Goethe's scientific Works (Translated) E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: David De Angelis
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In the years 1884-1897 Rudolf Steiner edited Goethe's scientific writings for the series "German National Literature" of the publisher Kürschner.

In Goethe's works, each individual experience is not an end in itself, but serves to substantiate a single, great idea: the unceasing harmonious becoming of the universe, revealed in this volume.

"The dominant influence in Steiner's life was that of Goethe. In 1833 he was invited to edit Goethe's scientific writings for the planned canonical edition, and his first publications, dating from 1866, are on Goethe. In 1890 he left Vienna and for six years went to work at the Goethe Archives in Weimar, strong not only in an orthodox culture that the following year would earn him a degree in philosophy at Rostock, but also in a very large body of general knowledge about all known disciplines."
James Webb

Leseprobe

GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC WORKS

Rudolf Steiner

Translation and 2022 edition by ©David De Angelis

All rights reserved

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

I. The genesis of the doctrine of metamorphosis

II. The genesis of Goethe's ideas on the formation of animals

III. The essence and significance of Goethe's writings on organic formation

IV. Conclusion on Goethe's morphological conceptions

V. Goethean knowledge

VI. Of the order in which Goethe's scientific works were arranged.

VII. From art to science

VIII. Goethean theory of knowledge

IX. Knowing and acting in the light of Goethean thought

1. - Methodology.

2. - Dogmatic method and immanent method

3. - System of science

4. - Of the limits of knowledge and hypothesis formation

5. - Ethical and historical sciences

X. Relationship between Goethean thought and other conceptions

XI. Goethe and mathematics

XII. Goethe's fundamental geological principle

XIII. Goethe's meteorological conceptions.

XIV. Goethe and scientific illusionism

XV. Goethe as thinker and scientist

1. - Goethe and modern natural science

2. - The "primordial phenomenon"

