On the Actuality of Goethe’s Natural Science

1. Let us begin with a brief glance at our own present and the crises intertwined in it. It is plain that we have been destroying nature for a long time. Plants, animals, and ecosystems worldwide are more endangered than ever before. Yet, in times of climate change and species extinction, it is not only the outer environment that sustains our lives that is under threat, it also is nature within ourselves: our capacities to perceive and experience.[i] We know that we cannot continue living the way we currently do. Against this backdrop, the nature of the relevance found in the epistemic attitude of Goethe’s morphology shall be outlined in broad strokes. Already in Goethe’s time, this epistemological stance was an attempt to regain a living relationship to nature. In the following paragraphs, the historicization will segue into analysis of the actuality, supplemented by Goethe’s own words.

2.  At the centre of Goethe’s natural science we find life itself, the »living formations« of a dynamic and mobile nature. Consequently, for researchers who study the processes of formation and transformation this means that they themselves must ensure to remain equally »mobile and malleable« (»beweglich und bildsam«):

»What has been formed is immediately transformed again, and if we want to gain living intuition/understanding (»lebendiges Anschaun«) of nature at least to some degree, we must stay as mobile and malleable as it is, following the example it has given.«

The »living intuition of nature« lies at the heart of morphological practice. On the one hand the morphological method that Goethe develops and practices in the field of natural science refers to a method of seeing and comparing any changing organisms, and, on the other, to a mental synopsis of the successively manifesting appearances (as in the serial metamorphosis of plants).

3. Putting them into a historical perspective, Goethe attributes the practices of morphology to a »drive« that mediates between outer and inner, aligning the outer appearance of shapes with the formative force within:

»In every age, a drive has emerged in scientific persons to recognize living formations as such, to grasp their visible and tangible parts in connection, to treat them as indications of what lies within, and thus to gain mastery of the whole through intellectual perception. How closely this scientific desire is related to the artistic and imitative drive hardly needs elaborate explanation. In the development of art, knowledge, and science, we therefore find various attempts to establish and develop a doctrine which we might call morphology.«

For Goethe, the understanding of a science necessarily includes understanding its history. His perspective on the history of morphology clearly points to its connections with the arts and their theory. Aesthetics, artistic representation, and natural science are linked together.

4. Goethe regards humans as a part of living nature. To be human means to experience nature and to understand oneself within this relation, as a part of nature. We do not merely observe nature; we participate in it. In this way, we read in nature’s ‘book’, and in this way nature can speak to us when we have immersed ourselves in its laws of formation:

»Each plant now proclaims to you the eternal laws,
Each flower speaks louder and louder to you.«

Such it is written in the elegy The Metamorphosis of Plants. These verses make it clear that Goethe’s »discourse on nature« is transformed into a »dialogue with nature«.[ii]

5. In Goethe’s conception of natural science, knowledge of nature and self-knowledge of the human being are inextricably linked:

»It is a pleasant task to explore nature and oneself at the same time, to do violence neither to her nor to one’s own spirit, but to bring both into balance with one another through a gentle reciprocal influence.«

This sentence, which expresses Goethe’s self-understanding as a natural scientist, breaks with the history of domination and violence in human exploitation of nature.

6. Goethe’s approach in order to relate nature and the human being originates in a »counter-movement« against the foundations of modern science.[iii] Since Descartes, the knowing subject has seen itself as a detached observer, facing nature as a separate object. In Descartes counterposing of the ego cogito and the res extensa, a rupture between nature and human consciousness arises. The knowing subject is torn from the fabric of nature. Contrary to the dualism of the two-substance theory that underpins modern science, Goethe sets his own natural science. Against this backdrop, Goethe draws intensively on Spinoza, because he opens up the prospect of thinking of spirit and matter as a unity again and understanding life as the identity of both.[iv] With Spinoza, spirit and matter can appear as related manifestations of the one divine essence (»deus sive natura«).

In this context, one may recall the study scene in Goethe’s Faust. Here it is Mephisto who mockingly points out the ‘de-spiritualizing’ procedures of science:

»Who wants to know a living thing and describe it well,
Seeks first the spirit to expel.
Then holds the parts in his own hands,
Lacks only, alas! the spiritual band.«

7. Historically, Goethe’s morphology develops before the division between the natural sciences and the humanities in the 19th century. From the very beginning, it refers to phenomena of both nature and culture. Methodologically, Goethe’s scientific approach is thoroughly ‘humanistic’: »In the humanities, knowledge of the object is never merely knowledge of the object, but always at the same time self-knowledge of the knowing subject.«[v] Within this epistemological framework, the subject is always related both to the object and to itself. Goethe emphasizes that

»by contemplating an ever-creating nature, we become worthy of participating spiritually in her productions.« (emphasis H.H.; »durch das Anschauen einer immer schaffenden Natur zur geistigen Teilnahme an ihren Produktionen würdig werden«.)

Morphological natural science is spiritual participation in the formative processes of nature, which in turn affect the perceiver, inspiring in him creative production. As the question of the ecological coexistence of humans and nature arises with new radical urgency today, can we learn from Goethe?