Goethe's Study of Metamorphosis in Light, Leaf, and Bone

A transcript of my lecture from a course I taught for Schumacher College a few years ago on the Organic Science of Goethe and Whitehead

A lightly edited transcript of the lecture above, which was part of a course I taught for Schumacher College in 2021:

A general comment about this course is that my goal here has been to bring modern science and organic philosophy—which thinkers like Goethe and Whitehead are representatives of—into harmony. The challenge is how to look at contemporary physics and biology, in particular, and integrate them with the more participatory method and soulful view of the cosmos that thinkers like Goethe and Whitehead articulated.

In thinking about this challenge, I, yesterday and earlier this week, was revisiting some lectures by the famous quantum physicist Richard Feynman, an American physicist. I listened to a lecture of his on quantum theory. Feynman, if you're not familiar, made really important contributions to what became known as the theory of quantum electrodynamics. He was quite insistent in his lecture that light is a particle, despite the way that it can sometimes behave as a wave. He says we have instrumentation that detects light in its particle nature, and he described light as sort of like when you flick a light switch on—it's like a shower of raindrops.

This light, of course, can be quantified, and the quantum laws of motion, he says, are widely applicable to so many different phenomena—not just in physics but in chemistry. He thinks as they continue to be applied, we will also see their relevance to biology. But he insists everything in nature is reducible to quantum laws of motion. Everything is reducible to the interaction of photons and electrons.

This is really a view that we would think is opposed to that of Goethe, who says don't look behind the phenomena; don't conjecture some sort of hypothesis of an unperceivable reality that would explain what we do perceive. But in some way, I'm setting the goal for myself and for us to think through together of how we could bring a view like Feynman's into harmony with Goethe's, even if they don't finally—you know, if Feynman was here, he might not agree. But how can we at least find a way to not make these incompatible but at least bring them into a contrast with each other such that they, in some way, elucidate one another?

One of the things that really struck me about Feynman's talk on quantum theory was that right at the beginning, he says, "Look, I'm going to explain this to you, but you're not going to understand it." He said, "You're not going to understand it because I don't understand it." Feynman is also famous for this statement that anyone who thinks they understand quantum theory doesn't understand quantum theory. That's an interesting thing to lead into a lecture with.

I'm going to tell you that I do, in fact, hope you understand when I explain Goethe's theories to you. I want to be understood, and I think you can understand, unlike Feynman, who says the quantum world is just too weird for human common sense to make sense of. I'm going to say Goethe's approach does make sense, and that's why it's of such value.

Feynman and Goethe are not opposed in every sense, though, because, after all, they're both searching for laws. They both desire to resolve the laws of nature from the seemingly scattered facts as nature first appears to us. Now, Feynman, of course, and other physicists would have a different definition of law than Goethe's. Feynman's laws are mathematical formalisms that are tied to laboratory measurements. So his laws are based on these hypothetical models that are tested, while Goethe's laws are not hypothetical models; they're directly intuited archetypes. He's talking about archetypal laws or what we would call in philosophy a formal cause.

As we'll see, Goethe's archetypal laws are not necessarily unmathematical or anti-mathematical, but they are more than merely quantitative. They're more than merely metrical or about measurement and what can be measured in a quantitative way. This is because, for Goethe, the archetypes have personality; they have style; they have agency—causal agency. They're formal causes. They're not merely digits in transit through some cosmic computer server.

Now, math itself, of course, is an archetypal language. Its formulas and its notations are—if they're grasping something real, it's because, in Whitehead's terms, we would say they're propositional feelings. They have real bearing on the activities of the physical universe. Whitehead, as we'll see when I go more into his thought in later sessions—our next session—he would talk about the geometry of space-time in terms of geometrical strains. The feeling of strain is something that gives the mathematical formulas and the geometrical manifold a perceivable quality, so it's not just numbers.

Similarly, the equations of quantum electrodynamics that Feynman is talking about can be understood in a Goethean way as nature's musical score. So that if these equations are accurate, they're describing the movement of matter through the universe as a kind of symphony of energy, such that, again, in Whitehead's terms, every local agitation of the electromagnetic field shakes the whole universe. There's a musical quality in the sense that if you were to change a note in a melody, you wreck the whole melody. As we were discussing last time, there's a wholeness to a melody or to a chord that's simultaneous, such that if you disturb any of its parts—its notes—you wreck the whole. Quantum theory is telling us something similar about the nature of electrons or photons, that they're part of a larger symphony—indeed, the symphony of the whole.

