Ecological Selfhood and Goethe’s Third Way between Erfahrung and Idee

I

At the turn of nineteenth century, the project of modern science in Germany faced two competing demands. The first emanated from the mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment that postulated an external world that had no share in mind and could be imagined as a mechanism. The second originated in Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalism. This asserted that truth is actively constructed by the knowing subject and that experience consequently cannot disclose the reality of things in themselves, dismantling both empiricist and rationalist claims to physical and metaphysical knowledge of the world. The far-reaching influence of Kant’s philosophy across the German intellectual landscape was felt in a groundswell of criticism of the old university system, giving rise to a radical call for a restructuring of universities based on “the spirit of German idealism.”¹ These disjunctive philosophies, differed fundamentally in their understanding of the relationship between the observing subject and the natural world of objects, foregrounding questions about the respective roles of “experience” and “idea” in scientific inquiry. The ontological and epistemological questions that this raised became of fundamental importance to the scientific investigations of Goethe around 1800. In response, Goethe’s work primarily in plant morphology and chromatics developed what scholars now widely consider to be a phenomenology of nature.² Reading Goethe’s receptions of mainstream science and Kantian philosophy in dialogue with one another, this article investigates Goethe’s complex mediation between these competing worldviews. It demonstrates that Goethe provided a strategy to meet these opposing demands, as he navigated a new direction for modern science between rationalism and empiricism and the idealism of the Kantian mind. Goethe offered a resolution to the dualism between mind and world, which has significant implications for environmental ethics today. I argue that Goethe’s resistance to the division between culture and nature anticipated key tenets of environmental philosophy, particularly deep ecology, as he searched instead for continuity between the human and nonhuman world. I explore the manner in which Goethe’s conception of nature appreciated what we would now call its intrinsic value and advanced an ethic of interrelatedness between humans and other life forms. This suggests that the paradigm shift that deep ecology signaled in recent years was already heralded by Goethe around the turn of the nineteenth century.

To humanists and scientists alike it is now abundantly clear that the environmental crisis is also a cultural crisis, that is in the way we represent and understand the natural world and our place in it (Stone 141; Rigby, Ecocriticism 153–54). Ethical concerns, therefore, about our attitudes towards the environment cannot be distinguished from the epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning the thought patterns and behaviors that have led to environmentally destructive outcomes (Fischer & Nassar 5). In the West particularly, these assumptions are predicated on the dualism between culture and nature that has contributed to our psychological displacement from the environment. Far from offering an alternative, modern science has been instrumental in the creation of this conceptual division between human beings and nature. For Francis Bacon, the “father” of modern science, the uncovering of nature’s secrets through reason and empirical investigation was motivated by the pursuit of mastery over the natural world. It was intended primarily, as Kate Rigby notes, to expand the bounds of our “God-given dominion over the rest of creation through technology.”³ While technology was once considered a corollary of knowledge of the natural world, after Galileo it was the laws of nature themselves and how these could be utilized in new technologies that constituted the actual knowledge of nature that was being looked for.⁴ The scientific project was focused not on understanding the natural world, but rather on adding to it, on reinventing it. Knowledge of nature thus, Gernot Böhme points out, was conflated with engineering: “Natur wird also nicht mehr gefunden, sondern erfunden” (137). Significantly, the desire to reinvent and control nature through the development of technology encompassed also a desire to emancipate ourselves from it, further estranging us from the earth (Böhme 138). The tendency to perceive the human and nonhuman world as dualistic was reinforced by the widespread acceptance of René Descartes’s and Isaac Newton’s view of matter as composed of invisible particles functioning mechanistically in accordance with immutable laws that could be rendered mathematically. The issue here, as Rigby notes, is not the validity and value of the scientific method, but rather the discourse framing the scientific project as a quest for human mastery over deanimated nature, devoid of ethical responsibility (Romanticism 64). This justified historically our exploitation of the environment, which is valued only in so far as it serves us as a resource.

The dualism between humans and nature was reinforced by the rigid separation of the natural and human sciences that became institutionalized in the early nineteenth century and consolidated the two cultures, to use C.P. Snow’s well-known term.⁵ Concurrently however, as Amanda Jo Goldstein notes, rival romantic philosophies attempted to overcome the divide between the humanities and the sciences, and “presumed, proposed, or defended other possible orders of knowledge” (274). The early Romantics in Germany were particularly stimulated by the parallelism that Kant established in his third Critique between an aesthetic and teleological judgement of nature, seeing within this a kinship to their own program to bridge the divide between aesthetics and natural science.⁶ These concerns heralded central imperatives of the environmental humanities, which have recognized that the field divisions inherited from the nineteenth century “not only fail to resolve but also help to produce, the ecological, bio-political, and economic crises that chronically evade their grasp” (Goldstein 274).

