Goethe & Biology

An Unpaid Debt

by Hermann Popplebaum

From the 1949 Edition of the Golden Blade

An Anthroposophical Journal

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/GoldenBlade_1949.pdf

The re-publication of Goethe’s scientific writings, which is bound to happen as the world prepares for the bicentenary of his birth, will create a precarious situation for all those who read them carefully. Some will say that it is only for the sake of completeness that they have to be re-published – but others may feel that this can never be a sufficient reason.

There are still those who maintain the attitude taken in the second half of the nineteenth century by looking down on the “scientific dabblings” of the poet whose creative capacities were so great that they invaded fields which, to put it crudely, were none of his business. They are apt to look upon his excursions into science as we do upon the fishing trips of a statesman. But there are now many others who see more than a personal whim in his persistent efforts to develop scientific ideas, and they are alarmed at the prospect of seeing these belittled when Goethe himself attributed so much value to them. They simply cannot believe that an individuality of his stature should have misjudged his own achievements to such an embarrassing degree.

Refusing therefore to admit that there was something wrong with Goethe, they must conclude that there is something wrong with the current ideas about his scientific efforts. They begin to long for a competent introduction to Goethe’s actual achievements in science instead of an apology for his whims. For these seekers, the existence of Rudolf Steiner’s commentaries on Goethe’s scientific writings is a most welcome discovery. Studying them, they learn to see in Goethe’s efforts not only an integral part of his full human stature, but also an impulse of which our scientific age is in great need. The duty to do justice to Goethe then develops into the duty to help convey his legacy to mankind of to-day.

The impressive series of Rudolf Steiner’s publications on Goethe as a scientist began with a small book called The Theory of Knowledge
Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, which appeared in 1886,¹ and it culminated in the work at the Goetheanum in Dornach, whose very name is a challenge to those who belittle Goethe as a scientist. The following essay proposes to give some results of a study of Goethe’s scientific writings, pursued through decades with the help of Rudolf Steiner’s commentaries.

Needless to say that as scientists of our age we can never foster the idea of a “back to Goethe” movement in science. And yet there is infinitely much to learn from his attitude towards know ledge in general, and knowledge of nature in particular. We can learn to look at definite scientific problems through the eyes of Goethe, as it were; or rather approach the problems posed by science in our age as he approached those of his time. It then appears how large a debt we still owe to to Goethe, a debt which is not yet acknowledged, much less paid.

One basic experience we owe to Goethe, in whatever field he touches. It is his almost miraculous sense for reality in observation and thought, his unerring feeling for fair procedure in experimenting, his permanent awareness against the intrusion of prejudice in the “assertion” of an idea. In all these respects he would still be an outstanding model for to-day’s science, even if all of his results had to be abandoned as erroneous. Rudolf Steiner accordingly has put the method of Goethe above all else, and has shown that even the controversial theory of Colour is methodically sound and a prototype of a fair scientific exposition.

This sense for reality allowed. Goethe to ascend from the phenomena observed in the inorganic world to the “primary phenomena”, to be seen only with the eyes of the spirit, of which they are the transient and variable expression. To establish a primary phenomenon (for instance in the realm of colour) the student needs to train his own sense for reality to protect him against wanton theorizing. The phenomena are mutually self-explaining; they do not need to be explained in terms of phenomena belonging to a different level. Colours, for instance, must explain each other by the manner and conditions in which they appear. It is vain to try to trace them to vibrations which are supposed to “underlie” them. The far-reaching consequences of such an attitude for a re-formulation of all laws in physics were anticipated in Rudolf
Steiner’s first book, mentioned above (see ch. xv).²

As we pass from the phenomena of physics to the manifestations of life, it becomes still more important to acquire a capacity for tracing continuity without falling into abstractions. This is very seldom recognized to-day. In botany and zoology we still speak of “laws” which “govern” plants and animals, as if this were the same kind of “lawfulness” that obtains in physics and chemistry.Here, Goethe can again be our guide, by guarding us against becoming entranced in speculations and generalisations instead of carefully “following up” related manifestations.