When we're trying to understand the relationship between equations and nature in a Goethean way, we can understand equations as musical notation.

Today, I'm going to talk about Goethe, and I've titled this "Between Stars and Soil: Goethe's Study of Metamorphosis in Light, Leaf, and Bone." We're going to talk about Goethe's color theory—that's his famous color wheel of complementary colors. This is a further iteration on his color wheel; he made this with his good friend Schiller. It's called the "Rose of Temperaments," where on the inner ring you see the colors; on the outer ring are the four temperaments; and then in between, the middle ring are these various vocations or jobs or identities that human beings take on—philosophers, scientists, artists, etc. You see the relationship that Goethe saw between our color experience and human personality and the moral domain, so that color wasn't merely something sensory for Goethe, or at least the sensory domain wasn't something separated off from the psychological.

We're also going to talk about Goethe's understanding of bone morphology and his sort of proto-evolutionary view of the human being's place in the animal kingdom. We're going to look at, of course, his understanding of plant morphology.

To begin with here, I want to share this beautiful quote from Whitehead's book Adventures of Ideas to illustrate the way that, while Goethe and Whitehead insist that we stay with the phenomena—with the perceived—and that we not conjecture something behind or beyond phenomena, something that would be unperceived and even unperceivable that might explain the phenomena. That's the hypothetical approach of science that Goethe is so critical of. We have to come to see Goethe's understanding; his higher understanding of theory must be understood in the original Greek sense, as a kind of contemplative—ancient Greek sense, Platonic sense—as a kind of contemplative observation. It shares the same root as our word "theater," meaning to understand the activity of nature. It needs to be displayed on stage, and we shouldn't be in a rush to pull the curtain back and see what's behind the stage.

This quote from Whitehead: He says,

"Philosophy has to rescue the facts as they are from the facts as they first appear. We view the sky at noon on a fine day; it is blue, flooded by the light of the sun. The direct fact of observation is the sun as the sole origin of light and the bare heavens. Conceive the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On the first day of human life, they watch the sunset, the stars appear, and lo, creation widened to man's view."

The stars appear; the sky that seemed to be blue, ruled by a single star, reveals—when the sun sets—it reveals itself to be more, far more. So the excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them. The lesson here is that there's very often more to phenomena than what first meets the eye. So we don't want to attempt to go beyond or behind phenomena to something unperceivable or only detectable by advanced instrumentation. Rather, we do want to be able to look deeper within the phenomena themselves. And stay with their metamorphic processes until we're sure that the whole of the phenomenon has revealed itself.

We're going to go back for a second to Plato. One of Whitehead's most famous lines is that all of Western philosophy can be understood as a series of footnotes to Plato. So forgive me for dwelling on Plato, but I think it's important to see the way in which I've found it interesting in studying Goethe that Goethe's critics will say, "Oh, well, he's too Platonic. His science of the archetypal phenomena of plants and animals and color—it's too Platonic. He's putting ideas in place of observations of the observable world." Meanwhile, his defenders, Goethe's defenders, will often say that, no, he's not Platonic at all. This came up in our first session with Henry Bortoft, who studied with Gadamer, and I understand that he recognizes that the deeper Platonic teachings may not be this two-world sense of a separation between ideas and sensory phenomena. We're going to go into this deeper reading of Plato.

But it's interesting here, I think, that his critics say he's too Platonic; his defenders say, "No, he's not Platonic." I think the truth is somewhere in between, and that's what I'm going to try to articulate here. I think it's important to recognize that in his dialogues, Plato has a pedagogical purpose, and he uses certain illustrations, certain myths, and certain diagrams, as we'll see, where he makes a division. And he makes statements that seem a bit harsh. Like his division between being and becoming, or the sensible and intelligible realms of eternal forms. But I think he intends these as teaching tools, and in the same way that Wittgenstein famously said that he wants to provide us a ladder to climb up to a higher perspective, at which point we would remove the ladder, I think we'll see how some of the things that Plato says are meant to be taken in that sense.

I think if Plato were alive today, given our current scientific understanding, he would probably be more Goethean and Whiteheadian in his explicit statements about his views.

