Spinoza, Goethe, and the Philosophy of Form

By

Michail Vlasopoulos

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master in Design Studies

History and Philosophy of Design Concentration
At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
May 2012
Copyright 2012 by Michail Vlasopoulos
The author hereby grants Harvard University permission to reproduce and distribute copies of this thesis
document, in whole or in part for educational purposes.

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Michail Vlasopoulos
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
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In loving memory of my father,

the Spinozist

Contents

Abstract 4
Introduction 5
The Metaphysics of Morphology 8
A Spinozistic Goal 8
Man and Nature: Transparency and Participation 10
The Principle of Sufficient Reason 12
The Principle of Continuity 15
Monism 18
Naturalism 19
The Geometry of Morphology 24
Universality 26
Necessity of Relations 27
Apathy 28
Synthetic Method 29
The Tenor of the Metaphor 36
The Structure of the Science of Morphology 38
The Within and the Without 38
The Bee and the Flower 41
The Voice of the Urtypus 42
Images 46
Bibliography 50

Abstract

Influenced by Baruch de Spinozas magnum opus, the Ethics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set
out to find an inherent spiritual gauge of living things, within what he called the mysterious
architecture of formative forces. Goethes research was crystallized in the concept of an archetype, an
Urtypus that could be used as a thread to find his way through the labyrinth of animal structure. This
essay explores the metaphysical principles that supported the founding of morphology. Goethe
employed the metaphysical structure of Spinozas universe as well as the scale of his geometric method
for his ascent to the higher laws inscribed in the forms of Nature. This essay treats Spinozas
metaphysics and Goethes morphology as facets of the same vision for a unification of explanatory
principles. Spinozas Rationalism sees the world as a web of conceptual connections that extends
equally over all the contents of the world. On the other side of the same coin, Goethes morphology
treats the world as a web of interrelated forms. Consequently, as Robert Richards sees evolutionary
theory as Goethean morphology running on geological time, Goethes morphology shall be presented
as an offshoot of Spinozistic metaphysics taken away from its geometric flatness and extending into the
fields of transformation.

Introduction

Spinoza and Goethe were drawn to eternal things. They each invested a substantial amount of
effort in their respective lifelong quests for an elusive philosophical object of desire: a definitive
explanation of our changeable world and our place in it, premised on an understanding of the more
stable and incorruptible things. Usually, this kind of thoroughgoing devotion to universals is motivated
by bitterness with the earthly particulars. And the forms of these eternal worlds are given to us as
logical negations of our sensible finite reality. As a matter of biographical fact, before they had begun
to contemplate the amaranthine features of the world, both Spinoza and Goethe experienced emotional
frustration due to their friction with the fluctuating nature of earthly affairs.1
In the beginning of the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (henceforth TIE, published circa.
1661) we find Spinoza coming to a crossroads in life. 2 He recounts his pivotal decision to abandon the
reassuring materialistic life of his time in order to seek a true and communicable good, something that
would bring him closer to unalloyed joy, entirely exempt from sadness.3 In a passage from his
autobiography that deals with Spinoza, Goethe writes that we are equipped with a means for
renouncing our cherished objects of the moment, replacing one passion for the other as we constantly
make our way through new models of life. The beginning of the TIE finds Spinoza standing on a
threshold between two radically different stances in life. But Spinoza isnt just rejecting his old
passions to replace them with new ones. Instead, he concentrates this indwelling
volatility (Leichtsinn) to completely resign from the world of passions in one grand act of total selfrenunciation.4 He seeks for that oceanic pleasure that would keep him afloat in the turbulent sea of
human passions. And most strikingly for Goethe, Spinozas commitment does not expect something in
return: it is a one-sided intellectual love of the eternal, a devotion to imperishable things. Unfortunately,

It has been rumored from Colerus, that Spinoza fell in love with Clara, the daughter of Franz van den Enden, the freethinker whose school he attended circa 1654.

2 Spinoza writes in his TIE, 7: For I saw that I was in the greatest danger, and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all
my strength, however uncertain it might belike a man suffering from a fatal illness, who, foreseeing certain death unless
he employs a remedy, is forced to seek it, however uncertain, with all his strength. Spinoza, The Collected Works, ed.
Edwin Curley (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, c1985), 9.
3

Spinoza, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, 10 and 13, in Curley, Edwin ed. The Collected Works (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, c1985), 10.
4

Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, trans. John Oxenford, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole, vol. I (London: Robertson,
Ashford and Bentley, 1902), 308.

he paid the price for this superhuman task by being esteemed by others as in-human,5 Goethe
remarks, a monster carrying out a monstrous philosophical vision.
Tellingly, Goethe immerses himself in the crystalline world of Spinozas Ethics following a
painful rejection. As a matter of fact, not only is Goethe using the Ethics to cultivate his own unusual
nature, but also to sedate his passions. It is in Spring and Summer of 1773, when twenty-four-year-old
Goethe plunges into Spinozas work for the first time, possibly as a way of distracting himself from the
intense anguish that Lotte Buffs marriage to Johann Christian Kestner caused him.6 Goethe confesses
that what struck him in Spinoza was the reconciling calm induced by the precision of his
mathematical method, standing in direct contrast with the poets own sensitivity.7 However, Spinozas
Ethics meant a lot more to Goethe than a sedative.
Goethe models his scientific method on the content and the form of Spinozas Ethics. He employs
the metaphysical structure of Spinozas universe as well as the scale of his geometric method for his
ascent to the higher laws inscribed in the forms of Nature. Goethe recalls in his autobiography how
much his whole mode of thinking was affected by Spinoza.8 Admittedly, every time he had to go back
to his works the same calm air breathed over him, a phrase that is followed by a dramatic statement:
I gave myself up to this reading, and thought, while I looked into myself, that I had never before so
clearly seen through the world.9 What could this through mean in the context of Goethes
fascination with Spinoza? Something in the work of this eminent seventeenth-century philosopher had
been mediating Goethes scientific outlook. Heinrich Heine claimed that all contemporary philosophers
possibly without knowing it, look through glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.10 The metaphor of

But, since in this there is something super-human, such persons are commonly esteemed in-human (monsters), without a
God and without a World. People hardly know what sort of horns and claws to give them (Goethe, Truth and Fiction
Relating to My Life, 308-309).
6

Goethe first read Spinoza's Ethics in spring and summer of 1773, perhaps to escape the bondage of the passions that
constricted him during the wedding of Lotte Buff (Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 377).
7

In book XIV of his autobiography, Goethe recalls: The all-composing calmness of Spinoza was in striking contrast with
my all-disturbing activity; his mathematical method was the direct opposite of my poetic humour and my way of writing;
and that very precision, which was thought ill-adapted to moral subjects, made me his enthusiastic disciple, his most
decided worshipper (Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 261-262). In book XVI, Goethe recalls: I well
remembered what peace of mind and clearness of ideas came over me when I first turned over the posthumous works of that
remarkable man (Ibid., 307) and My confidence in Spinoza rested on the serene effect he wrought in me (Ibid., 309).
8

This mind, which had worked upon me thus decisively, and which was destined to affect so deeply my whole mode of
thinking, was Spinoza. (Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 261). On 7th November 1816, Goethe writes to
Zelter from Weimar: Barring Shakespeare and Spinoza, I do not know that any dead writer has had such an effect upon
me (Goethes Letters to Zelter. With Extracts from those of Zelter to Goethe, 140).
9

Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 308 [Emphasis mine].

10

Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, 70.

Heinrich Heine suggests that the philosophical understanding of Nature at the turn of the eighteenth
century is premised on a particular modality of perception. The glass here may be a suitable vehicle
for this correlationSpinoza being a professional lens-grinder in addition to an influential philosopher
but the tenor of this metaphor remains unclear in particular as it relates to the genesis of Goethes
morphology.

The Metaphysics of Morphology

A Spinozistic Goal
In 1756, a seven-year-old Goethe attempted to literally worship Deus sive Natura by building an
altar for his formless deity composed of Its own works. The altar was put together in such a way to
represent the world symbolically. His simulacrum consisted of a stack of specimens from his natural
history museum placed on his fathers red lacquered music stand. Built one on top of the other in tiers,
his representatives of nature were topped with kindling tapers, the flame of which symbolized the
aspirations of mans heart towards his Maker.11
Goethes lifelong quest looks like an adult version of his boyhood altar: to simulate Nature
through its representative products. Goethe leads a truly Spinozistic life, dedicated to the study of the
imperishable things that lie beneath the transience of worldly forms. Just like in Spinoza, a new way of
life offers a lifesaving and soul-preserving remedy. From Italy, on the humble soil of which he would
glimpse the enduring forms of the Ideal, he writes:
I should like to occupy myself solely with relations that are enduring, and thus, according
to Spinoza, to win eternity for my spirit.12
Goethe chooses organic being as the point of entry to these enduring relations, most specifically in the
form of the humble plant. At some early point in his study of Spinoza, he must have come across the
memorable phrase near the end of the Ethics: The more we understand singular things, the more we
understand God.13 In June 1785, Goethe writes to Jacobi about how much Spinoza encourages him to
see God in the natural world in rebus singularibus and in herbis et lapidibus, to see the universal and
the divine in every humble singularity, in mere rocks and plants.14 Next year, in another letter to Jacobi
dated May 5, 1786 Goethe quotes Spinozas conception of scientia intuitiva, the third and higher kind

11

Near the end of Book I of his Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe recalls in third-person narrative: The God who stands in
immediate connection with nature, and owns and loves it as his work, seemed to him the proper God, who might be brought
into closer relationship with man, as with everything else, and who would take care of him, as of the motion of the stars, the
days and seasons, the animals and plants. . . . The boy could ascribe no form to this Being: he therefore sought him in his
works, and would, in the good Old-Testament fashion, build him an altar. Natural productions were set forth as images of
the world, over which a flame was to burn, signifying the aspirations of man's heart toward his Maker (Goethe, Truth and
Fiction Relating to My Life, 40).
12

Cited in Albert Bielschowsky 1788-1815; From The Italian Journey to the Wars of Liberation, vol. 2 of The Life of
Goethe, trans. William A. Cooper (NY and London: G. P. Puntam's Sons, 1907), 163.
13

Ethics, VP24 in Curley, ed. A Spinoza reader: The Ethics and Other Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994), 257.
14

WA 4.7:63, 64 cited in Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: Institute of Germanic Studies,
University of London, 1984), 162.

of knowledge. It is a knowledge that, as Spinoza defines: proceeds from an adequate idea of the
formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.15
These words have a tremendous impact on Goethe. Not only is a vision starting to appear in Goethes
mind but is also formulated in clearly Spinozistic terms:
These few words give me the courage to devote my life to the contemplation of those
things which I can reach and of whose essentia formali I can hope to form an adequate
idea.16
Four months after this last letter to Jacobi, at noon, Goethe leaves Weimar for a trip to Italy, where he
embarks on a quixotic journey that will eventually lead him to his finis: the crystallization of an
adequate idea of the plant, the invention of the concept of the Urpflanze. On the basis of this conceptual
understanding of plant form, Goethe will eventually construct an entire science of form, bridging the
plant with the insect and the human cranium (fig. 3 and diagram 1). Thus, Spinozas intuitive
knowledge is the starting point of Goethes science of morphology.
The science of morphology is a form of applied Spinozism that investigates forms of being within
the becoming of forms. It was founded by Goethe as a discipline for the understanding of the unity that
underlies the variety of organic forms. Within the very composite word morphology we trace the
conflation of form () with discourse (the suffix derived from ). The suffix of the
word is a promise for the possibility of a rational, discursive approach to phenomena pertaining to
organic transformation. Reason turns to the qualitative species of phenomena that were ostracized by
Newtonian science, the kind of intensive events that cannot be studied with extensive measures, nor
accounted for with fixed symbols.
In order to capture the logic of form and formation, Goethe premises his scientific program on a
philosophical model of Nature that is deeply rooted in Spinozas metaphysics. And this Nature is
neither green, nor chaotic, nor irrational. It is a conceptual construct that comes into being as a
community of metaphysical principles. This particular conception of Nature that was forged by Spinoza
and employed by Goethe is demarcated by five axiomatic commitments: 1) the co-extensiveness of
Nature and Man, embodied in an epistemic optimism that would eventually imbue Romantic science in
general; 2) the adoption the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the aversion to any brute facts in Nature,
15

Ethics, IIP40, S2, 141. Hoc cognoscendi genus procedit ab adaequata idea essentiae formalis quorundam Dei
attributorum ad adaequatum cognitionem essentiae rerum. Goethe according to David Bell identifies his own Anschauung
with the Intuitive knowledge of Spinoza. See David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe, 162.
16

WA 4.7:214 cited in Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe, 162.

