Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
own creations. As compared to their extremely powerful skills, chemists'
capacities to understand, foresee, and evaluate the effects of their own
doings are very poor because they lack the deeper understanding of a
more comprehensive philosophy of nature. Since the relationship be-
tween the famulus/chemist Wagner and the master/alchemist Faust is ex-
actly mirrored in Goethe's earlier ballad
Der Zauberlehrling
(1797,
The
Sorcerer's Apprentice
), we have good reasons to interpret that ballad
along the same line. Here again, the apprentice/chemist, while the mas-
ter/alchemist is temporarily out of town, tries to employ the master's
skills for his own purposes, although without real understanding. After
initial success, the apprentice loses control over his work. This time, the
apprentice is less lucky than Wagner because his work quickly grows
dangerous. The catastrophe is prevented only by his master's return at
the very last moment.
If these famous passages reflect the relationship between romantic al-
chemy or a holistic natural philosophy, on the one hand, and modern ex-
perimental chemistry, on the other, as I suggest, then we have little rea-
son to read Goethe in the ahistorical or even prophetic way that is
widespread nowadays. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there
was not yet the kind of powerful industrial technology, let alone genetic
engineering, that we have today. Instead, there was a debate about the
scope of natural philosophy and its fragmentation into the modern scien-
tific disciplines. In this drama, chemistry was the main character, be-
cause it emerged as the first experimental discipline, leaving natural phi-
losophy and the metaphysical tradition behind. Unlike later writers,
Goethe saw nothing wrong with chemistry as such, since it owed every-
thing, including its powerful skills, to its ancestors, as the master-
apprentice or master-famulus relation suggests. Problems arose only if
this newborn child pretended to be independent, if it applied its mother's
skills for its own purposes without her wisdom.
Goethe is but one example, and not even the earliest, among many
authors who, by literary means, expressed their critical view on chemis-
try's growing independence from natural philosophy. A widely used
scheme was first to convert the miserable seeker of the Middle Ages into
a successful seeker and then to point out that the alleged success is actu-
ally a failure or at least worthless. By so doing, writers criticized the nar-
