All things created would seem, in a way, to be purposeless, if they lacked an operation proper to them; since the purpose of everything is its operation [Omnes res creatae viderentur quodammodo esse frustra, si propria operatione destituerentur, cum omnis res sit propter suam operationem]. --St. Thomas Aquinas If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world. --John Ruskin By the 'primacy of perception,' we mean that the experience of perception is our experience at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true condition of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature. --Maurice Merleau-Ponty THIS ESSAY EXPLORES GOETHE'S DYNAMIC IDEA OF FORM AND DIFFERENTIation, while also considering the relevance of Goethean science for a poetics of Darstellung and for the development of modern phenomenology. Goethe's scientific writings, particularly in the area of botany, establish a strong link between a markedly formalist conception of plant life and a concurrent progression towards greater complexity of awareness that unfolds within the intelligence of the observer--indeed, appears properly constitutive of the observer's subjectivity. In turn, the joint differential advancement of both, phenomenon and observer, which by 1790 Goethe begins to formulate under the heading of metamorphosis appears entwined with a more wide-ranging cultural ideal of self-origination, self-organization, and human flourishing that German culture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century tends to subsume under the master-trope of Bildung. Like all such tropes, however, Bildung proves oddly resistant to conceptual scrutiny. Inasmuch as the Romantic discourse of Bildung consistently foregrounds its organicist, immediate, and submerged mode of operation, and so disavows its own status as theory, a principal challenge becomes how to scrutinize a conceptual architecture recurrently characterized by its proponents as strictly something altogether elemental: the very Law of Being rather than some method of knowing. Among the categories doing a lot of (subterranean) work in biological, literary, and philosophical narratives of Bildung is that of difference or, rather, differentiation. Its centrality comes into focus as soon as one begins to desynonymize, as any study of Bildung must, the claims of organicism from those of dialectics, the framework to which it bears the greatest affinity; and it is the (mostly implicit) work done by difference and differentiation that will be the principal focus of the remarks to follow. It is by now commonplace to speak of the late eighteenth century as undertaking a sweeping reappraisal of several key-concepts in European culture, such as taste, interest, subjectivity, history, form, and indeed life, to name but the most familiar. As remains to be seen, there is ample reason to add the notion of difference to that list. The concept of difference acquired central importance as a result of the critique of Averroist (or Aristotelian) ontology pioneered by fourteenth-century Franciscans (Duns Scotus, Ockham, Autrecourt, et al.). (1) Inadvertently, a dispute initially confined to scholastic theology laid the groundwork for the gradual bifurcation of theology and philosophy, especially as far as the latter took up questions subsequently compartmentalized under the heading of epistemology. Thus in the writings of Ockham we find the basic scholastic notion of a thing (res) losing its status as an ontological category (praedicamentum) and, instead, being defined on the (supposed) grounds of its sheer heterogeneity from other beings. …