3) the conviction that Nature consists in the continuity of forms instead of discreet units, a conviction
epitomized by the Principle of Continuity; 4) the commitment to the existence of One thing, as
embodied in the philosophical and morphological Monism; and finally 5) the thesis that all things
related to each other are governed by necessary and ecumenical laws, embodied in the spirit of
Naturalism. These five commitments intertwine in Goethes philosophical understanding of Nature, an
intellectual locus of all objects of Goethes scientific inquiry along with objects of his creative genius.
It may even be concluded that Goethes eternal laws of form are deduced from the very form Spinoza
gave to the eternal laws. Thus, by turning his scientific attention to this new science of forms, Goethe
gives a sensible form to the purely conceptual construct of Spinoza.

Man and Nature: Transparency and Participation

Nowadays, Reason or ratio may appear detached from what we conventionally refer to as
Nature. The familiar structure of our human-bound logic seems far removed from Natures
recalcitrance. Most of the times Nature seems to violate human logic or at the very least, contain dark
areas that no logic can enlighten. However, during the diachronic construction of the concept Nature,
there was no lack of points of convergence, moments of rationalization of Nature or even more
interestingly, instances of the naturalization of reason.
For a seventeenth-century Rationalist philosopher such as Spinoza, Man17 is capable of
participation in the logical structure of Nature; he is by nature, as it were, able to conduct metaphysics
and come face to face with reality. Reason is the locus of truth, the path where the idea meets with its
object, or the place that our mind-dependent reality conforms with the mind-independent contents of
the world. The world can be explained in terms of a chain of logical connections that is, by principle,
accessible to human beings. Spinoza is a philosopher who culminates the vision of seventeenth-century
Rationalism, and who, I would argue, touches the limit of its application. He considers intelligibility
the most natural feature of the world; the ability for something to be conceived or explained is the
condition for the possibility of its existence.18 In other words, Nature is axiomatically rational and
reason is natural.
All scientific inquiry for Spinoza ought to revolve around a single goal: the knowledge of the
17

I am choosing to use the outdated word Man with capital m instead of human or human being as a way to invoke the
anthropic subject as conceived in the seventeenth century, both linguistically and metaphysically.
18

In Spinozas work, to be conceived is coextensive with to be explained. See Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (London:
Routledge, 2008).

10

union which the mind has with the whole of Nature. This was after all the very goal of his selfrenunciation in the TIE: the conceptual frame of a new human nature and the limit of its attainment. For
that matter, there must have been sufficient reason to support this radical remodeling of his whole life
around it; an existentially fulfilling vision to compensate for what is left behind. The epistemic stance
of Spinoza was based on the metaphysical convictionthat appeared very early in the history of
Western thoughtthat human cognition is just a part of a universal Reason that governs everything.
For Spinoza, the universe is comprised by things held together by meaningful, conceptual relations,
even independently from our minds. Some things are conceived through themselves, called
substances, the basic constituents of the world. The other category pertains to things conceived
through something other than themselves, called modes. Explanation then, for Spinoza, is the modus
operandi of the Universe. A clear mark of this axiomatic commitment can be found in the second
axiom of the first part of the Ethics: What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived
through itself,19 which leads to the declaration in the demonstration of Proposition 4: Whatever is, is
either in itself or in another . . . outside the intellect there is nothing except substances and their
affections.20 This act of conceiving takes place in the infinite intellect of Spinozas God, that is to
say in a self-subsistent system of ideas in which every finite idea partakes. Any human being can
improve his perceptual ability by contemplating actively the logical structure of the world, a general
notion of which he can access from within the anthropological limits of his intellect. It may be
impossible for the human mind to grasp the world in its infinitude of elements and their relations, but in
principle, there is no qualitative difference between human minds and Gods mind. But this epistemic
optimism is evident not only in Spinoza but in Goethe as well. Goethe sees the human mind as capable
of perceiving the seed . . . of a relation which would have a harmony beyond the minds power to
comprehend or experience once the relation is fully developed; and such a perception would be the
most wonderful [impression] bestowed on the mind of man.21
As with Spinozas Ethics, Goethes theories and discoveries presuppose that Nature is a coherent
and logic-friendly field. The poem True Enough: To the Physicist, Goethes refutation of Albrecht
von Hallers anti-naturalist beliefs, reveals a remarkable Spinozistic undertone, as it asserts the

19

Ethics, IA2, 86.

20

Ibid., IP4D.

21

Goethe, A Study Based on Spinoza In Scientific Studies, vol. 12 of Goethe: The Collected Works, ed. and trans. Douglas
Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 9.

11

complete intelligibility of Nature. For Goethe, Man can have access to explanation exactly because he
constitutes a peripheral part of Natures logical field.
Into the core of Nature
O Philistine
No earthly mind can enter.
...
Happy the mortal creature
To whom she shows no more
Than the outer rind,
...
Nature has neither core
Nor outer rind,
Being all things at once.
Its yourself you should scrutinize to see
Whether youre center or periphery.22
...

Goethe argued strongly for the unity and compatibility of the healthy human organ with Nature.
He thought that the human body and mind could be the laboratory for a new kind of scientific
experiment that until then was confined within the boundaries of the objective world, a territory of
prediction and mastery that insulates itself from the human subject. For Goethe, Man is the most
accurate sensor of qualitative data, bits of truth that are invisible to artificial quantitative experiments.
As he writes to Zelter in July 22, 1808, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument
possible.23 By knowing more about the human being we discover more about Nature and vice versa.
Goethe promotes a transparency between the two terms that renders any sharp line between them
unjustifiable, a position emblematic of the entire Romantic Era.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

The core of the epistemological optimism of both thinkers is embodied in a powerful
metaphysical principle: the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter PSR), which expresses the
Rationalist demand for the full intelligibility of the world. Although it is usually attributed to G. W.
Leibnizwho built an entire system around the commitment to itSpinozas philosophy can be read

22

Goethe True Enough: To the Physicist (1820), trans. Michael Hamburger in Selected Poems, vol. 1 of Goethe: The
Collected Works, ed. Christopher Middleton (NJ: Princeton University Press 1994), 237.
23

Letter to Zelter, July 22, 1808, Maxims and Reflections in Scientific Studies, 311.

12

as having one of the most consistent and thorough applications of the PSR, probably in the entire
history of western philosophy. The PSR states that everything in the world must have an explanation,
which amounts to stating there can be no brute facts in nature. In other words, if something exists,
there must be a sufficient reason to account for its existence, a reason that if stated would make its
existence fully intelligible. All this simply means that everything must be premised in something, either
in itself, or in another. All effects are necessarily inherent in something. No such thing as a spontaneous
event can appear, but on the contrary, everything is grounded in and explained by antecedent causes.
This principle was invoked in an era in which nature was conceived of as a capricious and
recalcitrant environment, full of unjustified distinctions, such as the exceptional role of human form in
the universe, or the local effects of the spiritual realm that were supposed to intervene in matter-bound
causality. There were why questions that simply could not be answered; brute or unexplainable facts
that were impervious to explanation or human grasp and towards which thinkers developed an
irrational stance.
Under the grinding force of Spinozas Naturalism, all distinctions and bifurcations in nature
lose their relief in favor of a uniform continuum, wholly permeable to explication. As a result of
Spinozas thoroughgoing commitment to the PSR, the thing that is ultimately upheld is the
intelligibility of Nature, the logical structure of the world itself. As PSR forces us to see nature as fully
intelligible, there is no why question that lacks an answer. Not unlike Spinozas lenses, the whole
world is grounded to such an extent that nothing remains inexplicable or unintelligible. All that we
perceive in our common world of causally related objects is in the end just a series of explanations.
This is achieved philosophically by what Michael Della Rocca expounds as a twofold use of the
PSR.
Spinoza wants to explain what causality is: there must be a sufficient reason to explain what it is
for something to be the cause of a certain state of affairs. This is the first use of the PSR. The second
use purports to give a definite answer by doubling on itself. What causality is, is simply a way of
explaining some events by others. We see that PSR reaches its terminal limit after its twofold
application to a subject. The only thing that there is no need to explain further is explanation itself. As
Della Rocca argues in his book on Spinoza,24 if we fully follow Spinozas thoroughgoing commitment
to the PSR, we soon find that everything is explained in terms of explanation itself. Consequently, what

24

Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (London: Routledge, 2008).

13

best characterizes the metaphysical composition of Spinozas world is a web of explanation. Even
existence itself for Spinoza is just a state of explanation. For example, to be is simply to be explained,
or to be the cause of something is simply to explain it, or as Della Rocca so succinctly puts it: Our
place in the world simply is the way in which we are explained by certain things and can serve to make
intelligiblei.e., explaincertain other things.25 The PSR is the fuel of his ambitious drive for
explanation and the common semantic ground for all terms that he deploys in the Ethics: power,
perfection, psychology, consciousness, conatus, causality. All his terminological machinery converges
semantically and bottoms out metaphysically to intelligibility itself. In the end, as Della Rocca argues
the PSR is the structure and what the structure structures.26
If we turn now to Goethe, what governs his science of morphology, and even grounds its
possibility as a science, is the metaphysical view that existence must be expressed through form. This
in turn means that if we are to delve into the metaphysical structure of the world, we have to turn to the
study of forms:
Morphology rests on the conviction that everything which exists must signify and reveal
itself. From the first physical and chemical elements to the mental expression of man we
find this fundamental principle to hold. We turn immediately to that which has form. The
inorganic, the vegetative, the animal, the humaneach signifies itself, each appears as
what it is to our external and our internal sense. Form is changeable, becoming, passing.
The doctrine of form is the doctrine of alteration. The doctrine of metamorphosis is the key
to all the signs of nature.27
Here, we see yet another aspect of Goethes epistemic optimism, convinced as he is that all phenomena
in the world are sensible by our sensory apparatus and conceivable by our cognitive faculties. However,
we should not treat this as an empiricist approach to the study of forms. Although it may appear that
the inorganic, the vegetative, the animal, the human form pertains to an object of sensory experience,
form for Goethe means something far removed from the senses and closer to an object of pure
Reason.28 Form is a medium of ontological expression and not a mere object of our sensory experience.

25

Della Rocca, Spinoza, 2.

26

Della Rocca, Spinoza, 79.

