Goethe and WhiteheadSteps to a Science of Organism

Matthew David Segall

Does not the heaven vault above?Is the earth not firmly based down here?And do not, friendly,Eternal stars rise?Do we not look into each other’s eyes,And all in you is surgingTo your head and heart,And weaves in timeless mystery,Unseeable, yet seen, around you?Then let it fill your heart entirely,And when your rapture in this feeling iscomplete,Call it then as you will,Call it bliss! heart! love! God!I do not have a nameFor this.Feeling is all;Names are but sound and smokeBefogging heaven’s blazes.

—Goethe1

[Philosophy has] to rescue the facts asthey are from the facts as they appear. . .[W]e view the sky at noon on a fine day.It is blue, flooded by the light of the sun.The direct fact of observation is the sunas the sole origin of light, and the bareheavens. Conceive the myth of Adam andEve in the Garden on the first day of hu-man life. They watch the sunset, the starsappear:–‘And, Lo!, creation widened toman’s view.’ The excess of light disclosesfacts and also conceals them.

—Whitehead2

1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kauf-mann (New York: Anchor Books (1990), 327.

2 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York:

The universalist of Weimar sought truthin the world of appearance, the mathe-matician of Cambridge in the realm ofnumber and ratio.

—Yourgrau3

1 Introduction

The immediately preceding epigraph is from an articleon Goethe’s natural philosophy wherein WolfgangYourgrau intended to distinguish the poet-scientist’sintuitive method from the mathematical approach ofhis archnemesis, Newton:

Goethe approached every natural phe-nomenon . . . with the intuition of an artist.His conception of the cosmos was restrictedto forms, colours, sounds, thoughts, feel-ings and passions. But this subjectivepoetic world, colourful and reverberant,is unfortunately for Goethe annihilatedby objective mathematical physics. 4

The aim of the present essay is to save Goethe’s poeticview of Nature from such dismissals by comparing hismethod and its findings to those of a more congenialCambridge mathematician: Alfred North Whitehead.I make the case in what follows that Whitehead’s laterphilosophical work in the other Cambridge (the loca-tion of Harvard University, where he taught from 1924to 1937) provides cosmological context and metaphys-ical justification for the Goethean approach, thus

The Free Press, 1967), 155. Whitehead quote his secondto last line from Joseph Blanco White’s poem “To Night.”

3 Wolgang Yourgrau, “Reflections on the Natural Philoso-phy of Goethe.” Philosophy 26, no. 96 (1951), 75

4 Yourgrau, “Reflections,” 73.

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strengthening its position in the debate over whois authorized to speak for–or, perhaps, as Nature.Whitehead’s protest against scientific materialism’s“bifurcation of Nature” into subjective experience andobjective cause, and his reconstruction of mechanis-tic science on more experientially adequate organicgrounds, provides the occasion for a reconsiderationof Goethe’s poetic vision of the cosmos. First, Ibriefly review the literature on the resonances be-tween Goethe and Whitehead. Then I attempt toclarify Goethe’s relation to the mathematical methodsof natural science, an important issue for this com-parison given the mathematical inspirations guidingWhitehead’s adventure in cosmology. Finally, I tracethe striking parallels in their respective attempts tothink Nature, with special attention paid to the wayWhitehead’s process-relational “organic realism” andtheory of perception further clarify the metaphysicalimplications of Goethe’s way of seeing.

2 A Critical Review of the Literature

While a number of scholars have noted possible res-onances between Goethe and Whitehead’s thought,these remarks are usually made in passing. To myknowledge the philosophical nexus between these twothinkers has yet to be elaborated in any depth. Thefollowing list is not exhaustive, but at least providesa preliminary overview.

The most sustained treatment may be in Mary Al-ice Wyman’s book The Lure for Feeling, whereinshe devotes a chapter to comparing the theologi-cal overlaps in Goethe, Emerson, and Whitehead5.Wyman reports that Whitehead had only minor ac-quaintance with Goethe, but this is contradicted byWhitehead’s own statement as recorded by LucienPrice that he read Eckermann’s Conversations withGoethe“forwards and back.”6 Nonetheless, it may

5 Mary Alice Wyman, The Lure for Feeling in the CreativeProcess (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960).

6 Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead(United States: David R. Godine, 2001), 46. Eckermann’sthree-part book (1836-48) provided the main inspirationfor Price’s dialogues with Whitehead (x). Also recordedby Price is Whitehead’s curious remark:“It has been oc-curring to me of late that Goethe’s thinking is too special,and that the world would be better o↵ for the sound,sane, sensible, second-rate sentiments of Schiller. Theynever rise beyond a certain level but they are safe and ser-

be safely assumed that Whitehead had not studiedGoethe’s scientific works in any detail. Wyman notesseveral lines of convergence in their thinking. Theseinclude their shared enthusiasm for Plato, Spinoza,and Leibniz; their attempt to grasp the interplayof permanence and flux, or eternity’s participationin the creations of time; their insistence upon theprofound interrelationship of all particulars with oneanother and with the whole; their sense that Natureas a whole and in its products must be understoodas a process of development lured by an immanentdivine presence; and their predilection for polarity asan organizing principle, whereby the spiritual and ma-terial, or mental and physical poles of organic processare each given their due.

In her seminal study, Goethe: Poet and Thinker, Eliza-beth Mary Wilkinson depicts Goethe as having had aninstinctive, pre-philosophic grasp of the inadequacy ofthe bifurcation of Nature that was later so thoroughlycriticized by Whitehead7. She notes Goethe’s con-cern to avoid overemphasizing either the subjectiveor objective side of the bifurcation in an imbalancedattempt to overcome it, as idealists and materialistsare apt to do. There is an ambiguity in Wilkinson’scomparison that, to avoid a possible conflation, com-pels me to note in passing that Whitehead’s accountof the modern bifurcation between perception andits cause is not the same as Kant’s transcendentaldivision of phenomena from noumena. For Kant,causality is a category of understanding applicableonly to the phenomenal realm; it has no legitimate usefor the determination of things-in-themselves, whichremain forever beyond our knowledge.8 Whitehead’sprotest against the bifurcation of Nature is a critiqueof the more philosophically naive position of scientificmaterialism, which has it that a conjectured mind-independent domain of particles (or wave-potentials)serves as the causal substrate for what we in fact ex-perience—“the greenness of the trees, the song of thebirds, the warmth of the sun”—the latter thus being

viceable” (122). In context it is clear that these remarksconcern art and literature, rather than science; but as wewill see, the need for a more generic metaphysical render-ing of Goethe’s special scientific insights is precisely whyan integration of their respective approaches to Nature isso valuable.