Goethe’s life and works directly relate to these concerns and his refusal to reduce qualitative experience to quantifiable abstractions places him in close proximity to environmental philosophers today.⁷ His censure of scientific practice, notably his objections to Newton’s theory of refraction, have typically been blindsided by stereotypes dismissing them as nothing more than a poet’s fear of mathematical physics. As Dennis L. Sepper points out however, it was in fact Goethe who was defending the rights of reason and accused Newton of letting his “imagination run away with him” (Goethe, Newton 263). Goethe’s distrust of mathematical abstraction and the speculative tendencies of Newtonian science led him to develop what scholars now recognize was a phenomenology of the natural world that anticipated at once Edmund Husserl’s philosophical approach and important current tenets of philosophy of science.⁸ Eva-Maria Simms argues for example that Goethe, like Husserl, was seeking “a science of the qualitative dimension of being” and proposed a concept of participatory imagination that emphasized our embeddedness in the environment (160–163). Additionally, Iris Hennigfeld suggests that Goethe’s science aligns with Husserl’s interest in “original intuition” and the former’s theory of the Urphänomen is an example “of a phenomenological science of nature that explores the limits of intuition and cognition” (144–147).

For Goethe, embodied experience was an essential part of scientific inquiry. This conflicted radically with a dominant Cartesian worldview that, to speak with Simms, attempted to “denude nature of its living forms and to seclude human consciousness in its own subjective bubble” (161). Instead, Goethe’s methods foregrounded a dialogical relationship between the scientist and what may be considered the subject, not object, of study. He emphasized the myriad of interrelationships in nature and significantly did not limit these to the nonhuman world, but included also human beings as participants in the natural processes around them. A central principle of Goethe’s methodology is that in order to comprehend nature, the scientist must become mentally as flexible and dynamic as the natural transformations under investigation:

Das Gebildete wird sogleich wieder umgebildet, und wir haben uns, wenn wir einigermaßen zum lebendigen Anschaun der Natur gelangen wollen, selbst so beweglich und bildsam zu erhalten, nach dem Beispiele, mit dem sie uns vorgeht.⁹

The type of empiricism that Goethe advocated, which he termed zarte Empirie, enabled a participatory relationship between the knower and nature that was mutually transformative. This approach requires what Frederick Amrine terms a “metamorphosis” of the scientist and attunes us to the natural world.¹⁰ Educating our sensibility deepens our perceptual sensitivity to the environment and can foster a sense of moral responsibility towards nature. As Dalia Nassar argues, in “Goethe’s approach, we find a notion of epistemological responsibility or obligation that offers the necessary first step toward developing a sustainable environmental ethic” (299). Goethe’s view that the knowing subject must transform herself in order to adequately grasp the phenomenon, challenges the idea that knowledge is purely representation or construction, in which the known object (nature) is considered to be no more than inert and passive (Nassar 310–11). Rather in Goethe we find that there is an ontological reality that demands to be known in the right way. The knower is under a moral obligation to what is known and must remain open to being transformed by that knowledge.¹¹ Tim Mehigan and Peter Banki suggest that the independence of Goethe as a thinker lies in the “demand of the ethical,” which resists the separation of the moral and natural orders on which Enlightenment philosophies were premised (377). Instead, Goethe looked within nature for “the quintessence of the ethical relation” (377). This breaks fundamentally with the thought systems of the Enlightenment and Kant’s ethics particularly, which was considered to apply only to one side of the dualism between culture and nature. Goethe could never accept this distinction. Mehigan and Banki contend therefore that “Goethe’s relevance for our own age lies precisely in this move back to a greater, cosmically extended power in relation to which nature attains its true significance” (394). Goethe’s ethics can thus be said to be ecological in that it is founded on the interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds.

The significance of Goethe’s conception of nature for environmentalism today is further highlighted by his sensitivity to the problems of anthropocentrism. Goethe’s phenomenology, while anticipating Husserl, also moved beyond the latter’s attempt, as Simms observes, to place “the problematic of human consciousness and its world-constitution at the center of phenomenological inquiry” (171). Goethe already predicted the limits of phenomenology’s “humanism” and provided “a road-map of the territory the questioning mind encounters when it goes beyond itself” (Simms 171).

Goethe’s worldview denied humans a privileged position in their relation to nature and his scientific writings are remarkable in their attempt to steer clear of the claims of human exceptionalism.¹² This is exemplified in Goethe’s apparent discovery of the intermaxillary bone in humans, the supposed absence of which was considered a distinguishing mark between humans and apes. As Ryan Feigenbaum contends, the major significance of Goethe’s findings lies in the departure that they signify from an anthropocentric ontology (74). In searching for and discovering ostensibly that the intermaxillary bone existed in humans as well, Goethe undermined the common practice amongst contemporary naturalists and anatomists of looking for what makes us different from (other) animals and stand apart from the natural world. Goethe’s subversion of the ontological foundations of an anthropocentric worldview is further demonstrated by his categorization of large-scale ecological spaces, such as “Pflanzen-Ozean” and “Luftmeer,” in which terrestrial life (human and nonhuman) reside. Goethe emphasized, “auch wir sind Völker des Luftmeers.”¹³ These ecological spaces are not politically or culturally determined and transcend national boundaries. Shifting the focus from the human to the nonhuman, Goethe foregrounded the natural environment in which we reside and which provides the conditions for our survival.¹⁴

The move in Goethe’s thought from a philosophy of nature to ethics can be further appreciated, I argue, in view of the deep ecology movement. Coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the early 1970s, “deep ecology” was a way towards understanding the cultural aspects of the environmental crisis.¹⁵ By contrast, “shallow ecology” was characterized by Naess as being concerned exclusively with issues around pollution and resource depletion, in so far as these impacted on the interests of people in developed countries. The imputation of a “shallow” and one might say capitalistic approach is that the environmental crisis is a crisis only in so far as it concerns human interests and is to be addressed only as a technical problem that does not demand any radical changes to our modern relationship to the natural world. Deep ecology, alternatively, emphasized the interrelatedness between individuals to one another as well as to other nonhuman life forms. Organisms are viewed as “knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations” (Naess 95). Naess promoted an “ethic of interrelatedness,” in which humans are not morally privileged over other life forms, signifying a departure from human exceptionalism (Mathews 218). The ontological egalitarianism to which Naess was committed, I argue, was anteceded by Goethe’s writings on nature. The connections between Goethe and deep ecology, consequently, merit further investigation and offer a valuable measure of Goethe’s significance for environmental philosophy today. Such an examination elucidates the prescience of Goethe as a thinker at a time when the broader scientific community did not know to care (or care to know) about the environmental consequences of their pursuit for technology and mastery.

