Although Goethe’s literature had a great influence on the culture of his time, considering himself in German Shakespeare, and is still studied in institutes and faculties, the author was deeply mediocre in some areas.
Like most writers in history, Goethe was not only ignorant in science, but he believed in surrealist supercheries and displayed scientific opinions right and left as if he thought he was smarter than scientists than his time.
For example, he conceived a theory of colors inspired by science, but also in poetry, to challenge the proposal by Isaac Newton. He also argued that marriages work like chemical reactions. As Sam Kean explains in his book The Waning Spoon :
Even Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, contains rancid speculation about alchemy and, what is worse (at least alchemy is cool), it includes a vain Socratic dialogue between “neptunics” and “plutonic” about how rocks are formed. Neptunians like Goethe thought that rocks were formed by the precipitation of minerals in the ocean, the kingdom of the god Neptune; They were wrong.
The Plutonic so-called in honor of the god of the underworld, Pluto, and whose defense is taken over in Faust, in a little subtle hint, Satan himself, argued, correctly, that the volcanoes and the heat of the Earth’s interior form Most rocks. As always, Goethe took sides with the losing side because he was aesthetically pleasing.
