* This is a mini-Problematica (actually, an addendum). It concerns my recent essay on Goethe’s geology, which was perhaps cleverer than it needed to be…

Last month I wrote an essay on a surprising line from a Goethe poem. Here is the poem, with the relevant line italicized:

Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Kontinent, das alte,
Hast keine verfallene Schloesser
Und keine Basalte.
Dich stoert nicht im Innern
Zu lebendiger Zeit
Unnuetzes Erinnern
Und vergeblicher Streit.
[America you have it better
Than our continent, so old
You have no ruins of decaying castles
And no basalts to behold.
You never seem to be disturbed
Away from present life’s events
By memories that have no purpose
And useless, fruitless arguments.]

If you want to see what I said about it, you should consult the original essay. Basically, my line was that Goethe was using the absence of basalt as a metaphor for the absence, in America, of fruitless disputes like the long-running debate about the origin of basalt. (The debate concerned the question of whether basalt was a product of volcanism or a precipitate from a universal ocean.) I even tried to connect the conjunction of images in the poem— the crumbling castle and the basalt— to a particular place in Saxony: the town of Stolpen, with its famous castle perched atop a basaltic hill.

I wrote the essay and I was happy with it. But it also occurred to me that I could, ya know, email some people who know about Goethe’s geology to see if the interpretation checks out. Turns out I might have been overthinking things.

Jennifer Caisley kindly responded to my message and pointed me to this short note, titled “Goethe on America,” by Paul Carus (1909). Carus reveals two useful things. First, the poem “appears in Goethe’s handwriting as the enclosure of a letter of July 21, 1827, addressed to his musical friend, the composer [Carl Friedrich] Zelter.” This explains why I had such trouble figuring out where the damn thing came from. More importantly, there’s this:

An excerpt from Carus (1909). The diarist prince is Carl Bernhard, son of Goethe’s friend and patron, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach Carl August

I had been looking for some indication that, in Goethe’s view, America literally lacked basalts. Since I couldn’t find any— and since, on his geotheory, such an absence would be highly unusual— I assumed that none existed. But apparently I was wrong. Goethe may have rashly generalized from Karl Bernhard’s statement that no basalts had yet been found in the mountains of America to the claim that America had keine Basalte. Or perhaps this was just literary license. I’m not sure because, even for Goethe, the claim that America lacks basalt is pretty unusual. Basalt is a common rock type, and on Goethe’s geotheory it should have been abundantly developed in North America. (Actually, on any geotheory it should have been abundantly developed in North America, regardless of whether it had yet been found in the eastern mountains. North America is absolutely enormous!)

But hold on, because the literature on Goethe’s geotheory may need an update as well. In my essay I went along with the prevailing view that Goethe was an unreconstructed neptunist: someone who regarded rocks like granite and basalt as the residues of a universal ocean. But Jennifer Caisley also pointed me to this sentence, apparently written by Goethe in 1822:

Weltteil glücklich zu preisen, dass er vulkanische Wirkungen entbehrt, wodurch denn die Geologie der neuen Welt einen weit festern Charakter zeigt als der alten, wo nichts mehr auf festem Fuß zu stehen scheint.

In translation, Goethe is claiming that America is lucky because “volcanic effects are absent” (vulkanische Wirkungen entbehrt). So, geologically-speaking America is stable, unlike Europe, “where nothing seems to rest on a solid footing anymore” (wo nichts mehr auf festem Fuß zu stehen scheint). Perhaps this is a reference to the death of Napoleon in 1821, or to the repercussions of his earlier military defeat at Waterloo (1815).* Anyway, it strongly suggests that Goethe had second thoughts about the origin of basalt, and came to regard it (like most of his contemporaries) as the result of volcanic discharge.** It would be weird if Goethe thought that America lacked volcanos and basalt, but did not think basalt had a volcanic origin.

[* Here is Goethe on Napoleon: “His life was a stride of the demigod. He was in a state of continual enlightenment. His destiny was more brilliant than any the world had seen before him or would see after him. The story of Napoleon produces on me an impression like that of the Revelations of St. John the Divine. We all feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know what.”]

[** That he might have abandoned his earlier view by 1822 is entirely plausible. According to Karl Fink, Goethe formulated the “volcanic ocean” model around 1788–90.]

A map of the distribution of volcanoes, showing a conspicuous pattern of concentration along active continental margins. Of course, Goethe didn’t know what an active continental margin was. But perhaps I should have realized that the concentration of volcanoes in the western part of North America was something that might have led Goethe to think that America had no basalt. (Recall that Goethe was writing only a couple decades after the Lewis and Clark expedition, when the American west was not well known to easterners, to say nothing of Europeans)

What this means is that the received narrative about Goethe’s geology needs to be revised. Goethe really did come around to the near-consensus view on basalt, despite lingering affinities for Wernerian geotheory. I was wrong to call Goethe “a geological anachronism” who “clung to the idea that basaltic rocks crystallized out of a primordial ocean supercharged with minerals.” In some ways, Goethe was a geological anachronism. But on the basalt question he was a member of the mainstream, at least by the 1820s. This is how it seems to me, anyway, based on the evidence I’ve seen.

There’s more work to be done here but it’s work for somebody else. My sincere thanks go out to Jennifer Caisley for responding to my email. (Read her work if you can get your hands on it— it’s great.) Of course, I’m a little disappointed that the answer to my question, why did Goethe say that America had no basalt? is probably Goethe thought America had no basalt! But so it goes. Anyway, let’s have more studies of Goethe’s geology.

References

Baldridge, W. S. 1984. The geological writings of Goethe. American Scientist 72:163–167.

Carus, P. 1909. Goethe on America. Open Court 33:503–504.

Fink, K.J. 1991. Tropes of transition in Goethe’s history of science. https://pages.stolaf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/301/2015/02/1991-“Tropes-of-Transition-in-Goethes-History-of-Science”.pdf