Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal

of him in like measure within myself, that is my highest wish. This noble individual was not conscious of the fact that at that very moment the divine within him and the divine of the universe were most intimately united. So, for Goethe, the resonance with a natural rationality seems part of the genius of modern science. Einstein's 'cosmic religion', which reflects Spinoza, also echoes Goethe's remark (Ibid. , Item 575 from 1829): Man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible. Else he would give up investigating. But how far will Goethe share the devotion of these cosmic rationalists to the beautiful harmonies of mathematics, so distant from any pure and 'direct observation'? Kepler, Spinoza, Einstein need not, and would not, rest with discovery of a pattern within, behind, as a source of, the phenomenal world, and they would not let even the most profound of descriptive generalities satisfy scientific curiosity. For his part, Goethe sought fundamental archetypes, as in his intuition of a Urpjlanze, basic to all plants, infinitely plastic. When such would be found, Goethe would be content, for (as he said to Eckermann, Feb. 18, 1829): . . . to seek something behind (the Urphaenomenon) is futile. Here is the limit. But as a rule men are not satisfied to behold an Urphaenomenon. They think there must be something beyond. They are like children who, having looked into a mirror, turn it around to see what is on the other side.

Inhalt

I. Goethe in the History of Science.- Goethe's Relationship to the Theories of Development of His Time.- The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the Conditions of Existence in Goethe's Biological Thought.- Goethe's Entoptische Farben and the Problem of Polarity.- Goethe and Helmholtz: Science and Sensation.- Goethe and Psychoanalysis.- Goethe's Color Studies in a New Perspective: Die Farbenlehre in English.- II. Expanding the Limits of Traditional Scientific Methodology and Ontology.- Goethe and Modern Science.- Goethe and the Concept of Metamorphosis.- Is Goethe's Theory of Color Science?.- Goethe Against Newton: Towards Saving the Phenomenon.- Theory of Science in the Light of Goethe's Science of Nature.- Facts as Theory: Aspects of Goethe's Philosophy of Science.- The Theory of Color as the Symbolism of Insight.- III. Contemporary Relevance: A Viable Alternative?.- Form and Cause in Goethe's Morphology.- Goethean Method in the Work of Jochen Bockemühl.- Whiteness.- Goethe as a Forerunner of Alternative Science.- Self-Knowledge, Freedom and Irony: The Language of Nature in Goethe.- Postscript. Goethe's Science: An Alternative to Modern Science or within It - or No Alternative at All?.- Goethe and the Sciences: An Annotated Bibliography.- Index of Names.