Goethe can thus be placed at the forefront of a genealogy of thinkers that have examined the cultural underpinnings of the environmental crisis. In what follows, I examine the ways in which the principles of ontological egalitarianism and relationality resonate in Goethe’s nature philosophy as he steers a course beyond the opposition of consciousness and nature. The deep ecology movement that Goethe prefigures was a worldview and a series of principles that could function as a platform for activism. I will argue that Goethe goes beyond deep ecology by devising an alternative scientific method that puts its principles into practice. The Goethean scientist, it will be shown, establishes pathways for experimental science that lead to a more intimate and egalitarian understanding of the environment and demands the kind of reconceptualization of our relationship to nature that deep ecologists have called for.

II

On September 18, 1831, Goethe observed in a letter to Christoph Ludwig Friedrich Schultz: “Ich danke der kritischen und idealistischen Philosophie, daß sie mich auf mich selbst aufmerksam gemacht hat [ … ]; sie kommt aber nie zum Objekt” (JA 6:666). These comments, written towards the end of his life, are indicative of Goethe’s attitudes towards contemporary philosophy in Germany and what his ambitions as a scientist had been. Goethe acknowledged his indebtedness particularly to Kant in drawing his attention to the role of the subject in any act of cognition (Brady, Idea in Nature 97). The observable world is not simply given to experience, as empirical science would have it, but is always already predetermined or prestructured by a given theoretical perspective. Goethe was, nevertheless, dissatisfied with Kant’s veto on knowledge of an external reality and his scientific pursuits aimed at transcending this threshold. Goethe responded primarily to Kant’s argument in §80 of Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), in which the latter considered comparative anatomy and the possibility through this of constructing an “archaeology of nature.”¹⁶ While such an archaeology was logically possible, Kant considered it to be empirically false. He did not think it possible to grasp the living from the whole to its parts and termed any such conclusions “ein gewagtes Abenteuer der Vernunft.”¹⁷ Searching for a way past Kant’s veto, Goethe distinguishes between “eine reflektierende diskursive Urteilskraft,” through which Kant limits human judgement, and “anschauende Urteilskraft” (JA 6:409).¹⁸ For Goethe the intuitive power of judgment becomes an instrument of scientific inquiry. It must be possible, he argues, “daß wir uns, durch das Anschauen einer immer schaffenden Natur zur geistigen Teilnahme an ihren Produktionen würdig machten” (JA 6:409). Through this particular notion of judgment, Goethe establishes a position from which to undertake the adventure of reason that Kant had prohibited:

Hatte ich doch erst unbewußt und aus innerem Trieb auf jenes Urbildliche, Typische rastlos gedrungen, war es mir sogar geglückt, eine naturgemäße Darstellung aufzubauen, so konnte mich nunmehr nichts weiter verhindern, das Abenteuer der Vernunft, wie es der Alte vom Königsberge selbst nennt, mutig zu bestehen. (JA 6:409)

Goethe attempted effectively to clear a path between consciousness and nature, which for Kant must remain forever intractable. Reflecting on Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Goethe observes that “die alte Hauptfrage sich erneuere, wie viel unser selbst und wie viel die Außenwelt zu unserm geistigen Dasein beitrage” (JA 6:406). However, this dichotomy between mind and world alienates him: “Ich hatte beide niemals gesondert, und wenn ich nach meiner Weise über Gegenstände philosophierte, so tat ich es mit unbewußter Naivität und glaubte wirklich ich sähe meine Meinungen vor Augen” (JA 6:406). Goethe suggests therefore that we must find “daß der Philosoph wohl möchte recht haben welcher behauptet, daß keine Idee der Erfahrung völlig kongruiere, aber wohl zugibt daß Idee und Erfahrung analog sein können, ja müssen” (JA 6:410). While Goethe acknowledges the incongruencies between “idea” and “experience,” he emphasizes that they must still be analogous. The idea is not abstract but somehow tangible and therefore accessible to empirical studies.¹⁹

Kant played a crucial role, as Ronald H. Brady notes, in Goethe’s understanding of the difference between a purely sensible form and a higher experience of form (“Idea in Nature,” 95). However, for Goethe the “idea” was more real and objective than it was for Kant, even after he had arrived at a more philosophically sophisticated distinction between physical and mental seeing.²⁰ Goethe trusted in the senses.²¹ They were not secondary manifestations of an objective reality but had a reality in themselves, a realization that places Goethe in close proximity to Husserl’s philosophical approach. In order to demonstrate the continuity between consciousness and nature, the disciplines of morphology and chromatics were particularly valuable. There, as Amrine points out, “the contribution of the perceiving subject to the construction of the phenomenon is most immediately apparent.”²² Both morphology and chromatics represent “boundary situations” or “threshold experiences” that make it evident that “all perception is grounded in a realm beyond the split between subject and object” (“Metamorphosis” 202).