As I mentioned in my first lecture during our first session, Plato set astronomy on the path to science by devising his problem of the planets, which is really Plato saying that the sky is an archetypal phenomenon and that there must be some underlying unity of form within the seemingly random, wandering, crisscrossing, tangled patterns of stars and planets. Plato thought that when we look with merely our visual experience at the sky through our physical senses, it's like we're perceiving the universe upside down and backwards. We're seeing the embroidery of the heavens from the wrong side. Plato wanted us to come to see the heavens from the perspective of the eternal realm—to see them right side up.

You might think that the heliocentric theory that Copernicus articulates, and that sort of initiates the scientific revolution, was the solution to Plato's problem of the planets. But it's not really, because even heliocentrism, while it approaches a greater simplicity and archetypal harmony, remains a view from the backside of the embroidery of reality. It's still a view from the sensory realm, and it's not a solution to his problem. We'll talk more about why this is the case.

I want to talk about Plato's divided line, which is another pedagogical approach that Plato takes to awakening us to a form of archetypal perception, I would say, which is—I'm trying to read Plato more as a Goethean phenomenologist here, so we'll see if I succeed.

Plato's divided line is this diagram that he lays out in The Republic that Socrates lays out. He also has Socrates make an analogy between the good, which is sort of the highest idea in the intelligible realm, with the sun, which for Plato is the highest being in the sensory realm. So in the background here, you see a cave with a person exiting the cave. The Republic also is where Plato kind of lays out his soteriology, or his understanding of salvation, which is to escape the cave. To not just be transfixed by the shadows on the cave wall, but to move out into the light of reality.

So to escape the cave of appearances—and this can seem like it's exactly the opposite of Goethe's approach. But on the other hand, if we consider how Goethe felt about the way fancied hypotheses or conjectures that were meant to abstractly explain experience, how the imagination could take flight and project its own expectations onto our direct experience, and the way that those conjectures would stand in for or replace our direct experience, I think we can easily imagine him referring to this—what I might call idolatrous perception—as shadows on the cave wall. And so we can understand Goethe in this more Platonic sense.

I think for both Plato and Goethe, the apparent world, when rightly apprehended through this intuitive mode of participation—the apparent world is the archetypal world. The apparent world, rightly apprehended, is the archetypal world.

So Plato says—or Plato has Socrates say in The Republic:

"When the soul is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent, it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason. But when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only, and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason."

So Plato is having Socrates say, if we get lost in our opinions about sensory objects in the realm of becoming, it's like we are the wandering planets. We're shifting hither and thither, just as they do with their retrograde motions.

Plato goes on:

"This reality then, that gives truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of the good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge and of truth, insofar as known. Yet fair as they both are—knowledge and truth—in supposing the good to be something fairer still than these, you will think rightly of it."

So the good is the highest idea. But as for knowledge and truth, even as in our illustration, where he's comparing the good and the sun, "it is right to deem light and vision sun-like, but never to think that they are the sun."

So here we see a repetition of Goethe's own statement that there is something sun-like about vision, something sun-like about the eye.

Plato goes on again—sorry, Socrates goes on. I think it's important to mark the distinction and not say this is Plato speaking; this is Socrates speaking in one of Plato's dialogues.

"The sun not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility, but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture, though it is not itself generation."

So the sun is not an organism, in other words, in Plato's view here, because, again, he has, for pedagogical purposes, I would say, separated out the realm of becoming from the realm of being. And the sun is in the supralunary sphere, right? It's beyond the earthly plane, where on earth things are born and they die. In the heavens, the heavenly bodies are eternal; they're gods. The sun is a god; it is not born; it does not die; it is not itself generation. I think in a Goethean view and a Whiteheadian view—especially in Whitehead's view—we come to understand that the sun is a being. I mean, even modern cosmology. The sun was born, and it will die. It has an organic nature in that way. It is generated.

So going on:

"In like manner, then, the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence, but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power. The good is sovereign over the intelligible order and region, and the sun over the world of the eyeball—not to say the sky ball—but let that pass."

I want to pause here for a minute. What is Plato—is this some kind of a joke? What does he mean, the "sky ball"? I think what he's doing here is he's actually hinting at the heliocentric theory here. He's saying that sunlight is the condition for the possibility of vision. It rules over the world of the eyeball but also rules over the sky ball. And by "sky ball," I think he means the visible heavens. When we look up and we see this half of a sphere, this dome above us—that's the sky ball. And he's saying that the sun rules that, which during the day is quite obvious. But at night, with the wandering planets, it's not as obvious. But he's hinting that—I think he's hinting here that the sun must be at the center and that that would aid our understanding of the retrograde motion of the planets. But he doesn't want to get into this now.

