Spinoza, Goethe, and the Philosophy of Form

By

Michail Vlasopoulos

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master in Design Studies

History and Philosophy of Design Concentration

At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

May 2012

Copyright 2012 by Michail Vlasopoulos

The author hereby grants Harvard University permission to reproduce and distribute copies of this thesis document, in whole or in part for educational purposes.

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Michail Vlasopoulos

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

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Christopher D. Johnson

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, GSAS

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Martin Bechthold Sanford Kwinter

Master in Design Studies, Co-Chair Master in Design Studies, Co-Chair

Professor of Architectural Technology Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism

1

In loving memory of my father,

the Spinozist

2

Contents

Abstract 4

Introduction 5

The Metaphysics of Morphology 8

A Spinozistic Goal 8

Man and Nature: Transparency and Participation 10

The Principle of Sufficient Reason 12

The Principle of Continuity 15

Monism 18

Naturalism 19

The Geometry of Morphology 24

Universality 26

Necessity of Relations 27

Apathy 28

Synthetic Method 29

The Tenor of the Metaphor 36

The Structure of the Science of Morphology 38

The Within and the Without 38

The Bee and the Flower 41

The Voice of the Urtypus 42

Images 46

Bibliography 50

3

Abstract

Influenced by Baruch de Spinozas magnum opus, the Ethics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set

out to find an inherent spiritual gauge of living things, within what he called the mysterious

architecture of formative forces. Goethes research was crystallized in the concept of an archetype, an

Urtypus that could be used as a thread to find his way through the labyrinth of animal structure. This

essay explores the metaphysical principles that supported the founding of morphology. Goethe

employed the metaphysical structure of Spinozas universe as well as the scale of his geometric method

for his ascent to the higher laws inscribed in the forms of Nature. This essay treats Spinozas

metaphysics and Goethes morphology as facets of the same vision for a unification of explanatory

principles. Spinozas Rationalism sees the world as a web of conceptual connections that extends

equally over all the contents of the world. On the other side of the same coin, Goethes morphology

treats the world as a web of interrelated forms. Consequently, as Robert Richards sees evolutionary

theory as Goethean morphology running on geological time, Goethes morphology shall be presented

as an offshoot of Spinozistic metaphysics taken away from its geometric flatness and extending into the

fields of transformation.

4

Introduction

Spinoza and Goethe were drawn to eternal things. They each invested a substantial amount of

effort in their respective lifelong quests for an elusive philosophical object of desire: a definitive

explanation of our changeable world and our place in it, premised on an understanding of the more

stable and incorruptible things. Usually, this kind of thoroughgoing devotion to universals is motivated

by bitterness with the earthly particulars. And the forms of these eternal worlds are given to us as

logical negations of our sensible finite reality. As a matter of biographical fact, before they had begun

to contemplate the amaranthine features of the world, both Spinoza and Goethe experienced emotional

frustration due to their friction with the fluctuating nature of earthly affairs.1

In the beginning of the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (henceforth TIE, published circa.

1661) we find Spinoza coming to a crossroads in life.2 He recounts his pivotal decision to abandon the

reassuring materialistic life of his time in order to seek a true and communicable good, something that

would bring him closer to unalloyed joy, entirely exempt from sadness.3 In a passage from his

autobiography that deals with Spinoza, Goethe writes that we are equipped with a means for

renouncing our cherished objects of the moment, replacing one passion for the other as we constantly

make our way through new models of life. The beginning of the TIE finds Spinoza standing on a

threshold between two radically different stances in life. But Spinoza isnt just rejecting his old

passions to replace them with new ones. Instead, he concentrates this indwelling

volatility (Leichtsinn) to completely resign from the world of passions in one grand act of total self-

renunciation.4 He seeks for that oceanic pleasure that would keep him afloat in the turbulent sea of

human passions. And most strikingly for Goethe, Spinozas commitment does not expect something in

return: it is a one-sided intellectual love of the eternal, a devotion to imperishable things. Unfortunately,

5

1 It has been rumored from Colerus, that Spinoza fell in love with Clara, the daughter of Franz van den Enden, the free-thinker whose school he attended circa 1654.

2 Spinoza writes in his TIE, 7: For I saw that I was in the greatest danger, and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all my strength, however uncertain it might belike a man suffering from a fatal illness, who, foreseeing certain death unless he employs a remedy, is forced to seek it, however uncertain, with all his strength. Spinoza, The Collected Works, ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, c1985), 9.

3 Spinoza, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, 10 and 13, in Curley, Edwin ed. The Collected Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, c1985), 10.

4 Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, trans. John Oxenford, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole, vol. I (London: Robertson, Ashford and Bentley, 1902), 308.

he paid the price for this superhuman task by being esteemed by others as in-human,5 Goethe

remarks, a monster carrying out a monstrous philosophical vision.

Tellingly, Goethe immerses himself in the crystalline world of Spinozas Ethics following a

painful rejection. As a matter of fact, not only is Goethe using the Ethics to cultivate his own unusual

nature, but also to sedate his passions. It is in Spring and Summer of 1773, when twenty-four-year-old

Goethe plunges into Spinozas work for the first time, possibly as a way of distracting himself from the

intense anguish that Lotte Buffs marriage to Johann Christian Kestner caused him.6 Goethe confesses

that what struck him in Spinoza was the reconciling calm induced by the precision of his

mathematical method, standing in direct contrast with the poets own sensitivity.7 However, Spinozas

Ethics meant a lot more to Goethe than a sedative.

Goethe models his scientific method on the content and the form of Spinozas Ethics. He employs

the metaphysical structure of Spinozas universe as well as the scale of his geometric method for his

ascent to the higher laws inscribed in the forms of Nature. Goethe recalls in his autobiography how

much his whole mode of thinking was affected by Spinoza.8 Admittedly, every time he had to go back

to his works the same calm air breathed over him, a phrase that is followed by a dramatic statement:

I gave myself up to this reading, and thought, while I looked into myself, that I had never before so

clearly seen through the world.9 What could this through mean in the context of Goethes

fascination with Spinoza? Something in the work of this eminent seventeenth-century philosopher had

been mediating Goethes scientific outlook. Heinrich Heine claimed that all contemporary philosophers

possibly without knowing it, look through glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.10 The metaphor of

6

5 But, since in this there is something super-human, such persons are commonly esteemed in-human (monsters), without a God and without a World. People hardly know what sort of horns and claws to give them (Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 308-309).

6 Goethe first read Spinoza's Ethics in spring and summer of 1773, perhaps to escape the bondage of the passions that constricted him during the wedding of Lotte Buff (Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 377).

7 In book XIV of his autobiography, Goethe recalls: The all-composing calmness of Spinoza was in striking contrast with my all-disturbing activity; his mathematical method was the direct opposite of my poetic humour and my way of writing; and that very precision, which was thought ill-adapted to moral subjects, made me his enthusiastic disciple, his most decided worshipper (Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 261-262). In book XVI, Goethe recalls: I well remembered what peace of mind and clearness of ideas came over me when I first turned over the posthumous works of that remarkable man (Ibid., 307) and My confidence in Spinoza rested on the serene effect he wrought in me (Ibid., 309).

8 This mind, which had worked upon me thus decisively, and which was destined to affect so deeply my whole mode of thinking, was Spinoza. (Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 261). On 7th November 1816, Goethe writes to Zelter from Weimar: Barring Shakespeare and Spinoza, I do not know that any dead writer has had such an effect upon me (Goethes Letters to Zelter. With Extracts from those of Zelter to Goethe, 140).

9 Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 308 [Emphasis mine].

10 Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, 70.

Heinrich Heine suggests that the philosophical understanding of Nature at the turn of the eighteenth

century is premised on a particular modality of perception. The glass here may be a suitable vehicle

for this correlationSpinoza being a professional lens-grinder in addition to an influential philosopher

but the tenor of this metaphor remains unclear in particular as it relates to the genesis of Goethes

morphology.

