All Is Leaf Difference, Metamorphosis, Goethe's Phenomenology Knowledg#Pfau

"All is Leaf": Difference, Metamorphosis, and Goethe's Phenomenology of Knowledge
Author(s): THOMAS PFAU

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 49, No. 1 (SPRING 2010), pp. 3-41
Published by: Boston University
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THOMAS PFAU
"All is Leaf": Difference,

Metamorphosis, and Goethe's
Phenomenology of Knowledge
All things created would seem, in a way, to be purposeless, if they

lacked an operation proper to them; since the purpose of everything is
its operation [Omnes res creatae viderentur quodammodo esse frustra, si
propria operatione destituerentur, cum omnis res sit propter suam operationem].
-St. Thomas Aquinas
If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.
?-John Ruskin
By the 'primacy of perception,' we mean that the experience of per

ception is our experience at the moment when things, truths, values
are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches
us, outside all dogmatism, the true condition of objectivity itself; that
it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a ques
tion of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the
birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to re
cover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is
lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary,
rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of
non-human nature.
?Maurice Merleau-Ponty
HIS ESSAY EXPLORES GOETHE'S DYNAMIC IDEA OF FORM AND DIFFERENTI

AL ation, while also considering the relevance of Goethean science for a
poetics of Darstellung and for the development of modern phenomenology.
Goethe's scientific writings, particularly in the area of botany, establish a
strong link between a markedly formalist conception of plant life and a
concurrent progression towards greater complexity of awareness that un
folds within the intelligence of the observer?indeed, appears properly
SiR, 49 (Spring 2010)
4 THOMAS PFAU
constitutive of the observer's subjectivity. In turn, the joint differen

advancement of both, phenomenon and observer, which by 1790 Goet
begins to formulate under the heading of "metamorphosis" appears
twined with a more wide-ranging cultural ideal of self-origination, s
organization, and human flourishing that German culture from the l
eighteenth to the early twentieth century tends to subsume under the ma
ter-trope of Bildung. Like all such tropes, however, Bildung proves od
resistant to conceptual scrutiny. Inasmuch as the Romantic discours
Bildung consistently foregrounds its organicist, immediate, and submer
mode of operation, and so disavows its own status as theory, a princ
challenge becomes how to scrutinize a conceptual architecture recurren
characterized by its proponents as strictly something altogether elemental
the very Law of Being rather than some method of knowing. Among
categories doing a lot of (subterranean) work in biological, literary,
philosophical narratives of Bildung is that of "difference" or, rather, "diff
entiation." Its centrality comes into focus as soon as one begins to desynon
ymize, as any study of Bildung must, the claims of organicism from those
dialectics, the framework to which it bears the greatest affinity; and it is t
(mostly implicit) work done by "difference" and "differentiation" that wi
be the principal focus of the remarks to follow.
It is by now commonplace to speak of the late eighteenth century as un
dertaking a sweeping reappraisal of several key-concepts in European
ture, such as taste, interest, subjectivity, history, form, and indeed "life,
name but the most familiar. As remains to be seen, there is ample reason t
add the notion of "difference" to that list. The concept of "difference
quired central importance as a result of the critique of Averroist (or Arist
telian) ontology pioneered by fourteenth-century Franciscans (Du
Scotus, Ockham, Autrecourt, et al.).1 Inadvertently, a dispute initially
. See Ockham's Quodlibetal Questions, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Ke

(New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), esp. 1:13 (on the singularity of cognition); 2: 19 (on the b
as contingent on referentiality); 3: 12 (on the conceptual status of all thought); 4: 23?25
the contingency of substance on determinate quantity and quality). On the origins of mod
scientific thought in the Nominalist (Franciscan) critique of Aristotelian and Thomistic "s
stantial form," especially in the work of Ockham, see Louis Dupr?, Passage to Moder
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 15-90; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA:
vard UP, 2007) 90-99; Michael Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God: the Ambiguous Progr
Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004) 25-47; Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of t
Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1983) 126-79; and Mich
A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) 19?43
170-246. On eighteenth-century Empiricism and the particularization of knowledge,
Louis Dupr?, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New
ven: Yale UP, 2004) 18?44; Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.
Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1951) 37-92; Theod
GOETHE'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 5
fined to scholastic theology laid the groundwork for the gradual bifurcati
of theology and philosophy, especially as far as the latter took up question
subsequently compartmentalized under the heading of epistemology. T
in the writings of Ockham we find the basic scholastic notion of a "thing
(res) losing its status as an ontological "category" (praedicamentum) and, in
stead, being defined on the (supposed) grounds of its sheer heterogen
?rom other beings. "Things" turned into mere "objects" (objecta) or f
floating singularities, rather than operating as the "concreations" of
stantial form and universal reason as which they had been conceived by A
istotelian and Thomistic ontology.2 As a result, the concept of differ
emerges as an altogether crucial category; beginning with Ockham a
culminating in Lockean empiricism, "difference" functions in the stri
disjunctive sense in which it had first been advanced by Nominalist thoug
namely, as sheer "heterogeneity" and, hence, as a conceptual tool for
solving epistemological and theological questions alike by disaggregati
their constituent parts. In its modern sense as determination knowledge t
unfolds as the methodical disjunction (Spinoza's negatio) of entities dee
to be inherently dissimilar and unrelated.3 Only in the eighteenth centur
prompted in part by the neo-Platonists' insistent critique of rationali
do we find a concerted reexaminaci?n of modernity's axiomatic concep
difference as sheer heterogeneity. As an entailment of that revaluation
which the emergent biological sciences played a major role, the notion
difference is being saturated with a temporal, dynamic quality that
longer posits the external world as a mere inventory of static and dissimi
objects or appearances.4 Instead, difference now serves as a conceptual
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New Yo
Continuum, 1972) 3-42, esp. 22-23.
2. On Aquinas' conception of form, see Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the Eng
Dominican Province (Scotts Valley, CA: NovAntiqua, 2008) la Q 45 A 8: "the form
natural body is not subsisting, but is that by which a thing is. . . . it does not belong to fo
to be made or to be created, but to be concreated [Non enim considerabant quod forma natu
corpo?s non est subsistens, sed quo aliquid est . . . formarum non est fieri ?eque crean, sed conc
esse]." On form in Aquinas, see Herbert McCabe, On Aquinas (New York: Continuu
2008) 41-50; on its rejection, see Louis Dupr?, Passage 167-89; on Aquinas' "'non-sub
centered' approach to human experience ... as the actualization of intellectual capacitie
potentially significant objects, according to the axiom 'intellectus in actu est intelligibile in ac
[our inteUectual capacities actualized are the world's intelligibility realized]," see Fergus Ke
After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) 26-33 and 46-51 (27).
3. On the emergence of modern subjectivity, see Louis Dupr?, Passage 65-92; a
Thomas Pfau, "The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge's
astrophic Modernity," MLN, Comparative Literature Issue 122.5 (2007): 949-1004.
4. On the emergence and consolidation of the older, eighteenth-century "life-scienc
into various branches of modern biology, anatomy, etc., see Lynn K. Nyhart, Biology Ta
6 THOMAS PFAU
allowing the scientific observer to trace relations as they shift and mutate
over time. The result is a revival, not only of Plato's doctrine of ideas (in
Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Hemsterhuis, and Goethe) but also of its modifie
afterlife as the theory of rational or substantial forms that dominates West
ern metaphysics from Aristotle to Aquinas.
Yet beginning with Leibniz and culminating in Hegel, the understanding
of form and teleology also takes on a temporal, progressive quality not yet
called for in ancient and Thomistic thought. In reaction to the anxiety
inducing migration of the attribute of "infinity" from the ens metaphysicum
into a world riddled with seemingly endless epistemological challenges (ob
servable in Pascal), post-Lockean thought, in part inspired by neo-Platonist
models of the late seventeenth century, begins to "liquefy" (as Hegel was
to put it) the philosophical concept of "substance" and, indeed, to reinvest
it with a cryptic rationality of its own. Thus, as substance is being recast as a
self-organizing process in time (in Leibniz, Spinoza, Schelling and, most
ambitiously, Hegel), the ancient concept of "revelation" (jparousia) yields to
that of "emergence."5 Preparing for the fundamental shift in the meaning
ofform that we encounter in Kant's third Critique, Schelling's Naturphiloso
phie and, especially, in Hegel, Goethe's botanical writings of the late 1780
revive ancient models of nature-as-process by subtly amalgamating Platonic
form (eidos), Aristotelian teleology, and Ovidian metamorphosis. Thus th
empiricist (originally Nominalist) conception of difference as static and dis
junctive is gradually being supplanted by a dynamic and integrative logic of
difference as "transformation." No longer, then, is the self-identity of a
thing grounded in the Newtonian idea of an inert "substance." Rather, it
Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800?igoo (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
l99S) I?64, who offers an excellent discussion of morphology and formalist biology between
1800 and 1850; on the institutionalization of the natural sciences, see David Cahan, ed., From
Natural Philosophy to the Sciences (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 291?328 and Robert Rich
ards' essay on biology (in Cahan, ed., 16-48). The process of disciplinary specialization, as
well as institutional and professional consolidation, correlates with the demise of natural the
ology or arguments from design after 1800; on that topic, see Evan Thompson, Mind in Life:
Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007), esp.
13 8-73, and Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 2000) 116-36 and 170-96.
5. To "desynonymize" (as Coleridge would put it) the notions of "origination" and
"emergence" is key to grasping the conceptual implications of Goethean metamorphosis and
Bildung. Though theories of emergence only appear in the later nineteenth and early twenti
eth century (Mill, C. D. Broad, Samuel Alexander), early speculative instances can be found
in Goethe and, curiously, in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). For an ex
cellent introduction to emergentist thought, see the entry on "Emergent Properties" in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/
(accessed July 1, 2009).
comes to be "seen" as an internally differentiating and self-organizing pr

cess. "Difference," we might say, turns into a verb; where the Nominalist
and their empiricist heirs had located the identity of an object in its stri
"incommensurability" (Verschiedenheit) with other entities, organicist
dialectical thinking derives the identity of a thing?and the "law" gov
ing its form?from the progressive differentiation that characterizes its
mode of appearance, which in turn is reflexively appraised by the observi
intellect in a process that Hegel calls "mediation" (Vermittlung).
This momentous shift revives crucial aspects of Aristotelian and Tho
tic thought that had largely been eclipsed by modernity's rejection of fin
causes and substantial forms in favor of instrumental or efficient models
reason. What drives the late-eighteenth-century reappraisal of "differenc
is the following question: How are mind and world ontologically co
figured before their relation comes to be viewed as an epistemological pro
lem? The matter is eventually thrown into sharp relief by Heidegger as h
considers Parmenides' gnomic pronouncement ( a a voelv
a e?vai) [For the same <is> thinking as well as being]). As Heidegg
notes, to ponder Parmenides' saying is to try and remember this cons
tive "belonging together" of mind and world: "We lack the foundation fo
determining anything reliable about the belonging together of man and B
ing" and thus are "confined within the attempt to represent the 'togethe
... as a coordination [Zuordnung] and to establish and explain this coo
nation either in terms of man or in terms of Being."6 While obviously a
ing, "just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle," man's "distinctive fea
lies in this, that, as the being who thinks, he is open to Being, face to fa
with Being" (ID 31/Ger. 18). Crucially, then, "difference" (whic
definition belongs to the domain of thinking) must not be "applied" to th
mind/world relation since that very relation itself constitutes not a belat
synthesis of heterogeneous entities but precedes all analytic or reflexive
crimination: "We stubbornly misunderstand this . . . belonging together o
man and Being as long as we represent everything only in categories
mediations" (ID 32/Ger. 19). There simply is no warrant for modern
son's peremptory disaggregation of mind and world in that the notio
difference enabling any such discrimination is itself a primal and con
tive feature of mental activity to begin with. For Heidegger, the most co
spicuous symptom of modern Reason's voluntarist and self-certifying
spective on both itself and on the "world" as its supposed other has le
the conflation of thinking with "representation." If the modern subject i
to recover the identity of mind and world (in the ontological sense of th
6. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harp
1969) 30 (German: Identit?t und Differenz [Pfullingen: Neske, 1978] 17-18); English ve
henceforth cited as ID.
8 THOMAS PFAU
"belonging together") it will above all need to "move away from the atti
tude of representational thinking [vorstellendes Denken]" (ID 32/Ger. 20).
Though in markedly different ways, both Goethe and Hegel clearly push
thinking beyond the confines of "warranted" predication, syllogistic proof,
and the kind of "picture-thinking" that simply takes for granted the abso
lute heterogeneity of mind and world. While Hegel's role in this revalua
tion of the mind/world dichotomy has been scrupulously explored, Goe
the's far more practical approach to the same problem has drawn much less
attention?in part because he does not suppose that an obviously theoretical
dilemma is necessarily best remedied by further theoretical argument. In
stead, what distinguishes Goethe's scientific writings from those of virtually
all his peers is their markedly practical dimension. In subtle and understated
ways, Goethe's botanical writings in particular cannily anticipate modern
phenomenology by establishing an unfailingly concrete and dynamic, prac
tical model of what it means to be in the presence of phenomena or, sim
ply, to "see." His arguments constitute a decisive break with the Kantian
model of apperception that accompanies the synthesis of sensory data in
what remains a heavily compartmentalized, not to say baroque, architec
ture of the mind. Seeing in Goethe is not mere "experience" (Erfahrung)
but an "event" (Ereignis) that has much in common with ancient "contem
plation" (theoria), "wonder" (thaumazein), and "revelation" (parousia). What
Goethe calls Ereignis?the word so momentously deployed at the conclu
sion of Faust (Alles Verg?ngliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis / Das Unzul?ngliche /
Hier wird's Ereignis)?lies beyond the scope of efficient causation that had
largely come to be regarded as the only paradigm of rationality since the
scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century.7 Moreover, his deictic
emphasis on the here and now ("Hier wird's Ereignis") also hints at a reve
latory, higher kind of knowing that can only eventuate qua "seeing."
To see on this account is not simply to re-acquire something known
already but to partake of Being in its most elemental sense?namely, as
"appearance" or "phenomenon." As we shall see, knowledge for Goethe is
above all a sharing in the structure of appearance by way of sustained
observation?the latter being understood as a differential progression that
mirrors the dynamic, self-organizing structure of the organic phenomenon
under investigation.
Unlike object-knowledge in the modern, Cartesian or Newtonian sense,
Goethe's phenomenological approach thus conceives of knowledge as the
mediation of life itself. It constitutes "action" in the strong, Aristotelian
. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols.
(Munich: Beck, 1981) 3: 364; henceforth cited parenthetically as GHA. English: "All things
corruptible / Are but a parable; / Earth's insufficiency / Here finds fulfillment" (Goethe,
Faust (Part Two), trans. Philip Wayne [Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1959]).
sense of praxis (later revived in Arnold Gehlen's philosophical anthropol