27 Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, 1st division, 10: 128, cited in Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of
Evolution; the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwins Theory (University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 36.
28

For example, at some point he uses the term Reason to refer to the faculty that allows us to enter the Ur-phenomena, the
place where divine forces are at work.

14

There is, for that matter, a metaphysics of forms rather than a phenomenology of forms.29 This is clear
in zoological cases of where, although he cannot retrieve evidence of the archetype of some vertebrate
species through his senses, he nonetheless emphatically asserts the presence of the type metaphysically
as a kind of a morphogenetic field that transcends appearances.30
If, by way of Spinozas PSR, existence amounts to explanation or conceivability, existence for
Goethe is linked to morphological expression. In the same way we find no inexplicable facts in
Spinozas Nature, there are no formless events in Goethes Nature. In similar terms, Goethes Nature is
what can be expressed in form, just like Spinozas Nature is what can be explained. Since there are no
formless events in Goethes Nature, the presence of each thing has to be explained in terms of its prior
morphological stage. That leads to the view that there is no form that is really immune to
transformation or not yielding to explanation by the principles of metamorphosis. In turn, the principle
that every form is only a snapshot in an entire sequence of forms renders all discreetness in the world a
mere illusion. Indeed, for Goethe there are no isolated events, but instead all phenomena overlap with
each other as parts of Natures compact expression. This leads to the next aspect of <Nature>31, the
theme of continuity.

The Principle of Continuity

The Principle of Continuity (hereafter PC) amounts to conceiving matter as a continuous quantity
and perceiving Nature as a continuum. According to the PC nothing passes from one state to another
without passing through all the intermediate states between the two. This means that there are no
discreet steps in natural processes that involve some ultimate elements in matter, time, or logic. There
are no such things as indivisible atoms, discreet units of time, or unanalyzable elements because their
compactness would involve brute facts. The logical demand that everything has its explanation, forces
us to see ostensibly isolated units or separated states as continua. In this way the PC performs a kind of
logical anastomosis of spatial and temporal constituents, to use a Goethean principle of
29

Goethe writes in 13 Feb. 1829: The Understanding will not reach her; man must be capable of elevating himself to the
highest Reason, to come into contact with the Divinity, which manifests itself in the primitive phenomena (Urphnomenen),
which dwells behind them, and from which they proceed (Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 238). Even under the
Kantian framework that this passage resonates with, Reason is the faculty where metaphysics lives.

30 According to George Wells, we learn to see in a skeleton not merely what is there, but what must be there, because it
belongs to the type underlying all forms. We learn to see with the minds eye, and such intellectual intuition enables us to
discern not one but five fingers of the hoof of a horse. It is on the basis of such transcendent anatomy that Goethe credits
man with the intermaxillary bone (Wells, Goethe and the Intermaxillary Bone, 359).
31

Im using brackets to signify the concept of <Nature>, as opposed to the signifier Nature.

15

transformation. In space, in so far as matter is conceived of as a continuous extension without void, and
in time, in so far as all events occur in a gradual way. Any transformation in these terms is a sequence
of infinitesimally brief identities. The more closely differences are observed in space and time, the
more they diffuse in a temporal series of identities. The PC performed the key role in mathematics and
philosophy of eliminating finite distinctions by projecting them to infinity.
The PC was embodied in Leibnizs well-known axiom Natura non facit saltus, the thesis that
states nature does not make jumps. In turn, that last statement appeared in Carl Linnuss Systema
Natur (1735), in which the pioneering Swedish taxonomist anticipated a future in botanical science
where plants were to be treated as contiguous territories on a geographical map,32 fifty-four years
before Alexander von Humboldts Essai sur la gographie des plantes (1805). 33 All Natural
Philosophers after Linnus purported to fill in the gaps that were opened up between species by
researching the interstitial spaces between the fragments of the Linnan taxonomies. It was a quest to
find a scientific explanation for the apparent semblance and variability between species, ways of
diffusing the sharp lines of Linnus table. Goethes botanical work can in many ways be seen as the
fulfillment of this Linnan instruction for an anticipated biogeography of plants.
From very early on in his career, Goethe was committed to a seamless unity that underlies the
multiplicity of phenomena, what he saw as a tapestry without gaps.34 Goethes commitment to the PC
can be traced back to his essay on Spinoza, where he stated that, The infinite cannot be said to have
parts.35 But it was not until his Italian journey that he turned this principle into a heuristic tool with

32

The fragments of the NATURAL METHOD are to be sought out studiously. This is the beginning and the end of what is
needed in botany. Nature does not make leaps. All plants exhibit their contiguities on either side, like territories on a
geographical map. Carolus Linnus, Philosophia botanica, trans. Stephen Freer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
40, 77.
33

In Linnuss Systema we locate a proto-ecological thinking through which the observer is now the object of his own
analytical method. For the first time, human beings were placed next to other primates, subsumed in the category of
Anthropomorpha. Human form is no longer the source of analogythe fundamental tool for metaphysics during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rather, the Human Being now is a mere point in a system of the binomial coordinates.
34

Douglas Miller, introduction to Scientific Studies, xiv.

35

Goethe, A Study Based on Spinoza in Scientific Studies, 8.

16

which to invent the Urpflanze.36

His method of intuiting unity across diverse components comes in two sequential parts: first, the
homologous patterns in leaf structure are retrieved empirically and described in terms of the same field
of forces. Subsequently, by keeping these frames in memory, the observer is picturing them not as
distinct formson pain of violation of the PCbut as states of a seamless process of transformation
that runs both forwards and backwards. Here is a report on his method, in his Studies for a Physiology
of Plants (1795/c. 1891):
If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as
far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actually seen together before
me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole.
At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, but nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the
end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. I can do so by
dissolving the particular without destroying the impression itself.37
Goethe had reenacted the actual trajectory the leaf traces behind throughout its growth as in a
fluid story of floral forms.38 To this very continuum he gives the name Proteus, the only thing that
can be identified with a shape-shifting entity that expresses itself divergently across the kingdom
Plantae. Consequently, he defines Metamorphosis of Plants as, the process, by which one and the
same organ presents itself to our eyes under protean forms. 39 The identity of the Grundorgan in time
is explained by the view that every metamorphotic stage is asymptotically adjacent to the precedent and
the antecedent stage in a seamless sequence.
All the subsequent proceedings of his comparative anatomy are structured around the PC in the
understanding of form and formation. Goethe progressed from the conception of the Grundorgan, the
36

Goethe set off for Italy from Weimar at 3 A.M. in the evening of Sept. 3, 1786. During the years 1786-1788, he traveled
through Rome, Naples, Sicily, where he admittedly had the best time of his life, studying and writing his botanical works.
Goethe was exposed to a new spectrum of plant forms and most importantly to unprecedented variations of species that
were already known to him. At first he expected to find a perfect embodiment of plant form on the ground, as a
fulguration of the archetype on earth as real and tangible as the archetypal villa of Palladio that he visited in Vicenza, for
which he wrote in his diary on Sept. 21, 1786 that [a]rchitecture, has never, perhaps, achieved a greater degree of luxury.
However, after having failed to locate the Urpflanze in Italy, Goethe realized that it must grow in an entirely different
place. From May to July 1787, his thinking enters into a wholly different arena: he had to forge the archetype mentally. He
writes to Christian Nees von Esebeck in the middle of August 1816 about that particular period of his life: I sought at that
time the Urpflanze, unaware that I sought the idea, the concept whereby we could develop it for ourselves (Goethes Werke,
IV, 27: 144, cited in Lorraine Daston & Fernando Vidal, The moral authority of nature, 147).
37

Goethe, Studies for a Physiology of Plants in Scientific Studies, 75.

38

. . .Goethes overall intent was for the parts to form a whole and fluid story of floral forms in processto present, in
effect, a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants (Gordon Miller, introduction to Metamorphosis of Plants, xix).
39 Goethe, Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklren (Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, Gotha, 1790), 4, cited in Goethes
Botany: The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Tablers Ode to Nature (1782), vol. 10 of Chronica Botanica, no. 2, trans.
Agnes Robertson Arber. Chronica botanica, v. 10, no. 2 (Waltham, Mass.: Chronica Botanica, 1946), 91.

17

subject of lawful metamorphosis, to the more general Grundform, a set of Grundorgane that bear a
constant relation to each other during different stages of the organisms life as well across different
species of organisms. Given the continuity in ontogenesis and in eidogenesis, research can be held and
explanation can take place across different stages of the same organism as well as across different
organisms in space. As Goethe writes to a friend, every creature is but a note of the great harmony,
which must be studied in the Whole, or else it is nothing but a dead letter.40

Monism
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the eminent French supporter of the Goethean project, is known to have
said, there is philosophically speaking only a single animal,41 a phrase that may also represent
Goethes own views about the unity of form across all beings. The oneness in form that is asserted in
Saint-Hilaires statement is indeed the logical limit of the morphological explanation. If you take the
PSR and PC and draw the consequences from their synthesis you end up with really one thing across
time and space. Nature for Goethe has a more-or-less single fundamental form that is expressed
divergently across its homologous members, as if they were parts of a universal organism, the one
Animal. This morphological Monism of Goethe could not be more relevant to Spinozas Substance
Monism, a philosophy of the one and only existent.
Spinoza, drawing upon the new metaphysics of Ren Descartes, his predecessor, contemplates
the three kinds of substantiality, namely, matter, mind and God. Once inside the intricate machinery of
Spinozas geometric demonstration, the reader of the Ethics soon discovers that there cannot be two
substances of the same nature, or that real individuals cannot actually share a particular feature or
relation42 (Ethics, IP5). Subsequently, if one follows the logic behind the definition of substantiality s/
he quickly reaches the conclusion that the category of substance can be exclusively attributed to one
thing. Drawing upon Descartes and armed with the powerful PSR, Spinoza stretches the concept of

40

Indeed, man is most intimately allied to animals. The co-ordination of the Whole makes every creature to be that which
it is, and man is as much man through the form of his upper jaw, as through the form and nature of the last joint of his little
toe. And thus is every creature but a note of the great harmony, which must be studied in the Whole, or else it is nothing but
a dead letter. From this point of view I have written the little essay, and that is, properly speaking, the interest which lies
hidden in it. Letter to Carl Ludwig von Knebel, November 17, 1784, in Goethe, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Bach (Wiesbaden: Insel
Verlag, 1954, 208-209) translated in George Henry Lewes, The Story of Goethes Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.,
1890), 250.
41

Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2002), 304.
42

P5: In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. Ethics, IP5, 87.

18

substance to its logical limits. Everything is attracted to the One, the vanishing point of every
explanation, the only thing whose essence explains its existence. He thus attributed the term
substance to only one, self-caused, infinite thing. The logic behind Substance Monism generates a
new standpoint to contemplate the referent universe. In the conceptual laboratory of the philosopher,
the PSR and the PC become the philosophical organa for the anastomosis of the world.
Consequently, what Spinoza manages to do in the first part of the Ethics was to take the notion of
substance as it was applied in a plurivocal sense in Descartes (attributed to res extensa, res cogitans
and Deus accordingly) and to form an integrated philosophical system based on a univocal sense of
substantiality. By extending the prime metaphysical category of substance to its logical limits he
conflated all uses of substance to only one referent: a seamless, unitary substance that consists in an
infinity of attributes, two of which is extension and thought. But in order to do so, he declared what
Descartes only insinuated in his metaphysics, that we are mere modes, fleeting but nevertheless
interconnected states of a self-same medium. Everything is in God or Nature, not as parts but as modes,
that is to say finite affections or states of the substance. In this in and this or (Deus sive Natura)
lies the incendiary identification of Nature and God that branded Spinoza as an atheist for decades.

Naturalism
If the previous philosophical investigations uphold the singularity of Nature (whether it pertains
to a singular existent or a singular form) the doctrine of Naturalism deals with its uniformity. It states
that all things that bear some relation to each other are governed by the same laws. In other words, I
take the term Naturalism to refer to the conceptual impossibility of any unjustified exceptions or
bifurcations.43 In the essay Nature, George Christopher Tobler captures Goethes Naturalism in the
phrase: The one who does not see her everywhere sees her nowhere clearly.44 In other words,
<Nature> as a concept must be reserved for a boundless, all-encompassing, fully intelligible referent.
On the other side of the coin, Spinozas Naturalism can be located in the famous passage on affects:
. . . But my reason is this: nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect
in it, for Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one
and the same, that is, the laws and rules of Nature, according to which all things happen,
and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of
understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely,
43

I follow Della Roccas concept of Naturalism that is grounded in Spinozas metaphysics.

44

Scientific Studies, 3.

19

through the universal laws and rules of Nature. . . .45

According to the doctrine of Naturalism, everything in the world abides by the same laws, through
which they can all be explained. There is no room for the old belief in the exceptional place of Man in
the universe, his free will, or the unnatural operation of human affects. It is easy to see how this
doctrine emerges from the PSR. Suppose that we have a place in Nature that is governed by some ad
hoc rules instead of the universal laws that apply to everything else. If these rules are subject to
explanationin pain of violation of the PSRthey have to be ultimately reduced to the more general
rules, or else their local application would constitute a brute fact. However, if they are explained by
those universal laws then they are not exceptions after all. This means that every local behavior in
Nature must relate to the higher and universal principles. If there exists something that cannot be
reduced to the same overarching principles that govern everything, then this would signify an
anomalous or brute fact, something that the PSR forbids. All this may appear as commonsensical to us
if we fail to pay attention to the historical context in which Naturalism emerged.
The world during the ages preceding the rise of modern scientific culture was explanatorily
incoherent, perforated as it were by effects of supernatural forces, occult qualities and an overall
exaltation of behavior toward natural ends. This plurality of bifurcated environments could not be
studied under universal terms, and suffered the symptoms of irrational belief and superstition. Founders
of mechanical philosophy, starting with Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and culminating in
Newton succeeded in naturalizing all reality through a univocal understanding of the material
constitution of the universe. Indeed, the material universe was understood as a stupendous clockwork
mechanism, whose purported homogeneous nature would render feasible the pursuit of a uniform
science and, most importantly, it would ensure the reproducibility of its results. In other words, the
pervasive mechanicity that was attributed to the world provided the metaphysical terms for its
absolute intelligibility. A human body, a clock, a tree, the Heavens are not causally isolated worlds with
an inherent tendency to reach preordained states or physical fates, but instead, they are all amenable to
the same kind of explanation through a mathematical quantity completely separated from teleological
considerations.
However, the century that comes right after these considerations was faced with new problems
that jeopardized the uniformity of the explanatory terms of mechanical philosophy. Science in Goethes
45

Ethics, Preface to Part III, Of the Affects, 153.

20

time was preoccupied with achieving a quasi-Newtonian understanding of life processes. Albrecht
Haller was one of the most representative advocates of this approach. He wanted to explain organ
function in terms of vital forces, in the same way that Newton explained chemical and optical
phenomena by applying the concept of force. On the other hand, there were eminent scientists like
Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that argued for the irreducibility of vital
processes. According to them, life is manifested in goal-directed processes that are, in principle,
unexplainable by efficient causation. The problems of bio-causality would be the new center, around of
which eighteenth-century philosophers and naturalists reoriented their naturalistic demand for the
construction of a unified system of explanation.
Given the Rationalistic posture of eliminating any sharp lines in Nature, it becomes clearer that,
notwithstanding the differences in their subject matter, Spinozas geometric philosophy and Goethes
morphological science instantiate the same systematic attempt to explicate heterogeneous things in
terms of uniform laws and processes. By interpreting Goethean transformation as Spinozistic
explanation, this essay treats Spinozas metaphysics and Goethes morphology as facets of the same
vision for a unification of explanatory principles. Spinozas Rationalism sees the world in a web of
conceptual connections that bound together all the contents of the world, physical, psychological, moral
subjects alike. On the other side of the same coin, Goethes morphology treats the world as a web of
interrelated forms, cutting across members under the same kingdom (e.g. different species of Plantae,
or relations between Arthropoda and Vertebrata), as well as across entire kingdoms (e.g. Animalia and
Plantae) (fig. 3).

Consequently, its not so much that the organism has to be reduced to physical-chemical
processes, but reversely, the physical-chemical processes have to be described as degrees of organic
reality. Among the various objects of Romantic Science a new species of analogies and metaphors
emerged. The reduction from the complex to the simple reversed its direction: the organism is not an
extremely complicated machine, but the machine is an extremely simple organism. Everything can be
described as degrees of the same organic quality, a uniform body diversified by a vibrant field of vital
21

forces. The polarity of forces in Goethes scientific and poetic worksintensification and nullification,
diastole and systole, progress and regressconstituted a principle that expressed itself divergently in
various phenomena of the natural world and allowed the formulation of generative helixes that
explained growth, progressive change, semblance as well as difference. As Douglas Miller notes:
. . . [We] find this interplay of polarities in the expansion and contraction of leaf forms and
vertebrae metamorphosis, the beat of music, the diastole and systole of the heart, inhaling
and exhaling, acidification and deacidification.46
This approach is a way of reconciling the tensions of an entire era that William Blake so
brilliantly portrayed in his work Newton (fig 1). The print features Isaac Newton, the person who
became a designation of Physics itself, directing his immense genius downwards, onto the flatness of
a geometrical figure. At the same time, he seems oblivious to the wondrous, coral-like rock that
surrounds him, thereby possibly symbolizing the irreducible complexity of living tissue. The laws of
metamorphosis, albeit the malleable nature of their lawful expressions, nonetheless abide by the
universal laws of matter and spirit. Through Goethes Naturalism, the organic expression that was
reduced to Newtonian physics finds its way back into the geometric order of things. Moreover, in this
new picture of Nature a place was reserved for human expressivity.
Goethe, in reference again to Spinozas influence, declares that, Nature works after such eternal,
necessary, divine laws, that the Deity Himself could alter nothing in them.47 It is on this basis that he
develops his full-blown Naturalism by expounding the contrariety that haunts peoples minds regarding
Reason (meaning Free Will) on the one hand, and Necessity on the other, in absence of the Naturalistic
ideals. In his attempt to support the Spinozistic thesis, he presents himself as a spiritual automaton, 48
indulging in a spontaneous and involuntary drive to represent Nature from within its own resources. He
regards his indwelling poetic talent altogether as Nature and explores his unconsciously driven poetic
activity, what possibly results in one of the earliest attempts of expression d'criture automatique.49 In
46

Miller, introduction to Scientific Studies, xvi.

47

Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 310.

48

The automa spirituale is a remarkable description of human soul that Spinoza uses in his Tractatus de Intellectus
Emendatione (85), that operates according to necessary and determinate laws. A human being, or human mind traces a
continuous trajectory on a plane of ideas, either affirming or denying them. For this reason, the human mind is not prior to
its ideasas Descartes thoughtbut the mind consists in a collection of ideas corresponding to the human body. B
says for that matter that, for Spinoza ideas are not like mute pictures on a panel [Ethics, IIP49S2 (II)]
shaped and used at will. The human mind doesnt observe the ideas as if they were paintings, he thinks through them and
with them (, introduction to , 50). In TIE, note of 34, Spinoza notes . . . apart from the idea there is
neither affirmation, nor negation, nor any will (Curley, ed. Collected Works, 18).
49

Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 311-312.

22

the same passage, he regards his ardent desire for expression as something natural, even unconscious,
thus naturalizing his own poesis. His passion, looking through Spinozas lenses is presented as a part
of the geometry of the world or even an instrument for its observation.
Throughout the Romantic Era, emotion and personal expression will gain epistemological
significance to serve as instruments for the study of natural qualities. Perhaps this is the key for
studying the spirit of Spinozism that hovered over the entire Romantic epoch. There is a remarkable
passage in Spinozas Tractatus Politicus where he naturalizes human emotions by relating psychology
to meteorology. The archetypal Romantic natural phenomenon, the storm, is fundamentally of the same
kind and order as the internal turmoil of the Romantic subject.
So I have regarded human emotions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, pride, pity, and other
agitations of the mind not as vices of human nature but as properties pertaining to it in the
same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder, and such pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.50
This may as well be the hidden intellectual agenda in Friedrich Caspars, Wanderer Above the Sea of
Fog, the painter of the Naturalistic ideal par excellence, on the canvases of which Man and
environment meet as intensities of the same Nature (fig 2).
To put it in a nutshell, Goethes morphology is premised in the following chain of principles:
existence is expressed through form, that form comes in continuities, these continuities in turn are all
contained in one thing that is governed by necessary and universal laws. On these metaphysical
grounds, new species of comparisons, analogies and associations were made possible. Through
comparative anatomy, Goethes newly founded field, the Naturalistic ideal will be infused into the preDarwinian life sciences. Still, what could these convictions about Nature and her uniform laws have to
do with Spinozas geometric method, the rigid form of the Ethics itself, that Goethe held so dear? How
could the methodological standpoint of the dispassionate student of passions have inspired a nonanthropocentric standpoint in the anatomist?

50

Spinoza, Political Treatise, 4 in Complete Works, 681.

23

The Geometry of Morphology

Notwithstanding the powerful naturalistic belief that equally fuels the ideas of Spinoza and
Goethe, the mos geometricus of the Ethics still seems prima facie in direct opposition to Goethes study
of labile biological forms. The living, breathing and growing object seems incompatible with the
geometric structure that Spinoza used as scaffolding for his masterpiece. French philosopher Henri
Bergson once claimed that a neophyte confronted with the quasi-mechanical complexity of Spinozas
Ethics is struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnought
class.51 Similarly Heinrich Heine considered this method antiquated and a huge defect, like a bitter
shell that holds a tasty kernel. But the rigor of the geometrical structure must have played a more
significant role for Goethe than just a stronghold from devastating affects. Goethe confesses that he
read enough of himself into the Ethics (identifying his own self among the subjects of the Ethics), so
that, except from a sedative for his passions, it opened out for him a free, wide view over the sensible
and moral world seemed to open before me.52
If the content of Spinozistic metaphysics presents Nature as a web of explanation, the form of this
metaphysical web as well as the method of exposition is geometry. The Ethica, ordine Geometrico
Demonstrata, in its full title, is modeled according to the paradigm of Euclids Elements, the closest
there was to a seventeenth-century Rationalists conception of Scientia. The latter was considered to be
the mother of all sciences, a systematic body of knowledge that is founded on self-evident axioms and
primitive definitions on which an entire system of propositions can be laid out in an orderly deductive
fashion. However, Spinozas geometric demonstration is not meant as a mere model of scientific
enquiry, but aspires to say something about the world itself. The Ethics aspired not only to represent,
but to becomequa content and forma fragment of Nature, the Book of Nature par excellence.
Spinoza presented his version of Scientia as a simile for the coherence and intelligibility of the
metaphysical structure of the world. As such, it was chosen to reflect the uniformity and necessity of
the laws of Nature, that which deserves an equally uniform method of exposition. But in order to
uncover the meaning behind the geometric method we need some more detail on Spinozas ontological
structure of the world.
51 Nevertheless I know of nothing more instructive than the contrast between the form and the matter of a book like the
Ethics: on the one hand those tremendous things called Substance, Attribute and Mode, and the formidable array of
theorems with the close network of definitions, corollaries and scholia, and that complication of machinery, that power to
crush which causes the beginner, in the presence of the Ethics, to be struck with admiration and terror as though he were
before a battleship of the Dreadnought class (Bergson, Key Writings, 236-237).
52

Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My life, 261, book XIV.