The relationship between idea and experience in Goethe’s scientific studies is illustrated in his essay Glückliches Ereignis. There, Goethe relates an anecdote marking the beginnings of his friendship with Friedrich Schiller in July 1794. Hitherto, he observes, they had both harbored a mutual distrust for one another, due to their disparate Denkweisen (JA 6:402). For Goethe, Schiller epitomized the new trends in philosophy that at that time he abhorred, particularly “die Kantische Philosophie, welche das Subjekt so hoch erhebt, indem sie es einzuengen scheint” (JA 6:402). As their later friendship demonstrated however, a reconciliation between these “Geistesantipoden” was possible. Goethe recalls how, following a lecture they had both attended in Jena, they were drawn into conversation with one another, in the course of which Goethe explained his theory of plant morphology and sketched for Schiller “eine symbolische Pflanze” (403). Schiller replied famously: “das ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee,” to which Goethe retorted: “das kann mir sehr lieb sein daß ich Ideen habe ohne es zu wissen, und sie sogar mit Augen sehe” (403).

Goethe’s theory of the symbolic plant, or Urpflanze as it is more typically known, was foreign to Schiller and certainly did not constitute for him what empiricism was.²³ For Schiller the primal plant is an idealized truth, a design of human subjectivity, which can never be adequately embodied in the real world and represented as an empirical reality. Indeed, the dual nature of the Urpflanze as an idealized truth and empirical reality was a contradiction that beset Goethe’s theory from the outset. In Italienische Reise he describes searching for the Urpflanze in the botanical gardens of Palermo as if it actually existed.²⁴ However, in a later letter to Herder from Naples, Goethe seems to contradict or rather correct himself and refers to the Urpflanze as a concept or model.²⁵ As Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker suggests, in this seeming confusion between concept and experience is hidden the primal intuition of Goethe’s science (120). The distinction between them, which to Schiller appeared muddled in Goethe’s theory, seemed up till that point never to have occurred to Goethe. However, rather than exposing an inherent contradiction or methodological flaw to his approach, Schiller’s admonishment inspired Goethe to consider more carefully the basis of his own methods and why they differed so fundamentally. Schiller shattered Goethe’s naivety, yet as Weizsäcker notes, “in its very essence, Goethe’s science denied that ‘experience’ and ‘idea’ constitute a true alternative” (120). Goethe was able to see the primal plant because he could see “thinkingly” (120). Schiller’s response that the primal plant is an idea would have better suited Goethe from a platonic instead of a Kantian perspective. For Goethe the idea is the real pattern after which all plant life is modelled, not an idea as the highest regulative of our capacity for knowledge. However, Goethe also departs from Plato: the idea is what, in the strictest sense, one can see (Weizsäcker 121–122). Reflecting upon his dispute with Schiller, Goethe acknowledges: “wenn er das für eine Idee hielt, was ich als Erfahrung aussprach, so mußte doch zwischen beiden irgend etwas Vermittelndes, Bezügliches obwalten!” (JA 6:403). Schiller’s challenge drew Goethe’s attention to his own Verfahrungsart and forced him to confront the distinction therein between “Erfahrung” and “Idee,” allowing him to plot a pragmatic path between them.

Attempting to elucidate is methods, Goethe would later explain that his “Denkvermögen [ist] gegenständlich tätig.”²⁶ This means, he elaborates:

daß mein Denken sich von den Gegenständen nicht sondere, daß die Elemente der Gegenstände, die Anschauungen in dasselbe eingehen und von ihm auf das innigste durchdrungen werden, daß mein Anschauen selbst ein Denken, mein Denken ein Anschauen sei [ … ]. (JA 6:411)

The type of empiricism that Goethe advocates is one in which “thinking” and “looking” are inextricable. Goethe terms this zarte Empirie, which describes a type of empiricism “die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht, und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird” (JA 6:500). Goethe was critical of the function of theory in experimental science when it preceded and prestructured the event. Instead, he argued theory must be engendered by the event itself; it must emerge organically out of the act of observation.

