Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Books

Dealing with Faust as subject for painting without straying into a pictorial exegesis of its literary source, Nabil Kanso's paintings flow freely in expressing the characters vibrant intimacy, and their physical and spiritual torment.

Grappling with the intricate entanglement of human relations, the paintings carry their own vocabulary in tackling the sensuality and eroticism imbedded in various scenes of the human drama.

The vast range of works expressing the great intensity brought in the struggle between good and evil coalesce into a vigorous series in which each image relate its world and field of luminosity. The abundance of intermingling images appealing for both the eye and the mind offers a joy to the spirit and an exhilarating experience to the senses.

This short description and analysis of the life and work of Goethe centers on his personal development as expressed in his relationship with ' nature'. As Reed understands it Goethe's direct experience of nature was immediately transformed into poetry. Goethe sought and found in Nature inherent and organic development, the very process which shaped the world and his own inner life into wholeness. Reed traces Goethe's literary career from the sensational success of Werther through the period of Wilhelm Meister, then the period of plays, the ten years of virtual silence in Weimar, then the Italian journey and renewal toward the final development of Faust. He shows how Goethe despite uneasy times, and difficult moods lived truly the life of the happy genius, achieving a kind of harmony and wholeness which is rare among great creators.
This is an excellent work though there is a feeling of special pleading in the championing of works of art which however much they resound with readers of German do not seem to have attracted a real readership in the world today.

This is a book of essays contributed by numerous historans, philosophers of science and scientific researchers specially focusing on Goethe's scientific work as well the philosophy of nature inherent in his approach to studying natural phenomena.

The book is separated into three parts: I. Goethe in the history of science, II. Goethe in Scientific methodology and Ontology and III. The contemporary use of Goethe's approach.

Each section has contributions which are deep analytical studies in their area, recapitulations of Goethe's stance and in some instances a remarkably insightful and philosophically/spiritually deep comprehension of the scale of Goethe's aim in science which explains the degree to which he himself considered his scientific work as more important than his artistic achievements.
As an example consider (not all):

Jeffrey Barnouw: a study on Helmholtz's comments on Goethe's work.

Douglas E. Miller: Goethe's colour science and its translation from the German into English.

Carl Friederich von Weizsaecker: a very deep study of Goethe's concept of metamorphosis.

Dennis L. Sepper: Sepper's superb, in depth, study of both Newton's Optics and The Farbenlehre which led to the book published by CUP.

Arthur G. Zajonc: The comprehension required in order to know what Goethe meant when saying that "the phenomenon is already the theory".

Ronald H. Brady: The understanding of both form and cause in Goethe's phenomenology.

Frederick Amrine: A study of the contemporary work of Jochen Bockemuehl in plant metamorphosis.

and finally a postscript summarising the individual contributions and their overall standing regarding the current view of Goethe's scientific contribution.

This is a must book for anyone wanting to not only get some understanding of Goethe's contribution to science, the philosophy of science but of the spirit of science as well. Ever since reading the superb book "The Wholeness of Nature" by Henri Bortoft I have attempted to purchase a copy of this text which unfortunately has been much too expensive. Luckily I obtained one second hand. It has been worth it. Along with the aforementioned book by Bortoft, Portmann's work on "Animal Forms and Patterns" and Jack Turner's "Abstract Wild" it becomes a member of essential items in my library.

As a student, Steiner's scientific ability was acknowledged when he was asked to edit Goethe's writings on nature. In Goethe he recognized one who had been able to perceive the spiritual in nature, even though he had not carried this as far as a direct perception of the spirit. Steiner was able to bring a new understanding to Goethe's scientific work through this insight into his perception of nature. Since no existing philosophical theory could take this kind of vision into account, and since Goethe had never stated explicitly what his philosophy of life was, Steiner filled this need in his writings. These are valuable contributions to the philosophy of science!

Gary Scharnhorst read and digested virtually every commentary on Henry Thoreau in English from the earliest reviews to the critical studies up to the time of this book's publication. The book is a gift to Thoreau's fans and scholars. Scharnhorst doesn't play favorites with any critical approach. He offers a balanced view of everything he considers, noting trends and doing brief content summaries to save readers many hours of work. Anyone researching Thoreau at the graduate or professional level should see this book.

The figure and transcendence of Faust in the Western Civilization has only been surmounted perhaps by Grail 's Legend. Under this interesting perspective the author establishes important evidences. The search of the eternal youth combined with wisdom of the golden years was always a dream. The personal drama of Faust must be judged and perceived as the final result of a host of important feats in a set of disciplines, that challenged and proclaimed the premise about the man as the sublime measure of all things. As smartly the author establishes: "We can proceed to find out what the poem means, without first having to worry about what it means to us." Following this reasoning line, it you scrutinize the full significance only under the reason lights - in search of an untold relief - and just state it is a febrile product of a fevered imagination, you definitively would isolate conscious or unconsciously from the powerful mythic that would seem to underlay beneath it.

The search of the immortality in a controlled world featured for pacts and agreements could lessen the value and work out as a mental trammel to realize in its wholeness the essential core of this superb work. We should keep in mind Goethe wrote the most apology to Prometheus ever written. So, if you link the fact the tragedy in its whole transcendence was seriously diminished and almost reduced to ashes for two very different currents: the religion and the reason. The first of these pacifies the terrible consequences derived from the breakthrough of the rules and its deep cosmic impact and submits the cosmic designs to a divine will, annuls totally the cathartic experience and pares the redemption significance. The second one, the reason, always find out a hidden reason or would reduce the fatalism to a statistical circumstance. If Oedipus was victim of a fatal celestial nasty trick, Faust was victim of the memory or to look behind, searching the ashes of the past to live in this warmth matrix.

