Since Goethe lived to be eighty-two, his life provides an almost unmanageable amount of material for the biographer. Matthew Bell cuts a path through this forest by offering an intellectual biography. The events of Goethe’s life are recounted concisely as a framework within which to explore his contacts with philosophy (principally that of Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant and Schelling), his study of the natural world and his reflections on politics and power. The many strengths of Bell’s book also include incisive studies of Goethe’s literary works, from the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which took Europe by storm, to Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy (1832), which mystified contemporaries but which we have gradually learned to read and appreciate.

Goethe’s philosophical coordinates came initially from Rousseau and Spinoza, two thinkers who appealed to and fortified his own disposition. Rousseau’s concept of amour de soi, the urge for self–preservation, appears in Goethe as the need for individual authenticity. The opposing force, Rousseau’s amour propre, becomes the dead weight of social conventions suppressing whatever is distinctive, original and creative. Hence Goethe’s protagonists are powerful, charismatic personalities who experience society as a ‘prison’, the metaphor used by Werther and Faust. For some, such as Werther, the only way out is death. Others, such as Faust, preserve their essential character, but the struggle to do so leaves victims in its wake. Werther himself, unable to conquer his love for the married Lotte, leaves her and her husband devastated by his suicide. Faust’s egotism inflicts tragedy on his lover Gretchen. Goethe is honest about the cost to others of preserving one’s own authenticity.

Disliking the arid Lutheranism of his upbringing, Goethe found a more congenial religious outlook in the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who was often unjustly reviled as an atheist. Spinoza offered him a God who was identical with the world. There was no need to fantasise a Heaven: you had immediate access to what Goethe in a late poem called ‘God-Nature’. Nor was there any need to be sentimental, in the manner of the late Enlightenment, about the harmony of the natural world. For Spinoza, love of God and nature was not transactional. You should love God without expecting God to love you back. For Goethe, similarly, ‘nature is unfeeling’. Nature needed to be loved for its own sake, and that meant studying nature in minute detail and understanding it as a system that worked entirely by its own laws.

Nature proved endlessly fascinating. Goethe’s interest in natural science began around 1780, when he assumed responsibility for mining and forestry in the duchy of Weimar and was thus drawn to learn about mineralogy, geology and botany. He went on to study the development of plants and animals, as well as meteorology and optics. The latter gave rise to his Theory of Colours (1810), the longest book he ever published, an attempt to disprove Newton’s theory of the spectrum and to show instead that colours were produced by the polarity of light and darkness. Bell, who gives a careful critical summary of the Theory of Colours, shares the common (though not universal) view that Goethe’s campaign against Newton, in which he had a heavy emotional investment, was ‘wrong-headed’.

Goethe wanted, however, to see his many empirical observations as illustrating general principles. He doggedly went through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but did not like Kant’s argument that our knowledge of nature is constituted by our mental apparatus. Goethe preferred a strict realism, in which nature’s qualities exist independently of the observer. He worked with the post-Kantian philosopher Schelling to find nature’s underlying principles. Bell explains this search with great lucidity. However, it led Goethe to what has been called a ‘metaphysics of science’ which is not itself scientifically verifiable.

Goethe’s scientific researches were hampered by his distaste for abstraction. He could not accept Newton’s claim that colours were not real experiences but illusions produced by rays passing through the spectrum. To him, the eye was an active participant in the production of colours: ‘If the eye were not sun-like/It could never see the sun’, begins a late poem. He maintained the doctrine, going back to the early Greek philosopher Protagoras, of homo mensura, man as the measure of all things. Hence he had doubts about artificial aids to vision, such as microscopes, telescopes and even spectacles.

Nevertheless, some of Goethe’s scientific work proved valuable for posterity. His studies of plant development inspired the botanical researches Alexander von Humboldt carried out in South America, and were partially translated as late as 1946 by the Cambridge botanist Agnes Arber. And he even, as Bell argues, came close to anticipating Darwin, who cites him in The Origin of Species. Like Darwin, Goethe maintained that a species evolves in response to environmental pressures. Fish and seals independently develop fins or flappers through living in water. Again like Darwin, Goethe thought that these evolutionary processes had no final causes. They were just responses to the animals’ situation, or, in later parlance, to their ecological niche. There was no need to imagine a divine plan, or even a secular teleology, in any part of nature, including human life.

The homo mensura principle also enters into Goethe’s reflections on art. He valued ancient Greek and Italian Renaissance art because of their focus on the human form. As he put it, ‘the human form, and specifically in its dignity and fullness of health, [remains] the main goal of all visual art.’ This humanism led him to disparage Indian art for so often depicting animals, a rare negative note in Goethe’s otherwise enthusiastic response to Asiatic cultures: Bell mentions the fascination with which in 1814 he witnessed Bashkir Cossacks (Muslim soldiers in Russian service, who had helped to defeat Napoleon) praying with their mullah in a Weimar school hall. 

Bell is clear-eyed in his assessment of Goethe’s political views. As he spent over fifty years in the small duchy of Weimar, often as an administrator, some contemporaries charged him with servility and unthinking conservatism. Even though the elderly Goethe professed to be a staunch liberal, Bell notes sceptically that he never voiced any thoughts about constitutional and representative government, or about human rights. He produces ample evidence that Goethe instinctively preferred paternalist, even authoritarian government. 

Goethe repeatedly insisted that power was based on military strength. He inordinately admired Napoleon, who held an hour’s conversation with him in 1808 and awarded him the Légion d’honneur. Napoleon appears masked as the conqueror Timur in the Divan, including in the poem that begins: ‘Supreme power, you can sense it, cannot be banned from the world; I like to converse with the clever and with despots’. Goethe thought aristocracy the best form of government, democracy the worst, apart from anarchy. These illiberal views have recently occasioned much head-shaking and hand-wringing, which Bell discreetly passes over.

Goethe does, however, display socially liberal views, unusual in his time, concerning homosexuality. In his biographical essay on the art historian Winckelmann, he accepts the latter’s homosexuality as a quality that made him exceptionally able to appreciate the art and culture of the Greeks. To illustrate the emotionally rich same-sex relationships that existed among the Greeks, Goethe also mentions the inseparable friendship between the nymphs Chloris and Thyia – as Bell notes, a rare acknowledgement of female homosexuality.

This deeply learned, crisply written biography is equally remote from hagiography and iconoclasm. My only cavil concerns the book’s design. If its ten long, sometimes very long chapters had been divided into subchapters, it would have been much easier to navigate. Nevertheless, it will henceforth be among the indispensable studies of Goethe.