*
GOETHE: THE SENSUOUS IMAGINATION
Theodore
Roszak
In
Goethe, the best of Blake and Wordsworth meet: Blake's
transcendent symbolism drawn from the esoteric tradition(Gnosticism, Christian cabbalism, the
Hermetica),
Wordsworth's sacramental vision of nature. Only
Blake,
among the Romantics, matches Goethe's urgent
concern
for the modern crisis of consciousness. Both
marked
out Newton as their prime antagonist. But Goethe
brought
a greater philosophical subtlety to the encounter
and
a greater care to salvage the Science of nature from
militant
reductionism.
Three
related aspects of Goethe's natural philosophy: (1)
contemplative
non-intervention; (2) the primacy of the
qualitative;
(3) organic dialectics. The first two have to do
with method; the last with worldview.
1.
Contemplative Non-intervention.
from
Faust:
Mystery-filled
in the light of day,
Nature;
won't have her veils stripped away.
Hide
or show: it's hers to choose.
She'll
not be forced with rack or screws.
Goethe
in his nature studies used microscope and prism
but
always reluctantly. He was uneasy with the instruments,
fearing they would distort the phenomena, do
violence
to the immediate reality of nature . . . or rather
to
the senses that have been formed in and by and for
nature
to gaze upon her in her "natural" scale and appearance.
The
instruments betokened for Goethe man's increasingly
alienated stance over against nature
and the aggressiveness
that follows therefrom. "It is," he remarked, "a
calamity that the use of the experiment has severed nature
from man, so that he is content to understand nature
merely
through what artificial instruments reveal, and by
so
doing even restricts her achievements." For what can
such manipulative procedures ever "prove"
except the
possibilities
of manipulation? which, as Bacon long ago
promised,
are tantalizingly great.
(Goethe
would not even wear spectacles willingly, believing
that eyesight is integral to the personality, a part of
one's
peculiar destiny, and not to be artificially standardized.)
"The
human being himself, "Goethe insisted, "to the
extent
that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most
exact
physical apparatus that can exist." An idea that
could easily reach a fussy, foolish extreme for nature
composes
some of her loveliest poems for microscope and
telescope.
But Goethe's suspicion of the instruments, of
experimental
constraints generally, is far from cranky; it
leads
to significant philosophical questions.
Does
modern experimentation "discover" or "manufacture"
the effects it studies? Eddington raises the issue (in
his Philosophy of Physical Science), asking if advanced
experimental
equipment does not tell us how nature can
be
made to behave, rather than how she cares to act.
A
tricky point. Perhaps the equipment is already a carrier
of
assumptions, for its job is exactly to isolate and focus
meaning,
to screen out. On what basis? True, the equipment
helps collect facts. But as Goethe knew: "everything
tactual
is already theory." Thus we find nothing but an
objectified
nature because that is all we look for: a universe whose only "meaning" is that of predictive regularity.
The
rest is "contamination", "experimental error" . . .
mere
"side effects." "In natural science the object of investigation
is not nature as such, but nature exposed to
man's
mode of enquiry." (Werner Heisenberg)
Goethe,
rejecting domineering analysis, preferred a radically
different approach: "passive attentiveness" . . . with
a
sharp eye for the unique moment, the astonishing insight
which finally crowns perhaps years of watchful waiting
and which no amount of research could ever piece together.
Nature (he knew) invites and rewards curiosity,
but
not aggressive probing. The trick is to get into the
swing,
the flow of the phenomena . . . gradually, patiently,
receptively
. . . even as we get to know-by-loving and
love-by-knowing
another person. Such knowledge does indeed
seem to come "of itself," in startling quantum jumps:
Gestalten.
"One instance," said Goethe, "is often worth a
thousand,
bearing all within itself."
What
happens in that unique moment? The discovery of what
Goethe called the ''Ur-phanom๋n."
(How we could
use
an English equivalent of that dark, throaty German
Ur-
. . . meaning ancient, primordial, basic, elemental,
archetypal.
Urphanom๋n call it the "deep down phenomenon.")
