Gabrielle Bersier, Wege des Heilens: Goethes physiologische Autobiographie Dichtung und Wahrheit. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2014. 253 pp.

Summary

As its title suggests, Bersier's comprehensive analysis utilizes physiology, as understood during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to examine Goethe's autobiography both textually and contextually. The purpose of this focus on physiology is twofold: it serves as a critique of the sometimes myopic and derivative scholarship on Goethe's autobiographical text and as an exploration of a previously unexamined avenue of interpretation. First, Bersier demonstrates in a brief yet thorough survey of scholarship that until recently an exegetical emphasis had been placed on reading the maturation of Dichtung und Wahrheit's autobiographical protagonist through the lens of Goethe's own botanical writings, leading many scholars to follow Georg Misch, who adapted the concept of entelechy from plant metamorphosis to human formation. Bersier contends that this perspective lacks the necessary textual support and can be effectively challenged by an investigation of Goethe's reception of, and participation in, the physiological debates of his age. Second, Bersier argues that such an investigation into Goethe's activity in the physiological discourse of his time shows that the first twelve books of Dichtung und Wahrheit were conceived as an autobiographical treatise on physiology with the aim of contesting many philosophical theories developed during late Romanticism.

The current volume is divided into three parts, the first of which extensively investigates the development of physiological research during Enlightenment and Romanticism. This examination highlights the predominance of physiology in the natural sciences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in addition to providing insight into the theories and debates that had a formative effect on Goethe's scientific and autobiographical writings. Bersier also shows that Goethe's participation in this discourse did not confine itself to mere intellectual curiosity. Reflecting his interest in physiological theories posited by the likes of the zoologist Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Goethe exercised his administrative influence over the University of Jena by arranging an academic position for the young natural philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. Schelling's early scholarship supported Goethe's own belief that human physiology was based on the balancing and mediation of three influences: irritability, sensitivity, and the reproductive drive. Bersier adeptly connects these historical and discursive threads in order to establish the extent to which Goethe relied on the physiological discourse of the time while fashioning the narrative of his early life.