ogy); that is, knowledge qua "observing" (Beobachten) circumscribes and
"organizes" the human being as a continuous spectrum of discrete prac
tices, from the most rudimentary instances of sense-perception to the most
sophisticated kinds of modeling and conceptualizing the phenomenon. As
Olaf Breidbach, Dorothea Kuhn, and others have shown, the young Goe
the (before 1800) reacted against "the development of the sciences whose
techniques of objectification could not accommodate his concept of a mor
phology of nature."8 Always a fierce, if at times also a misguided critic of
Newton, Goethe keenly felt that modern science's disaggregation of nature
into discrete and unrelated singularities proves oblivious of nature's over
arching unity as a self-originating (epigenetic) and self-organizing totality
of metamorphoses. It also erodes any sense of a primordial connection be
tween an intelligent observer and organic life, understood not as "object"
but as a thing (res) that acquires reality only by a triadic process of differen
tiation, variation, and transformation that Goethe seeks to articulate under
the heading of "metamorphosis." By contrast, operating almost exclusively
with a model of efficient causation, Nominalist theology, as well as the sci
entific projects of Empiricism to which it would eventually give rise, con
ceives of perception as a mechanistic and notably unself-conscious breaking
down of material "sensation" as something to be apprehended, disaggre
gated, and tabulated as so many finite singularities. Obviously wary of that
project, Heidegger in his account of Parmenides links Ereignis with a
unique type of "seeing" or "beholding." Indeed, it is only by turning away
from the "scaffolding" (Ge-Stell) of modern instrumental and appropriative
reason that we may encounter Being as a primordial "belonging together"
of mind and world:
Within the scaffolding there prevails a strange ownership and a strange

appropriation. We must experience simply this owning in which
man and Being are delivered over to each other, that is, we must enter
into what we call the event of appropriation. <The word "event" we
take from autochthonous language. Event means literally to bring
into-view, that is, to behold, that is, to draw close to oneself qua look
ing, to appropriated . . . What we experience in the frame as the con
stellation of Being and man through the modern world of technology
is a prelude to what is called the event of appropriation. This event,
however, does not necessarily persist in its prelude. For in the event of
appropriation the possibility arises that it may overcome the mere
dominance of the frame to turn it into a more original appropriating.9
8. Olaf Breidbach, Goethe's Metamorphosenlehre (Munich: Fink, 2006) 61.
9. ID 36-37; the text in angular brackets is omitted in Stambaugh's translation; the full
10 THOMAS PFAU
Heidegger's "event" is the moment where thinking experiences itself

more than the appropriation and synthesis of perceptual data. This "m
than" involves a phenomenological turn, mind's very being-present-
thinking/perceiving (yoeiv). Such being-present-to-thinking, however
must not be confused with the monitorial agency of Kantian "app
ception." Rather, it intimates that to think is to act on an already exis
relation?Aquinas would have called it "grace" or "gift" (donum)?a kind
"belonging together" with Being that, for Heidegger, still resonates in the
etymological roots of Er-eignis as Er-?ugen ("to bring-into-view"). In
much as "seeing" is always more than the perceptual appropriation of
ternal," singular objects, it follows that "difference" can only be a der
tive concept that has forgotten the primordial co-inherence of what
distinguishes. In other words, "difference" as a category constitutive of
tional thought rests on the identity of?indeed, is itself a function o
Being. Inherently unable to name Being itself, difference lays bare the
junctive and proprietary habitus of modern instrumental reason, which fo
Heidegger is crystallized by the idea of technology as "scaffolding" (
Stelt). Hence it is only to the extent that we become aware of that pa
digm that we may once more attain a form of non-appropriative beho
ing, something on the order of Keatsian "negative capability," H?lderl
"openness" (das Offene), themselves poignant echoes of pre-Socratic "w
der" (thaumazein) in that they recall how?prior to all perceiving
representation?seeing is always an "event."
While Heidegger arguably thinks of Hegel as the quintessential repres
tative of modern metaphysics and its "forgetfulness of Being" (Seinsverge
enheit), the latter's writings often draw close to the notion of "event" tha
Heidegger has in mind. Extending H?lderlin's speculative interest in
aclitus' idea of a "self-differing One" (hen diapheron eauto), Hegel seem
anxious to bridge the gap between modern instrumental reason and
ontology of pre-Socratic thought. In Hegel, then, "difference" no long
disaggregates mind and world, just as he resists the Kantian notion of
thesis as the belated realignment of appearances with the understandi
(Verstand). Bent on moving beyond the disjunctive view of mind an
world and the consequent, mimetic or correspondence-theory of kno
German passage runs as follows: "Im Ge-Stell waltet ein seltsames Vereignen und Zueignen
gilt, dieses Eignen, worin Mensch und Sein einander ge-eignet sind, schlicht zu erfahren, d
einzukehren in das, was wir das Ereignis nennen. Das Wort Ereignis ist der gewachsenen Sprach
entnommen. Er-eignen hei?t urspr?nglich: er-?ugen, d.h. erblicken, im Blicken zu sich rufen, a
eignen. . . . Was wir im Ge-Stell als der Konstellation von Sein und Mensch durch die mode
technische Welt erfahren, ist ein Vorspiel dessen, was Er-eignis hei?t. Dieses verharrt jedoch n
notwendig in seinem Vorspiel. Denn im Er-eignis spricht die M?glichkeit an, da? es das blo?e Wal
des Ge-Stells in ein anf?nglicheres Sein verwindet" {Identit?t und Differenz 24?25).
edge, Hegel instead conceives "difference" as the basis for the self
explication of the idea in time. The meaning of "difference" shifts from
one of "opposition" (Gegensatz) to one of "mediation" (Vermittlung), thus
replacing the criterion of "incommensurability" (Verschiedenheit) with that
of a "relation" (Beziehung). As the core mechanism of Hegelian dialectics,
"mediation ... is nothing but self-sameness [understood] as its own move
ment [die Vermittlung ist nichts anders als die sich bewegende Sichselbstgleich
heit]."10 For the dialectical agenda of liquefying of substance into subject or
process (and philosophy's concomitant transformation into a narrative proj
ect) to succeed, what was needed above all was a fundamentally changed
notion of difference.
Hegel thus extends a claim first advanced by Schelling vis-?-vis Fichte
and Kant: namely, that the principal tool of the understanding, the "con
cept" (Begriff) stands not in radical separation from being (Sein) but is fun
damentally on a continuum with being inasmuch as the latter must be
thought as forever developing. The principal source of resistance to specu
lative or dialectical thinking resides in a misprision of the "concept" as a
static and mimetic representation of some equally static, separate reality. To
the extent that our intellectual armature presupposes the ontological sepa
ration of mind and world, Hegel contends, we have not yet understood
what a "concept" properly is. Revealing the strong affinity between dialec
tical thinking and what Weber was to identify as the Protestant work ethic,
Hegel thus redefines the "labor of the spirit" (Arbeit des Geistes) as follows:
it "consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensu
ous mode of apprehension . . . but rather in just its opposite, in freeing de
terminate thoughts (Gedanken) from their fixity . . . [For] fixed thoughts
have the , the power of the negative, or pure actuality, for the substance
and element of their existence." To tease the developmental logic, the in
trinsic "dynamism" (Bewegung) out of thought is the great task of specula
tive dialectics: "Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking . . . recognizes
itself as a moment, or when the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself?
not by leaving itself out, or setting itself aside, but by giving up the fixity of
its self-positing. . . . Through this movement the pure thoughts become no
tions (Begriffe), and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements
(Selbstbewegungen), circles, spiritual essences, which is what their substance
is" (PS 19-20/PG 30?31). The reappraisal of "difference" that I have just
sketched thus entails a change in the concept of seeing (as "more-than"
perception) and of Darstellung (as "more-than" representation). Arguably,
io. G. W. F. Hegel, Ph?nomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg:

Meiner, 1952) 21; henceforth cited parenthetically as PG. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.
Miller (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 11, trans, modified; henceforth PS.
12 THOMAS PFAU
to the detriment of his own presentation, Hegel does not foreground

problem of Darstellung and remains unresponsive to an insight so pow
fully articulated long before by Ovid and, in Hegel's own time, by Goethe.
That is, though keen to move beyond the rationalist model of knowle
as-representation?and, hence, to sublate concept into idea, and substan
into a reflexive "movement" (Bewegung)?Hegel can realize that proje
only by defining the movement of thought as the progressive attenua
and conceptual mediation of all material sensation. Seeing or, rather, "
ing" as Hegel so tellingly puts it in the Phenomenology, thus amounts to a
state that, while not exactly non-cognitive, seems alarmingly inarticu
about its own conceptual import. His frequent use of organicist metaphors
(particularly in the "Preface") to the Phenomenology notwithstanding, Heg
thus consistently emphasizes that the "articulation of form" (Ausbildung d
Form) can only be fully achieved in the medium of speculative concep
"Truth has only the concept as the element of its existence [an dem Begrif
allein das Element ihrer Existenz zu haben]" (PS IPG ).
So as to map more accurately the road not taken by dialectical thinking,
it helps to revisit Ovid before turning to Goethe, for it is in Ovid that th
idea of being as internal, dynamic, and open-ended differentiation is most
vividly entwined with the dramatic and concrete medium of poetry. Ovid'
Metamorphoses (~8 A.D.) thus offers an enormously rich and influentia
count of change as a dynamic self-transformation intrinsic to the structu
of matter. In so doing, Ovid embraces the concept of change as a profo
formal-aesthetic challenge within which lies hidden the perfect temp
for narrative art. Proposing to tell "Of bodies changed to other forms . . .
In one continuous song from nature's first / Remote beginnings to o
modern times," Ovid's most famous work grasps transformation in all
alternately sudden, creeping, freakish, or glorious manifestations as the v
essence of being. Indeed, his "continuous song" is prompted by a cent
mystery; for what perplexes is not the hypothesis of things (material,
ganic, or human) being dissimilar but, on the contrary, the apparent f
that all discrete entities appear to be transient manifestations of an
encompassing One. In their apparitional singularity, discrete things (or
ganic beings) reveal their connection to that One through an inscruta
and unrelenting propensity to alter their shape. As the focal point of
many brilliant and highly particular descriptive passages, change and diffe
entiation in Ovid point toward the modern, organicist conception
change as a continual process of internal and purposive differentiation.
In the Metamorphoses, then, Heraclitus' notion of flux is no longer seen
an unstable relation between discrete things but as the very essence of bei
that can only manifest itself through the transient appearance of thin
This the Metamorphoses achieves by transposing change from its pr
Socratic status as a metaphysical enigma into the vivid and purposive me