3. - The system of natural science

4. - The color theory system

5. - The concept of space according to Goethe

6. - Goethe, Newton and the physicists

XVI. Goethe versus atomism

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

XVII. Goethean worldview in the poet's "Prose Sayings"

INTRODUCTION

On Aug. 18, 1787, Goethe wrote from Italy to Knebel: "After what I have seen of plants and fishes, near Naples and in Sicily, I would be very tempted, if I were ten years younger, to make a journey to India, not already to discover new things, but to contemplate in my own way those already discovered." In these words is indicated the point of view from which we must consider Goethe's scientific works. In his case it is never the discovery of new facts, but the adoption of a new point of view, a certain way of observing nature. It is true that Goethe made a number of important single discoveries, such as that of the intermaxillary bone and the vertebral theory of the skull, in osteology, and, in the field of botany, that of the identity of all plant organs with the caulinaria leaf; etc. But as the animating breath of these particulars, we must consider a grandiose conception of nature, by which they are all supported; and above all we must see in the theory of organisms a grandiose discovery, such as to overshadow everything else: that of the essence of the organism itself. Goethe has set forth the principle by which an organism is that which it manifests to us of itself, the causes of which the phenomena of life appear to us the consequence, and all the questions of principle which in this connection we must raise [1] This, in regard to the organic sciences, is, from the beginning, the goal of his every effort, in the pursuit of which the above-mentioned particulars almost imposed themselves upon him. He had to find them, if he did not want to be impeded in his further work. Before him, natural science did not know the essence of the phenomena of life, and studied organisms simply according to the composition of parts and external characters, as one studies even inorganic objects: therefore it was often led to misinterpret the particulars, and to place them in a false light. Of course, from the particulars as such, such an error is undetectable; we recognize it only when we understand the organism; for the particulars, considered in isolation, do not carry their explanatory principle in themselves. Only the nature of the whole explains them, for it is the whole that gives them essence and meaning. Only when Goethe had unveiled the nature of the whole did he detect those misinterpretations; they were irreconcilable with his theory of living beings, indeed contradicted them. If he wanted to proceed his way, he had to eliminate such preconceptions; this occurred in the case of the intermaxillary bone. Unknown to older natural science were certain facts that acquire value and interest only for those in possession of a theory such as that of the vertebral nature of cranial bones. Every such obstacle had to be removed by means of individual experiences; but in Goethe these individual experiences never appear to us as an end in themselves; e.g. if they are always made to corroborate a great idea, to confirm the fundamental discovery. It is undeniable that, either sooner or later, Goethe's contemporaries came to the same observations, and that today they would probably all have been known even without Goethe's efforts; but it is even more undeniable that his great discovery, embracing the whole of organic nature, has not hitherto been expounded by anyone else independently of him and in as perfect a manner; indeed, to this day we lack even an evaluation of that discovery that is even remotely adequate to its importance [2] After all, it seems indifferent whether a fact was discovered by Goethe or merely rediscovered: the fact acquires its true significance only by the way he fits it into his own conception of nature. This is what had hitherto gone undetected. Too much emphasis was placed on those particular facts, thus provoking controversy. Often, it is true, reference was made to Goethe's belief in the coherence of nature, but without considering that by this one was pointing out only a quite secondary and insignificant feature of Goethe's conceptions, and that, e.g., in the science of organisms, the most important thing is to show what is the nature of that which preserves such coherence. If, in this regard, type is mentioned, it is necessary to indicate what the essence of type consists in according to Goethe. The most significant element in the metamorphosis of plants is not, for example, the discovery of the single fact that leaf, calyx, chord, etc., are identical organs, but rather the grandiose construction of thought that ensues, of a living complex of interacting formative laws which by its own force determines the particulars, the individual stages of development. The greatness of this thought, which Goethe later tried to extend to the animal world as well, becomes apparent to us only if we try to make it live in us, if we undertake to rethink it ourselves. We then realize that it is the nature of the plant itself, translated into an idea, which lives in our spirit as it lives in the object; we also realize that in this way we represent to ourselves a living organism down to its tiniest particles, and not a dead, definite object, but rather something in the process of development, a becoming in incessant restlessness. While in the following pages we shall attempt to expound in detail what has been only hinted at here, the true relationship of Goethe's conception of nature to that of our time, and in particular to the theory of evolution in its modern form, will also become apparent to us.

[1] Those who declare such an intent unattainable a priori will never come to an understanding of Goethe's conceptions of nature: those, on the other hand, who dispassionately undertake its study, without prejudging such a question, will resolve the latter in the affirmative when the study is completed. Some might be led to scruple by cede Goethe's own remarks, e.g., the following: "Without presuming to want to discover the first engines of natural actions, we would have directed our attention to the extrusion of those forces, by which the plant gradually transforms one and the same organ." But in Goethe, such statements are never directed against the generic possibility of knowing the essence of things; they are only the expression of his caution in judging the physical-mechanical conditions underlying the organism, since he well knew how such problems could be solved only with time.

[2] By this we do not in any way wish to claim that Goethe was never understood from this point of view. On the contrary: in the present edition we have several times had occasion to mention a number of scholars who present themselves to us as the continuers and elaborators of Goethean ideas, such as Voigt, Nees von Esnbeck, d'Alton (serior and junior), Schelver, C. G. Carus, Martius, etc., for example. But all these scholars built precisely their own systems on the basis of the conceptions set forth in Goethe's writings, and precisely of them it cannot be said that they would have arrived at their ideas even without Goethe; while on the other hand some of his contemporaries, such as Josephy in Cöttinga, discovered, independently of Goethe, the intermaxillary bone, and Oken the vertebral theory of the skull.

I. The genesis of the doctrine of metamorphosis

Following the genesis of Goethe's ideas around the formation of organisms, one is easily seized by doubt as to which part should be ascribed to the poet's youthful period, that is, the one before his arrival in Weimar. Goethe himself valued his scientific knowledge of that time very little: "I had no concept of what is properly called external nature, nor the slightest cognition of its so-called three kingdoms." Based on this statement, the beginning of Goethe's scientific thinking is generally considered to be after his arrival in Weimar. Yet it is necessary to go back still farther, if the whole spirit of his conceptions is not to be left unexplained: for already in his earliest youth the life-giving power is shown which guided his studies in the direction we are going to expound. When Goethe came to the University of Leipzig, there still reigned in natural studies that spirit, characteristic of a large part of the eighteenth century, which split all science into two extremes, and felt no need at all to reconcile them. On the one hand stood the philosophy of Christian Wolf (1679-1754), which moved in an entirely abstract sphere; on the other, the individual branches of science, which were lost in the outward description of infinite particulars, while they absolutely lacked the aspiration to search the world of their objects for a higher principle. That philosophy could not find the transition from the sphere of its general concepts, to the realm of immediate reality, of individual existence. There the most obvious things were treated with the utmost meticulousness; there it was taught that the thing is a quid having no contradiction in itself, that there are finite substances and infinite substances, etc.. But when with such general statements one approached the things themselves, in order to understand their action and life, one did not know where to begin, and was unable to apply those concepts to the world in which we live and want to understand. As for the things themselves, they were described somewhat arbitrarily, without principles, only according to appearance and external characteristics. They stood then facing each other without any possibility of reconciliation, a doctrine of principles, which lacked living content, loving adherence to immediate reality, and a science without principles, devoid of ideal content: each was fruitless to the other. Goethe's wholesome nature came to find itself equally repelled by these one-sidednesses, and, in contrasting them, representations developed in him which led him later to that fruitful conception of nature, in which idea and experience, in total interpenetration, vivify each other, and become a whole. Therefore, precisely the concept that less than any other could be grasped from those extreme points of view, namely, the concept of life, was the first to develop in Goethe A living being shows us, if we consider it according to its outward appearance, a quantity of details that appear to us as parts or organs of it. The description of such parts, their form, mutual position, size, etc., can form the subject of an extended treatment, and to this the second of the currents we have mentioned was devoted. In this way, however, one can also describe any mechanical compound of inorganic bodies. It was completely forgotten that in the organism one must keep an eye indeed on the fact that in it the outward manifestation is dominated by an inward principle, and that in each organ the whole acts. That outward appearance, the spatial contiguity of the parts, can be observed even after the destruction of life, for it still persists for some time. But what stands before us in a dead organism is in truth no longer an organism; the principle of it that interpenetrates all particulars has disappeared. To that way of observing things which destroys life in order to know life, Goethe contrasts in time the possibility and necessity of another, higher observation. We see this as early as in a letter from the Strasbourg period, dated July 14, 1770, where he speaks of a butterfly: "The poor beast trembles in the net, so stripped of the most beautiful colors; and even if one succeeds in catching it unharmed, in the end there it is, stiff and inanimate; the corpse is not the whole animal, it lacks something, it lacks a principal part which in this as in every other case is essential: life...." The words of Faust also flow from the same conception:

Who yearns to know

something living and to describe it,

Seeks from before to drive out the spirit;

So the parts he holds,

And he lacks, alas, only the essentials:

the spiritual nexus!

But Goethe, as was to be presumed given his nature, did not merely deny a conception of others, but sought to elaborate more and more of his own; and in the hints we possess of his thinking in the years 1769-1775, we often recognize the insights of his further works. Even then he elaborated the idea of a being in which each part vivifies the others and one principle interpenetrates all the particulars. In Faust it is said:

How everything is woven into a whole,

Each thing in the other works and lives,

And in the satyros:

As from the uncreated

Out came the entity first,

the power of light

resounded through the night,

beings all

pervaded deep inside,

because of lust

great copy germinated

and, hatched, the elements

with hunger one in the other

could spill over,

interpenetrating everything,

By everything permeated.

This entity is thought of in such a way that it is subject over time to constant transformations, but that, on all steps of transformations, it always manifests itself as unique, establishing itself as enduring, as stable in mutation. In the Satyros it is further said of it:

And he went up and down rotating

the primal entity

that everything in itself encompasses

And she is alone and eternal,

Always changing appearance,

Always the same to itself.

