| Physiognomies
Rudolf Steiner |
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| Nevertheless these joking caricatures are evidence of the drawer’s sharp powers of observation and for his intuitive understanding of inner nature, even in its distortion. What the soul comprehends becomes subtle intuition and playfully converts it to form. |
| Physiognomies
Rudolf Steiner |
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| 1. Goethean Science: The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development
Translated by William Lindemann Rudolf Steiner |
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| [ 4 ] This is how matters stood when Goethe undertook to devote himself to the organic sciences. But he entered into these studies after preparing himself for them in a most appropriate way, through repeated readings of the philosopher Spinoza. |
| In 1796 attempts were made to grow plants in darkness and under coloured glass. Later on, the metamorphosis of insects was also investigated. [ 34 ] A further stimulus came from the philologist F.A. |
| Also, Goethe's Metamorphosis had already been translated into French by F. de Gingins-Lassaraz. Under such conditions, Goethe could definitely hope that a translation of his botanical writings into French, carried out with his collaboration, would not fall on barren ground. |
| 1. Goethean Science: The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development
Translated by William Lindemann Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
[ 1 ] The great significance of Goethe's morphological works is to be sought in the fact that in them the theoretical basis and method for studying organic entities are established, and this is a scientific deed of the first order. [ 2 ] If one is to do justice to this rightly, one must above all bear in mind the great difference existing between the phenomena of inorganic nature and those of organic nature. A phenomenon of the first kind, for example, is the impact of two elastic balls upon one another. If one ball is at rest and the other ball strikes it from a certain direction and with a certain velocity, then the first ball is likewise given a certain direction and velocity. If it is a matter then of comprehending such a phenomenon, this can be achieved only by our transforming into concepts what is directly there for the senses. We would succeed in this to the extent that nothing of a sense-perceptibly real nature remained that we had not permeated conceptually. We see one ball approach and strike the other, which then goes on moving. We have comprehended this phenomenon when, from the mass, direction, and velocity of the first ball, and from the mass of the second, we can determine the direction and velocity of the second ball; when we see that under the given conditions this phenomenon must necessarily occur. But this means nothing other than: that which offers itself to our senses must appear as a necessary consequence of what we have to postulate ideally beforehand. If this is the case, then we can say that concept and phenomenon coincide. There is nothing in the concept that is not also in the phenomenon, and nothing in the phenomenon that is not also in the concept. Now we must take a closer look into those relationships out of which a phenomenon of inorganic nature occurs as a necessary consequence. The important fact arises here that the sense-perceptible processes of inorganic nature are determined by factors that likewise belong to the sense world. In our example, mass, velocity, and direction—i.e., exclusively factors belonging to the sense world—come into consideration. Nothing further arises as a determining factor for the phenomenon. It is only the directly sense-perceptible factors that determine one another. A conceptual grasp of such processes is therefore nothing other than a tracing of something sense-perceptibly real back to something sense-perceptibly real. Spatial-temporal relationships, mass, weight, or sense-perceptible forces such as light or warmth call forth phenomena that themselves belong in the same category. A body is heated and increases thereby in volume; the heating and the expanding both belong to the sense world; both the cause and the effect do so. We therefore do not need to go outside the sense world at all in order to comprehend such processes. We merely trace, within the sense world, one phenomenon back to another. When we therefore explain such a phenomenon, i.e., want to permeate it conceptually, we do not need to take up into the concept any elements other than those which are observably perceptible to our senses. We can observe everything that we want to comprehend. And the congruence of perception (phenomenon) and concept consists in this. Nothing in the processes remains obscure to us, because we know the relationships from which they follow. With this, we have elaborated upon the character of inorganic nature and have shown at the same time to what extent we can explain inorganic nature out of itself, without going out of or beyond it. Now one has never doubted this explainability, ever since one first began to think about the nature of these things. One has not, to be sure, always gone through the above train of thought from which the possibility of a congruence of concept and perception follows; but still one has never hesitated to explain phenomena out of the nature of their own being in the way indicated.31 [ 3 ] But matters were different, up until Goethe, with respect to the phenomena of the organic world. In the case of an organism, sense-perceptible factors appear—form, size, colour, warmth conditions of an organ, for example—that are not determined by factors of the same kind. One cannot say of the plant, for example, that the size, form, location, etc., of the roots determine the sense-perceptible factors of the leaf or blossom. A body for which this were the case would not be an organism but rather a machine. It must be admitted that all the sense-perceptible factors of a living being do not manifest as a result of other sense-perceptible factors,32 as is the case with inorganic nature. On the contrary, in an organism, all sense-perceptible qualities manifest as the result of a factor that is no longer sense-perceptible. They manifest as the result of a higher unity hovering over the sense-perceptible processes. It is not the shape of the root which determines that of the trunk, nor the trunk's shape which determines that of the leaf, and so on, rather, all these forms are determined by something standing over them that itself is not again a form observable by the senses; these forms do exist for one another, but not as a result of one another. They do not mutually determine one another, but rather are all determined by something else. Here we cannot trace what we perceive with our senses back to other sense-perceptible factors; we must take up, into the concept of the processes, elements that do not belong to the world of the senses; we must go out of and beyond the sense world. Observation no longer suffices; we must grasp the unity conceptually if we want to explain the phenomena. Because of this, however, a separation occurs between observation and concept; they no longer seem to coincide with each other; the concept hovers over what is observed. It becomes difficult to see the connection. Whereas in inorganic nature concept and reality were one, here they seem to diverge and actually to belong to two different worlds. The observation that offers itself directly to the senses no longer seems to bear within itself its own basis, its own being. The object does not seem explainable out of itself, but rather from something else. Because the object appears in a way not governed by the laws of the sense world, but is there for the senses nevertheless, appears to the senses, it is then as though we stood here before an insoluble contradiction in nature, as though a chasm existed between inorganic phenomena, which are comprehensible through themselves, and organic beings, in which an intrusion into the laws of nature occurs, in which universally valid laws seem suddenly to be broken. Up until Goethe, in fact, science generally considered this chasm to exist; he was the first to succeed in speaking the word that solved the riddle. Before him, one thought that only inorganic nature was explainable out of itself; man's ability to know ceases when confronted by organic nature. One can best estimate the greatness of the deed Goethe accomplished when one considers that the great reformer of philosophy in recent time, Kant, not only shared completely in that old error, but even sought, in fact, to find a scientific foundation for the view that the human spirit will never succeed in explaining organic entities. He saw the possibility, to be sure, of an intellect—of an intellectus archetypus, of an intuitive intellect—to which it would be granted to see into the relationship of concept and reality in organic beings just as it does in inorganic things; only, he denied to man himself the possibility of any such intellect (Verstand).33 For Kant, it is supposedly characteristic of the human intellect that it can think of the unity, the concept of a thing, only as resulting from the interaction of its parts—as an analytical generalization gained by a process of abstraction—but not in such a way that each individual part manifests as the outflow of a definite concrete (synthetical) unity, of a concept in an intuitive form. For this reason, it is also supposedly impossible for the intellect to explain organic nature, because organic nature would have to be thought of, indeed, as working from the whole into the parts. Kant says about this: “It is characteristic of our intellect, therefore, with respect to our power of judgment, that it does not determine knowledge through itself, does not determine what is particular through what is general, and that therefore the particular cannot be traced back to the general.”34 According to this, we would therefore have to renounce all knowledge, with regard to organic entities, of the necessary connection between the idea of the whole—which can only be thought—and what manifests to our senses in space and time. According to Kant, we must limit ourselves to the recognition that such a connection exists; but the logical challenge to know how the general thought, the idea, steps out of itself and manifests itself as sense-perceptible reality, this supposedly cannot be fulfilled with respect to organisms. Rather we would have to assume that concept and reality confront each other here without mediation; and that some influence lying outside them both creates them in somewhat the same way a person, according to an idea he has thought up, constructs some composite thing or other—a machine, for example. In this way the possibility of an explanation of the world of organisms was denied, its impossibility in fact seemingly proven. [ 4 ] This is how matters stood when Goethe undertook to devote himself to the organic sciences. But he entered into these studies after preparing himself for them in a most appropriate way, through repeated readings of the philosopher Spinoza. [ 5 ] Goethe took up Spinoza for the first time in the spring of 1774. In Poetry and Truth, he says of this, his first acquaintance with the philosopher: “That is, after vainly looking around in the whole world for a means of educating my strange being, I finally happened upon the Ethics of this man.” In the summer of the same year, Goethe met with Friedrich Jacobi. The latter, who had come more thoroughly to terms with Spinoza—as his letters of 1785 about Spinoza's teachings show—was entirely qualified to lead Goethe more deeply into the essential nature of the philosopher. Spinoza was also very much discussed at that time, for in Goethe “everything was still in its first effects and counter-effects, fermenting and seething.” Somewhat later, he found a book in his father's library whose author heatedly opposed Spinoza, even distorting him, in fact, into a total caricature. This gave Goethe the stimulus to occupy himself seriously once more with the profound thinker. In Spinoza's writings he found elucidation on the deepest scientific questions that he was then capable of raising. In 1784, the poet reads Spinoza with Frau von Stein. On November 19, 1784, he writes to her: “I am bringing Spinoza along in Latin, in which everything is much clearer ...” The effect of this philosopher upon Goethe was now immense. Goethe himself was always clear about this. In 1816, he writes to Zelter: “Except for Shakespeare and Spinoza, I do not know that any departed soul has had such an effect upon me (as Linnaeus).” He regards Shakespeare and Spinoza therefore as the two spirits who have exerted the greatest influence on him. The manner in which this influence now manifested itself with respect to his studies of organic development becomes clearest to us if we consider a statement about Lavater from Goethe's Italian Journey; Lavater was also in fact a proponent of the view generally prevalent then that something living can arise only through an influence that does not lie in the nature of the entity itself, through a violation of the general laws of nature. Goethe then wrote the following words about this: “Recently I found, in a pitiful, apostolically monkish declamation of the Zürich prophet, the nonsensical words that everything that has life lives by something outside itself. Or it sounded something like that. Now a missionary can write down something like that, and when he is revising it no good spirit tugs at his sleeve.” Now that is expressed entirely in the spirit of Spinoza. Spinoza makes a distinction between three kinds of knowledge. The first kind is that in which upon hearing or reading certain words we recall certain things and form certain mental pictures of these things which are similar to the pictures by which we represent the things to ourselves pictorially. The second kind of knowledge is that in which, out of sufficient mental pictures of the characteristics of things, we form general concepts for ourselves. The third kind of knowledge, however, is that in which we advance from an adequate picture of the real being of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the being of things. Spinoza calls this kind