dium of narrative and figurai art. Ovidian metamorphosis is not simply a
mythic conception but is intricately entwined with the shifting and multi
layered process of aesthetic presentation (Darstellung). A fine example of
metamorphosis as both an ontological principle and a premise for narrative
art can be found in Ovid's frequent use of transformative puns and other
types of wordplay. As Garth Tissol has shown in great detail, "though the
reader receives Ovid's version of a tale together with the echoes of other
versions that it calls to life in the memory, at the same time Ovid's own
version may cause the reader's judgment to undergo many revisions. Ovid
perceived in narrative structure, no less than in wit, an opportunity to em
body metamorphosis and flux";11 likewise, Haupt and Ehwald's classical
commentary remarks on "Ovid's exaggerated rhetoric, which intensifies,
expands, and transforms what it has received."12 Implicitly, then, Ovid's
consciously literary project crystallizes the disjunction of the noumenal and
the phenomenal realm long before they were expressly disaggregated by
Descartes and Kant. Yet what captivates the Ovidian reader of myth, and
even more so Ovid the artist, is not the analysis of metamorphosis by
means of an abstract distinction of the kind eventually proposed by Kant.
On the contrary, in unfailingly concrete, vivid, and often playful language,
Ovid presents the material and phenomenal world as a welter of pro
foundly and vividly related things. For Ovid no less than for Goethe, it is
precisely this coalescence of the phenomenal (ektypal) with the ontological
(archetypal) that furnishes the impetus for scientific study and imbues all in
quiry into nature with a strong narrative momentum. "Change" in the
physical universe emerges as the counterpart to the intellect's essential drive
towards narrative meaning or as "the development of a history in the guise
of a Gestalt encountered in narrative." Indeed, as Goethe will insist, change
mirrors the drive towards narrative by connecting deceptively heteroge
neous things as but so many virtual points of reference marking and giving
structure to the temporal flow of the observing consciousness.13
11. Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamor
phoses (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 88.
12. Qtd. in Tissol 115.
13. Breidbach 55?56; among the Romantics, it is arguably Shelley who most fully em
brace's Ovid's central notion of "omnia mutantur, nihil interit" (everything changes, nothing
dies); see his famous opening lines to "Mont Blanc" or his shorter lyrics, especially "The
Cloud" and "Ode to the West Wind." Wasserman notes how "each stanza of the poem's
terza rima contains an unused, unfulfilled line that, like a seed in the grave, upon the comple
tion, or 'death,' of its own stanza gives birth to the rhyme of the next (Earl R. Wasserman,
Shelley: A Critical Reading [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971] 245); on Shelley and con
temporary debates in the life-sciences, see also Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Roman
ticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009) 154-207.
14 THOMAS PFAU
A couple of passages, one found early in Book of the Metamorphoses

the other from the programmatic discussion of the work's eponymous con
cept in Book 15, throw into relief the full complexity of Ovidian m
morphosis as a dynamic, ceaseless, and inscrutable force (kinesis). Ovid's
count of Daphne, pursued by Apollo and imploring her father, Peneu
to shelter her will bring into focus key aspects of Ovid crucial to ear
nineteenth-century narratives of Bildung in a variety of aesthetic forms a
other disciplines:
And then she saw the river, swift Peneus,

And called; "Help, father, help! If mystic power
Dwells in your waters, change me and destroy
My baleful beauty that has pleased too well."
Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs
A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom
Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms
Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves;
Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast
In numb stiff roots, her face and head became
The crown of a green tree; all that remained
Of Daphne was her shining loveliness.
And still Apollo loved her; on the trunk
He placed his hand and felt beneath the bark
Her heart still beating . . .14
Arguably, the catalyst for this famous episode and its dramatic account
cross-species transformation is an element of danger, urgency, and se
preservation. Daphne's desperate appeal to Peneus is prompted by the
longing for survival and shelter from Apollo's sexual pr?dation. Since s
ter cannot be obtained in any three-dimensional space elsewhere, and since
the object of contest is her very body, nothing less than the utter transfo
mation ofthat body will do. Quite possibly, her attempt to escape the go
sexual aggression is not only (perhaps not even primarily) prompted by
desire to remain inviolate per se but by her wish to exercise control ov
her future progeny. For her being to continue in the physical form of
ture offspring, she must control what will become of her now. Daphn
transformation into an alien physical shape thus proves less invasive than i
sexually violated, she were to give birth to offspring from which she wou
be essentially alienated.
Arguably the most compelling aspect about Ovid's art of narrati
14- Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), Book 1:
52; henceforth cited parenthetically as Met.
transfiguration are the myriad sensory particulars, the visceral power of de

tail, and the way in which images reveal his underlying grasp of being as a
shifting kaleidoscope of phenomenal qualities. A long tradition of readers
has thus viewed Ovid's approach to epic form as one of "clever pastiche"
and his overall art as "letting each detail catch his reader's attention without
ever arresting it." Still, as the Daphne episode shows, "variety was never an
unsophisticated or simple thing" since the motif of the "determined virgin
courted by the passionate god" undergoes itself repeated metamorphosis
throughout Ovid's text. Far from offering up "epic style [as] only a fa?ade,"
Ovid "gradually subtracts and adds motif-elements so that in the end he
has, in fact, substituted one complete motif for another."15 Embedded in an
irresistibly propulsive syntax, the discrete images wherein Daphne's trans
figuration is captured thus function less by referring to specific physical
parts (leaves, roots, bark, branches, etc.) than by revealing a timeless iso
morphism of the lauraceae tree with the human body. Thus Daphne is not
so much transfigured into something "else" but?in a deeper sense that can
only be captured figurally?she merges with a form to which she has al
ways borne a latent kinship. As the very archetype of growth and nature,
the tree does not "differ" from her in the sense of being a separate and in
compatible entity. Rather, it embodies nature as forever metastasizing and,
hence, as something in which Daphne has always latently shared and to
which she now returns. In its modular structure, the Lauraceae tree (one of
some 30 to 50 genera and about 2,000 distinct species) bears a marked for
mal affinity to the human body, and for one to morph into the other is not
so much to alter its essence as to fully realize it?namely, as something that
is by definition altering, unfolding, and internally differentiating itself.
There is, of course, no shortage of examples from literary history to
show how compelling an artistic premise Ovid created. By transposing the
immediacy of mythic consciousness into the sensory and self-conscious
"event" of the creative act, metamorphosis throws into relief the question
of Darstellung or poi?sis that was to occupy countless poets and aestheticians,
particularly during the (long) Romantic period. We encounter it in Mil
ton's Paradise Lost, Coleridge's "Christabel," Beethoven's late variations,
Keats's "Lamia," Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Richard
Strauss Tod und Verkl?rung, Metamorphosen, and Daphne, and in Schoen
berg's austere realization of form as Entwicklungsvariation. In all these cases, a
narrative of sudden and momentous transformation moves its protagonist
or core-motif towards greater self-awareness and complexity. In its material
instantiation, phenomenal apprehension, and formal-symbolic presenta
tion, metamorphosis constitutes the formal catalyst for a process of Bildung
15- Brooks Otis, Ovid as Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966) 77-79.
16 THOMAS PFAU
that Goethe characterizes as "perpetual transfiguration" (fortw?hrend

Umbilden [GHA 13: 60]).16 Meanwhile, the last book of the Metamorpho
shows Ovid gravitating towards a more general conception of change
which the constitutive notion of difference has become a theoretical fo
point independent of its manifestation in concrete mythical accounts:
the soul
Roams to and fro, now here, now there, and takes
What frame it will, passing from beast to man,
From our own form to beast and never dies.
As yielding wax is stamped with new designs
And changes shape and seems not still the same,
Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls
Are still the same for ever, but adopt
In their migrations ever-varying forms.
(Met. 15: 166-74)
Bury a prize bull, slain for sacrifice,
And from the rotting flesh?a well-known fact?
Bees everywhere are born, flower-loving bees,
Which like their parent range the countryside,
Work with a will and a hope for work's reward.
A charger in his grave will generate
Hornets. If you remove the bending claws
16. Wagner's and Strauss' oeuvres arguably explore the aesthetic potential of metamor
phosis more profoundly than anyone else. Wagner's crucial transfiguration of his eponymous
protagonists in Act I, Sc. 5 of Tristan & Isolde or the equally abrupt reversion of the clandes
tine lovers revealed by the light of "denuded day, one last time" (der ?de Tag, zum letzten
Mal) at the beginning of Act 11, Sc. 3 come to mind. At the formal level, the compositional
design of Tristan & Isolde, with its proto-Modernist use of chromaticism effectively imple
ments the principle of metamorphosis at every turn of Wagner's acutely polyphonic score:
"The expression 'chromatic alteration,' one of the basic categories of the style of Tristan, un
derlines the fact that a note that impinges on its neighbour as a chromatic passing note or as a
suspension began as a variant or chromaticization of a diatonic degree?that is, as an 'alter
ation.' . . . The chromaticism of Tristan relies for its expressive effect on the listener's aware
ness of deviation from the diatonic background of the chord?that is on his awareness of the
'alteration': the musical expression is inseparable from the divergence from the norm" (Carl
Dahlhaus and John Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner [New York: Norton, 1984] 119-20);
see also Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
(New York: Oxford UP, 2004) 75?118; an entirely different, though no less pervasive princi
ple of continual transformation drives the motivic work of Wagner's Ring, such that any
number of motifs (Rhinemaiden-, Wotan-, Valhalla-, Siegfried-motif, et al.) are variationally
derived from?or indeed "emergent" properties of?the core motif of the ring. For a discus
sion of "transfiguration" (Verwandlung) in the oeuvre of Richard Strauss, see Brian Gilliam,
"Ariadne, Daphne, and the Problem of Verwandlung," Cambridge Opera Journal 15 (2003): 67?
80.
Of a beach-crab and sink the rest in sand,

A scorpion will crawl from the buried part,
Tail curved to strike. And grubs, as country folk
Observe, whose white cocoons are wrapped in leaves,
Emerge as butterflies that grace a grave.
? ?
These creatures all derive their first

From others of their kind.
? ?
So?lest I range too far and my steeds

Their course?the earth and all therein
And all thereunder change and change
We too ourselves, who of this world a
Not only flesh and blood but pilgrim s
Can make our homes in creatures of t
Or of the farm. These creatures migh
Souls of our parents, brothers, other k
[Met., 15: 362-73; 393-94
Most clearly, the shift towards a more abst

reflected by Ovid's use, in the first passage,
stamped . . . ") and, in the final long passag
show that the mythical principle of "the on
which by then Ovid has traced through so
reflected in more general terms. As his sel
too far . . . ") makes clear, Ovid is not produci
tending an aesthetic principle within it. Wh
Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology (1842) alr
Metamorphoses: "the phenomenon which is h
mythical content as such but the significan
sciousness and the power it exerts on consc
the material content of mythology, but the in
rienced, with which it is believed?as only s
tive reality can be believed."17 As Ovid's m
(bull, charger, crab, etc.) of carcasses gener
cates, the transformations that inherited myt
caprice of the Greeks' anthropomorphic go
servable, indeed predictable in the quotidia
death.18
. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1955) 5.
18. Robert Richards (The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of
18 THOMAS PFAU
By virtue of its systematic gathering into the comprehensive narrative o

the Metamorphoses, the pre-Socratic enigma of absolute flux and discontin
ity gradually acquires a more abstract, notional authority as functional dif
ference. By means of aesthetic representation, life comes to be gras
not in abstract conceptual but acutely specific form qua "seeing"?as a
terned continuum of internal, formal differentiation. As Cassirer had put
some time ago, the as yet unreflected way of being in the world that
call myth "lacks the category of the ideal. For here " 'image' does not
resent the 'thing'; it is the thing; it does not merely stand for the object, bu
has the same actuality, so that it replaces the thing's immediate presen
(Symbolic Forms 38). By contrast, the writing of myth, the transposition
its concrete, incidental occurrence into the marked "event-character"
aesthetic presentation (Darstellung) draws out the ritual and universal
mension of the mythic image. Arnold Gehlen thus identifies Darstellung as
one of the "anthropological roots of art." It effects a transition of t
fleeting, incidental, and accidental concrete occurrence "into the catego
of preservation and continuity [die ?berf?hrung in die Kategorie des
Beisichbehaltens und der Dauer]": "The tremendous superiority of prese
tion [Darstellung] over the concept" has to do with the fact that "the form
takes the specificity of the object as its point of departure and invests it wi
continuity; by contrast, the concept merely 'means' something and eva
rates unless it is sustained by some external support."19
Throughout his far-flung botanical writings, Goethe insists that to un

stand the development of an organism means to grasp its constituent part
as having originated in a single Gestalt. Organicism implies that we w
with the assumption of a fundamental homology whereby seemingly d
tinct features of a complex organism can be traced back to a single gen
tive Gestalt. Rather than positing the substantive heterogeneity of par
"difference" in this new, simultaneously concrete and speculative sense
ables the gifted observer to access the dynamic and teleological structure o
living forms. Differentiation thus lies at the very root of Goethe's life-lon
commitment to morphology as the only justifiable method for the study o
life, be it in the domain of biology, psychology, or aesthetics. In his 1
preface to a new edition of The Metamorphosis of Plants (first published in
1790), Goethe notes how, "when we study forms, the organic ones in p
Goethe [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002] 375 ) notes that, as early as 1786, Goethe had be
to study the apparent generation of minute organisms (infusoria) when exposed to light,
how organic matter appeared to generate living organisms that, over the course of day
would undergo further transformation.
19. Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Sp?tkultur (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004) 63.
goethe's phenomenology of knowledge 19
ticular, nowhere do we find permanence, repose, or termination.

