The causal dimension of Goethe's morphology

Abstract

Any modern readings 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 too easily dismissed by readers who assume that Goethe's work must either be encompassed by modern developments or be mistaken. The assumption is aided by the fact that Goethe's notion of an archetype , which is the causal aspect of his work, has been misread by inserting it within the context of Naturphilosophie and the work of those men, particularly Oken and Owen, who seem most representative of it. Goethe's notion, as it is developed in his botanical writings, cannot be subsumed over this model—it is a unique product. In order to develop a concept adequate to his intention, however, it will be necessary to relate his approach to the history of morphology, and by doing so, disentangle Goethe's idea from the more common one. I shall argue that the misreading above arises from the assumption that Goethe, like Oken and Owen, begins from the organizing concept of a common underlying schema and offers a version of this as an archetype. Since the notion of such a common structural plan is part of modern morphology, the misreading is inevitable unless the reader is able to detect another starting point in Goethe's work. Goethe begins, in fact, with transformation functions rather than schemas, and describes movement rather than stasis. We shall see what a great difference this will make only when we understand how central the notion of a common schema was to the historical development of morphology, excluding Goethe.