of knowledge scientia intuitiva, knowledge in beholding. This last, the highest kind of knowledge, is that for which Goethe strove. One must above all be clear about what Spinoza meant by this The things are to be known in such a way that we recognize within their being certain attributes of God. Spinoza's God is the idea-content of the world, the driving principle that supports and carries everything. Now one can picture this either in such a way that one takes this principle to be an independent being—existing by itself, separated off from finite beings—that has these finite things outside itself, governs them, and causes them to interact. Or, on the other hand, one can picture this being as having merged into finite things in such a way that it is no longer over and outside them, but rather now exists only within them. This view in no way denies that primal principle; it acknowledges it entirely; only, it regards this principle as having been poured out into the world. The first view regards the finite world as a manifestation of the infinite, but this infinite remains with its own being intact; it relinquishes nothing of itself. It does not go out of itself; it remains what it was before it manifested itself. The second view also regards the finite world as a manifestation of the infinite, only it assumes that this infinite, in becoming manifest, has gone entirely out of itself, has laid itself, its own being and life, into its creation in such a way that it now exists only within this creation. Now since our activity of knowing is obviously a becoming aware of the essential being of things, and since this being can after all consist only in the involvement a finite being has in the primal principle of all things, our activity of knowing must then mean a becoming aware of that infinite within the things.35 Now, as we have described above, it was readily assumed, before Goethe, with respect to inorganic nature, that one could explain it out of itself, that it carries within itself its own substantiation and essential being, but that this is not the case with organic nature. Here one could not know, within an object itself, that essential being that manifests itself within the object. One therefore assumed this being to be outside the object. In short: one explained organic nature according to the first view and inorganic nature according to the second. As we have seen, Spinoza had proven the necessity for a unified knowledge. He was too much the philosopher to have been able also to extend this theoretical requirement out over the specialized area of organic science. It remained for Goethe to do this now. Not only his statement about Spinoza quoted above, but also numerous others show us that Goethe adhered decisively to Spinoza's views. In Poetry and Truth: “Nature works according to laws that are eternal, necessary, and so divine that even the Divinity Himself could change nothing about them.” And, in connection with Jacobi's book, Of Divine Things and their Manifestation,36 Goethe remarks: “How could the book of such a beloved friend be welcome to me when I had to see developed in it the thesis that nature conceals God. With my pure, deep, inborn, and trained way of looking at things, which had taught me absolutely to see God in nature, nature in God, such that this way of picturing things constituted the foundation of my whole existence, would not such a peculiar, one-sidedly limited statement estrange me forever in spirit from this most noble man whose heart I revered and loved?” Goethe was completely conscious of the great step he was taking in science; he recognized that by breaking down the barriers between inorganic and organic nature and by consistently carrying through on Spinoza's way of thinking, he was giving science a significant turn. We find his knowledge of this fact expressed in his essay Power to Judge in Beholding (Anschauende Urteilskraft). After he had found, in the Critique of Judgment, the Kantian establishment of the in ability of the human intellect to explain an organism, as we described above, Goethe expresses his opposition to it in this way: “To be sure, the author (Kant) seems here to point to a divine intellect; but when we, in fact, lift ourselves in the moral sphere into a higher region through belief in God, virtue, and immortality and mean to draw near to the primal being, so likewise, in the intellectual realm, it could very well be the case that we would make ourselves worthy, through beholding an ever-creating nature, of participating spiritually in its productions. Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more could keep me then from courageously under taking the adventure of reason, as the old man of Königsberg himself calls it.” [ 6 ] The essential thing about a process of inorganic nature—a process belonging merely to the sense world, in other words—consists in the fact that it is caused and determined by another process which likewise belongs only to the sense world. Let us assume now that the causal process consists of the elements m, d, and v (mass, direction, and velocity of a moving elastic ball) and that the resulting process consists of the elements m', d', and v'; then what m, d, and v are will always determine what m', d', and v' are. If I now want to comprehend the process, I must represent the whole process, consisting of cause and effect, in one common concept. But this concept is not of such a sort that it could lie within the process itself and determine the process. The concept now brings both processes together into one common expression: It does not cause and determine. Only the objects of the sense world determine each other. The elements m, d, and v are elements that are also perceptible to the external senses. The concept appears there only in order to serve man's spirit as a means of drawing things together; it expresses something that is not ideally, conceptually real, but rather is sense-perceptibly real. And that something which it expresses is a sense-perceptible object. Knowledge of inorganic nature is based upon the possibility of grasping the outer world through the senses and of expressing its interactions through concepts. Kant saw the possibility of knowing things in this way as the only way man has. He called this thinking “discursive.” What we want to know is an external perception; the concept, the unity that draws things together, is merely a means. But if we wanted to know organic nature, we would then have to consider the ideal element, the conceptual factor, not as something that expresses or signifies something else, but rather we would have to know the ideal element as such; it would have to have a content of its own, stemming from itself, and not from the spatial-temporal world of the senses. That unity which, in inorganic nature, man's spirit merely abstracts from the world, would have to build upon itself, would have to develop itself out of its own self, would have to be fashioned in accordance with its own being and not according to the influences of other objects. Man is supposedly denied the ability to apprehend such an entity as this that develops itself out of itself and that manifests itself out of its own power. Now what is necessary for such an apprehension? A power of judgment that can impart to a thought yet another substance (Stoff) than one merely taken up by the outer senses, a power of judgment that can apprehend not merely what is sense-perceptible, but also what is purely ideal, by itself, separated from the sense world. Now one can call a concept that is not taken from the sense world by abstraction, but rather has a content flowing out of itself and only out of itself, an “intuitive concept” and knowledge of this concept an “intuitive” one. What follows from this is clear: An organism can be apprehended only in an intuitive concept. Goethe shows, through what he does, that it is granted to the human being to know in this way. [ 7 ] What prevails in the inorganic world is the interaction of the parts of a series of phenomena; it is their reciprocal determining of each other. This is not the case in the organic world. There, one part of an entity does not determine the other, but rather the whole (the idea), out of itself and in accordance with its own being, determines each individual part. One can follow Goethe in calling this self-determining whole an “entelechy.” An entelechy is therefore a power that, out of itself, calls itself into existence. What comes into manifestation also has a sense-perceptible existence, but this is determined by that entelechical principle. From this also arises the seeming contradiction. An organism determines itself out of itself, fashions its characteristics in accordance with a presupposed principle, and yet it is sense-perceptibly real. It has therefore arrived at its sense-perceptible reality in a completely different way than the other objects of the sense world; thus it seems to have arisen in an unnatural way. But it is also entirely explainable that an organism, in its externality, is just as susceptible to the influences of the sense world as is any other body. The stone falling from a roof can strike a living entity just as well as an inorganic object. An organism is connected with the outer world through its intake of nourishment, etc.; all the physical circumstances of the outer world affect it. Of course this can also occur only insofar as the organism is an object of the sense world, a spatial-temporal object. This object of the outer world then, this entelechical principle that has come into existence, is the outer manifestation of the organism. But since the organism is subject not only to its own laws of development but also to the conditions of the outer world, since it is not only what it should be in accordance with the being of the self-determining entelechical principle, but also is what other dependencies and influences have made it, therefore the organism never seems, as it were, to accord fully with itself, never seems obedient merely to its own being. Here human reason enters and forms for itself, in idea, an organism that is not in accordance with the influences of the outer world, but rather corresponds only to that entelechical principle. Every coincidental influence that has nothing to do with the organism as such falls away entirely here. This idea, now, that corresponds purely to what is organic in the organism is the idea of the archetypal organism; it is Goethe's typus. From this one can also see the great justification for this idea of the typus. This idea is not merely an intellectual concept; it is what is truly organic in every organism, without which an organism would not be one. This idea is, in fact, more real than any individual real organism, because it manifests itself in every organism. It also expresses the essential nature of an organism more fully, more purely than any individual, particular organism. It is acquired in an essentially different way than the concept of an inorganic process. This latter is drawn from, abstracted from, reality; it is not at work within reality; the idea of the organism, however, is active, is at work as entelechy within the organism; it is, in the form grasped by our reason, only the being of the entelechy itself. This idea does not draw the experience together; it brings about what is to be experienced. Goethe expresses this in the following words: “Concept is summation, idea is result of experience; to find the sum requires intellect; to grasp the result requires reason” (Aphorisms in Prose). This explains that kind of reality which belongs to the Goethean archetypal organism (archetypal plant or archetypal animal). This Goethean method is clearly the only possible one by which to penetrate into the essential nature of the world of organisms. [ 8 ] With respect to the inorganic, the fact should be regarded as essential that the phenomenon, in all its manifoldness, is not identical with the lawfulness that explains it, but rather points, merely, to this lawfulness as to something external to it. The observation (the material element of knowledge, given us by the outer senses) and the concept (the formal element, by which we recognize the observation as necessitated) confront each other as two elements that objectively require each other, it is true; but they do so in such a way that the concept does not lie within the individual parts of a series of phenomena themselves but rather within a relationship of these parts to each other. This relationship, which brings the manifoldness into a unified whole, is founded within the individual parts of the given, but as a whole (as a unity) it does not come to real, concrete manifestation. Only the parts of this relationship come to outer existence—in the object. The unity, the concept, first comes to manifestation as such within our intellect. The intellect has the task of drawing together the manifoldness of the phenomenon; it relates itself to the manifoldness as its sum. We have to do here with a duality: with the manifold thing that we observe, and with the unity that we think. In organic nature the parts of the manifoldness of an entity do not stand in such an external relationship to each other. The unity comes into reality in the observed entity simultaneously with the manifoldness, as something identical with the manifoldness. The relationship of the individual parts of a phenomenal whole (an organism) has become a real one. It no longer comes to concrete manifestation merely within our intellect, but rather within the object itself, and in the object it brings forth the manifoldness out of itself. The concept does not have the role merely of summation, of being a combiner that has its object outside itself; the concept has become completely one with the object. What we observe is no longer different from that by which we think the observed; we are observing the concept as the idea itself. Therefore, Goethe calls the ability by which we comprehend organic nature the power to judge in beholding (Anschauende Urteilskraft). What explains (the formal element of knowledge, the concept) and what is explained (the material, the beheld) are identical. The idea by which we grasp the organic is therefore essentially different from the concept by which we explain the inorganic; the idea does not