7 Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson, Goethe: Poet and Thinker(London: Edward Arnold, 1962), 136

8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxvi, 115

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reduced to the status of a dream9. As is detailedbelow, Whitehead’s reconstructive metaphysical pro-gram aims to provide “the all-embracing relations” bywhich the split between “the red glow of the sunset”and “the molecules and electric waves by which menof science would explain the phenomenon” can bereconciled as aspects of one and the same organicreality.10

Also focusing on Goethe and Whitehead’s respectiveresponses to Kant’s transcendental idealism are ElkeWeik’s “Goethe and the study of life,” and R. H.Stephenson’s “‘Binary Synthesis’: Goethe’s AestheticIntuition in Literature and Science.” Weik’s articlelinks Goethe’s “gentle empirics” to Whitehead’s rela-tional account of perception, revealing the similarityin their approaches to overcoming Kant’s categori-cal severance of phenomena from noumena: whereasKant only allowed for the participatory co-creationof the empirical ego with a merely apparent world,Goethe and Whitehead’s more radically participatoryapproach grants ideas an existence within nature, notjust in the human mind.11 In his article, Stephen-son goes so far as to claim that “Goethe’s scientificmethod is. . . indistinguishable from the Process Phi-losophy articulated by Whitehead and his followers,”pointing to their nearly identical prescriptions forovercoming the dualism of Kant’s Critique of PureReason by way of a “Critique of the Senses” (Goethe)or “critique of pure feeling” (Whitehead). 12

In The Rehabilitation of Whitehead, George R. Lu-cas points to Goethe, as well as the post-Kantianphilosophers Schelling and Hegel, as early origina-tors of process thought, thus cementing at least anindirect lineage.13 Clark S. Muenzer’s entry in theGoethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts mentionsthe kinship between Whitehead’s notion of “prehen-

9 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 30-31.10 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 32, 2911 Weik, “Goethe and the study of life: a comparison with

Husserl and Simmel,” in Cont Philos Rev 50, 335–357(2017).

12 Stephenson, “‘Binary Synthesis’: Goethe’s Aesthetic In-tuition in Literature and Science,” in Science in Context18(4): 2005, 553, 569.

13 Lucas, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analyticand Historical Assessment of Process Philosophy (NewYork: State University of New York, 1989), 16. See alsomy Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure inCosmology (SacraSage, 2021) for more on the Schelling-Whitehead nexus.

sion” and Goethe’s relational grasp of philosophicalconcepts (Begri↵e) as elements

[operating] within the world and not aboveit. . . [maintaining] themselves—to borrowanother Whiteheadian term—by becom-ing ‘ingredient’ in the ongoing concres-cence of new concepts and new perceptualobjects. 14

I return to the importance of prehension in the finalsection of this essay, as it is the keystone of White-head’s categoreal scheme providing the all-embracingrelations for mending the bifurcated world of materi-alism. In Goethe and Science: A Reappraisal, bothJe↵rey Barnouw’s chapter “Goethe and Helmholtz:Science and Sensation,” and Arthur Zajonc’s chapter“Facts as Theory: Aspects of Goethe’s Philosophy ofScience” make reference to Whitehea”s appeal to intu-ition and to his famous critique of the “fallacy of mis-placed concreteness” as it relates to Goethe’s rejectionof hypothesized causes hidden behind appearances.15

Maria Ilheu and Mariana Valente’s article “DelicateEmpiricism and Romance in Education for Sustain-ability” fruitfully draws upon Goethe’s method andWhitehead’s pedagogical theory to reconnect the in-tellectual and sensual aspects of education.16 Finally,Yourgrau cites Whitehead’s Process and Reality in hisarticle, but not to draw comparisons with Goethe’sscientific work, and not, unfortunately, to occasiona reconsideration of his conclusion that natural sci-ence is unlikely to be reformable along Goethean orWhiteheadian lines. 17

These scattered remarks are encouraging, as at firstglance one may be tempted to distance Goethe’sresolutely phenomenological approach to natural sci-ence from Whitehead’s mathematically informed and,while experientially grounded, still unapologetically

14 Muenzer, “Begri↵ (Concept),” in the Goethe-Lexiconof Philosophical Concepts. Vol. 1, No. 1 (2021).https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/34

15 Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler(eds.), Goethe and Science: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: D.Reidel Publishing Company, 1987).

16 Ilheu and Valente, “Delicate Empiricism and Romance inEducation for Sustainability,” in Rehearsing Science andArt to re-connect culture and nature, eds. Alison Neilsonand Jose Eduardo Silva (Portugal: Teatro do Frio, 2019),59-74.

17 Yourgrau, “Reflections,” 81.

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speculative method of philosophizing. As is unpackedlater, Whitehead, like Goethe, had his own critiquesof the mathematical physics and mechanistic meta-physics of his day. And upon closer examination, itwould be unwise to overlook the mathematical as-pects of Goethe’s scientific method. It is to the latterissue that I now turn.

3 The Method of Mathesis

Philosophy is akin to poetry. . . In eachcase there is reference to form beyond thedirect meaning of words. Poetry allies it-self to metre, philosophy to mathematicalpattern.

—Whitehead18

“The true method of discovery,” according to White-head,

is like the flight of an aeroplane. It startsfrom the ground of particular observation;it makes a flight in the thin air of imagi-native generalization; and it again landsfor renewed observation rendered acuteby rational interpretation.19

Goethe, Whitehead, and Newton, like all modernscientific thinkers, creatively inherit the twofold in-ductive to deductive method of investigation origi-nally formulated by Aristotle in Posterior Analyt-ics, wherein The Philosopher analogized the properdemonstration of scientific knowledge of causes tothe mathematical style of reasoning from clear firstprinciples (which Aristotle calls archai) to necessaryconclusions.20 Aristotle characterized the two aspectsof scientific reasoning for which the human soul isconstituted as follows. Induction is a movement ofabstract generalization from particular perceptions

18 Whitehead, Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press,1938/1968, 174.

19 Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The FreePress, 1978), 5.

20 Goethe also borrows aspects of his color theory fromAristotle, who had suggested two millennia earlier thatcolor results from a mixing of light and dark (see Senseand Sensibilia, Book 4, 442). Plato is similarly suggestive(see Timaeus, 67d-68d).

to the universal principle they exemplify. Such princi-ples are necessary to provide premises for deductions,which move from inductively derived universals tothe demonstration of their logically necessary impli-cations. In the ideal, high-altitude context of puregeometry, induction allows a mathematician to dis-cover new truths by, e.g., observing that every trianglehas angles adding up to 180 degrees. The claim re-mains hypothetical and does not in itself prove thatall triangles necessarily have angles adding up to 180degrees. Proof of the hypothesis requires deductivedemonstration via a series of logical steps, at whichpoint it becomes a theorem. The situation is a bitmessier in the more down-to-earth context of naturalscientific investigation. Unlike Newton, who Goetheargues prematurely limited experiment in order toprove pre-existing hypotheses, Goethe and White-head’s elaboration of the proper scientific methodgenerates an iterative and cumulative cycle of learn-ing that forestalls the model-centrism resulting fromthe scientistic tendency to leap to hypothetical gener-alizations on too narrow an empirical basis, withoutproper attention having been paid to the phenomenathemselves.

The history of thought,” Whitehead continues, “showsthat false interpretations of observed facts enter intothe records of their observation. Thus both theory,and received notions as to fact, are in doubt.”21

Whitehead’s cycle of discovery, with its emphasisupon the importance of landing for renewed obser-vation, can be understood as his way of heedingGoethe’s warning about “the power of imaginationthat with its wings lifts [us] on high when [we thinkwe are] still touching the earth.”22 The point isnot to avoid imaginative abstraction, which evenGoethe admits is impossible, since “everything fac-tual is already theory.”23 The point is rather to avoidrushing to prove a preconceived model with one ora few contrived experiments before the phenomenathemselves have been thoroughly distilled throughmanifold cycles of observation and generalization.24

Goethe laments the error so prevalent in his scien-

21 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 9.22 Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator Between Subject

and Object,” excerpted and translated by Dennis Sepper,Goethe Contra Newton, 67.

