Goethe Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), German writer often considered the leading cultural figure of his age. He wrote lyric poetry, dramas, and fictional, essayistic, and aphoristic prose as well as works in various natural sciences, including anatomy, botany, and optics. A lawyer by training, for most of his life Goethe was a government official at the provincial court of Saxony-Weimar. In his numerous contributions to world literature, such as the novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship (1795/96), Elective Affinities (1809), and Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage (1821/29), and the two-part tragedy Faust (1808/32), Goethe represented the tensions between individual and society as well as between culture and nature, with increased recognition of their tragic opposition and the need to cultivate a resigned self-discipline in artistic and social matters. In his poetic and scientific treatment of nature he was influenced by Spinoza’s pantheist identification of nature and God and maintained that everything in nature is animate and expressive of divine presence. In his theory and practice of science he opposed the quantitative and experimental method and insisted on a description of the phenomena that was to include the intuitive grasp of the archetypal forms or shapes underlying all development in nature. See also PANTHEISM , SPINOZ. G.Z.