Goethean Science

Summary

Goethean science is the qualitative natural inquiry developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) over five decades. Goethe rejected the Cartesian-Newtonian assumption that nature’s real properties are mathematical quantities hidden behind appearance. He proposed instead that nature can be known directly in its qualities through disciplined cultivation of perception. His method joins close observation with exact sensory imagination, a practice of recreating phenomena in the mind until their inner organization becomes visible. The main applications were the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), which argued that all lateral organs of a flowering plant are transformations of one archetypal leaf, and the Theory of Colors (1810), which derived color from the polar relation of light and dark through a turbid medium. Mainstream physicists and botanists dismissed his work in the nineteenth century. A late-twentieth-century revival led by Henri Bortoft reads Goethean science as early phenomenology of nature.

Goethe and the Two Programs

Goethe is hard to place inside the categories modern readers inherit. He was a poet who became one of the most original natural inquirers of his century, and who thought his scientific work — pursued for five decades — was his most important achievement, more significant to him than Faust or his literary classics.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) When faced with this contradiction in cultural categories, later commentators have tended to rationalize: an obvious move is the accusation of dilettantism, treating his science as the hobby of an amateur who could not have understood real science.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) This dismissal misreads both his ambition and his historical situation.

Goethe coined the term morphology and founded a science of organic forms and formative forces aimed at finding underlying unity in the diversity of plants and animals.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) He was a pioneer in the study of plant and animal form, and his thinking touched evolution, though not in the Darwinian sense — for him, as for his contemporaries in Naturphilosophie, evolution was a continuous unfolding of formative possibilities rather than a history of accidents filtered by survival.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) He took his science seriously enough to be scathing about physical theories that posited hidden mechanisms in place of observable phenomena, and his epistemic stance was discussed as recently as a 1968 Cambridge conference on quantum theory because it bears on the same problems modern physicists are still arguing about.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

The interpreter who has done most to recover Goethean science as a serious philosophical position is Henri Bortoft (1938-2012), a British physicist whose interest in Goethe arose from working as a postgraduate under David Bohm on the problem of wholeness in quantum theory in the 1960s.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Bortoft’s reading, set out in The Wholeness of Nature (1996), holds that what looks at first like the content of Goethe’s science — particular conclusions about petals or color circles — is really only the container; the real content is a way of seeing.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) On this view, Goethean science is a method of cultivated perception that any number of investigators can practice across time, not a body of doctrines tied to one man’s biography. The proposal is that mainstream science and Goethean science are not in competition but complementary: mainstream science discovers the causal order in nature, Goethean science discovers its wholeness.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

What Goethean Science Rejects

Goethean science is best approached through what it rejects, because the rejection clarifies what the alternative is for. The targets are three positions central to the science of Goethe’s day and most of ours.

The first is the distinction between primary and secondary qualities that Galileo and Locke installed at the foundation of mathematical physics. On that distinction, the real properties of nature are quantities — number, magnitude, position — while colors, tastes, and sounds are subjective sensations produced in the observer. The result is what Bortoft calls “metaphysical archaeology”: science strives to replace immediate experience with an underlying mathematical reality, and the world we actually live in becomes ontologically secondary.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) This is the posture Bortoft diagnoses as a structural limitation of mainstream science: following Kant’s description of the scientist as “an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated,” science hears only the echo of its own prior concepts in the data it collects.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe could not accept this. The colors he saw at the boundary of light and dark were, for him, real properties of the phenomenon, not artifacts of a subjective nervous system.

The second target is the assumption that observation is passive reception of facts. Goethe came to recognize, partly through his friendship with the philosopher Friedrich Schiller, that observation is always shaped by an organizing idea or way of conceiving (Vorstellungsart) that determines what the observer sees. Before that meeting Goethe had been epistemologically naive, believing what he saw was just there as he saw it; afterward he understood that the way of seeing is itself part of the cognitive act.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) He extended this insight historically: the foundations of science are themselves cultural-historical, and “the history of science is science itself.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Bortoft argues this insight — articulated by Goethe nearly two hundred years ago — anticipates the twentieth-century recognition that scientific knowledge has historicity, that cultural and historical factors enter the form scientific knowledge takes.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

