Goethe and the Ethos of Science

by Dennis Sepper

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5
Urphenomenality and the Basis of Science 

The full book can be found HERE 

If ultimately I rest content with the Urphenomenon, it is, after all, but a kind of resignation; yet it makes a great difference whether I resign myself at the boundaries of humanity, or within a hypothetical narrowness of my small-minded individuality.
— Goethe (MR, no. 577)

The Opticks spurred the growth of eighteenth-century experimental science by teaching investigators to see theoretically,  mathematico-physically. Both the Opticks and the Principia provided decisive paradigms for exploring in detail the substructures of everyday appearances. The Opticks in particular showed how from within the bewildering, apparently arbitrary domain of colors one could gain virtually self- evident mathematico-physical knowledge about the nature of light and colors by fusing the way of experiment with mathematical demonstration. Thenceforth, wherever the physicist saw light, he also saw geometrically conceived color rays. The eye became little more than a passive detector, even an undependable one, for it could be deceived when it was fatigued or when the rays were mixed with one another. 

Almost every early nineteenth-century critic of Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre had been initiated into this kind of seeing and took for granted the factuality of Newton’s interpretation (indeed, Goethe complained that not just physicists but also almost every intelligent layman had been indoctrinated as well; see LA I, 3: 116). By and large the critiques were conducted at the level of abstracted theory, with only occasional glances at experimental phenomena – usually cited according to Newton’s descriptions – a cruel irony for Goethe, whose first hope was to induce physicists to reexamine the experiments and phenomena of color in a more or less comprehensive way independent of the standard theory. Not a few of the earliest reviewers hit upon the approach that Helmholtz would canonize in 1853 – to argue that the poetic nature disables one from genuinely comprehending the power of mathematical abstraction and the rigorous methods of physical science.

Goethe cannot be held blameless of the misunderstandings of his critics, however. Reading the foreword to Zur Farbenlehre and the introduction to the didactic part one can easily miss the concern for comprehensiveness and even Goethe’s disavowal of intending merely to put a hypothesis of his own in place of Newton’s (HA, 13: 319); and by stating in the foreword that the “capital intention” (Hauptabsicht) of the work was to apply “the language of nature” (HA, 13: 316), a language of polarities, to color, he gave the impression that Zur Farbenlehre was chiefly devoted to drawing the study of color into the ambit of speculative Naturphilosophie. What some were quick to interpret as a confession of allegiance was more an acknowledgment of affinity, however. Well before Goethe invited Schelling to take up a professorship at the University of Jena (1798), Goethe had become convinced that polarities in the phenomena of color (such as those made apparent by the Beitrdge zur Optik) demanded a vocabulary of polarities.

Goethe was perhaps too subtle for his own good and overrated the ability of his readers to penetrate the complexities of the phenomena and the rich density of his prose. A more explicit statement of his method and purpose at the outset might have more effectively forestalled misunderstandings than the occasional pithy remarks in the body of the work. Certainly his labeling the phenomena of turbid media Urphenomenal, then trying to extend this Urphenomenon as the principle of explanation for refractive colors, convinced many that this was the sum and substance of his theory, perfectly analogous to Newton’s principle of diverse refrangibility. Of course, the Urphenomenon is not so much a single, objectified phenomenon, conceived at a high level of abstraction, as it is a rubric for a determinate and naturally unified sequence of experiments and phenomena. The Urphenomenon was intended to unify the phenomena of color. Yet the very multiplicity of the phenomena presented in the didactic part defeated Goethe’s synthetic powers, despite his having devoted the better part of two decades to the project. It is hardly surprising that those for whom theoretical seeing in the manner of Newton had become second nature found themselves wondering what all the phenomena in Zur Farbenlehre were meant to prove. At least the ray concept gave the investigator something definite and inalterable to look for in any event of color, no matter what one did to the light; in contrast, the Urphenomenon, as the phenomenal first principle of color, is for the most part not immediately isolable in new classes of color phenomena. The encounter of light with a turbid medium is supposed to occur in all the physical and chemical color phenomena, but its particular manifestations depend on the specific circumstances of the event/ experiment, and so one cannot presume that the addition of further circumstances, such as the interposition of a lens, will not introduce something unanticipated. There is therefore no inalterable entity to quantify; instead, there are appearances to be compared with one another and (experimental) conditions to be classified. 