7

The Metaphysics of Morphology

A Spinozistic Goal

In 1756, a seven-year-old Goethe attempted to literally worship Deus sive Natura by building an

altar for his formless deity composed of Its own works. The altar was put together in such a way to

represent the world symbolically. His simulacrum consisted of a stack of specimens from his natural

history museum placed on his fathers red lacquered music stand. Built one on top of the other in tiers,

his representatives of nature were topped with kindling tapers, the flame of which symbolized the

aspirations of mans heart towards his Maker.11

Goethes lifelong quest looks like an adult version of his boyhood altar: to simulate Nature

through its representative products. Goethe leads a truly Spinozistic life, dedicated to the study of the

imperishable things that lie beneath the transience of worldly forms. Just like in Spinoza, a new way of

life offers a lifesaving and soul-preserving remedy. From Italy, on the humble soil of which he would

glimpse the enduring forms of the Ideal, he writes:

I should like to occupy myself solely with relations that are enduring, and thus, according to Spinoza, to win eternity for my spirit.12

Goethe chooses organic being as the point of entry to these enduring relations, most specifically in the

form of the humble plant. At some early point in his study of Spinoza, he must have come across the

memorable phrase near the end of the Ethics: The more we understand singular things, the more we

understand God.13 In June 1785, Goethe writes to Jacobi about how much Spinoza encourages him to

see God in the natural world in rebus singularibus and in herbis et lapidibus, to see the universal and

the divine in every humble singularity, in mere rocks and plants.14 Next year, in another letter to Jacobi

dated May 5, 1786 Goethe quotes Spinozas conception of scientia intuitiva, the third and higher kind

8

11 Near the end of Book I of his Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe recalls in third-person narrative: The God who stands in immediate connection with nature, and owns and loves it as his work, seemed to him the proper God, who might be brought into closer relationship with man, as with everything else, and who would take care of him, as of the motion of the stars, the days and seasons, the animals and plants. . . . The boy could ascribe no form to this Being: he therefore sought him in his works, and would, in the good Old-Testament fashion, build him an altar. Natural productions were set forth as images of the world, over which a flame was to burn, signifying the aspirations of man's heart toward his Maker (Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 40).

12 Cited in Albert Bielschowsky 1788-1815; From The Italian Journey to the Wars of Liberation, vol. 2 of The Life of Goethe, trans. William A. Cooper (NY and London: G. P. Puntam's Sons, 1907), 163.

13 Ethics, VP24 in Curley, ed. A Spinoza reader: The Ethics and Other Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 257.

14 WA 4.7:63, 64 cited in Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1984), 162.

of knowledge. It is a knowledge that, as Spinoza defines: proceeds from an adequate idea of the

formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.15

These words have a tremendous impact on Goethe. Not only is a vision starting to appear in Goethes

mind but is also formulated in clearly Spinozistic terms:

These few words give me the courage to devote my life to the contemplation of those things which I can reach and of whose essentia formali I can hope to form an adequate idea.16

Four months after this last letter to Jacobi, at noon, Goethe leaves Weimar for a trip to Italy, where he

embarks on a quixotic journey that will eventually lead him to his finis: the crystallization of an

adequate idea of the plant, the invention of the concept of the Urpflanze. On the basis of this conceptual

understanding of plant form, Goethe will eventually construct an entire science of form, bridging the

plant with the insect and the human cranium (fig. 3 and diagram 1). Thus, Spinozas intuitive

knowledge is the starting point of Goethes science of morphology.

The science of morphology is a form of applied Spinozism that investigates forms of being within

the becoming of forms. It was founded by Goethe as a discipline for the understanding of the unity that

underlies the variety of organic forms. Within the very composite word morphology we trace the

conflation of form () with discourse (the suffix derived from ). The suffix of the

word is a promise for the possibility of a rational, discursive approach to phenomena pertaining to

organic transformation. Reason turns to the qualitative species of phenomena that were ostracized by

Newtonian science, the kind of intensive events that cannot be studied with extensive measures, nor

accounted for with fixed symbols.

In order to capture the logic of form and formation, Goethe premises his scientific program on a

philosophical model of Nature that is deeply rooted in Spinozas metaphysics. And this Nature is

neither green, nor chaotic, nor irrational. It is a conceptual construct that comes into being as a

community of metaphysical principles. This particular conception of Nature that was forged by Spinoza

and employed by Goethe is demarcated by five axiomatic commitments: 1) the co-extensiveness of

Nature and Man, embodied in an epistemic optimism that would eventually imbue Romantic science in

general; 2) the adoption the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the aversion to any brute facts in Nature,

9

15 Ethics, IIP40, S2, 141. Hoc cognoscendi genus procedit ab adaequata idea essentiae formalis quorundam Dei attributorum ad adaequatum cognitionem essentiae rerum. Goethe according to David Bell identifies his own Anschauung with the Intuitive knowledge of Spinoza. See David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe, 162.

16 WA 4.7:214 cited in Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe, 162.

3) the conviction that Nature consists in the continuity of forms instead of discreet units, a conviction

epitomized by the Principle of Continuity; 4) the commitment to the existence of One thing, as

embodied in the philosophical and morphological Monism; and finally 5) the thesis that all things

related to each other are governed by necessary and ecumenical laws, embodied in the spirit of

Naturalism. These five commitments intertwine in Goethes philosophical understanding of Nature, an

intellectual locus of all objects of Goethes scientific inquiry along with objects of his creative genius.

It may even be concluded that Goethes eternal laws of form are deduced from the very form Spinoza

gave to the eternal laws. Thus, by turning his scientific attention to this new science of forms, Goethe

gives a sensible form to the purely conceptual construct of Spinoza.

Man and Nature: Transparency and Participation

Nowadays, Reason or ratio may appear detached from what we conventionally refer to as

Nature. The familiar structure of our human-bound logic seems far removed from Natures

recalcitrance. Most of the times Nature seems to violate human logic or at the very least, contain dark

areas that no logic can enlighten. However, during the diachronic construction of the concept Nature,

there was no lack of points of convergence, moments of rationalization of Nature or even more

interestingly, instances of the naturalization of reason.

For a seventeenth-century Rationalist philosopher such as Spinoza, Man17 is capable of

participation in the logical structure of Nature; he is by nature, as it were, able to conduct metaphysics

and come face to face with reality. Reason is the locus of truth, the path where the idea meets with its

object, or the place that our mind-dependent reality conforms with the mind-independent contents of

the world. The world can be explained in terms of a chain of logical connections that is, by principle,

accessible to human beings. Spinoza is a philosopher who culminates the vision of seventeenth-century

Rationalism, and who, I would argue, touches the limit of its application. He considers intelligibility

the most natural feature of the world; the ability for something to be conceived or explained is the

condition for the possibility of its existence.18 In other words, Nature is axiomatically rational and

reason is natural.

All scientific inquiry for Spinoza ought to revolve around a single goal: the knowledge of the

10

17 I am choosing to use the outdated word Man with capital m instead of human or human being as a way to invoke the anthropic subject as conceived in the seventeenth century, both linguistically and metaphysically.

18 In Spinozas work, to be conceived is coextensive with to be explained. See Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (London: Routledge, 2008).

union which the mind has with the whole of Nature. This was after all the very goal of his self-

renunciation in the TIE: the conceptual frame of a new human nature and the limit of its attainment. For

that matter, there must have been sufficient reason to support this radical remodeling of his whole life

around it; an existentially fulfilling vision to compensate for what is left behind. The epistemic stance

of Spinoza was based on the metaphysical convictionthat appeared very early in the history of

Western thoughtthat human cognition is just a part of a universal Reason that governs everything.

