REFERENCES TO SCHELLING IN ECKERMANN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE Biographical details and Aspects of Natural Philosophy in Elective Affinities

Abstract

In his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe mentioned four times the problems of the biographical background and compositional principles of Elective Affinities (1809), but these laconic remarks were deliberately left outside the text of the novel, and did not provide any clearly identifiable clues either as to the genesis or the structure of the novel. Each of the four self-reflections can, however, be complemented by a broader context that served as the conceptual framework for Goethe’s scheme of exchange decomposition, namely Schelling’s frame of natural philosophy, which can be identified textually following Eckermann’s elliptical notes. In addition to making of chemistry, not yet recognised as a science by Kant, an element of his tripartite frame of Potencies, the philosopher himself referred to Torbern Bergmann’s concept of exchange decomposition, which was decisive for Goethe. Schelling incorporated the broader concept of Verwandschaft (kinship) into his own system of thought, and the chapter on the Philosophy of Chemistry in his work Ideas for the Philosophy of Nature also dealt in detail with the phenomena of Verbindung (union) and Trennung (separation). The variability of this philosophical approach to the general principles of nature can be seen in the novel, in which Goethe did not use a single scheme of affinities, but used all three contemporary versions of this still malleable chemical principle to shape the structural composition of his work and the relations between characters. One of Goethe’s self-reflections, in which he rejected the principle of the gradual structuring of nature, corresponds to Schelling’s discontinuity principle from The First Exposition of My Philosophy System, and to his concept of cohesion as a counter-concept to kinship. The general lesson of the self-reflections on the novel, which also draws on the biographical aspects of Schelling and Caroline Michaelis, might be that Goethe ‘concealed’ full meanings, evoking reception elements and wider external textual contexts, in the sometimes enigmatic sentences in Eckermann’s book, just as he did in his own works.