In the realms of life, things which belong closely to one another may be found far apart. A species of plant, for instance, may belong to another one growing in another country in an altogether different climate. An organ of one animal may be closely akin to another organ in another animal, although this looks quite different and is endowed with a different function. The ground on which organic knowledge can grow must first be rested from the grip of abstraction. Instead of recognizing abstract laws, we have to trace concrete forms (types) which create a natural hierarchic system. Ascending from specific shapes to ever more comprehensive ones, we arrive at the “archetypal form” (Urgestalt), which includes all empirical plant forms and even many potential forms never found to exist “and yet able to exist”.

Thus, while inorganic phenomena can be gathered up in and reduced to “primal phenomena,” living individuals and groups can be traced to and evolved from the “archetype,” which is the fountain head of their variety and the guarantor of their common characteristics at the same time. If we speak, as is often done to-day, of a “common pattern,” we miss the essential meaning of the Urgestalt, because we still refer to a fact of mere consciousness ; while Goethe spoke of an actual treasury of potential forms which is manipulated by Nature as a sculptor handles his clay.

Rudolf Steiner, when formulating this difference in precise terms, emphasized how momentous a change is involved when science turns from man-made collective ideas about Nature, which are employed for gathering up facts for intellectual mastery, to the formative storehouse which Nature herself handles when shaping plants and animals. (The philosopher will certainly say that this difference is known as that between realism and nominalism, and that the two medieval schools of philosophers fought a hard battle over it until finally the nominalists prevailed. But Goethe’s archetype requires a realistic interpretation, not a nominalistic one. The Urpflanze is not a conceptual scheme devised by man’s intelligence, but a tool of Nature, handled by her!)

It rests with the intelligent student of Goethe’s writings to be on guard against nominalism, and to make an effort to seize with the power of imagination the. reality which Nature employs when moulding living forms out of invisible archetypal shapes. He can do so, as Goethe did, by following up the appearance and disappearance of characteristic form-qualities while a plant is running its course from seed to seedling, from the leafy to the flowering state, into the fructiferous phase and then to the seed again while the body withers away—a most impressive lesson in continuity. The archetypal plant remains, in a sense, while the phases replace each other; it is the continuity underlying the change. So it is never perceived in fullness unless the student begins to “see” it extending through space and time.

The “space-time-continuum” which the physicist to-day constructs in a laborious effort of abstraction to make his imperceptible “physical world” intelligible, embodies itself visibly in every living being on earth, offering itself to immediate perception by man, if only he strives for “concretion” instead of abstraction.

The effort to grasp this reality must be ever-renewed. The statement of the result in words may vary considerably. Those who like generalities may speak paradoxically of a conceptual entity which is active in the circulation of juices, or, conversely, of a succession of shapes which spring from a conceptual matrix. The main thing is to keep in mind that it is only in human knowledge that the conceptual ingredient of reality can be regarded separately from, and set over against, the perceptual; in Nature the two aspects of reality are indissolubly integrated.³

Goethe was not so naive as to assume that he could convey his realistic conception of the archetype to his contemporaries without running into a conflict with the Kantians. If he had fostered such a naivette, then his short skirmish with the Kantian in Schiller would have certainly cured him. , He saw quite clearly where he had, to deviate from Kant—namely, where he claimed the status of a red entity for his Urpflanze no matter what an educated Kantian might dogmatically hold against him. Goethe could, with a smile, claim that he “saw the idea with his own eyes”—with his spirit-eyes obviously; but the smiling implication here is that the human spirit has eyes!