For Spinoza, the universe is comprised by things held together by meaningful, conceptual relations,

even independently from our minds. Some things are conceived through themselves, called

substances, the basic constituents of the world. The other category pertains to things conceived

through something other than themselves, called modes. Explanation then, for Spinoza, is the modus

operandi of the Universe. A clear mark of this axiomatic commitment can be found in the second

axiom of the first part of the Ethics: What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived

through itself,19 which leads to the declaration in the demonstration of Proposition 4: Whatever is, is

either in itself or in another . . . outside the intellect there is nothing except substances and their

affections.20 This act of conceiving takes place in the infinite intellect of Spinozas God, that is to

say in a self-subsistent system of ideas in which every finite idea partakes. Any human being can

improve his perceptual ability by contemplating actively the logical structure of the world, a general

notion of which he can access from within the anthropological limits of his intellect. It may be

impossible for the human mind to grasp the world in its infinitude of elements and their relations, but in

principle, there is no qualitative difference between human minds and Gods mind. But this epistemic

optimism is evident not only in Spinoza but in Goethe as well. Goethe sees the human mind as capable

of perceiving the seed . . . of a relation which would have a harmony beyond the minds power to

comprehend or experience once the relation is fully developed; and such a perception would be the

most wonderful [impression] bestowed on the mind of man.21

As with Spinozas Ethics, Goethes theories and discoveries presuppose that Nature is a coherent

and logic-friendly field. The poem True Enough: To the Physicist, Goethes refutation of Albrecht

von Hallers anti-naturalist beliefs, reveals a remarkable Spinozistic undertone, as it asserts the

11

19 Ethics, IA2, 86.

20 Ibid., IP4D.

21 Goethe, A Study Based on Spinoza In Scientific Studies, vol. 12 of Goethe: The Collected Works, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 9.

complete intelligibility of Nature. For Goethe, Man can have access to explanation exactly because he

constitutes a peripheral part of Natures logical field.

Into the core of NatureO PhilistineNo earthly mind can enter.. . .Happy the mortal creature To whom she shows no more Than the outer rind,. . .Nature has neither core Nor outer rind, Being all things at once. Its yourself you should scrutinize to see Whether youre center or periphery.22

. . .

Goethe argued strongly for the unity and compatibility of the healthy human organ with Nature.

He thought that the human body and mind could be the laboratory for a new kind of scientific

experiment that until then was confined within the boundaries of the objective world, a territory of

prediction and mastery that insulates itself from the human subject. For Goethe, Man is the most

accurate sensor of qualitative data, bits of truth that are invisible to artificial quantitative experiments.

As he writes to Zelter in July 22, 1808, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument

possible.23 By knowing more about the human being we discover more about Nature and vice versa.

Goethe promotes a transparency between the two terms that renders any sharp line between them

unjustifiable, a position emblematic of the entire Romantic Era.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

The core of the epistemological optimism of both thinkers is embodied in a powerful

metaphysical principle: the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter PSR), which expresses the

Rationalist demand for the full intelligibility of the world. Although it is usually attributed to G. W.

Leibnizwho built an entire system around the commitment to itSpinozas philosophy can be read

12

22 Goethe True Enough: To the Physicist (1820), trans. Michael Hamburger in Selected Poems, vol. 1 of Goethe: The Collected Works, ed. Christopher Middleton (NJ: Princeton University Press 1994), 237.

23 Letter to Zelter, July 22, 1808, Maxims and Reflections in Scientific Studies, 311.

as having one of the most consistent and thorough applications of the PSR, probably in the entire

history of western philosophy. The PSR states that everything in the world must have an explanation,

which amounts to stating there can be no brute facts in nature. In other words, if something exists,

there must be a sufficient reason to account for its existence, a reason that if stated would make its

existence fully intelligible. All this simply means that everything must be premised in something, either

in itself, or in another. All effects are necessarily inherent in something. No such thing as a spontaneous

event can appear, but on the contrary, everything is grounded in and explained by antecedent causes.

This principle was invoked in an era in which nature was conceived of as a capricious and

recalcitrant environment, full of unjustified distinctions, such as the exceptional role of human form in

the universe, or the local effects of the spiritual realm that were supposed to intervene in matter-bound

causality. There were why questions that simply could not be answered; brute or unexplainable facts

that were impervious to explanation or human grasp and towards which thinkers developed an

irrational stance.

Under the grinding force of Spinozas Naturalism, all distinctions and bifurcations in nature

lose their relief in favor of a uniform continuum, wholly permeable to explication. As a result of

Spinozas thoroughgoing commitment to the PSR, the thing that is ultimately upheld is the

intelligibility of Nature, the logical structure of the world itself. As PSR forces us to see nature as fully

intelligible, there is no why question that lacks an answer. Not unlike Spinozas lenses, the whole

world is grounded to such an extent that nothing remains inexplicable or unintelligible. All that we

perceive in our common world of causally related objects is in the end just a series of explanations.

This is achieved philosophically by what Michael Della Rocca expounds as a twofold use of the

PSR.

Spinoza wants to explain what causality is: there must be a sufficient reason to explain what it is

for something to be the cause of a certain state of affairs. This is the first use of the PSR. The second

use purports to give a definite answer by doubling on itself. What causality is, is simply a way of

explaining some events by others. We see that PSR reaches its terminal limit after its twofold

application to a subject. The only thing that there is no need to explain further is explanation itself. As

Della Rocca argues in his book on Spinoza,24 if we fully follow Spinozas thoroughgoing commitment

to the PSR, we soon find that everything is explained in terms of explanation itself. Consequently, what

1324 Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (London: Routledge, 2008).

best characterizes the metaphysical composition of Spinozas world is a web of explanation. Even

existence itself for Spinoza is just a state of explanation. For example, to be is simply to be explained,

or to be the cause of something is simply to explain it, or as Della Rocca so succinctly puts it: Our

place in the world simply is the way in which we are explained by certain things and can serve to make

intelligiblei.e., explaincertain other things.25 The PSR is the fuel of his ambitious drive for

explanation and the common semantic ground for all terms that he deploys in the Ethics: power,

perfection, psychology, consciousness, conatus, causality. All his terminological machinery converges

semantically and bottoms out metaphysically to intelligibility itself. In the end, as Della Rocca argues

the PSR is the structure and what the structure structures.26

If we turn now to Goethe, what governs his science of morphology, and even grounds its

possibility as a science, is the metaphysical view that existence must be expressed through form. This

in turn means that if we are to delve into the metaphysical structure of the world, we have to turn to the

study of forms:

Morphology rests on the conviction that everything which exists must signify and reveal itself. From the first physical and chemical elements to the mental expression of man we find this fundamental principle to hold. We turn immediately to that which has form. The inorganic, the vegetative, the animal, the humaneach signifies itself, each appears as what it is to our external and our internal sense. Form is changeable, becoming, passing. The doctrine of form is the doctrine of alteration. The doctrine of metamorphosis is the key to all the signs of nature.27

Here, we see yet another aspect of Goethes epistemic optimism, convinced as he is that all phenomena

in the world are sensible by our sensory apparatus and conceivable by our cognitive faculties. However,

we should not treat this as an empiricist approach to the study of forms. Although it may appear that

the inorganic, the vegetative, the animal, the human form pertains to an object of sensory experience,

form for Goethe means something far removed from the senses and closer to an object of pure

Reason.28 Form is a medium of ontological expression and not a mere object of our sensory experience.

14

25 Della Rocca, Spinoza, 2.

26 Della Rocca, Spinoza, 79.

27 Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, 1st division, 10: 128, cited in Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution; the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwins Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 36.

28 For example, at some point he uses the term Reason to refer to the faculty that allows us to enter the Ur-phenomena, the place where divine forces are at work.

There is, for that matter, a metaphysics of forms rather than a phenomenology of forms.29 This is clear

in zoological cases of where, although he cannot retrieve evidence of the archetype of some vertebrate

species through his senses, he nonetheless emphatically asserts the presence of the type metaphysically

as a kind of a morphogenetic field that transcends appearances.30

If, by way of Spinozas PSR, existence amounts to explanation or conceivability, existence for

Goethe is linked to morphological expression. In the same way we find no inexplicable facts in

Spinozas Nature, there are no formless events in Goethes Nature. In similar terms, Goethes Nature is

what can be expressed in form, just like Spinozas Nature is what can be explained. Since there are no

formless events in Goethes Nature, the presence of each thing has to be explained in terms of its prior

morphological stage. That leads to the view that there is no form that is really immune to

transformation or not yielding to explanation by the principles of metamorphosis. In turn, the principle

that every form is only a snapshot in an entire sequence of forms renders all discreetness in the world a

mere illusion. Indeed, for Goethe there are no isolated events, but instead all phenomena overlap with

each other as parts of Natures compact expression. This leads to the next aspect of 31, the

theme of continuity.