merely draw together—like a sum—a given manifoldness, but rather sets forth its own content out of itself. The idea is the result of the given (of experience), is concrete manifestation. Herein lies the reason why in inorganic natural science we speak of laws (natural laws) and explain the facts by them, and in organic nature, on the other hand, we do this by types. The law is not one and the same with the manifoldness of the observed that the law governs; the law stands over it; in the typus, however, the ideal element and the real element have become a unity; the manifoldness can be explained only as going forth from a point of the whole, the whole that is identical with the manifoldness. [ 9 ] In Goethe's knowledge of this relationship between the science of the inorganic and that of the organic lies what is so significant in his research. One is in error, therefore, when today one often explains his research as a forerunner of that monism which wants to found a unified view of nature—comprising both the organic and the inorganic—by endeavoring to trace what is organic back to the same laws (mechanical-physical categories and laws of nature) by which the inorganic is determined. We have seen how Goethe conceives a monistic view to be. The way he explains the organic is essentially different from the way he proceeds with respect to the inorganic. He wants to be sure that the mechanistic way of explaining things is strictly avoided with respect to what is of a higher nature (see his Aphorisms in Prose). He criticizes Kieser and Link for wanting to trace organic phenomena back to inorganic activity. [ 10 ] What gave rise to the erroneous view about Goethe indicated above was the relationship into which he brought himself to Kant with respect to the possibility of a knowledge of organic nature. But when Kant asserts that our intellect is not able to explain organic nature, he certainly does not mean by this that organic nature rests upon mechanical lawfulness and that he is only unable to grasp it as resulting from mechanical-physical categories. For Kant, the reason for this inability lies, rather, precisely in the fact that our intellect can explain only mechanical-physical things and that the being of the organism is not of this nature. Were it so, then the intellect, by virtue of the categories at its command, could very well grasp its being. It is definitely not Goethe's thought now to explain the organic world as a mechanism in spite of Kant; but rather he maintains that we by no means lack the ability to know that higher kind of nature's working which establishes the essential being of the organic. [ 11 ] As we consider what has just been said, we are confronted right away by an essential difference between inorganic and organic nature. Since in inorganic nature any process whatever can cause another, and this in turn yet another, and so on, the sequence of occurrences seems nowhere to be a closed one. Everything is in continuous interaction, without any one particular group of objects being able to close itself off from the effects of others. The sequences of inorganic activity have nowhere a beginning nor an end; there is only a chance connection between one happening and the next. If a stone falls to earth, the effect it produces depends upon the chance form of the object on which it falls. It is a different matter now with an organism. Here the unity is primary. The entelechy, built upon itself, comprises a number of sense-perceptible developmental forms of which one must be the first and another the last; in which one form can always only follow the other in an altogether definite way. The ideal unity puts forth out of itself a series of sense-perceptible organs in a certain sequence in time and in a particular spatial relationship, and closes itself off in an altogether definite way from the rest of nature. It puts forth its various states out of itself. These can therefore also be grasped only when one studies the development of successive states as they emerge from an ideal unity; i.e., an organic entity can be understood only in its becoming, in its developing. An inorganic body is closed off, rigid, can only be moved from outside, is inwardly immobile. An organism is restlessness within itself, ever transforming it self from within, changing, producing metamorphoses. The following statements of Goethe refer to this: “Reason is oriented toward what is becoming, the intellect toward what has become; the former does not bother itself about purpose (wozu?); the latter does not ask about origin (woher?). Reason rejoices in development; intellect wishes to hold everything fixed in order to use it” (Aphorisms in Prose) and: “Reason has rulership only over what is living; the world that has already come about, with which geognosy concerns itself, is dead.” (Ibid.) [ 12 ] The organism confronts us in nature in two main forms: as plant and as animal, in a different way in each. The plant differs from the animal in its lack of any real inner life. This last manifests in the animal as sensation, arbitrary movement, etc. The plant has no such soul principle. It still consists entirely in its externality, in its form. By determining its life, as it were, out of one point, that entelechical principle confronts us in the plant in such a way that all its individual organs are formed according to the same developmental principle. The entelechy manifests here as the developmental force of the individual organs. These last are all fashioned according to one and the same developmental type; they manifest as modifications of one basic organ, as a repetition of this organ at different levels of development. What makes the plant into a plant, a certain form-creating force, is at work in every organ in the same way. Every organ appears therefore as identical to all the others and also to the whole plant. Goethe expresses this as follows: “I have realized, namely, that in that organ of the plant which we are usually accustomed to address as ‘leaf,’ the true Proteus lies hidden that can conceal and reveal itself in every formation. Anyway you look at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ (Keim) that one cannot think the one without the other.” (Italian Journey) Thus the plant appears, as it were, composed of nothing but individual plants, as a complex individual consisting in turn of simpler ones. The development of the plant progresses therefore from level to level and forms organs; each organ is identical to every other, i.e., similar in formative principle, different in appearance. The inner unity spreads itself out, as it were, in the plant; it expresses itself in manifoldness, loses itself in this manifoldness in such a way that it does not gain—as the animal does, as we will see later—a concrete existence which is endowed with a certain independence and which, as a center of life, confronts the manifoldness of the organs and uses them as mediators with the outer world. [ 13 ] The question now arises: What brings about that difference in the appearance of plant organs which, according to their inner principle, are identical? How is it possible for developmental laws that all work according to one formative principle to bring forth at one time a leaf and at another a petal? In the case of plant life, which lies entirely in the realm of the external, this differentiation can also be based only upon external, i.e., spatial, factors. Goethe regards an alternating expansion and contraction as just such external factors. As the entelechical principle of plant life, working out from one point, comes into existence, it manifests itself as something spatial; the formative forces work in space. They create organs with definite spatial forms. Now these forces either concentrate themselves, they strive to come together, as it were, into one single point (this is the stage of contraction); or they spread themselves out, unfold themselves, seek in a certain way to distance themselves from each other (this is the stage of expansion). In the whole life of the plant, three expansions alternate with three contractions. Everything that enters as differentiation into the plant's formative forces which in their essential nature are identical—stems from this alternating expansion and contraction. At first the whole plant, in all its potential, rests, drawn together into one point, in the  [ 14 ] seed (a). It then comes forth and unfolds itself, spreads itself out in leaf-formation (c). The formative forces thrust themselves apart more and more; therefore the lower leaves appear still raw, compact (cc'); the further up the stem they are, the more ribbed and indented they become. What formerly was still pressing together now separates (leaf d and e). What earlier stood at successive intervals (zz') from each other appears again in one point of the stem (w) in the calyx (f). This is the second contraction. In the corolla, an unfolding, a spreading out, occurs again. Compared with the sepals, the petals (g) are finer and more delicate, which can only be due to a lesser intensity at one point, i.e., be due to a greater extension of the formative forces. The next contraction occurs in the reproductive organs (stamens (h), and pistil (i)), after which a new expansion takes place in the fruiting (k). In the seed (a) that emerges from the fruit, the whole being of the plant again appears contracted to a point.37 [ 15 ] The whole plant represents only an unfolding, a realization, of what rests in the bud or in the seed as potentiality. Bud and seed need only the appropriate external influences in order to become fully developed plant forms. The only difference between bud and seed is that the latter has the earth directly as the basis of its unfolding, whereas the former generally represents a plant formation upon the plant itself. The seed represents a plant individuality of a higher kind, or, if you will, a whole cycle of plant forms. With the forming of every bud, the plant begins a new stage of its life, as it were; it regenerates itself, concentrates its forces in order to unfold them again anew. The forming of a bud is therefore an interruption of vegetation. The plant's life can contract itself into a bud when the conditions for actual real life are lacking, in order then to unfold itself anew when such conditions do occur. The interruption of vegetation in winter is based on this. Goethe says about this: “It is very interesting to observe how a vegetation works that is actively continued and uninterrupted by severe cold; here there are no buds, and one only learns now to comprehend what a bud is.”38 What lies hidden in the bud where we are is open to the day there; what lies within the bud, therefore, is true plant life; only the conditions for its unfolding are lacking. [ 16 ] Goethe's concept of alternating expansion and contraction has met with especially strong opposition. All the attacks on it, however, originate from a misunderstanding. One believes that these concepts could be valid only if a physical cause could be found for them, only if one could demonstrate a way of working of the laws at work in the plant from which such expansion and contraction could proceed. This only shows that one is setting the matter down on its tip instead of its base. There is not something there that causes the contraction and expansion; on the contrary, everything else is the result of these; they cause a progressive metamorphosis from stage to stage. One is just not able to picture the concept in its own characteristic form, in its intuitive form; one requires that the concept represent the result of an external process. One can only think of expansion and contraction as caused and not as causing. Goethe does not look upon expansion and contraction as resulting from the nature of the inorganic processes occurring in the plant; rather he regards them as the way that inner entelechical principle shapes itself. He could therefore not view them as a sum, as a drawing together, of sense-perceptible processes and deduce them from such processes, but rather had to see them as proceeding from the inner unified principle itself. [ 18 ] The plant's life is maintained by metabolism. With respect to this, an essential difference sets in between those organs closer to the root—i.e., to that organ which sees to the taking in of nourishment from the earth—and those organs that receive the nourishment which has already passed through the other organs. The former appear directly dependent upon their external inorganic environment; the latter, on the other hand, upon the organic parts that precede them. Each subsequent organ thus receives a nourishment prepared, as it were, for it by the preceding organ. Nature progresses from seed to fruit through a series of stages in such a way that what follows appears as the result of what precedes. And Goethe calls this progressing a progressing upon a spiritual ladder. Nothing more than what we have indicated lies in his words, “that an upper node—through the fact that it arises out of the preceding one and receives its sap indirectly through it—must receive its sap in a more refined and more filtered state, must also enjoy the effects of what the leaves have done with the sap in the meantime, must develop itself more finely and bring a finer sap to its leaves and buds.” All these things become comprehensible when one applies to them the meaning intended by Goethe. [ 18 ] The ideas presented here are the elements inherent in the being of the archetypal plant—inherent in a way that conforms, in fact, only to this archetypal plant itself, and not as these elements manifest in any given plant where they no longer conform to their original state but rather to external conditions. [ 19 ] Something different occurs now, to be sure, in animal life. Life does not lose itself here in its external features, but rather separates itself, detaches itself from its corporeality and uses its corporeal manifestation only as a tool. It no longer expresses itself as the mere ability to shape an organism from within outward, but rather expresses itself within an organism as something that is still there besides the organism, as its ruling power. The animal appears as a self-contained world, a microcosm in a much higher sense than the plant. It has a centre that each organ serves.