These spirit eyes and their training for actual research are the crux of every effort to understand Goethe’s contribution to biology. This point must never be slurred over. It is not fair to him if we try to water down his words about the spiritual visibility of the archetypal plant by calling his language exaggerated, or by attributing his definite words to his special gift of visualization or symbolization. Rudolf Steiner spent a considerable part of his lifework in showing that Goethe had the capacity of supersensible perception, a capacity which is destined to become the general equipment necessary for future biological research. It is not to be taken as symbolical when Goethe calls the archetypal plant a “proteus which must not be allowed to escape,” or when he speaks of the archetype as uniting “a generic tenacity with a felicitous pliability,” or when he says in another place that some species “let themselves be lured into producing variations.” The more we take these descriptions as literal and real, the better it is for our understanding of what is meant.

In our age, we cannot imitate Goethe’s pictorial language when we refer to the spiritually visible form which penetrates the material
organism of living beings. We may, as Rudolf Steiner did, speak of the “body of formative forces” which belongs as a necessary knowledge, not in fact—from the matter which is in its reach. And yet we can again and again refresh our grip on’ the reality which Goethe caught in the magnificently simple words with which he begins his little book on the Metamorphosis of Plants:

“Anyone who pays but a little attention to the growth of plants, will soon observe that some of their outer parts sometimes alter and—either wholly or more or less—pass over into the shape of the neighbouring parts. …”

Is it not as if the plant world itself spoke of its secret in these lines and in those which follow them, and as if Goethe had merely lent his voice to it ? We might even learn how the archetypal plant lives and breathes in the pulsating form, as it expands and contracts, from feeling how the secret of its breathing reverberates through Goethe’s sentences! For words can become tools of science just as are scalpels and microscopes, with the important difference that words can restore the reality which other instruments have taken apart.

Here is another contribution of Goethe towards a really scientific procedure; we need not only adequate methods of research, but also
ways of adequate exposition. Of this he has given a shining example in the Metamorphosis of Plants. One day, perhaps, this little book
will become a standard text for all students of life’s subtler secrets.

There is another debt we owe to Goethe. He was the first to steer clear, when developing the image of the archetypal plant, of the danger of a teleological element entering into it. He did not want to interpret the types as the result of divine purposes or as “thoughts of the creator.” To-day, however, we have the neo-Thomist school of philosophy of nature which does exactly what Goethe wanted to avoid; it speaks of the types as thoughts of God, Whose ideas have become manifest in them. Here a distinction which Goethe was careful enough to make is dropped, and morphology is thrown back upon a pre-Goethean phase of its development.

Goethe attempted to do with the living types what he had done with the colours. He arranged them so that they could speak their secret by mutual self-explanation. Their language became so clear and audible that it needed no translation into terms of causes or ends. The type is active within the plant, so it does not need to make it grow and change by an outside impact or cause. The type with the outside conditions produces form upon form, without any guiding purpose. In the realm of living forms, Nature is too free to be pushed by causes, and she is too abundant to let herself be tied down by purpose. So the archetypal plant is alive in a realm which teems with interrelated shapes, but where the human-all-too-human ideas of causes and purpose are strangers.

If the knowledge of the archetype as initiated by Goethe is to act as a seed which might grow in the biology of the future (he spoke himself of the tree of botany which may freely and cheerfully unfold, but it is true for the whole of biology) it must be kept pure.

In order to show what difference it makes for research whether one applies Goethe’s view of the reality of the archetype and its derivative types and sub-types, or whether one disregards it, we need refer only to two fields of modem biology which still occupy central positions in research. We mean evolutionism (or history of living shapes), and genetics (or science of heredity). It becomes obvious at once what an important mission could be fulfilled by a further development of Goethe’s contributions to biology in our time.

