The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Introduction

[ 1 ] On August 18, 1787, Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy: “Based on what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to take a trip to India, not to discover anything new, but to view what has already been discovered in my own way. ” [WA 8, 250] ^{1All passages from letters written by Goethe are cited from the so-called Weimar Edition (= WA) or Sophie Edition of Goethe’s Works, Section IV: Letters, 50 vols., Weimar 1887–1912; the two numbers refer to the volume and page number within this section. — Additions by the editor are placed in square brackets.} These words express the perspective from which we must view Goethe’s scientific work. For him, it was never a matter of discovering new facts, but rather of opening up a new perspective, a particular way of viewing nature. It is true that Goethe made a series of major individual discoveries, such as those concerning the intervertebral bone and the vertebral theory of the skull in osteology, the identity of all plant organs with the stem leaf in botany, and so on. But as the animating spirit behind all these details, we must consider a magnificent view of nature that sustains them; in the study of organisms, we must above all focus on a magnificent discovery that eclipses all else: that of the very essence of the organism itself. He has set forth that principle by which an organism is what it appears to be, the causes as a result of which the manifestations of life appear to us—indeed, everything we need to ask in principle regarding this matter. ^{2Anyone who declares such a goal unattainable from the outset will never come to understand Goethe’s views on nature; on the other hand, anyone who approaches the study of these views without prejudice, leaving this question open, will certainly answer it in the affirmative upon completing the study. Some of Goethe’s own remarks might well give rise to reservations in the minds of many, such as the following: “We should have… without presuming to discover the primary driving forces behind natural phenomena, focused our attention on the manifestation of the forces through which the plant gradually transforms one and the same organ.” However, such statements on Goethe’s part are never directed against the fundamental possibility of recognizing the essence of things; rather, he is simply cautious enough not to pass hasty judgment on the physical and mechanical conditions underlying the organism, since he knew full well that such questions can only be resolved over time.} From the very beginning, this has been the goal of all his endeavors with regard to the organic natural sciences; in pursuing this goal, those details present themselves to him almost of their own accord. He had to discover them if he did not wish to be hindered in his further pursuits. The natural science that preceded him—which did not understand the nature of life phenomena and simply examined organisms according to their composition of parts and their external characteristics, just as one does with inorganic objects—often had to give the details a false interpretation along the way, casting them in a false light. Of course, one cannot discern such an error in the details as such. We recognize this only when we understand the organism, since the details, when considered in isolation, do not contain within themselves the principle of their explanation. They can be explained only by the nature of the whole, because it is the whole that gives them their essence and meaning. It was only after Goethe had revealed precisely this nature of the whole that those erroneous interpretations became apparent to him; they were incompatible with his theory of living beings—they contradicted it. If he wished to proceed further along his path, he had to eliminate such prejudices. This was the case with the intervertebral bone. Facts that are of value and interest only when one possesses precisely that theory—such as the vertebral nature of the skull bones—were unknown to that earlier natural philosophy. All these obstacles had to be cleared away through individual experiences. Thus, in Goethe’s work, these individual observations never appear to us as an end in themselves; they must always be made in order to confirm a great idea, that central discovery . It cannot be denied that Goethe’s contemporaries sooner or later arrived at the same observations, and that today they might all be known even without Goethe’s efforts; but it is even less deniable that his great discovery—encompassing all of organic nature—has to this day been articulated by no one else independently of Goethe in such an excellent manner, ^{3By this we do not in any way mean to say that Goethe has never been understood in this regard. On the contrary: In this edition itself, we repeatedly take the opportunity to point out a number of men who appear to us as continuers and elaborators of Goethe’s ideas. Names such as Voigt, Nees von Esenbeck, d’Alton (the elder and the younger), Schelver, C. G. Carus, Martius, and others belong to this group. But these men built their systems precisely on the foundation of the views set forth in Goethe’s writings, and one cannot say of them in particular that they would have arrived at their concepts even without Goethe, whereas all of the latter’s contemporaries—for example, Josephi of Göttingen—independently arrived at the theory of the intervertebral bones, or Oken at the theory of the vertebrae.} Indeed, to this day we lack even a somewhat satisfactory appreciation of these ideas. It seems, in essence, irrelevant whether Goethe was the first to discover a fact or merely rediscovered it; it is only through the way he integrates it into his view of nature that it gains its true significance. That is what has been overlooked until now. People emphasized those specific facts too much, thereby inviting polemics. Although Goethe’s conviction regarding the consistency of nature was often pointed out, one failed to note that this represents only a very minor, insignificant characteristic of Goethe’s views, and that—for example, with regard to organic life—the main point is to show what kind of nature it is that preserves that consistency. If one refers to the “type” in this context, one must explain what constitutes the essence of the type in Goethe’s sense.

[ 2 ] The significance of plant metamorphosis lies, for example, not in the discovery of the individual fact that the leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are identical organs, but in the magnificent conceptual structure of a living whole—composed of interrelated laws of formation—that emerges from this and which determines the details, the individual stages of development, from within itself. The grandeur of this idea—which Goethe later sought to extend to the animal kingdom—becomes apparent only when one attempts to bring it to life in one’s mind, when one undertakes to reflect upon it. One then becomes aware that it is the very nature of the plant, translated into the idea , which lives in our spirit just as it does in the object; one also notices that one enlivens an organism down to its smallest parts, conceiving it not as a dead, closed object, but as something developing, coming into being, as a constant restlessness within itself.

[ 3 ] As we now attempt to explain in detail everything hinted at here, the true relationship between Goethe’s view of nature and that of our time—namely, the theory of evolution in its modern form—will become clear to us.