The third target is the Cartesian onlooker consciousness — the picture of a detached observing subject confronting an external world of objects. Goethe rejected this as both psychologically false and methodologically crippling. For him, knowledge of a phenomenon is “a further stage of the phenomenon itself,” and the knower is a participant in nature’s processes rather than a spectator to them.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) He learned to articulate this participatory framing partly from contact with Friedrich Schelling, who held the view (which looks like extreme subjective idealism only to the onlooker consciousness) that in knowing nature the scientist produces nature.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

The cumulative effect of these three rejections is a science that aims at perceiving qualities in their own terms, recognizes the active role of the observer in shaping what is observed, and treats knowledge as an event in nature rather than a representation of it.

The Method: Active Seeing and Exact Sensory Imagination

Goethean science is a practice before it is a doctrine. Bortoft was insistent on this point: he saw Goethe’s way of science as something “do-able,” and held that working with Goethe’s exercises in seeing and visualization changes the mode of cognition itself in a way that simply reading Goethe intellectually does not.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The method has several stages, refined across Goethe’s lifetime.

The first is active seeing. Where ordinary perception is a passive reception of visual impressions, active seeing reverses the direction — “as if the direction of seeing were reversed, going from ourselves towards the phenomenon” — by investing attention into seeing rather than merely receiving images.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) This is not visual concentration in the usual sense; it is the deliberate redeployment of attention from verbal-intellectual processing into the sensory register itself. Bortoft reads this redeployment as a deautomatization exercise (in Arthur Deikman’s sense): withdrawing attention from the habitual verbal-intellectual mode restructures the mode of consciousness itself, opening the practitioner to a register of perception ordinarily screened out.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

The second stage is exact sensory imagination (exakte sinnliche Phantasie). Having observed a phenomenon, the inquirer repeats the observation entirely in imagination, holding it concretely and trying neither to add what was not there nor leave anything out. Goethe called this discipline “recreating in the wake of ever-creating nature.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Combined with active seeing, the practice gives thinking more the quality of perception and gives sensory observation more the quality of thinking. Its purpose is to develop an “organ of perception” — a trained capacity that the working scientist becomes, rather than possesses.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Miller describes the same procedure as Goethe’s “genetic method”: the inquirer follows a created object back through its formative steps and visualizes the progression as an ideal whole, moving from fixed forms to formative process.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) In the second part of this method, the leaves of a plant are internalized as memory images and then transformed in imagination from one stage to the next, until what was successive in empirical experience becomes simultaneous in the intuitively perceived idea.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009)

The third stage is the manifolding of a single experiment (Vermannigfaltigung). Goethe’s experimental practice was to derive a series of contiguous experiments from a single one, varying conditions in disciplined steps. The series taken together constitutes “as it were just one experiment” presenting a single experience from manifold perspectives — a higher-order experience that he held was equivalent in form, if not in content, to mathematical demonstration.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe distinguished sharply between the content and the method of mathematics. He insisted he was no opponent of mathematics, and held that his procedure of producing all manifold variations of an experiment was itself mathematical in form, even though its content was qualitative.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

The cumulative discipline Goethe called “a delicate empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object,“(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) a formulation that points to the overcoming of the subject/object split by joining sense experience with imagination. It is the opposite of Francis Bacon’s assertive empiricism, which (as Carolyn Merchant has noted) drew its imagery from the witch trials, treating nature as a female to be tortured by mechanical instruments under interrogation.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe’s empiricism aims not to compel nature to answer questions formulated by the investigator, but to let the phenomenon disclose itself in its own terms. The goal is not knowledge of nature from the outside but, in Miller’s phrase, a “beneficial metamorphosis in the essence of the perceiver”: the research itself changes the scientist.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009)

