Second Lecture

Goethe presented things differently; Goethe thought about the world differently from those who, in a certain sense, believed they had achieved a kind of philosophical conclusion at the end of the 19th century. This can be seen particularly clearly in Goethe when we consider how, on his return from his Italian journey, he wrote the classic little treatise “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants,” and how the ideas in this treatise emerged as a natural product of his soul from this particular kind of quest for knowledge. If we look at what is presented here, we will find that Goethe's way of knowing was particularly suited to penetrating the life of the plant world through observation. At the end of the 19th century, however, there was a particular focus on developing those processes of knowledge that penetrate the fabric of inorganic, inanimate nature. In their knowledge, some individuals attempted to react against this orientation of the entire process of knowledge toward inanimate nature. It can be said that Goethe's thinking, Goethe's imagination, lived in a different way in relation to external perception, to the external sensory world, than the kind of thinking that is particularly capable of penetrating the inanimate world. What Goethe thought was, in a sense, inclined to penetrate deeply into what his eyes saw, what his senses perceived. What the senses perceive is much further removed from the thought process that approaches inanimate nature than perception and thinking were in Goethe. Goethe's thinking was such that it could remain flexible by following the entire growth process of the plant, by following how one plant form is a modification of another. Goethe's thinking was not rigid, not stiffly contoured; it was such that his concepts were constantly metamorphosing, and through this they became, I would say, intimately adapted to the course that plant nature itself undergoes.