9. The Significance of Goethe's Thinking for His View of Nature
Introduction. This is based on the fact that we consider the view of nature itself to be incomplete.
In science, no special attention is paid to the actual genius of nature. At most, it is admitted that the genius's gaze succeeds in spotting the combination of natural forces; but it is not considered decisive for the shaping of the world view that we seek in science. The influence of genius on science is therefore said to be only a historical one, not a factual one.
What distinguishes the epoch of education in which we live from others can be traced back to Goethe. He has given it its character. In him, German poetry of our century sees an ideal to strive for; with the eye gained from his writings, we look at antiquity; with the same eye, Germans have succeeded in unraveling Shakespeare's genius. All the radii of German intellectual life emanate from him. However, this magnificent image of the great genius is marred by a dark spot that stands in unsatisfactory disharmony with the brightness spreading over it. Goethe's unreserved admiration in all fields of the intellect is contrasted with the dubious position in which his scientific achievements are placed.
Today, we have come back from the absolute rejection of these achievements, which occurred during Goethe's lifetime and long after his death, and we still have a completely negative attitude towards the physical part of the color theory, but we still grant them some importance. But if we take a closer look at the verdict of modern science, we cannot deny that the recognition of Goethe's scientific achievements is based on completely different premises than his other achievements and is by no means on a par with them.
Those who go furthest in their appreciation of Goethe in a scientific sense admit that Goethe's view of nature is based on ideas that also underlie the modern science of organisms – the Darwin-Haeckelian theory of evolution. But no one can dispute that this modern science does not originate from Goethe's view at all. His influence on it is not noticeable. And if it has been claimed in recent times that modern developmental theory would have reached its present state even without Goethe, this cannot be denied. Thus, one cannot ascribe to his efforts the power that was necessary to elevate the ideas on which they were based to the level of scientific conviction.
This fact is attributed to the fact that Goethe, while conceiving the connections within the organic series of beings entirely in line with the theory of evolution, did not penetrate to the principles that make this kind of connection comprehensible to us. Goethe is said to have anticipated Darwin's world view without being able to provide an explanation of it at the same time. Without this explanation, the theory of evolution appears as an arbitrary hypothesis.
This is precisely where the difference in the appreciation of Goethe's scientific achievements and his other writings lies. Through the latter, he created a new epoch. But the former lack precisely that which would make them the starting point of a new epoch. For we must not deceive ourselves: a scientific world view without a principled foundation is without any kind of justification and is no more than a series of unfounded ideas. Such a view lacks the one characteristic that would make it convincing: inner perfection, self-contained.
One would think that with such a fundamental difference in the influence of Goethe's two directions on posterity (that of his artistic and that of his scientific achievements), the origin of the same should also be traced back to two very different dispositions of Goethe's mind.
The question arises as to why Goethe was able to achieve the highest level of perfection in one direction, while in the other he was forced to stop where he should have provided the supports for his scientific edifice. Why the highest level of perfection in one area, while in the other it is precisely that which is lacking, which is necessary for perfection? Otherwise, it is much more the task of the genius to state the principles, and it is then up to the lesser minds to draw the further conclusions.
It seems to us that these principles are by no means lacking in Goethe, that one has simply not yet found the way to arrive at them.
The main characteristic of all of Goethe's views can be traced back to the fact that he seeks everything that is supposed to determine our judgment about an object in the external world in the realm of the latter itself. He does not allow anything extraneous or borrowed from the outside into such a judgment.
We can follow this in his ethical, aesthetic and also in his scientific assessments of events or objects. In Truth and Poetry, he occasionally says, in an explanation of his inclination towards incognito: “It is not a matter of objects in so far as they are worthy of praise or blame, but in so far as they can occur.” A judgment about whether something is praiseworthy or blameworthy presupposes an ethical model according to which one values an object. But Goethe rejects such a model because it is not taken from the events themselves, but rather is brought in from the outside. His judgment seeks only that which lies within the events themselves and makes it possible for us to explain why they have come about as they have. In his works one can find innumerable proofs of this direction of his mind. It may be said that Goethe does not judge about the objects of the external world, but he regards them in such a way that they express the explanation that our scientific need demands. He judges in the objects.