[ 20 ] In the case of the plant, the whole plant is in every organ, but the life principle exists nowhere as a particular center; the identity of the organs lies in their being formed according to the same laws. In the case of the animal, every organ appears as coming from that center; the center shapes all organs in accordance with its own nature. The form of the animal is therefore the basis for its external existence. This form, however, is determined from within. The way an animal lives must therefore take its direction from those inner formative principles. On the other hand, the inner development in itself is unrestricted, free; within certain limits, it can adapt itself to outer influences; but this development is still determined by the inner nature of the typus and not by mechanical influences from outside. Adaptation cannot therefore go so far as to make an organism seem to be only a product of the outer world. Its development is restricted to certain limits.
[ 21 ] If every animal being existed only in accordance with the principles lying within the archetypal animal, then they would all be alike. But the animal organism members itself into a number of organ systems, each of which can arrive at a definite degree of development. This is the basis now for a diverse evolution. Equally valid among the others as idea, one system can nevertheless push itself forward to a particular degree; it can use for itself the supply of formative forces lying within the animal organism and can deprive the other organs of it. The animal will thus appear as particularly developed in the direction of that organ system. Another animal will appear as developed in another direction. Herein lies the possibility for the differentiation of the archetypal organism in its transition to the phenomenal realm in genera and species. [ 22 ] The real (factual) causes of this differentiation, however, are still not yet given thereby. Here adaptation and the struggle for existence come into their own right—the former causing the organism to shape itself in accordance with the outer conditions surrounding it, the latter working in such a way that only those entities survive that are best adapted to existing conditions. Adaptation and the struggle for existence, however, could have absolutely no effect upon the organism if the constituting principle of the organism were not of such a kind that—while continuously maintaining its inner unity—it can take on the most manifold forms. The relationship of outer formative forces to this principle should in no way be regarded as one in which, for example, the former determine the latter in the same way one inorganic entity determines another. The outer conditions are, to be sure, the stimulus for the typus to develop in a certain form; but this form itself cannot be derived from the outer determining factors, but only from the inner principle. In explaining the form, one should always seek the outer factors, but one should not regard the form itself as resulting from them. Goethe would have rejected the derivation of the developmental forms of an organism from the surrounding outer world through mere causality, just as much as he rejected the teleological principle according to which the form of an organ is traced back to an external purpose it is to serve. [ 23 ] In the case of those organ systems of an animal in which what matters is more the external aspect of the structure—in the bones, for example—there that law which we saw in the plants appears again, as in the forming of the skull bones. Goethe's gift for recognizing the inner lawfulness in purely external forms manifests here quite especially. [ 24 ] The difference between plant and animal established by these views of Goethe might seem meaningless in face of the fact that modern science has grounds for justifiable doubt that there is any definite borderline between plant and animal. Goethe, however, was already aware of the impossibility of setting up any such borderline. In spite of this, there are specific definitions of plant and animal. This is connected with Goethe's whole view of nature. He assumes absolutely nothing constant, fixed, in the phenomenal realm; for in this realm everything fluctuates in continuous motion. But the essential being of a thing, which can be held fast in a concept, cannot be derived from the fluctuating forms, but rather from certain intermediary stages at which this being can be observed. For Goethe's view, it is quite natural that one set up specific definitions and that these are nevertheless not held to in one's experience of certain transitional forms. In fact, he sees precisely in this the mobile life of nature. [ 25 ] With these ideas, Goethe established the theoretical foundations of organic science. He found the essential being of the organism. One can easily fail to recognize this if one demands that the typus, that self-constituted principle (entelechy), itself be explained by something else. But this is an unfounded demand, because the typus, held fast in its intuitive form, explains itself. For anyone who has grasped that “forming of itself in accordance with itself” of the entelechical principle, this constitutes the solution of the riddle of life. Any other solution is impossible, because this solution is the essential being of the thing itself. If Darwinism has to presuppose an archetypal organism, then one can say of Goethe that he discovered the essential being of that archetypal organism.39 It is Goethe who broke with the mere juxtaposing of genera and species, and who undertook a regeneration of organic science in accordance with the essential being of the organism. Whereas the systems before Goethe needed just as many different concepts (ideas) as there were outwardly different species for which no intermediary existed, Goethe maintained that in idea all organisms are alike, that they are different only in their manifestation; and he explained why they are so. With this, the philosophical foundation for a scientific system of organisms was created. It was then only a matter of implementing this system. It would have to be shown how all real organisms are only manifestations of an idea, and how they manifest themselves in a given case. [ 26 ] The great deed thus accomplished for science was also widely acknowledged by those more educated in the field. The younger d'Alton writes to Goethe on July 6, 1827: “I would regard it as my greatest reward if Your Excellency, whom natural science has to thank not only for a total transformation through magnificent perspectives and new views in botany, but also for many first-rate contributions to the field of osteology, should recognize in the accompanying pages an endeavor worthy of praise.” Nees von Esenbeck, on June 24, 1820, wrote: “In your book, which you called An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, the plant has spoken about itself among us for the first time, and, in this beautiful anthropomorphism, also captivated me while I was still young.” And finally Voigt, on June 6, 1831: “With lively interest and humble thanks I have received your little book on metamorphosis, which now so obligingly includes me historically also as one of the early adherents of this theory. It is strange: one is fairer toward animal metamorphosis—I do not mean the old metamorphosis of the insects, but rather the new kind about the vertebrae—than toward plant metamorphosis. Apart from the plagiarisms and misuses, the silent recognition of animal metamorphosis may rest on the belief that one was risking less there. For, in the skeleton the separate bones remain ever the same, whereas in botany, metamorphosis threatens to topple the whole terminology and consequently the determining of species, and there weak people are afraid, because they do not know where something like that might lead.” Here there is complete understanding for Goethe's ideas. The awareness is there that a new way of viewing what is individual must take place; and the new systematics, the study of particulars, should only first proceed then from this new view. The self-supporting typus contains the possibility of assuming endlessly manifold forms as it enters into manifestation; and these forms are the object of our sense perception, are the genera and species of the organism living in space and time. Insofar as our spirit apprehends that general idea, the typus, it has grasped the whole realm of organisms in all its unity. When now our spirit beholds the development of the typus in each particular form of manifestation, this form becomes comprehensible to it; this form appears to our spirit as one of the stages, one of the metamorphoses, in which the typus realizes itself. And the nature of the systematics to be founded by Goethe was to consist in demonstrating these different stages. In the animal, as well as in the plant realm, there holds sway an ascending evolutionary sequence; organisms are divided into highly developed and undeveloped ones. How is this possible? It is characteristic of the ideal form of the typus of the organisms, in fact, that it consists of spatial and temporal elements. For this reason, it also appeared to Goethe as a sensible-supersensible form. It contains spatial temporal forms as ideal perception (intuitive). When the typus now enters into manifestation, the truly (no longer intuitive) sense-perceptible form can correspond fully to that ideal form or not; the typus can come to its full development or not. The lower organisms are indeed lower through the fact that their form of manifestation does not fully correspond with the organic typus. The more that outer manifestation and organic typus coincide in a given entity, the more highly developed it is. This is the objective basis of an ascending evolutionary sequence. It is the task of any systematics to demonstrate this relationship with respect to the form of every organism. In arriving at the typus, the archetypal organism, however, no account can be taken of this; in arriving at the typus it can only be a matter of finding a form that represents the most perfect expression of the typus. Goethe's archetypal plant is meant to provide such a form. [ 27 ] One has reproached Goethe for taking no account of the world of cryptogamia in arriving at his typus. We have indicated earlier that this could only have been so out of the fullest consciousness, since he did occupy himself also with the study of these plants. This does have its objective basis, however. The cryptogamia are in fact those plants in which the archetypal plant only comes to expression in a highly one sided way; they represent the idea of the plant in a one-sided sense-perceptible form. They can be judged according to the idea thus set up; but this idea itself only bursts forth fully in the phanerogamia. [ 28 ] But what is to be said here is that Goethe never accomplished this implementation of his basic thought, that he entered too little into the realm of the particular. Therefore all his works remain fragmentary. His intention of also shedding light here is shown by his words in the Italian Journey (September 27, 1786) to the effect that it will be possible, with the help of his ideas, “truly to determine genera and species, which until now has occurred in a very arbitrary way, it seems to me.” He did not carry out this intention, did not make a specific presentation of the connection of his general thoughts to the realm of the particular, to the reality of the individual forms. This he himself regarded as a deficiency in his fragments; with respect to this he writes to Soret von de Candolle on June 28, 1828: “It is also becoming more and more clear to me how he regards my intentions, in which I am persisting and which, in my short essay on metamorphosis, are stated definitely enough, it is true, but whose connection with botany based on perception does not emerge clearly enough, as I have known for a long time.” This is certainly also the reason why Goethe's views were so misunderstood; they were misunderstood only because they were not understood at all. [ 29 ] In Goethe's concepts we also gain an ideal explanation for the fact, discovered by Darwin and Haeckel, that the developmental history of the individual represents a repetition of the history of the race. For, what Haeckel puts forward here cannot after all be taken for anything more than an unexplained fact. It is the fact that every individual entity passes, in a shortened form, through all those stages of development that paleontology also shows us as separate organic forms. Haeckel and his followers explain this by the law of heredity. But heredity is itself nothing other than an abbreviated expression for the fact just mentioned. The explanation for it is that those forms, as well as those of the individual, are the manifest forms of one and the same archetypal image that, in successive epochs, brings to unfoldment the formative forces lying within this image as potentiality. Every higher entity is indeed more perfect through the fact that, through the favorable influences of its environment, it is not hindered in the completely free unfolding of itself in accordance with its inner nature. If, on the other hand, because of certain influences, the individual is compelled to remain at a lower stage, then only some of its inner forces come to manifestation, and then that which is only a part of a whole in a more highly developed individual is this individual's whole. And in this way the higher organism appears in its development as composed of the lower organisms, or too the lower organisms appear in their development as parts of the higher one. In the development of a higher animal, we must therefore also see again the development of all the lower ones (biogenetic law). Just as the physicist is not satisfied with merely stating and describing-facts, but also seeks out their laws—i.e., the concepts of the phenomena—so, for the person who wants to penetrate into the nature of organic entities, it also does not suffice for him merely to cite the facts of kinship, heredity, struggle for existence, etc.; but rather he wants to know the ideas underlying these things. We find this striving in Goethe. What Kepler's three laws are for the physicist, Goethe's ideas of the typus are for the organic scientist. Without them, the world is a mere labyrinth of facts for us. This has often been misunderstood. One declares that the concept of metamorphosis in Goethe's sense is merely a picture that basically occurs only in our intellect through abstraction. That Goethe was not clear about the fact that the concept of the transformation of leaves into flower organs makes sense only if the latter, the stamens, for example, were once real leaves. However, this turns Goethe's view upside down. A sense-perceptible organ is turned into a principally primary one and the other organ is then derived from it in a sense-perceptible way. Goethe never meant it this way. For him, what is first in time is absolutely not also first with respect to the idea, to the principle. It