Schiller himself was stimulated by the originality of Goethe’s thought to reflect on the significance of what he refers to as Goethe’s “rational empiricism.” In a letter to Goethe on January 19, 1798, Schiller suggests that his type of empiricism alone “zu dem reinen Phänomen [ … ] hindurchdringen [kann].”²⁷ Schiller accuses rationalism of a “Despotism der Denkkräfte,” which errs particularly, he warns, because “[der Rationalism] dürftigerweise bloß die Länge und nicht die Breite der Natur in Anschlag bringt.” That is, rationalism takes only causality in nature into account and not a phenomenon’s relationship to its environment; it can only fathom nature mechanically and not what we would now call ecologically. An empirical phenomenon, on the other hand, “[ist] immer nur Einen Fall, ein einziges Element der Erfahrung,” the danger of this being that a chance occurrence be taken mistakenly as necessity: “eine bestimmte Wirklichkeit eingeschränkt, ohne das Mögliche zu ahnen [ … ].” For the rational empiricist, however, “die vollkommene Wirksamkeit der freien Denkkräfte” is combined with “der reinsten und ausgebreitetsten Wirksamkeit der sinnlichen Wahrnehmungsvermögen.” This alone Schiller concludes “wird dem Object sein ganzes Recht erweisen.” Goethe’s approach, Schiller recognizes, synthesizes cognition and sensory perception and demands cognitive and experiential freedom. The observer must free himself from prejudice, the strictures of theory, and be open and receptive to the phenomenon. In this way, the object of inquiry can be liberated from the observer’s mental categories that seek to box it in. An object then must have an “intrinsic meaning” that rational empiricism alone can recognize, a realization that places a moral obligation on the observer to know the object in the right way. Natural phenomena must in consequence also have “intrinsic value,” independent of the observer’s interpretative or utilitarian agenda. An appreciation of what that meaning and value is, constitutes the type of knowledge of the natural world that the Goethean scientist pursues. This challenged an experimental science that, in Goethe’s view, manipulated nature to conform to a given hypothesis or theoretical perspective, one of his principle objections to Newtonian physics. Goethe dismantles this coercive practice by attempting to understand nature in its own right; nature dictates theory, not the other way round.

For Kant, the combination of “concepts” and “intuitions” was a necessary condition of experience. The category of “ideas” had a second-order status of structuring and ordering our first-order perceptions of individual objects. “Ideas” were “subjectively necessary”; however they were not a required condition for the possibility of experience (Pinkard 42). While Goethe could not accept that experience and idea offered a true alternative, he still acknowledged the incongruencies between them. For him it was their temporal distinction that was of primary significance:

die Idee ist unabhängig von Raum und Zeit, die Naturforschung ist in Raum und Zeit beschränkt, daher ist in der Idee Simultanes und Sukzessives innigst verbunden, auf dem Standpunkt der Erfahrung hingegen immer getrennt, und eine Naturwirkung die wir der Idee gemäß als simultan and sukzessiv zugleich denken sollen, scheint uns in eine Art Wahnsinn zu versetzen. (JA 6:410)

The resolution, then, to the dualism between idea and experience that Goethe provides, is in devising a method that enables us to see the morphological continuity, for example between the parts of a plant, that is not temporally given to experience.²⁸ Metamorphosis is not merely the outward change of a plant, but as Simms points out “describes the essential form a plant assumes over time” (170). Thus, to picture Goethe’s Urpflanze we must imagine “the series of gestures a plant unfolds throughout its life in one image” (Simms 170). To visualize the Urphänomen requires what Goethe terms “eine exakte sinnliche Phantasie.”²⁹ Imagination does not merely produce fictions or illusions, as opposed to reality, but serves as an instrument for scientific inquiry, through which the “fullness of time” can be grasped and represented (Simm 170). Goethe, therefore, can be said to have seen the Urpflanze in the botanic gardens of Palermo because “through imaginative variation [ … ] he grasped its essential, protean form in time.”³⁰ Imagination allows us to grasp a holistic continuity between the parts of the plant by seeing them specifically as transformations of a “leaf form” (Blatt), which Goethe understood as “a motivic template,”³¹ generating increasingly complex variations.³²

The Urphänomen is thus a manifestation that embraces idea and experience to reveal a higher order of knowledge of the natural world. The structure of the phenomenon, as Amrine points out, “precipitates out of the interaction between observer and observed.”³³ In this dialogical relationship, the knowing subject is not elevated above the natural world of objects; instead they are both active participants in a reciprocal process of metamorphosis. As will be examined below, the type of empiricism that Goethe advocated was mutually transformative, requiring the observer to be mentally as dynamic as the natural transformations under investigation. The epistemological and ontological consequences of this insight would have significant implications for Goethe’s view on the practices of experimental science that would come to a head in his polemics against Newton’s color theory.

III

Goethe may have been particularly sensitive to Schiller’s objection to his theories on plant morphology since his early work in chromatics had met with equal resistance from the scientific community. His Beiträge zur Optik, published in 1791, was largely dismissed. Similar to his encounter with Schiller, this spurred him, in an effort to understand why his theory was rejected, to question the type of knowledge on which science based itself.³⁴ This pursuit culminated in Zur Farbenlehre (1810), which Goethe considered his most important work and believed it had been misunderstood fundamentally by his contemporaries.³⁵

The tensions between idea and experience that beset his theories, Goethe came to realize, similarly destabilized the truths that “normal science” promoted.³⁶ Goethe’s studies of Kant provided him with the major insight that the mind takes an active role in its cognitive relation to an object; that in science, as in art, truth is intentionally constructed by the knowing subject.³⁷ Consequently, in Farbenlehre Goethe was able to recognize that any observation is theory laden. This refers not to the subsequent interpretation of an event as mainstream science would have it, but rather that the idea structures the event itself: “Jedes Ansehen geht über in ein Betrachten, jedes Betrachten in ein Sinnen, jedes Sinnen in ein Verknüpfen, und so kann man sagen, dass wir schon bei jedem aufmerksamen Blick in die Welt theoretisieren” (HA 13:317). This realization preempts the concerns of philosophers of science in the twentieth century, notably those of Thomas Kuhn, who shows that paradigms delimit scientific knowledge (11). The scientist, Kuhn argues, is trained within a paradigm and taught to see phenomena in a certain way, with the consequence that only phenomena anticipated by the paradigm are usually noticed. Kuhn’s insights were prefigured by Goethe, who noted that the way of seeing or what he termed Vorstellungsart makes the world visible in a certain light and thus different ways of seeing makes the world visible differently. Science was thus not empirically founded in the naïve way that Goethe had assumed; it was historically determined. This led Goethe to the remarkable observations that “die Geschichte der Wissenschaft die Wissenschaft selbst sei”³⁸ and “alles Faktische [ist] schon Theorie” (JA 6:501).