Knowledge and Belief
Goethe's views on the organic can be traced back to this principle. He contradicts the same, both the view of the final causes, which at the time of Goethe still represented almost the whole world, as well as the assumption [regarding] that the living beings could be traced back to mechanical causes. The former view comes down to the fact that an organic being has such an organization that we cannot explain it according to mere physical laws; the components of the being are in a connection and interaction that they would never enter into if they merely obeyed the mechanical-physical forces that govern them. Since these forces are the only ones that are accessible to our knowledge, the structure of organisms can only be explained if we assume that an external principle builds them according to a premeditated plan, so that this structure becomes a purposeful one. In this doctrine, theology found a mainstay of religion, a proof of the existence of God, and Kant gave it philosophical sanction. It contradicted Goethe's fundamental principle because it resorted to something outside the organism to explain it. It had to demand that all the elements that help us to understand the organism be found within it. If living beings have some purposeful structure, then something must be found within them from which this structure follows. Goethe's response to Link, who seeks to explain organic natural phenomena in terms of teleological principles, is: “The author, a knowledgeable botanist, explains physiological phenomena in terms of teleological views that are not, and cannot be, ours.” On January 6, 1798, he wrote to Schiller: “You know how much I am attached to the purposiveness of organic nature inwardly.” But the mechanistic view of living beings was just as incompatible with his fundamental principles as the teleologic one. The reason is quite the same. This view, too, does not explain the organism in terms of laws that are peculiar to it, as it were, innate in it, but rather makes it appear to be dominated by forces that are effective in inorganic nature. He did not want to explain the organic from the inorganic, but from itself. Even in his youth, he rejected the idea that the whole universe could be traced back to mechanical laws, as he describes in Truth and Fiction in relation to the système de la nature. “The système de la nature was announced, and so we really hoped to learn something about nature, our idol.” He sees himself as disappointed. “A matter should be from eternity, and moved from eternity, and should now with this movement right and left and on all sides without further ado produce the infinite phenomena of existence. We would have been satisfied with all this if the author had really built the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he may know as little about nature as we do: for by putting up some general concepts, he immediately leaves them to transform that which appears higher than nature, or as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, indeed moving, but still directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained a great deal.” The same is expressed in the following saying of Goethe: “The nearest comprehensible causes are comprehensible and for that very reason most comprehensible; which is why we like to think of ourselves as mechanical, which is of a higher kind.” - This is proof that Goethe found teleology and the mechanical world view to be equally insufficient to explain the organic.
He demanded that a true science of the organic should create the concept of the organic and the laws of life in the mind, just as Galileo once created the laws of mechanical nature. But that is the task of genius. In his theory of colors, Goethe emphasizes the importance of natural science to the genius, for whom “one case is worth a thousand,” and he admires Galileo for developing the theory of pendulums and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.
Every advance in science depends on our expanding our system of concepts, for in doing so we shed light in a realm of phenomena that is dark to us. Without Galileo's laws, we can observe the swinging motion of bodies, the motion of falling and throwing, for as long as we like, but we will not understand them. Merely describing the phenomena is not enough. It is essential that our mind is able to create a concept that makes an appearance understandable to us. But this requires creative power. It is the peculiarity of genius that from within it the conceptual does not emerge as a gray, content-free generalization - gray theory - but as one that is saturated and full of content, creating ideas that make the outside world comprehensible to our minds.
In our time, however, people fail to recognize the necessity of this creative power of genius for science. This is because they consider the latter to be nothing more than a reflection, a photograph of reality, to which faithfulness is the main requirement. The task of compiling such a “lifelike” image falls primarily to what is called “common sense.” In the face of such a view, the substantial ideas of genius naturally appear as a falsification of experience, as “conceptual poetry”.
For this view, genius has a very small role at all. At most, it can hasten the discovery of some natural law through a divinatory insight, it can find sooner what the history of science without it would have arrived at sooner or later, but that genius should also have any significance for the formulation of the content of a natural law is, according to this view, out of the question. In the face of this view, one is driven to ask: why have science at all if it is supposed to offer nothing more than a reflection of experience? Why not be satisfied with mere contemplation? The history of science, as well as science itself today, refutes this view. All progress in science is based on the creative power of the human mind. The laws of nature are not the object of direct experience; they are the creations of the human mind. Goethe belongs to the ranks of those who have truly conquered a field for science by creating new ideas. What he calls the type in the field of organic nature is to the latter what Galileo's mechanical principles are.
Only the consistent development of the fundamental view of the necessity of explaining every object of nature from its own self, as set forth above, led Goethe to this idea of the type. But his mission as a poet is also based on the same fundamental direction of his spirit. As a poet, he had the task of transforming immediate reality into poetry. This immediate reality as such no longer satisfies a certain higher need of man.