is not because the stamens were once true leaves that they are now related to the leaves; no, but rather because they are related ideally, in accordance with their inner nature, they appeared at one time as true leaves. The sense-perceptible transformation is only the result of the ideal relatedness and not the other way around. Today, it is an established empirical fact that all the lateral organs of the plant are identical; but why does one call them identical? According to Schleiden, because these all develop on the axis in such a way that they are pushed forth as lateral protuberances, in such a way that lateral cell formation remains only on the original body and that no new cells form on the tip that is formed first. This is a purely external relatedness, and one considers the idea of identity to be the result of this. Again the matter is otherwise for Goethe. For him the lateral organs are identical in their idea, in their inner being; therefore they also manifest outwardly as identical formations. For him, sense-perceptible relatedness is a result of inner, ideal relatedness. The Goethean conception differs from the materialistic one in the way it poses its questions; the two do not contradict one another; they complement one another. Goethe's ideas provide the foundation for the other view. Goethe's ideas are not merely a poetic foreshadowing of later discoveries but rather independent principle discoveries that have not by far been valued enough and upon which natural science will still draw for a long time. Even when the empirical facts that he used shall have been far surpassed, or in part even disproven, by more exact and detailed research. still the ideas he set up are fundamental once and for all for organic science, because they are independent of those empirical facts. Just as, according to Kepler's laws, every newly discovered planet must revolve around its star, so must every process in organic nature occur according to Goethe's ideas. Long before Kepler and Copernicus, people saw the occurrences in the starry heavens. These two first found the laws. Long before Goethe, people observed the realm of organic nature; Goethe found its laws. Goethe is the Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world. [ 30 ] One can also clarify for oneself the nature of the Goethean theory in the following way. Besides ordinary empirical mechanics, which only collects the facts, there is also a rational mechanics, which, from the inner nature of the basic mechanical principles, deduces the a priori laws as necessary ones. As empirical mechanics relates to rational mechanics, so the theories of Darwin, Haeckel, etc., relate to the rational organic science of Goethe. About this aspect of his theory, Goethe was not at once clear from the beginning. Later, to be sure, he expressed it quite emphatically. When he writes to Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Wackenroder, on January 21, 1832: “Continue to acquaint me with everything that interests you; it will connect somewhere with my reflections,” he means by this only that he has found the basic principles of organic science from which everything else must be derived. At an earlier time, however, this all worked unconsciously in his spirit and he just treated the facts according to it.40 It first became objectively clear to him through that first scientific conversation with Schiller which we will describe later. Schiller recognized right away the ideal nature of Goethe's archetypal plant and declared that no reality could be consistent with such a plant. This stimulated Goethe to think about the relationship of what he called “typus” to empirical reality. He encountered a problem here that belongs to the most significant problems of all human investigation: the problem of the relationship between idea and reality, between thinking and experience. This became ever clearer to him: No one single empirical object corresponds entirely to his typus; no entity of nature was identical to it. The content of the typus concept cannot therefore stem from the sense world as such, even though it is won in the encounter with the sense world. Its content must therefore lie within the typus itself; the idea of the archetypal entity could only be of a kind which, by virtue of a necessity lying within itself, develops a content out of itself that then in another form—in the form of a perception—manifests within the phenomenal world. it is interesting in this regard to see how Goethe himself, when meeting empirical natural scientists. stood up for the rights of experience and for keeping idea and object strictly separated. In 1786, Sömmerring sends him a book in which Sömmerring makes an attempt to discover the seat of the soul. In a letter that he sends to Sömmerring on August 28, 1796, Goethe finds that Sömmerring has woven too much metaphysics into his views; an idea about objects of experience has no justification if it goes beyond these, if it is not founded in the being of the object itself. With objects of experience, the idea is an organ for grasping, in its necessary interconnection, that which otherwise would be merely perceived in a blind juxtaposition and succession. But, from the fact that the idea is not allowed to bring anything new to the object, it follows that the object itself, in its own essential being, is something ideal and that empirical reality must have two sides: one, by which it is particular, individual, and the other by which it is ideal-general. [ 31 ] Association with contemporary philosophers and the reading of their works led Goethe to many points of view in this respect. Schelling's work On the World-Soul 41 and his Sketch of a System of natural Philosophy 42 as well as Steffen's Basic Features of a philosophical Natural Science 43 were fruitful for him. Also a great deal was talked through with Hegel. These stimuli finally led him to take up Kant again, with whom Goethe had already once occupied himself at Schiller's instigation. In 1817 (see his Annals) he takes a historical look at Kant's influence upon his ideas on nature and natural things. To these reflections, going to the core of science, we owe the following essays:
How the Essay on the Metamorphosis of the Plants Arose[ 32 ] All these essays express the thought already indicated above, that every object has two sides: the direct one of its manifestation (form of manifestation), and the second one that contains its being. In this way, Goethe arrives at the only satisfactory view of nature, which establishes the one truly objective method. If a theory regards the ideas as something foreign to the object itself, as something merely subjective, then it cannot profess to be truly objective if it ever uses the idea at all. But Goethe can maintain that he adds nothing to the objects that does not already lie in the objects themselves. [ 33 ] Goethe also pursued the detailed factual aspects of those branches of science to which his ideas were related. In 1795, he attended lectures by Loder on the ligaments; during this period, he did not at all lose sight of anatomy and physiology, which seems all the more important since it was precisely then that he was writing his lectures on osteology. In 1796 attempts were made to grow plants in darkness and under coloured glass. Later on, the metamorphosis of insects was also investigated. [ 34 ] A further stimulus came from the philologist F.A. Wolff who drew Goethe's attention to his namesake Wolff who, in his Theoria Generationis, had already expressed ideas in 1759 that were similar to those of Goethe on the metamorphosis of the plants. Goethe was moved by this fact to concern himself more deeply with Wolff, which he did in 1807; he discovered later, however, that Wolff, with all his acuity, was not yet clear on precisely the main points. Wolff did not yet know the typus as something non-sense-perceptible, as something that develops its content merely out of inner necessity. He still regarded the plant as an external, mechanical complex of individual details. [ 35 ] Goethe's exchanges with his many scientist friends, as well as the joy of having found recognition and imitation of his endeavors among many kindred spirits, led Goethe to the thought, in 1807, of publishing the fragments of his natural-scientific studies that he had held back until then. He gradually abandoned his intention of writing a more comprehensive natural-scientific work. But the individual essays did not yet reach publication in 1807. His interest in the colour theory pushed morphology into the background again for a time. The first booklet of these essays first appeared in 1817. By 1824, two volumes of these essays had appeared, the first in four booklets, the second in two. Besides the essays on Goethe's own views, we also find here discussions of significant literary publications in the realm of morphology, and also treatises of other scholars, whose presentations, however, are always complementary to Goethe's interpretation of nature. [ 36 ] On yet two further occasions, Goethe was challenged to occupy himself more intensively with natural-scientific matters. Both of these involved significant literary publications—in the realm of science—that related most deeply to his own strivings. On the first occasion, the stimulus was given by the studies of the botanist Martius on the spiral tendency in plants, on the second occasion, by a natural-scientific dispute in the French Academy of Sciences. [ 37 ] Martius saw plant form, in its development, as comprised of a spiral and a vertical tendency. The vertical tendency brings about growth in the direction of the root and stem; the spiral tendency brings about the spreading out of leaves, blossoms, etc. Goethe saw in this thought only an elaboration of ideas he had already set down in 1790 in his book on metamorphosis, but here focusing more on spatial elements (vertical, spiral). For proof of this assertion, we refer you to our comments on Goethe's essay, On the Spiral Tendency of Vegetation,44 from which the fact emerges that Goethe, in this essay, does not bring forward anything essentially new with respect to his earlier ideas. We want to direct this statement particularly to those who assert that there is evident here, in fact, a retrogression of Goethe from his earlier clear views back into the “deepest depths of mysticism.” [ 38 ] Even at a most advanced age (1830–32), Goethe still wrote two essays on the dispute between the two French natural scientists, Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In these essays we find yet once more, in striking conciseness, a synthesis of the principles of Goethe's view of nature. [ 39 ] Cuvier was altogether an empiricist of the old school of natural science. For each species of animal he sought a particular corresponding concept. He believed he had to take up into the conceptual edifice of his system of organic nature as many individual types as there are animal species present in nature. But for him the individual types stood there side by side without any mediation. What he did not take into consideration is this. Our need for knowledge is not satisfied with the particular as such in the way it approaches us directly as phenomenon. But since we approach an entity of the sense world with no other intention, in fact, than of knowing it, we should not assume that the reason we declare ourselves unsatisfied with the particular as such is to be found in the nature of our ability to know. On the contrary, the reason must lie within the object itself. The essential being of the particular itself, in fact, by no means consists only in this, its particularness; it presses, in order to be understood, toward a kind of being that is not particular, but rather, general (ein Allgemeines). This ideal-general is the actual being—the essence of every particular entity. Only one side of the existence of a particular entity lies in its particularness; the other side is the general—the typus (see Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose). This is how it is to be understood when the particular is spoken of as a form of the general. Since the ideal-general is therefore the actual being, the content, of the particular, it is impossible for the ideal-general to be derived, abstracted, from the particular. Since it has nowhere from which to borrow its content, it must give this content to itself. The typical-general is therefore of such a nature that, in it, content and form are identical. But it can therefore also be grasped only as a whole, independent of what is individual. Science has the task with every particular entity of showing how, according to the entity's essential being, the entity subordinates itself to the ideal-general. Through this the particular kinds of existence enter the stage of mutually determining and depending upon each other. What otherwise can be perceived only as spatial-temporal juxtaposition and succession is now seen in necessary interconnection. But Cuvier wouldn't hear of any such view. This view, on the other hand, was the one held by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This is actually the aspect that aroused Goethe's interest in this dispute. The matter has often been misrepresented because one saw the facts, through the glasses of most modern views, in a completely different light than that in which they appear if one approaches them without preconceptions. Geoffroy referred not only to his own research, but also to a number of German scientists of like mind, among whom Goethe is also named. [ 40 ] Goethe's interest in this matter was extraordinary. He was extremely happy to find a colleague in Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: “Now Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is also definitely on our side and with him all his significant students and adherents in France This event is of inconceivably great value to me, and I am right to jubilate about the final victory of something to which I have dedicated my life and which is pre-eminently also my own,” he says to Eckermann on August 2, 1830. It is altogether a strange phenomenon that in Germany Goethe's research found a response only among philosophers and but little among natural scientists, whereas the response in France was more significant among the latter. De Candolle gave Goethe's theory of metamorphosis his closest attention and treated botany generally in a way that was not far from Goethean views. Also, Goethe's Metamorphosis had already been translated into French by F. de Gingins-Lassaraz. Under such conditions, Goethe could definitely hope that a translation of his botanical writings into French, carried out with his collaboration, would not fall on barren ground. Such a translation was then provided in 1831, with Goethe's continuous assistance, by Friedrich Jakob Soret. It contained that first Attempt of 1790, the history of Goethe's botanical studies, and the effect of his theories upon his contemporaries, as well as something about de Candolle,—in French, with German on the opposite page.