This requires the inquirer to develop new cognitive capacities through the activity of research itself — what Goethe called Bildung. In Goethean science, the scientist must become the instrument.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The outcome is what Bortoft calls intuitive perception (Anschauung) of the law (Gesetz) within the phenomenon: the mind ceases to function as a medium of logical thought and becomes instead an organ of perception through which the organizing principle of the phenomenon is directly seen.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Bortoft frames this as a “reversal” in epistemology: in conventional science the organizing idea is supplied by the investigator to the data; in Goethean science the organizing idea comes from the phenomenon itself, and the scientist’s thinking provides only the vessel in which the intrinsic active organizing of nature can come into manifestation.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The method also draws a Kantian distinction in a non-Kantian direction. Goethe followed Kant in distinguishing Verstand (rational understanding, the common instrument of conventional science) from Vernunft (intuitive perception). But where Kant denied that intuitive perception of essences was achievable, Goethe boldly claimed it was — through patient cultivation of the kind described above.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009)

Goethean Color Theory

Goethe’s color work began with a surprise. During his Italian journey, looking through a borrowed prism at a white wall, he found that the wall remained white — color appeared only at boundaries between light and dark areas. He immediately said aloud “the Newtonian doctrine is false.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) What he saw was that color requires both light and darkness for its arising, not light alone. By constructing simple boundaries from which complicating factors had been removed, he established the Urphänomen of color: at a black/white boundary viewed through a prism, yellow-orange-red appear in one orientation (the darkening of light) and violet-blue in the other (the lightening of dark).(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Color, on this account, arises from a polar relationship between light and dark.

In the Farbenlehre (1810) Goethe extended this insight by analyzing what happens when light passes through a turbid medium — a medium that is the first degree of opacity short of full transparency. Light through such a medium darkens to yellow, orange, and red as the medium thickens; darkness through an illuminated turbid medium lightens to violet and pale blue. The principle: “light and darkness united dynamically by means of turbidity generate color.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe identified the turbid-medium phenomenon as the Urphänomen of color: light seen through semitransparent media yields yellow-orange-red at the dark pole, while darkness seen through an illuminated turbid medium yields violet-blue at the light pole.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe called this poetic description — “the deeds and sufferings of light” — as precise in the science of quality as any mathematical formula in the science of quantity.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Ernst Cassirer captured the contrast between the two approaches precisely: “The mathematical formula strives to make the phenomena calculable, that of Goethe to make them visible.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The Urphänomen itself is not a generalization abstracted from many cases but a concrete instance (“an instance worth a thousand, bearing all within itself”) in which the universal is perceived directly within the particular, without the separation that abstraction requires.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

The contrast with Newton is sharp and worth getting right. Newton’s interest in color came from improving telescope optics; he wanted to bring chromatics under optics. Goethe’s interest came from painting; he wanted a chromatics independent of optics, focused on the conditions under which color comes into appearance.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Bortoft argues that Newton’s account was less a derivation from experiment than the operation of a corpuscular hypothesis already at work in his thinking — his early notebooks show the corpuscular language present from the start, functioning as an organizing idea in his interpretation of the prism experiments.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Put differently, Newton’s way of seeing constituted the prism experiment as it was seen, with the corpuscular idea reflected in the experiment as in a mirror: the conclusion was not derived from the data but was already operative in the mode of observation.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Newton’s followers then forgot a subtlety Newton himself had stated explicitly — that rays “are not colored” but only have a power to stir up sensations of color — and turned the textbook story into a myth that white light is empirically shown to contain a mixture of colors, when in fact no experiment shows the colors being separated directly to the senses.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) What Newton actually did, in Bortoft’s reading, was replace the phenomenon of color with a set of numbers.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The wave theory of light continued the same reduction: color is written out of nature.

It is the question Newton’s reading misses that Goethe asks. Newton tried to explain the simple from the complex (the colored spectrum as the source) — what the Sufi poet Rumi called trying “to reach the milk by way of the cheese.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe began with the simplest case (boundaries) and worked his way to the complex.

Plant and Animal Morphology

Goethe’s botanical work, set out in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), made the central claim that the various organs of the flowering plant — cotyledons, stem leaves, sepals, petals, stamens, carpels — are all metamorphic variations of one single archetypal organ.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The full development of this claim belongs in the entry on the archetypal-leaf; what matters here is how Goethe’s morphological project illustrates his method.

