Goethe's Morphology: Aesthetic Science, the Urpflanze, and Unity in Diversity

Goethe’s scientific focus and methodology is continuous with his Aesthetic. It starts with an attention to its object with a view to discovering how far an identity, a self-maintenance, can be revealed within the diverse parts of its development. Arber (1950) draws upon Spinoza’s dictum to demonstrate this central feature of Goethe’s morphology: "The effort by which each thing endeavours to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself". Turn this sentence around and we have our methodology: observe the thing in its manifold being as an expression of its "endeavours to persevere in its own being”.

Observe the functions of the various parts of a plant, for example, as contributors to its effort for being; start, that is, with a perception that defines the thing in its clearest form, and then proceed from this analysis towards an imaginative synthesis in which formal and material aspects are united. Such an approach, Cassirer (1950) points out, is based upon a fundamental assumption that there exists, in Goethe’s terms, "an imminent law of nature”, a law derived, not from abstract mathematical principles, as in Newtonian physics, nor from induction, as with Bacon, but from an insight into the complementary relation of the individual particular and the universal form. “The particular always underlies the universal; the universal must forever submit to the particular”. The crucial insight, then, is to understand the particular as a form of a universal: in short, a type exemplifying a law that governs a whole.

But in order to understand fully Goethe’s perspective, we must recognise the dynamic and developmental nature of his thought. Cassirer points out that for Goethe “the type itself is a being that is only perceived in its development, a permanence that exists only as it comes to pass” (1950, p. 148). The type itself varies over time: its permanence includes change and variability.

We can readily acknowledge the validity of this view when it is related to any developmental process in which a continuity is observed alongside qualitative variations between stages. This may then lead us to believe that Goethe had in mind the same empirical process in the development of species that Darwin was to suggest. This conclusion would be in error. Goethe does not view his archetypal plant, the ‘Urpflanze’, as an empirically demonstrated entity that gives rise to the multiplicity of variations found in plants (he thought the leaf was the essential feature present in this diversity). He did not propose any historical investigation to trace the development of this archetype because he thought of it as a symbolic rendering of an ideal. An empirical, historical analysis of the development of a type can only proceed from particular cases through a generalisation which places them in discrete classes or series. But as fruitful as such an endeavour may prove to be, it cannot do justice to an idea of ancestral form that ‘is available only to the mind’.

We reach here the central distinguishing feature of Goethe’s morphology: the significance of the idea within and beyond the sensuous. Surely, there is no room in modern science for such an idea! That Goethe was only too aware of the difficulties attached to the idea of the archetypal plant is evident in his poem, ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’, when he says: "All forms are alike but not identical, and thus they point to a secret law, a sacred mystery. If only I could reveal to you, sweet friend, the crucial word that solves it!” But why then, given that no word or any one image can define this idea, does Goethe, who has acknowledged that a universal can be expressed only in a particular instance, persist with it?

To attempt to answer this question we need to look once more at the way the foundational aspects of his thinking relate to one another. We should first note his insistence that all investigation should begin and return to the actual. The beginning of research should be a concentrated perception of the object in all its dimensions, and he argues that one should never lose sight of these actualities in reflection. He advocates a realist position. But it is an imaginative realism, and it is necessarily so, since imagination, far from being a separate “faculty”, is a natural part of all the ways in which reality is experienced - in perception, cognition, and memory - and in all academic disciplines as soon as the question of the possible arises.

The product of imaginative perception is the type, an exemplary form - classification concepts, we have seen, are a later development of the type - reached through an intuition perceiving a unity in a diversity, the so-called eidetic intuition. Being exemplary in character a type has an openness to other instances that we might term "thematic” rather than classificatory: think of all the activities that come under the label of “games” as aspects of a theme whose underlying type is intuitively recognisable. Goethe’s type or form is not, then, accurately given by the German ‘Gestalt’ which suggests a fulfilled form but as ‘Bildung’ whose meaning is formation, education or self-completion.

Steuer (2002) argues that the idea of an originating essential type can be viewed as a model that "creates the conditions in which the phenomenon can be said to appear" and that therefore it is a working ideal from which analysis and synthesis can begin. It is an analysis of the process in which the potential reaches its actuality. For Goethe it was the leaf which had the potential to form a whole plant; Agnes Arber argued that the different parts of the plant - stem, root, flower and so forth - could be apprehended as a whole in their identification as "partial shoots". We can state either of these as a hypothetical essence to be analysed in terms of its adequacy for explaining the coherence of the parts and this the identity of the plant qua plant. It should be noted, though, that in using the terms "parts", there is no implication that these are separate "building blocks" united through a classification based upon a common denominator.

The unity of an organic whole is implicative: each part has the potentiality for the whole within itself: a comparison with a hologram in which each separated part has the same image as the whole comes to mind, but is somewhat misleading in implying that the part is the finished version represented by the whole; a more accurate but still extreme example is afforded by what biologists call autotonomy, whereby a creature may re-grow a lost bodily part - the lizard that loses its tail, the starfish that divides itself in half, and the sea slug which can decapitate itself to grow a new body complete with a beating heart!

These examples of biological growth may provide evidence for the idea of the whole within the part, but they do not reflect the focus of Goethe’s morphology in which the empirical study of development that is factual and historical is sidelined in favour of an ideational discipline concerned with the identity of something per se: what it ‘is’ to be a plant or a human being, what it means, therefore, "to become what you are". Agnes Arber provides the essential clue to this focus when in the preface to her ‘The Natural Philosophy of Plant Forms’ she states the belief that when morphology is subject to the discipline of philosophy "its content may be unified by the synthesis of various theories that are, from the standpoint of analytic science, irreconcilable".

The philosophical issues she judges significant are indicated by two accounts dealing with these issues, namely, ‘The Manifold and the One’ and ‘The Mind and the Eye’. We can surmise that Goethe himself had the identical preoccupation. Without denying in any way the value of analytic science, unless it degenerated into a mechanical reductionism, he followed the principle that the empiricism inherent in a morphological approach required its placement within a philosophical context which could provide the theoretical context in which empirical data could make sense. This context would address the major questions that underlie empirical work: what we should mean when we talk of “parts” and “wholes”, the “sensuous” and the “form”, or “subjective” and “objective”.

Let’s now return to that puzzle expressed by Goethe in his poem on the metamorphosis of plants - the mysterious, sacred law that cannot be exactly defined. We can suppose now that this law refers to a limit that must be placed upon the exactness of explicit and adequate statements, that something must by the very nature of science be left unsaid. This is not simply to say that the unknown always awaits further study, for that is the very limitation which science thrives upon. The law is imposed upon us by “things being alike but not identical”. Now, as we have seen, this is the principle of metaphor, in which something is and is not like the other. Metaphor is an assertion which contains its own negation.

In this way it can treat adequately the dependence and interdependence of material and form, part and whole, and subjective and objective, all of which contribute to our appreciation of a whole. The metaphor ‘suggests’ a unity which we comprehend through a connection made in our own, lived experience, and which is the proper field of the poetic. It is a commonplace to say that we see ourselves in Nature and we see Nature within ourselves. But it is not a commonplace that we wish to see ourselves whole; it is the most powerful of motives once humanity has made the transition from the pre-symbolic to the symbolic precisely because our final cause, that which can give us completion, can never take the form of a formula.