ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Rousseau, Goethe, and Henry David Thoreau are frequently included among the seminal figures in the emergence of modern autobiography as a literary genre and, more generally, in the development of Western intellectual and literary thought. The absolute division or difference between art and science that Walter Benjamin insists on in his analysis is precisely the opposition Goethe seeks to undermine. Both Goethe and Thoreau wish to restore a common ground between poetry and science through perception and an informed imagination. For Goethe this new mode of perception develops into the theory of metamorphosis. Thoreau dramatically expands Goethe’s notion of metamorphosis to encompass all forms of life, human and non-human. Thoreau’s writing can be viewed as an extension of Rousseau’s historical approach to nature and the self.