The intense interest in the mutual relations of organic forms as forms leads to the construction of “natural systems” for plants animals to illustrate their morphological kinship. Goethe took great delight in these studies because they showed him how his concept of metamorphosis did not apply to the individual organism only, but also to larger and smaller groups of forms (the systematic categories), which suggested that they themselves were organisms of a higher order. The whole kingdom of plants behaved as if it were one great individual, growing in regular pulsations, expanding and contracting, and coming to a culmination in the most perfect types of flowering plants. Likewise, the animal orders, classes and phyla, duly arranged according to their morphological kinship, gave the picture of a tree which blossoms in the warm-blooded vertebrates. Yet this arrangement does not, if we apply Goethe’s view, represent an historical succession in which the later forms sprang materially from the earlier ones. All forms, the simpler and the more elaborate types, are equally manifestations of the archetype which lives in them all. We are victims of a fallacy if we credit an early and simple form of the past with being the originator of the later and more complicated forms.

Post-Goethean evolutionism has abandoned Goethe’s conception and has proceeded with the construction of lines of descent in which
the simpler forms play the part of the ancestors of the more elaborate ones. Rudolf Steiner pointed out (1886) the momentous change
entailed in this abandoning of Goethe’s original view. “All forms,” he wrote, “result from the type, the first and the last of them are its manifestations. The type we must use as the foundation of a real science of organics, and not try to deduce the particular animal
and plant genera from each other.”

The advent of Darwin’s book. The Origin of Species (1859) distracted attention even more from the reality of the types by attributing all transformations to the power of. the struggle for existence which he supposed to end with the survival of the fittest, leaving nothing to the influence of the inherent differences of the types. All interest became concentrated on the mode of transformation, as if there were no object which was being transformed. If Goethe’s impulse had been more alive than it was at the time of Darwin, it would have been seen that the struggle for existence, with the resulting “adaptations,” could account—if for anything at all—for the change of the actual forms, but never for the characteristic forms themselves. But by a curious fallacy (the so-called infinite regress”), it was assumed that the structure with which
the individual entered the struggle for existence was in turn already the result of the ancestor’s struggle for existence, and so on backward to the beginnings of life. In other words, the question. What is it that adapts itself? was answered somewhat facetiously: What adapts itself is the product of previous adaptations. … It was as if the existence of the concrete organism, which has its characteristics and hears them, had fallen into complete oblivion and been replaced by the picture of the cumulative effects of bygone battles for life.

During this drift into abstraction Rudolf Steiner raised his warning voice, much as he appreciated the work of Darwin. He wrote (1886):

“How does biology nowadays employ the principle of adaptation and struggle for existence, none of which we want to deny as facts ? People believe that they can deduce the characteristics of a certain species from the exterior conditions in which it lived, just as they can deduce for example the increase in temperature of a body from the sim’s rays which strike upon it. They forget completely that the specific characteristics in their definite content can never be proved to result from outer conditions. These conditions may have a modifying influence, but a creative cause they are surely not.”

The specific pattern of a type (phylum, class or order), thus constitutes a reality in its own right. It should not be “explained” by reference to another sphere of hypothetical causes, but ought to be followed up by relating it to other types and sub-types until they all explain each other reciprocally. The tracing of the basic characteristics of a type to the supposed influence of outer conditions (or rather to events which impinged on the ancestors of its present representatives) is a loss on the explanatory level comparable to that which occurs when we try to “explain” a colour from “underlying vibrations.” Here is the “reductionist fallacy” again, to use a modern term. Goethe created the tool for warding it off, long before the situation became as urgent as it is to-day.

It is perfectly legitimate, of course, to study the way in which the type becomes modified by a variety of outer circumstances. In this field most valuable research work has been done in our time. Geographical and climatic variations have been studied all over the globe. Modifications and even mutations (sudden hereditary variations) have been experimentally produced by the most varied forms of impact. But all these studies revealed only the tenacity of the type of plant or animal used; the responses to outer conditions, striking though they were, never modified the essential plan of organisation; they were always the responses of the type to certain influences, never direct effects of mere causes. Between the outer impact and the result, the type has always vigorously asserted its existence.