Then he goes on to lay out his divided line. He says, "Represent the intelligible and sensible realms by a line divided into two unequal sections, and cut each section again in the same ratio."

So Plato is here performing a kind of transcendental anatomy on the world soul. He's bisecting the world soul, and here's his incision—several incisions. This is a scale of knowledge and being, meant to show on the left the things with minimal existence, to the right things with more existence.

On the far side of the scale is mere sensation—barely any reality here. We're dealing with images and shadows and reflections. This is the backside of the embroidery of reality. The sensible realm. And the best we can do in this realm, Plato has Socrates say, is we can develop a sort of common sense understanding based on opinions and beliefs about the objects of the sensory world, like rocks and plants and animals, artifacts. This is the realm of warmth and color.

Goethe studied Linnaeus's classification of plants very closely, and I think in Plato's sense, this would be understood as existing in this domain of common sense, where we're categorizing things according to their similarities in the sensory world. So you look at the similarities of plant forms without grasping their dynamic processes of growth and metamorphosis, looking at the finished forms and classifying them according to similarities of form in their finished state.

Now, scientific hypothesis is actually straddling Plato's line here, with one foot in the sensible realm and another foot in the intelligible realm. And why is this? Well, science really is using geometry, arithmetic, and mathematics to bring the sensory world—observations of particular facts in the sensory world—under the rules and the laws of mathematics to develop theories. Like the theories of light, electromagnetism, space-time.

What's interesting about contemporary physics is the way that it has resolved matter and space-time and light and electromagnetism into something that's rather immaterial—something highly mathematical: these waveforms. This is a depiction of some standing waves derived from Schrödinger's wave equation. And so Plato would say that this mathematical understanding of nature is actually closer to what he was hoping for as a solution to his problem of the planets—not just to see the sun as the center, because, after all, the sun is in motion around the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy—the Milky Way galaxy—is itself in motion around other galaxies as part of a supercluster of galaxies, and on and on. Everything is in motion. And so the Copernican heliocentric view is actually not an answer or solution to Plato's problem. Contemporary mathematical physics is closer; it's getting at these underlying unities of form beneath the scattered facts of the visible world.

But there's something still higher for Plato. There's the ideas of truth and beauty, the idea of the good, the idea of the one, which for Plato is—it's not one as opposed to two or three or many; it's a one that's beyond the numeral one; it's not a numeral. I think Plato's intention is not to oppose the one to the many but to say that actually, again, when rightly apprehended, each of the many contains the one, reflects the one.

And so I think Goethe's method helps make this even clearer. When Goethe understands "theoria," theory, he means to bring theory and empiricism into a sort of harmony through what he calls "delicate empiricism." He says delicate empiricism is the approach that makes itself utterly identical with its object, thereby becoming true theory. So in other words, Goethe wants, by arranging the facts in an appropriate series, he wants to allow the theory to show itself through the proper arrangement of the facts, so that there's not a sense of theory being separate from the factual phenomena.

Goethe says also, with his archetypal phenomenology trying to remove this line that Plato puts—again, I think pedagogically—in place to separate the sensory from the intelligible realm. Goethe's archetypal phenomenology is trying to bring together the realm of being or eternity and the realm of becoming. And he shows this in this excerpt from one of his poems: "And rolling up and down did go the all and one eternal thing, ever, ever constant." So he's trying to grasp and express this paradox between becoming and being, in the way that the archetypal phenomenon—whether we're talking about that in the growth of plants or the archetypal phenomenon of animal morphology or color—there's something that's always in process, and yet through the changing process is revealed this underlying form, or within the visible process is a form that becomes apparent when we cultivate that proper organ of archetypal perception.

So Goethe was very influenced by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who, as we'll see in a moment, said that the proper method of understanding God is to study the smallest things—to study the particulars—to see God in each of the many, just as Plato said, to see the one in each of the many. And so Goethe says in a letter to his friend Jacobi, "I look for the divine in herbs and pebbles." Not as some grand transcendent being beyond the universe, but no—in herbs and pebbles.