Goethe of course argued that Urphenomenality was not incompatible with mathematics; for example, Galileo’s kinetic law of freely falling bodies was based on an Urphenomenal unification of manifold individual instances (see Chapter 2, note 19). Yet we might still like to distinguish between a quantitatively formulated Urphenomenon like Galileo’s and a qualitative one like Goethe’s; furthermore, we might decide that any quantitatively formulated theory ought to be favored over any nonquantitative one (and perhaps that a more fully quantified one should be favored over any that is less quantified). We might argue that Goethe, despite his attempts to forestall the empirical aimlessness of Baconian method and his awareness of how difficult it is to survey an entire science, succumbed to the sheer impossibility of grasping the whole, that like any Baconian he was ultimately overcome by the profusion of nature.

Mathematical theories, accordingly, are not simply aids to science but of its essence. They abstract from nature’s profusion, and that is precisely their strength. They help pick out one by one the various strands and elements that nature comprises and that otherwise are likely to stay hidden. The precision and economy of mathematics encourage the rapid progress of science better than any Goethean community of researchers with various Vorstellungsarten could, for mathematized theories can be applied and tested more swiftly and certainly than what is not quantified or otherwise exactly specified. This possibility of application and test concentrates and directs the efforts of scientists to seek ever greater exactness. Against the profusion of nature we must pit the ability of the scientific imagination to seize the main chance with determinate and bold hypotheses, not just with modest generalizations. More than any other single factor, the well-defined (and thus preeminently mathematical) hypothesis creates the discipline and rigor of science. If restricting the application of hypotheses or postponing their introduction until after a phenomenal base is laid ends up dispersing the energy of researchers and retards scientific advancement, might we not reasonably decide that the price for a Goethean science is too high?

The legitimacy of this question is reinforced when one considers Goethe’s ever more frequent acknowledgment of a conceptual aspect to the Urphenomenon and the inevitable gap between idea and experience. In the essay “Bedenken und Ergebung,” written ca. 1818, Goethe asserted the existence of an essentially unresolvable tension between theory and phenomenon (HA, 13: 31). This gap was already apparent to him no later than 1798, when in the posthumously published “Erfahrung und Wissenschaft” he wrote: 

Since the observer never sees the pure phenomenon [das reine Phdnomen; presumably this can be identified with the later Urphanomen] with his eyes, but rather a great deal depends on his mood, on the momentary state of the organ, on light, air, climate, bodies, [method of] treatment and a thousand other circumstances: One has to drink up a sea if one wants to hold on to the individuality of the phenomenon and to observe, measure, weigh, and describe that individuality. {HA, 13: 24)

In practice this means, as he remarked two paragraphs before, that “there are, as I am often able to note particularly in the subject that I am working on [color theory], many empirical gaps one must dispose of to obtain a pure, constant phenomenon; but as soon as I let myself do this, I am setting up a kind of ideal” (ibid.)

If Goethean method at best provides us with an ideal, not with an inductive truth or proven fact, we might again wonder whether ultimately it is not more efficient and more productive to cultivate hypotheses at the very beginning of a science. Rather than keep the imagination in check, as the Goethe of both the Beitrdge and Zur Farbenlehre had done, it would be better to give it free rein. Strict empiricism, whether or not it posits certainty as its object, rarely produces great science; at best it can lead up to it. The cautious method and discipline on which this kind of empiricism is founded may be laudable, but there is a rigor of another kind involved in taking a hypothesis and putting it to work. One might agree with Goethe’s assertion1 that “there is nevertheless a great difference, whether one, like the theorists, casts whole numbers into the breaches on behalf of a hypothesis, or whether one offers up an empirical breach to the idea of the pure phenomenon” (HA, 13: 24), but come to the opposite conclusion: that in the sciences we must choose the way of number, more generally the way of mathematics, as quickly as is practicable.

