Johann Wilhelm Ritter

Originally published in: Herausforderung Biologie: Fragen an die Biologie – Fragen aus der Biologie. Ed. Rüdiger Heinze, Johannes Fehrle, and Kerstin Müller. Münster; Berlin; Vienna; Zurich; London: LIT, 2010. 83–112. Print. --- This is an early study for my 'Habilitation' thesis "Natur / Poesie", in which I wrote about German Romantic scientists as literary writers. This particular article was inspired by an Ethics in Biology class at the University of Freiburg, where I presented on two of 'my' writers,  Johann Wilhelm Ritter and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert - largely forgotten today, but highly regarded at their time. The organizers of this class then invited me to write up my results for a volume of selected contributions to their class - which I gladly did.

Developing galvanic experiments can be understood as a complex phenomeno-technology, in which the instruments reading the material phenomena became the apparatus productive of the phenomena investigated, the phenomena investigated, and a concrete means of conceptualizing that phenomena. Through the galvanic experiments, the frog leg became a technology for both reading and writing material inscriptions, as well as the material being investigated. Ritter’s studies of this developing phenomeno-technology led to the exploration of the relationships between organic, chemical and electrical phenomena. He also engaged in a series of self-experiments in which the frog apparatus was replaced by his own sense organs as instruments for reading galvanic action, extending instrumentality into the experimental subject as well as the object studied. Ritter accompanied his accounts of galvanic experiments with figures, which he called experiments as well as formulae. Like his experiments they are demonstrative in the sense of both displaying and figuring out nature’s laws. Novalis depicted Ritter’s figures an “instrumental language” that was a means of theorizing phenomena as well as experiencing a theory. But Ritter did not claim the script of nature thus articulated unveiled the truth of nature. They are expressive of the figurative form knowledge of nature necessarily takes.

Der Aufsatz erfasst die intensive Beschäftigung Herzog Ernst II. von Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg mit der zeitgenössischen experimentellen Naturforschung. Ausgehend von bisher unerschlossenem Quellenmaterial skizziert er die Traditionslinie naturwissenschaftlicher Bildung am Gothaer Hof im 18. Jahrhundert, die in den Interessen des Herzogs Ernst II. kulminierte, mit seinem Ableben 1804 zugleich aber auch endete. Anschließend zeigt der Beitrag die inneren und äußeren Voraussetzungen für die „Physikalischen Lehrstunden“ von etwa 1778 bis 1785 sowie deren Quellenüberlieferung auf. Hierfür werden insbesondere die Aufzeichnungen des Herzogs zu den Lehrstunden und das Manuskript Vorlesungen über die Naturlehre von Ludwig Christian Lichtenberg herangezogen. Dass Herzog Ernst II. auch nach 1785 die neuesten Entdeckungen auf dem Gebiet der Experimentalphysik, insbesondere der Elektrochemie, durch den Physiker Johann Wilhelm Ritter auf das genaueste verfolgte, führte die Traditionslinien naturwissenschaftlicher Bildung und Wissensakkumulation am Gothaer Hof ins 19. Jahrhundert fort.


This article examines Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and his preoccupation with contemporary experimental natural history. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, it traces the development of scientific education at the Gotha court, which peaked with Ernest’s interest and ended with his death in 1804. In addition, both the preconditions of the (c. 1778–1785) “Physikalische Lehrstunden” (physics classes) and their tradition in sources (the Duke’s records of the classes and Ludwig Christian Lichtenberg’s manuscript Vorlesungen über die Naturlehre) are analyzed. As Ernest II closely followed the latest developments in experimental physics – and especially in electrochemistry as practiced by physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter – until well after 1785, the traditions of scientific education and the accumulation of scientific knowledge at the Gotha court continued into the early 19th century.

After the defeat of Napoleon in June 1815, the redefinition of the “nation state” heightened a dynamic vision of the world that placed process and unity at the center of European thought. So overwhelming was this perspective that the most influential scientists and philosophers of the age developed a fascination with the physical forces—magnetism, electricity, heat, light—that define our world in order to capitalize on nature’s potential for societal development. The desire to harness the power of nature was not an aspiration for the natural sciences alone, but one shared by the arts in the nineteenth century. Romantic opera, an amalgam of all the arts, allied itself with many of the exploratory visions of the age through its desire to electrify audiences with a bevy of new images and sounds in order to create an entirely unknown visual and sonic landscape. Never before in the history of opera were the separate artistic forces of sound, image, and text brought together to present such a unified vision of nature itself. By examining the sound and the representation of the forces of nature in the operas of Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Carl Maria von Weber, Musicologist Mark Pottinger illuminates not only the artistic goals of early nineteenth-century opera, but also the overarching theories of the scientific community and their connection to a romantic vision for society.

The theories of reproduction that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century exhibited a range in experimental thinking about concepts of gender and sexuality. This essay focuses on the work of a writer who proposed an unusual alternative to polarity-based ideas of reproduction. Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) was a physicist and friend to the German Romantics and someone whose writing also shares many interests with German Naturphilosophie. The essay discusses how, inspired by ideas from the alchemical tradition, Ritter challenged conventional thinking about reproduction in two significant ways: by linking it to the idea of rotation, and by using the figure of the androgyne to understand reproductive models in terms of triads, rather than oppositional pairings. A further objective of this essay is to consider which aspects of the alchemical tradition proved the most useful for Ritter’s experimental thinking and to show how he integrated them with reflections on contemporary scientific developments around 1800.

The focus of this essay is on the poetic function of the symbol ⊗ in the fragments of Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the way it is deeply imbedded in processes of construction. I argue that, through connections to materiality, this symbol functions as a nodal point that implicates the reader of Ritter's fragment project within the same operations of constructing both symbols and ideas that inform the text. This approach entails a significant departure from the scholarship of the past decade or two, where Ritter's ⊗ has been understood almost exclusively as a phenomenon of acoustics and self-writing.

Note: 50 free reprints are available, see the link provided below.