23 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (London: Penguin, 1998),maxim 575

24 See Dennis Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton, 70.

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tific contemporaries of leaping “immediately from thesingle factor to what is general.”25

Goethe’s main targets, of course, were Newton andhis followers. For Newton, because the sole purposeof his experimental design was to prove a precon-ceived geometric model, the fastest means to arrivingat the desired result was not to try “a multiple ofthings,” but “only the Experimentum Crucis,” for itis not the number of experiments, but their “weight”that is important: “where one will do, what needof many?”26Goethe’s method, in contrast, requiresthe painstaking arrangement of a complete series ofexperiments, followed by patient contemplation of themorphological relationship between each particularinstance. Gradually, the archetypal process instanti-ated by each particular form is perceptually distilled,bringing the general and the particular into coinci-dence: “the particular is the general made manifestunder di↵erent conditions.”27

That the Goethean method stands opposed to themathematical method is a view shared even by somedefenders of Goethe’s contributions to natural science,most prominently Henri Bortoft.28 Even if Goethedid not make straightforward use of arithmetic orgeometry in his investigations of natural phenomena,this does not mean that he was opposed to their use inall cases. Nor does it imply that his method is non- oranti-mathematical in the original and perhaps moreesoteric sense of màjhsic (mathesis), which need notbe quantitative in its approach but is, as the ancientPythagorean school had it, essentially an educationalmethod—the art of learning—meant to dialecticallylead one along a trail of proportional and analogicalresonances from the sensible to the archetypal modeof perception.29 The Spinozist philosopher Gilles

25 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 1164.26 Herbert Turnbull, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton

II. 1676-1687 (Cambridge: 1960), 79.27 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 569.28 Henri Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dy-

namic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought(Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2012). In Dennis L. Sepper’sterms, “Goethe is not as amathematical as people think”(Goethe Contra Newton, x).

29 Note that the sense of mathesis described here is not the“mathesis universalis” sought by Descartes and criticizedby Bortoft (Taking Appearance Seriously, 12); See ChikaraSasaki, Descartes’ Mathematical Thought (Kluwer, 2003),342. Dialectical mathesis is rather the Platonic “vertex” ofall scientific studies, prior to arithmetic and geometry asit is their common source (Republic 534e-535a). In Michel

Deleuze defines mathesis as an initiatory and incar-national way of knowing that overcomes dualities,whether that between percept and concept, particu-lar and universal, finite and infinite, or corporeal andspiritual. 30 Robin Mackay elaborates:

Mathesis treats of the nature of life ante-rior to philosophical reflection and scien-tific objectivity, that is to say before thecleavage between the subject and objectof thought: it returns us to ‘things-in-themselves in their wild state,’ the worldof concepts fauves [bestial concepts].31

Of course, mathesis can sometimes make use of ab-stract algebraic symbols in its pedagogical pursuit ofthe True, the Good, and the Beautiful. While Goethedid not employ algebra in his scientific studies, as acelebrated man of letters he can hardly be said tohave dispensed with the symbolic in the compositionof his scientific much less his poetic works, both ofwhich must count as expressions of his love for therhymes and rhythms of Nature. For example, whenwe first hear from Faust just after the Prologue inHeaven, he, having learned all that culture has too↵er, asks for spiritual help “to learn what naturehas to teach.” He opens the book on his desk toreveal the symbol of the microcosm: “Was it a godthat made these symbols be/. . . And with mysteriouspotency/Make nature’s hidden powers around me,manifest?” 32

Foucault’s terms, mathesis is “the project of a generalscience of order” (The Order of Things: An Archeologyof the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 71.In Rudolf Steiner terms: “The essential property of math-ematical perception is this: that a single sense-perceptibleform leads me beyond itself [to] a presentation of a compre-hensive spiritual fact” “Mathematics and Occultism,” anaddress delivered to the First Annual Congress of the Fed-eration of European Sections of the Theosophical Society,Amsterdam, June, 1904. Translated by M. H. Eyre, editedby H. Collison. For more on the Pythagorean connection,see Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science,Christopher Bamford (ed.), New York: Lindisfarne Books,1980.

30 Gilles Deleuze, “Mathesis, Science and Philosophy,” inR. Mackay (ed.), Collapse III (Falmouth: Urbanomic,November 2007), 151

31 Mackay, Collapse III, 28.32 Goethe’s Faust, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Anchor Books, 1990), 97-99. See also Maxims and Re-flections, maxim 314: “This is true symbolism, wherethe particular represents the general, not as dream and

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While Goethe’s participatory, concretely phenomeno-logical approach to the study of Nature must bedistinguished from the model-centric mathematicalanalysis characteristic of modern physical science 33,Bortoft goes too far in outright denying the math-ematical mode of operation to Goethe. 34 Whilethere is undoubtedly a tendency toward misplacedconcreteness in mechanistic approaches to physics andbiology, this has less to do with mathesis as such thanwith scientific materialism’s insistence upon bifurcat-ing Nature into primary quantitative and secondaryqualitative characteristics.

Despite the Humean decree of the logical positiviststhat only two kinds of meaningful propositions exist(i.e., the analytic truths of reason and the synthetictruths of fact), Kant taught us that mathematicsevinces a third kind of proposition: the synthetic apriori.35. Like Whitehead—who argued that posi-tivism is “a method which, if consistently pursued,would have left science where it found it” 36 ” –Bortoftpoints out that the positivist denial of Kant’s am-phibious logico-intuitive form of knowing in favor of“Hume’s fork” is, ironically, “hopelessly inadequate forunderstanding science.”37 “Twist and turn our con-cepts as we will,” says Kant, without mathematicalintuition we could not even arrive at the sum of fiveand seven, much less knowledge of the laws of physics.38 While Kant insisted that we remain limited todiscursive understanding when it comes to our sen-sory intuitions of Nature’s products, mathematicalconstruction achieves a form of pure intuition thatpartially reunites what the understanding forces usto separate. Intuitive mathesis makes it possible forus to cognize precisely the sort of necessary internal

shadow, but as a live and immediate revelation of theunfathomable”; and Sepper’s Goethe Contra Newton, 76:“Goethe once said of mathematical symbolization that ithas the potential to become nearly identical in the highestsense with the phenomena that it represents.”

33 For more on the problems with “model-centrism” in con-temporary physics, see Randall Auxier and Gary Her-stein’s The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s RadicalEmpiricism (Routledge, 2017), 111

34 See Troy Vine. “Newton, Goethe and the MathematicalStyle of Thinking: A Critique of Henri Bortoft’s TakingAppearance Seriously,” Holistic Science Journal, Vol. 4,2020, 72-73.

35 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press), A10/B14, 143↵.

36 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 537 Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, 219n56.38 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B14-17, 144.

relations that Bortoft rightly emphasizes are so impor-tant for Goethe’s holistic science of metamorphosis.39

Synthetic a priori knowledge was an essential com-ponent of Kant’s new transcendental grounding ofNewtonian science, as it allowed the necessary anduniversal truths of mathematics to be granted deter-minative status in our judgments of the laws of empir-ical Nature. However, while mathematics granted usformal knowledge of the spatiotemporal domain, Kantlimited this knowledge to appearances. He held thathuman cognition is necessarily split into two stems:the senses, which feed us the raw material of experi-ence filtered through the formal structures of spaceand time, and the understanding, by whose machi-nations and logical rules that material is digestedand judged. 40 He denied that the understandingcould reach beyond the limits of the senses to per-ceive essences or archetypal ideas directly. In hisdiscussion of Kant, Bortoft does not mention the sig-nificance of Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva for Goethe,as without the influence of Spinoza, it is conceiv-able that Goethe’s methodological interventions intonatural science may have been stymied by Kant’sdichotomy between discursive and intuitive forms ofunderstanding. Spinoza also drew upon the pow-erful example of mathematics, but unlike Kant, heextended the possibility of intuitive understandingbeyond the mathematical domain into the naturalworld. In general, Spinoza and Kant would agreethat an intuitive grasp of the essence or productivecause of a thing is the highest standard of truth. Forexample, to know the productive essence of a circlemeans not just being able to recognize one but beingable to create it according to a rule—i.e., a circle “is aplane surface described by a line, one point of whichis fixed and the other in motion.” 41 But beyondthe construction of mathematical objects, Kant didnot allow that humans could gain intuitive knowledgeof the inner archetypal core of Nature, either as awhole or in its individual products. Kant added that“we would not understand what it is even if someone[capable of such knowledge] could tell us”: the idea

39 Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, 26-27. See alsoVine, “Newton,” 76↵.

40 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A15/B29, 135.41 Eckart Forster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy,

252.

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that we might grasp such a core “is a mere fancy.” 42

Kant’s denial of archetypal knowledge was less prob-lematic in the inorganic realm, wherein it was thoughtthat mathematically derived Newtonian laws exhaus-tively determined natural phenomena. But organizedor living beings proved to be a striking exception,as Kant realized that organisms displayed a formof circular or whole-to-part self-organizing causalitythat is unlike the linear causal order of partes extrapartes determining non-living phenomena. 43 ForKant, our discursive understanding could only buildits knowledge up out of parts, thus leaving us consti-tutively blind to the incarnate archetypal dynamicsat play in the formation of living beings. Kant’s dis-cursive method works well in the case of machines,but organisms–whose parts are each internally relatedto and mutually productive of one another and thewhole to which they belong—could only be known byan intuitive form of cognition unavailable to dividedminds like ours.

Having read Kant’s Critique of Judgment just af-ter completing his Metamorphosis of Plants (bothpublished in 1790), Goethe realized that with hisdiscovery of the Urpflanze, or archetypal plant, hewas claiming precisely the sort of intuitive knowledgeof organic formation that Kant had forbidden. A fewyears earlier, when these ideas were just taking shape,Goethe had written to Herder from Italy:

The Urpflanze would be the most won-derful creation on the earth, for whichnature herself should envy me. With thismodel and the key that it contains, onecould invent an infinite number of plants,ones that despite their imaginary exis-tence could possibly be real, thus whichare not solely literary and painterly shad-ows and illusions, but which possess aninner truth and necessity. This same prin-ciple would apply to all other living thingsas well.44

Goethe’s reference to the “inner truth and necessity”by which the Urpflanze allows one to invent new

42 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A277/B333, 375.43 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:374, 24544 Goethe to Herder (May 17, 1787), Italienische Reise in

Briefe Vol. 2, 60.

plants parallels Spinoza’s intuitive understanding ofa circle’s productive cause, whereby we not only rec-ognize but can generate the shape ourselves. Goethethus extended Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva beyondthe purely geometrical realm into the study of thegenesis of actual organic forms.45 A “fortunate en-counter” in 1794 with the Kantian poet FriedrichSchiller precipitated a further deepening of Goethe’sself-understanding. To that point he had been pro-ceeding mostly on the instincts of his genius and wasstill in search of a robust methodological justificationfor his findings. Goethe o↵ered Schiller a spirited ac-count of his observations of the archetypal plant, evensketching its form on a spare sheet of paper. Schillerlistened but responded unceremoniously: “That isnot an observation from experience. That is an idea.”Goethe, initially frustrated, collected his wits andreplied: “Then I may rejoice that I have ideas with-out knowing it and can even see them with my owneyes.”46

Despite his witty reply, Goethe recognized the powerof Schiller’s Kantian critique. Rather than claimingan immediate intuitive insight into the holistic ideasubtending many particular facts, Goethe would cometo a�rm the methodological importance of providinga discursive and experimental demonstration of theway these facts mutually produce one another andthe whole within which they are composed. Like agood geometer, he must show his work step-by-step,despite his genius for imaginatively leaping to thesolution. He thus took himself to be seeking a middlepath between Spinoza and Kant “to make discursiveand intuitive thinking compatible.”47

We cannot begin straight away with the essence oridea that organizes the whole, but must arrive atit in stepwise fashion by gathering together manycontiguous phenomena:

. . . the greatest accomplishments come fromthose who never tire in exploring and

45 Forster argues that, while Spinoza uses geometrical ex-amples to illustrate intuitive science, this does not meanthat the method was in principle inapplicable to particularnatural processes, such as the study of plant and animalgrowth, or color phenomena (see The Twenty-Five Yearsof Philosophy, 97-98).

46 Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by D. E. Miller(Suhrkamp, 1988), 20

47 Forster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 254.

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working out every possible aspect andmodification of every bit of empirical evi-dence, every experiment. . . To follow ev-ery single experiment through its vari-ations is the real task of the scientificresearcher.48

Goethe goes on to analogize his method of distillingthe higher archetypal phenomenon out of a contigu-ous series of empirical phenomena to mathematicaldemonstration:

[The archetypal phenomenon] shows thegeneral formula, so to speak, that over-arches an array of individual arithmeticsums. . . . From the mathematician wemust learn the meticulous care required toconnect things in unbroken succession.49

Eckart Forster provides a helpful analogy to the Fi-bonacci sequence that clarifies the Goethean methodof archetypal distillation.50 The string of numbers1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, . . . is analogous tothe series of contiguous experimental observations.When enough numbers have been listed, or factshave been gathered, it becomes possible to intuit therhythmic pattern of proportional transition guidingtheir metamorphosis. An internal relationship gov-erns the series of numbers/phenomena through thephases of their transformation, the rules for whichcan be formulated in general or archetypal terms. Inthe case of the Fibonacci sequence, the formula is

48 Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by D. E. Miller(Suhrkamp, 1988), 15-16.

49 Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by D. E. Miller(Suhrkamp, 1988), 16. I have inserted “archetypal phe-nomenon” where Goethe himself had written of “empiricalevidence. . . of a higher sort.” I believe this interpretationis justified in light of Goethe’s later collaboration withSchelling, who in his 1799 work First Outline of a Sys-tem of the Philosophy of Nature (transl. Keith Peter-son, SUNY, 2004) built on his conversations with Goetheto elaborate a form of “unconditioned empiricism” (24),claiming that philosophy of nature is precisely “empiri-cism extended to include unconditionedness” (22), or toinclude what he elsewhere calls the “absolute organism,”the archetype of which all particular organisms are approx-imations (49). Schelling thus attempted to philosophicallyground Goethe’s higher empiricism in the archetypal dy-namics of a self-organizing Nature, whereby a diversity offinite appearances, when taken as a metamorphic whole,are seen to converge upon an overarching ideal (50).

50 Forster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 256-257

Fn = F(n�1) + F(n�2), F1 = 1, F2 = 1. In the case ofGoethe’s observations of the phases of plant growthacross a variety of species, it is the expansive andcontractive movements of the archetypal leaf, a pri-mal form from which all phases of plant growth aretopologically derivable. 51

Having explicated Goethe’s mature understandingof his scientific method, we can a�rm that whileBortoft’s distinction between internal and externalrelations is edifying, his dichotomous characteriza-tion of the “concrete” Goethean and the “abstract”mathematical approaches to science is misleading.52

Bortoft’s treatment of Goethe’s alleged divergencefrom the mathematical style of thinking stands op-posed to Goethe’s own description of his method.Troy Vine goes so far as to say that “Goethe’s ap-proach is closer to mathematics” than Newton’s!53

Vine’s claim is justified in that, even though Newtonused geometry in his optical analysis of light, theorder of the colors in his spectrum is entirely con-tingent, meaning that the colors are only externallyrelated, their order left entirely unexplained. Thisdespite the fact that Newton employed a clever musi-cal analogy to determine the position of each coloron his spectrum wheel. According to Dennis Sepper,“Newton’s proportions are based on an arbitrary se-lection of the experimental circumstances, which ifchosen di↵erently, give quite di↵erent results.”54 Incontrast, in his Farbenlehre Goethe applies the prin-ciple of polarity (also applied in the three expansiveand contractive phases of plant growth) to reveal thenecessary internal relations among the colors of hisspectrum.55

Yourgrau elaborates the antithetical world views ofGoethe and Newton in terms similar to Bortoft, re-marking that while Goethe concentrated on “theevent in its totality” (or in Planck’s terms, “he wouldnever see a detail without considering the whole”56,

51 Though Forster doesn’t mention it, the Golden Mean orPhi spiral found in growth patterns throughout the plantkingdom is derived from the Fibonacci sequence, so therewould seem to be more than a loose analogy between itand the archetypal metamorphosis of plants.