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| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Epistemology
Translated by William Lindemann Rudolf Steiner |
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| It is an enemy of perception only when a philosophy that does not understand itself wants to spin the whole rich content of the sense world out of the idea. For then philosophy conveys a system of empty phrases instead of living nature. |
| under the presupposition that what is given to the senses is mental picture. That is the basic mistake in Volkelt's epistemology. |
| Thus his epistemology consists only in answering the question: How is knowing possible, under the presupposition that the given is a manifoldness of mental pictures? For us the matter appears quite different. |
| 1. Goethean Science: Goethe's Epistemology
Translated by William Lindemann Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 1 ] We have already indicated in the previous chapter that Goethe's scientific world view does not exist for us as a complete whole, developed out of one principle. We have to do only with individual manifestations from which we see how one thought or another looks in the light of his way of thinking. This is the case with his scientific works, with the brief indications he gives about one concept or another in his Aphorisms in Prose, and with his letters to his friends. And the artistic development of his world view, finally, which does also offer us the most manifold clues to his basic ideas, is there for us in his literary works. By unreservedly acknowledging that Goethe never expressed his basic principles as a coherent whole, however, we are by no means accepting at the same time the validity of any assertion to the effect that Goethe's world view does not spring from an ideal center that can be brought into a strictly scientific formulation. [ 2 ] We must above all be clear about what the real question here is. What it was in Goethe's spirit that worked as the inner driving principle in all his creations, that imbued and enlivened them, could not come to the fore as such, in its own particular nature. Just because it imbues everything about Goethe, it could not at the same time appear before his consciousness as something separate. If the latter had been the case, then it would have had to appear before his spirit as something complete and at rest instead of being, as was actually the case, continuously active and at work. The interpreter of Goethe is obliged to follow the manifold activities and manifestations of this principle, to follow its constant flow, in order then to sketch it in its ideal outlines, and as a complete whole. If we are successful in expressing, clearly and definitely, the scientific content of this principle and in developing it on all sides with scientific consistency, only then will Goethe's exoteric expositions appear in their true light, because we will see them in their evolution, from a common center. [ 3 ] In this chapter we will concern ourselves with Goethe's epistemology. With respect to the task of this science, a certain confusion has unfortunately arisen since Kant that we must briefly touch upon before proceeding to Goethe's relationship to this science. [ 4 ] Kant believed that philosophy before him had taken wrong paths because it strove for knowledge of the being of things without first asking itself how such a knowledge might be possible. He saw what was fundamentally wrong with all philosophizing before him to lie in the fact that one reflected upon the nature of the object to be known before one had examined the activity of knowing itself, with regard to what it could do. He therefore took this latter examination as his basic philosophical problem and inaugurated thereby a new direction in thought. Since then the philosophy that has based itself on Kant has expended untold scientific force in answering this question; and today more than ever, one is seeking in philosophical circles to come closer to accomplishing this task. But epistemology, which at the present time has become nothing less than the question of the day, is supposedly nothing other than the detailed answer to the question: How is knowledge possible? Applied to Goethe the question would read: How did Goethe conceive of the possibility of knowledge? [ 5 ] Upon closer examination, however, the fact emerges that the answering of this question may absolutely not be placed at the forefront of epistemology. If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be. [ 6 ] The forming of a particular judgment, the establishing of a fact or a series of facts—which according to Kant one could already call knowledge—is not yet by any means knowing in Goethe's sense. Otherwise he would not have said about style that it rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge and through this fact stands in contrast to simple imitation of nature in which the artist turns to the objects of nature, imitates its forms and colours faithfully, diligently, and most exactly, and is conscientious about never distancing himself from nature. This distancing of oneself from the sense world in all its directness is indicative of Goethe's view of real knowing. The directly given is experience. In our knowing, however, we create a picture of the directly given that contains considerably more than what the senses—which are after all the mediators of all experience—can provide. In order to know nature in the Goethean sense, we must not hold onto it in its factuality; rather, nature, in the process of our knowing, must reveal itself as something essentially higher than what it appears to be when it first confronts us. The school of Mill assumes that all we can do with experience is merely bring particular things together into groups that we then hold fast as abstract concepts. This is no true knowing. For, those abstract concepts of Mill have no other task than that of bringing together what is presented to the senses with all the qualities of direct experience. A true knowing must acknowledge that the direct form of the world given to sense perception is not yet its essential one, but rather that this essential form first reveals itself to us in the process of knowing. Knowing must provide us with that which sense experience withholds from us, but which is still real. Mill's knowing is therefore no true knowing, because it is only an elaborated sense experience. He leaves the things in the form our eyes and ears convey them. It is not that we should leave the realm of the experiencable and lose ourselves in a construct of fantasy, as the metaphysicians of earlier and more recent times loved to do, but rather, we should advance from the form of the experiencable as it presents itself to us in what is given to the senses, to a form of it that satisfies our reason. [ 7 ] The question now confronts us: How does what is directly experienced relate to the picture of experience that arises in the process of knowing? We want first to answer this question quite independently and then show that the answer we give follows from the Goethean world view. [ 8 ] At first, the world presents itself to us as a manifoldness in space and time. We perceive particulars separated in space and time: this colour here, that shape there; this tone now, that sound then, etc. Let us first take an example from the inorganic world and separate quite exactly what we perceive with the senses from what the cognitive process provides. We see a stone flying toward a windowpane, breaking through it, and falling to the ground after a certain time. We ask what is given here in direct experience. A series of sequential visual perceptions, originating from the places successively occupied by the stone, a series of sound perceptions as the glass shatters, the pieces of glass flying, etc. Unless someone wishes to deceive himself he must say: Nothing more is given to direct experience than this unrelated aggregate of acts of perception. [ 9 ] One also finds the same strict delimitation of what is directly perceived (sense experience) in Volkelt's excellent book Kant's Epistemology Analysed for its Basic Principles,49 which belongs to the best that modern philosophy has produced. But it is absolutely impossible to see why Volkelt regards the unrelated pictures of perception as mental pictures and thereby at the very start blocks the path to any possible objective knowledge. To regard direct experience from the very start as a complex of mental pictures is, after all, a definite preconception. When I have some object or other before me, I see, with respect to it, form and colour; I perceive a certain degree of hardness, etc. Whether this aggregate of pictures given to my senses is something lying outside myself, or whether it is a mere complex of mental pictures: this I cannot know from the very start. Just as little as I know from the very start—without thinking reflection—that the warmth of a stone is a result of the enwarming rays of the sun, so just as little do I know in what relationship the world given to me stands with respect to my ability to make mental pictures. Volkelt places at the forefront of epistemology the proposition “that we have a manifoldness of mental pictures of such and such kinds.” That we are given a manifoldness is correct; but how do we know that this manifoldness consists of mental pictures? Volkelt, in fact, does something quite inadmissible when first he asserts that we must hold fast to what is given us in direct experience, and then makes the presupposition, which cannot be given to direct experience, that the world of experience is a world of mental pictures. When we make a presupposition like that of Volkelt, then we are forced at once into stating our epistemological question wrongly as described above. If our perceptions are mental pictures, then our whole science is a science of mental pictures and the question arises: How is it possible for our mental picture to coincide with the object of which we make a mental picture? [ 10 ] But where does any real science ever have anything to do with this question? Look at mathematics! It has a figure before it arising from the intersection of three straight lines: a triangle. The three angles a, b, c remain in a fixed relationship; their sum is one straight angle or two right angles (180°). That is a mathematical judgment. The angles a, b, and c are perceived. The cognitive judgment occurs on the basis of thinking reflection. It establishes a relationship between three perceptual pictures. There is no question here of any reflecting upon some object or other standing behind the picture of the triangle. And all the sciences do it this way. They spin threads from picture to picture, create order in what, for direct perception, is a chaos; nowhere, however, does anything else come into consideration besides the given. Truth is not the coinciding of a mental picture with its object, but rather the expression of a relationship between two perceived facts.  [ 11 ] Let us return to our example of the thrown stone. We connect the sight perceptions that originate from the individual locations in which the stone finds itself. This connection gives us a curved line (the trajectory), and we obtain the laws of trajectory; when furthermore we take into account the material composition of the glass, and then understand the flying stone as cause, the shattering of the glass as effect, and so on, we then have permeated the given with concepts in such a way that it becomes comprehensible to us. This entire operation, which draws together the manifoldness of perception into a conceptual unity, occurs within our consciousness. The ideal interrelationship of the perceptual pictures is not given by the senses, but rather is grasped absolutely on its own by our spirit. For a being endowed only with the ability to perceive with the senses, this whole operation would simply not be there. For such a being the outer world would simply remain that disconnected chaos of perceptions we characterized as what first (directly) confronts us. [ 12 ] So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete. [ 13 ] Everything depends on what one conceives the relationship between idea and sense-perceptible reality to be. By sense-perceptible reality I mean here the totality of perceptions communicated to the human being by the senses. Now the most widely held view is that the concept is a means, belonging solely to human consciousness, by which consciousness takes possession for itself of the data of reality. The essential being of reality, according to this view, lies in the “in-itselfness” of the things themselves, so that, if we were really able to arrive at the primal ground of things, we would still be able to take possession only of our conceptual copy of this primal ground and by no means of the primal ground itself. This view, therefore, assumes the existence of two completely separate worlds. The objective outer world, which bears its essential being, the ground of its existence, within itself, and the subjective-ideal inner world, which is supposedly a conceptual copy of the outer world. The inner world is a matter of no concern to the objective world, is not required by it; the inner world is present only for the knowing human being. To bring about a congruence of these two worlds would be the epistemological ideal of this basic view. I consider the adherents of this view to be not only the natural-scientific direction of our time, but also the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Neo-Kantians, and no less so the last phase of Schelling's philosophy. AII these directions of thought are in agreement about seeking the essence of the world in something transsubjective, and about having to admit, from their standpoint, that the subjective ideal world—which is therefore for them also merely a world of mental pictures—has no significance for reality itself, but purely and simply for human consciousness alone. [ 14 ] I have already indicated that this view leads to the assumption of a perfect congruency between concept (idea) and perception. What is present in the latter would also have to be contained in its conceptual counterpart, only in an ideal form. With respect to content, both worlds would have to match each other completely. The conditions of spatial-temporal