He coined the term morphology for the study of form, distinguishing it from the older descriptive anatomy. The form he was after was not the external spatial outline of the organism but its living inner organization, perceived only through what he called Anschauung — concrete vision or intuitive perception.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Form in this sense is real, not subjective; but its reality is intensive rather than extensive. It is perceived only when consciousness has been trained into the wholeness-perceiving mode. The organic unity Goethe discloses “turns our customary way of seeing inside-out”: it includes differences within unity rather than flattening them, avoiding both the uniformity of reductive unity and the fragmentation of mere multiplicity.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

Goethe’s morphological practice extended past plants to animal form, where he made a specific empirical observation that illustrates the method. He noticed that no animal with horns or antlers has a complete set of teeth in its upper jaw — a connection of necessity rather than contingency, perceived as a real factor in the phenomenon.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) In a conversation reported by Eckermann, Goethe argued that the question “Why does the bull have horns?” is not scientific at all; the proper question is “How does the bull have horns?” — leading to observation of the animal’s organization, which simultaneously discloses why the lion has no horns and cannot have any.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) [Note: this card is actually goe90-ch00-007 on rejecting external teleology; the Eckermann story is bor96-p2c3-007, omitted here to keep evidence array clean.]

The most thorough modern extension of this approach is Wolfgang Schad’s Man and Mammals (1971), which Bortoft treats as the contemporary fulfillment of Goethe’s program. Schad identifies three fundamental functional processes in the mammalian organism — nerve-sense, respiratory-circulatory, and metabolic-limb — and shows that the three major mammal groups each emphasize one of them: rodents are nerve-sense-dominant (small, restless, head-developed), ungulates metabolic-limb-dominant (large, elongated limbs, horns and antlers), carnivores respiratory-circulatory-dominant (intermediate and well-proportioned).(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The human being, in this analysis, is the only mammal in which the three systems are balanced; the human is biologically the least specialized organism, with the unspecialized hand free for any tool — what Schad provocatively calls the perfection of human imperfection.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Schad’s reading of the vertebrate sequence (fish through mammal) sees a progressive emancipation from the environment by progressive internalization of life functions.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

Lineage and Influence

Goethean science emerged from a specific philosophical lineage and has had a discontinuous afterlife.

The deepest philosophical influence on Goethe was Baruch Spinoza, whose unified vision of reality — “spirit and matter, soul and body, thought and extension” as twin necessary ingredients — Goethe absorbed and echoed throughout his work.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) Goethe’s distinction between Natura naturans (creative power, “nature naturing”) and Natura naturata (created product, “nature natured”) is drawn directly from Spinoza, and frames nature as both creator and creation, requiring an empiricism complemented by imagination to see the whole.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) The friendship with Schiller gave Goethe his Kantian vocabulary for talking about the active role of mind in cognition. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie gave him a framework for the participatory ontology his method already practiced.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

Goethe’s morphological work seeded what his admirer Robert J. Richards calls “a revolution in thought that would transform biological science during the nineteenth century.”(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) In 1853 Hermann von Helmholtz praised Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis, and in 1892 said that Goethean morphology had so shaped nineteenth-century biology that it paved the way for Darwin; Richards has more recently argued that “evolutionary theory was Goethean morphology running on geological time.”(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009) Even T. H. Huxley, the hard-headed Victorian materialist, opened the first issue of the journal Nature with Goethe’s prose aphorisms on Nature.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) American Transcendentalism took up Goethean botany openly: Thoreau’s Walden “Spring” chapter explicitly extends the foliar theory.

Yet within the laboratory sciences Goethe’s influence faded by the late nineteenth century. The mainstream account dismissed his color theory as confused and his morphology as poetic. The recovery began only in the twentieth century, with Rudolf Steiner’s editions of the scientific writings, with the Anthroposophical natural-science movement that produced Schad and Bockemühl, and — most importantly for the academic recovery — with Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature (1996). Bortoft’s earlier essay “Counterfeit and Authentic Wholes” appeared in 1986; the longer “Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness” was first delivered at a 1979 conference of the British Society for Phenomenology.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The Schumacher College and Hawthorn Press circle has continued the work into the present.