52 Vine, “Newton,” 86.53 Vine, “Newton,” 86.54 Sepper, Dennis L. Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and

the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1988), 84.

55 Vine, “Newton,” 82↵.56 Yourgrau, “Reflections,” 73.

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Newton sought “the mathematical pattern underlyingthe world of phenomena.”57 Yourgrau claims it wasGoethe’s intolerance of mathematical analysis thatmade it impossible for him to understand Newton’sachievement in optics. In addition to what has alreadybeen said above, we can turn again to Goethe’s ownstatements on the matter. In his Farbenlehre, Goetheadmits that while he “can boast of no attainmentsof this kind,” he nonetheless viewed mathematics as“one of the noblest auxiliaries which can be employedby man” and to be “of the greatest use to the physicalsciences.” 58 Goethe especially lauded the use of ge-ometry in astronomy: for example, he considered “apenetrating mathematician before the starry heavens[to be] godlike.”59 In his conversations with Ecker-mann, he “[honors] mathematics as the most sublimeand useful science,” but adds that the use of geome-try should not be abused by extending it indefinitelyinto domains ill-suited to quantitative or metricalanalysis.”60 His quarrel with Newton had nothing todo with mathematics as such, but with the propermethodology for the examination of color, a decidedlyqualitative phenomenon. While Goethe admitted theimportance of geometry for the study of optics, heargued that such a study should not be mixed upwith chromatics. This is because color phenomenado not have an exclusively physical nor geometricalorigin and so can be studied independently of optics.Here we can return again to Aristotle, who says itsometimes occurs that mathematicians, in their rushto demonstrate hidden causes, do so in ignorance ofall the relevant facts:

. . . it is the business of the empirical ob-servers to know the fact, of the mathe-maticians to know the reasoned fact; forthe latter are in possession of the demon-strations giving the causes, and are oftenignorant of the fact: just as we have of-ten a clear insight into a universal, butthrough lack of observation are ignorantof some of its particular instances.61

57 Yourgrau, “Reflections,” 73.58 Goethe, Theory of Colours; Translated from the German

with Notes, by C. L. Eastlake. United Kingdom: Murray,1840, 286-287.

59 Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen. London: Penguin,1998, no. 606.

60 Letter to Eckermann, December 20, 1826.61 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Part 13. Trans-

Even so, Goethe admits that in his study of color“there are evidently certain points where the assistanceof geometry would be desirable,” though he regretsthat the “unprejudiced mathematicians” with whomhe has had the “good fortune to be acquainted” wereotherwise occupied and so could not contribute to hisstudy. He hopes that sensitive mathematicians un-burdened by Newton’s hasty reduction of chromaticphenomena to a clever optical model will take uphis work in order to determine precisely where geo-metrical analysis may further elucidate the subject.62

To simply reduce the experiential metamorphosis ofcolor to an explanation in terms of the geometricalanalysis of objectified “Rays di↵erently refrangible”63

is not only to “unweave a rainbow,”64 it is to “murderto dissect,”65 as the living eye is uprooted from itsparticipation in the organic circuit responsible forgenerating color phenomena.

Contrary to Yourgrau, then, it is Newton’s arbitrary“mathematico-technical approach” and not Goethe’sholistic view that is “restricted.” While Goethe alsomade use of the mathematical style of thinking in hisscientific work, he never lost sight of our human par-ticipation in the living phenomena of Nature. Indeed,he employed a more integral and transdisciplinaryform of mathesis known to the ancients. 66 He oncereferred to himself as an “ethical aesthetic mathe-matician”67 because he understood his task to be notonly that of distilling the dynamic forms at work inphenomena but also restoring to Nature the ethicaland aesthetic values “annihilated” by the quantita-tive models of mechanistic physics. Whitehead tookup a similar task, not only to help ameliorate theecological catastrophe that had already resulted from

lation by G. R. G. Mure from The Inter-net Classics Archive by Daniel C. Stevenson(http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/posterior.1.i.html).

62 Goethe, Theory of Colours, 287-288.63 Newton, “New Theory about Light and Colors,” Philo-

sophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1672), 3079.64 John Keats, “Lamia.” The Poems of John Keats. New

York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., p. 161.65 William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “The Ta-

bles Turned.” Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems.United Kingdom: J. and A. Arch, 1798, 188.

66 E.g., the Neoplatonist Proclus defines mathesis as “thescience of learning” by means of “the recollection of ideas”(A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements[Princeton: 1992], 38).

67 Letter to Boisseree in Goethes Werke. IV. Abteilung:Goethes Briefe. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großher-zogin Sophie von Sachsen, Munich: 1987, p. 220f

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the single-eyed deployment of such abstractions dur-ing the industrial revolution, but also to deepen ourscientific understanding of the world-process in itsconcrete wholeness. Whitehead’s protest against ma-terialism was not meant to place artificial restraintsupon the explanatory prowess of natural science. Onthe contrary, given the demolition of mechanistic ma-terialism by the second scientific revolution of theearly twentieth century, his primary motivation wasto develop a new metaphysical background for andcosmological interpretation of the latest scientific dis-coveries. In the final section, I turn to the waysWhitehead’s cosmological scheme, and in particularhis theory of perception, can further explicate andlend metaphysical support to Goethe’s intuitive un-derstanding of natural phenomena.

4 The Philosophy of Organism and thePrehensional Account of Perception

Nature speaks. . . with herself and to usin a thousand modes. To the attentiveobserver she is nowhere dead nor silent;she has even a secret agent in inflexiblematter. . . However manifold, complicated,and unintelligible this language may oftenseem to us, yet its elements remain everthe same.

—Goethe68

The things of heaven and earth containsuch a wealth of value that only the organsof all beings jointly can encompass it.

–Goethe 69

While cracks in the metaphysical edifice of scien-tific materialism continue to widen, there remains apopular scientistic orthodoxy that prides itself uponhaving secured objectivity by eliminating any traceof intelligent human beings or even sentient organ-isms from its explanations of the universe. Mindand life are treated not as the natural flowering of

68 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Theory of Colours. Trans.C. L. Eastlake. United Kingdom: Murray, 1840, p. xviii.

69 Letter to Jacobi June 1, 1813, trans. Wiegand, 45-46

latent potentials in matter but as peripheral acci-dents ultimately explainable in terms of the mindless,lifeless reduction base of any of a variety of abstractmathematico-technical models. Nature has thus beenscrubbed clean of everything qualitative, value-laden,and purposive, leaving behind only what can be quan-titatively measured and fed into supercomputers insearch of useful predictions. A coherent account of themetamorphosis of phenomena in concrete experiencehas been replaced by the abstract but instrumentallypowerful knowledge a↵orded by evermore complicatedcomputer models.