rather that everything is in ceaseless flux. This is why our language
such frequent use of the term 'Bildung' to designate what has been b
forth and likewise what is in the process of being brought forth" (G
55).20 Beyond the two distinct meanings of Bildung here identified,
yet another manifestation of it, namely, a "a drive [Trieb] to reco
ing forms as such, to understand their outwardly visible and tangibl
in relation to one another, to lay hold of them as indicia of inne
(GHA 13: 5 5/EM 23). In what may be a fragment of a larger poe
ural processes, the hexametric "Metamorphose der Tiere," Goet
identifies this ceaseless self-differentiating tendency as the very law
ganic form:
Dieser sch?ne Begriff von Macht und Schranken, von Willk?r

Und Gesetz, von Freiheit und Ma?, von beweglicher Ordnung
[This beautiful notion of power and limits, of spontaneity

And law, of freedom and measure, of dynamic order.]21
In its basic outline, this conception appears to have first occurred to

Goethe during his Italian journey of 1787. First published in 1817 as part of
some autobiographical miscellany in his journal Zur Morphologie, Goethe's
short reminiscence of his "Propitious Encounter" (Gl?ckliches Ereignis) with
Schiller sometime around 1788?1789 centers on a conversation about the
status of method in scientific inquiry. Cued by Schiller's misgivings about
the "mangled methods of regarding Nature [eine so zerst?ckelte Art die Natur
zu behandeln]," Goethe begins to sketch "a spirited explanation of my the
ory of the metamorphosis of plants with graphic pen sketches of a symbolic
plant. He listened and looked with great interest, with unerring compre
hension, but when I had ended, he shook his head, saying, 'That is not an
empiric experience, it is an idea.' . . . Controlling myself, I replied, 'How
splendid that I have ideas without knowing it, and can see them before my
very eyes.'"22 Momentarily stung by the gravity of Schiller's objection,
20. English translation from Goethe, Botanical Writings, trans. Erika M?ller, ed. James
Engard (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1952); henceforth cited parenthetically as EM.
21. GHA 1: 203 (my translation); first printed in 1820, the date of composition for "Meta
morphosis of Animals" is rather uncertain; Trunz proposes near contemporaneity with Goe
the's closely related didactic poem on the "Metamorphosis of Plants," written in June 1798,
though a diary entry of 10 November 1806 has been construed as evidence of a far later com
position for "Metamorphosis of Animals," a poem whose strictly hexametric form also differs
considerably from the elegiac distich employed in "Metamorphosis of Plants." See Trunz's
commentary (GHA 1: 616-19).
22. GHA 10: 540-41/ 217; for a discussion of this pivotal exchange and on Goethe's
inception of metamorphosis as a template for studying the development of living forms, see
20 THOMAS PFAU
Goethe realizes that to formulate a compelling account of organic deve

ment requires a far more explicit notion of what it means to relate to
nomena or, simply, to "see." The internal differentiation that defines plan
life demands a quasi-phenomenological type of perceptual intelligence,
that undergoes a correlative Bildung as it responds to the evolving ap
ances of organic life. Indeed, Goethe elsewhere remarks how "my bot
cal education resembled to a certain degree the course of botanical his
itself."23 In the short essay, of 1823, Goethe notes how his method of "co
crete thinking" (gegenst?ndliches Denken) ultimately refers back to, but
qualifies, the ancient precept of self-knowledge ( e a ) that, w
alternately Stoic or Augustinian emphasis, anchors modern rationalism
the way through Descartes and Kant: "The great and important-soun
advice, 'Know thyself,' always appeared to me to be open to question,
ruse of conspiring priests intent upon confusing the laity with unattaina
ideals, upon seducing them from active life to dangerous introspecti
Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aw
of it only within himself, and of himself only within it. Each new subjec
well observed, opens up within us a new vehicle of thought" (GHA 1
3 S/EM 235-36).
Before tracing the deeper implications behind these seemingly casua
marks, we need to scrutinize Goethe's central proposition of a "symbo
plant" and his provocative claim that by means of it he could "see [id
before my very own eyes." The notion of an archetypal or symbolic p
(Urpflanze) initially surfaces in Goethe's account of his stay at Padua, whi
included a first visit to Europe's oldest botanic garden on 27 Septem
1786.24 As he notes,
many plants can stay outdoors even in the winter . . . [and] it is agre
able and instructive to wander amidst vegetation that is foreign to us.
We eventually think no more at all about plants we are accustomed to
like other long familiar objects; and what is observation without
thought? Here in this newly encountered diversity that idea of min
keeps gaining strength, namely, that perhaps all plant forms can be de
Ronald H. Brady, "The Idea in Nature: Rereading Goethe's Organics," in Goethe's W

Science: a Phenomenology of Nature, ed. David Seamon and Arthur Zaj one (Albany,
SUNY , 1998) 83-111, Elaine P. Miller, The Vegetative Soul (Albany: SUNY , 200
77; Jocelyn Holland, German Romanticism and Science (New York: Routledge, 2009) 19
and Olaf Breidbach 17-20.
23. GHA 13: 151 /EM 151; "The practice of science for Goethe does not merely prov
abstract knowledge; it entails at the same time a transformation and development of the
man being" (Hensel 78)
24. See Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: the Poet and the Age (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) 1: 423.
rived from one plant. Only in this way would it be possible truly to
determine genera and species. (GHA n: 60/1949: 53?54)25
Not to be confused with Charles Darwin's later notion of "one common

ancestor," Goethe's Urpflanze does not hypostatize a primal organism by
drawing an abstract inference on the basis of intermediate forms extracted
from the geological record. In fact, it bears pointing out that Goethe's bo
tanical studies unfold in almost complete indifference to his own concur
rent geological research or that of other, more professional stratographers.
Rather, what prompts Goethe's hypothesis of an archetypal Urpflanze is his
dissatisfaction with the mechanical, Linn?an taxonomy of species based on
a single arbitrary physiological trait that often led to the peculiar attribution
of a given species to a genus with which it has nothing in common except
the one criterion that governs the taxonomic process.26 Aside from this es
sentially negative or reactive motive, however, Goethe's more significant
concern is to recover the ontological unity of "thinking and seeing" to
which, long before, Parmenides had given expression. A subsequent entry
(17 April 1787) in his Italian fourney finds Goethe musing on the opulent
vegetation of Palermo and recalling his "old fanciful idea [alte Grille]: might
I not discover the primordial plant [Urpflanze] amid this multitude? Such a
thing must exist, after all!" (GHA 11: 266/1949: 214). Most famously,
Goethe's letter to Herder, written from Naples on 17 May 1787, identifies
the two principal traits governing Goethe's botanical theory: its economy
and its susceptibility to imaginative extension and variation: "The chief
point, where the germ is lodged, I have discerned quite clearly and beyond
doubt. The rest I can also already see as a whole, with only a few points still
25- English translation from Goethe's Autobiography: Poetry and Truth from My Own Life,
trans. R. O. Moon (Washington, DC: Public Affairs P, 1949); henceforth cited as 1949.
26. On Linnaeus, whose main work?his Systema Naturae (ist ed. 1735), while influential
throughout the remainder of the century, was already assailed by Buffon's Histoire Naturelle
(1749-67)?see Majori? Grene and David Depew, The Philosophy of Biology: an Episodic His
tory (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004) 72-74; for an account of Goethe's emergent interest
in Linnaeus, botany, and (via Herder) the transmutation of species, see Richards, The Roman
tic Conception of Life 375, 383?400. Above all, Goethe credits Rousseau for having suggested
to him "a method more progressive and less removed from the senses than the one pursued
by . . . Linn?." Linn?'s taxonomical approach, in which a man is "expected to commit to
memory a ready-made terminology, a certain number of words, and bywords, with which to
classify any given form . . . always seemed to me to result in a kind of mosaic, in which one
completed block is placed next to another, creating finally a single picture from thousands of
pieces; this was somewhat distasteful to me" (GHA 13: 158; 160-61/EM 157; 159-60); on
that passage, see Ronald H. Brady, "The Idea in Nature" 92-93. For fine introductions to
Goethe's concepts of morphology and the Urph?nomen, see Nicholas Boyle 592-97 and Joan
Steigerwald, "Goethe's Morphology: Urph?nomene and Aesthetic Appraisal," Journal of the
History of Biology 35 (2002): 291-328.
22 THOMAS PFAU
remaining to be captured more distinctly. The archetypal plant (Urpflanze

as I see it will be the most wonderful creation in the whole world, and
ture herself will envy me for it. With this model, and the key to it, one w
be able to invent plants without limit to conform, that is to say, plan
which even if they do not actually exist nevertheless might exist and whic
are not merely picturesque and poetic visions and illusions, but have in
truth and logic. The same law will permit itself to be applied to everythin
that is living" (GHA n: 323? 24./EM 14). Moving away from the not
"that the plant forms around us are . . . predetermined," Goethe late
calls being drawn to a different model, one that is shaped by the pla
mode of appearance as a dynamic, differentiating process. He is enthra
by the sheer tropism of organic life, "a happy mobility and flexibility
abling [plants] to adapt themselves to the many conditions throughout
world, and to be formed and reformed in accordance with them" (G
13: 163/EM 161-62). To be sure, Goethe's formalism does not disa
functionalism and the idea of adaptative development; what he rejects
merely the hypothesis that contingent environmental factors could un
erally determine or alter the morphological specifics of a plant or its diff
ential trajectory in time.27
Priding itself on its economy and its imaginative potential, Goethe's
tanical theory holds that any given plant species develops by differentiall
realizing a single organic form: the leaf. In a sequence of paragraphs,
the's most comprehensive botanical text, the Metamorphosis of Plants, thu
construes plant life as a trajectory of increasing morphological complexity
Presented in classical, Linn?an fashion, as a series of short, at times aphor
tic paragraphs, Goethe's Attempt to Elucidate the Metamorphosis of Plant
(1790) draws on an already rich array of carefully preserved and descr
specimens whose total number, by the time of Goethe's death, would
ceed 18,000.28 As Goethe proceeds to detail, in the course of its dev
mental trajectory a given plant species differentially exfoliates a single
stalt whose archetypal status Goethe gradually seeks to distill?not inf
through a series of precise empirical observations and descriptions. Se
leaves (Samenbl?tter), roots, stem, branch, corolla (Krone), nectarines, caly
27. Thus, in ?30 in his Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe acknowledges how "abundant n
triment retards the flowering of a plant and that moderate, or indeed scanty, nutriment
tens it" (GHA 13: 72-3/EM42). See also remarks in the later, autobiographical recollect
of his botanical research ("Geschichte meiner botanischen Studien"), where Goethe app
to concede a more significant adaptive relation between plant development and envir
mental conditions (GHA 13: 161/EM 160); see also Richards, The Romantic Conception of L
445 and Gould 288-89, wno also sees Goethe's formalism as open to functionalist cons
ations.
28. Uwe P?rksen, "Die Selbst?berwachung des Beobachters," Goethe-fahrbuch 118 (2001):
203. On the genesis of Goethe's 1790 essay, see Nicholas Boyle 592-97.
(Kelch), petals, fruits, and style (Griffel) all refer back to the same "abstract
generating principle, from which stem leaves depart least in actual expres
sion" (Gould 285). Understood as a process of "unceasing transformation"
(fortw?hrendes Umbilden [GHA 13: 60/EM 27]), all plant life thus unfolds as
the continual metamorphosis of a single archetypal Gestalt or Idee for which
the leaf furnishes the most compelling phenomenal template. The study of
plant life thus resolves itself for Goethe into a rigorous morphological de
scription of how the motivic template of the "leaf" (Blatt) generates varia
tional differences and so achieves greater complexity over time. Jochen
Bockem?hl breaks down the developmental process into four discrete ac
tivities: 1) "'shooting,' when the leaf's apiculus extends away from the
growing point"; 2) "articulating," when the tip "begins to move in several
different directions"; 3) "spreading," when "the points of articulation begin
to move away from each other"; and 4) "stemming," when "the stalk at
the base of the leaf extends itself."29 In a telling echo of Cassirer's remark
(quoted above) that mythical consciousness is above all distinguished by its
"intensity," Bockem?hl thus notes how the leaf, being the central module
of Goethe's entire botanical theory, challenges the observer to participate
in the phenomenon in a very specific manner: "It is crucial to emphasize
that this increasing ideality is not an increasing abstraction. The greater
ideality of the last two levels [i.e., the four generative activities just identi
fied and the "regulative movements of separating/interpenetrating and fus
ing/inversion] is not a function of their remoteness from the phenomena
but, rather, of the degree of intensity with which we participate mentally in
the phenomena."30
Here, then, we are returned to the changing conception of "difference"
in late-eighteenth-century philosophy and the life sciences. That is, we
find differentiation holding a constitutive function in Goethe's ontological
view of life as epigenetic: "whatever becomes appearance, must differenti
ate itself so as to be able to appear at all [was in die Erscheinung tritt, mu? sich
trennen, um nur zu erscheinen]" (GHA 13: 561). The dynamic operation of
difference, meanwhile, is circumscribed by two elemental traits that, ac
29-Jochen Bockem?hl, "Transformations in the Foliage Leaves of Higher Plants," in Goe

the's Way of Science 116.
30. Bockem?hl 127; see also Fritz Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der
Wahrnehmung (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000) 75, who remarks how "for Goethe the act of per
ception is the act of objectivity [Akt der Gegenst?ndlichkeit selbst]. The perception of the object
has the same structure as the object itself: the splitting up of the particular and the universal
into a dynamic of reciprocity." For David E. Wellbery, this "tension between finitude
and infinity, the contingent and the necessary" is the defining characteristic of Romanti
cism's endogenous (self-generating) understanding of form ("Romanticism and Modernity;
Epistemological Continuities and Discontinuities," European Romantic Review 21.2 [2009]:
281.
24 THOMAS PFAU
cording to Goethe, characterize the Bildung of organic life as metamorpho

sis: "polarity and intensification" (Polarit?t und Steigerung).31 As regards the
morphological complexity, variational differences, and occasional irregular
ity of plants, Goethe likewise posits two operative principles that Stephen
Jay Gould translates as "the refinement of sap" and "cycles of expansion
and contraction" (287), respectively. Leading from "cotyledon to flower,"
such "refinement" or "intensification" organizes all morphological differ
ences along a linear, goal-oriented trajectory?as, for example, in the grad
ated foliar structure of the sunflower. At the same time, Goethe, like
Lamarck, bows to "empirical data of greater complexity and messiness"
(Gould 287 ) and introduces a second principle, cyclical rather than se
quential in kind. Thus his "cycles of expansion and contraction" account
both for the modification of the archetypal leaf (as pistil, stem leaf, calyx,
and so forth) and for more contingent phenomena, such as peculiar digres
sions, eccentric formations such as a perforiate rose whose blossom is pene
trated by its own stem.32 As Ronald Brady and, most recently, Olaf Breid
bach have shown in their detailed accounts of Goethe's plant-morphology,
the Urpflanze of which Goethe begins to speak in 1787 "was probably a
general plan?rather than an ancestral species?from its inception." For
Goethe postulates "(1) the 'general homology' of all appendicular organs of
the shoot; (2) a generalized plan for the underlying organ; (3) by repetition
and transformation of the underlying organ, a generalized plan for the
whole shoot."33
In short, the "idea" (as Schiller had put it) of the archetypal plant is nei
ther an abstraction from the empirical processes of plant development nor a
hypothesis ventured prior to the actual observation of organic growth.
Rather, being realized solely in the "event" of seeing, the idea of a single
Gestalt (the leaf) furnishes the concrete framework without which a given
plant's progressive, internal differentiation could never be observed. ? 120
in The Metamorphosis of Plants offers a more precise definition of the "leaf"
in Goethe's theory: "it is self-evident that we ought to have a general term
with which to designate this diversely metamorphosed organ and with
which to compare all manifestations of its form. At present we must be
31. GH A 13: 48; Engard and Mueller mis-translate the second of these terms, Steigerung, as
"progression" (244).
32. GHA 13: 78; see also Helmut M?ller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and
Literature around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997) 43 and Richards, The Romantic Conception
of Life 447 ff; aside from Blumenbach and the young Alexander von Humboldt, the latter
meeting Goethe in Weimar for the first time in 1794, Goethe's principal source for this con
cept was, of course, Kant's discussion of ideological thinking in the Critique of Judgment, esp.
?? 62-78.
33. Ronald Brady, "Form and Cause in Goethe's Morphology," in Goethe and the Sciences:
a Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine and Francis J. Zucker (Dodrecht: D. Reidel, 1987) 269.
content to train ourselves to bring these manifestations into relationshi

opposing directions, backward and forward. For we might equally we
that a stamen is a contracted petal, as that a petal is a stamen in a state
pansion . . ." (GHA 13: 101/JEM 77). Goethe's 'leaf thus is neither
ristic abstraction (on the order of the Kantian "schema"), nor is it mere
"simplification of foliar members. All empirical forms are, for [Goe
equally particularized, and his general organ can be general only by lack
such particularity. His leaf accomplishes this requirement by having no
at a (Brady, "Form" 272). To make better sense of this seemingly
doxical entity?at once concrete, dynamic, and yet devoid of partic
form?we will first have to understand what, for Goethe, it means to "s
in the realm of science and poetry.
The catalyst impelling the entire process of metamorphosis
epigenetic, self-originating "drive" (Bildungstrieb) of the kind first pro
by Blumenbach and conceptually sharpened in Kant's third Critique
sources that Goethe acknowledges in his 1817?1818 essay on the "Bi
strieb." Still, Goethe also insists that all talk of "a nisus formativus ... a
orous activity effecting formation" remains unproductively fixat
"words that merely beg the question. ... In considering an organic en
unity and freedom of the creative urge are incomprehensible withou
concept of metamorphosis" (GHA 13: 32/EM233). Characteristically
of any attempts to isolate and name ultimate causes, however, Goet
stead focuses on what is objectively given qua phenomenon?that is
"the ideal archetypes giving necessity to the transformation of f
through a disciplined perception, the pure phenomena that could be
sented through images" (Steigerwald 311).
An introductory essay on "Morphology" from 1806 (first publishe
1817) shows Goethe dwelling on the modular logic of organic deve
ment. Whereas close observation of plant growth reveals that "wh
just been formed is instantly transformed [umgebildet]," botanical study
respond to such fluidity only by subdividing the body of a given pla
ganism. In so doing, "we finally came to such beginnings as have be
beled 'similar parts' [Similarteile]." Yet Goethe's concern is not simply
the apparent resemblance of discrete parts but with "a higher law of th
ganism." For the true goal of empirical observation is not to disaggr
parts but to "see and understand" (in the rich sense of Parmenides' v
all morphological difference as the expression of the fundamental princ
that "all is leaf" (Alles ist Blatt)34 that had already suggested itself to G
during his Italian journey of 1787:
34? Goethe, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, ed. Hermann B?hlau et al., 143 vols. (We
1887-1919), Part Ii, vol. 7: 282; henceforth cited as WA.
26 THOMAS PFAU
Each living creature is a complex, not a unit; even when it appears t

be an individual, it nevertheless remains an aggregation of living an
independent parts, identical in idea and disposition, but in outward
appearance identical or similar, unlike or dissimilar. These organism
are partly united by origin; partly they discover each other and unite.
They separate and seek each other out again, thus bringing about en
less production in all ways and in all directions. . . . That a plant or
even a tree, though it appears to us as an individual, consists purely of
detached parts resembling both each other and the whole?of this fac
there is no doubt. (GHA 13: 56-57/EM 24)
As the central module of a trajectory in which a given plant underg

continuous morphological change or differentiation, Goethe's leaf ma
productively related to renewed interest in contemporary biology to
plain "how individual forms are made"?something that neither Darwi
evolution nor the great synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s had been abl
explain.35 For Sean B. Carroll, the "key to understanding form is dev
ment, the process through which a single-celled egg gives rise to a comple
multi-billion-celled animal."36 The notion of "development" thus aims
fill in a major blind-spot of evolutionary biology in its dominant, Dar
ian realization. For evolutionary thinking had only ever sought to exp
morphological differences functionally, namely, as arising from chance va
tion and natural selection, and hence ascertainable only a posteriori throu
the aggregation of myriad samples spanning vast expanses of geologi
time. Yet in so framing the question, Darwinian evolutionary theor
lacked both the interest and the conceptual armature for explaining
this or that particular form is generated. All it could do was explain,
purely taxonomic basis, why some forms are still with us whereas oth
have gone extinct.
While "every animal form is a product of two processes?developm
from an egg and evolution from its ancestors" (Carroll 4), Darwi
35? As Ernst Mayr, himself a central figure in the "great synthesis" puts it, that disciplin
shift fused the inquiries of "two factions, on the one side the experimental geneticists, m
interested in the mechanism of evolution and studying variation within a population as
as the achievement and maintenance of adaptation, and another faction consisting of the
uralists, systematists, and paleontologists, primarily interested in the study of biodiversity,
is, species, speciation, and macroevolution. In the years 1937 to 1947, a synthesis of the
fields was achieved owing to a mutual understanding of each others' views. The resul
the so-called evolutionary synthesis, actually very much of a return to classical Darwini
evolution as variation and selection" (address delivered at the 51st Annual Meeting of
American Institute of Biological Sciences, Washington, DC, March 22, 2000).
36. Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo (New Yo
Scribner, 2005) x.
thought largely took for granted the former and focused its aggregative
soning on variations such as could be read off the copious, if uneven
of specimens from successive geological periods. "Ignorant of the rela
ship between genes and form," Darwin and Huxley arguably had to p
their focus in this way, since "the puzzle of how a simple egg gives rise
complex individual stood as one of the most elusive questions in all of
ogy" (Carroll 6?7). Only recently, then, a new area of inquiry compa
developmental genes between species has arisen "at the interface of em
ology and evolutionary biology?evolutionary developmental biology
Devo' for short" (Carroll 9). Contemporary work in the emerge
field of Evo Devo thus focuses on the minute processes whereby gen
information is translated into, or realized as, a specific organic form
overall concern thus lies with "how complexity is constructed from a sin
cell" (Carroll 10). As it happens, this relatively new area of inquiry exhib
some striking conceptual affinities with Goethe's morphological appr
to development two centuries earlier. Given that "only a tiny fractio
our DNA, just about 1.5 percent, codes for the roughly 25,000 protein
our bodies" and another 3 percent are "regulatory"?i.e., determi
"when, where, and how much of a gene's product is made" (Carroll
it comes as no surprise that any given organism is preponderantly c
prised of modular parts rather than heterogeneous components.
Through a series of examples, Carroll illustrates the logic of "modu
design," such that in the case of a butterfly wing what at first glance appe
a chaotic and asymmetrical design turns out to be "built of repeating
tifs" upon closer inspection (21). From primitive trilobites of the Cambri
and Silusian strata to millipedes, snake skeletons, or the bone structu
the human hand, the new field of Evo Devo furnishes genetic confirmati
for a discovery first made by British biologist William Bateson (18
1926), namely, "that many large animals were constructed of repea
parts, and many body parts themselves were constructed of repeated unit
(Carroll 26). When scrutinizing a given limb structure in diverse species,
even across multiple genera, advanced comparative anatomy will thu
veal "serial homologs, structures that arose as a repeated series and ha
come differentiated to varying degrees in different animals."37 Carroll h
37? Carroll 29; the notion of organisms connected by a "functional analogy" of their
blueprint surfaces in a variety of nineteenth-century biologists, including Etienne Geof
de St. Hilaire, who in 1818 speaks of "a principle of connections" and a "principle of
position" and Richard Owen, who in 1848 defines functional similarity analogy and stan
party identity homology (qtd. in Brady, "Form" 257-300 [258-59]). Likewise, Darwin s
of a common phylum whose persistence, throughout the variations effected by descent,
redity, and selective transmission, is legible in the "mutual affinities of organic beings"
the Origin of the Species, ed. Joseph Carroll (Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2003) 96. In
28 THOMAS PFAU
makes reference to a law formulated by paleontologist Samuel Wend

Williston (1851?1918) who, in 1914, declared it to be "a law in evoluti
that the parts in an organism tend toward reduction in number, with
fewer parts greatly specialized in function" (qtd. in Carroll 33). As Car
argues, it is the principal objective of Evo Devo to inquire into the c
nection between the apparent economy of modular design (something
Goethe had already observed in his Metamorphosis of Plants) and the broad
field of evolutionary genetics. If, as Carroll puts it, "modularity, symmet
and polarity are nearly universal features of animal design" (34), then
longitudinal study of how species diversify requires that one begin
studying the genetic rules that govern the "development" or Bildung of d
crete organisms.
Given the close affinities between the life-sciences and aesthetic mod
of autopoiesis around 1800, it hardly comes as a surprise that Goethe's
tion of a modular, "dynamic form" (itself subject to apprehension by a
ence of morphology) should in due course have been echoed by a bran
of literary studies specifically focused on the emergence and internal o
nization of literary forms and genres. Vladimir Propp's Morphology of th
Folktale (1928) may be the best known attempt to identify a modula
depth-structure of some thirty-one "functions" and seven character-ar
types (or "actants" in Greimas' parlance). What we call and experience
story (r?cit) thus arises from the various combinations, emphases, and int
relations of which these narrative modules are susceptible. Another study,
more subtle in procedure though less resonant in Anglo-American cr
cism, is Andr? Jolies' Einfache Formen (1930). For Jolies, the central
tion, formulated in expressly Goethean terms, is "how language, with
surrendering the role of signification [Bedeutung], may simultaneously
come form [Gebilde]." Concentrating on a number of familiar and compact
genres (legend, heroic poem; myth, riddle, fairy-tale, et al.), Jolies tr
the genesis of "simple forms" by observing "how the same phenomen
will repeat itself in enriched form [wie eine selbe Erscheinung . . . sich
reichernd wiederholt] at another level, and how an identical, form-giving
-delimiting power, operating at continuously higher levels, will control th
system [of poetic genre] as a totality. "38 Offering as a first illustration o
own research in Osteology, Goethe had already become aware of the modular logic und
ing skeletal structures, in part because such a hypothesis allowed him "to create series of
mal differentiations" (Serien von Formdiversifizierungen) and to grasp "complexity as varia
(Vielfalt als Variation zu begreifen). "Becoming is simply the exfoliation of what is possi
rather than the creation of the new" (qtd. in Breidbach 29-30; 69). On the pioneering
ments of Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1734?1794) concerning the modularity and differen
logic of developmental processes in organic nature, see Breidbach 87?93.
38. Andr? Jolies, Einfache Formen (T?bingen: Max Niemeyer, 1965) 9; for a recent attem
to link poetic form to the organicist models in circulation after 1780, see Gigante, esp. 1-
this model the simple form of hagiographie narrative, Jolies emphasizes t

modularity here does not involve the simple accumulation of traits require
for sainthood (specific actions, consistently superior conduct, miracle
etc.). Rather, the narrative case for sainthood becomes compelling?i
much the same way that the prosecution of a crime does?only if the
crete features give rise to a coherent imitatio. That is, the modules or top
constituting the building blocks of the case to be made must coalesce into
compelling symbolic Gestalt. Only in the resulting, condensed narrat
form does the hagiographie vita acquire significance, and for it to do s
"has to unfold in such a way that ... in it the life in question occurs again
It is not sufficient for the vita to offer a neutral inventory of events and a
but it must allow them to constitute themselves as form [diese in sich
Form werden lassen]."
In Jolies' account, the full significance of form thus can never be realiz
by some positivist or historicist method for the simple reason that, as a c
dition of its very emergence, form "shatters the historicity of its compone
and now saturates them with the value of imitability" (39?40). At tim
drawing on physiological metaphors, particularly from the realm
Osteology, Jolies thus notes how the sheer recurrence of certain "mot
or "topoi" (words he deploys with some unease), show language?a
with its narrated, modular events?"gradually calcifying [erh?rtet] into a f
type of literary form" (44). Similar to Propp's morphology of the folk-ta
Jolies' study thus rejects what are regarded as arbitrary schemes of litera
classification in favor of a genetic conception of form as a modular,
organizing, and internally significant (symbolic) reality. In ways that reca
Goethe's dismissal of Linn?an abstract taxonomy, Jolies thus insists that li
erary form constitutes itself in much the same way that a living orga
acquires its eventual Gestalt, viz., not as an abstract or artificial conceptio
but as a sequence of transformations occurring within the linguistic m
rial itself: guided by the intellect, language "names, is generative, creative
interpretive [benennend, erzeugend, schaffend, deutend] and thus generat
form [bildet eine Gestalt]; having issued from life, form also continually fe
back into life; for this no artwork is needed" (50). One is struck by
continuities between Jolies' account of genre as "simple form" and
terminology ("modular design," "serial homologs," "polarity")
ployed by Carroll as he seeks to complement evolutionary accounts
species-development with an equally precise model for the emergence
particular organic forms. Thus Jolies will distinguish between a "sim
form" and its specific realization in a given r?cit (gegenw?rtige einfache F
[47]). Notably, both Jolies' literary and Carroll's biological theories re
ate, however unwittingly, the distinction between form in the Aristotelia
Thomistic sense (viz., as "species" or forma substantialis) actualized qua
eration" and in its Nominalist sense as sheer singularity?a "this-ness
30 THOMAS PFAU
(haecceitas) whose intelligibility can be secured only at the expense of its on

tological estrangement from creator and observer alike.
Now it is precisely the dynamic and relational notion of difference intro
duced at the beginning of this essay which allows modern organicist theory
to reintegrate the Aristotelian and Thomistic ontology of "substantial
form" with the modern, Nominalist and disjunctive concept of form as the
source of a given being's singular and separate existence. Rather than
rejecting the concrete "leaf" as a mere apparition, or indeed repudiating its
substantial form as an unwarranted abstraction, Goethe posits metamorpho
sis as the law of appearance, with the leaf furnishing the enduring and
concrete substratum for a process of continuous internal differentiation
whereby a plant realizes its substantial identity. As the consummate em
bodiment of modular design, the leaf acquires its deeper significance for
Goethe's botanical research because it allows the truly observing eye to
"see" an idea and, hence, genuinely "see" for the first time. In other
words, the leaf is simultaneously an actual physical entity and the reflex of a
universal law governing all organic production. Goethe calls it a "phenom
enon." What the new field of Evo Devo finds so intriguing is a deeper
level of significance that had prompted the young Goethe sojourning in It
aly to remark on the essential nexus between perceiving and thinking
("what is observation without thought?"). Not to be confused with mere
gazing or sense-perception, "seeing" in the Goethean sense reappraises the
modern object as phenomenon, that is, as a manifestation of life. This is not
the place to expand on the aesthetic implications of Goethe's understand
ing of phenomenon and what, with his approval, the anthropologist
Heimroth in 1823 labeled Goethe's "concrete thinking" (gegenst?ndliches
Denken). As early as 1796, Coleridge pursues a strikingly similar course of
inquiry, such as when constructing the agenda for a book he hopes
Godwin may write. Among the questions to be taken up is whether "an
action bearing all the semblance of pre-designing Consciousness may yet be
simply organic, & whether a series of such actions are possible?and close
on the heels of this question would follow the old 'Is Logic the Essence of
Thinking?' in other words?Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs?
&?how far is the word 'arbitrary' a misnomer? Are not words &c parts &
germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth?" What
was to be a life-long pursuit for Coleridge, namely, "to destroy the old an
tithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & liv
ing Things too" set the agenda for Romantic poetics, as happens concur
rently in Novalis, Schlegel, and Goethe.39 It also established the conceptual
39? The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1956-71) 1: 625-26.
matrix for a post-Romantic, symbolist intensification of Darstellung as a

hyper-naturalism of the kind eventually developed in John Ruskin's theory
of painting, in the Journals and poetry of the young Gerard Manley
Hopkins (himself significantly inspired by Ruskin), or indeed in the
Sekundenstil of late-nineteenth-century German Naturalism and its Mod
ernist extension in the oeuvre of Proust and Musil in particular.40
Meanwhile, however unwittingly, Goethe's misgivings about all talk of
"objects" as so much heterogeneous "matter" or stuffand his considered
preference for the word "appearance"?reminds us that the modern sense
of objectum could only have taken hold once the Thomistic notion of "sub
stantial forms" had been rejected. That is, prior to the Nominalist critique
of Averroism, "natural things were not objects as such. . . . They were
things, subjects of their own actualization in being, in attributes, in pro
cesses, and in the realizations of their potentialities. Metaphysically, things
were not objecta; they were res, as they were indeed beings" (Buckley 94).
Just so, Goethe's "phenomenon" emerges as the correlate of a process of
seeing that involves the purposive organization and differentiation of a
motivic premise over time. In a fine turn of phrase, Goethe calls such
phenomenological seeing "a delicate empiricism which enters into the
closest union with its object and is therefore transformed into an actual the
ory [Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch
macht und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird]" (GHA 12: 435/1998: 75).41
There is ample justification for linking Goethe's concept of the "phenome
non" to the rise of modern phenomenology in the work of Brentano,
Husserl, and the early Heidegger. It may help to recall Heidegger's incisive
exposition of "phenomenon" in Being and Time, which focuses on the am
bivalence of the Greek phainesthai ("to bring into daylight"), a verb whose
construction in the "middle voice" as phaind ("that within which some
40. On Heimroth's characterization, see Goethe's short essay "Bedeutende Fordernis

durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort" (GHA 13: 37-41). Hopkins' Journal entries of 1866
and 1867 offer numerous instances of his attempt to transpose Ruskin's microscopic, pre
Raphaelite aesthetics of painting into the medium of poetry. See his entry for 6 July 1866: "I
have a note on elm-leaves, that they sit crisp, dark, glossy, and saddle-shaped along their
twigs, in which at that time an inner frill of soft juicy young leaves had just been run" (The
Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House [Oxford: Oxford UP,
?959] !52)- Here and elsewhere (see his journal entries for 30 August 1866; 11 July 1867),
Hopkins' appears consumed with mining the existing lexical reservoir of English and, fre
quently, with adding to it in order to capture the textural richness and complexity of percep
tion as an "event." On the impact of Ruskin's writings, particularly his Elements of Drawing
(ist ed., 1857), on the young Hopkins at Balliol College, see Norman White, Hopkins: a Lit
erary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 68-79.
41. English translation from Maxims and Reflections, trans. Elizabeth Stopp (Harmonds
worth: Penguin, 1998); henceforth cited as 1998.
32 THOMAS PFAU
thing can become manifest, visible in itself") betrays a peculiar confluence

of two seemingly opposed notions, those of deception and revelation. As
Heidegger notes, it is
only because something claims to show itself in accordance with its

meaning at all, that is, claims to be a phenomenon, can it show itself as
something it is not, or can it "only look like ..." One speaks of "ap
pearances or symptoms of illness." What is meant by this are occur
rences in the body that show themselves and in this self-showing as
such "indicate" something that does not show itself. Appearance, as
the appearance "of something," thus precisely does not mean that
something shows itself; rather, it means that something makes itself
known which does not show itself. It makes itself known through
something that does show itself. Appearing is a not showing itself. But
this "not" must by no means be confused with the privative not which
determines the structure of semblance. What does not show itself, in
the manner of what appears, can also never seem.42
In contrast to mere perception, the phenomenological concept of "seeing"

involves a quasi-forensic process that grants us access to the realm of Being
which, precisely by "not showing itself," is also immune to the taint of
mere semblance. Positively speaking, a formally self-conscious intelligence
concretizes itself inasmuch as it grasps the fleeting configuration of the ap
parent "object" as the appearance of a rational or substantial form.
The Aristotelian and Thomistic overtones are striking, even as they go
unrecognized by Goethe and are (perhaps deliberately) underplayed by
Heidegger. Rather than the mystical idea o?visio found in Meister Eckhart,
Aquinas points to our sensory appraisal of the world as that which actuates
our intellect. If "all knowledge comes by the form" (omnis cogitado est per
form?m), "sight"?both intellectual and sensible?constitutes the moment
where form "appears" and thus acquires reality as an "event" in the
way that Heidegger's etymological conjunction of "event" and "behold
ing" (er-eignen/er-?ugen) had meant to suggest. As Aquinas puts it: "Two
things are required both for sensible and for intellectual vision?viz., the
power of sight and the union of the thing seen with the sight. For vision is
made actual only when the thing seen is in a certain way in the seer [unto rei
visae cum visu, non enimfit visto in actu, nisi per hoc quod res visa quodammodo est
in vidente]" (Summa Theologiae la Q. 12 A. 2).
However unwittingly, Goethe's scientific writings revive this integrative
Thomistic conception, and in so doing set the stage for modern phenom
42. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (T?bingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979) 25-26. English:
Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY , 1996) 29.
enology's far more explicit attempt to recover an ontological conception of

mind and world long eclipsed by Nominalism's and Empiricism's deflated
and disjunctive approach to knowledge. It is in the work of Merleau
Ponty, whose theory of perception Goethe's accounts of "concrete think
ing" seem to anticipate most clearly, that we find an uncannily precise echo
of a point that Goethe was trying to capture. Recalling the pre-Socratic
idea of an ontological "coordination" of mind and world to which I
averted at the beginning, Merleau-Ponty's 1946 address to the Soci?t?
Fran?aise de Philosophie stresses that "meaning and signs, the form and
matter of perception, be related from the beginning and that, as we say, the
matter of perception be 'pregnant with its form.'" Perhaps alluding to
Kant's acute difficulties with grounding the synthesis of apperception in the
"Transcendental Deduction" of the first Critique, Merleau-Ponty thus in
sists how "the synthesis which constitutes the unity of the perceived objects
and which gives meaning to the perceptual data is not an intellectual syn
thesis." For whereas "an intellectual act would grasp the object either as
possible or as necessary ... in perception it is 'real'; it is given as the infinite
sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which it is given
but in none of which it is given exhaustively."43 The "reality" of percep
tion thus appears to be anchored in a temporal dimension; that is, percep
tion can only "eventuate" as a succession of discrete and differential per
spectives registered as a continuous and evolving "phenomenon" within an
observing intelligence and, in turn, furnishing the very raw-material on
which that subjectivity itself depends. What the trajectory of perception
thus reveals is the ontological belonging-together of the observer and the
phenomenon. As Husserl had put it in 1905: "appearances themselves don't
appear; they are experienced [Die Erscheinungen selbst erscheinen nicht, sie
werden erlebt]."44 This key insight, substantially anticipated by Goethe,
constitutes itself an unwitting reoccupation of the originally Thomist posi
43? Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP, 1964) 15; as Steigerwald notes, the ambition of Goethe's botanical project
"was to eliminate the subjective elements he contended were leading contemporary art and
science astray and to provide an objective vision of science in their stead, an intuition of
Urph?nomene on the basis of a disciplined perception" (314). A fuller discussion of Goethe's
scientific writings in relation to modern phenomenology would have to factor in Franz
Brentano 's critique of "perception" and his influential development of the concept of
intentionality, as well as the fifth of Husserl's Logical Investigations, especially the discussion of
"attentiveness" (Aufmerksamkeit) and the consequent, sharp discrimination between the mate
rial substratum of an intentional act and its "quality" (?? 19-20). For a thorough archeology
of different versions of phenomenology and their critical reception by post-structuralist and
deconstructionist thought, see Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenom
enology (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 1-33.
44. Logische Untersuchungen, 2nd ed. (T?bingen: Niemeyer, 1980), vol. 2: 350.
34 THOMAS PFAU
tion according to which the reality of the "thing" (res) inheres in its opera
tion (omnis res sit propter suam operationem) and where, consequently, the en
gaged beholder and that which is beheld share in the same dynamic
principle. "A certain fittingness of world to mind [convenientia entis ad
intellectum]" thus yields what Fergus Kerr calls a "radically non-interiorist
account of the self, " one that no longer involves some hermetic Cartesian
cogito wrestling with medium-sized dry goods. Instead, "action, activity, in
ward and external, is the normal manifestation of being." At least in part,
phenomenology, certainly in the way that Goethe's scientific writings pave
the way for its articulation a century later, reinstates a Thomistic cosmology
that consists "of a constantly reassembling network of transactions, beings
becoming themselves in their doings . . . always already in relation, self
revealing in [their] own unique proper way, acting reacting, and interact
ing."45
Related to this "reoccupation" of the most significant pre-modern con
cept of knowledge is Goethe's association of "phenomenon" with its ety
mological roots of light and darkness. Thus the word "phenomenon" most
frequently appears in the context of Goethe's Theory of Colors and in his
vast correspondence related to that project. As he remarks, "the phenome
non appears to me as a universal that will disclose itself under specific con
ditions, such as when in the course of prismatic experiments a pure light
displaces the appearance to the dark margins."46 Science's principal chal
lenge, then, is to articulate the phenomenon's deep-structural logic, as well
as the degree to which an observing intelligence is always implicated in it.
A number of aphorisms from Maxims and Reflections make a compelling
case for Goethe as a precursor of twentieth-century phenomenological
thought. Noting how "the phenomenon is not detached from the ob
server, but intertwined and involved with him" (GHA 12: 435/1998: 155),
Goethe is anxious to expunge all traces of Cartesian dualism when
reflecting on the event-character of sensory experience: "everything factual
is already theory: to understand this would be the greatest possible achieve
ment. . . . Don't go looking for anything beyond phenomena: they are
45? Summa Theologiae la q. 105 a. 5; Kerr 32; 48?49.

46. Letter to T. J. Seebeck (21 January 1816): "So erscheint mir das Ph?nomen als ein
allgemeines ?berall verborgen liegendes, unter gewissen Umst?nden hervortretendes, wie denn bey den
prismatischen Versuchen ein reines lichtes Bild die Erscheinung an die dunklen R?nder dr?ngt" ( WA,
pt. ?v, 26: 228). For a discussion of Goethe's creative reciprocity of sight and phenomenon in
The Theory of Colors and his elegiac poem "Metamorphosis of Plants" (1798), see the essays
by Astrida Tantillo ("The Subjective Eye: Goethe's Farbenlehre and Faust") and Heide
Crawford ("Poetically Visualizing Urgestalten: The Union of Nature, Art, and the Love of
Woman in Goethe's 'Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen' "), both in The Enlightened Eye: Goe
the and Visual Culture, ed. Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia A. Simpson (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007).
themselves what they teach, the doctrine" (GHA 12: 432/1998: 77);
again, "He who has a phenomenon before his eyes is often already thinkin
beyond it; whoever only hears talk of it, thinks nothing at all [Wer
Ph?nomen vor Augen hat, denkt schon oft dr?ber hinaus; wer nur davon erz
h?rt, denkt gar nichts]" (GHA 12: 434/1998: 155). The challenge for scienc
thus is to understand that it is only ever involved with "objects" at the l
of "phenomenon" and that, consequently, it must at all times stay fo
on the dynamic process whereby phenomena make their "appearance"
so show themselves to be constitutively entwined with an observing inte
gence. It follows for Goethe that the practice of any science must be just
attentive to the process of Darstellung, that is, the symbolic and narrativ
process that "makes present" what has appeared in such a way as to disclo
the hidden, primordial law or idea of which the phenomenon is a fle
manifestation. Belonging to the order of praxis rather than epistem
Goethean science constitutes a hermeneutic event, a process of "understan
ing" whereby sustained observation continually feeds back into the
server's concurrent quest for intelligent self-determination and vice-vers
Hence, all genuine apprehension for Goethe is possible only within
ready existing framework of comprehension, even as it also transforms a
deepens that very framework.
By contrast, Goethe claims, a science that relies on a classical, mim
paradigm of representation to capture its perceptions is doomed to fa
this regard, Goethe contends, "physics is worst off. ... Its hypotheses
analogies are but concealed anthropomorphisms, parables, and such.
means of these [physicists] believe to be stating the phenomenon it
rather than attending to the conditions under which the phenomeno
pears."47 To "see" the objective world as phenomenon is, for Goethe
once a radically deductive and inductive process; for it to deliver anythin
"we must focus the mind as well as the eye and conceptualize to perce
The perceiver is also a thinker in a manner that usually escapes notice
what is thought in this manner is also seen?that is, the resultant ima
an instance of our conceptual category" (Brady, "Idea" 97). This recipr
dynamic should help clarify how, for Goethe, the differential form
plant points to its archetype or, rather, makes that archetype (Urb
Urpflanze) more than the "idea" to which Schiller had restricted it. Ke
any genuine "grasping" of the phenomenon?that is, to understanding
phenomenon as the "truth" of an object typically misconstrued
47? Diary entry from April 1817: "Die Physik dagegen ist am ?belsten dran . . . ih
Hypothesen und Analogien sind versteckte Anthropomorphismen, Gleichni?reden und dergleic
Dadurch glauben sie das Ph?nomen auszusprechen, anstatt da? sie sich um die Bedingu
bek?mmern sollten, unter welchen es erscheint" (WA, pt. in, 6: 32-33).
36 THOMAS PFAU
ephemeral singularity?is Goethe's notion of "intuition" (Anschauung

Unlike the Kantian model of "intuition" in the first Critique, w
confines the term to a crudely sensory apprehension of inchoate data by
"reproductive imagination," Goethe understands intuition as the sens
apprehension of a complex organizational pattern. At the same time, here
following Kant, Goethe insists that unless a pattern of some kind is alread
in place at the moment of "seeing," no perception would ever occur
follows, that the self-organizing logic of Bildung never originated in som
primal and amorphous welter of material (pre-cognitive) "data" to be
sively apprehended by the subject's sensory apparatus. In fact, no suc
stance of entirely neutral and pre-intellectual perception has ever b
shown. Rather, Bildung is always already at work, subtly interwoven
the intelligential process of "seeing" itself.
As Goethe stresses, all seeing?if it is to be more than mere mindless
meaningless gazing?begins with a sudden cognitive realization; he call
an aper?u, a moment at once speculative and concrete that is typically exp
rienced as an "awakening" or as a "conversion of sense [Sinnes?nderun
Telling here is the fusion, within that last compound noun, of a sens
and an intellectual dimension; thus, while an aper?u involves our becom
"conscious of a great maxim, which is always an operation of the m
akin to genius [das Gewahrwerden einer gro?en Maxime, welches immer e
genialische Geistesoperation ist]," it does so only through the concrete, sens
and material event of seeing.48 It hardly surprises, then, that the term ape
should occur with particular frequency throughout Goethe's Theory
Colors. Raising the stakes in one such instance, Goethe insists that "ev
thing in science depends on what is called an aper?u, a becoming awar
what truly constitutes the ground of appearance; such a realization will be
fruit ad infinitum" (GHA 14: 98). As described in this passage,
Goethean aper?u bears a strong conceptual resemblance to the reflec
judgment of Kant's third Critique. Both notions involve the sudden
vergence of our sensory and intellectual faculties in a productive (alb
strictly formal) relation. Hence, what Kant refers to as the "conformity"
"attunement" (?bereinstimmung, Zusammenstimmung) between the sensor
and intellectual faculties of cognition amounts to a formal condition t
enables what he calls "knowledge in general" (Erkenntnis ?berhaupt).49 It
48. (GHA io: 89/1949: 603); in Maxims and Reflections, Goethe remarks how "Alles wah
Aper?u kommt aus einer Folge und bringt Folge. Es ist ein Mittelglied einer gro?en, produ
aufsteigenden Kette" (GHA 12: 414; my translation); David Wellbery sees Goethe advan
"the epistemological figure of a systematically disciplined intuitive attention that conform
and finally produces out of itself the formal regularity in question" (278).
49. For a fuller discussion of Kantian judgment and its complex troping of "voice"
"mood" (Stimmung), see Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melanch
1790-1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 33-45.
only when this condition has been met and ratified by an act of reflective
judgment that the project of subjective cognition and its eventual, inter
subjective "communicability" (Kant's Mitteilbarkeit) can get underway. Yet
for Goethe, this instantaneous collaboration of the subject's sensory and in
tellectual capacities is not confirmed by a reflective judgment but, instead,
derives its corroboration from the "event" (Ereignis) of concrete "seeing"
and thinking (gegenst?ndliches Denken). What he calls aper?u reveals to the
observer that what he is looking at, or indeed looking "for," is indeed no
mere discrete object but, rather, "appearance." The specific object is
merely that as which something else appears that can never show itself di
rectly. In striking anticipation of Heidegger's definition of the phenome
non, Goethe defines "seeing" as recognizing within a given phenomenon
the law governing its existence, which cannot appear per se but nonethe
less conditions the object's specific mode of appearance. Indeed, it is only
through the object as appearance?viz., as the correlate of genuine
"seeing"?that one obtains access to the self-organizing, differential play of
forces over time (Bildung), forces that will eventually crystallize in what is
known as "object" (Gegenstand).
Goethe's characterization of the plant's successive development both as
"vegetative growth, by development of stems and leaves; and next, through
reproduction, which is completed in the formation of flower and fruit"
(GHA 13: 99/EM 76) posits a process that is fundamentally incompatible
with mimetic forms of representation. If we take, for example, the progres
sive differentiation of the ordinary field buttercup (ranunculus acris) and
break it down into a number of stages, it is logically evident that each of
the discrete stages is itself merely an arbitrary isolation of a dynamic pro
gression. However indispensable to scientific inquiry, any such freeze
frame technique does not alter the fact that "the movement we are thinking
would, if entirely phenomenal, be entirely continuous, leaving no gaps.
Thus as gaps narrow the impression of movement is strengthened" (Brady,
"Form" 276). Consequently, there is no underlying Gestalt or concrete or
ganic entity undergoing variational or teleological change. Rather, change
itself is the only reality, and as such it "demands difference, and [as] contin
uous change, continuous difference." It follows, that "for the purpose of
our intention, the arrested stage, or Gestalt, is an abstraction. It is held in
arrest by our sensible experience, but when we attempt to detect the rela
tion between stages, we must dissolve that condition in the mind"; as
Brady continues:
were someone to remark, when viewing such a series, that 'they are all
the same thing,' the meaning of the statement would seem immedi
ately apparent. But no single schema can generalize upon the series,
for each schema, being itself a type of Gestalt, will be closer to one
38 THOMAS PFAU
stage of the series than it is to the others. This is very apparent with
the leaves, but it holds true of the vertebrae as well. ... It might see
counter-intuitive to speak of movement, rather than an object making
the movement, as generative, but between the forms and their mov
ment there is only one possibility. We must remember that no singl
Gestalt, qua Gestalt, can generate a movement between forms. We d
tect the movement through the differential between forms, but n
one form can give us this. The movement, on the other hand, is a
continuity which must contain, in order to be continuous, multiple
Gestalts. Thus the movement is not itself a product of the forms from
which it is detected, but rather the unity of those forms, from which
unity of any form belonging to the series can be generated. ("Form
277-79)
To understand the metamorphosis of plants, it is crucial for the observer fo

cused on the organic growth of a particular species to monitor his own
propensity to formulate laws based on abstractions (an organic substratum,
or an abstract Gestalt) that are, in fact, never objectively there but, instead,
constitute formal, schematic expedients without which one would not be
able to observe anything. As Brady makes clear, change as a linear and un
ceasing differential progression has to be given ontological primacy. Hence,
ifit is illogical to speak of change taking place between stages, it is also im
permissible to posit some fundamental, invariant entity that supposedly
holds constant through the process of change. Change, in Goethe's theory
of organic development, does not alter a form putatively given; rather, it
produces any sense of form. To claim otherwise would be to backslide into
vitalist mystification by postulating a Lebenskraft within matter itself. For
only by appealing to such an agency?itself entirely beyond the scope of
what can be verified or observed?could one then explain how one given
stage or Gestalt should inexorably lead to another. Yet for Goethe, to be al
together true to the phenomenon means never entirely leaving its orbit, as
would invariably be the case if we were to hypostatize a quasi-Platonic
super-agency supposedly impelling the dynamic metamorphoses of discrete
organic forms.
For Brady, what distinguishes Goethe's morphological concept of sci
ence is this genial capacity of "seeing" every form or stage in actual or po
tential continuity with others, and to refrain from isolating it as a discrete
entity: "The morphologist not only 'sees' that two distinct configurations
are still 'the same,' but is made aware, by the same faculty, of nascent po
tentials that seem to arise from every juxtaposition. . . . The individual leaf
now appears to be 'coming from' something as well as 'passing to' some
thing, and by so doing represents, to our mind, more than itself. " Once it is
grasped or, rather, has been "seen" that "the single image is incomplete, its
full import can appear within sensible conditions only through continuous
transformation?through change" ("Form" 282, 285). Yet the ultimate
significance of this quasi-phenomenological mode of seeing that takes
shape throughout Goethe's botanical writings has to do with how it reflects
back to the observing intelligence its own cognate structure. To reiterate:
taken as phenomenon, Goethe's leaf visually realizes the idea of the whole
of (plant) life?the deep and imageless truth that accounts for the leaf's par
ticular formal mode of appearance and, unable to appear as such, can only
appear in some concrete guise or Gestalt. Whereas, ordinary empirical in
quiry will separate "the living thing . . . into its elements, but one cannot
put these elements together again," Goethe's alternative is to "recognize
living forms as such, to understand their outwardly visible and tangible
parts in relation to one another, and to lay hold of them as indicia of the in
ner parts [ihre ?u?ern sichtbaren greiflichen Teile . . . als Andeutungen des Innern
aufzunehmen]" (GHA 13: 55/JBM 23).
In their proto-modernist conception of form as Ph?nomen and Erschein
ung, Goethe's botanical writings thus prefigure with uncanny exactitude
what Arnold Gehlen had called "transcendence into this world" (Transzen
dieren ins Diesseits), a grasping of the divine in rigorously phenomenal, con
crete, and dynamic ways. No doubt cued also by the Urtext of Ovid's Meta
morphoses, Goethe's botanical theory remains groundbreaking less for what
it tells us about plants than for its superior insight into all sensory experi
ence as inherently dynamic, intelligential, and profoundly entwined with
the aesthetic process of Darstellung. As Goethe notes in his Theory of Colors
(? 751),
we never sufficiently reflect that a language, strictly speaking, can only

be symbolical and figurative, that it can never express things directly,
but only, as it were, reflectedly [nur im Widerscheine]. This is especially
the case in speaking of qualities which are only imperfectly presented
to observation, which might rather be called powers than objects, and
which are ever in movement throughout nature. They are not to be
arrested, and yet we find it necessary to describe them; hence we look
for all kinds of formulae in order, figuratively [gleichnisweise] at least, to
define them. (GHA 13: 491-92)50
Just as the myth of Daphne had exemplified long before, Goethe under
stands internal differentiation as the very essence of life?a continuous
"becoming other in order to remain itself" (Brady, "Form" 286). It is not
50. Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London: F. Cass & Co., 1967) 300. See
also Goethe's "Introduction" to the Theory of Colors, where he remarks on how, struggling
for an adequate terminology of this most elusive of phenomena (light), observers have fash
ioned "a symbolical language . . . which, from its close analogy, may be employed as equiva
lent to a direct and appropriate terminology" (xix/GHA 13: 316).
40 THOMAS PFAU
merely a chemical churning of matter or the sum total of photosynthesis,

circulation, respiration, digestion, etc. Rather, as an intrinsically concrete
and "appearing" form, life continually solicits our active participation as
observing and representing (darstellende) intelligence.
Specifically this last consideration also makes clear that knowledge, for
Goethe, is not object-knowledge or -representation (Vorstellung) in the
Cartesian and Newtonian sense; nor indeed does it involve an apperceptive
synthesis and accumulation of "data" to be "applied" or otherwise "ex
pended" in the pursuit of some contingent objective. Goethean organicism
thus is not a concept merely imputed to "objects out there." Rather, it
posits that the law of form cannot be separated from the form of appear
ance. In that view, engaging the world as a practical, sensory, and intelli
gent being means to understand mind and world as ontologically entwined,
not as subject and object but as res in the sense that Michael Buckley has re
covered as the cornerstone of Aristotelian and Thomistic thought. Only in
this non-appropriative sense, then, does "seeing" ever allow for the possi
bility that the observer will be genuinely and continually "formed" and
"transformed" by the encounter with concrete, living forms.51 In its dy
namic sense as natura form?ns, Goethean form denotes both the implacable
drive of all phenomena toward self-organization at the level of appearance
and the observer's fashioning of a suitable form of presentation (Darstellung)
without which there would be nothing to "see."
If, then, one attempts to situate the Romantic concept of self-generation
within a larger narrative of intellectual history, Romantic organicism can
be understood as an attempt to reconcile two conceptions of form that had
long been opposed in Western thought. One is the Aristotelian/Thomist
ontology of substantial form?a unified, animating principle serving as the
ontological warrant for the self-identity and consequent intelligibility of all
finite matter. The other is the idea of form as the source of a given entity's
radical particularity and dissimilarity from any other being. What enables
Romantic organicism to reconcile these two models is its entirely novel
understanding of difference?which no longer signifies heterogeneity and in
commensurability but, instead, a relation whereby a being realizes its essence
51. Elsewhere, Brady points out how Goethe's definition of "seeing" as "cognizing ... is
not a proposition about what is perceived but an activity that actualizes the perception. Each
act of seeing is necessarily an act of understanding. . . . We do not perceive and then bring forward
a concept to understand. We focus our understanding to bring forth a perception" ("Idea"
88); Fritz Breithaupt succinctly and persuasively notes that "above all, the aim of Goethe's
Phenomenology is to preserve the openness of the phenomenon and to counter its
mortification by the terminally objective [Offenhalten des Ph?nomenalen, die Verhinderung der
Mortifikation durch das endg?ltige Objective] " (Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung
[Freiburg: Rombach, 2000] 78).
over time by transforming its core motif into a complex structure (Gebilde).
Similar to the ancient and Scholastic idea of substantial form, a single Ge
stalt does indeed underwrite the self-identity of an organic or aesthetic
being. Yet in Goethe form no longer secures a thing's coherence instanta
neously but, instead, realizes it as a sequence of minute differentiations un
folding over time. The unparalleled influence of such a conception on
nineteenth-century art and aesthetics owes much to the fact that it articu
lates the Romantic notion of form-as-process in phenomenologically con
crete, rather than mystical, ways. Thus, in fusing the law of form with the
law of its appearance, Goethe shows how organic form not only unfolds
but, in so doing, also concretizes the beholder's intellectual persona. Such a
model not only breaks with the Enlightenment idea of "sense-perception"
as a passive and mechanical accumulation of data, but it also edges away
from the Kantian model of "experience" as premised on an a priori mental
architecture serving as its condition of possibility. Instead, aesthetic knowl
edge in Goethe shows the observer's intelligence to be wholly enmeshed
with the form or phenomenon unfolding before him. From here it is not
far to the proto-modernist aesthetic of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy or in
deed the microscopic, not to say forensic idiom of a Proust or Musil bur
rowing ever more into the alluring possibility of mind constructing its
world as a work of art only to find itself hypnotized by its own projections.
Duke University

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"All is Leaf": Difference, Metamorphosis, and Goethe's Phenomenology of Knowledge

Author(s): THOMAS PFAU

"All is Leaf": Difference,

All things created would seem, in a way, to be purposeless, if they

By the 'primacy of perception,' we mean that the experience of per

HIS ESSAY EXPLORES GOETHE'S DYNAMIC IDEA OF FORM AND DIFFERENTI

SiR, 49 (Spring 2010)

constitutive of the observer's subjectivity. In turn, the joint differen

. See Ockham's Quodlibetal Questions, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Ke

comes to be "seen" as an internally differentiating and self-organizing pr

sense of praxis (later revived in Arnold Gehlen's philosophical anthropol

Within the scaffolding there prevails a strange ownership and a strange

Heidegger's "event" is the moment where thinking experiences itself

io. G. W. F. Hegel, Ph?nomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg:

to the detriment of his own presentation, Hegel does not foreground

Socratic status as a metaphysical enigma into the vivid and purposive me

A couple of passages, one found early in Book of the Metamorphoses

And then she saw the river, swift Peneus,

transfiguration are the myriad sensory particulars, the visceral power of de

that Goethe characterizes as "perpetual transfiguration" (fortw?hrend

Of a beach-crab and sink the rest in sand,

These creatures all derive their first

So?lest I range too far and my steeds

Most clearly, the shift towards a more abst

By virtue of its systematic gathering into the comprehensive narrative o

Throughout his far-flung botanical writings, Goethe insists that to un

ticular, nowhere do we find permanence, repose, or termination.

Dieser sch?ne Begriff von Macht und Schranken, von Willk?r

[This beautiful notion of power and limits, of spontaneity

In its basic outline, this conception appears to have first occurred to

Goethe realizes that to formulate a compelling account of organic deve

Ronald H. Brady, "The Idea in Nature: Rereading Goethe's Organics," in Goethe's W

Not to be confused with Charles Darwin's later notion of "one common

remaining to be captured more distinctly. The archetypal plant (Urpflanze

29-Jochen Bockem?hl, "Transformations in the Foliage Leaves of Higher Plants," in Goe

cording to Goethe, characterize the Bildung of organic life as metamorpho

content to train ourselves to bring these manifestations into relationshi

Each living creature is a complex, not a unit; even when it appears t

As the central module of a trajectory in which a given plant underg

makes reference to a law formulated by paleontologist Samuel Wend

this model the simple form of hagiographie narrative, Jolies emphasizes t

(haecceitas) whose intelligibility can be secured only at the expense of its on

matrix for a post-Romantic, symbolist intensification of Darstellung as a

40. On Heimroth's characterization, see Goethe's short essay "Bedeutende Fordernis

thing can become manifest, visible in itself") betrays a peculiar confluence

only because something claims to show itself in accordance with its

In contrast to mere perception, the phenomenological concept of "seeing"

enology's far more explicit attempt to recover an ontological conception of

45? Summa Theologiae la q. 105 a. 5; Kerr 32; 48?49.

ephemeral singularity?is Goethe's notion of "intuition" (Anschauung

To understand the metamorphosis of plants, it is crucial for the observer fo

we never sufficiently reflect that a language, strictly speaking, can only

merely a chemical churning of matter or the sum total of photosynthesis,

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