The claim that Goethe may be held as Husserl’s legitimate ancestor is strengthened by his anticipation of the latter’s criticism of science in the major work of his late period, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936). For Husserl, the paradox of Western science lay in its claim to be universal, when in fact it had emerged out of a specific cultural and historical setting (Hyder xvi). Western science was moreover in a crisis of its own making, due to antagonisms between the respective principles of experience and objectivity. While the former demanded that an empirical science limit itself to what is given by experience, the latter insisted that the external world is independent of mind or any other content derived from the constitution of the observing subject (Brady, “Idea in Nature” 85). These demands on the scientific project can be traced back to René Descartes, who argued that real science could only be conducted when there is no human influence.³⁹ The Cartesian split between mind and an external reality attempted to seclude human consciousness in its own subjective bubble, while positing the external world as an object independent of us that can be imagined as a mechanism. It failed to recognize, however, that human cognition rests upon the foundations of sensory experience. Husserl opposed this naïve objectivism in European science and in his phenomenology attempted to study in a systematic manner our different ways of experiencing reality, through the acts of transcendental subjectivity.⁴⁰ The central problem lying at the heart of his Crisis is the relation between the world as experienced and the world as it exists scientifically (Hyder xv). In response, Husserl coined the term Lebenswelt to signify our natural world, the world we live in and which encompasses and absorbs our everyday activities. The aim of phenomenology, according to Husserl, is to reflect upon that world and make us see how it is constituted by us i.e. how we structure reality (Føllesdal 39). Significantly, science belongs to and is consequently justified by “the concreteness of the life-word” that it describes.⁴¹ Husserl’s intention is to anchor scientific inquiry in a tangible world that is meaningful to our day-to-day lives.

Goethe’s critique of scientific practice similarly revolves around the tension between a mechanistic conception of the world and how it appears. For him it is the world that is lived in and experienced that is important. He emphasizes, therefore, that the observer must stay with the phenomenon and not seek to go beyond it by imagining a mechanism or cause, as he elaborates in his reported conversations with Eckermann:

Das Höchste, wozu der Mensch gelangen kann [ … ] ist das Erstaunen, und wenn ihn das Urphänomen in Erstaunen setzt, so sei er zufrieden; ein Höheres kann es ihm nicht gewähren, und ein Weiteres soll er nicht dahinter suchen; hier ist die Grenze. Aber den Menschen ist der Anblick eines Urphänomens gewöhnlich noch nicht genug, sie denken, es müsse noch weiter gehen, und sie sind den Kindern ähnlich, die, wenn sie in einen Spiegel geguckt, ihn sogleich umwenden, um zu sehen, was auf der anderen Seite ist.⁴² (Emphasis added)

Goethe objected to the way science manipulates nature to conform to a specific hypothesis and theoretical perspective, diverging from phenomena in favor of abstract mathematical laws. This rebuke of scientific methods is expounded in his attack on Newton in Farbenlehre. Newton’s theorization of the color spectrum, according to Goethe, was an abstraction, a “mathematical idealization” that leads to a falsification of the phenomenon (Sepper, “Goethe, Color,” 191). Goethe saw Newton’s writings on chromatics as directed toward proving a favored hypothesis and not understanding the phenomenon of color itself.

For Goethe, this exemplified a fundamental error generally in scientific practice. He objected to a science that considered only those qualities trustworthy that could be verified mathematically (i.e. primary qualities that could be numbered, weighed and measured). Secondary qualities that were not quantifiable, consequently, were eliminated or disregarded as unimportant to our understanding of reality. This resulted in science diverging from what is given by experience and becoming increasingly speculative. As Henri Bortoft points out, by replacing the phenomenon with a model that only incorporates primary qualities, positivism (as it would later be termed by Auguste Comte) strives to reveal an underlying mathematical reality that is supposed to be more real than the phenomenon perceived through the senses (18). This scientific ideal is epitomized by Newton’s theory of color in which he explains secondary qualities by effectively correlating them with measurements of primary qualities, with the result that he essentially eliminated color as a phenomenon.

The primary objective of Goethe’s treatise on color was not to disprove Newton’s theory of refraction. Goethe’s ambitions were higher: he targeted the very culture of science itself and scientific understanding (Sepper, “Goethe, Color,” 192). Goethe objected to the truths that science claimed to uncover and in Farbenlehre he was addressing the question of how experimental science should proceed. Goethe’s investigations, in contrast to Newtonian science, attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the way things are, to the appearance of things as such, not overdetermined by a given theoretical perspective or Vorstellungsart.⁴³ In Newton, to use Schiller’s terminology, theory acted “despotically” and it was Goethe’s intention to liberate the object of inquiry. Goethe’s criticism of mainstream scientific practice points towards what we would now call an anthropocentrism that he believed frustrated scientific efforts because it judged nature by external principles that would otherwise not exist in the natural world.⁴⁴ The scientific practice of creating an artificial experiment to prove a given hypothesis is moreover self-fulfilling because it arranges phenomena in ways that predict the outcomes it is seeking.