There is something about the way phenomena unfold that can no longer satisfy us. Chance plays a role and brings about constellations in reality that do not satisfy our reason. Goethe felt this more than anyone else. He often speaks of “wicked” chance, by which he means that some event takes an outcome that it would not take if only the necessity of reason were to prevail in the world. His mission in both poetry and science is to arrive at a satisfactory view of things that goes beyond what is directly experienced. “Real life often loses its luster to such an extent” (Poetry and Truth II, 9th book and Schröer's edition of the dramas $117), ”that it [sometimes] has to be refreshed with the varnish of fiction.” But in doing so, he never goes beyond what is given to man in poetry either, so that Merck could say of him that he seeks to give the real a poetic form, while others seek to realize the so-called poetic, the imaginative, which gives nothing but nonsense. We see that Goethe's whole mission actually consists in seeking the necessary, that which satisfies our minds, within reality itself. But his work in the field of inorganic nature is also based on the same disposition of his mind.
In the organism, we have a center that works from within the phenomena, and this is what we have to start with in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of them. In inorganic nature, however, there is no such central element; all effects can be traced back to external influences, spatial and temporal conditions, etc. It seems almost impossible to provide anything other than a mere photograph if one does not want to go beyond reality. And yet Goethe demands with all his energy that we also seek the principles for explaining phenomena within the given itself. “The highest would be to comprehend that all fact is already theory.” To get to know Goethe from this side, it is necessary, above all, to consider what Goethe the experiment is. A phenomenon of inorganic nature results from the interaction of the qualities that fill space and time, from the interaction of substances and forces.
The conditions for the progression of a phenomenon lie in the nature of the interacting objects and in the constellation in which they find themselves as a result of their location in space and time. This latter factor is now something that is added to the nature of the objects. Phenomena thus always contain a factor that prevents us from explaining them as a necessary consequence of the existing objects. According to Goethe, the experiment is to eliminate this factor of direct experience. The experiment is to bring the objects of the sensory world into such a mutual dependence that we are able to recognize a certain event as the necessary consequence of the existing objects. Everything that modifies the original mutual behavior of the objects is to be eliminated by the experiment. Goethe calls a phenomenon that comes about in this way a primal phenomenon. In mathematics, the primal phenomenon of physics corresponds to the axiom. The latter has no other function than to show us the relationships between simple spatial quantities in such a way that their connection is immediately comprehensible to us without further deduction. The entire mathematical system is nothing more than a complication of the axioms. Goethe wants to shape physics in an analogous way. It should be a system that arises through a complication of the archetypal phenomena and thus has an inner necessity in the way it is constructed. We find every phenomenon of experience in the system of science, not only in the random constellation in which it appears to us in the external world, but in a systematic whole from which it can be fully understood in its course. For Goethe, theory is nothing more than higher experience, but precisely higher experience, in which all details are connected as required by reason. “There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself intimately identical with the object and thereby becomes the actual theory” (Spr. in Prosa, N. 906).
Do we now ask whether Goethe's view of nature really lacks fundamental principles and whether it therefore proves to be incomplete, unfinished, in need of justification? The preceding pages show most decidedly that this is not the case. The foundations of Goethe's scientific views are the most definite that can be imagined, and they are identical with those that determine the whole direction of his work. His view is self-sustaining and did not have to await its justification from a later time. What it lacked was to apply the given points of view to all areas of the world of phenomena.
The reason why the self-justifying guarantee of Goethe's world view was denied is that so far no one has considered his scientific endeavors in the context of his entire being. But most of his assertions are not at all comprehensible without such a perspective, and it is easy to then attribute a false sense to them. If we now look from the Goethean view of nature to the modern one, of which he was a prophet, then we must indeed admit that his starting points were essentially different. The modern view of nature arose from the need to explain the entire universe in terms of mechanical causality. It was believed that the explanation of nature could only be made consistent if the laws that govern the inorganic could also be extended to the organic. We see that this view is based on a premise that Goethe rejected.
From this alone it is clear that the similarity of one of Goethe's assertions with one of the mechanical explanation of nature can only be an external one, and that it is absolutely necessary to go back to the most original axioms of Goethe if one wants to recognize the true meaning of his assertions. From this it also becomes clear how the misunderstanding we referred to above regarding the recognition of Goethe as a scientific thinker developed. There is a certain, and it must be admitted extensive, agreement between Goethe's view of nature and that of modern natural science; however, Goethe starts from completely different premises than the latter. But because these latter premises were not regarded as really scientific, because they were denied the power to found a view of nature, it was concluded that Goethe lacked the principles for his view of nature altogether, whereas in fact he lacked only those that dominate the mechanical explanation of the universe.
Goethe's view of nature is thus a self-contained whole, with its own foundations, and can only be understood in itself. By being lumped together with other theories, it is placed in an inadequate position.
But if one is to pass judgment on its influence on the shaping of science, then it must indeed be described as very slight, and it remains for the future to decide whether, through the power inherent in it, it will succeed to satisfy the scientific needs of humanity more than other explanations of nature, and whether it will thus one day be granted a more fruitful influence on the development of human thought than has been the case so far.