So let's spend just a second more on this divided line to understand Goethe's debt to Spinoza. Goethe says that his trust in Spinoza rested on the peaceful effect that reading him brought forth. So Goethe would read Spinoza's Ethics, and he would feel a sense of calm come over him. Spinoza says about the sensible world:

"As long as the human mind perceives things from the common order of nature, it does not have an adequate but only a confused and mutilated knowledge of itself, of its own body, and of external bodies."

So confused and mutilated, like looking at the backside of the embroidery. And Spinoza has three types of knowledge that correspond to this Platonic diagram. The first kind of knowledge would be the sort of opinions that we can form and names that we can give to the objects in our shared perceptual field in the realm of natura naturata, which is a Latin term trying to point to the realm of nature as a collection of objects, of finished forms. Neglecting their process of becoming and generation, and looking at them as finished forms.

Spinoza then says about the intelligible world:

"We conceive things as actual in two ways: either insofar as we conceive them to exist in relation to a certain time and place, or insofar as we conceive them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine nature. But the things we conceive in this second way, as true or real, we conceive under the species of eternity, and to that extent they involve the eternal and infinite essence of God."

So Spinoza is, of course, often described as a pantheist. He sees God and nature as the same—two names for the same infinite substance. And these higher forms of knowledge participate in this infinite divine substance so as to bring forth a holistic knowledge of the things in the sensory world.

Spinoza's second kind of knowledge would be like, with its discursive understanding, it's a scientific hypothesis and using mathematics to experiment and come up with these more adequate ideal models of the behavior of sensory objects. That's normal science.

This third kind of knowledge, though, is what's really important for Goethe. Spinoza called it "intuitive science," and it's knowledge of the natural world through participating in the divine. And for Spinoza, another way of thinking of God is as natura naturans, which is this Latin phrase that's pointing to nature in the process of producing its forms, rather than the naturata, which are the finished forms. The naturans are the forms in the process of being generated; it's creative nature rather than created nature.

And Goethe's method, as he understood it in reading Spinoza, was to identify with and participate in this creative potency of nature, this infinite divine creativity, so as to know the objects of the sensible world through that productivity.

Spinoza says:

"The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God. Therefore, anyone who knows things by this third kind of cognition or knowledge—intuitive science—passes to the highest human perfection and consequently is affected by the highest joy, accompanied by an idea of himself or herself and his or her own virtue. To conceive things from the vantage of eternity is to conceive things insofar as they are conceived through God's essence, and therefore, insofar as our mind conceives itself and the body from the vantage of eternity, to that extent it necessarily has cognition of God and knows itself to be the formal cause of particular things."

And so Goethe read this and felt like Spinoza was describing his own way of knowing and its possibility through a participation in this divine creative essence underlying the finished forms of visible nature.

But there's a problem. His name is Immanuel Kant. And we went over Kant's transcendental understanding of the limits of human knowledge in our first session together. Kant stands guard, enforcing the boundary between the sensible and intelligible domains, as Plato had separated them. Kant insists on the limits of human reason, and he says, contrary to Spinoza, contrary to Goethe, we cannot know the essence of things, nor can we know as God knows. Kant would refer to this sort of knowledge as an archetypal intelligence or as an intuitive understanding. He didn't think it was possible. We are finite, limited beings who don't have access to such divine modes of knowing.

This is Kant's tombstone, and written on it in German—and I believe in Russian, since it was erected when Königsberg was annexed into Russia—he says, this is from his, I believe it's from the Critique of Practical Judgment, used on his tombstone:

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and perseveringly my thinking engages itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

And so Kant, remember, he said that our theoretical knowledge of nature, or the starry heavens, is limited to a sort of phenomenal knowledge of appearances. But we can understand those phenomena according to laws that are mechanistic, and so we can have a complete theoretical knowledge of the phenomenal world according to the sort of Newtonian mathematical method. But then the moral law within him—this is not something that's within the phenomenal realm of nature for Kant. It's through our experience of morality and conscience and our sense of duty to will freely, to will the good, that Kant thought we did participate in the supersensible realm, in the intelligible realm. And so for Kant, we have access to the supersensible only through our moral experience, not through our theoretical understanding and our sensory experience.

Kant also says that we cannot know organisms, which do appear in the phenomenal world, according to these mechanistic laws that apply to the inorganic world. He famously says, "There will never be a Newton even of a mere blade of grass." In other words, we will never have a mechanical explanation for how this recursive circular form of causation—we could call it formal causation and also final causation; it's more than the efficient causation of mechanisms—this formal and final circular causality in organisms, whereby the parts produce one another and the whole. It's not just one cause producing another effect that is external to it, but each part acting as a cause to produce other parts that maintain the whole of an organism. Kant says we don't have the categories to understand the possibility of that sort of a phenomenon. And so he protects, in this way, life from reduction to mechanism, but he also limits science to mechanism at the same time.