Goethe clearly understood nevertheless that everyday sensory experiences cannot stand as purely phenomenal and that we can never escape, as Sepper notes, “the interpenetration of experience and conception, of phenomenon and theory, of fact and perspective.”⁴⁵ For Goethe each act of seeing is an act of understanding and he credits Kant with drawing his attention to the presence of the self in any act of cognition. However, unlike Kant, Goethe believed that by remaining conscious of one’s own thinking it was possible to remain faithful to the appearance itself. For this reason, an empirical study should consist not only of patient observation, but also self observation.⁴⁶ In his essay Der Versuch als Vermittler von Object und Subject, Goethe notes that the observer usually only sees objects in relation to himself and that this leads to “tausend Irrtümern” (JA 6:380). Goethe warns that preconceptions or Vorstellungsarten often predetermine the results and conclusions reached in experiments, since “der Mensch erfreut sich nur einer Sache, in so fern er sich dieselbe vorstellt, sie muß in seine Sinnesart passen” (JA 6:385). Anything that does not fit these preconceptions are consequently rearranged, anomalies discarded, so as not to interfere with an original idea or hypothesis. In this way, the experiment mirrors “nicht mehr einer freiwirkenden Republik, sondern einem despotischen Hofe [ … ].”⁴⁷ Mistakes arise, moreover, when the observer sticks to “eine gefaßte Idee” that pre-structures the event and creates an artificial environment by forcefully bringing phenomena into contact with each other in order to prove a given hypothesis.⁴⁸ This is an example of the anthropocentrism that pervades scientific practice because it imposes an intellectual structure that does not actually exist in the object being studied.⁴⁹ By arranging phenomena to suit the observer, experiments fail to consider how they interact with their natural environment, that is ecologically. In order to resist the strictures of any given Vorstellungsart and to liberate the object as Goethe intends, the observer must first become self-conscious. That is, he must be mindful of the way in which subjective attitudes shape and interfere with his observations: one must become “sein eigener Strengster Beobachter ” and be “immer gegen sich selbst mißtrauisch” (JA 6:381).

In Farbenlehre, Goethe suggests therefore that the scientist should proceed “mit Selbstkenntnis” and “Ironie” (HA 13:317). In other words, the observer must remain inwardly mobile and resist any habits of perception (Amrine, “Metamorphosis,” 195). Goethe’s method of zarte Empirie prevents the scientist’s results from being prejudiced by a given theoretical perspective and avoids abstraction and instead keeps the phenomenon “recht lebendig und nützlich” (HA 13:317). Keeping the phenomenon alive signifies for Goethe an appreciation of the “die Mannigfaltigkeit ihrer Erscheinungen” (HA 13:316), as opposed to isolating individual phenomenon as Newtonian science dictated. Goethe was not against experimentation per se; rather he opposed studying phenomena in isolation and drawing too many inferences from a single experiment, which he accused Newton of doing. Instead, Goethe advocated and carried out a multiplicity of related experiments to reveal different aspects of nature. This facilitates a hermeneutics of nature that would lead to a richer understanding of the phenomena under consideration. Normal science prefers “durch irgendeine Erklärungsart die Phänomene beiseite zu bringen, anstatt sich die Mühe zu geben, das Einzelne kennen zu lernen und ein Ganzes zu erbauen” (HA 13:322–323). Instead, Goethe notes elsewhere, in observing objects of nature the most important task (“die höchste Pflicht”) is “jede Bedingung unter welcher ein Phänomen erscheint genau aufzusuchen und nach möglichster Vollständigkeit der Phänomene zu trachten [ … ].”⁵⁰ A phenomenon, when observed in this way, will reveal “eine Art Organisation” and manifest “ihr inneres Gesamtleben” (JA 6:405).

The Goethean scientist must question his theoretical horizons and always be open to alternative perspectives should the phenomena under consideration require it. This guards against anthropocentricism because it resists the intellectual structures through which we add to nature and manipulate it for our own ends. Goethe’s rejection of the scientific practice of isolating phenomena to prove a given hypothesis, emphasizes the wholeness of nature, which science must strive to comprehend. This challenges explicitly the principle of division that was fundamental to the mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment and prefigures essential concerns of deep ecology. The assumption, inherited from the Enlightenment, that things in their nature are fundamentally divided, quickly leads to a world of oppositions and hierarchies of moral worth, evident in such dichotomies as mind/matter, subject/object, human/nature, reason/emotion (Mathews 226). These pairs are dualistic in that they are taken to be logically disjunctive. The term on the left-hand side is systematically ranked above the term on the right, which stands only in an instrumental relation to the former. Dualistic thinking allowed humanity to be separated from the rest of nature, which could be reduced to sheer materiality, devoid of its own intelligence, and legitimately subordinated as an object for both exploitation and investigation. Deep ecologists sought to heal this conceptual divide by proposing a new paradigm that reenvisioned nature and nonhuman life as having “intrinsic value,” that is independent of its utility value for us (Mathews 222). Against a world of divisions, deep ecologists promote an “ethic of interrelatedness” that encompasses human and nonhuman life. Relationality is conceived as an antidote to dualistic organization, making implausible a system of moral hierarchies promoted by the Enlightenment.