24

Spinoza closed everything in a Parmenidean-like Being, a self-identical, immobile existent.

However, the way in which substance perseveres in its identity through incessant transformations
presupposes a refined internal relation between being and becoming. Spinoza here espouses two
voices for his ontological structure, as it was originally introduced by Cusanus and Bruno. Natura
naturans (naturing nature) pertains to the active part of the Substance, as the immanent cause of all
its effects, and Natura naturata (natured nature) to the passive effects thereof.53 The two voices of
Spinozas universe are interwoven within the same analytic statement of Gods identity. In other words,
Natura naturata is conceptually connected with Natura naturans in the same way the properties of a
triangle necessarily follow from its definition.
I think I have shown clearly enough that from Gods supreme power, or infinite nature,
infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, i.e., all things, have necessarily flowed, or
always follow, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it
follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles.54
This self-contained entitythe function that relates Natura naturans with Natura naturata is
the only thing that is explained through itself, i.e. the explanation lies within itself, whereas any other
dependent thing is explained through another. This difference allows the circulation of explanation
from causes to effects. The causal force of the active part of Nature is channeled through what one
scholar calls a cascade of effects55 on the edges of which finite beings grow as part of the protean
epidermis of the substance. This is also the fuel that keeps the geometric machine of the Ethics
running and producing new propositions, scholia, corollaries. In other words, the dynamic unfolding of
Nature occurs by and through geometric necessity, just like the unfolding of its definition in the
subsequent propositions. Since, the effects are anticipated in the premises, they are only causally
posterior and not ontologically separate. This is Spinozas immanent causality expressed in geometric
language. We cannot separate Natura naturata from Natura naturans just as we cannot set apart the
properties of the triangle from its definition. So then, to represent this ontological structure and follow
the current of explanation, as it were, one has to proceed from the cause to the effects, to begin from

53

[B]y Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of
substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by
Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the
modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived
without God (Ethics, IP29 Scholium, 104-105).
54

Ethics, IP17S, 98.

55

Martial Gueroult, Spinoza, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1968), I. 9.

25

a self-evident definition of everything, and draw out all of its consequences synthetically. All axioms,
postulates, and scholia are presented as explications of the definition of Deus, through which the writer
aspires to represent the story of their ontological dependence on their generative cause. The
geometrical narrative unfolds with necessity from the premise of all things, God, to its conclusions, the
laws of nature, matter, mind, freedom etc. In other words, the mos geometricus simulates the modus
operandi of the world.
For these reasons, the Ethics is, to us, more like a fossil that contains archaeological information
of the causal structure of Nature that once dwelled in the philosophers mind, rather than an arbitrary
garment for a philosophical content. This reading reflects a popular belief among contemporary
Spinoza scholars that treat the form of the Ethics, as a necessary consequent of its content, so that the
character of the method which Spinoza fixed upon for the problem of philosophy involved in advance
the metaphysical character of its solution.56
The features of the geometric method that mirror actual features of Spinozas Nature can be
summed up in the following order: 1) Universality across different objects; 2) Necessity of relations
between things as matter of conceptual connection; 3) Aesthetic objectivity; 4) Synthetic method from
the cause to the effects.

Universality
Between the lines of the following passage from Spinozas Ethics, we can trace the reason behind
the application of the mos geometricus for the study of such a seemingly alien subject for geometry: the
human passions. Spinozas account for his method is contained in a passage that follows directly after
the one in which we located Naturalism. The passage is so revealing regarding the relation between the
Naturalistic content and the geometric form that it is worth quoting at length:
But my reason is this: nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in
it, for Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and
the same, that is, the laws and rules of Nature, according to which all things happen, and
change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of
understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely,
through the universal laws and rules of Nature.
The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, and the like, considered in themselves,
follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as the other singular things. And
56

[T]he real process of the procedure of things forth from God must be thought after the analogy of the logical procedure
of the consequent from its ground or reason, and thus the character of the method which Spinoza fixed upon for the problem
of philosophy involved in advance the metaphysical character of its solution (Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 396).

26

therefore they acknowledge certain causes, through which they are understood, and have
certain properties, as worthy of our knowledge as the properties of any other thing, by the
mere contemplation of which we are pleased. Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers
of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the
preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and
appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.57
Goethe admitted how much this method struck him in an emotionally turbulent time. Spinozas
geometrical thinking enforces his Naturalism insofar as it renders everything connected to each other. It
is the form of the unitary web of explanation that permeates all singular things and reveals the roots of
their geometric exposition. All singular things, a mountain, a storm, even Goethes devastation after
Lotte Buffs rejection, would all be observed from the same dispassionate standpoint of the
philosopher, as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies. Analogously, the principles of
metamorphosis as the driving forces of all nature constitute Goethes own view from everywhere that
allows a universal explanation of anatomy, botany, meteorology, musicology and optics. The geometry
of the Ethics as well as the geometry of the forces of metamorphosis, work as universal and unitary
modes of explaining a variety of phenomena.

Necessity of Relations
It should be noted however, that metamorphosis, at least as it was perceived in the seventeenth
century, was something that Spinoza vehemently attacked in his writings, both in the TIE as well as in
the Ethics. Spinoza heavily criticized metamorphosis as being suspicious of superstition and the lack of
knowledge.58
But as we have said, the less men know Nature, the more easily they can feign many things,
such as, that trees speak, that men are changed in a moment into stones and into springs,
that nothing becomes something, that even Gods are changed into beasts and into men, and
infinitely many other things of that kind. 59
In a passage from the Ethics, his words echo a similar negative attitude towards the metamorphosis and
the confusion that it relates to:
57

Ethics, Preface to Part III, Of the Affects, 153.

58

It has been argued that the passage on his TIE refers to Roman poet Ovids Metamorphoses. As a matter of fact, Ovid
seems to have reintroduced an element of caprice in the natural processes, some room for the unexplained or the brute fact,
to re-mystify the world of Lucretius that preceded his own poem andexcept from the brute spontaneity of the clinamen
reduced every form to the universal units of explanation, the atoms.
59

Spinoza, TIE 58 in The Collected Works, 27.

27

. . . for those who do not know the true causes of things confuse everything and without any
conflict of mind feign that both trees and men speak, imagine that men are formed both
from stones and from seed, and that any form whatever is changed into any other.60
These passages indicate that the common belief in Spinozas time regarded metamorphosis as
something that bends the laws of Nature, circumventing of the orderly establishment of natural forms.
Indeed, metamorphosis has been a principal metaphysical problem for lots of ancient thinkers;
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Aristotle to mention a few, all dealt with this inexorable
problematic: How, from a given something, do you get something else? How do we make sense of this
disruption of the identity over time? It seems that Spinoza implies there is an order that governs the
alteration of forms that, even if it remained elusive for his time, it could never be found to elude the
necessary and uniform order of Nature. Thus, we should read Spinozas harsh critique as an
anticipation of a demystification of metamorphosis, a way of perceiving it as geometrical in its
explanation as any other subject.
Along this Naturalist line of motivation, Goethe seems to have applied the rigor and transparency
of Spinozas approach to the fluid alterations of biological form. In Goethes work, we find the rigor of
conceptual connections that bind together the terms in the Ethics, and which are used for the
rationalization of events of qualitative metamorphosis. Metamorphosis for Goethe can be treated as a
conceptual connection between forms, a way of explaining each form in terms of antecedent and
subsequent stages in the transformation of a single archetype. There are necessary, conceptual relations
across metamorphotic stages of the same entity through time as well as necessary vertical relations
between different species and the archetype. In fact, Goethe will eventually describe the principles that
guide metamorphosis as algebraic formulas, thus framing the relations between forms as necessary
and rigorous as the relations between ideas. Douglas Miller argues that:
In Goethe's view, these metamorphoses are as subject to natural law as any algebraic
formula or line-of-sight computation, and he admonishes us to bring the same sense for
truth and regularity to qualitative events as we would bring to mathematical work.61
Apathy
In a different passage earlier in the Ethics, Spinoza argues for a detachment of the concepts of
right-wrong or beautiful-ugly from things, concepts that humans assign according to how well they
60

Ethics IP8, Scholium 2, 88.

61

Douglas Miller, introduction to Scientific Studies, xv.

28

serve needs or agree to our own constitution. The pure science of mathematics offers, according to
Spinoza, a unique and objective view from a place that has neither sensory prejudices nor teleological
thinking. In the past, mathematics liberated the human race from the territory of his psychology and the
wiring of his senses and showed a different standard of truth.
So they maintained it as certain that the judgments of the gods far surpass man's grasp. This
alone, of course, would have caused the truth to be hidden from the human race to eternity,
if mathematics, which is concerned not with ends, but only with the essences and properties
of figures, had not shown men another standard of truth.62
Goethe, too, infuses this aesthetic apathy to his own scientific method. In one of his pivotal essays on
method, The Experiment As Mediator between Object and Subject written in 1792, about two years
after the publication of his pamphlet on the Metamorphosis of Plants, he suggests that the true botanist
has to leave behind the yardstick of the human standpoint and assume the neutral view of a
seemingly godlike being, directing his dispassionate gaze outwards like the sun shines on all plants
equally. The scientific measurement must be discovered in the sphere of his observations and not
applied arbitrarily from the center of his own subject.63 For Goethe, everything has the same
significance, either thistle or flower and that it should not be valued according to how well each serve
human purposes. He thus argues for a uniform allocation of scientific interest and aesthetic judgment
over all beings. Just like the geometric method extends over moral and sensible subjects, the scientist
must learn to transcend his aesthetic predispositions and reach out to the external world in a uniform
way. In short, in the same way that Spinoza approaches human affects from a non-human dispassionate
perspective, Goethe studies human anatomy from the standpoint of a non-anthropomorphic archetype.

Synthetic Method
We already discussed the way Goethes morphology is premised on the principle that existence is
expressed through form, that form comes in continuities, and that these continuities are all contained in
one thing that is governed by necessary and universal laws. In other words, there are no isolated events
from the whole of nature and due to this coextensiveness of phenomena, the scientist is assigned with
the mission to reveal the latent connections they all maintain with the whole. In a remarkable passage
from his 1792 essay, The Experiment As Mediator between Object and Subject in which these
62

Ethics, Appendix to Part I, [I], 111.

63

Scientific Studies, 11.