The Principle of Continuity

The Principle of Continuity (hereafter PC) amounts to conceiving matter as a continuous quantity

and perceiving Nature as a continuum. According to the PC nothing passes from one state to another

without passing through all the intermediate states between the two. This means that there are no

discreet steps in natural processes that involve some ultimate elements in matter, time, or logic. There

are no such things as indivisible atoms, discreet units of time, or unanalyzable elements because their

compactness would involve brute facts. The logical demand that everything has its explanation, forces

us to see ostensibly isolated units or separated states as continua. In this way the PC performs a kind of

logical anastomosis of spatial and temporal constituents, to use a Goethean principle of

15

29 Goethe writes in 13 Feb. 1829: The Understanding will not reach her; man must be capable of elevating himself to the highest Reason, to come into contact with the Divinity, which manifests itself in the primitive phenomena (Urphnomenen), which dwells behind them, and from which they proceed (Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 238). Even under the Kantian framework that this passage resonates with, Reason is the faculty where metaphysics lives.

30 According to George Wells, we learn to see in a skeleton not merely what is there, but what must be there, because it belongs to the type underlying all forms. We learn to see with the minds eye, and such intellectual intuition enables us to discern not one but five fingers of the hoof of a horse. It is on the basis of such transcendent anatomy that Goethe credits man with the intermaxillary bone (Wells, Goethe and the Intermaxillary Bone, 359).

31 Im using brackets to signify the concept of , as opposed to the signifier Nature.

transformation. In space, in so far as matter is conceived of as a continuous extension without void, and

in time, in so far as all events occur in a gradual way. Any transformation in these terms is a sequence

of infinitesimally brief identities. The more closely differences are observed in space and time, the

more they diffuse in a temporal series of identities. The PC performed the key role in mathematics and

philosophy of eliminating finite distinctions by projecting them to infinity.

The PC was embodied in Leibnizs well-known axiom Natura non facit saltus, the thesis that

states nature does not make jumps. In turn, that last statement appeared in Carl Linnuss Systema

Natur (1735), in which the pioneering Swedish taxonomist anticipated a future in botanical science

where plants were to be treated as contiguous territories on a geographical map,32 fifty-four years

before Alexander von Humboldts Essai sur la gographie des plantes (1805).33 All Natural

Philosophers after Linnus purported to fill in the gaps that were opened up between species by

researching the interstitial spaces between the fragments of the Linnan taxonomies. It was a quest to

find a scientific explanation for the apparent semblance and variability between species, ways of

diffusing the sharp lines of Linnus table. Goethes botanical work can in many ways be seen as the

fulfillment of this Linnan instruction for an anticipated biogeography of plants.

From very early on in his career, Goethe was committed to a seamless unity that underlies the

multiplicity of phenomena, what he saw as a tapestry without gaps.34 Goethes commitment to the PC

can be traced back to his essay on Spinoza, where he stated that, The infinite cannot be said to have

parts.35 But it was not until his Italian journey that he turned this principle into a heuristic tool with

16

32 The fragments of the NATURAL METHOD are to be sought out studiously. This is the beginning and the end of what is needed in botany. Nature does not make leaps. All plants exhibit their contiguities on either side, like territories on a geographical map. Carolus Linnus, Philosophia botanica, trans. Stephen Freer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 40, 77.

33 In Linnuss Systema we locate a proto-ecological thinking through which the observer is now the object of his own analytical method. For the first time, human beings were placed next to other primates, subsumed in the category of Anthropomorpha. Human form is no longer the source of analogythe fundamental tool for metaphysics during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rather, the Human Being now is a mere point in a system of the binomial coordinates.

34 Douglas Miller, introduction to Scientific Studies, xiv.

35 Goethe, A Study Based on Spinoza in Scientific Studies, 8.

which to invent the Urpflanze.36

His method of intuiting unity across diverse components comes in two sequential parts: first, the

homologous patterns in leaf structure are retrieved empirically and described in terms of the same field

of forces. Subsequently, by keeping these frames in memory, the observer is picturing them not as

distinct formson pain of violation of the PCbut as states of a seamless process of transformation

that runs both forwards and backwards. Here is a report on his method, in his Studies for a Physiology

of Plants (1795/c. 1891):

If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole.

At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, but nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. I can do so by dissolving the particular without destroying the impression itself.37

Goethe had reenacted the actual trajectory the leaf traces behind throughout its growth as in a

fluid story of floral forms.38 To this very continuum he gives the name Proteus, the only thing that

can be identified with a shape-shifting entity that expresses itself divergently across the kingdom

Plantae. Consequently, he defines Metamorphosis of Plants as, the process, by which one and the

same organ presents itself to our eyes under protean forms.39 The identity of the Grundorgan in time

is explained by the view that every metamorphotic stage is asymptotically adjacent to the precedent and

the antecedent stage in a seamless sequence.

All the subsequent proceedings of his comparative anatomy are structured around the PC in the

understanding of form and formation. Goethe progressed from the conception of the Grundorgan, the

17

36 Goethe set off for Italy from Weimar at 3 A.M. in the evening of Sept. 3, 1786. During the years 1786-1788, he traveled through Rome, Naples, Sicily, where he admittedly had the best time of his life, studying and writing his botanical works. Goethe was exposed to a new spectrum of plant forms and most importantly to unprecedented variations of species that were already known to him. At first he expected to find a perfect embodiment of plant form on the ground, as a fulguration of the archetype on earth as real and tangible as the archetypal villa of Palladio that he visited in Vicenza, for which he wrote in his diary on Sept. 21, 1786 that [a]rchitecture, has never, perhaps, achieved a greater degree of luxury. However, after having failed to locate the Urpflanze in Italy, Goethe realized that it must grow in an entirely different place. From May to July 1787, his thinking enters into a wholly different arena: he had to forge the archetype mentally. He writes to Christian Nees von Esebeck in the middle of August 1816 about that particular period of his life: I sought at that time the Urpflanze, unaware that I sought the idea, the concept whereby we could develop it for ourselves (Goethes Werke, IV, 27: 144, cited in Lorraine Daston & Fernando Vidal, The moral authority of nature, 147).

37 Goethe, Studies for a Physiology of Plants in Scientific Studies, 75.

38 . . .Goethes overall intent was for the parts to form a whole and fluid story of floral forms in processto present, in effect, a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants (Gordon Miller, introduction to Metamorphosis of Plants, xix).

39 Goethe, Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklren (Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, Gotha, 1790), 4, cited in Goethes Botany: The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Tablers Ode to Nature (1782), vol. 10 of Chronica Botanica, no. 2, trans. Agnes Robertson Arber. Chronica botanica, v. 10, no. 2 (Waltham, Mass.: Chronica Botanica, 1946), 91.

subject of lawful metamorphosis, to the more general Grundform, a set of Grundorgane that bear a

constant relation to each other during different stages of the organisms life as well across different

species of organisms. Given the continuity in ontogenesis and in eidogenesis, research can be held and

explanation can take place across different stages of the same organism as well as across different

organisms in space. As Goethe writes to a friend, every creature is but a note of the great harmony,

which must be studied in the Whole, or else it is nothing but a dead letter.40

Monism

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the eminent French supporter of the Goethean project, is known to have

said, there is philosophically speaking only a single animal,41 a phrase that may also represent

Goethes own views about the unity of form across all beings. The oneness in form that is asserted in

Saint-Hilaires statement is indeed the logical limit of the morphological explanation. If you take the

PSR and PC and draw the consequences from their synthesis you end up with really one thing across

time and space. Nature for Goethe has a more-or-less single fundamental form that is expressed

divergently across its homologous members, as if they were parts of a universal organism, the one

Animal. This morphological Monism of Goethe could not be more relevant to Spinozas Substance

Monism, a philosophy of the one and only existent.