The concepts of intrinsic value and relationality are foreshadowed in Goethe’s thought and allow us to appreciate retrospectively his move from a philosophy of nature to environmental ethics. He opposed positioning the human subject as a separate moral entity that stood apart from nature; both he argued were governed by the same fundamental laws and were inextricably entwined: “Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird” (JA 6:412). The interdependence between humans and the environment is emphasized in Goethe’s Farbenlehre. Challenging the assumptions of a Cartesian worldview, he demonstrates that color both exists in nature and is part of our own inner experience. Goethe, moreover, draws our attention to the codependency between color and sight, which constitutes he suggests one of the many interrelationships in nature: “beide [sind] sogleich als eins und dasselbe zu denken” (HA 13:324). Color can only exist if there is an eye that perceives it: “Die Farbe sei ein elementares Naturphänomen für den Sinn des Auges” (HA 13:324). In turn, the existence of the eye is dependent on light: “Das Auge hat sein Dasein dem Licht zu danken [ … ]. Aus gleichgültigen tierischen Hilfsorganen ruft sich das Licht ein Organ hervor, das seinesgleichen werde” (HA 13:323). Consequently, there is a bidirectionality between organisms and the environment; both are transformed through contact with the other.⁵¹ Significantly, humans undergo the same transformations as other organisms, since “Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf” (JA 6:412). Nature, as Goethe understands it, is not passive or inert. It is not an object but rather a subject of study that stands in a dialogical relationship with the observer. Goethe challenges not only the principle of division but also the hierarchy inherent within a dualistic worldview that privileges the human subject over the natural world. By understanding humans instead as being in the world and part of nature, Goethe encourages us to identify with other, nonhuman, life forms, providing the basis for an ethical relationship to the environment. For Arne Naess, the firmest basis for environmental protection lies in what he calls “ecological selfhood.” This ideal of self realization is based on “active identification with wider and wider circles of being” (Mathews 211); that is, we identify not only with our family or community and culture, or with humanity, but with our environment as well. In reconceptualizing the relation between humans and the environment, in ways that emphasize the many interrelationships between them, Goethe postulates a notion of selfhood and relationality that bears many parallels with the ecological self that Naess proposes. Goethe asks us to identify with the natural world instead of seeking mastery over it. The environment, Goethe teaches, has indeed “intrinsic value” and must not be reduced to merely a resource or laws that can be exploited for material and technological gain as Newtonian science dictated.

Goethe does not hold science alone responsible for promoting anthropocentric attitudes, but implicates the humanist tradition as well. There, he disapproves of the focus on the human self as the center of inquiry, the locus of meaning, because it leads to forgetfulness of the earth. Goethe asks us to be self-conscious, that is to be aware of the ways our subjective attitudes shape our experiences. However, self-consciousness should not come at the cost of egocentrism:

Hiebei benkenn’ ich, daß mir von jeher die große und so bedeutend klingende Aufgabe: erkenne dich selbst, immer verdächtig vorkam, als eine List geheim verbündeter Priester, die den Menschen durch unerreichbare Forderungen verwirren und von Tätigkeit gegen die Außenwelt zu einer innern falschen Beschaulichkeit verleiten wollten. (JA 6:411–412)

The Delphic maxim “know thyself” has accompanied the Western tradition from ancient Greece to modern times. However, Goethe questions the motivations behind it, suggesting it is a ploy, surreptitiously aimed at misleading us from our duties to the external world. The Außenwelt to which Goethe refers, given his sensitivity to the problems of anthropocentrism, denotes arguably more than just the human word. Remembering the earth is accompanied by an ethical responsibility to care for it. This responsibility should act as a guiding principle for scientists and humanists alike; a duty, however, to which they have been blinded by the misguided claims of human exceptionalism.

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This article has examined Goethe’s response to the competing demands of mechanical philosophy and Kant’s transcendentalism on modern science that had profound implications for our understanding of the human relationship to the natural world. I have argued that Goethe navigated past these opposing worldviews by negotiating a third way beyond the empiricist and idealist traditions. Goethe established a counter paradigm, in which the human observer is not alienated from nature but a participant within it, having significant implications for environmental philosophy and the deep ecology movement. Goethe’s refusal to distinguish human beings from the rest of nature and his emphasis rather on the interdependence between them, leads to the possibility of an ethical relationship to the environment.

I have demonstrated that Goethe, in reconceptualizing the relationship between the human and more-than-human world, anticipated the concepts of ontological egalitarianism and ecological self realization that Arne Naess proposed must be based on identification with wider and wider circles of being. Goethe’s nature philosophy, however, not only foreshadows Naess, but contributes to deep ecology in significant ways. Naess’ philosophy established a series of principles on which our attitudes to the environment should be based. It is limited however by not providing a method to achieve these aims. Goethe’s contribution is to provide just such an alternative approach to science that puts the principles of deep ecology into practice. Goethe’s methods are founded on a belief in ontological egalitarianism by overturning the hierarchical structure governing the relationship between the knowing subject and the natural world of objects. Just as the primal plant precipitates out of its interaction with the observer, so too must the scientist be open to being transformed by the phenomenon and change her way of thinking if the object demands it. This dialogical relationship facilitates an appreciation of the intrinsic value of natural phenomena, leading to a more intimate understanding of the environment and our place within it. The “ecological self” had already found a model in Goethe’s thought.