Goethe was a true free man, knows about these limitations, but never gives up and creates this towering work.

Jantz makes a conscientious analysis to put us in context about the manifold implications and influences of this personage in a convulsed historic moment.

Go for this substantial, ambitious and absorbing essay that undeniably will contribute to expand and understand still more the enormous significance of this literary legacy.

This remarkable book is composed of six lectures which Santayana read at Columbia University in 1910--lectures based on a regular course he taught at Harvard College. It is extraordinary that there should ever have been university lectures of such outstanding quality. It is doubtful that we have anything to approach it today. As merely a book, "Three Philosophical Poets" is a masterpiece of style and interpretation. The three philosophical poets of the title are Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, each of whom represents the three main sources of the major speculative systems of Western philosophy. Lucretius, the materialist, is the poet of naturalism; Dante, the Christian and Platonist, is the poet of supernaturalism; and Goethe, the romanticist, is the poet of experience and idealism.

What gives this book its special excellence is Santayana's ability to describe each of the traditions with sympathetic understanding. Although a materialist himself, Santayana does not use the book do advance any specific philosophical agenda. He does not try to score points against the speculative traditions he dislikes (e.g. romanticism, idealism), nor does he make any effort to trump the materialism that he favored or the Catholicism he admired. Instead, he seeks to uncover the special motivations and passions that lead to each tradition, showing how even the most dubious philosophical ideas have a sort of plausibility when one understands how intensely human they are. For example, the supernaturalism of Dante is ultimately an expression of the idea that things are to be understood by their uses or purposes. This, in the final analysis, is what unites Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with the Christian tradition. The Greek naturalists, on the other hand, had a totally different view. "Nothing arises in the body in order that we may use it," insisted Lucretius, "but what arises brings forth its use." Here we have a discarding of final causes typical not merely of naturalism, but of modern science as well.

There is no better introduction to materialism-naturalism, platonism-Christianity, and romanticism-idealism. Santayana clears up scores of misconceptions which have developed regarding these traditions and shows that no philosophical vision can be entirely just to the totality of human life if it does not take into consideration at least some of the insights peculiar to each of these traditions. It does not speak well for our culture that this beautifully written work should have been allowed to fall out of print.

This text presents the rarely complete cycles of poetry known as the Roman Elegies and the Venetian Epigrams in translation. It outlines the structures and the influences, and is not to be missed by any admirer of Goethe.

It is not only recommended, but it is incumbent on anyone who wishes to read this book to read "The Sorrows Of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first. Otherwise, this book will make no sense whatsoever.

Mann writes a hilarious tale of "what if?" the real life Charlotte Kestner & Goethe met up in Weimer 50 or so years after the publication of Werther. The result is a true masterpiece of writing. We get to meet Charlotte, as well as Arthur Schopenhaur's rather ditzy (at least in this novel, anyway) sister, Adele along with the almighty Goethe himself. The book centers around an interesting question: which is more real? The true life Charlotte? Or the fictional one of Werther? This is an intriguing question, as Mann furnishes the "real" Kestner (which is also a fictional one) with a "real" personality; something which was rather lacking in Goethe's story.

The book has everything one would want for fans of both Goethe and Mann. It articulates the "pressures" put on people who exist in reality who provide the inspiration for fictional characters in novels. Who, in fact, has it worse? The innocent individual who is inserted into fictional stories? Or the artist who feeds personal experiences into the machinery of his genius with the efficacy of producing great art? Who makes the greater sacrifice in the name of creativity?

This is a truly wonderful book. Although most of Mann's books have a distinctive humor to them, this one is much more lighthearted than any of his others. There is even a wonderful chapter in which we first meet Goethe....a stream-of-consciousness which asks the $60,000 question: what HAPPENS inside a mind as massive as Goethe's? It kind of reminded me of Hermann Broch's "The Death Of Virgil" which asked a similar question regarding the mental acumen of Virgil in a stream-of-consciousness way. In either case, who could ask for anything more?

Modern Epic is a formidable epic in and of itself. There is something almost evil about the way Professor Moretti reconstructs the occult roads of the literary and political chaos we call Modernism. Moretti begins by doubting the coherence of the term Modernism - the irreconcilability of texts as different as Ulysses and Metamorphosis. He then suggests that one of the major achievements (and quests) of writers from Goethe to the present is to create world-texts, scriptures, anachronistic verbal beasts that are essentially forms of epic literature. As primary epics have foundational relationships to various cultures one can see Moretti's point when he asserts that writers like Goethe, Wagner, Pound, Joyce, and the neglected master Imre Madach have agendas that are almost luciferian. For my part I cannot go with Moretti who prefers culture over wisdom but I am seduced by what I see as a program he describes in his book - the quest for a universal mythology - the epic story of humanity written from the periphery. Moretti discovers the epic nature of "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" which was written from the global periphery as most epics are. And epics such as "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" show the literary spirit at its most clear and visionary - as distinct from national novels of manners.

World literature is the cultural dominance. Vacations into national literatures or subcultural literatures have their charm but world literature and its movement through the modern epic is where the cultural spirit is at its most intense and relevant.