reality would have to repeat themselves exactly in the idea; only, instead of perceived extension shape colour, etc., the corresponding mental pictures would have to be present. If I were looking at a triangle, for example, I would have to follow in thought its outline, size, directions of its sides, etc., and then produce a conceptual photograph of it for myself. In the case of a second triangle, I would have to do exactly the same thing, and so on with every object of the external and internal sense world. Thus every single thing is to be found again exactly, with respect to its location and characteristics, within my ideal world picture. [ 15 ] We must now ask ourselves: Does the above assumption correspond to the facts? Not in the least. My concept of the triangle is a single one, comprising every single perceived triangle; and no matter how often I picture it, this concept always remains the same. My various pictures of the triangle are all identical to one another. I have absolutely only one concept of the triangle. [ 16 ] Within reality, every single thing presents itself as a particular, quite definite “this,” surrounded by equally definite, actual, and reality-imbued “those.” The concept, as a strict unity, confronts this manifoldness. In the concept there is no separation, no parts; it does not multiply itself; it is, no matter how often it is pictured, always the same. [ 17 ] The question now arises: What is then actually the bearer of this identity that the concept has? Its form of manifestation as a picture cannot in fact be this bearer, for Berkeley was completely right in maintaining that my present picture of a tree has absolutely nothing to do with my picture of the same tree a minute later, if I closed my eyes in between; and the various pictures that several people have of one object have just as little to do with each other. The identity can therefore lie only within the content of the picture, within its what. The significance, the content, must insure the identity for me. [ 18 ] But since this is so, that view collapses that denies to the concept or idea any independent content. This view believes, namely, that the conceptual unity as such is altogether without any content; that this unity arises solely through the fact that certain characteristics of the objects of experience are left aside and that what they have in common, on the other hand, is lifted out and incorporated into our intellect so that we may comfortably bring together the manifoldness of objective reality according to the principle of grasping all of experience with the mind in the fewest possible general unities—i.e., according to the principle of the smallest measure of force (Kraftmasses). Along with modern natural philosophy Schopenhauer takes this standpoint. But this standpoint is presented with the harshest, and therefore most one-sided consistency in the little book of Richard Avenarius, Philosophy as Thinking about the World According to the Principle of the Smallest Measure of Force. Prolegomena of a Critique of Pure Experience.50 [ 19 ] But this view rests solely upon a total misconstruing not only of the content of the concept but also of the perception. [ 20 ] In order to gain some clarity here, one must go back to the reason for contrasting the perception, as something particular, with the concept, as something general. [ 21 ] One must ask oneself the question: Wherein do the characteristic features of the particular actually lie? Can these be determined conceptually? Can we say: This conceptual unity must break up into this or that particular, visible manifoldness? “No,” is the very definite answer. The concept itself does not know particularity at all. The latter must therefore lie in elements that are altogether inaccessible to the concept as such. But since we do not know any in-between entity between the perception and the concept—unless one wishes to introduce something like Kant's fantastic-mystical schemata, which today, however, cannot be taken seriously after all—these elements must belong to the perception itself. The basis for particularization cannot be derived from the concept, but rather must be sought within the perception itself. What constitutes the particularity of an object cannot be grasped conceptually, but only perceived. Therein lies the reason why every philosophy must founder that wants to derive (deduce) from the concept itself the entire visible reality in all its particularization. Therein lies also the classic error of Fichte, who wanted to derive the whole world from consciousness. [ 22 ] But someone who wants to reproach and dismiss idealistic philosophy because he sees this impossibility of deriving the world from the concept as a defect in it—such a person is acting no more intelligently than the philosopher Krug, a follower of Kant, who demanded of the philosophy of identity that it deduce for him a pen with which to write. [ 23 ] What really distinguishes the perception essentially from the idea is, in fact, just this element that cannot be brought into the concept and that must, in fact, be experienced. Through this, concept and perception confront each other, to be sure, as kindred yet different sides of the world. And since the perception requires the concept, as we have shown, the perception proves that it does not have its essence in its particularity but rather in its conceptual generality. But this generality, in its manifestation, can first be found only within the subject; for, this generality can indeed be gained in connection with the object, but not out of the object. [ 24 ] The concept cannot derive its content from experience, for it does not take up into itself precisely that which is characteristic of experience: its particularity. Everything that constitutes this particularity is foreign to the concept. The concept must therefore give itself its own content. [ 25 ] It is usually said that an object of experience is individual, is a lively perception, and that the concept, on the other hand, is abstract, is poor, sorry, and empty when compared to the perception with its rich content. But wherein is the wealth of differentiations sought? In their number, which because of the infinitude of space can be infinitely great. For all this, however, the concept is no less richly defined. The number there is replaced by qualities here. But just as in the concept the numbers are not to be found, so in the perception the dynamic-qualitative character is lacking. The concept is just as individual, just as rich in content, as the perception. The difference is only that for grasping the content of perception nothing is necessary except open senses and a purely passive attitude toward the outer world, whereas the ideal core of the world must arise in man's spirit through his own spontaneous activity, if this core is to come into view at all. It is an entirely inconsequential and useless kind of talk to say that the concept is the enemy of living perception. The concept is the essential being of the perception, the actual driving and active principle in it; the concept adds its content to that of the perception, without eliminating the latter—for, the content of perception as such does not concern the concept at all—and the concept is supposed to be the enemy of perception! It is an enemy of perception only when a philosophy that does not understand itself wants to spin the whole rich content of the sense world out of the idea. For then philosophy conveys a system of empty phrases instead of living nature. [ 26 ] Only in the way we have indicated can a person arrive at a satisfactory explanation of what knowledge of experience actually is. The necessity of advancing to conceptual knowledge would be totally incomprehensible if the concept brought nothing new to sense perception. A knowledge purely of experience must not take one step beyond the millions of particulars that lie before us as perceptions. The science of pure experience, in order to be consistent, must negate its own content. For why create once more in concept form what is already there without it as perception? A consistent positivism, in the light of these reflections, would simply have to cease all scientific work and rely merely upon whatever happens to occur. If it does not do this, then it carries out in practice what it rejects in theory. It is altogether the case that materialism, as well as realism, implicitly admits what we are maintaining. The way they proceed is only justified from our standpoint and is in the most glaring contradiction to their own basic theoretical views. [ 27 ] From our standpoint, the necessity for scientific knowledge and the transcending of sense experience can be explained without any contradictions. The sense world confronts us as that which is first and directly given; it faces us like an immense riddle, because we can never find in the sense world itself what is driving and working in it. Reason enters then and, with the ideal world that it presents, holds out to the sense world the principle being that constitutes the solution to the riddle. These principles are just as objective as the sense world is. The fact that they do not come into appearance to the senses but only to reason does not affect their content. If there were no thinking beings, these principles would, indeed, never come into appearance; but they would not therefore be any less the essence of the phenomenal world. [ 28 ] With this we have set up a truly immanent world view in contrast to the transcendental one of Locke, Kant, the later Schelling, Schopenhauer, Volkelt, the Neo-Kantians, and modern natural scientists. [ 29 ] They seek the ground of the world in something foreign to consciousness, in the beyond; immanent philosophy seeks it in what comes into appearance for reason. The transcendental world view regards conceptual knowledge as a picture of the world; the immanent world view regards it as the world's highest form of manifestation. The first view can therefore provide only a formal epistemology that bases itself upon the question: What is the relationship between thinking and real being? The second view places at the forefront of its epistemology the question: What is knowing? The first takes its start from the preconception that there is an essential difference between thinking and real being; the second begins, without preconceptions, with what alone is certain—thinking—and knows that, other than thinking, it can find no real being. [ 30 ] If we now summarize the results we have achieved from these epistemological reflections, we arrive at the following: We have to take our start from the completely indeterminate direct form of reality, from what is given to the senses before we bring our thinking into movement, from what is only seen, only heard, etc. The point is that we be aware what the senses convey to us and what thinking conveys. The senses do not tell us that things stand in any particular relationship to each other, such as for example that this is the cause and that is the effect. For the senses, all things are equally essential for the structure of the world. Unthinking observation does not know that a seed stands at a higher level of development than a grain of sand on the road. For the senses they are both of equal significance if they look the same outwardly. At this level of observation, Napoleon is no more important in world history than Jones or Smith in some remote mountain village. This is as far as present-day epistemology has advanced. That it has by no means thought these truths through exhaustively, however, is shown by the fact that almost all epistemologists make the mistake—with respect to this for the moment undefined and indeterminate configuration that we confront in the first stage of our perception—of immediately designating it as “mental picture.”51 This means, in fact, a violating, in the crudest way, of its own insight which it had just achieved. If we remain at the stage of direct sense perception, we know just as little that a falling stone is a mental picture as we know that it is the cause of the depression in the ground where it hit. Just as we can arrive at the concept “cause” only by manifold reflection, so also we could arrive at the knowledge that the world given us is merely mental picture—even if this were correct—only by thinking about it. My senses reveal nothing to me as to whether what they are communicating to me is real being or whether it is merely mental picture. The sense world confronts us as though fired from a pistol. If we want to have it in its purity, we must refrain from attaching any predicate to it that would characterize it. We can say only one thing: It confronts us; it is given us. With this, however, absolutely nothing at all is determined about it itself. Only when we proceed in this way do we not block the way for ourselves to an unbiased judgment about this given. If from the very start we attach a particular characterization to the given, then this freedom from bias ceases. If we say, for example, that the given is mental picture, then the whole investigation which follows can only be conducted under this presupposition. We would not be able in this way to provide an epistemology free of presuppositions, but rather would be answering the question “What is knowing?” under the presupposition that what is given to the senses is mental picture. That is the basic mistake in Volkelt's epistemology. At the beginning of it, he sets up the very strict requirement that epistemology must be free of any presuppositions. But he then places in the forefront the statement that what we have is a manifoldness of mental pictures. Thus his epistemology consists only in answering the question: How is knowing possible, under the presupposition that the given is a manifoldness of mental pictures? For us the matter appears quite different. We take the given as it is: as a manifoldness of—something or other that will reveal itself to us if we allow ourselves to be taken along by it. Thus we have the prospect of arriving at an objective knowledge, because we are allowing the object itself to speak. We can hope that this configuration we confront will reveal everything to us we need, if we do not make it impossible, through some hindering preconception, for it freely to approach our power of judgment with its communications. For