Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a poet, a novelist, a scientist and an essayist on a dizzying range of topics.
In the 19th century, he was widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of modern Europe. In this important and ambitious work, Matthew Bell offers a wide-ranging intellectual biography of Goethe, tracing the evolution of his thought and reassessing its value.
Bell examines the full spectrum of Goethe’s writing, from his most well-known works, including the dramatic poem “Faust” and the novels “Wilhelm Meister” and “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” to lesser-known essays and reviews.
Throughout, Bell draws on Goethe’s letters and diaries, most of which are still only available in German, embedding Goethe’s thought in his lived experience and in the cultural and intellectual life of Europe from the 1750s to the 1830s.
What We Are Reading Today: Goethe: A Life in Ideas by Matthew Bell
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What We Are Reading Today: Goethe: A Life in Ideas by Matthew Bell
What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser
Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths.
“On Pedantry” offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates.
Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors.
He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas.