Consider quantum and relativity theories. They re-main two of the most successful scientific modelsin human history, where success is measured lessby deeper understanding than by predictive power.Their technological applications (like microprocessors,wireless communications, and nuclear energy) havecompletely transformed civilization. Despite their in-strumental successes, however, massive metaphysicalproblems remain. For starters, each model describesan entirely distinct kind of universe: quantum the-ory implies a cosmos of discontinuous acausal leaps,while relativity implies a causally limited spacetimecontinuum. While the incompatibility of these twootherwise extremely accurate mathematical modelscontinues to puzzle physicists, the models are no lesspuzzling on their own. Their physical implicationsare typically construed as so profoundly at odds withthe commonsense presuppositions of civilized life thatphysicists are encouraged not to ask what the equa-tions mean. Among quantum physicists, the typicalmantra is: “shut up and calculate.”70 To give a fewexamples of the confounding implications of thesemodels: time is said to be a reversible, presentless,and ultimately illusory variable; space is said to bendeven to the point of breaking; and material parti-cles, now equivalent to wave-like agitations in a field,are said to exist nonlocally as clouds of probabilityspanning the entire universe.

From Whitehead’s point of view, the situation twen-tieth century physics finds itself in is double-edged:on the one hand, non-Euclidean geometrical meth-ods and more precise measuring instruments haveenabled tremendous advances, while, on the otherhand, despite the demolition of the old metaphysi-

70 David N. Mermin, “What’s wrong with this pillow?”Physics Today 42, 4, 9 (1989);

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cal foundations of classical physics nothing new hasbeen put in their place. As a result, natural sciencehas “degenerated into a medley of ad hoc hypothe-ses.”71 Further, our commonsense experience haslost all touch with the utterly bizarre nature of theuniverse described in the latest models of theoreti-cal physics. “The divergence of the formulae aboutnature from the appearance of nature,” Whiteheadlamented, “has robbed the formulae of any explana-tory character.”72 Whitehead was dissatisfied withthe instrumentalization of physical theory and frus-trated by the tendency of its materialist popularizersto marshal unexamined and inadequate metaphysicsin an attempt at “brilliant feats of explaining away”all those aspects of Nature (colors, sounds, feelings,purposes, etc.) deemed superfluous or epiphenom-enal. In place of such a bifurcated, model-centricreductionism, he sought to assemble a more adequatemetaphysical scheme in terms of which the new scien-tific discoveries could be understood to hang togetherwith “the general consciousness of what in practicewe experience”73 For Whitehead, “the red glow of thesunset” that warms the hearts of poets must come tobe understood as no less a part of Nature than “themolecules and electric waves by which men of sciencewould explain the phenomenon.”74

From Goethe’s convergent perspective, the detach-ment of physics from human life can lead only todisaster: “experiments have been. . . segregated fromthe human factor [such] that nature is to be recog-nized only by the evidence of artificial instruments”which, Goethe protested, “limits what nature wantsto achieve and prove.”75 Goethe here grants Naturethe status of subject as well as object of science. If, asSchelling put it, the human is “Nature itself philoso-phizing (Autophusis philosophia),”76 then our nativesuite of evolved senses and contemplative powersmay easily be thrown out of proportion and confusedby the technological sophistication of our measuringdevices and the perceptually suspect computationalmodels they are used to calibrate. The reigning model-

71 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 18.72 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 154.73 Whitehead, Process and Reality. New York: The Free

Press, 1978, 1774 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1920, 29.75 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 706.76 Schelling, Schellings sammtliche Werke, Vol. 11, trans.

Iain Hamilton Grant, 258.

centric approach to natural science risks mutilationof both the human being and the world-organism forwhom we serve as organs of knowing. As RandallAuxier and Gary Herstein pointedly ask:

[W]hen experience in its radical fullnessand connectedness is disdained in favor ofclever mathematical models. . .what arewe left with to test our models, otherthan the formal and recondite clevernessof those models?. . . Do we achieve any-thing other than a preordained ‘fit’ with a‘reality’ that bears no particular relationto experience? Do we just promiscuouslyadd new parameters as needed and con-venient? Under such assumptions, expe-rience can o↵er no meaningful feedback,since it has been shut out of the processof model-centric science when it daredto challenge the models that experiencewould be called upon to test. 77

Instead of defining the scientific method so as torequire the total withdrawal of consciousness fromphenomena (or, said otherwise, the replacement ofphenomena altogether with imperceivable abstractmodels), Goethe and Whitehead alike encourage usto trust our senses: “in so far as we make use of ourhealthy senses” Goethe claimed, “the human beingis the most powerful and exact scientific instrumentpossible.”78 Similarly, for Whitehead, “Natural phi-losophy should never ask, what is in the mind andwhat is in nature. To do so is a confession that ithas failed to express relations between things percep-tively known.”79 Similarly, for Whitehead, “Naturalphilosophy should never ask, what is in the mind andwhat is in nature. To do so is a confession that it hasfailed to express relations between things perceptivelyknown.”80 Both thinkers sought to heal the incisionhewn by modern philosophy between the perceptualand causal domains. In Goethe’s terms, “theory pureand simple is no use except in that it makes us be-lieve in the interconnection of phenomena.”81 andin Whitehead’s terms, the “sole justification” for any

77 Auxier and Herstein, The Quantum of Explanation, 111.78 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 706.79 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 575.80 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 30.81 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 529.

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theory is “the elucidation of immediate experience.”82.Elsewhere, Whitehead reiterates that “[t]here is nogoing behind actual [occasions of experience] to findanything more real.”83 Nature, for Whitehead as forGoethe, becomes simply “what we are aware of inperception.” 84

Two potential misunderstandings of this novel ap-proach to scientific investigation must be addressed.First, trusting our senses does not mean remainingon the surface, accepting first impressions as thoughthey granted immediate knowledge of reality. Oftenit happens that we do not see what Nature is tryingto show us; we see, rather, our own symbolic rep-resentation of things. Our expectations shape whatwe perceive, so much so that habitual perceptiontends more to paste over the world with well-wornwords instead of letting it take shape within us. Thus,as historians of science know well, “false interpreta-tions of observed facts enter into the records of theirobservation”85 Instead of naive sensory empiricism,Whitehead means to a�rm our “instinctive attitude”that “by due attention, more can be found in naturethan that which is observed at first sight.” 86 Onlythe perception-dulling influence of bifurcated model-centric theorizing convinces us to accept less thanwhat our senses are capable of revealing. Second,the point is not to dispense with hypothetical mod-eling outright, but to hold our mental models withirony, keeping in mind, as Goethe suggests, that theyare like “sca↵oldings erected in front of a buildingand then dismantled when the building is finished.”87

Models become idols when they function to obscureour living contemplation of phenomena by demotingwhat we are actually aware of in perception to themere secondary e↵ect of some imperceivable cause.Goethean philosopher Rudolf Steiner sums up theproper approach to modeling by reminding scientiststhat “Only hypotheses that can cease to be hypothe-ses have any justification.”88 In other words, whenthe archetypal phenomenon has been distilled out ofa properly arranged series of experiments, then thehypothetical sca↵olding that may have tentatively

82 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 4.83 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18.84 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 28.85 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 9.86 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 29.87 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 1222.88 Steiner, Goethean Science, 135.

guided our research can be set aside, allowing theIdea itself to shine through in the form of its nowpurified appearances.