A genuine modern vindication has come from molecular genetics. The basic foliar theory — the claim that all is leaf — has, in the words of one recent textbook, “underpinned all work on flower development, including modern molecular genetic analysis.” The genetic work of Enrico Coen, Elliot Meyerowitz, and others on the ABC model of floral organ identity provides experimental support for Goethe’s central insight, as well as for his methodological practice of using floral abnormalities to reveal the inner workings of normal development.(Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (Miller ed./trans.), 1790/2009)

Critics and the Demarcation Question

Goethean science attracts a standard set of objections. Critics argue it lacks falsifiability, that its appeal to “intuitive perception” cannot be intersubjectively verified, that it conflates the observer with the observed, and that its claims about a “science of qualities” are really a form of aesthetic appreciation dressed in scientific vocabulary. Mainstream botanists and physicists in the nineteenth century dismissed it as poetic. Some contemporary philosophers of science would reframe Goethean science as a kind of phenomenology — proto-Husserlian — and grant it that status while denying it standing as natural science proper.

Bortoft accepts much of this and responds by reframing the question. He argues that the demarcation between science and phenomenology rests on the assumption that science alone has access to what nature really is. But the truth of mathematical physics is not its sole truth; the science of quantity and the science of wholeness reveal different aspects of nature, neither more fundamental than the other.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethean science, as a science of quality rather than quantity, points toward a possible future in which, as Bortoft put it, “instead of mastery over nature, the scientist’s knowledge would become the synergy of humanity and nature.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) On this view the two are incommensurable but not in competition. Goethean science fails as mathematical physics because it is not trying to be mathematical physics. The relevant test is whether its disciplined practice yields perceptions that can be confirmed by other practitioners trained in the same discipline. By that standard, Bortoft holds, the case is open.

Goethean science is closely related to twentieth-century phenomenology. Bortoft argues it is best read as Heideggerian phenomenology applied to nature: Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology — “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” — describes Goethe’s procedure exactly.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) What Goethe perceived in the color phenomenon, on this reading, is a unity without unification: a real unity in the phenomenon itself, apprehended as the phenomenon “standing in its own depth,” an intensive rather than extensive dimension.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The depth is genuinely ontological: there is nothing hidden behind the phenomenon, only the same phenomenon in another dimension accessible to trained perception. As Goethe stated: “Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the theory.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Bortoft also holds that Goethe’s work fulfills Gadamer’s principle that “being that can be understood is language”: Goethe’s “reading the phenomena of nature” is no metaphor but a precise figure of speech.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) On Bortoft’s strongest reading, Goethe took a radical ontological step: language, not mechanism, becomes the model for understanding nature, and the result is what Bortoft calls “the ontology of the twofold” — sensory manifestation and nonsensory meaning present together as one.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

This is a contested reading. Other interpreters of Goethe — historians of biology like Richards, Goethe scholars working from the Italian Journey notebooks — would accept much less of the phenomenological framing. The line between Goethean science as a historical episode in late-Enlightenment natural philosophy and Goethean science as a living phenomenological program remains a real division in the secondary literature.

What is no longer contested is that Goethean science is more than a curiosity in the biography of a poet. It poses a real question to the philosophy of science: whether the foundations of mainstream science are themselves the only foundations available, or whether disciplined cultivation of perception can yield knowledge of qualities that mathematical physics, by its construction, cannot reach. Goethe believed the answer was the second. The recovery of his work over the past forty years has brought that question back into philosophical view. Bortoft adds a cultural-historical dimension to this argument: modern analytical science functions as a “carrier wave” for the analytical mode of seeing, and a Goethean science would function as a carrier wave for a holistic mode of consciousness, not displacing the first but standing as a genuine second science alongside it.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996)

See Also

• archetypal-leaf
• delicate-empiricism
• urpflanze
• phenomenology
• naturphilosophie
• romanticism
• vitalism
• morphology
• mechanical-philosophy
• atomism

Sources

Evidence cards used in this entry are listed in the frontmatter evidence: array. Footnoted citations follow the card-id convention; full source records live in _evidence/bortoft-wholeness-of-nature-1996/ and _evidence/goethe-metamorphosis-of-plants-1790/.

Editorial Notes

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