Spinoza, drawing upon the new metaphysics of Ren Descartes, his predecessor, contemplates

the three kinds of substantiality, namely, matter, mind and God. Once inside the intricate machinery of

Spinozas geometric demonstration, the reader of the Ethics soon discovers that there cannot be two

substances of the same nature, or that real individuals cannot actually share a particular feature or

relation42 (Ethics, IP5). Subsequently, if one follows the logic behind the definition of substantiality s/

he quickly reaches the conclusion that the category of substance can be exclusively attributed to one

thing. Drawing upon Descartes and armed with the powerful PSR, Spinoza stretches the concept of

18

40 Indeed, man is most intimately allied to animals. The co-ordination of the Whole makes every creature to be that which it is, and man is as much man through the form of his upper jaw, as through the form and nature of the last joint of his little toe. And thus is every creature but a note of the great harmony, which must be studied in the Whole, or else it is nothing but a dead letter. From this point of view I have written the little essay, and that is, properly speaking, the interest which lies hidden in it. Letter to Carl Ludwig von Knebel, November 17, 1784, in Goethe, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Bach (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1954, 208-209) translated in George Henry Lewes, The Story of Goethes Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1890), 250.

41 Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 304.

42 P5: In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. Ethics, IP5, 87.

substance to its logical limits. Everything is attracted to the One, the vanishing point of every

explanation, the only thing whose essence explains its existence. He thus attributed the term

substance to only one, self-caused, infinite thing. The logic behind Substance Monism generates a

new standpoint to contemplate the referent universe. In the conceptual laboratory of the philosopher,

the PSR and the PC become the philosophical organa for the anastomosis of the world.

Consequently, what Spinoza manages to do in the first part of the Ethics was to take the notion of

substance as it was applied in a plurivocal sense in Descartes (attributed to res extensa, res cogitans

and Deus accordingly) and to form an integrated philosophical system based on a univocal sense of

substantiality. By extending the prime metaphysical category of substance to its logical limits he

conflated all uses of substance to only one referent: a seamless, unitary substance that consists in an

infinity of attributes, two of which is extension and thought. But in order to do so, he declared what

Descartes only insinuated in his metaphysics, that we are mere modes, fleeting but nevertheless

interconnected states of a self-same medium. Everything is in God or Nature, not as parts but as modes,

that is to say finite affections or states of the substance. In this in and this or (Deus sive Natura)

lies the incendiary identification of Nature and God that branded Spinoza as an atheist for decades.

Naturalism

If the previous philosophical investigations uphold the singularity of Nature (whether it pertains

to a singular existent or a singular form) the doctrine of Naturalism deals with its uniformity. It states

that all things that bear some relation to each other are governed by the same laws. In other words, I

take the term Naturalism to refer to the conceptual impossibility of any unjustified exceptions or

bifurcations.43 In the essay Nature, George Christopher Tobler captures Goethes Naturalism in the

phrase: The one who does not see her everywhere sees her nowhere clearly.44 In other words,

as a concept must be reserved for a boundless, all-encompassing, fully intelligible referent.

On the other side of the coin, Spinozas Naturalism can be located in the famous passage on affects:

. . . But my reason is this: nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in it, for Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same, that is, the laws and rules of Nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely,

19

43 I follow Della Roccas concept of Naturalism that is grounded in Spinozas metaphysics.

44 Scientific Studies, 3.

through the universal laws and rules of Nature. . . .45

According to the doctrine of Naturalism, everything in the world abides by the same laws, through

which they can all be explained. There is no room for the old belief in the exceptional place of Man in

the universe, his free will, or the unnatural operation of human affects. It is easy to see how this

doctrine emerges from the PSR. Suppose that we have a place in Nature that is governed by some ad

hoc rules instead of the universal laws that apply to everything else. If these rules are subject to

explanationin pain of violation of the PSRthey have to be ultimately reduced to the more general

rules, or else their local application would constitute a brute fact. However, if they are explained by

those universal laws then they are not exceptions after all. This means that every local behavior in

Nature must relate to the higher and universal principles. If there exists something that cannot be

reduced to the same overarching principles that govern everything, then this would signify an

anomalous or brute fact, something that the PSR forbids. All this may appear as commonsensical to us

if we fail to pay attention to the historical context in which Naturalism emerged.

The world during the ages preceding the rise of modern scientific culture was explanatorily

incoherent, perforated as it were by effects of supernatural forces, occult qualities and an overall

exaltation of behavior toward natural ends. This plurality of bifurcated environments could not be

studied under universal terms, and suffered the symptoms of irrational belief and superstition. Founders

of mechanical philosophy, starting with Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and culminating in

Newton succeeded in naturalizing all reality through a univocal understanding of the material

constitution of the universe. Indeed, the material universe was understood as a stupendous clockwork

mechanism, whose purported homogeneous nature would render feasible the pursuit of a uniform

science and, most importantly, it would ensure the reproducibility of its results. In other words, the

pervasive mechanicity that was attributed to the world provided the metaphysical terms for its

absolute intelligibility. A human body, a clock, a tree, the Heavens are not causally isolated worlds with

an inherent tendency to reach preordained states or physical fates, but instead, they are all amenable to

the same kind of explanation through a mathematical quantity completely separated from teleological

considerations.

However, the century that comes right after these considerations was faced with new problems

that jeopardized the uniformity of the explanatory terms of mechanical philosophy. Science in Goethes

2045 Ethics, Preface to Part III, Of the Affects, 153.

time was preoccupied with achieving a quasi-Newtonian understanding of life processes. Albrecht

Haller was one of the most representative advocates of this approach. He wanted to explain organ

function in terms of vital forces, in the same way that Newton explained chemical and optical

phenomena by applying the concept of force. On the other hand, there were eminent scientists like

Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that argued for the irreducibility of vital

processes. According to them, life is manifested in goal-directed processes that are, in principle,

unexplainable by efficient causation. The problems of bio-causality would be the new center, around of

which eighteenth-century philosophers and naturalists reoriented their naturalistic demand for the

construction of a unified system of explanation.

Given the Rationalistic posture of eliminating any sharp lines in Nature, it becomes clearer that,

notwithstanding the differences in their subject matter, Spinozas geometric philosophy and Goethes

morphological science instantiate the same systematic attempt to explicate heterogeneous things in

terms of uniform laws and processes. By interpreting Goethean transformation as Spinozistic

explanation, this essay treats Spinozas metaphysics and Goethes morphology as facets of the same

vision for a unification of explanatory principles. Spinozas Rationalism sees the world in a web of

conceptual connections that bound together all the contents of the world, physical, psychological, moral

subjects alike. On the other side of the same coin, Goethes morphology treats the world as a web of

interrelated forms, cutting across members under the same kingdom (e.g. different species of Plantae,

or relations between Arthropoda and Vertebrata), as well as across entire kingdoms (e.g. Animalia and

Plantae) (fig. 3).

Consequently, its not so much that the organism has to be reduced to physical-chemical

processes, but reversely, the physical-chemical processes have to be described as degrees of organic

reality. Among the various objects of Romantic Science a new species of analogies and metaphors

emerged. The reduction from the complex to the simple reversed its direction: the organism is not an

extremely complicated machine, but the machine is an extremely simple organism. Everything can be

described as degrees of the same organic quality, a uniform body diversified by a vibrant field of vital

21

forces. The polarity of forces in Goethes scientific and poetic worksintensification and nullification,

diastole and systole, progress and regressconstituted a principle that expressed itself divergently in

various phenomena of the natural world and allowed the formulation of generative helixes that

explained growth, progressive change, semblance as well as difference. As Douglas Miller notes:

. . . [We] find this interplay of polarities in the expansion and contraction of leaf forms and vertebrae metamorphosis, the beat of music, the diastole and systole of the heart, inhaling and exhaling, acidification and deacidification.46

This approach is a way of reconciling the tensions of an entire era that William Blake so

brilliantly portrayed in his work Newton (fig 1). The print features Isaac Newton, the person who

became a designation of Physics itself, directing his immense genius downwards, onto the flatness of

a geometrical figure. At the same time, he seems oblivious to the wondrous, coral-like rock that

surrounds him, thereby possibly symbolizing the irreducible complexity of living tissue. The laws of

metamorphosis, albeit the malleable nature of their lawful expressions, nonetheless abide by the

universal laws of matter and spirit. Through Goethes Naturalism, the organic expression that was

reduced to Newtonian physics finds its way back into the geometric order of things. Moreover, in this

new picture of Nature a place was reserved for human expressivity.