Kant will say that artists can at least unconsciously participate in nature's formative archetypal power. When an artistic genius brings forth a beautiful poem or a sculpture or whatever it may be, Kant would say that the artist is themselves giving expression to or channeling, you might say, the formative creative power of nature. But the artist does so unconsciously and can't provide the rules by which someone else might be able to recreate that work of art. We would expect that a scientist, when they develop a new theory of nature, could provide the rules, the mathematical formula, the steps that allow someone else to reproduce that understanding. And Kant says just as we don't expect a genius to be able to teach someone else how to reproduce a beautiful work of art, we can't expect that scientists can, in this same way, participate in the formative creative power of nature and devise an organic theory that would allow someone else to understand what they're describing. And so he denies the possibility of scientific genius in that sense; he denies the scientist the ability to participate in nature's formative power.

Now, Goethe's obviously not happy with this. He reads Kant's critique; he reads Kant's Critique of Judgment and sees how Kant is describing the possibility of a kind of archetypal intelligence or an intuitive understanding, but Kant is denying this to human beings. And Goethe is saying, "No, I do this all the time in my scientific work." And he says—Goethe says, though Kant in the Critique of Judgment seems to be referring to a divine intellect—"Yet just as we are able to elevate ourselves to a higher region in the ethical sphere through our belief in God, virtue, and immortality." So remember Kant says that we do participate in the supersensible through our willing of the good and through our moral experience—Goethe says, "The case might be the same in the intellectual sphere or in the realm of theory, so that by intuiting a continuously creative nature, we make ourselves worthy of intellectual participation in its productions."

And so, of course, in his understanding of plant morphology and plant metamorphosis, Goethe describes this archetypal rhythm of expansion and contraction through the phases of plant development—the eternal systole and diastole, as he would say—and there's a gradual intensification of the plant as it moves through the various metamorphic forms that the leaf takes until it reaches its highest state of intensification in the flower and the fruit and the seed within the fruit.

Goethe makes a distinction between a term that came up last time, Gestalt, and this other German term, Bildung. And Gestalt, for Goethe, he worried that in an attempt to describe the archetypal form at work in plant growth, he worried that it was too static, this notion of Gestalt. It seemed to him to refer to an already finished form, whereas Bildung, he thought, had this connotation of more of a process—a formative process. And so Bildung is the term that he would use to refer to the archetypal leaf as it moves through its various phases of metamorphosis in the growth of a plant.

Goethe says that:

"the entire plant world is a vast sea which is as necessary to the existence of individual insects as the oceans and rivers are to the existence of individual fish."

So he had a very ecological understanding of the natural world.

Goethe says:

"The archetypal plant is the most wonderful creation in the world, for which nature herself should envy me. With this model and its key, one can invent plants ad infinitum, and consequently—that is to say, plants which could exist even if they do not exist and are not, as it were, artistic or poetic shadows and fancies, but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law may be applied to all else that lives."

"Forwards and backwards, the plant is only ever leaf." Now, when Goethe says "all is leaf," we don't want to mistake him for saying that the finished form of the leaf is what he means. He's talking about a generative process, and he needed to refer to some empirical phenomenon—a fact, the leaf—in order to give it a name. But he's really talking about a process of metamorphosis, and he's using "leaf" as a convenient stand-in for a process that we can't really give a single name to because it's too protean. We may as well have said that everything is petal—it would work just as well. But Goethe says everything is leaf, but he's always trying to explain he doesn't mean the finished form of the leaf. There's an archetypal leaf that we don't see, that the visible leaf itself is just an example of this archetypal leaf, which is more of a formative power than it is a finished form. So he's talking about the natura naturans aspect of the leaf, not the naturata aspect of the leaf.