The "open secret" which nature co-operates with
her
respectful students to bring to light. . . like Wordsworth's
"great consummation" that gracefully fits mind to
universe.
All these nature lovers are born Taoists.
For
Goethe the deep down phenomenon always revealed
an
instance of organic dialectics . . . form in metamorphosis
(more of this below). Contra-Kant, Goethe felt the
human
mind exists in nature to complete nature's forms,
to
discover her "ideal in the real" . . . as if the mind were
an
organ of sensuous perception . . . an inner eye that
"sees"
underlying ideas.
Does
this not rank Goethe, then, among the founders of
both
Gestalt psychology and phenomenology? He did not
much
philosophize on his method; but (unlike most
phenomenologists,
who drown us in endless, abstruse, theoretical
preliminaries) he did put the technique to work
in
studies of anatomy, botany, and the color spectrum.
Important
here: the fruitful notion that knower must blend
unobtrusively
with known . . . rather than manhandle his
subject.
Obviously, this means getting in close, working
with
the grain, trusting, merging . . . like the fish in the
water.
By
contemplation of an ever-creative nature, we might
make
ourselves worthy of participating intellectually in
her productions. Had not I myself ceaselessly pressed
forward
to the archetype, though at first unconsciously,
from
an inner urge; had I not even succeeded in evolving
a
method in harmony with Nature?
(Compare
with Bacon's sense that nature, deceitful and
hostile,
must be ambushed and coerced into giving up its
secrets.)
The
wisdom of (Goethe's approach has been abundantly
demonstrated
in the new humanistic social sciences, where
participative involvement flow replaces objective neutrality.
Also
in ethology, where at last we study the animals in
their
environmental field on their own terms . . . only to
discover
they are far smarter, more dignified, more communicative than we ever guessed.
Yet this is only the "method"
our "primitive" ancestors, used as they meditated on
the ways of the beasts.
A
deep question: how far can such contemplative nonintervention carry us in the understanding of nature? To
what levels of reality? How much can we de-objectify
(recover
from the alienative dichotomy)? Theodor Schwenk's
studies of water and fluid forms take us beyond the
plants
and animals: an attractive new prospect. (See his
Sensitive Chaos.)
Abraham
Maslow has recommended the I-Thou relationship
generally as a new "paradigm for science." He calls
it
"fusion knowledge," a "caring objectivity":
.
. .
if you love something or someone enough at the
level
of Being, then you can enjoy its actualization of itself,
which means that you will not want to interfere
with
it, since you will love it as it is in itself. . . if
you
love something the way it is . . . you may then
see it (or him) [or her] as it is
in its own nature, untouched, unspoiled, i.e., objectively. The greater your
Being-Love
of the person, the less your need to be blind.
(Maslow, The Psychology of Science)
Goethe,
all the way.
But
the approach implies limits demands respect for those limits:
a discipline of the sacred. . . patience, forbearance,
perhaps
renunciation.
The
ability to allow nature its mysteries . . . because mystery
is truth's dancing partner . . . because a respect for
mystery
may go deeper than our knowledge ever can . . . and
because our knowledge, where it pretends to replace
mystery,
may only be an arrogant caricature of truth. So
Goethe's
"respect for the unfathomable." Beyond,
the
Urphanom๋n,
he said, lies "the realm of the Mothers." Probe
further, and you only bring back manipulative
tricks:
levers, buttons, and switches.
Does
the brainwasher who can expertly maneuver your
behavior
(via electrodes, chemicals, behavior therapy)
really
"know" what you're all about? Or does he "know"
you
less and less, precisely as he becomes more proficient?
Obviously
there is no formal way to draw the implied limit.
We
must be guided by the spirit, not the letter. But the
rough
rule of thumb, the feel of Goethe's studies through-out:
nature is neither machine nor dead carcass; treat her
always
as you would a beloved friend. For so she is . . . if we
only knew.
2.
The Primacy of the Qualitative.
Trust
to what the senses show.
There's
nothing false in what they know
If
Understanding stays awake.
Joy
and freshness in your vision couple.
Roam
free afield, stay sure and supple.
