Goethe's dream

Abstract

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined living organisms as objects with an intrinsic purpose, which are self‐organized in such a way that every part is a function of the whole and the whole is a function of every part, and in which “nothing is for nothing”. Kant already anticipated the tension between agency and structure, and between forward and backward causation. He also perceived living beings as entities that, being extremely complex, are not amenable to descriptions based on laws that are similar to the fundamental laws of physics: “There will never be a Newton of a grass blade,” he wrote. Less metaphorically, Kant believed that science would not be able to understand living entities by focusing exclusively on their component parts, and, therefore, that it would never be able to explain a whole organism completely and exhaustively. > The history of biological research can be regarded as an attempt to prove Kant wrong The history of biological research can be regarded as an attempt to prove Kant wrong. We can mainly distinguish two major strategies to achieve this, analytical and synthetic, which in turn have determined how biologists have tried to understand what is a living being. Analytical biology, or the so‐called reductionist approach to biology, has mainly focused on the study of the individual components of living organisms. Its last incarnation, molecular biology, has been extraordinarily successful at producing a deluge of data on the molecular mechanisms underpinning life processes and has resulted in tremendous advances in the explanation of life workings (Morange, 2005). There is a complementary—sometimes antagonistic—tradition in biology, the synthetic tradition, which states that the essence of a living entity cannot be understood by merely studying its parts (Keller, 2002; Pereto & Catala, 2007). The German poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe …