The philosophical legacy of Goethe’s morphology

inIsis - The Field Centre Research Journal Vol.2 No.2 - 2015

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The philosophical legacy of Goethe’s morphologyBy Dr Troy Vine

To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

IntroductionHow can Goethe’s thought be relevant in the 21st century? This is the main question I attempt to address in this essay. However, I have decided not to address it head on, so to speak, by analyzing our current situation and seeing whether this or that insight of Goethe’s can be of service in solving this or that problem. Instead, I have decided to take a single idea from Goethe’s extensive corpus and trace its historical development down to the present day under various thinkers to see if a logical next stage arises naturally out of such an historical presentation, a next stage that could represent, if you like, the continuation of the inner necessity of its historical movement.

The idea I have chosen for this short historical study is Goethe’s Urpflanze - his archetypal plant - and the story I sketch is the development of this idea in the philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein. This philosophical unfolding of the Urpflanze has five parts: After a brief characterization of Goethe’s germinal idea of the Urpflanze I present the conceptual apparatus developed by Kant, which provides the conceptual soil out of which an understanding for the Urpflanze can grow. I then look at its development under Hegel and explore the conceptual difficulties with which we are presented with if we are to take the Urpflanze seriously as the single unified principle of all plants. As a further step, I turn to Wittgenstein to explore the idea of the Urpflanze as a principle that is grasped in our perceptual capacity; i.e. that which enables us to recognize all plants as belonging to a single unity. Lastly I consider the direction in which we should look to develop further the conception of the Urpflanze.


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This short story is in many ways a summary of relevant aspects uncovered in recent research concerning Goethe and his influence on the history of philosophy and I am particularly indebted to Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, in which he describes Wittgenstein’s “life and work in the one narrative” (Monk, p. xviii), and Eckart Förster’s The 25 years of Philosophy, where he offers a systematic reconstruction of the historical period that starts with the publication of Kant’s Critic of Pure Reason and ends with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

The Goethean seed of the UrpflanzeDespite having studied plants for many years, the first serious conception of the Urpflanze came to Goethe on his Italian journey in 1787. When in Italy he writes that:

Seeing such a variety of new and renewed forms [of plants], my old fancy suddenly came back to mind: Among this multitude might I not discover the Urpflanze? There certainly must be one. Otherwise, how could I recognize that this or that form was a plant if all were not built upon the same basic model? (Goethe, 1970, p. 259)

A month later he wrote to Herder saying that:The Urpflanze is going to be the strangest creature in the world, which nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could. (Goethe, 1970, p. 310)

However, Goethe soon realized that the question of how different plants relate to each other was related to another question, namely, how different stages of the same plant relate to each other. It was to this second question that Goethe then turned his attention, and in 1790 he published his Metamorphosis of Plants.

The germination of the Urpflanze in Kantian soil Shortly after the publication of Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants Kant published his third and final critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Kant devotes a large portion of this critique to developing a philosophy of living organisms. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that on receiving a copy, Goethe reports that a “wonderful period arrived in my life” (Goethe, 1995, p. 29). He was inspired to begin work on a second edition of the

Metamorphosis of Plants, which, however, he never finishes and instead devotes himself to his chromatic studies. To understand how fruitful Kant’s third Critique was, not only for Goethe’s botanical endeavors but also for subsequent philosophical development, we will turn to a short survey of some key concepts of Kant’s philosophy.

Kant based his critical philosophy on the central idea that knowledge results from the interplay of two heterogeneous sources, namely thinking and observation i.e. spontaneity and intuition in Kant’s language. (It must be here borne in mind that ‘intuition’ in the original German (Anschauung) is from the verb ‘anschauen’ which means ‘to look at’. This very common German word is often translated in the Goethe literature as ‘beholding’, which, though closer to the German, has the disadvantage of obscuring Goethe’s connection to Kant). However, despite differentiating these two faculties, and their separate sources, Kant noted that our observation of the world always contains aspects of both these faculties. As Kant famously stated: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75).

Kant further restricted objective knowledge of the world to the interplay of a particular kind of thinking, namely discursive understanding, and a particular kind of intuition, namely sensible intuition i.e. observations made with the use of the senses. This ‘sensibility’ or ‘receptivity’ is to restrict the spontaneity of thinking, which can grasp many different possibilities, of which, however, only one, the one given by the senses, is real. In order to define these two technical terms ex negativo, Kant developed the medieval philosophical idea of a divine intelligence to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of a non-discursive understanding (i.e. an intuitive understanding) and a non-sensible intuition (i.e. an intellectual intuition).

The idea of non-discursive knowledge is as old as philosophy itself, and is discussed under the rubric of intuitio (the Latin noun of action for intueri, which means to look upon, consider, contemplate) (OED). In scholastic philosophy intuition was regarded as the faculty for spiritual perception and immediate knowledge possessed by angelic beings, and Spinoza developed the idea of a scientia intuitiva in relation to mathematics.

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Kant, however, breaking with the medieval tradition, characterizes human understanding as purely discursive, which means that the general concept of something we observe can only be arrived at by abstracting all the common aspects from different concrete specimens of things we see in the world. The general concept ‘plant’, for example, is arrived at by abstracting that which is common to all plants we have seen, and discarding all that is specific to a particular plant, or species. Thus we might define a plant as something that has roots, stem, leaves and flowers. Such a general concept of plant is what Kant calls an analytic universal. The analytic universal is always poorer in content than any given specimen we might see, as we have had to discard all that is specific to a given species. An analytic universal is therefore highly abstract.

To arrive at the general concept, the analytic universal, we have had to reject what Aristotle called the differentia. The differentia is an aspect that is unique to a given species, and that which differentiates it from another species belonging to the same genus. A particular species of plants will have flowers of a particular colour, whereas the general concept ‘plant’ cannot have flowers of any particular colour because different species have flowers of different colours. As a result, this Aristotelian way of categorizing organisms, which forms the basis of the Linnaean system we still use today, can never come to an understanding of the unity that underlies the multiplicity we see in the world around us. As Kant remarks, the individual must always seem arbitrary from the perspective of the analytic universal: “Our understanding thus has this peculiarity for the power of judgment, that in cognition by means of it the particular is not determined by the universal, and the latter therefore cannot be derived from the former alone” (Kant, 2000, p. 276). As the genus is always poorer in content than the species that come under it one can never derive the species from a genus, as the species are always richer in content.

This result, however, shouldn’t be surprising because it follows directly from the characterization of the human understanding as discursive; we arrive at the analytic universal only by discarding the particular, the differentia, and retaining only what is common. Thus the greater the number of species whose relation to each other we want to understand, the poorer and less

capable of explanation is the analytic universal. Such a general concept arrived at via abstraction is what Bortoft calls a ‘counterfeit whole (Bortoft, p. 4). It is a ‘counterfeit whole’ because we can never derive the parts from the whole, nor understand their relation and connectedness to the whole.

Kant nevertheless does offer a theoretically possible alternative. The divine faculty of intuitive understanding can conceive of the parts united with the whole in one act:

Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts. (Kant, 2000, p. 276)

Such an intuitive understanding, therefore, does not need to proceed from the parts to the whole discursively, i.e. analytically, to come to the analytic universal, but rather arrives at the particular in its full specificity by ‘limiting’ an intuitive conception of the whole. Such an “authentic whole”, as Bortoft calls it, does not start from multiplicity but from original unity, and thus the universal is synthetic and therefore includes all its parts within it, i.e. it is a synthetic universal. It is the a unity which “includes difference without fragmenting the unity” (Bortoft, p. 75). Once the synthetic universal had been grasped it is possible to derive all species from it and so it is richer in content than its species. In a lecture Kant once described the analytic universal as the “unity within many” and the synthetic universal as the “many within unity” (Sparby, 2014, p. 42).

Regardless of the possibility of such an intuitive understanding, we are not divine but human and so, concludes Kant, we do not possess such a faculty and must rest content with our discursive understanding. The result is that nature seems purposive to us, but the idea of organisms having purpose is something we impose on organisms because we cannot grasp them in their wholeness, or, as Kant expressed it, the teleology of nature is a regulative principle and not constitutive of nature.

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While Kant was developing this conception of organism and restricting the human capacity to knowledge of an analytic universal, Goethe was on his Italian journey developing a method that did lead to an intuitive understanding of plants. As we saw above, Goethe states that it is possible to derive all possible species from the Urpflanze, whether they exist yet or not, according to an “inner truth and necessity”. Thus the model, the Urpflanze, is the synthetic universal of all plants and its key is the intuitive understanding, which, via limitation, is able to derive all possible as well as actual species from the Urpflanze. The unity of the plant kingdom can thus be understood as an authentic whole. This deep congruity of Kant’s philosophical work with Goethe’s botanical studies brought, as we have seen, great joy to Goethe, as well as the impulse to research further.

Goethe states the importance of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement in his short essay Anschauende Urteilskraft [intuitive power of judgement], and quotes the section quoted above, where Kant describes the intuitive understanding. Goethe then comments that:

Impelled from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly towards primal image [Urbildliche] and prototype, and had even succeeded in building up a method of representing it, which conformed to nature. Thus there was nothing further to prevent me from bodily embarking on this “adventure of reason” (as the sage of Königsburg himself called it). (Goethe, 1995, p. 32)

With ‘Urbildliche’ (archetypal) Goethe is explicitly referring to the intuitive understanding albeit with another term Kant also uses for the same. (Again, the translation obfuscates the Kantian context of Goethe’s thought.) However, this point is often overlooked.

The most famous misunderstanding of Goethe’s Urpflanze resulted in his well-known disagreement with Schiller. When, after a detailed description from Goethe, Schiller exclaimed that the Urpflanze was not an experience but rather an idea, Goethe sarcastically retorts that “I am very glad that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes”. Cassirer, who did so much to bring Goethe into the philosophical debate, says of the Urpflanze that it has “no independent, isolated ontological existence; it is a regulative principle that is necessary for the

use of experience itself, completing it and giving it a systematic unity” (Cassirer, p. 544). However, regardless of the truth of the first part, the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles is a distinction valid only for discursive understanding - as Kant often emphasizes - and is purely subjective and thus is not part of the essence of nature itself, which can only be grasped by intuitive understanding. As Jost Schieren shows, Goethe is not objecting to Schiller’s Kantianism as someone unversed in Kant’s philosophical distinctions, but rather is alluding to the fact that the Urpflanze is an example of a synthetic universal (Schieren, p. 72).

The Hegelian stem of the UrpflanzeEven when it is acknowledged that Goethe’s Urpflanze is an example of a synthetic universal, the implications are often insufficiently explored. As a result, a deeply problematic aspect of its logical structure, which was first noticed by Hegel, is generally overlooked. We will now address this problem in the context of Hegel’s philosophy.

Like Goethe, Hegel was faced with the problem of how different entities are related to each other and how each one can be given a place within the same unity without contradicting the others. Hegel’s problem did not concern plants, however, but philosophical systems. After coming to lecture at Jena on Goethe’s invitation in 1805, he wanted a system within which the history of philosophy could be understood within the context of the evolution of consciousness. This resulted in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where we find in the introduction:

It [conventional opinion] does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears into the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly when the fruit appears the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as a truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is a necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.(Hegel, 1977, p. 2)

While Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants is not named, this analogy of the temporal development of different philosophical systems to the stages of a plant makes clear the deep influence of Goethe’s plant studies. As Hegel wrote in a letter to Goethe looking back at that time: “When I survey the course of my spiritual development, I see you in it everywhere intertwined and I regard myself as one of your sons; you have nurtured in me a tenacious inner strength against abstraction” (Hoffmeister, 1952, p. 83). One of the original contributions of Förster’s study is to demonstrate the effect of Goethe’s thought on the development of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The question that now arises is how Hegel’s thought develops our understanding of the Urpflanze further. To answer this question we need to ask why the idea of a synthetic universal might be rejected. Förster claims that Kant nowhere proves its impossibility, but rather assumes it (Förster, p. 253). However, there is good reason why one would want to reject such an idea, and it is the same reason that Hegel’s philosophy was rejected by Bertrand Russell and others at the beginning of the last century: The synthetic universal contains, or at least appears to contain, a contradiction.

To my knowledge, the only paper in the literature that addresses this problem in relation to Goethe’s Urpflanze is Terje Sparby’s The Problem of Higher Knowledge in Hegel’s Philosophy, which is a response to Förster’s research. As we saw above, for the discursive understanding the genus is always poorer in content than the species, or technically expressed, the species are under the genus. Since Aristotle, the differentiae have been regarded as not belonging to the genus, but to the species. The reason for this is to avoid the genus containing a contradiction. If the genus of all flowering plants were to contain the colour of the flowers, we should say of the genus that it has both red and non-red flowers, which is a contradiction. Just as an individual leaf cannot be simultaneously green all over and not green all over, so can the genus not contain the predicate ‘red flowers’ and ‘non-red flowers’.

Hegel saw this problem in full clarity, but instead of abandoning the whole project as necessarily doomed he developed a new kind of logic that is based on the idea that a contradiction is a fundamental principle of reality, and we must therefore find a way to cope with it philosophically. Hegel develops such a method in his

Science of Logic. In the introduction he argues that logic has not progressed since Aristotle and is therefore in need of a full revision. One of the main problems with logic is that it separates form from content. This means that the different rules for combining premises such that if the premises are true then the conclusion is also true are developed in isolation from what the premises actually state, i.e. their content. Thus formal logic gives the licit ways of connecting concepts without reference to the content of the concept. It is, therefore, a purely analytic process that is not concerned with truth itself, but rather with the structure of truth preserving inferences. In such a logical system a contradiction ‘breaks’ the truth preserving structure, and nothing is left over, so to speak.

The outcome of this kind of discursive understanding is that thinking and its objects are separate. Hegel notes that in ancient metaphysics there is a concept of thinking in which “thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content” (Hegel, 2010, p. 25). However, to develop a new logic based on this type of thinking a new philosophical method is required that animates “the dead bones of logic” by revealing the inner movement of the content of a concept. By rejecting the content and considering only the form, traditional logic is not able to overcome contradiction and reach the “living, concrete unity”. Only living thinking has “the power to fill the abstract groundwork of logic previously acquired through study with the content of every truth, and to bestow upon this content the value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but embraces them all in its grasp and is their essence, the absolutely true” (Hegel, 2010, p. 37).

It is clear that Hegel is developing a conceptual understanding of the synthetic universal, or the “concrete universal” as he also calls it. What, then, is the key idea we can take from Hegel’s logic that can enrich our understanding of the Urpflanze? Hegel investigates the logical nature of the synthetic universal by starting from some concrete particular and observing its ‘inner movement’, and thereby reveals the inner dialectical structure of the synthetic universal: What is first posited transforms itself into its opposite which then enters into conflict and a contradiction results. However, such a self-contradiction “does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness” (Hegel,

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2010, p. 33). Rather, because one has not abstracted the content before starting, the contradiction is able to result in something positive:

Because the result, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has a content. It is a new concept but one higher and richer than the preceding – richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite. (Hegel, 2010, p. 33)

Here we have a description of a dialectical movement that allows us to arrive at a universal that contains the particulars in it instead of under it. Because the two contradicting aspects are included in the unification, the concept that results is a richer concept than the previous concepts. Thus, in Hegel’s dialectic, the genus contains its species in it, and is therefore richer. However, due to the contradiction contained within it, it is not a static concept, but a living, or “fluid” concept.

Hegel’s determinate negation is therefore a further development of Kant’s intuitive understanding (Sparby, 2014, p. 274). With Hegel’s logic, then, we have the principle with which we can understand the conceptual structure of Goethe’s Urpflanze, though it does mean radically changing our idea of a contradiction. Whether Hegel has committed a cardinal logical sin, as Russell believed, or discovered a new “living” thinking in contrast to the dead abstract thinking of formal logic is a contentious issue in philosophy. However, if we are to take Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze, as described in his letter to Herder, seriously, then we must also take the idea of a synthetic universal seriously, together with Hegel’s concomitant idea of determinate negation.

The Wittgensteinian leaves of the UrpflanzeWe have, however, still not gained any clarity on what Goethe meant when he said he could see the Urpflanze with his eyes. To do so we turn to Wittgenstein’s theory of perception, which in turn gives us a further insight into clearing up the dispute between Goethe and Schiller.

Wittgenstein, whose main interest was to understand language, also began to consider the problem of how parts relate to the whole, in this case how the different meanings and usages of the same word relate to each other. Specifically, he was challenging the Platonic

picture that everything described by the same word must have something in common i.e. all be contained in the same analytic universal. (Whether this really was Plato’s view we will leave aside for now, but suffice to say Bortoft believes that Plato was also developing a philosophy of the synthetic universal.) The problem with such a picture is that one could not define what that thing common to all instances was without running into a contradiction. When faced with a similar problem to Hegel, Wittgenstein also turned to Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants for inspiration and guidance.

In The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, which was originally a collaboration between Friedrich Waismann and Wittgenstein to explain Wittgenstein’s thought to the Vienna Circle, we find the following description. It is worth quoting it in toto not only because it is one of the few explicit expressions of Wittgenstein philosophical intention and method, but also because it demonstrates explicitly the direct influence of Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze.

Our thought here marches with certain views of Goethe’s which he expressed in the Metamorphosis of Plants. We are in the habit, whenever we perceive similarities, of seeking some common origin for them. The urge to follow such phenomena back to their origin in the past expresses itself in a certain style of thinking. This recognizes, so to speak, only a single schema for such similarities, namely the arrangement of a series in time. (And presumably bound up with the uniqueness of the causal schema). But Goethe’s view shows that this is not the only possible form of conception. His conception of the Urpflanze implies no hypothesis about the temporal development of the vegetable kingdom such as that of Darwin. What then is the problem solved by this idea? It is the problem of the surveyable presentation. Goethe’s aphorism ‘All the organs of the plant are leaves transformed’ offers us a plan in which we may group the organs of plants according to their similarities as if around a natural centre. We see the original form of the leaf changing into similar and cognate forms, into the leaves of the calyx, the leaves of the petal, into organs that are half petal, half stamens, and so on. We follow this sensous transformation of the type by linking up the leaf through intermediate forms with other organs of the plant.

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This is precisely what we are doing here. We are collating one form of language with its environment, or transforming it in imagination so as to gain a view of the whole space in which the structure of our language has its being. (Waismann, p. 80)

What is here clearly expressed is not only the adoption of a particular idea from Goethe, but also an adoption of his whole way of thinking, his whole Vorstellungsart. Such an approach rejects an explanation of phenomena that links them in terms of unseen causal and hypothetical mechanisms, and instead seeks to understand them by arranging them in a ‘surveyable presentation’ grouped around a ‘natural centre’. But how does this apply to language? Wittgenstein develops this idea in his Philosophical Investigations, where he asks us to:

Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games and so on. What is common to them all? - Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them, you won’t see something common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think but look! (PI, §66)

Wittgenstein goes on to call the similarities that we can see “family resemblances”, and that all games form a family.

Now it is important to stress that what makes them a family is not something they all have in common, but instead overlapping resemblances that we can see and order into criss-crossing series. This capacity to ‘see connections’ allows us to form a surveyable presentation, which in turn gives us understanding (PI, §122). But it is important to note that this idea of ‘seeing connections’ isn’t metaphorical but a key idea Wittgenstein generalized from his theory of perception, which, as Stephen Mulhall shows, is central to his philosophical thought as a whole. It is perhaps unsurprising that Wittgenstein developed the idea of seeing connections in the context of Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology, in which we find a development of Goethe’s concept of Gestalt.

Köhler uses many different figures to show that we perceive the world as an organized whole. Such figures include so-called ambiguous figures, which can be seen as depicting one of two possible objects. However, the object seen can suddenly switch into the other possible object. The most famous ambiguous figure is the “duck-rabbit”, which Wittgenstein reproduces as a sketch in his Philosophical Investigations (below).

One of the conclusions of the possible switch of the Gestalt from duck to rabbit or vice versa is that there are two kinds of seeing. Wittgenstein begins his discussion of this topic with:

Two uses of the word “see”.The one: “What do you see there?” - “I see this “(and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness in these two faces” [...]What is important is the categorical difference between the two ‘objects’ of sight. (PI, p. 203)

However, while these two uses of the word see are categorically different, Kohler classes these two different kinds of seeing as pertaining to two different ‘visual realities’, namely the sensations of colours and shapes on the one hand and their organziation on the other. What changes in a Gestalt-switch is that the same sensations are organized in a different way. This Kantian ‘two part’ theory of ‘the ‘given’ and its interpretation (‘material’ and ‘form’ in Kant) is what Wittgenstein rejects. Such a theory implies that what we perceive is a kind of ‘inner object’ that is a representation of an ‘outer’ object to which we have no direct access but instead a mediated access via sensations. What Wittgenstein wants to show is that what is given in perception is the world itself, and not a representation of it. Thus when we suddenly see the duck-rabbit picture as a rabbit, he calls it ‘noticing’ an aspect. However, this does not mean it wasn’t there before, rather we just hadn’t noticed it. Thus we are not adding something to what was already given, but rather our perception is of a continuous whole, though comprising different kinds of aspects (I follow here Mulhall’s interpretation of Wittgenstein).


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What Wittgenstein, like Hegel, rejects is the Kantian superstition of a thing-in-itself “behind the phenomena” which causes us, via our receptivity, to have certain sensations, which are then ‘organized’ into a representation by our spontaneity (thinking). The Kantian insight that our knowledge of the world comes about via restriction (receptivity) of our thinking (spontaneity) all to easily leads to the Kantian thought that this restriction is extra-conceptual, which Hegel and Wittgenstein reject.

Our language and reality have the same intrinsic structure, and when our language represents something that is the case in the world, there is not some mysterious fit between language and some extra-linguistic reality. As Wittgenstein puts it, “when we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, then, with what we mean we do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but mean: such-and-such is” (PI, §95). McDowell, who used the insights from Hegel and Wittgenstein to develop Kant’s original insight further, paraphrases it, “there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world” (McDowell, p. 27).

How should we, then, conceive the Kantian notion of two sources of knowledge? As McDowell points out:

The fact that experience is passive, a matter of receptivity in operation, should assure us that we have all the external constraint we can reasonably want. The constraint comes from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable. (McDowell, p. 28)

By applying this idea to the dispute between Goethe and Schiller Monk claims we can clear up the disagreement:

On Wittgenstein’s view, both Goethe and Schiller could be said to be right: Schiller is right to insist that the Urpflanze belongs to the same category as ideas (rather than that of physical objects), and Goethe is right to insist that, in some sense, he sees it with his own eyes. The philosophical task is to explain how this can be so - to describe the phenomena as seeing-as in such a way that is does not appear paradoxical that a Gestalt (an ‘aspect’, an ‘organized whole’) is at one and the same time an idea and an ‘object’ of vision. (Monk, p. 512)

What Wittgenstein shows is that in both kinds of seeing we are seeing aspects, and that aspects are conceptual in nature, but also constitutive of reality. In learning to see the Urpflanze, Goethe learnt to see a new aspect of reality. Thus, when Goethe talks of developing a ‘new organ of perception’, he means he is developing a faculty to see something that he could not see before. As Wittgenstein remarks about noticing an aspect:

It is as if one had brought a concept to what one sees, and one now sees the concept along with the thing. It is itself hardly visible, and yet it spreads an ordering veil over the objects. (RPP, §961)

Similarly, Goethe noticed a new aspect of reality, which someone who is ‘aspect-blind’ as Wittgenstein calls it, cannot see. However, once seen, the idea of the Urpflanze “spreads its veil” over all plants and allows us to see them in a new way. By ‘organ’ he is of course not referring to the vehicle of sight, the eye, but to the faculty of sight itself in which thinking participates. Thus can Wittgenstein say that noticing an aspect seems “half visual experience, half thought” (PI, p.207).

The flowering of the UrpflanzeKant’s sharp distinction between thinking (spontaneity) and observation (intuition) allows us to characterize Hegel’s philosophy as the fruition of the Kantian insight that “thoughts without content are empty.” Similarly, we can see in Wittgenstein the fruition of the related Kantian insight that “intuitions without concepts are blind”. It is thus tempting to see the next step as the synthesis of these two approaches. However, such an attempt initially appears to have a bleak outlook. Wittgenstein once commented that: “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in shewing that things which look the same are really different” (Rhees, p. 171).

However, Wittgenstein did concede on another occasion that “the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work” (Lee, p. 74). Also, both thinkers adopt a fundamental insight from Goethe, namely that the essence is to be found within the appearance. Kant divorces reality from appearance, and then restricts our knowledge to the latter, thus rendering the former an inaccessible ‘thing-in-itself ’. Following Goethe, Hegel and Wittgenstein reject this separation as absolute: In Hegel, we find the

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rejection of the separation between form and content in logic and in Wittgenstein the rejection of the logical positivists’ attempt to reduce language to logic. They both then adopt Goethe’s morphology as a method to include the appearances, i.e. the content, in the search for the essence. Thus both thinkers strive to develop a philosophy that does not succumb to the “abstraction that we fear” (Goethe, 1995, p. 159).

Based on this common ground, how should we then proceed in synthesizing these two philosophers? We can take our starting point from Bortoft’s monograph Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness. Here, with exemplary clarity, Bortoft develops the Kantian distinction between the analytic and synthetic universal (though the connection to Kant remains implicit) by developing Wittgenstein’s theory of perception, especially the idea that we perceive aspects, or “meaning” (Bortoft, p. 53):

With the distinction between “unity in multiplicity” and “multiplicity in unity” is it now possible for us to look at a statement such as “All is leaf” and understand it as the expression of a perception of the universal shining in the particular (Bortoft, p. 88).

Bortoft describes learning to see new aspects to which we were previously blind as ‘deepening’ our perception in the same sense that the three-dimensional aspect of a two-dimensional figure can suddenly dawn on us thus giving the figure depth. “But this depth is peculiar inasmuch as it is entirely within the phenomena and not behind it [...] It is in fact the depth of the phenomenon itself” (Bortoft, p. 68). Wittgenstein is describing something similar when he says: “I meet someone whom I have not seen for years; I see him clearly, but fail to recognize him. Suddenly I recognize him. I see his former face in the altered one” (PI, p. 208).

Similarly, I can see a particular plant as just that particular plant, but I can also recognize the Urpflanze in that plant. I can see not only the plant as it currently is before me, but its resemblance to previous stages as well as to other plants, which differ in various ways. Wittgenstein calls the many different ways in which objects denoted by the same word resemble each other ‘family resemblances’. Thus we could say that when we see the Urpflanze in the plant before us we are also seeing the family resemblances between it and all other

plants, both actual and possible. But what has changed when we see the Urpflanze in the plant we are looking at? What is this added ‘depth’? As Bortoft remarks, a “transition is made from seeing the individual organs to seeing the formative movement that is the plant” (Bortoft, p. 292). That is, we see the plant in its actuality as well as in its potentiality.

In an early conception of the determinate negation Hegel pictures the form of the earth as being the negation of the movement of the cosmos. Although he later abandoned this picture, the idea that form is the determinate negation of movement, or “the reduction of the total movement to rest”, can be a fruitful metaphor (Sparby, 2015, p. 110). Just as when we see something moving, we see not only its form but also that it has come from somewhere, and is going somewhere, so with the plant we can see the ‘movement’ of its coming into being and passing away as well as the actual form, in which this ‘movement’ has come to rest. We see each particular plant as a ‘limitation’ of the Urpflanze, which we also see.

However, if we can see that actual plant as well as the potential plant, the plant appears both as that which it is and also as that which it is not. This has the same air of contradiction about it as the synthetic universal. I believe that in taking the idea of the Urpflanze and exploring the connection between Hegel’s idea of determinate negation of being and not-being, which results in becoming, with Wittgenstein’s ideas relating to the surveyable presentation we can begin to find a synthesis of Wittgenstein and Hegel’s thought, and thus further develop our understanding of Goethe’s Urpflanze. We can begin such an undertaking by exploring the question of whether the ‘understanding’ that is gained from a surveyable presentation is a shift from seeing the aspect as an analytic universal to a synthetic.

Taking this thought further, there is another aspect where Hegel and Wittgenstein’s thought can provide us with a potentially fruitful synthesis. Now, the shift in perception from seeing just the particular plant to seeing it within the Urpflanze is what Bortoft characterizes as a shift from an analytical to an holistic mode of consciousness (Bortoft, p. 86). An analytic way of seeing needs to construct an abstract theory to explain what is being seen, but a synthetic way of seeing has no need to because an understanding of


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the thing observed is already contained within the seeing. In this latter kind of seeing there is clearly a different relation between subject and object, or between perceiver and world. This shift in seeing thus a shift in consciousness; that which we previously had to add to reality in order to understand it, i.e. abstract thoughts, we now find in reality itself i.e. as synthetic or living thought. The distinction between the actual plant given in sensibility and the possible plants given to the understanding has collapsed. The next question to explore is whether we can locate this shift of consciousness in the evolutionary framework given in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This would give us a framework within which Wittgenstein’s theory of perception, coupled with the idea of a shift from analytic to holistic consciousness, can be placed. Thus the evolutionary aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought, which remained relatively undeveloped, can be placed within a Hegelian framework.

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Bibliography

Bortoft, H., The Wholeness of Nature, Gt. Barrington, 1996.Cassirer, E., Gesammelte Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Vol. 24, Hamburg, 2007.Förster, E., The 25 Years of Philosophy, Cambridge, 2012. Goethe, J. W. von, Scientific Studies, Vol. 12, New Jersey, 1995.Goethe, J. W. von, Italian Journey, London, 1970. Hoffmeister, J. (ed.), Briefe von und an Hegel, Vol. 3, Hamburg, 1952. Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, 1977. Hegel, G. W. F., The Science of Logic, Cambridge, 2010. Kant, E., Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge, 1998, (=A/B). Kant, E., Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge, 2000.Lee, D. (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1939-1932, Oxford, 1980.McDowell, J., Mind and World, Cambridge, 1994. Monk, R., Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York, 1991. Mulhall, S., On Being in the World, London, 1990.Rhees, R. (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein, Oxford, 1981.Schieren, J., Anschauende Urteilskraft, Düsseldorf/Bonn, 1998.Sparby, T., The Problem of Higher Knowledge in Hegel’s Philosophy, in: Hegel Bulletin, Vol 35, Issue 01, 2014, pp. 33 - 55.Sparby, T., Hegel’s Conception of the Determinate Negation, Leiden, 2015.Waismann, F., The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, New York, 1965.Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 2009, (=PI).Wittgenstein, L., Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, Oxford, 1983, (=RPP).

ConclusionBy planting the seed of Goethe’s Urpflanze in the philosophical soil prepared by Kant we see it flourish in the philosophies of Hegel and Wittgenstein. While much excellent research has been done in the last century to develop and apply Goethe’s scientific method to many diverse topics, the development of a philosophical understanding of his method had been neglected. By embracing and developing the philosophical legacy of two of the most influential philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively, Goethe’s morphology can be given a contemporary philosophical basis and the seed of the Urpflanze first planted by Goethe in the 18th century can bloom in the 21st.

Documents

The philosophical legacy of Goethe’s morphology