See what riches
are yours to take.
(Goethe,
Vermachtnis)
Goethe
kept his natural philosophy innocent of mathematics, of all reductive
abstractions. (He once called
mathematics,
"a scientific coffin.") His sensory data, were
never
measurements taken, but qualities
savored. He
worked from the qualities always from the qualities:
color,
texture, above all form . . . the sweet nourishment
of
the senses: Artists soul food. His eye for form and color
was
almost voluptuous; it caressed what it studied and felt
its
way in deep.
Goethe
called it his "exact sensory imagination" (exakte
sinnliche Phantasia) an intuitive power within the senses
which can alone midwife the Urphanom๋n.
The
idea is much like Wordsworth's "language of the
sense,"
which (paradoxically) transcends the "bodily eye"
only
by working through it, toward a deeper sensory
participation.
And like Wordsworth's "great argument,"
the idea
is a direct rejection of Kant. Deliberately so on
Goethe's
part. For Goethe, like Wordsworth, enjoyed "the
power
of a peculiar eye."
Hence,
Goethe's impassioned attack, on Newton's theory
of
light and color. Charles Gillispie has called Goethe's
own
color theory "the painful spectacle of a great man
making
a fool of himself." Very nearly. But why did
Goethe untrained in optical research and mathematics
decide to run the risk?
Because
he astutely saw in Newton's Opticks, in the exclusiveness
of that ingenious study, an early example of what
would
become the dismal scientific rule: empiricide the
subordination
of qualitative experience to quantitative generalization
- to
the extent that "empiricism" finishes as
no
more than a checking of measurements . . . often no
more
than a reading of meters.
So
Newton had objectified the study of light and color. He
had
made the spectrum a matter of variable refraction
(eventually
to be measured out as wavelengths), had
atomized
light into theoretical corpuscles. A brilliant
achievement.
But what had become of the feel of vision:
the
evocative aesthetic action of light and color in the eye
. . . the living experience? Where
was the sense of beauty in
Newton's research? Where were the rich emotional and
symbolic associations
the very meaning of color?
Shelved. Crowded out. Become suddenly less real . . .
merely
subjective . . . uninteresting from the scientific
point
of view. Dissipated among the colorless, unobservable
particles of light.
Goethe
bridled at the loss. . . and rebelled. He would,
he
said, "rescue the attractive study of colors from the
atomistic
restriction and isolation in which it has been
banished,
in order to restore it to the general dynamic flow
of
life and action which the present age loves to recognize
in
nature."
For
who were these "mathematical opticians" to pretend
they
alone know the truth about color?
.
. . they no longer continue to ask if there are in this
world
painters, dyers, someone who observes the atmosphere
and the colorful world with the freedom of a true physicist, or a pretty girl, adorning herself to suit her
complexion.
The
attack on Newton is much too shrill, totally out of
keeping
with Goethe's usual Olympian calm. But he would
not
see the colors abandoned to objective consciousness.
He
loved them too much as an artist, poet, visionary
philosopher
. . . as a child loves them. For they are a
sensuous
joy and a superb symbolic vocabulary. But only if
they
survive fundamentally as qualities of experience.
Consider
how Newton studied light. By hiding away in a
dark room, trapping a single ray of sunshine in his prism
and
then (in cold blood) committing measurements upon it.
But what sort of way was this (Goethe asked) to
seek
an
understanding of light, something so simple and universal
. . . it fills the wide air and bathes the earth . . .
and
that is its natural habitat. (Again the question: does
the
experiment "discover" or "manufacture" its effects?)
Goethe's
mocking response: the poem Murky Law (where
"your teacher" = Newton).
Friends,
leave behind that darkened room
Where light of day is
much abused,
And,
bent low by crooked thought and gloom,
Our
sight is anguished and confused.
The
superstitious gullible
Have
been with us quite long enough;
Your teacher has
but filled you full
With
spectral, mad, delusive stuff.
An
eye that seeks the broad daylight
Becomes
itself a heavenly blue;
In
the Sirocco's late twilight
Pure
fire-red the sun's last hue.
