What Is World?

WHAT DO WE MEAN when we say the word “world”? Or more precisely, when we say the word Welt? Welt, or “world,” is a key concept in modernity, and the way we think about it is inseparable from the way we think about what it means to be human and to relate to other humans, to the imagined environment, and to the physical environment. Modernity’s struggle with the network of relationships humanity has established is encompassed in the question, what is world? Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014) gives Welt a full seven and a half pages, noting how it separates “the cosmological concept of the world, of which I am but a tiny part,” from the “phenomenological conception—that within which the human being deploys his being, according to a triple determination: cosmological, anthropological and ontological.” This dividing function is a concise description of the ground Johann Wolfgang Goethe covers in his poetic and scientific works. To understand what the work of this concept has been in modernity, it is worth investigating what the term meant for Goethe, not as a unified concept that was carried through into subsequent discussions of what Welt might mean, but as a series of explorations in various discourses whose aim was a unified experience of life. The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the dimensions of Welt as Goethe explored it, and the analysis is framed by the assumption that the tensions he attached to the concept are defining tensions of modernity with which we continue to live. It is possible to read almost any text of Goethe's in this way—and to do so profitably. This chapter confines itself to Faust, the writings on Weltliteratur (world literature), and the methodological considerations in Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors, 1810).

In keeping with the theme of this volume, the understanding of German as a language and a culture in the world points to a multilayered mapping of linguistic and cultural processes onto territory. The practical dimension involved here was of interest to Goethe, and he noted it in such everyday experiences as the informal dissemination of information, navigating the built world, assimilating global news, tending libraries, cultivating friendships, and so on.