Goethe, in reference again to Spinozas influence, declares that, Nature works after such eternal,

necessary, divine laws, that the Deity Himself could alter nothing in them.47 It is on this basis that he

develops his full-blown Naturalism by expounding the contrariety that haunts peoples minds regarding

Reason (meaning Free Will) on the one hand, and Necessity on the other, in absence of the Naturalistic

ideals. In his attempt to support the Spinozistic thesis, he presents himself as a spiritual automaton,48

indulging in a spontaneous and involuntary drive to represent Nature from within its own resources. He

regards his indwelling poetic talent altogether as Nature and explores his unconsciously driven poetic

activity, what possibly results in one of the earliest attempts of expression d'criture automatique.49 In

22

46 Miller, introduction to Scientific Studies, xvi.

47 Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 310.

48 The automa spirituale is a remarkable description of human soul that Spinoza uses in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (85), that operates according to necessary and determinate laws. A human being, or human mind traces a continuous trajectory on a plane of ideas, either affirming or denying them. For this reason, the human mind is not prior to its ideasas Descartes thoughtbut the mind consists in a collection of ideas corresponding to the human body. B says for that matter that, for Spinoza ideas are not like mute pictures on a panel [Ethics, IIP49S2 (II)] shaped and used at will. The human mind doesnt observe the ideas as if they were paintings, he thinks through them and with them (, introduction to , 50). In TIE, note of 34, Spinoza notes . . . apart from the idea there is neither affirmation, nor negation, nor any will (Curley, ed. Collected Works, 18).

49 Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life, 311-312.

the same passage, he regards his ardent desire for expression as something natural, even unconscious,

thus naturalizing his own poesis. His passion, looking through Spinozas lenses is presented as a part

of the geometry of the world or even an instrument for its observation.

Throughout the Romantic Era, emotion and personal expression will gain epistemological

significance to serve as instruments for the study of natural qualities. Perhaps this is the key for

studying the spirit of Spinozism that hovered over the entire Romantic epoch. There is a remarkable

passage in Spinozas Tractatus Politicus where he naturalizes human emotions by relating psychology

to meteorology. The archetypal Romantic natural phenomenon, the storm, is fundamentally of the same

kind and order as the internal turmoil of the Romantic subject.

So I have regarded human emotions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, pride, pity, and other agitations of the mind not as vices of human nature but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder, and such pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.50

This may as well be the hidden intellectual agenda in Friedrich Caspars, Wanderer Above the Sea of

Fog, the painter of the Naturalistic ideal par excellence, on the canvases of which Man and

environment meet as intensities of the same Nature (fig 2).

To put it in a nutshell, Goethes morphology is premised in the following chain of principles:

existence is expressed through form, that form comes in continuities, these continuities in turn are all

contained in one thing that is governed by necessary and universal laws. On these metaphysical

grounds, new species of comparisons, analogies and associations were made possible. Through

comparative anatomy, Goethes newly founded field, the Naturalistic ideal will be infused into the pre-

Darwinian life sciences. Still, what could these convictions about Nature and her uniform laws have to

do with Spinozas geometric method, the rigid form of the Ethics itself, that Goethe held so dear? How

could the methodological standpoint of the dispassionate student of passions have inspired a non-

anthropocentric standpoint in the anatomist?

2350 Spinoza, Political Treatise, 4 in Complete Works, 681.

The Geometry of Morphology

Notwithstanding the powerful naturalistic belief that equally fuels the ideas of Spinoza and

Goethe, the mos geometricus of the Ethics still seems prima facie in direct opposition to Goethes study

of labile biological forms. The living, breathing and growing object seems incompatible with the

geometric structure that Spinoza used as scaffolding for his masterpiece. French philosopher Henri

Bergson once claimed that a neophyte confronted with the quasi-mechanical complexity of Spinozas

Ethics is struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnought

class.51 Similarly Heinrich Heine considered this method antiquated and a huge defect, like a bitter

shell that holds a tasty kernel. But the rigor of the geometrical structure must have played a more

significant role for Goethe than just a stronghold from devastating affects. Goethe confesses that he

read enough of himself into the Ethics (identifying his own self among the subjects of the Ethics), so

that, except from a sedative for his passions, it opened out for him a free, wide view over the sensible

and moral world seemed to open before me.52

If the content of Spinozistic metaphysics presents Nature as a web of explanation, the form of this

metaphysical web as well as the method of exposition is geometry. The Ethica, ordine Geometrico

Demonstrata, in its full title, is modeled according to the paradigm of Euclids Elements, the closest

there was to a seventeenth-century Rationalists conception of Scientia. The latter was considered to be

the mother of all sciences, a systematic body of knowledge that is founded on self-evident axioms and

primitive definitions on which an entire system of propositions can be laid out in an orderly deductive

fashion. However, Spinozas geometric demonstration is not meant as a mere model of scientific

enquiry, but aspires to say something about the world itself. The Ethics aspired not only to represent,

but to becomequa content and forma fragment of Nature, the Book of Nature par excellence.

Spinoza presented his version of Scientia as a simile for the coherence and intelligibility of the

metaphysical structure of the world. As such, it was chosen to reflect the uniformity and necessity of

the laws of Nature, that which deserves an equally uniform method of exposition. But in order to

uncover the meaning behind the geometric method we need some more detail on Spinozas ontological

structure of the world.

24

51 Nevertheless I know of nothing more instructive than the contrast between the form and the matter of a book like the Ethics: on the one hand those tremendous things called Substance, Attribute and Mode, and the formidable array of theorems with the close network of definitions, corollaries and scholia, and that complication of machinery, that power to crush which causes the beginner, in the presence of the Ethics, to be struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnought class (Bergson, Key Writings, 236-237).

52 Goethe, Truth and Fiction Relating to My life, 261, book XIV.

Spinoza closed everything in a Parmenidean-like Being, a self-identical, immobile existent.

However, the way in which substance perseveres in its identity through incessant transformations

presupposes a refined internal relation between being and becoming. Spinoza here espouses two

voices for his ontological structure, as it was originally introduced by Cusanus and Bruno. Natura

naturans (naturing nature) pertains to the active part of the Substance, as the immanent cause of all

its effects, and Natura naturata (natured nature) to the passive effects thereof.53 The two voices of

Spinozas universe are interwoven within the same analytic statement of Gods identity. In other words,

Natura naturata is conceptually connected with Natura naturans in the same way the properties of a

triangle necessarily follow from its definition.

I think I have shown clearly enough that from Gods supreme power, or infinite nature, infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, i.e., all things, have necessarily flowed, or always follow, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles.54

This self-contained entitythe function that relates Natura naturans with Natura naturata is

the only thing that is explained through itself, i.e. the explanation lies within itself, whereas any other

dependent thing is explained through another. This difference allows the circulation of explanation

from causes to effects. The causal force of the active part of Nature is channeled through what one

scholar calls a cascade of effects55 on the edges of which finite beings grow as part of the protean

epidermis of the substance. This is also the fuel that keeps the geometric machine of the Ethics

running and producing new propositions, scholia, corollaries. In other words, the dynamic unfolding of

Nature occurs by and through geometric necessity, just like the unfolding of its definition in the

subsequent propositions. Since, the effects are anticipated in the premises, they are only causally

posterior and not ontologically separate. This is Spinozas immanent causality expressed in geometric

language. We cannot separate Natura naturata from Natura naturans just as we cannot set apart the

properties of the triangle from its definition. So then, to represent this ontological structure and follow

the current of explanation, as it were, one has to proceed from the cause to the effects, to begin from

25

53 [B]y Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God (Ethics, IP29 Scholium, 104-105).