There nature gives away her glory
Gladly to whole hearts and eyes.
And
there we'll ground our color theory
upon
a truth that never dies
In
no respect does Goethe's alchemical background shine
through
more brightly than in his defense of the qualities.
For alchemy, being a science of meanings, is the science of
qualities:
a visionary complex wherein art, science, religion
mingle
and no one level of consciousness is expanded at
the
expense of the others. (What a strange notion that
must
seem to the research specialist!)
Goethe
referred to his alchemy as "my mystical-cabbalistical chemistry." R.
D. Gray observes: "The
degree to which alchemy had
established control over
Goethe's
interests in early manhood can scarcely be over-emphasized. . . Almost the whole
of his scientific work
might
well be described as a more logical development of
traditional
alchemical ideas." (See his Goethe the Alchemist.)
"What is the hardest thing of all?" asked Goethe and answered:
"What seems the easiest to you: to use your eyes
to
see what lies in front of them."
Strange
remark. And yet. . . was there ever a culture that
granted
less reality to the sensory life than does the scientific
west? Have we not been persuaded ever since Galileo-Descartes-Locke
that sense qualities are "secondary" . . .
merely
subjective? Does not physics (which is, after all,
the
basic science) teach us that real reality is brittle atomic
bits, ghostly oscillations, vibrations, matter waves
. . .
"unobservables'' that
theoretical intellect cunningly deduces
from indirect observation? Even time and space are
not
what experience make of them, but weird mathematical
enigmas.
.
. .
neither the immediate sense perceptions, like red,
blue,
bitter, sweet, resonant . . . nor the consciousness
itself
of which they are part, appear as such in the objective
picture of Nature; they have here formal representatives
of a totally different kind, namely, electro-magnetic
vibrations, frequencies, chemical reactions . . .
and
the physiological function of the central nervous
system. {Erwin Schrodinger,
What Is
Life?}
I
once asked a theoretical physicist in what sense he in
this most basic of all sciences ever "sees" nature. In this
wise,
he said:
1.
Somewhere in the world there is a cloud chamber.
2.
A camera takes pictures of events in this chamber.
3.
Hired student assistants routinely "scan" the photographic
plates, hunting for certain hen-scratches
thereon.
4.
Their results are measured up and often run through a
computer to digest the results.
5.
The computer produces a print-out.
6.
A senior experimentalist looks over some selected plates and the print-out, decides what's what, and
tells
a junior member of the team.
7.
The junior member writes up a report.
8.
The report is published.
9.The
report is abstracted.
10.
My friend has an assistant who surveys the current
literature and abstracts the
abstracts.
11. My friend reads, the abstracts of abstracts, and
proceeds
to do basic research.
Empiricism.
. .
Goethe
catches the paradox of it all in his epigram: "Empiricist:
Who would deny you've chosen the surest road of
all?
But yet you grope like a blind man along that best
paved road."
Undeniably,
it is a prodigious feat on the scientist's part to
"think
away" the qualitative display of nature. And of
course
it was necessary to read the qualities out of primary
nature
if scientific man was to gain the state of objectivity
(alienation)
which power-knowledge demanded. But Goethe
and the Romantics were more concerned, for what was
lost than gained.
Move
through the chemist's periodic
table. What is the difference
there between the elements? Their atomic number:
a purely quantitative shift. But we do not experience
the
elements or their compounds as a matter of more-or-less. (e.g., gold as merely
something more of whatever
oxygen
is.) No more than we experience red as being
something
more or less of what blue is.
Our
senses (and here is one of the deep mysteries) grasp
the
differences as qualitatively spaced and segregated: differences
radically of kind, not of degree. And this too is
a reality: what Goethe called "the true illusion." There is
surely
a troubling gap here.
.
. . quantum mechanics implies all the properties of
copper sulphate; but it would be difficult indeed to deduce
the blue color of copper sulphate from quantum
mechanics.
And yet copper sulphate is blue, and insofar
as
science is a description of the world, our science is
imperfect
if it ignores the blueness of copper sulphate.