In light of Goethe’s intuitive method and Whitehead’s“organic empiricism,”89 the true task of science be-comes the search for the systematic relations amongthe metamorphic nexus of phenomena. This phenom-enal nexus displays an aesthetic spectrum rangingfrom the superficiality of the sensorial to the depthof the archetypal. While clearly critical of scientificmaterialism, Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme alsoinvolves a sustained critique of Kantian modes ofidealistic philosophizing which seek to balance thefoundations of world order upon the “cognitive andconceptual experience” of rational subjects; instead,Whitehead converges with Goethe by rooting his cos-mology in aesthetics, such that “the actual world isthe outcome of the aesthetic order.”90

Rather than explaining away the qualitative appear-ance of Nature within our consciousness as an ir-relevant “psychic addition” projected upon the realcausal processes hidden beneath it, or so inflatingconsciousness that it becomes the sole transcenden-tal source of Nature’s intelligible order, Whiteheadinsists on placing perception back in the midst ofthings themselves, such that we come to see how “itis a fact of nature that the world so appears.”91

He continues:

The living organ of experience is the liv-ing body as a whole. . . The actualities ofnature must be so interpreted as to beexplanatory of this fact. . . Human experi-ence is an act of self-origination includingthe whole of nature, limited to the per-spective of a focal region, located withinthe body.92

The human body is thus a microcosm, a cosmic frac-tal creatively repeating in unique miniature what theorganism of the universe does macrocosmically. But

89 Whitehead, The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North White-head, 1925-1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Sci-ence, edited by Brian G. Henning, Joseph Petek, GeorgeLucas (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 9.

90 Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 91-9291 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 214.92 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 225.

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not just the human: all actual entities function asmicrocosmic amplifiers of the whole of cosmogene-sis. “Nature is always like itself in matters both thegreatest and the smallest,” says Goethe, giving voiceto the ancient doctrine of correspondence. “Everydim glass pane transmits beautiful blue colour,” hecontinues, connecting the doctrine to the findings ofhis Farbenslehre, “as also the whole atmosphere withits world-enveloping clouds.”93

Whereas Goethe tends to turn to poetic symbol to con-vey the esoteric meaning of the microcosm-macrocosmresonance, Whitehead attempts to render it rationallyin the form of his novel categoreal scheme, describingthe perceptual process in a generic enough way thatit is adequate for the interpretation of aesthetic activ-ities at every scale of Nature, whether the vibrationsof atoms, the reactions of molecules, the intuitions ofpoets, or the propositions of philosophers. Impatientminds rush to replace the metamorphic phenomena ofNature with names and formulas, makeshift labels towhich we can a�x our partiality, idolatrous explana-tions that only obscure true archetypal understanding.While admittedly at first imposing, Whitehead foundthe jargon of his metaphysical scheme to be a nec-essary evil to break free of tired groves of thought.His neologisms are an invitation to behold the worldafresh, to look and feel again without taking habitualcategories for granted. His categoreal scheme is anattempt at re-describing the flow of phenomena asnature directs. It follows from Whitehead’s “refusalto bifurcate nature into individual experience andexternal cause”94 that a mediating category is neces-sary to serve as a bridge between private feelings andpublic facts. How is it that external objects cometo find themselves as factors related within subjec-tive experience? Whitehead invented the concepts of“concrescence,” “actual occasion,” and “prehension”in order to weave together what had been torn asun-der: rather than conceiving of conscious thoughts,emotions, and sensations as something separate fromor beyond Nature (with Nature itself reduced to thehurrying of mute material), consciousness is reinter-preted as a vastly more complex form of feeling that,at least in germ, is pervasive throughout the physicalworld. In Whitehead’s scheme, prehensions threadthe experiential fabric that weaves the causal nexus of

93 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 1275.94 Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity, 66.

actual occasions together. Prehensions serve to bringthe past into the present, and to give the present tothe future. They are the sympathetic feelings grant-ing the public objects of the perished past entry intothe subjective immediacy of another once-occurrentliving present. And they fuel the aim at future satis-faction that launches individual subjective occasionsof experience beyond the privacy of the present intosuperjective social immortality.95 Actual occasionsof experience arise out of their prehensions of thepast, enjoy themselves in the present, and perishinto the future, contributing their aesthetic achieve-ments, their memories and motives, to the formationof “historical routes” or enduring “societies”: all en-during entities ranging from stars to sunflowers areexamples of complex societies composed of intimatelyrelated individual occasions of experience inheritingand reproducing a shared genetic character.96

A human being is also such a society:

The human body is to be conceived as acomplex ‘amplifier’—to use the languageof the technology of electromagnetism.The various actual [occasions], which com-pose the body, are so coordinated thatthe experiences of any part of the bodyare transmitted to one or more centraloccasions to be inherited with enhance-ments accruing upon the way, or finallyadded by reason of the final integration.The enduring personality is the historicroute of living occasions which are sever-ally dominant in the body at successiveinstants. The human body is thus achiev-ing on a scale of concentrated e�ciencya type of social organization, which withevery gradation of e�ciency constitutesthe orderliness whereby a cosmic epochshelters in itself intensity of satisfaction.97

A historical route of feeling or organized society ofoccasions presupposes a lineage of intimately interre-lated individual experiences. As Goethe would haveput it poetically, concrescing actual occasions mustfirst die to themselves as subjects before they can

95 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 290.96 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 108.97 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 119.

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become for others as superjects98 –others who “knowus better than we ourselves can.”99 In Whitehead’scosmological scheme, the subjective immediacy ofself-enjoyment and the objective immortality of so-cial purpose constitute the beating heart of Nature’screative advance, an intensifying rhythm goading ev-ermore complex forms of organization to arise. InGoethe’s terms, again, “the inner and outer spheres[are] interwoven. There is constant systole and dias-tole, a breathing in and a breathing out of the livingorganism.”’100

Goethe’s gentle empiricism is often described as aform of nature phenomenology.101 In Taking Appear-ance Seriously, Bortoft fruitfully contrasts Husserl’sphenomenological method (later developed into em-bodied phenomenology by Merleau-Ponty) to the Cartesian-Kantian representationalist account of perception.102

Rather than conscious subjectivity being construedas a ‘container’ closed o↵ from the world” and onlytentatively related to external objects via internalsymbolic representations, Bortoft champions the phe-nomenological concept of “intentionality”, that is,the world-directed “intrinsic openness of conscious-ness.”103 Whitehead is also critical of the “theory ofrepresentative perception” infecting much of modernphilosophy, as the “fatal gap” it artificially inserts“between mental symbol and actuality symbolized”produces insoluble epistemological problems by solip-sistically isolating the knowing subject from the ob-

98 See Goethe’s poem “Blissful Yearning” in West-EasternDivan (trans. A. S. Kline) for a poetic account ofwhat Whitehead described in terms of the processof concrescence: “Tell it no one but the wise,/Thecrowd will only jeer:/The living thing I praise,/Thatlongs for death by fire./Cooling, in those nights oflove,/Conceiving as you were conceived,/A strange emo-tion fills you/While the quiet candle gleams./You’re nolonger in the grasp/Of shadows, darkening,/A new desirelifts you up/On to a higher mating./No distances canweigh you down,/Enchanted you come flying,/And greedyfor the light, at last,/A moth, you burn in dying./And aslong as you lack this/True word: Die and Become!/You’llbe but a dismal guest/In Earth’s darkened room.”

99 Goethe, Scientific Studies, 39100 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 278.101 See for example Fritz Heinemann, “Goethe’s Phenomeno-

logical Method” in Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 33 (Jan. 1934),67-81 and Iris Hennigfeld, “Goethe’s PhenomenologicalWay of Thinking and the Urphanomen” in Goethe Year-book, Vol. 22 (2015), 143-167.