29

commitments are starting to be crystallized into a method, Goethe writes:

Nothing happens in living nature that does not bear some relation to the whole. The
empirical evidence may seem quite isolated, we may view our experiments as mere isolated
facts, but this is not to say that they are, in fact, isolated. The question is: how can we find
the connection between these phenomena, these events? . . . All things in nature, especially
the commoner forces and elements, work incessantly upon one another; we can say that
each phenomenon is connected with countless others just as we can say that a point of light
floating in space sends its rays in all directions.64
We trace Goethes persistent theological theme of a source of light that radiates uniformly in all
directions. Given this commitment to the intelligibility of nature, Goethe presents a method of unifying
the fragments of empirical evidence under principles of ever-increasing priority or explanatory
extension. He thinks the scientist has to present every known phenomenon in a certain sequence so
that we could determine the degree to which all might be governed by a general principle.65 He gives
the example of his study of Optics, which he thought of as a single experiment understood as a whole,
across its manifold variations, with a corresponding general formula that overarches an array of
individual arithmetic sums.66
Goethes method operates from a dispassionate and unprejudiced point-of-view through which
empirical data is assembled in a sequential fashion for the purpose of ascending to the over-arching
features of the world, to higher axioms and principles; these higher principle in turn determine the ways
in which new data is collected and processed. Briefly put, Goethe is an Empiricist but with a
Rationalist heart. All data is collected through experience but, at the same time, it is oriented towards a
horizon of metaphysical principles upon which they are premised. It is like amassing evidence for a
case that is already solved, or putting together parts of a puzzle that is already pictured as a whole.
Even though every analysis presupposes a synthesis 67 for Goethe, the reconciliation of the two
approaches, the analytic and the synthetic is pictured as a feedback-loop that starts from synthetic but
passes through both of the methods in a recursive fashion. 68 He offers a metaphor for the dialectic
animation of the body of knowledge within this loop: the sciences come to life only when the two
64

Ibid., 15-16.

65

Goethe, Analysis and Synthesis, Ibid., 48.

66

Ibid., 16.

67

Ibid., 49.

68

It is easy to see how this method works using the example of Goethes discovery of the os intermaxillare in Man. He
initiated his analytic search with an a priori commitment to his Naturalism, the fact that everything plays by the same rule,
especially human form. The analysis was in a way prejudiced with this metaphysical hypothesis or principle.

30

exist side by side like exhaling and inhaling.69

Goethes appreciation for the transparency and the rigor of the geometric method can be traced
back to the essay The Experiment As Mediator between Object and Subject. Here he instructs us to
learn from the way mathematicians bring together things in unbroken sequences:
From the mathematician we must learn the meticulous care required to connect things in
unbroken succession, or rather, to derive things step by step. Even where we do not venture
to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had to satisfy the strictest of
geometricians.
In the mathematical method we find an approach which by its deliberate and pure nature
instantly exposes every leap in an assertion. Actually, its proofs merely state in a detailed
way that what is presented as connected was already there in each of the parts and as a
consecutive whole, that it has been reviewed in its entirety and found to be correct and
irrefutable under all circumstances. Thus its demonstrations are always more exposition,
recapitulation, than argument.70
Nature, ontologically speaking, is conceived of as the synthetic source for every subsequent analysis
just like the concentrated principles of geometric systems are channeled throughout a body of
propositions. The act of discovery is seen as an unpacking of the whole, all proofs being already
contained in each of the parts of the whole and waiting to be unfolded. Goethe believes that the
archetype was an idea through which Nature was necessarily expressed. Nature proceeds from ideas,
he writes, just as man follows an idea in all he undertakes.71 This is how he justified the geometric
necessity of the ekphrasis of the archetype as if it were an a priori condition for the possibility of every
creature. In other words the necessity runs from the generative source (Natura naturans) towards its
derivatives (Natura naturata). Consequently, if we want to follow the logical interrelations of forms,
Goethe argues, we have to follow the natural direction from cause to the effect.
To outline the meaning of the synthetic method, and the point of convergence between Spinoza
and Goethe, it may be useful to jump forward in time, to another nineteenth-century thinker. Ralph
Waldo Emerson, argues in his journal that all our classifications of Nature may appear useful to us, but
they should be treated only as provisional measures, cross-sections of a continuum that is waiting to be
discovered philosophically. Emerson, even without explicitly stating it, builds a bridge between the
method of Spinoza and the science of Goethe. He upholds the synthetic method in which an initial,
69

Ibid., 49.

70

Ibid., 16.

71

Zur Morphologie. Verfolg (WA vi, 348) cited in George A. Wells Goethe and the Intermaxillary Bone The British
Journal for the History of Science 3, no. 4 (1967), 358.

31

most general idea unfolds to new truths and classifications that are already contained and anticipated in
the premises. Emerson saw the Idea of the cosmic constitution as a harmonious geometric problem that
is premised in a pure, plastic Idea.72 He anticipates the migration of the synthetic method from the
study of ethical truths to Botany, and considers that as the only legitimate philosophical way of
producing real classifications:
The way they classify is by counting stamens, or filaments, or teeth and hoofs and shells. A
true what we call argument, the unfolding an idea, as is continually done in Platos
Dialogues, in Carlyles Characteristics, or in a thousand acknowledged applications of
familiar ethical truths,these are natural classifications containing their own reason in
themselves, and making known facts continually. They are themselves the formula, the
largest generalization of the facts, and if thousands on thousands more should be
discovered, this idea hath predicted already their place and fate. 73
Indeed, Spinoza can be retrospectively attributed with this kind of quest for the glimmering of that
pure, plastic Idea. Even in his earlier works, Spinoza is occupied with the problem of the definition
of a thing from which it is deduced a dynamic self-regulatory system of modifications.74 In order to
reproduce Nature, ones mind must, according to the TIE:
. . .bring all of its ideas forth from that idea which represents the source and origin of the
whole of Nature, so that that idea is also the source of the other ideas.75
Alternately, the entire project of the Ethics is the result of the synthetic exposition of an innate idea of
God, that qualifies as the source and origin of the whole Nature. The idea of God for Spinoza is an
indwelling logical concept of a self-caused entity, the vanishing point of all explanation necessitated
from the PSR. Deus is Spinozas own Archimedean point, on the self-evidence of which he will throw
the whole weight of all the subsequent knowledge we may build on our leading assumptions.76 Thus,
from the definition of God or Nature, an infinite system of interconnected modes is deduced according
to the geometric machine of his book, the Ethics. God as the causa sui, is the source from which all

72

The Idea according to which the Universe is made is wholly wanting to us; is it not ? Yet it may or will be found to be
constructed on as harmonious and perfect a thought, self-explaining, as a problem in geometry. The classification of all
natural science is arbitrary, I believe; no method philosophical in any one. . . . All our classifications are and very
convenient, but must be looked on as temporary, and the eye always watching for the glimmering of that pure, plastic
Idea (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, with Annotations, 292-293, May 3, 1834).
73

Emerson, Journals, with Annotations, 294.

74

, in , 191.

75

TIE, 42, Collected Works, 20.

76

Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: his life and philosophy (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), 129.

32

homologous ideas of singular things, of human mind, human affects and natural laws are deduced.
Garrett pictures this with a metaphor la Deleuze:
. . .each proposition is like a pleat or fold in a Baroque curtain that as one unfolds it one
realizes envelops bolt after bolt of pleated cloth. As each proposition is unfolded, longer
and longer demonstrations and justifications emerge until the whole argument up to that
point is like one long seamless piece of cloth.77
Indeed, the same scheme of synthetic progression had initially inspired Goethe to embark on his
scientific inquiry. For, if we trace back to the origins of Goethes scientific and philosophical thinking,
the point of departure seems to be the Intuitive knowledge of Spinoza:
And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain
attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.78
As a result of a careful self-examination, Goethe admits in one of his last essays written in 1823, that
his whole method relies on derivation: I persist until I have discovered a pregnant point from which
several things may be derived.79 Thus, Goethes account of morphology presents itself as an
intrinsically synthetic science; a progression from the sources of all forms to a system of interconnected
forms, just like in Spinozas TIE. The new field of comparative anatomy bears within its very name the
dialectical respiration of science. Goethe saw anatomy as doing for organized beings what
chemistry does for unorganized matter.80 The anatomy part pertains to the analytic pole of science
that describes, dissects and reverse-engineers, but only within a field of comparison whose unity is
presupposed. How then was the source of all forms retrieved and how did it provide the synthetic
ground that made analysis possible?
One of the previous obstacles for the development of comparative anatomy was, according to
Goethe, the boundless extension of empirical observation with no agreements, or common perspective.
With no such a system available, no meaningful comparisons could be made since the point of
comparison is unfixed and moveable. The rather fragmented understanding of anatomy, thus called for
a reordering of its measures and dimensions. As Goethe explains:
Observations have remained as disparate as the circumstances under which they were
77 Aaron

Garrett, "The Virtues of Geometry" (forthcoming).

78

Ethics, IIP40, S2, 141.

79

Significant Help, Scientific Studies, 41.

80

Scientific Studies, 117.

33

made. It was impossible to reach agreement on terminology. Scholars, horsemen, hunters,

butchers, etc., traditionally used different sets of names.
No one was willing to believe in a common reference point for things, nor in a common
point of view on them.81
Goethes solution of the osteological archetype constitutes the syntax of a new universal language for
the conduction of anatomical science. By looking for ways of creating a universal semantic field for his
comparative anatomy, Goethe discovered a universal form underlying a multiplicity of signified forms.
Still one may ask, what kind of form could play the role of signifying a vast array of animal forms?
Goetheconvinced that Nature operates with the same laws everywhere82discovers the intermaxillary bone (what became known then as Goethes bone) in Man in 1784.83 After discovering the
os intermaxillare in Man (fig. 4), Goethe convinced himself to break away from the notion of his
predecessors of using a particular species as a yardstick for all the others. For these reasons, the
archetype was chosen to be as general as possible, containing the forms of all animals as potential.84
Therefore, no particular animal could be used as a gauge of this morphological affinity, especially the
human form. The archetype becomes the non-human fulcrum of all forms that supports the comparison
of individual anatomical features and enforces the synonymity of them in a field where everything is
rendered homologous to each other.
The plastic idea of the archetype is primarily a field of explanation from an animal species to the
next, from the organism to the part, and from the part to other subordinate parts.85 Within this plane
occurs every form, or in Spinozistic terms, every explanation. Therefore, Goethes archetype constitutes
81

Scientific Studies, 117.

82

Her tread is measured, her exceptions rare, her laws immutable (Goethe 1995, 3-5).

83

In 1784, and independently from Broussonet (1779) and Vicq dAzyr (1780), Goethe discovered the human intermaxillary
bone fused behind the incisors in the front of the human palate, thus nullifying the anatomical differentia between ape and
human. The essence of the human being was up until that time was resting on this absence in his anatomy. The distinction
between man and animal long eluded discovery. Ultimately it was believed that the definitive difference between ape and
man lay in the placement of the apes four incisors in a bone clearly and physically separate from other bones. Goethes
The Content Prefaced (From On Morphology) in Goethe, Scientific Studies, 68. In the Outline for a General Introduction
to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing with Osteology Goethe criticized the denial of the os intermaxillare in man as an
indirect denial of the archetype and the promises that it brings: Certain rigid opinions became established. It was denied,
for instance, that the human being has an intermaxillary bone. The reason for this was strange enoughthis trait was to
distinguish us from the apes. No one realized that the indirect denial of the archetype deprived osteology of a promising
approach (Ibid., 124).
84

Goethe, "Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing with

Osteology" in Scientific Studies, 118.
85 Goethe suggests that there are two ways in which the Osteological Archetype can be employed in comparative anatomy
studies: we can compare two different species with the archetype or we can choose a part of the archetype and trace its form
descriptively through a longitudinal sequence of different genera (Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Scientific
Studies, 119).

