Poesie und Metamorphose. Wellenlinie und Spiraltendenz in Goethes morphologischen Schriften und in Faust

In his scientific studies Goethe never failed to emphasize the affinity between the forms of arts and the forms of nature, expressed in the principle of ‘metamorphosis’. The idea of metamorphosis, already applied to Botany in the second half of the 18th century by Wolff and Linnaeus, however, is according to Goethe ‘dangerous’, because it is animated by a ‘centrifugal’ energy that would lead to the absence of form, if there were not a ‘centripetal’ energy, contrary to it, which he defines as “the impulse of specification”, the “tenacious faculty of persistence”. These two energies, characterized by a spiral movement, proceed simultaneously, allowing forms to change, while maintaining their uniqueness, their ‘continuous life’, a Nachleben in change. To the term Gestalt (‘form’) Goethe prefers that of Bildung (‘formation’), which indicates both what is already produced and what is being produced, and which thus reflects the idea of a continuous undulating motion that governs nature and that he also finds in art, for example in what he calls the “petrified” wave of the Laocoon sculpture group. The following contribution intends to analyze the way in which this vital principle is applied in Goethe’s literary work, especially in the Second Part of the Faust tragedy.