Compare with these words what Goethe wrote in 1807, as an introduction to his Theory of Metamorphosis: "But if we observe all forms, and particularly the organic, we shall never find anything lasting, quiescent and bounded; on the contrary, everything sways in perpetual motion." In that passage he contrasts this swaying, as a constant element, with the idea, that is, with a quid held still in experience only for a moment." It will be easily deduced from the quoted passage from Satyros that the foundation of morphological ideas had been laid by Goethe even before his arrival in Weimar.

But what should be kept in mind is that that idea of a living being is not immediately applied to a single organism, but that the whole universe is conceived of as a living being. It is true that the adoption of this view was fostered by the alchemical work done in collaboration with Miss von Klettenberg and the reading of Theophrastus Paracelsus after Goethe's return from Leipzig (1768-69). An attempt was made to stop in some experiment, to represent in some substance, that principle interpenetrating the whole universe. But this almost mystical way of contemplating the world represents only a passing episode in Goethe's evolution, and it soon gives way to a saner and more objective conception. Nevertheless, the vision of the universe as a great organism, hinted at in the above-mentioned passages from Faust and Satyros, persists until around 1780, as we shall see later in the essay on Nature. We encounter it again in Faust and precisely there where the Earth Spirit is presented as that vital principle that interpenetrates the organism-universe:

In the billows of life,

In the whirlwind of facts,

I ascend and descend,

I go weaving! Birth and death,

eternal sea,

operating alternately,

living by burning!

While such definite conceptions were developing in Goethe's spirit, a book came into his hands in Strasbourg in which a conception of the world exactly opposite to his own was advocated: the Système de la nature of Holbach. If until then Goethe had found to be criticized only the fact that living things were described as a mechanical agglomeration of individual things, now in Holbach there appeared to him a philosopher who really regarded living things as a mechanism. What there arose only from the inability to know life at its root, here led to a dogma that killed life itself. Goethe speaks of it thus in Poetry and Truth: "Should a matter exist from eternity, and from eternity be in motion, and with such motion should it without fail produce, left and right and in every direction, the infinite phenomena of existence? We might perhaps even have accepted all this, if from his moving matter the author had really caused the world to arise before our eyes. But of nature he knows as much as we do: for, having planted there some general concepts, he immediately abandons them, in order to transform that which is superior to nature, (or which at least appears, as a superior nature, in nature), into a material, heavy, moving nature; yes, but without direction, nor is it form: and with this he thinks he has taken a great step." Goethe could not find in this anything but "matter in motion." In contrast to these concepts, his own ideas about nature were becoming clearer and clearer. We find them set forth in full in the essay La Natura, written around i 780: and since in it we find coordinated all of Goethe's ideas about nature, which before are found only hinted at here and there, that essay has a very special importance. We encounter there the idea of a being in constant change and yet always identical with itself: "Everything is new, and yet always the same." "It (nature) is eternally transforming, and there is not a moment's stop in it," but "its laws are immutable." We shall see later how Goethe sought, in the infinity of plant forms, the primordial plant one. And we also find this thought hinted at even then: "Each of the works of nature has its own essence, each of its phenomena its own particular concept, and yet everything is one." Thus, even the position he later took when confronted with exceptional cases is clearly outlined even then, namely, that of not considering them simply as errors of formation, but of explaining them according to laws of nature: "Even the most unnatural thing is nature" and "its exceptions are rare." We have seen that Goethe, even before coming to Weimar, had formed a certain concept of the organism. Indeed, the essay cited above, although composed much later, contains for the most part opinions from his earlier periods. He had not yet applied that concept to a particular species of natural objects, to individual beings: the immediate reality of the concrete world of living beings was needed for that. The reflection of nature, passed through the human spirit, was certainly not the element capable of stimulating Goethe. Botanical conversations with the courtly adviser Ludwig in Leipzig remained just as devoid of profound effect as convivial ones with medical friends in Strasbourg. In regard to scientific studies, the young Goethe appears to us precisely yearning for the freshness of direct contemplation of nature. like Faust, who expresses his nostalgia in words:

Ah, if I could by mountainous peaks

Go, O moon, to your dear light,

Flying with spirits for caves,

In your twilight hovering over the meadows!