34

a geometric locus defined by all the lines of explanation that are traced by the Grundorgane in Nature
as narratives of transformation (diagram 2). The regularity and the explanatory power of the archetypal
form as a common reference point is the thread that permeates across all forms and kinds, the means
to find our way through the labyrinth of animal structure.86 This mythological metaphor offers an
image for the commitment to the full intelligibility of a structure, a path opened as it were by the
thread of the archetype which saturates all interstitial spaces with explanation, just like Spinozas
geometrical exposition exposed the full intelligibility of the cosmos.
In the same way that Spinoza approaches human affects from a non-human and dispassionate
perspective Goethe studies the human anatomy from the standpoint of a non-anthropomorphic
archetype. Human form, just like human psychology is not barricaded from the natural order of things,
neither immune to the same explanatory principles that mirror the same order. If Spinozas Geometry is
the form of his Naturalism, Goethes own view from everywhere corresponds to the intuitive grasp
of the archetype. If Geometry delineates the horizon of explanation in Nature, the archetype in
morphology offers a general and penetrating overview of Nature:
But in establishing the archetype, we must look further afield in nature; we will be unable
to form a general picture of mammals without such an overview, and by calling on all of
nature when we construct this picture we will be able to modify it by regression to produce
pictures of less perfect creatures. 87
In sum, both authors are devoted to the search of an adequate idea of the absolute in order to
proceed to the finite things in an orderly, deductive way. It is tempting to describe morphology as a
Scientia, a deductive exposition of an attribute of Naturethe most general, universal feature
drawing from it all its logical consequences, in the world of finite forms. For, ultimately, Spinozas
Deus and Goethes Natura, share the same role as sources or engines of explanation. Standing at the
top as overarching features in systems of explanation, they are what all finite things and sensible forms
are ultimately reduced to, the vanishing point of all why questions animated by the PSR. In the
course of explicating their subjects, the definition of Spinozas substance unfolds deductively to reveal
an entire self-regulatory system of modifications, just like Goethes archetype unfurls, modification
after modification, to reveal every conceivable animal form. If this is the case, the Goethean archetype,
by way of an analogy, is to the diverse anatomical features what Spinozas seamless piece of cloth of
86

Ibid., 121.

87

Ibid., 119.

35

geometric argumentation stands to its propositional pleats. This is a way, for the purposes of this
essay, to bridge Goethes Formalism with the rigidity and rigor of the mos geometricus of Spinoza.88

The Tenor of the Metaphor

As a way of going back full circle to the initial question, the Spinozistic lenses that mediate
between the Romantic scientist and the object of his study are clearly a metaphor for the Naturalism
that Spinoza bequeathed to his Romantic followers. As a way to provide some context about this
metaphor, Heine engaged a vitriolic attack on Hegel and Schelling about the originality of their work,
supposing their wrongful appropriation of Spinoza would become evident if only Spinoza were some
day liberated from his rigid, antiquated Cartesian, mathematical form and made accessible to a large
public. 89 Heine celebrates the new form that the doctrine of Spinozism assumes, away from its old
and Cartesian mathematical form, that he never liked:
Goethe was the Spinoza of poetry. The whole of Goethes poetry is animated by the same
spirit that is wafted towards us from the writings of Spinoza. . . . The doctrine of Spinoza
has escaped from its chrysalid mathematical form, and flutters about us as a lyric of
Goethe.90
In the same way Robert Richards sees evolutionary theory as Goethean morphology running on
geological time,91 Goethes morphology in turn can be seen as an offshoot of Spinozistic metaphysics
taken away from its atemporal, geometric flatness and extending into the fields of transformation.

88

It may also be argued that the two thinkers meet on some middle ground. Spinoza sees geometry as inherently dynamic,
alive as it were, capable for example of producing movement out of extension and logic out of mere thought, and Goethe
sees biological form as inherently geometrical, that is, able to be logically deduced from a self-explanatory Urtypus.
89

Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, 70.

90

Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Fragment, trans. John Snodgrass (London: Trubner & Co,
1882), 135 & 137.
91

Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 407.

36

However, this ethereal, lyrical form that Goethes Spinozism is found must be conceived as coextensive
with the synthetic method, even though it appears not to conform with it. This is what the epistemic
glasses of Spinoza consist in, cut as they were to t the ideals of Naturalism. The geometric exposition
is not simply a manner of style, but is a methodologically and metaphysically profound way of
seeing. Or, as Spinoza himself argued: the eyes of the mind, by which it sees and observes things,
are the demonstrations themselves.92 The lenses of Spinoza are a metaphor for this Naturalist ideal and
the way it assumed the form of geometrical demonstration. Ultimately, geometry in the hands of
Spinoza as well as Goethe becomes the prime vehicle for the naturalization of the world.

92

Ethics, Part V, 23s., 256.

37

The Structure of the Science of Morphology

The Within and the Without

In one of his earlier essays on general morphology, circa 1790-1794, coming right after the
publication of his pamphlet on plant metamorphosis, Goethe explicitly challenges the theme of divine
providence, the conception that a living being is created for certain external purposes and that its form
is so determined by an intentional primal force.93 He libels the human scientist who projects his own
anthropic intent or purpose onto things external, and thus fails to form a larger concept of nature than
of himself.94 Goethe wants to say that everything has the same significance, be it thistle or flower and
that it should not be valued according to how well it serves human purposes. Beings are not Mans
tools but the means of their own existence.
There was a Biblical-related belief, still popular in the age of Goethe, that a divine will directly
creates all different species, and immediately assigns behavioral morphologies to the natural world.
Nature comes in gaps as it were, and the reason is unjustifiablyeven superstitiouslyassigned to the
caprices of the creative force. The scientist only categorizes what God arbitrarily divides. A portrait of
Linnaeus was known to be labeled with the phrase: Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit.95 Thus, the fish
for example has fins because someone, provident enough designed it along with the environment that
it corresponds to it, in this case, water. This belief was still popular in Spinozas time and it was must
have contrasted with Spinozas powerful Naturalism. The Appendix to the first part of The Ethics,
contains a critique of the view that all the relations within nature are a result of divine teleology that
singles out some species over the others and assembles the right organ to match with the function.
Furthermore, they findboth in themselves and outside themselvesmany means that are
very helpful in seeking their own advantage, for example, eyes for seeing, teeth for
chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish [NS: and
so with almost all other things whose natural causes they have no reason to doubt]. Hence,
they consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they
had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that
there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they
considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves; but
from the means they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there
was a ruler, or a number of rulers, of Nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken

93

Goethe, Toward a General Comparative Theory in Scientific Studies, 53.

94

Ibid., 54.

95 According

to The Twentieth century, vol. LXII of The Nineteenth Century and After, A monthly Review founded by James
Knowles (London: Spottiswoode & Co. Ltd, 1907), 827.

38

care of all things for them, and made all things for their use.96
For Spinoza, this belief in the final causes is utterly flawed. He protests characteristically that this
doctrine reverses the order of nature, naturam omnino evertere:
[T]his doctrine concerning the end turns Nature completely upside down. For what is really
a cause, it considers as an effect, and conversely. What is by nature prior, it makes posterior.
And finally, what is supreme and most perfect, it makes imperfect.97
Yet, if you are a Spinozistic-minded eighteenth-century naturalist, and you clear away the central
explanatory role that divine providence plays by appealing to Naturalist principles, you still need a way
to account for both similarity and dissimilarity, the conjunction and disjunction of forms in the natural
world. You need a means of explanation that leaves no gaps, that completely saturates the face of the
natural universe. Slowly and discretely, Goethe initiates his pioneering view, first making sure to assert
the piety of this shift to elicit a compatibility with the religious-minded naturalists. [W]ill we not
show more regard for the primal force of nature, he says, if we realize that its forms are created by
something working from without as well as from within?98 But what are these two central themes in
Goethes writings, the within and the without? And, most importantly, what explanatory roles do
they play in his theory?
From as early as his essay on Spinoza, Goethe needed to postulate that any creature exists
through its own nature. Though it seems that one is produced from the other, instead one living being
gives another cause to be, and compels it to exist in a certain state.99 This noticeably reflects Spinozas
understanding of causal determination in his universe. A different cause defines a things essence, and a
different cause guides its existence. There are, as Stephen Nadler notes, two nexuses of explanation or
causality in Spinoza. Every event stands at the intersection of a horizontal nexus within which a
thing is temporally and causally related to (infinitely many) prior and posterior things, and a vertical
nexus within which a thing and its relationship to other things is causally related to eternal principles,
culminating in Natures attributes.100 This ontological structure of the world corresponds to an
analogous epistemological stance. Spinoza argues that the knowledge of things should not be sought in
96

Ethics, Appendix to Part I, 110.

97

Ibid., 112

98

Scientific Studies, 54 (my emphasis).

99

A Study Based on Spinoza in Scientific Studies, 8.

100

Steven M. Nadler, Spinozas Ethics: an Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 100-101.

39

the conjunctural conditions of existence, but in the terms of their conceptual presentation. Following
the vertical nexus of explanation of the essences of things we discover the true genera of things not as a
nominal category but as the generative causes of their essences.
The essences of singular, changeable things are not to be drawn from their series, or order
of existing, since it offers us nothing but extrinsic denominations, relations, or at most,
circumstances, all of which are far from the inmost essence of things. That essence is to be
sought only from the fixed and eternal things, and at the same time from the laws inscribed
in these things, as in their true codes, according to which all singular things come to be, and
are ordered. Indeed these singular, changeable things depend so intimately, and (so to
speak) essentially, on the fixed things that they can neither be nor be conceived without
them.101
Due to Spinozas Naturalism, Nature has such a logical structure that allows us to ascend to the most
pervasive, the most natural elements of the world. It looks like this very argument insinuates a kind
of Formalism, in so far as the relations that are contained in a things essence, gain some preponderance
over the conditions of existence. Spinozas universe stresses the epistemological priority of the
vertical nexus, the very same direction that explanation in Goethes Formalism follows.
There are relations that remain everlasting as ordained by the essences of things. Every metrically
determined form partakes in the ecumenical template of the determinable archetype. This exactly
constitutes the infinite that dwells in each creature;102 the ultimate cause must be sought at the
heights of the infinite things and not in the surface of finite relations. This is what Goethe calls the
unstructured, unlimited element as a vehicle for the unstructured being.
Whereas the relations of the fundamental animal parts are given internally in its essence, the
relations with the environment are external to the terms of its conceptual representation. The inner
nucleus adapts itself across the horizontal conjectural relations of the ecosystem. That means that there
are no fixed functional relations in Nature between animals and their habitats but only temporary states
of a self-regulating field. Function is a local expression of form, or function emerges at the hinge
between expressions of the same underlying form. Diversity in form is not decreed by a higher
authority, but brought together by an earthly horizontal causality. This in turn means that function can
be diffused to relations between forms, so that we can see the structured world itself [considered] as

101

TIE 101 in The Collected Works, 41.

102

It is the way in which the finite being participates in something infinite, just as Goethes essay on Spinoza suggests.

40

an interrelationship of many elements.103

The same views are reflected in the poem Metamorphose der Tiere, presumably written in
1806. The laws that She, Nature, puts forth are twofold: She limits the scope of each creature, Gives it
a limited want yet supplies it with means without limit.104 In other words, within a limited structural
range, form is capable of being modified ad infinitum. Consequently, there is an interrelation of causal
feedback between the shape of a creature and its habits. The Bildungstrieb, or the Formative Impulse105
works with the inner perfection of the type and molds it according to the demands of outer
practicality. Thus, Goethe sees the mechanism behind morphogenesis in the organic realm as a blind
probe, as it werewithout the ability to foresee a telosexploring a space of possible forms that is
articulated by vast veins of order.