The great changes which the phyla and classes of animals and plants have passed through in the course of the earth’s history cannot be “explained” by changes of the surroundings alone. They bear witness to the metamorphoses through which the archetype has passed. They are, therefore, of a rhythmic character, just as is the metamorphosis of the individual. The appearance and disappearance of certain sub-types, their sudden emergence and their radical extinction, their “announcement” by forerunners and their occasional “lingering” in a few late survivors, give a dramatically vivid picture of the changing destinies of the plant and animal types.⁴ “The book of Nature becomes legible,” Goethe once wrote. Indeed, it does. But only if we read it with the realisation that it is the story of the invisible archetypes of which its text speaks.

The other field of biology to which a Goethean re-casting would be of great importance is genetics (science of heredity). At first sight, there seems to be no point where such work could begin, as genetics has become so much a matter of statistics and mathematics that the facts of observation almost disappear in a welter of abstract formulations. But if this be true, then the first task of a Goethean approach is to restore the plain facts about heredity and to free them from distracting hypotheses.

The most striking and yet also the most common of these facts is the reappearance of the parental shape in the progeny—one could also say, the temporary disappearance of the parental shape in the young until they grow up. For it is growth which brings out again the vanished likeness to the parentage. In this general form the phenomenon is the same in plants, animals and man. But the general formulation also makes it evident how closely akin the secret of heredity is to that of the rhythms of growth. It really belongs to the larger scope of riddles in which the “invisible type” manifests itself. So there should be no doubt as to the possibility of applying here the lessons learnt from Goethe.

As they reappear in the next generation, the bodily characteristics emerge in their previous, closely interwoven arrangement, each in its proper place. Wherever they may have been in the mean time, and whatever the manner of their “preservation,” they never appear jumbled once they do come to appearance. The physical materials out of which the visible shape is being built is compelled to fit into the form which “embodies” itself. The physical matter sprouts forth to fit the shape; the shape descends to dispose the matter. Yet there is no point of rest, for soon the production of germs (spores, eggs and sperms, buds and bulbs, etc.) begins, and the visible shape withdraws and becomes a mere potentiality until the time for a new generation arrives.

This attempt at a Goethean formulation of heredity, imperfect though it may be felt to be, has at least one good point. It brings out the degree to which traditional genetics has lost sight of the overt facts. For it passes them by and plunges at once into a discussion of the transfer of isolated characteristic and of how they can be traced individually through the progeny. The whole wonder web of the observable shape, in which the individual characteristic is nothing but a mesh, is forgotten.

Gregor Mendel’s idea of focussing the interest on single characteristics, as they are passed on to another generation, was certainly a stroke of genius and opened the way to systematic experimentation. But this methodical simplification has had the serious consequence of estranging genetics from its original problem and made it into an art of calculation, with figures and symbols very remote from the biological setting in which heredity happens as a process of life.

Moreover, the conception of material particles (genes) as “carriers” of hereditary characteristics and of their localisation in the chromosomes, has further distracted our view from the region to which the phenomenon of heredity belongs. The well known details of cell-division, and especially the behaviour of the chromatin, went far towards corroborating the gene-idea, and so it could seem as if the essentials of heredity were understood.

Although it is impossible to give here the whole story of this amazing development of a highly abstract theory, we may venture to say that for a Goethean view one thing is obvious. We have here to do with a large-scale substitution of a complicated atomistic system as a causal explanation for &cts which have been torn from their natural setting. It is sliding down to a lower explanatory level, quite similar to that which has occurred in the case of the “explanation” of colour from vibrations in physics, and also (as we said above) in the case of interpreting organic shapes in terms of environmental influences in Darwinism.

Goethe wanted colour phenomena to explain each other. He also made possible an organic science which the types were so arranged as to illumine each other and become deducible from the archetype by mere comparison. In both fields Rudolf Steiner has shown the way far beyond toe point which Goethe reached. Why should not we take up the facts of heredity, too, and illumine them by relating them to other problems which fall into the same orbit ? That is why we advocate here a treatment of the heredity problem by linking it up with the other riddles of living shapes, their appearance and disappearance, their unfoldment and simplification, their variation, their rhythmic behaviour, etc.