even if reality should forever remain a riddle to us, a truth like this would be of value only if it had been attained in connection with the things of the world. It would be totally meaningless, however, to assert that our consciousness is constituted in such and such a way and that therefore we cannot gain any clarity about the things of this world. Whether our spiritual powers are adequate for grasping the essential being of things must be tested by us in connection with these things themselves. I might have the most highly developed spiritual powers; but if things reveal nothing about themselves, my gifts are of no avail. And conversely: I might know that my powers are slight; whether, in spite of this, they still might not suffice for me to know the things, this I still do not know. [ 31 ] What we have recognized in addition is that the directly given, in the first form of it which we have described, leaves us unsatisfied. It confronts us like a challenge, like a riddle to be solved. It says to us: I am there; but in the form in which I confront you there, I am not in my true form. As we hear this voice from outside, as we become aware that we are confronting a half of something, are confronting an entity that conceals its better side from us, then there announces itself within us the activity of that organ through which we can gain enlightenment about that other side of reality, and through which we are able to supplement that half of something and render it whole. We become aware that we must make up through thinking for what we do not see, hear, etc. Thinking is called upon to solve the riddle with which perception presents us. [ 32 ] We will first become clear about this relationship when we investigate why we are unsatisfied by perceptible reality, but are satisfied, on the other hand, by a thought-through reality. Perceptible reality confronts us as something finished. It is just there; we have contributed nothing to its being there in the way it is. We feel ourselves confronted, therefore, by a foreign entity that we have not produced, at whose production we were not even, in fact, present. We stand before something that has already come about. But we are able to grasp only something about which we know how it has become what it is, how it has come about; when we know where the strings are that support what appears before us. With our thinking, this is different. A thought-configuration does not come before me unless I myself participate in its coming about; it comes into the field of my perception only through the fact that I myself lift it up out of the dark abyss of imperceptibility. The thought does not arise in me as a finished entity the way a sense perception does, but rather I am conscious of the fact that, when I do hold fast to a concept in its complete form, I myself have brought it into this form. What then lies before me appears to me not as something first, but rather as something last, as the completion of a process that is so integrally merged with me that I have always stood within it. But this is what I must demand of a thing that enters the horizon of my perception, in order to understand it. Nothing may remain obscure to me; nothing may appear closed off; I myself must follow it to that stage at which it has become something finished. This is why the direct form of reality, which we usually call experience, moves us to work it through in knowledge. When we bring our thinking into movement, we then go back to the determining factors of the given that at first remained hidden to us; we work our way up from the product to the production; we arrive at the stage where sense perception becomes transparent to us in the same way the thought is. Our need for knowledge is thus satisfied. We can therefore come to terms with a thing in knowledge only when we have completely (thoroughly) penetrated with thinking what is directly perceived. A process of the world appears completely penetrated by us only when the process is our own activity. A thought appears as the completion of a process within which we stand. Thinking, however, is the only process into which we can completely place ourselves, into which we can merge. Therefore, to our knowing contemplation, the reality we experience must appear to emerge as though out of a thought-process, in the same way as pure thought does. To investigate the essential being of a thing means to begin at the center of the thought-world and to work from there until a thought-configuration appears before our soul that seems to us to be identical to the thing we are experiencing. When we speak of the essential being of a thing or of the world altogether, we cannot therefore mean anything else at all than the grasping of reality as thought, as idea. In the idea we recognize that from which we must derive everything else: the principle of things. What philosophers call the absolute, the eternal being, the ground of the world, what the religions call God, this we call, on the basis of our epistemological studies: the idea. Everything in the world that does not appear directly as idea will still ultimately be recognized as going forth from the idea. What seems, on superficial examination, to have no part at all in the idea is found by a deeper thinking to stem from it. No other form of existence can satisfy us except one stemming from the idea. Nothing may remain away from it; everything must become a part of the great whole that the idea encompasses. The idea, however, requires no going out beyond itself. It is self-sustained being, well founded in itself. This does not lie at all in the fact that we have the idea directly present in our consciousness. This lies in the nature of the idea itself. If the idea did not itself express its own being, then it would in fact also appear to us in the same way the rest of reality does: needing explanation. But this then seems to contradict what we said earlier, that the idea appears in a form satisfying to us because we participate actively in its coming about. But this is not due to the organization of our consciousness. If the idea were not a being founded upon itself, then we could not have any such consciousness at all. If something does not have within itself the center from which it springs, but rather has it outside itself, then, when it confronts me, I cannot declare myself satisfied with it; I must go out beyond it, to that center, in fact. Only when I meet something that does not point out beyond itself, do I then achieve the consciousness: now you are standing within the center; here you can remain. My consciousness that I am standing within a thing is only the result of the objective nature of this thing, which is that it brings its principle along with it. By taking possession of the idea, we arrive at the core of the world. What we grasp there is that from which everything goes forth. We become united with this principle; therefore the idea, which is most objective, appears to us at the same time as most subjective. [ 33 ] Sense-perceptible reality is such a riddle to us precisely because we do not find its center within itself. It ceases to be a riddle to us when we recognize that sense-perceptible reality has the same center as the thought-world that comes to manifestation within us. [ 34 ] This centre can only be a unified one. It must in fact be of such a kind that everything else points to it as that which explains it. If there were several centers to the world—several principles by which the world were to be known—and if one region of reality pointed to this world principle and another one to that world principle, then, as soon as we found ourselves in one region of reality, we would be directed only toward the one center. It would not occur to us at all to ask about still other centers. One region would know nothing about the other. They would simply not be there for each other. It therefore makes no sense at all to speak of more than one world. The idea, therefore, in all the places of the world, in all consciousnesses, is one and the same. The fact that there are different consciousnesses and that each of them presents the idea to itself does not change the situation at all. The ideal content of the world is founded upon itself, is complete within itself. We do not create it, we only seek to grasp it. Thinking does not create it but rather perceives it only. Thinking is not a producer, but rather an organ of apprehension. Just as different eyes see one and the same object, so different consciousnesses think one and the same thought-content. Manifold consciousnesses think one and the same thing; only, they approach this one thing from different sides. It therefore appears to them as modified in manifold ways. This modification is not a differentness of objects, however, but rather an apprehending from different angles of vision. The differences in people's views are just as explainable as the differences that a landscape presents to two observers standing in different places. If one is capable at all of pressing forward to the world of ideas, then one can be certain that one ultimately has a world of ideas that is common to all human beings. Then at most it can still be a question of our grasping this world in a quite one-sided way, of our taking a standpoint from which this world of ideas does not appear to us in the most suitable light, and so on. [ 35 ] We never do confront a sense world completely devoid of all thought-content. At most, in early childhood where there is as yet no trace of thinking, do we come close to pure sense perception. In ordinary life we have to do with an experience that is half-permeated by thinking, that already appears more or less lifted out of the darkness of perception into the bright clarity of spiritual comprehension. The sciences work toward the goal of fully overcoming this darkness and of leaving nothing in experience that has not been permeated with thought. Now what task has epistemology fulfilled with respect to the other sciences? It has made clear to us what the purpose and task of any science is. It has shown us what the significance is of the content of the individual sciences. Our epistemology is the science that characterizes all the other sciences. It has made clear to us that what is gained by the individual sciences is the objective ground of world existence. The sciences arrive at a series of concepts; epistemology teaches us about the actual task of these concepts. By arriving at this distinctive conclusion, our epistemology, which is in keeping with the sense of Goethe's way of thinking, diverges from all other epistemologies of the present day. Our epistemology does not merely want to establish a formal connection between thinking and real being; it does not want to solve the epistemological problem in a merely logical way; it wants to arrive at a positive result. It shows what the content of our thinking is; and it finds that this what is at the same time the objective content of the world. Thus epistemology becomes for us the most significant of the sciences for the human being. It gives man clarity about himself; it shows him his place in the world; it is thereby a source of satisfaction for him. It first tells him what he is called to be and to do. The human being feels himself uplifted in his possession of its truths; his scientific investigation gains a new illumination. Now he knows for the first time that he is most directly connected with the core of world existence, that he uncovers this core which remains hidden to all other beings, that in him the world spirit comes to manifestation, that the world spirit dwells within him. He sees himself as the one who completes the world process; he sees that he is called to accomplish what the other powers of the world are not able to do, that he has to set the crown upon creation. If religion teaches that God created man in His own image, then our epistemology teaches us that God has led His creation only to a certain point. There He let the human being arise, and the human being, by knowing himself and looking about him, sets himself the task of working on, of completing what the primal power began. The human being immerses himself ; in the world and recognizes how he can build further on the ground that has been laid; he grasps the indication that the primal spirit has made and carries out this indication. [ 36 ] Thus epistemology is the teaching both of the significance and of the vocation (Bestimmung) of man; and it solves this task (of the “vocation of man”) in a far more definite way than Fichte did at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. One does not by any means achieve, through the thought-configurations of this powerful spirit, the same full satisfaction that must come to us from a genuine epistemology. [ 37 ] We have the task, with regard to every single entity, of working upon it in such a way that it appears as flowing from the idea, that it completely dissolves as a single thing and merges with the idea, into whose element we feel ourselves transferred. Our spirit has the task of developing itself in such a way that it is capable of seeing into all the reality given it, of seeing it in the way it appears as going forth from the idea. We must show ourselves to be continuous workers in the sense that we transform every object of experience so that it appears as part of our ideal world picture. With this we have arrived at where the Goethean way of looking at the world takes its start. We must apply what we have said in such a way that we picture to ourselves that the relationship between idea and reality that we have just presented is what Goethe actually does in his investigations; Goethe grapples with things in just the way we have shown to be the valid one. He himself sees his inner working, in fact, as a living helper in learning (Heuristik), a helper that recognizes an unknown, dimly-sensed rule (the idea) and resolves to find it in the outer world and to introduce it into the outer world (Aphorisms in Prose). When Goethe demands that the human being should instruct his organs (Aphorisms in Prose), that also means only that the human being does not simply give himself over to what his senses convey to him, but rather directs his senses in such a way that they show him things in the right light.
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