102 Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, 48-49.103 Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, 48.

jects supposedly known.104 But on some readings,the intentionality by which a subject directs itselftoward objects may overly privilege the active role ofconsciousness, such that the object is diminished tothe status of something passively grasped by the pre-determined intention of a substantial (or, in Kant’scase, a transcendental) subject. Goethe’s method-ological claims to an enhanced, delicate empiricismthat seeks to become intimately united with its ob-jects through the receptive cultivation of new organsof perception105 led Bortoft to propose a hermeneuticreversal of Husserlian intentionality. After this re-versal, objects can be understood as “coming-towardand constituting the subject, instead of [the subject]going-toward and constituting the object.”106 In thisway, Bortoft suggests that Goethe’s method is anattempt to “return us to the original meaning of‘subject’ before Kant inverted it.”107

The convergence with Whitehead’s account of per-ception could not be closer:

. . . for Kant the process whereby thereis experience is a process from subjectiv-ity to apparent objectivity. The philoso-phy of organism inverts this analysis, andexplains the process as proceeding fromobjectivity to subjectivity . . . 108

Building on Whitehead’s novel category of prehension,we could refer to Bortoft’s “reverse intentionality” asthe perceptual mode of “prehensionality.” Whereasintentionality refers to the object-directedness of sub-jects, prehensionality refers to the subject-directednessof objects. As we’ve seen, in Whitehead’s scheme,objects are understood to be perished subjects, or su-perjects, with aims seeking satisfaction through theirgrowth into and achievement of a novel subjective per-spective. Whitehead coins the term “concrescence” todescribe the process whereby the multifaceted objec-tivity of the past grows together to form a new unifiedsubjective experience in the present. Rather than apre-existent subject internally representing external

104 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 54, 76.105 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, maxim 565; Goethe:

Scientific Studies, Douglas Miller (ed.), (New York:Suhrkamp Publishers: 1988), 39.

106 Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, 104.107 Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, 104.108 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 156.

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objects, prehensionality describes a perceptual pro-cess whereby new subjects, like Goethe’s new organsof perception, are brought forth by objective expe-riential vectors streaming in from the environment.Goethe claimed that living perception requires us to“become as mobile and flexible as nature herself.”109;he thus described his intuitive observation of Natureas a process whereby “the elements of the object, theperceptions of the object, flow into my thinking.”110

It is not just that the subject conforms to its objects,it is that a completed subject cannot be said to fullypre-exist the prehensive unification of the objectswhich compose it. Considered from the perspectiveof its incomplete process of concrescence, the subjectremains a “nascent creature.” 111 Subjects are thusgranted a partial or quasi- pre-existence, since theremust be at least the premonition or promise of asubjectively unified satisfaction in order to lure manymutually sensitive prehensions out of the settled pasttoward the one unique aim of the new occasion theyare actualizing within. Like tones struck to forma chord, prehensions grow into harmony with oneanother guided by the emergent self-enjoyment of anewly concrescent subject, which upon experiencingthe world thus harmonized, perishes into superjectiv-ity to carry its realized value into future members ofits lineage.

In Goethean fashion, Whitehead’s metaphysics of per-ception reveals the participatory nature of knowledge,whereby the scientist and the phenomenon underinvestigation are co-creatively caught in mutual meta-morphosis. In Goethe’s terms:

The human being knows himself only in-sofar as he knows the world; he perceivesthe world only in himself, and himself onlyin the world. Every new object, clearlyseen, opens up a new organ of perceptionin us.112

Goethe is fond of saying that the phenomena them-selves, rightly apprehended, exhibit for us their owntheoretical explanation: “Everything factual is al-

109 Goethe, from On Morphology (1807). In Miller, Douglas(ed.), Goethe: Scientific Studies, 64. Translated by CraigHoldridge

110 Goethe, Scientific Studies, 39.111 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 224.112 Goethe, Scientific Studies, 39.

ready theory: to understand this would be the great-est possible achievement.”113 Whitehead expandedhis theory of prehensions to develop an account ofwhat he called “propositional feelings,” which canhelp us make philosophical sense of Goethe’s claim.Whitehead defines a propositional feeling as the pre-hension of a theory.114 In Whitehead’s cosmos, onlyvery rarely do prehensions of propositions rise tothe level of conscious judgments of correctness orincorrectness. In most occasions of experience, theveracity of a proposition matters only incidentally:propositional feelings act primarily as aesthetic luresby bringing the given, already actualized situationinto contrast with possibilities that could have been orthat may yet become. Goethe’s study of the Urpflanzeor archetypal plant provides a striking illustration ofwhat Whitehead means. The propositional feelingsassociated in the historical route of a developing plantwork to shelter its inner archetypal satisfaction, thusexpressing the established order of its kingdom, whilealso allowing it to adjust as needed to contingentenvironmental conditions. Plants express the phys-ical purposes of their inherited archetype, but withenough propositional flexibility to adapt to changingcircumstances. Goethe’s archetypal plant is not aKantian idea, but nor is it a mind-independent cause.His intuition of the archetypal dynamics at play in thegrowth of various plant species can be described inWhiteheadian terms as his prehension of physical pur-poses and propositional feelings—the “ur-feelings,” asit were—guiding plant development. Thus, Goethe’smorphological method is literally a matter of comingto perceptually resonate with and poetically describethe propositional feelings, or theories, shaping theorganic world. The Goethean scientist thus does notinvent theoretical models to explain Nature by ref-erence to something unperceived and unperceivable,but rather, by prehensively participating in the mor-phogenesis of phenomena, discovers the propositionalfeelings–the theories–that Nature itself is realizing.

5 Conclusion

This essay has only just begun the task of integrat-ing Goethe’s poetic science with Whitehead’s organic

113 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, 575.114 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 184.

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metaphysics. We have seen how the method of math-esis guides both of their investigations into the natureof Nature, replacing the still prominent pursuit ofcertain knowledge derived from toy models with anopen-ended process of learning in relationship to acreative, living universe. “Nature is never complete,”Whitehead reminds us; “It is always passing beyonditself.”115 Thus our method must not clutch afterrigid mechanical idols but remain in sensitive contactwith the organic flow of phenomena. Goethe andWhitehead provide natural science with a pathwaybeyond the bifurcated image of the cosmos, invitingus into a re-integrated world wherein fact and value,perception and causation, and beauty and truth areeach understood as co-constitutive goods ingredientin the wholeness of a reality-in-process.

Both Whitehead and Goethe inhabit a Heraclitan uni-verse of flux, a universe wherein “None could swimthat very river \Twice, so quick the changes came.”Whitehead extends Heraclitus’ aphorism into episte-mology, remarking that “no thinker thinks twice; and,to put the matter more generally, no subject experi-ences twice.”’116 Even a million-year-old mountainvibrates in geologic rhythm: though relative to ourshort human lifespans it seems static, in earth-time“Like a wave it lifts and passes,/Back to atoms on theshore.” Even were it made to stand before us un-changing, we’d find ourselves still “with ever-changingeyes” unable to perceive it but in process. And yet,both thinkers also intuited an Eternal One at workwithin all things, a universal spirit reincarnate aseach particular, an archetypal power transforminglife into death, and death into rebirth.

See in each beginning, ending,Double aspects of the One;Here, amid stampeding objects,Be among the first to run,Thankful to the muses whose favorGrants you one imperishable thing:What the heart can hold to ponder;What the spirit shape to sing.117

115 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 289.116 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 29.117 Goethe, “Permanence in Change” (trans. John Frederick

Nims) in Christopher Middleton (ed.), Goethe, The Col-lected Works, Vol. 1 (Princeton University Press: 1983),169.