There was an important botanist who followed Goethe named Matthias Schleiden, and Schleiden studied Goethe very closely. I wanted to read what he says about the plant realm here. He says:

"Here there is nothing firm, nothing consistent; an endless becoming and unfolding, in the continual death and destruction side by side and intergrafted—such is the plant. It has a history not only of its formation but also of its existence, not merely of its origin but of its persistence. We speak of plants; where are they? When is a plant perfect, complete, so that I may snatch it out of the continual change of matter and form and examine it as a thing become? No individual, persistent, or rather apparently persistent form, but only the course of its development can be the object of a study of form in botany. Every system which devotes itself to the isolated formal relations of this or that epoch of plant growth, of this or that phase, without regard to the law of development, is a fanciful air castle which has no foundation in actuality and therefore does not belong to scientific botany."

So Schleiden here is trying to make, I think, what Goethe's point is here more clear—that we're really looking at a process of development when we study plant morphology. We're looking for the underlying archetypal law of this development; we're not looking for some isolated finished form. And so when Goethe says "all is leaf," he doesn't mean the isolated finished form of the leaf; he means the archetypal power which he names "leaf" but which gives rise to leaf as much as petal or sepal or seed or fruit. It's the leaf as the protean form that moves through expansion and contraction to give rise to the plant in its wholeness.

To better grasp Goethe's method here and the way that, as I said at the beginning, it's not mathematical in a quantitative and metrical sense, but it's mathematical in a deeper archetypal way. I'm borrowing an example here from the scholar of German idealism, Eckart Förster. This is more obvious in Goethe's color experiments, but it's also there in his study of plants.

We have this string of numbers here, and imagine this string of numbers as akin to the different phases of plant development or as akin to the different experiments that Goethe went through in his attempt to understand color. The question is, how are we to derive the underlying form or the formula for a stream of particulars—either a stream of particular observations of plants in their growth process or of color phenomena in our experiments? Or how are we to derive the formula for a string of numbers?

Goethe says that "there's a formula which countless individual problems of arithmetic can be expressed." So Goethe himself—and this is drawing on Spinoza's example, where in Spinoza's third kind of knowledge, he often will give mathematical intuitions as an example. Of course, this sequence of numbers is the Fibonacci sequence, and this is a theory—or rather a formula—that would allow us to derive the next number in the series.

In the same way that this formula reveals the underlying unity of a string of otherwise seemingly random numbers, Goethe's method is an attempt to bring together individual observations—whether of the different stages of plant growth or animal morphology or the different experiments of his color theory—to bring them together in a series so that, in paying close attention to the transitions, we can come up with an archetypal unity that underlies them. And so how is this formula of the Fibonacci sequence—how was it derived from this string of numbers? By paying attention to the nature of the transition between numbers. You add the prior two together to get the next number.

So Goethe says that:

"I sought to conduct a series of experiments which border on and immediately touch upon each other, and which indeed, once one has become thoroughly familiar with them and contemplated them as a whole, constitutes but one single experiment, only one experience seen from the most various vantage points. An experience of this kind, consisting as it does in a series of experiences, is manifestly of a higher kind. It represents the formula in which countless individual problems of arithmetic are expressed."

So there's Goethe's use of that mathematical analogy.

"To work towards such experiences, I believe, the highest duty of the naturalist."

He began to explore the image of the color spectrum. So this is from a film—a 1998 documentary by the Danish directors Marie Louise von Franz and Henrik Motzkus. It's called Light, Darkness, and Colours. The whole thing's on YouTube; highly recommend it. I wanted to play this particular video of their experiment that Goethe would have absolutely loved because it shows the metamorphosis of color. And this is an example of Goethe's physical colors. Goethe distinguished between three different types of colors: the physiological, which we'll get to in a moment, which is, I think, where his most significant contribution is in understanding physiological colors and the activity of the eye in bringing forth colors. But this is an example of physical colors, and it reveals the metamorphosis of color and shows why Goethe's understanding differed from Newton's.

[At this point, the lecturer would include a video or demonstration of Goethe's color experiments, showing how colors arise at the boundaries of light and darkness and how the prism experiment differs from Newton's interpretation.]

So that's an example of Goethe's physical colors, which, for him, meant the effect that a medium has—whether a prism in that case, a prism made of water, or the effect that any medium, like an atmosphere, what that does to the nature of light in revealing color.

The other forms were chemical colors, which have to do more with the way that color adheres on the surface of objects. But then there's the physiological colors, and this is where I think Goethe's contribution really is. He recognized the way that the eye is active in the visual apprehension of color; it's not merely a passive recipient of wavelengths. The eye is rather actively seeking harmony and wholeness, providing what the phenomena do not. This is his color wheel. And there are these complementary colors, and Goethe shows in his experiments the way that the eye will complete, will bring forth the whole color wheel to complement whatever color is in the visual field.

