ABSTRACT
Ethics committees are supposed to obtain legitimization, whole institutes to produce ethical knowledge, and new professorships to disseminate this knowledge. At the same time, there is a great deal of embarrassment when it comes to describe just what an ethics of nature should look like. Laypersons and their democratic representatives have an entirely genuine interest in the regulation of science, which, however, relates in the end not to the content of knowledge, but rather only to its application. The concept of acknowledgment is evidently a conception of knowledge in which the relationship to ethics is already implicit. With the connection between knowledge and acknowledgment Johann Gottlieb Herder, as a linguist, refers back to an antiquated usage of knowledge as found, for example, in the biblical, that is. The key concept that unites knowledge of nature and ethics for Goethe is the concept of education.