Such an approach would also make it evident how the estrangement of genetics from the factual has had to be paid for by auxiliary
assumptions, designed to remove embarrassing discrepancies with the factual. We mean the hypotheses of gene-linkage of multiple factors, lethal factors and the like. The discrepancies, however came really from the artificial first assumption of Mendel, namely, that characteristics are isolated units and find their way into the progeny irrespective of others.

It also becomes clear that the much-admired chromosome charts, with the genes plotted on them in linear arrangement, cannot shed
any light on the essential riddle of the transfer of the shape; for, even if we knew the position of all genes- in all chromosomes, their arrangement is such that it bears no resemblance to the mutual relation of the overt characteristics in the living individual. A glance at a chromosome chart can easily show this. The gene which is thought to determine the shape of the eye may lie in a different chromosome from that which is supposed to cause the colour of the eye; the shape of the head into which the eyes must fit may be traced to a gene located in a third chromosome, etc.

The genes are arranged much as are the building blocks in a boy’s toy box- they are quite orderly – but in a quite different pattern from the position they will occupy in the house to be built. The boy must break the first order, to fit the blocks into the second. Thus, even if the genes are what geneticists believe them to be, we still need the active intervention of the living shape (the type, or body of formative forces) to bring the material into due position. For only the total form makes the characteristic into what it is and gives it sense and functional scope.

Whichever way we turn it, the archetype, together with the types and sub-types, occupies a role of paramount importance in the scheme of living things. It also proves to be quite active in the experiments with hybrids which have become so famous through Mendel. Two varieties of peas, when cross-bred, produce a uniform progeny in the first generation. In the second, there is a “segregation” in which both grand-parental forms reappear and also the hybrid form is continued, each of them at a certain constant percentage. The new combinations which a breeder can choose to produce from these various categories bring about similar segregations in definite proportions. We are taught how to figure out the percentages in terms of genes distributed.

But one can also try to view the process as a whole, as Goethe would have done had he known it. Then it appears that the original two types, after a transient interpenetration in the first filial generation, tend to separate again, elastically rebounding from another, as it were, until the bulk of the ever-increasing progeny has reverted to either one or the other. Only a minority continues to waver between the two alternatives, but even their descendants lose half their numbers in each generation because of the continuing tendency to “revert to type.” In actual, non-experimental conditions the number of lingering hybrids would soon become negligible. In the end, there would be two true-breeding types again, clearly separated. Each type would have thrown off the other like a foreign body.

Besides this impressive self-assertion of the types, the rhythmic character of the segregation is the most striking feature in this process. Both observations, however, bring us nearer to seeing how the types really possess that elasticity which they show also when responding to a variety of surroundings. Goethe was certainly right when he credited them with “a generic tenacity as well as a felicitous pliability.” The more we keep our eyes on the actual happenings of the realm of life, the more we become convinced that Goethe, by his discovery of the type as Nature’s tool, has rendered a tremendous service to biology.

There are many other problems, including some which deal with man himself, which do not only allow of, but urgently need, a similar re-casting in the light of Goethe’s intentions. We owe it, indeed, to him, to pursue the paths which he has opened. If we do this, we may look forward to much of his scientific legacy which will no doubt be reprinted before long. For we may then read his words without embarrassment, and with a little better conscience

1. English Edition, transl. by Olin D. Wannamaker, New York, 1940.

2. To-day, sixty years later, the “anti-reductionist” conception gains ground in philosophy. See Krikorian, Naturalism and the Human Spirit, New York, 1946.

3.  Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity Ch. V.

4. E. Dacque, Urwelt, Sage und Menschheit (1924); Organische Morphologie u. Palaontologie (1935). G. Grohmann, Entwicklungsgesetze in der fossilen Pflanzenwelt (1932). H. Poppelbaum, Mensch und Tier (1927). O. H. Schindewolf, Palaontologies Entwicklungslehre und Genetik (1936).