Kraft (Force)

The lexeme Kraft (force) is a foundational concept for Goethe that expresses the dynamism essential to his thought. Its tendency to move between operations of particularity and generality, polarity and intensification, differentiation and dedifferentiation, potentiality and actuality, norm and deviation, rationality and irrationality, and cognition and creativity together lend it a characteristic mobility, multiplicity, and diffusion. The discursive tensions and blendings of the concept during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—which extend between the obscure aesthetic construction of force in Karl Philipp Moritz and Johann Gottfried Herder and its scientific construction in Kant and Newton as the condition of possibility of knowledge—also manifest themselves in Goethe’s concept. As a grounding and ungrounding at one and the same time, Kraft thus serves as a material condition for the genesis of knowledge, on the one hand, and a metaphysical index of something absolutely unconditioned (das Unbedingte), on the other. When Goethe conceptualizes force as unconditioned, rather than as a condition of this or that individual being, he configures it in a number of ways. These include force as movement in processes of transformation and becoming, as potential, as a capacity for trans-discursive drift or blending, and as a non-discursive resistance to integration into normative, cognitive, and representational modes of thought. Certain scenes in Goethe's literary works—including most prominently, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; The Elective Affinities), Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years), Pandora (1807/08), and Faust(1808/32)—can be read as thought experiments that offer ontological conceptions of force in order to explore its informing oppositions of movement and metamorphosis, potentiality and actuality, as well as trans-discursivity and non-discursivity.

Os desdobramentos da psicologia experimental em Moritz, Kant e Kierkegaard

Depois de breve contextualização, este texto estuda a herança da psicologia experimental de Christian Wolff em Karl Philipp Moritz, Immanuel Kant e Søren Kierkegaard. Esses três autores transformaram as premissas mais científicas e técnicas da disciplina em formas mais abertas de experimentação romanesca ou teatral.

“Observe, Write!”

This chapter examines how Karl Philipp Moritz invoked the psychological productivity of novelistic storytelling in publishing the “psychological novel” Anton Reiser (1785–1790) as part of his project of empirical psychology or Erfahrungsseelenkunde. This use of fictional narrative for the representation of dispassionate observation, and the choice of engaging a literary genre for the production of psychological knowledge assigned irreducible cognitive qualities to literature. Anton Reiser is not only another case of Moritz's extensive psychological project but also a paradigmatic case for the importance of literary form in the observation and recording of psychic phenomena. The institutional framework of the novel is not just the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, but literary discourse as an epistemological rather than aesthetic enterprise. Ultimately, Anton Reiser is a literary exercise in establishing a perspective from which self-observation becomes possible.

La Götterlehre di Karl Philipp Moritz. Nell’officina del linguaggio mitopoietico degli antichi

The unpublished translation of Götterlehre (1791) by K.Ph. Moritz presents the mythopoietic process of the Ancients by means of the tale of the origins of the numinous and of its ekfrastic structuring into the great mythical representations of the Greek-Roman world. In the background of Moritz’s visit to Italy (1786-1788) and of his fruitful friendship with Goethe, the introductory essay illustrates the theoretical premises of the specific aesthetic itinerary covered by a work of classical mythology conceveid as Dichtung and codified by a very original and universal Sprache der Phantasie, emblematic figural language that refers to the iconic character of the text with the rich repertoire of lithographies based on drawingings by Carstens, inspired by ancient cameos and gems of Lippert’s Dactyliotheca and the Stosch collection.