Admirer
| Date
| Description
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 Germaine Stael
(1766-1817)
French-born Swiss writer | c.1810 | In her publication On Germany, written following her 1803-date exile to Germany by Napoleon, for publishing her controversial novel Delphine (1802), during which time she entered into the Goethe-Schiller circle, she, supposedly, commented on Goethe’s Elective Affinities “one cannot deny that there is in this book a profound understanding of the human heart, but it is a discouraging one. Life is presented as a thing of indifferent value, however one regards it—sad when one gets to the bottom of it, pleasant enough when one evades it, prone to moral ills, which one must cure if one can and of which one must die if one cannot.” [3] |
 Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856)
German poet | c.1810 | Claimed, supposedly that that Goethe was a corrupter of religion; that the novel overturns "everything holy" and is an attack against religion, morality, and the social forms. [2] In his later writings, he commented how beautiful was the explanation about the laws of reproduction by Goethe. |
 Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860)
German philosopher
(IQ=185) | 1816 | Goethe’s sole direct human chemistry protégé; based his will to power theory, and a large amount of his monumental two-volume The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844), on Goethe's human elective affinities theory, whom he talked to personally about (1816-1819), explaining, therein, how chemical phenomena and reactions scale up to the human-human interaction level. |
 George Eliot
(1819-1880)
English realism philosopher / novelist
(IQ=190) | 1854 | In a debate with German literary historian Adolf Stahr (1805-1876), she defended the dénouement of Goethe's Elective Affinities, and in most of her works to follow—most notably her 1872 novel Middlemarch on Elective Affinities—employed Goethe's human chemical theory as the structural backbone of her realism views. |
 Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927)
First female US presidential candidate | 1871 | Believes that a “subtle insinuation of a great revolutionary doctrine pervades the whole.” |
 Max Weber
(1864-1920)
German sociologist | 1878 | At the age of 14, read Elective Affinities in the classroom, "hiding it behind his textbook", and went on to formulate a large amount of sociology theory, through the his reformulation or rather reinterpretation of the standard Goethean elective affinities into what has come to be known as Weberian elective affinities, proposing that there is an “elective affinity” between important ideological, economic, and social interests, conditions, forces, and processes constituting the development of rational capitalism; the 2013 University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, “Architectural Elective Affinities Conference”, is themed on the subject of “architectural elective affinities”, defined as a “complex borrowing of Weberian elective affinities”. [1] |
 Joseph Cook
(dates) | 1879 | In his collected lectures book Scepticism and Rationalism: Elective Affinities and Hereditary, gave a 15-point set of rules as to how Goethe’s elective affinities regulate relationships. [2] |
 Wilhelm Bolsche (1861-1939)
German natural scientist | 1889 | Is of the opinion that the novel is realistic due to its portrayal of natural forces and psychology, but that it should be seen as a predecessor to such realistic works such as George Eliot and Balzac, and is a pioneering work of literary realism. |
 Ernst Haeckel
(1834-1919)
German physician and biologist | 1899 | Believes that “Goethe, in his classical romance, Affinities, compares the relations of pairs of loves with the phenomenon of the same name in the formation of chemical combinations. The irresistible passion that draws Edward to the sympathetic Ottilie, or Paris to Helen, and leaps over all bounds of reason and morality, is the same powerful unconscious attractive force which impels the living spermatozoon to force an entrance into the ovum in the fertilization of the egg of the animal or plant—the same impetuous movement which unities the two atoms of the hydrogen to one atom of the oxygen for the formation of the a molecule of water. This fundamental unity of affinity in the whole of nature was recognized by the great Greek scientist Empedocles in the fifth century BC in his theory of the love and hatred of the elements.” |
 Leopoldo Alas
(1852-1901)
Spanish realism novelist | 1890 | His novel His Only Son, supposedly, is a so-called successor to Elective Affinities. |
 Fielding Garrison
(1870-1935)
American science historian | 1901 | Believes Goethe’s "chemical anthropomorphisms" (see: anthropomorphism), as he calls them, “seem so plausible and fascinating”, and are in some way related to American engineer Willard Gibbs’ 1876 chemical thermodynamics. |
 René Magritte
(1898-1967)
Belgian surrealist artist | 1933 | Painted “Elective Affinities” of very large egg about to hatch in a very confined cage. |
 Witold Gombrowicz
(1904-1969)
Polish lawyer turned dramatic novelist | 1955 | His Pornographia (and 2003 film adaptation) is a remake, described by him as a “descent to the dark limits of the conscience and the body”. |
 Jeremy Adler
(1947-)
English affinity chemistry historian and German-languages scholar | 1969 | Spent 1969 to 1977 doing research into the history, chemistry, and background to the reactions used to construct each chapter of the novella; published many expansions of this work in both English and German, in chapter and article form, into the 1990s. |
 Tom Stoppard
(1937-)
English playwright | 1993 | Did a remake of Elective Affinities in the form of the play Arcadia, albeit with a twist: the story is juxtaposed between the years 1809 (time of publication of original) and the modern day, and the storyline involves heat, the second law, the steam engine, the “attraction that Newton left out”, chaos theory, among other modern day science aspects. |
 Kevin Yee
(1970-)
American Germanic-languages scholar | 1997 | His “The Captain as Catalyst in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften” attempts to argue that Captain acts as a catalyst (or human catalyst) who “propels, accelerates, and alters the reaction without being affected himself.” |
 Karl Fink
(c. 1960-)
American Germanic-languages scholar | 1999 | His 1999 conference presentation turned 2001 book chapter “Goethe’s Intensified Border” builds on the earlier human chemical reaction theory work of Jeremy Adler (1969), to present tentative formulations and gives discussion of nine of the supposed thirty-six Bergman-style chemical reactions that Goethe, supposedly, used as frameworks for each of his 36 chapters. |
 Astrida Tantillo (c.1963-)
American Germanic-languages and Goethean scholar | 2001 | Published Goethe's Elective Affinities and the Critic. |
 Jurgen Mimkes
(1939-)
German metalurgist, thermodynamicist, and physical socio-economist | 2000s | His circa 2000s articles and working manuscript Chemistry of Social Bonds (2010-present) open to quotes and discussions of Goethe and his elective affinities theories. |
 Libb Thims
(1972- ACM) (222- AG)
American electrochemical engineer (IQ=~190) | 2006 | Discovered Goethe and his affinity chemistry based human chemical reaction theory in 2006, via footnote 2.5 of Belgian chemical thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine's 1984 Order Out of Chaos, after previous searching for the first theorizer of this topic and researching the same topic for a period of eleven years, following the supplanting of the question into his mind while sitting in his undergraduate chemical engineering thermodynamics class, but for whatever reason not raising his hand to ask the question openly in class (see: reverse engineering puzzle; love thought experiment; Thims history). |
 Wolfe von Lenkiewicz
(1966-)
British artist | 2011 | Painted an oil on canvas 210 x 160 centimeter artwork entitled “Elective Affinities”, depicting a mixture of the thematics of Lewis Carol’s 1865 fantasy novel Alice and Wonderland and Goethe’s Elective Affinities. |
