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 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Click image for large view
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Born in Frankfurt A.M., August 28, 1749. Poet, dramatist, scientist,
traveler, state minister, etc., author of Faust, Wilhelm Meister,
and many other works. Died in Weimar, March 22, 1832. In August
1781 the Grand Duchess Amalia of Saxe-Weimar founded the Tiefurter
Journal, the Journal of Tiefurt, to which Goethe contributed at her
invitation. When Rudolf Steiner was active as editor of the natural
scientific writings of Goethe at the Goethe-Schiller Archives in
Weimar, he published proof that the Fragment uber die Natur, The
Fragment concerning Nature, which had appeared in the Journal of
Tiefurt was definitely to be attributed to Goethe (Schriften der
Goethe-Gesellschaft, Publications of the Goethe Society, ed. by
Bernhard Suphan, Weimar, Vol. VII, 1892, article by Rudolf Steiner).
Thus, just 110 years after the Fragment had appeared, Rudolf Steiner
showed its importance and its relationship to Goethe's work. In the
edition of Goethe's works published by Prof. Joseph Kürschner
(1853–1902) (the volumes of Goethe's natural scientific writings
edited by Rudolf Steiner), the Fragment appears at the beginning of
the essays “On Natural Science in General,” Vol. XXXIV,
p. 1. The Fragment appeared in an English translation with notes by
George Adams under the title, Nature — An Essay in Aphorisms,
Anthroposophical Quarterly, London, Vol. VII, No. 1, Easter, 1932, pp.
2–5. In his
Goethe's Conception of the World,
Rudolf Steiner describes this Fragment as “the essay in which
the seeds of the later Goethean world-conception are already to be
found. What is here expressed as dim feeling, later developed into
clear, definite thought.” In similar vein, George Witkowski in
his well-known biography of Goethe (Leipzig, 1899) describes this
Fragment as “the seed from which came all of Goethe's great
thoughts about nature.”
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