[Alvin
M. Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science]
The
trouble with qualities: they will not be added and subtracted. Quantities can be
counted (which is objective); qualities must be evaluated (which is subjective).
Of
course,
qualities can be reduced to quantifiable causes; that
is what Newton
did with color.
But then they are no
longer
qualities. We do not see wavelengths; we deduce
them.
The
difference between Goethe's and Newton's color
theories
rests mainly on the fact that Newton considered
light
and colors "indirect phenomena," whereas Goethe
considered
them addressed, i.e. "direct phenomena,"
[Adolf
Portmann, New Paths in Biology]
"Addressed".
. . like something laid out played out before
us . . . a presentation. Perhaps (so alchemy insisted)
a
message, subjective but universal: a script of qualities,
there to
be read. Newton and his heirs translated the script into
another language, killing the poetry. Goethe the alchemist
preferred to read the original . . . and was led inevitably
to other meanings.
3.
Organic Dialectics.
Joyously,
so long ago,
My
eager mind did strive
To
study and discover
Nature
in her works alive:
She, the everlasting
Oneness
In
the manyness divined.
Big
minuteness, tiny bigness,
All according to its kind,
Ever
changing, ever constant
Near and far, far and near,
Shaping
and reshaping . . .
Why
but to wonder am I here!
[Goethe,
Parabase]
"Goethe's
sense of nature was an awareness of one pervasive
pattern of process, of formation and transformation,
which
was equally evident to him by introspection and
by
observation. His entire life was devoted to the clarification
of this sense of . . . unity in process . . ." (L. L.
Whyte)
"Unity in process" the study which Goethe invented and
named morphology: a remarkable new vision of nature
and
Romanticism's most characteristic contribution to science.
For morphology requires the Romantic relish for
organic
aesthetics, for fluid, never-quite-complete, creative
shapings
. . . as if one were watching nature sculpture
itself
from within, flowing through invisible, projective patterns
. . . striving toward a higher end.
Morphology
holds a permanent place in biology, thanks
to
"Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants. And without the
Romantic
fascination with organic form and flux, no
Darwinian
breakthrough. Evolutionary theory builds on the
morphological
eye for unity in process. Goethe himself had
no
doubt whatever about evolution via adaptation to the
environment:
.
. . we shall eventually regard the whole animal kingdom
once more as an element in which one species is
supported
on and by means of another, if not actually originating
one from another.
But
Goethe paired environmental selection with the internal
factors of evolution: life striving against the odds to
realize
its archetypal form, its Urphanom๋n. Goethe's conception
of evolution, merging internal thrust with external
pressure,
destiny with selectivity, was more sophisticated
than
Darwin's . . . but (seemingly) less "objective" because
involving the notion of inner purposive tendency:
Bildungstrieb.
(Darwin
objectified evolution by simply reading Malthus
and the rigors of cutthroat capitalist competition into the
"mechanism" of selection a classic example of scientific
"neutrality" adapting itself naively to the social ethos of
the day.
But
for Goethe, morphology reached beyond botany. It
was
the key to a universal process, which included the inorganic as well. Morphological dynamism
was nature herself.
It was the moving signature of the cosmos.
The
meaning of that signature? Polarity and synthesis
the
energy behind all formative tendency: the divine
rhythm.
As in Blake: the strife and reconciliation of Los
and Enitharmon.
Goethe's major scientific speculations
in botany and color
theory
grow
from his vision of polarity moving toward an
"intensified"
union of opposite's: a "higher third." The
paradox-logic
of synthesized contraries which flows so
richly down through Hegel, the post-Kantians, Marx,
Freud.
Polarity
and synthesis: the master image of Goethe's natural
philosophy. Thus the plant (the ideal plant: the Urpflanze)
is seen as an infinite series of variations on one basic
form
(the leaf) driven forward by the polarity of expansion
and contraction . . . expansion and contraction up
through
seven cycles from cotyledons to flowering fruit.
And back to
Seed again.
Very
late in life, Goethe switched his botanical morphology
over
to another polarity, which opposed the vertical to the
spiral
tendencies in plant growth. But the basic ideals the
same:
When
we see that the vertical system is definitely male
and
the spiral definitely female we will be able to conceive of all vegetation as androgynous from the root up.
