Goethe at MIT
A review of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, with an introduction and photography by Gordon L. Miller
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009)
Stephen L. Talbott
From Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press — that bastion of technical and engineering expertise — there now comes a surprising and remarkable production. On the highest quality paper, with a hardcover binding worthy of the diaries of Picasso, a graceful, informative introduction and appendix by Gordon L. Miller, and, above all, with numerous spectacularly beautiful photographs (also by Miller), MIT has presented us with a true gift: a luxuriously blooming edition of Goethe’s 1790 work, The Metamorphosis of Plants. The book is a wonderful validation of the scientific worth of Goethe’s pioneering researches on morphology — researches that, according to historian Robert J. Richards (quoted in the introduction), “seeded a revolution in thought that would transform biological science during the nineteenth century.”
Just as we can recognize a certain unity among the diverse forms of apple tree, so, too, we recognize a much broader unity embracing the entire plant kingdom and distinguishing it from animals. Goethe, by studying intensely many different plants in a variety of contexts, came to an inner realization of that unity, which he called the archetypal plant, or Urpflanze. He understood that this could not be any physical plant. But at the same time, if we recognize a unity among plants, this unity must in one way or another be characterizable, and the characterization would point to essential features of the ideal plant. Goethe attempted to sketch some of these features in his Metamorphosis of Plants. In Miller’s words, Goethe “coupled rigorous empiricism with precise imagination to see particular natural phenomena as concrete symbols of the universal principles, organizing ideas, or inner laws of nature.” In the plant, these laws manifest as patterns of metamorphosis.
References to “ideal plant” and “inner laws” might seem foreign to the spirit of modern biology. However, even at the level of molecular biology the scientist is continually referring to “regulation,” “coordination,” “information,” and “communication” — all pointing to an inner coherence and to guiding principles that shape the organism as a developing form.
Goethe tried to be as fully conscious as possible of his own cognitive processes. He concerned himself a great deal with the potentials and pitfalls of scientific practice. In the book’s appendix, Miller sketches Goethe’s own sense of method, which the German artist and scientist once described this way:
If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole. At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, but nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. I can do so by dissolving the particular without destroying the impression itself.
(For a brief discussion of how this works in practice, see “Can We Learn to Think Like a Plant?” at https://bwo.life/mqual. The article draws heavily on the late Ronald Brady’s consideration of leaf sequences.)
In carrying out this work, one necessarily rises (applying Goethe’s terminology) from understanding to reason. That is how one penetrates to the heart of nature:
The intellect will not reach her; man must be capable of elevating himself to the highest reason to touch the divine, which manifests itself in the archetypal phenomena (Urphänomene) — both physical and moral — and dwells behind them and is their origin. The divine works in the living, not in the dead; in what becomes and transforms, not in what has become and is fixed. Therefore reason, with its tendency toward the divine, has only to do with becoming and the living; but the intellect with what has become and is already fixed, so that it may make use of it. (Translation modified by C. Holdrege.)
In an age of technologically dominated science, there is a good case to be made that Goethe’s practice and his methodological reflections have become more, not less, relevant to the scientific enterprise. This book nicely supports that case.