The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Introduction

[ 1 ] On August 18, 1787, Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy: "After 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 make a journey to India, not to discover something new, but to see what I have discovered in my own way. " [WA 8, 250] ^{1All passages from letters written by Goethe are quoted from the so-called Weimar Edition (= WA) or Sophien Edition of Goethe's works, Division IV: Letters, 50 vols, Weimar 1887-1912; the two numbers refer to the volume and page number of this section. - Additions by the editor are placed in square brackets.} In these words lies the point of view from which we have to consider Goethe's scientific works. It is never a question of discovering new facts, but of opening up a new point of view, a certain way of looking at nature. It is true that Goethe made a number of great individual discoveries, such as that of the interosseous 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 soul of all these details we have to consider a magnificent view of nature, by which they are supported, and in the doctrine of organisms we have above all to consider a magnificent discovery which overshadows all the rest: that of the nature of the organism itself. He has set forth the principle by which an organism is what it presents itself to be, the causes as the result of which the manifestations of life appear to us, and indeed all that we have to ask in principle in this respect. ^{2Whoever declares such a goal to be unattainable from the outset will never come to an understanding of Goethe's views of nature; whoever, on the other hand, approaches the study of them without prejudice, leaving this question open, will certainly answer it affirmatively after completing it. Some of Goethe's own remarks may well give rise to misgivings, such as the following: "We would... without presuming to want to discover the first motive forces of the effects of nature, have directed our attention to the expression of the forces by which the plant gradually transforms one and the same organ." However, such statements by Goethe are never directed against the fundamental possibility of recognizing the essence of things, but he is only careful enough not to make hasty judgments about the physical-mechanical conditions that underlie the organism, since he knew well that such questions can only be solved in the course of time.} From the very beginning, this is the goal of all his endeavours with regard to the organic natural sciences; in pursuing it, those details force themselves upon him as if of their own accord. He had to find them if he did not want to be hindered in his further endeavors. Natural science before him, which did not know the essence of the phenomena of life and simply examined organisms according to their composition of parts, according to their external characteristics, just as one does with inorganic things, often had to give the details a false interpretation in its way, put them in a false light. Of course, one cannot recognize such an error in the details as such. We only recognize this when we understand the organism, since the details, taken separately, do not carry the principle of their explanation in themselves. They can only be explained by the nature of the whole, because it is the whole that gives them essence and meaning. It was only after Goethe had revealed this very nature of the whole that those erroneous interpretations became apparent to him; they could not be reconciled with his theory of living beings, they contradicted it. If he wanted to continue on his path, he had to get rid of such prejudices. This was the case with the intermediate bone. Facts that are only of value and interest if one possesses that theory, such as the vertebral nature of the skull bones, were unknown to the older natural theory. All these obstacles had to be removed by individual experience. Thus the latter never appear to us in Goethe as an end in themselves; they must always be made in order to confirm a great thought, to confirm that central discovery. It cannot be denied that Goethe's contemporaries arrived at the same observations sooner or later, and that today they would perhaps all be known even without Goethe's endeavors; but it can be denied even less that his great discovery, which encompasses the whole of organic nature, has never been expressed in the same excellent way by anyone else, ^{3indeed, we by no means mean to say that Goethe was never understood at all in this respect. On the contrary, in this edition we ourselves repeatedly take the opportunity to refer to a number of men who appear to us to have continued and elaborated 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 in this series. But these built their systems on the basis of the views laid down in Goethe's writings, and it cannot be said of them in particular that they would have arrived at their concepts without Goethe, whereas contemporaries of the latter - e.g. Josephi von Göttingen - independently arrived at the interosseous, or Oken at the vertebral theory.} Indeed, to this day we lack even a somewhat satisfactory appreciation of them. It seems basically irrelevant whether Goethe first or only rediscovered a fact; it only gains its true meaning through the way in which he incorporates it into his view of nature. That is what has been overlooked up to now. Those particular facts have been overemphasized, thereby inciting polemics. It is true that one often pointed to Goethe's conviction of the consistency of nature, but one did not take into account that this is only a quite secondary, less significant characteristic of Goethe's views and that, for example, in relation to organicism, the main thing is to show what nature it is that preserves that consistency. If one names the type, then one has to say what the essence of the type consists of in Goethe's sense.

[ 2 ] The significance of plant metamorphosis, for example, does not lie in the discovery of the individual fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc. are identical organs, but in the magnificent conceptual structure of a living whole of interdependent laws of formation which emerges from it and which determines the details, the individual stages of development, out of itself. The greatness of this thought, which Goethe then sought to extend to the animal world, only becomes apparent when one tries to bring it to life in one's mind, when one undertakes to ponder it. One then realizes that it is the nature of the plant itself translated into the idea, which lives in our spirit just as much as in the object; one also notices that one imagines an organism animated down to the smallest parts, not as a dead, closed object, but as something developing, becoming, as the constant restlessness within itself.

[ 3 ] In the following, as we attempt to explain in detail all that has been outlined here, the true relationship of Goethe's view of nature to that of our time, namely to the theory of development in its modern form, will be revealed to us.