In
the course of the transformations of growth the two
systems are separated, in
obvious contrast to one another,
and
take opposing courses, to be reunited on a higher
level.
In
Goethe's color theory, the polarized tension is between
dark
and light:
"Darkness and light have eternally opposed
each
other, one alien to the other . . ."
We
see on the one side light, brightness; on the other
darkness,
obscurity: we bring the semi-transparent medium
between the two, and from these contrasts and this
medium
the colors develop themselves . . . directly tending
again to a point of union.
The
"point of union" here is the "intensification" of the
spectrum
to a pure red (Purpur) which is the "true reconciliation"
of all color contrasts: "the acme of the phenomenon."
Further:
Goethe was impressed by the polar character of
magnetism
and electricity a fascination that works its way
through
German Naturphilosophie into Faraday's (non-mathematical)
research on the electromagnetic field, the
first
break within science from strictly mechanistic models.
(See
L. Pearce Williams, The Origins of Field Theory.)
From
the Color Theory:
To
divide the united, to unite the divided, is the life of
nature;
this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal
contraction and expansion, the inspiration and expiration
of the world in which we live and move.
To
see all nature as a rhythm of opposites, a vital pulsation
("I
compare the earth and her atmosphere to a great living
being
perpetually inhaling and exhaling") moving toward
higher
organic unity . . . this again is Goethe the alchemist
speaking.
For
alchemy is grounded in such an organic dialectics.
Goethe's
Urpflanze is the Hermetic androgyne. Union of the
masculine
and feminine powers, the yin and yang. His
color theory is modeled on the three major stages of the
alchemist's Great Work;
the blackening of
the prima
materia
(the nigredo), the whitening (the (albedo), and
finally,
surmounting the black and white, the 'reddening'
(the rubedo), which is embodiment of spirit.
Both
the Urpflanze and the colors "climb up the spiritual
ladder"
to the point of maximum "intensification" (Goethe's Steigerung
the
alchemical term).
But
all this for Goethe as for Blake and Wordsworth
belongs to
the "eyes of the spirit. ("The observer does
not
see a pure phenomenon with his eyes, but more with
his
soul.") The natural object becomes, like the alchemist's
Great
Work, a mandala-like focus for meditation: studied
into
and through, until the senses are themselves "intensified"
by the object . . . so the
transcendent correspondences
emerge . . . and, at the highest stage, the
harmony
of the Whole: "the open secret."
Science
of nature has one goal:
To
find both manyness and Whole.
Nothing "inside" or "Out There,"
The
"outer" world is all "In Here."
This
mystery grasp without delay,
This
secret always on display.
The
true illusion celebrate,
Be
joyful in the serious game!
No
living thing lives separate:
One
and Many are the same.
[Goethe,
Epirrhema]
More than any artist before or since, Goethe
made the
heroic effort to integrate science with traditional wisdom.
He
sought a disciplined nature study which might yet be
artistically
and morally "useful": a science of the whole
person,
the base for a unified culture.
Goethe's
model was alchemy, but an alchemy purged of its
musty
bookishness and distracting metaphorical Confusion,
better
to see the sacramental vision: the splendor of the
chemical
marriage, always there in the background of
his
art and thought. And what is natural philosophy without
that?
Goethe
tried. But orthodox science is after all no natural
philosophy;
only a "productive research" in pursuit of
"hard
results." As Charles Gillispie observes (disdainfully):
in Goethe's nature "everything blends into everything
. . . not to be embraced by measurement but to be
penetrated
by sympathy."
The
sensuous imagination yields joy and
poetry; it discovers
meaning . . . but little power. And that little is only
what
comes of moving with the grain. Which requires
much
trust, much love. As it turns out, too much for the
likes
of most of us moderns.
So
Goethe's lament for the age:
Woe,
woe!
You
have shattered it,
This
lovely world,
With
mighty fists.
It
reels, it collapses!
A
demigod has smashed it
Utterly!
From Chapter 9 of Theodore Roszak's book,