54 Ethics, IP17S, 98.

55 Martial Gueroult, Spinoza, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1968), I. 9.

a self-evident definition of everything, and draw out all of its consequences synthetically. All axioms,

postulates, and scholia are presented as explications of the definition of Deus, through which the writer

aspires to represent the story of their ontological dependence on their generative cause. The

geometrical narrative unfolds with necessity from the premise of all things, God, to its conclusions, the

laws of nature, matter, mind, freedom etc. In other words, the mos geometricus simulates the modus

operandi of the world.

For these reasons, the Ethics is, to us, more like a fossil that contains archaeological information

of the causal structure of Nature that once dwelled in the philosophers mind, rather than an arbitrary

garment for a philosophical content. This reading reflects a popular belief among contemporary

Spinoza scholars that treat the form of the Ethics, as a necessary consequent of its content, so that the

character of the method which Spinoza fixed upon for the problem of philosophy involved in advance

the metaphysical character of its solution.56

The features of the geometric method that mirror actual features of Spinozas Nature can be

summed up in the following order: 1) Universality across different objects; 2) Necessity of relations

between things as matter of conceptual connection; 3) Aesthetic objectivity; 4) Synthetic method from

the cause to the effects.

Universality

Between the lines of the following passage from Spinozas Ethics, we can trace the reason behind

the application of the mos geometricus for the study of such a seemingly alien subject for geometry: the

human passions. Spinozas account for his method is contained in a passage that follows directly after

the one in which we located Naturalism. The passage is so revealing regarding the relation between the

Naturalistic content and the geometric form that it is worth quoting at length:

But my reason is this: nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in it, for Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same, that is, the laws and rules of Nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely, through the universal laws and rules of Nature.

The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, and the like, considered in themselves, follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as the other singular things. And

26

56 [T]he real process of the procedure of things forth from God must be thought after the analogy of the logical procedure of the consequent from its ground or reason, and thus the character of the method which Spinoza fixed upon for the problem of philosophy involved in advance the metaphysical character of its solution (Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 396).

therefore they acknowledge certain causes, through which they are understood, and have certain properties, as worthy of our knowledge as the properties of any other thing, by the mere contemplation of which we are pleased. Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.57

Goethe admitted how much this method struck him in an emotionally turbulent time. Spinozas

geometrical thinking enforces his Naturalism insofar as it renders everything connected to each other. It

is the form of the unitary web of explanation that permeates all singular things and reveals the roots of

their geometric exposition. All singular things, a mountain, a storm, even Goethes devastation after

Lotte Buffs rejection, would all be observed from the same dispassionate standpoint of the

philosopher, as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies. Analogously, the principles of

metamorphosis as the driving forces of all nature constitute Goethes own view from everywhere that

allows a universal explanation of anatomy, botany, meteorology, musicology and optics. The geometry

of the Ethics as well as the geometry of the forces of metamorphosis, work as universal and unitary

modes of explaining a variety of phenomena.

Necessity of Relations

It should be noted however, that metamorphosis, at least as it was perceived in the seventeenth

century, was something that Spinoza vehemently attacked in his writings, both in the TIE as well as in

the Ethics. Spinoza heavily criticized metamorphosis as being suspicious of superstition and the lack of

knowledge.58

But as we have said, the less men know Nature, the more easily they can feign many things, such as, that trees speak, that men are changed in a moment into stones and into springs, that nothing becomes something, that even Gods are changed into beasts and into men, and infinitely many other things of that kind. 59

In a passage from the Ethics, his words echo a similar negative attitude towards the metamorphosis and

the confusion that it relates to:

27

57 Ethics, Preface to Part III, Of the Affects, 153.

58 It has been argued that the passage on his TIE refers to Roman poet Ovids Metamorphoses. As a matter of fact, Ovid seems to have reintroduced an element of caprice in the natural processes, some room for the unexplained or the brute fact, to re-mystify the world of Lucretius that preceded his own poem andexcept from the brute spontaneity of the clinamen reduced every form to the universal units of explanation, the atoms.

59 Spinoza, TIE 58 in The Collected Works, 27.

. . . for those who do not know the true causes of things confuse everything and without any conflict of mind feign that both trees and men speak, imagine that men are formed both from stones and from seed, and that any form whatever is changed into any other.60

These passages indicate that the common belief in Spinozas time regarded metamorphosis as

something that bends the laws of Nature, circumventing of the orderly establishment of natural forms.

Indeed, metamorphosis has been a principal metaphysical problem for lots of ancient thinkers;

Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Aristotle to mention a few, all dealt with this inexorable

problematic: How, from a given something, do you get something else? How do we make sense of this

disruption of the identity over time? It seems that Spinoza implies there is an order that governs the

alteration of forms that, even if it remained elusive for his time, it could never be found to elude the

necessary and uniform order of Nature. Thus, we should read Spinozas harsh critique as an

anticipation of a demystification of metamorphosis, a way of perceiving it as geometrical in its

explanation as any other subject.

Along this Naturalist line of motivation, Goethe seems to have applied the rigor and transparency

of Spinozas approach to the fluid alterations of biological form. In Goethes work, we find the rigor of

conceptual connections that bind together the terms in the Ethics, and which are used for the

rationalization of events of qualitative metamorphosis. Metamorphosis for Goethe can be treated as a

conceptual connection between forms, a way of explaining each form in terms of antecedent and

subsequent stages in the transformation of a single archetype. There are necessary, conceptual relations

across metamorphotic stages of the same entity through time as well as necessary vertical relations

between different species and the archetype. In fact, Goethe will eventually describe the principles that

guide metamorphosis as algebraic formulas, thus framing the relations between forms as necessary

and rigorous as the relations between ideas. Douglas Miller argues that:

In Goethe's view, these metamorphoses are as subject to natural law as any algebraic formula or line-of-sight computation, and he admonishes us to bring the same sense for truth and regularity to qualitative events as we would bring to mathematical work.61

Apathy

In a different passage earlier in the Ethics, Spinoza argues for a detachment of the concepts of

right-wrong or beautiful-ugly from things, concepts that humans assign according to how well they

28

60 Ethics IP8, Scholium 2, 88.

61 Douglas Miller, introduction to Scientific Studies, xv.

serve needs or agree to our own constitution. The pure science of mathematics offers, according to

Spinoza, a unique and objective view from a place that has neither sensory prejudices nor teleological

thinking. In the past, mathematics liberated the human race from the territory of his psychology and the

wiring of his senses and showed a different standard of truth.

So they maintained it as certain that the judgments of the gods far surpass man's grasp. This alone, of course, would have caused the truth to be hidden from the human race to eternity, if mathematics, which is concerned not with ends, but only with the essences and properties of figures, had not shown men another standard of truth.62

Goethe, too, infuses this aesthetic apathy to his own scientific method. In one of his pivotal essays on

method, The Experiment As Mediator between Object and Subject written in 1792, about two years

after the publication of his pamphlet on the Metamorphosis of Plants, he suggests that the true botanist

has to leave behind the yardstick of the human standpoint and assume the neutral view of a

seemingly godlike being, directing his dispassionate gaze outwards like the sun shines on all plants

equally. The scientific measurement must be discovered in the sphere of his observations and not

applied arbitrarily from the center of his own subject.63 For Goethe, everything has the same

significance, either thistle or flower and that it should not be valued according to how well each serve

human purposes. He thus argues for a uniform allocation of scientific interest and aesthetic judgment

over all beings. Just like the geometric method extends over moral and sensible subjects, the scientist

must learn to transcend his aesthetic predispositions and reach out to the external world in a uniform

way. In short, in the same way that Spinoza approaches human affects from a non-human dispassionate

perspective, Goethe studies human anatomy from the standpoint of a non-anthropomorphic archetype.