There are a couple of examples that we can give of this. One is of colored shadows, and the other is of the so-called accidental colors. I'll show another clip from this same film again to give you an example of what colored shadows are, and then we'll do an experiment ourselves to see what the accidental colors are. The significance here of these two forms of physiological color is that one is an example of the eye bringing harmony to visual experience of color simultaneously—that would be the experience of colored shadows—and the experience of accidental colors is an example of the eye bringing harmony successively. So in other words, in time, not at the same time simultaneously as with colored shadows, but successively. Goethe says that the reason I mention this subtle distinction is that Goethe says in an idea, the simultaneous and the successive are intimately bound up together, whereas in experience, they're always separated.

[The lecturer would include demonstrations of colored shadows and accidental colors, illustrating how the eye generates complementary colors to create a harmonious visual experience.]

We see here how Goethe is studying color in a way that is bringing the activity of the eye to bear, rather than just imagining that color can be explained by reference to something unperceivable that's beyond or behind the phenomena. He's saying that we have to bring forth a more holistic understanding of color in the context of human experience. It doesn't mean there's not much to be learned from the study of wavelengths of light and so on. I think we need to tone down Goethe's polemic a little bit against Newton, as I said, in order to see harmony between contemporary science and this Goethean participatory way of knowledge. There's going to need to be compromises on both sides, and I think that while I can understand how Goethe felt that Newton's influence was damaging to the holistic nature of human perception and the activity of the eye, I also think that Newton was doing something profound as well. So we'll get more into that in later sessions.

Finally, I just want to talk a bit about Goethe's understanding of bone morphology in animals, where he applies the same method as he does to plant morphology. He says in his study of the human skull and in searching for the intermaxillary—or now it's called the premaxillary bone—he says that "man is very closely related to the animals. Unity of the whole makes every creature into that which it is. Man is man as well through the form and nature of his upper jaw as he is man through the form and nature of the tip of his little toe. And thus is every creature only one tone, one hue of a great harmony which one must thus study in the whole and at large, lest every particular become a dead letter. I have written this small treatise"—his book on animal morphology from that point of view—and that is really the interest that lies hidden therein—or rather, it was a book specifically on his discovery of the intermaxillary bone.

This was a controversy because the theorists of the day were saying that there is no intermaxillary bone in the human, and that this was because the human was created separately—that the human is a distinct being who's not related to the rest of the animal kingdom. Goethe, following Herder and these other early sort of proto-evolutionary thinkers like Schelling and others, thought that the human was part of nature and that the human bone structure, therefore, must be continuous with the animal vertebrate archetype. Rather than looking for a particular part of the human skeleton that would differentiate it, we have to understand the differentiation of species in a more holistic way—that it's the same vertebrate archetype working itself out, and the species differ from one another because of the different proportion of archetypal forces that are able to manifest in each case in relation to the unique environmental conditions of that species.

Goethe saw this archetypal power as shaping the form of an organism, but also recognized that environmental constraints influence how fully the archetype can be expressed. He applied this idea to vertebrates in much the same way as he had to plants. Just as in plants "all is leaf," in vertebrates "all is vertebra." Goethe noted in his letters that, in 1790 (though he mistakenly says 1791), when he picked up a battered sheep skull from the sands of a Jewish cemetery in Venice, he realized that the facial bones could also be traced back to the vertebrae. Thus, every bone in a vertebrate skeleton could be understood as a metamorphosed vertebra.

There was, however, a priority dispute between Goethe and Lorenz Oken, who also claimed to have discovered this principle that "all is vertebra." It seems that both came to this realization independently. Additionally, Richard Owen, an English biologist who studied Goethe, misinterpreted Goethe’s archetypal approach. Owen viewed the archetypal form as a fixed fossil, rather than a dynamic process, as Goethe intended. While Owen depicted the archetypal vertebrate as a static form, Goethe meant it to represent an ongoing process of development, similar to his statement "all is leaf" in reference to plants.

Ultimately, Goethe's method of "delicate empiricism," where theory and experience are harmonized, offers a pathway to reconcile modern scientific insights with a participatory worldview. It encourages us to perceive the self-organizing archetypal patterns inherent in natural processes, fostering a more integrated and holistic understanding of the cosmos and our human place within it.