Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology

Abstract

Any modern reading of Goethe’s morphological writings must struggle with the author’s apparent satisfaction that his ‘morphology’ (Goethe coined the term) was both a descriptive science and a causal one. This unlikely attitude is made all the more difficult by Goethe’s suggestion that form — at least in the sense of ‘archetypal form’ — is itself causal. That ‘form,’ which is normally thought to be the effect of causal process, may somehow be identified with its origin, is counterintuitive to our normal habits of thought. It is not surprising therefore that the identity of ‘form’ and ‘law’ in Goethe’s writings is generally treated as an idealistic excess of Naturphilosophie which required no special effort to understand. Members of that school showed a tendency to reify ideas and had no misgivings about imposing such notions upon their observations. By the simple expedient of his inclusion in a homogeneous Naturphilosophie Goethe can be made unproblematic. It is an attractive solution, but an incorrect one.

A preliminary version of this paper, entitled ‘The Causal Dimension of Goethe’s Morphology’, was presented at the symposium ‘Goethe as a Scientist’ held at the University of California at Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology, 12–13 April 1982, and initially published in the Journal of Social and Biological Structures 7 (1984) 345–356. The present version was read at a joint symposium sponsored by the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science and the Departments of Germanic Languages and History of Science at Harvard University, 3–4 December 1982.