Synthetic Method

We already discussed the way Goethes morphology is premised on the principle that existence is

expressed through form, that form comes in continuities, and that these continuities are all contained in

one thing that is governed by necessary and universal laws. In other words, there are no isolated events

from the whole of nature and due to this coextensiveness of phenomena, the scientist is assigned with

the mission to reveal the latent connections they all maintain with the whole. In a remarkable passage

from his 1792 essay, The Experiment As Mediator between Object and Subject in which these

29

62 Ethics, Appendix to Part I, [I], 111.

63 Scientific Studies, 11.

commitments are starting to be crystallized into a method, Goethe writes:

Nothing happens in living nature that does not bear some relation to the whole. The empirical evidence may seem quite isolated, we may view our experiments as mere isolated facts, but this is not to say that they are, in fact, isolated. The question is: how can we find the connection between these phenomena, these events? . . . All things in nature, especially the commoner forces and elements, work incessantly upon one another; we can say that each phenomenon is connected with countless others just as we can say that a point of light floating in space sends its rays in all directions.64

We trace Goethes persistent theological theme of a source of light that radiates uniformly in all

directions. Given this commitment to the intelligibility of nature, Goethe presents a method of unifying

the fragments of empirical evidence under principles of ever-increasing priority or explanatory

extension. He thinks the scientist has to present every known phenomenon in a certain sequence so

that we could determine the degree to which all might be governed by a general principle.65 He gives

the example of his study of Optics, which he thought of as a single experiment understood as a whole,

across its manifold variations, with a corresponding general formula that overarches an array of

individual arithmetic sums.66

Goethes method operates from a dispassionate and unprejudiced point-of-view through which

empirical data is assembled in a sequential fashion for the purpose of ascending to the over-arching

features of the world, to higher axioms and principles; these higher principle in turn determine the ways

in which new data is collected and processed. Briefly put, Goethe is an Empiricist but with a

Rationalist heart. All data is collected through experience but, at the same time, it is oriented towards a

horizon of metaphysical principles upon which they are premised. It is like amassing evidence for a

case that is already solved, or putting together parts of a puzzle that is already pictured as a whole.

Even though every analysis presupposes a synthesis67 for Goethe, the reconciliation of the two

approaches, the analytic and the synthetic is pictured as a feedback-loop that starts from synthetic but

passes through both of the methods in a recursive fashion.68 He offers a metaphor for the dialectic

animation of the body of knowledge within this loop: the sciences come to life only when the two

30

64 Ibid., 15-16.

65 Goethe, Analysis and Synthesis, Ibid., 48.

66 Ibid., 16.

67 Ibid., 49.

68 It is easy to see how this method works using the example of Goethes discovery of the os intermaxillare in Man. He initiated his analytic search with an a priori commitment to his Naturalism, the fact that everything plays by the same rule, especially human form. The analysis was in a way prejudiced with this metaphysical hypothesis or principle.

exist side by side like exhaling and inhaling.69

Goethes appreciation for the transparency and the rigor of the geometric method can be traced

back to the essay The Experiment As Mediator between Object and Subject. Here he instructs us to

learn from the way mathematicians bring together things in unbroken sequences:

From the mathematician we must learn the meticulous care required to connect things in unbroken succession, or rather, to derive things step by step. Even where we do not venture to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had to satisfy the strictest of geometricians.

In the mathematical method we find an approach which by its deliberate and pure nature instantly exposes every leap in an assertion. Actually, its proofs merely state in a detailed way that what is presented as connected was already there in each of the parts and as a consecutive whole, that it has been reviewed in its entirety and found to be correct and irrefutable under all circumstances. Thus its demonstrations are always more exposition, recapitulation, than argument.70

Nature, ontologically speaking, is conceived of as the synthetic source for every subsequent analysis

just like the concentrated principles of geometric systems are channeled throughout a body of

propositions. The act of discovery is seen as an unpacking of the whole, all proofs being already

contained in each of the parts of the whole and waiting to be unfolded. Goethe believes that the

archetype was an idea through which Nature was necessarily expressed. Nature proceeds from ideas,

he writes, just as man follows an idea in all he undertakes.71 This is how he justified the geometric

necessity of the ekphrasis of the archetype as if it were an a priori condition for the possibility of every

creature. In other words the necessity runs from the generative source (Natura naturans) towards its

derivatives (Natura naturata). Consequently, if we want to follow the logical interrelations of forms,

Goethe argues, we have to follow the natural direction from cause to the effect.

To outline the meaning of the synthetic method, and the point of convergence between Spinoza

and Goethe, it may be useful to jump forward in time, to another nineteenth-century thinker. Ralph

Waldo Emerson, argues in his journal that all our classifications of Nature may appear useful to us, but

they should be treated only as provisional measures, cross-sections of a continuum that is waiting to be

discovered philosophically. Emerson, even without explicitly stating it, builds a bridge between the

method of Spinoza and the science of Goethe. He upholds the synthetic method in which an initial,

31

69 Ibid., 49.

70 Ibid., 16.

71 Zur Morphologie. Verfolg (WA vi, 348) cited in George A. Wells Goethe and the Intermaxillary Bone The British Journal for the History of Science 3, no. 4 (1967), 358.

most general idea unfolds to new truths and classifications that are already contained and anticipated in

the premises. Emerson saw the Idea of the cosmic constitution as a harmonious geometric problem that

is premised in a pure, plastic Idea.72 He anticipates the migration of the synthetic method from the

study of ethical truths to Botany, and considers that as the only legitimate philosophical way of

producing real classifications:

The way they classify is by counting stamens, or filaments, or teeth and hoofs and shells. A true what we call argument, the unfolding an idea, as is continually done in Platos Dialogues, in Carlyles Characteristics, or in a thousand acknowledged applications of familiar ethical truths,these are natural classifications containing their own reason in themselves, and making known facts continually. They are themselves the formula, the largest generalization of the facts, and if thousands on thousands more should be discovered, this idea hath predicted already their place and fate.73

Indeed, Spinoza can be retrospectively attributed with this kind of quest for the glimmering of that

pure, plastic Idea. Even in his earlier works, Spinoza is occupied with the problem of the definition

of a thing from which it is deduced a dynamic self-regulatory system of modifications.74 In order to

reproduce Nature, ones mind must, according to the TIE:

. . .bring all of its ideas forth from that idea which represents the source and origin of the whole of Nature, so that that idea is also the source of the other ideas.75

Alternately, the entire project of the Ethics is the result of the synthetic exposition of an innate idea of

God, that qualifies as the source and origin of the whole Nature. The idea of God for Spinoza is an

indwelling logical concept of a self-caused entity, the vanishing point of all explanation necessitated

from the PSR. Deus is Spinozas own Archimedean point, on the self-evidence of which he will throw

the whole weight of all the subsequent knowledge we may build on our leading assumptions.76 Thus,

from the definition of God or Nature, an infinite system of interconnected modes is deduced according

to the geometric machine of his book, the Ethics. God as the causa sui, is the source from which all

32

72 The Idea according to which the Universe is made is wholly wanting to us; is it not ? Yet it may or will be found to be constructed on as harmonious and perfect a thought, self-explaining, as a problem in geometry. The classification of all natural science is arbitrary, I believe; no method philosophical in any one. . . . All our classifications are and very convenient, but must be looked on as temporary, and the eye always watching for the glimmering of that pure, plastic Idea (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, with Annotations, 292-293, May 3, 1834).

73 Emerson, Journals, with Annotations, 294.

74 , in , 191.

75 TIE, 42, Collected Works, 20.

76 Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: his life and philosophy (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), 129.

homologous ideas of singular things, of human mind, human affects and natural laws are deduced.

Garrett pictures this with a metaphor la Deleuze:

. . .each proposition is like a pleat or fold in a Baroque curtain that as one unfolds it one realizes envelops bolt after bolt of pleated cloth. As each proposition is unfolded, longer and longer demonstrations and justifications emerge until the whole argument up to that point is like one long seamless piece of cloth.77

Indeed, the same scheme of synthetic progression had initially inspired Goethe to embark on his

scientific inquiry. For, if we trace back to the origins of Goethes scientific and philosophical thinking,

the point of departure seems to be the Intuitive knowledge of Spinoza:

And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.78

As a result of a careful self-examination, Goethe admits in one of his last essays written in 1823, that

his whole method relies on derivation: I persi