The Bee and the Flower

The novelty of Goethes natural theory can be summed up in this insightful refinement he
performs in the logic of natural science: instead of saying The fish exists for the water, he supports
the view that The fish exists in the water and by means of the water, thus engineering an assemblage
composed of fish and water, and the principles of adaptation.106 In a different passage Goethe argues
that the animal is formed by circumstances for circumstances107 This amounts to saying that what
appear as designed or designoid objects assume their purposes horizontally in absence of an
anthropic-minded providence. This is a decisive and much anticipated point in the development of
natural science, in its attempt to confront, just like Spinoza did in the Appendix, the view of those who
could not believe that the things had made themselves.108
Instead of following direct decrees from a toolmaker God, the creatures are indirectly determined
by an undifferentiated element (the within) and horizontally determined within a system of
interconnected forms (the without). They grow their behavior and their role in the ecosystem from

103

We progress on our path as follows: first we viewed the unstructured, unlimited element as a vehicle for the
unstructured being, and now we will raise our observation to a higher level to consider the structured world itself as an
interrelationship of many elements (Scientific Studies, 55).
104

Carus, Goethe, with Special Consideration of his Philosophy (Chicago & London: The Open Court pub. co, 1915), 256.

105 A concept

of vital force shared by Blumenbach, Wolff, Goethe and others to support their epigenetic views. It is the force
that underlies vital activities such as nutrition, development and reproduction.
106

. . . the creature not only exists in that element, but may also evolve there. (Ibid., 55).

107

Ibid., 121.

108

Ethics, Appendix to Part I, 110.

41

within the soil of their nucleotic form. The form of the fish happens to be purposefully fitting for water
because water itself has been the efficient cause of its morphological specificities along with the
behavior that was natured from within these circumstances.109 Any ostensible ergonomy of the
creatures physiology is due to the historical effect of its efficient cause. The way the nucleotic form
has been processed by the environment is the cause of the correspondence between creature and its
conditions of existence. The same metaphysical principles that are at work, allow Goethe to indulge in
a particularly insightful analogy:
We will see the entire plant world, for example, as a vast sea which is as necessary to the
existence of individual insects as the oceans and rivers are to the existence of individual
fish . . . Ultimately we will see the whole world of animals as a great element in which one
species is created or at least sustained, by and through another. 110
The flower is not for pleasing the human senses, but yet is another expression of a nucleotic plan that
molded itself into oceans that serve insects. Nowhere can be found a better application of the theory
of metamorphosis as a means of explanation than in the case of the bees and flowers assemblage.
Goethe wants to reduce the functional correspondence of the pollinator and the flower to an
interrelation between forms. In order to do that, he describes the union of the two plant genders that is
facilitated by pollinators as a spiritual anastomosis, as if the same force by which parts are fused to
leafy surfaces, operates across spaces and across kingdoms. This is his description of the voyage from
the point of view of the pollen, seeing the airborne voyage of the pollen as another expansioncontraction cycle that meshes into the habits of the insects:
[I]n its activity this pollen replaces the expansive force taken from the vessels which
produced it. Now released, it seeks out the female parts that the same effect of nature bring
to meet it; it attaches itself to these parts, and suffuses them with its influence.111
By proposing an alternate to the doctrine of final causes, Goethe restores nature to its order. Spinoza, if
he could have read these lines, would have been as happy as a bee in clover.

The Voice of the Urtypus

As far as the structure of Spinozas universe is concerned, between the active Natura naturans
109

Goethe identified the different elements of nature as bringing different effects on the nucleotic form, e.g. water has a
bloating effect on form, whereas air has a drying effect.
110

Scientific Studies, 56.

111

Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 55, 63.

42

and the passive Natura naturata there is what one scholar calls an entire cascade of effects,112 a
spectrum of consequences that emanate from God or Nature. As we move further away from the
generative cause, we find a gradated conveyance of the necessity from the cause to its effects. This is
how Spinoza establishes two levels of actualization of the attributes, all within the necessary logical
connection that binds natura naturans (the premises) with natura naturata (conclusion). There are two
ways in which an effect could follow: directly from an attribute of Nature alone, or indirectly from an
attribute of Nature in so far as it is modified by an infinite modification. In the first way, the effect is
coeternal and spontaneously caused by God, and in the secondstill necessary and eternal it is not
following from the substance and its attribute alone. In this way Spinoza sets an intermediary level of
actualization for the natura naturans, in other words an immediacy between the causal force of Nature
and its most remote effects, us.
Prometheus is a poem written by Goethe in 1772-1774, during the same period of his first
encounter with Spinoza. In it, Prometheus, mans beloved Titan who defied the will of the gods,
declares his independence by breaking away from Zeus, and by disseminating the flame of knowledge
to mankind. His essence is dispersed and distributed as craft and fore-thinking to people (in Greek:
deriving from [] and verb []). In the figure of Prometheus, Goethe gives a
voice to an emancipatory reaction to the unresponsive and unmerciful face of Zeus:
Here I sit, forming men
In my image,
A race to resemble me:
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad
And never to heed you,
Like me!113
I read this as a literary exercise in Spinozism. Except from the mythological theme of the defiant Titan,
an immediacy is insinuated that would have shocked, as it did, many people that related Spinozism to
Atheism. Indeed, the poem captures a heroic Spinozistic tone, the prose of which inspired Lessing to

112

Gueroult, Spinoza, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1968), I. 9.

113

Goethe, Selected Poems. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works, ed. Christopher Middleton (NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994), 31.

43

come out with his Spinozism, announcing from his deathbed in front of a stunned Jacobi:114
The orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot stomach them. Hen
kai pan! I know of nothing else. . . . There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of
Spinoza.115
From his own autobiography, Goethe declared that the fable of Prometheus was living in him, in
a period of his life where he was so much drawn into his creative abilities that he separated himself
from the gods, like Prometheus. The old Titan web I cut up according to my own
measurements . . . Goethe writes in the same passage.116 What mostly struck Goethe in the symbol of
Prometheus is that:
. . . even in spite of superior beings, he is able to act and to create. It is also a beautiful
thought, and well suited to poetry, to represent men as created not by the Supreme Ruler of
the world, but by an intermediate agent . . .117
Could this immediacy between the supreme ruling power and the finite beings be related to Goethes
scientific project, merged as it was with his poetic imagination? The poem contains within its form a
seed of the Spinozistic argument that he must have gleaned from that initial reading of the Ethics and
later applied to his natural theory. 118 Prometheus mediates the divine power to its creation from his
own creative workshop of human form. The fictional Prometheus brings forth representatives of the
horizontal causality, the hut, the hearth with its glowing embers, the human affects, all artifacts of
earth-bound causality articulating the life of the Titan. Prometheus, in short, is the Urtypus itself,
imbued with voice, inscribed within every human form as its infinite mode, or the intermediary genus
between God and his creation. The humanity channels the archetypal form of their guardian Titan from
one being to the other, like fire. What indeed individuates the Prometheic form across different
114

Jacobi showed Lessing an unpublished version of the poem without mentioning his author, something that elicited the
latters endorsement of its Spinozistic spirit, an event that spawned the Pantheismusstreit after his death. The unauthorized
publication of Goethes poem by Jacobi in 1785 served to ignite an explosion in the words of its author. During one of
their encounters, Jacobi read to him Goethes pantheistic poem Prometheus, after which Lessing confessed that he had
himself come to embrace Spinozism and was no longer able to accept the orthodox conception of God, though he had kept
the fact from his best friend, Mendelssohn (Dahlstrom, A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, 626).
115

F. H. Jacobi, Jacobi an M. Mendelssohn, Pempelfort, 4 November 1783, in Bw, 229; English: CDS1, 187, cited in
Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), 31.
116

Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 277.

117

Ibid., 278.

118

Goethe will ultimately argue: We show disrespect neither for the primal force of nature nor for the wisdom and power
of a creator if we assume that the former acts indirectly, and that the latter acted indirectly at the beginning of all
things (Scientific Studies, 55).

44

instantiations is the causal longitude of the environment. And thus, the body of the Prometheus,
articulated in space and in time, speaks for the formless, voiceless causal source. Therefore, the poem
anticipates the transmigration of the Spinozistic ideal from the poetic imagination to the scientific
program of Goethe. Eventually, the old Titan web takes the form of the plane of relations between
wholes and parts, delineating natures compact and seamless expression. Through this process, a
profound message is carried through, transcribed in the new language of forms: we are but explications
of the Prometheic form; the Prometheic form is explicated into us.-

45

Images

(fig. 1) William Blake, Newton, colour print with pen & ink and watercolour, completed in 1795, reworked in
1805.
(fig. 2) David Friedrich Caspar, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818.

46

(fig. 3) A partially completed pencil and ink drawing by Goethe, with notes on the three organic
systems (the sensitive, the mobile and the nutritive) included in his 1790 Zur Morphologie.
Typus of Higher Plant and Insect. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, vol.
9A, Zur Morphologie. Edited by Dorothea Kuhn. Wemar; Bohlau, 1977, table 9 and pp. 239-40.
(fig. 4) Tab. IV & Tab. V, showing the presence of os intermaxillare both in the walrus and man, from:
Goethe, Dem Menschen wie den Tieren ist ein Zwischenknochen der odem Kinnlade zuzuschreiben, 1784.

47

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(diagram 1) In his trip to Italy, from 1786-1788, Goethe invented the idea of the transcendental leaf, a mental
reenactment of the plants growth in terms of a story of floral forms. A single organ, what he called leaf,
appears in a variety of forms as it passes through three full cycles of expansion-contraction from seed to
flower to fruit and then back to seed. The leaf is the only thing that qualifies as the true Proteus, the shapeshifting sea god in Greek mythology. This diagram is the geometric statement of the formative forces that
shape all plant forms. A few years later, Goethe extrapolated the conception of this fundamental organ to the
study of insects. In this famous sketch from 1790s Goethe discerns the same sequentiality in the structure of
the plant as well as the insect. Finally, in a grand culmination of his project, the idea of the fundamental organ
and its developmental trajectory was extrapolated from plants to vertebrates. The leaf was to different parts of
the plant, what the vertebra was to different parts of the skeletal system. Just as the stem was seen as a
contracted leaf, so too the skull was described as an expanded vertebra. According to the vertebral theory of
the skull then, the head is the story of the unfolding of an archetypal vertebra. Thus, the scientific interest of
Goethe extends over different species of objects all studied by the same science of Form. A universal Form
imbued by the principles of transformation is the common ground to support all these "scientific analogies"
between insects, plants and vertebrates.
The stem is a modified leaf
The insect is a modified larva
The cranium is a modified vertebrae
So all these propositions in the logic of transformation constitute lines of explanation between parts in a
sequence.

48

-./("

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(diagram 2) This diagram is a map to the structure of Goethes science of Form. The vertical axis corresponds
to the explanation between parts across the organisms life, and the horizontal axis corresponds to the
longitudinal sequence of different species in space. Goethes investigation culminates in the discovery of the
underlying unity across phyla (arthropoda and chordata). Just as every stage in the development of an
organism is a modification of a fundamental organ, so too every species is a mere snapshot in an seamless
sequence of transformations of the osteological archetype, starting from the simple three-part body of the
insects and diversifying into all kinds of animals, from bird, to ape, to human. Goethes archetype constitutes
a geometric locus defined by all the lines of explanation that are traced on these narratives of transformation.
Nature is a continuum in time as well as in space.

49

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