the natural sciences: “even Boerhaave’s teacher, Drellincourt, has alone collected 262 groundless hypotheses on the process of procreation from the writings of his predecessors,—and nothing is more certain than that his own system is the 263^rd.”²¹ The labyrinth of false paths can ultimately be reduced to the “two main roads” of epigenesis and evolution (today more commonly referred to as preformation), described by Blumenbach as follows:

Entweder nemlich man nimmt an, dass der reife, übrigens aber rohe ungeformte Zeugungsstoff der Eltern, wenn er zu seiner Zeit und unter den erforderlichen Umständen an den Ort seiner Bestimmung gelangt, dann zum neuen Geschöpfe allmälig ausgebildet werde. Diess [sic] lehrt die Epigenese.

Oder aber man verwirft alle Zeugung in der Welt, und glaubt dagegen, dass zu allen Menschen und Thieren und Pflanzen, die je gelebt haben und noch leben werden, die Keime gleich bey der ersten Schöpfung erschaffen worden, so dass sich nun eine Generation nach der anderen blos zu entwickeln braucht. Deshalb heisst diess die Lehre der Evolution. (Blumenbach, Bildungstrieb, 13–14)

Namely, one either assumes that the mature, but otherwise rough and unformed procreative matter of the parents, when it arrives at its time and under the right circumstances at the place of its determination, is then gradually formed (ausgebildet) into a new creature. The theory of epigenesis teaches this.

Or one dispenses with all procreation in the world and believes on the contrary that for all humans and animals and pla...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Romanticism
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Poetic Procreation and Goethe’s Theory of Metamorphosis
• 3 Friedrich von Hardenberg and the Discourse of Procreation
• 4 The Poet as Artisan and the Instruments of Procreation
• 5 Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the Writing of Life
• 6 Procreative Thinking—Scientific Projects
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index