This kind of argument against Goethe and in favor of abstract hypothesis is not simply answerable. One question that would first have to be posed would be about the goal science is pursuing, and another would ask about the horizon within which we gauge scientific progress. These would take us too far afield at present, although they are questions that are implicitly and sometimes explicitly posed by Goethe, especially in the great literary works of his maturity (e.g., Elective Affinities, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, and Faust II). It is more pertinent to restate a basic Goethean contention: That to be genuinely scientific, a science and its practitioners must develop a coherent understanding and a clear conception of what part of nature they are attempting to investigate and how they ought to go about it. This procedure is in fact part of the science  itself, not pre-science; it is a necessary preliminary to, and constant concomitant of, all hypothetical science. Furthermore, no matter how powerful theories, hypotheses, and mathematics may prove, scientific understanding is not simply reducible to them. One cannot properly understand scientific theories unless one comprehends their role in seeing and knowing. Goethe would insist that science cannot avoid beginning with and returning to a relatively concrete sense of how the field in question is articulated and how it is related to other fields. Although this articulation will almost surely be modified in light of one’s results, it is the concrete field that makes sense of the results; and, as Goethe once remarked, the human spirit possesses and must reassert “its old right of putting itself directly in touch with nature,” a right that he believed nineteenth-century science was neglecting but that had to be exercised if science was to be fully scientific (HA, 13: 50). 

The truth embodied in this old right is often overlooked because of enthusiasm for new hypotheses and the apparent regularity with which scientific results can claim to overthrow naive intuitions, but it is conceded, tacitly or expressly, in virtually every scientific work. The Opticks, for instance, is divided not according to properties of the ray but according to the different classes of phenomena (reflective and refractive, those of thin films, those of diffraction). Where he can, Newton tries to assimilate them to a single property, but where he cannot he is willing to introduce new properties (e.g., repulsive forces) to account for a class that refuses assimilation. That is, the articulation of the class is prior; the explanation (property) follows the lead of the preliminary and largely “intuitive” classification. What Goethe’s Urphenomenon does is to elaborate and articulate the principle of unity of these classes: It draws out what is common to all the events of a given type, or rather it is an explicit constitution of the type, not as a single, isolated phenomenon nor as matter for theoretical proof, nor as a highly abstract concept, but in the form of a phenomenal abstraction made as concrete, as full of content as possible. In  pursuing the Urphenomenon one is trying to give scientific articulation and expression to what would otherwise be an unexamined, and in that sense prescientific, understanding of the field under investigation.

This approach does not abolish hypothetical or abstract science, but rather provides a method of binding hypotheses and abstractions concretely to the entire field. Goethe would argue that every science is constructed on, in fact begins in, such a field. It is characteristic of scientific discipline not to abandon an investigation the moment a new hypothesis comes into view but rather to go about things methodically and with due care. A surveyor would not rush off to the other end of the field just because he saw something interesting there; nor will he let himself be  absorbed by every blade of grass. What he does in the first place is orient himself to the natural landmarks of the field and note their relationship to the surrounding countryside. The initial survey then provides a map by which others can in future find their bearings. It can be changed in light of future developments and projects. Someday, perhaps, there may even come a botanist who will extend the work closer to those very blades of grass, or a cosmologist who will place the field in relationship with the universe. 

A summary catalog of Goethean criteria for science might, then, read as follows. Any theory that is unbound by the necessary qualifications, conditions, and restrictions that enable it to be used as a genuine instrument of knowing is inferior to a theory that acknowledges  bounds. Any theory that uses mathematics to appear more exacting than it really is – a phenomenon not unknown in the history of the modern sciences (see, for instance, Westfall 1972 on Newton’s fudge factor) – is inferior to a theory that obligates itself to follow with care the manifold courses of nature’s evidence. The best way to foster scientific knowledge is to ensure that one is completely familiar with the phenomena before going behind or beneath them in search of causes – that is, one first ought to grasp and conceive the Urphenomena. Nothing in principle prevents the subsequent or concomitant mathematization of Urphenomena (Goethe’s understanding of Galileo’s law of falling bodies underscores this) as long as the mathematical theory is presented with the requisite caveats about complicating circumstances, acknowledges the inevitable margins of error, and disavows trying to supplant the phenomena themselves.