Metamorphosis, page 10
The Sorrows of Young Werther, a tragic tale of unrequited love, immediately catapults Goethe into the literary stratosphere (Napoleon will famously take a copy with him when he sails off to conquer Egypt). Establishing German for the first time as a European literary language, it becomes a cult book for a generation. The following year, 1775, the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach invites Goethe to his court. Goethe is twenty-six, the duke just eighteen, but Karl August has read Werther and, like the rest of Germany, is charmed. Appointed to his Privy Council, Goethe assumes a rather astonishing list of official duties at court: As head of the Duchy’s War Commission, he recruits mercenaries to fight against the American revolutionaries; as head of the Mines and Highways Commissions, he oversees the digging of silver and building of roads; he even becomes chancellor of the Exchequer. He helps plan Weimar’s botanical park, and implements reforms in its university at Jena. In 1782 he is ennobled, becoming von Goethe. He is now the duke’s closest confidant and friend.
The future holds great things for him. He will write the magnificent novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, about a bourgeois businessman’s empty life and journey to self-realization (the romantic critic Friedrich Schlegel will judge it equal in importance to Europe as the French Revolution). He will also write his dark poetic masterpiece, Faust: A Tragedy, the tale of God’s favorite human being on earth, the scholar Heinrich Faust, selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for earthly pleasures and unlimited knowledge. Goethe, like Faust and the alchemists of old, aspires to encompass the whole universe and overcome all its contradictions. His breast bursts with passion, but he knows that life is full of sorrow. “While Man’s desires and aspirations stir,” he’ll have his protagonist lament, “He cannot choose but err.”
But Goethe feels trapped. Fleeing the limelight of his transcontinental celebrity, he decides to travel to Italy under an assumed name. It is 1786, and the next twenty months will forever change him. Alongside the discovery of the treasures of Roman and Greek antiquity, alongside the paintings and sculptures and architecture later adoringly described in his Italian Journey, Goethe is immensely struck by the beauty of the outdoors. For readers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is to say, most enlightened Americans of the second half of the nineteenth century, Goethe will be remembered as one of the six “representative men” of humanity—“the Writer,” alongside Plato, “the Philosopher”; Swedenborg, “the Mystic”; Montaigne, “the Skeptic”; Shakespeare, “the Poet”; and Napoleon, “the Man of the World.”i He is revered even today as the founding figure of Romanticism, straddling the classical and modern worlds. But for the moment, Goethe puts aside his voracious appetite for human affairs. As he makes his way from Venice to Sicily, Verona to Bologna, Palermo to Padua; from the Adriatic to the Apennines to the Straights of Messina and back again to Rome, he is now desperately obsessed with flowers.
Why flowers? Before Italy, Goethe had noticed the fundamental similarity of structure among different organisms: Just as humans have femur bones, so, in slightly different proportions, do lions, hippopotami, and dogs. Anatomists of his age had observed that vertebrates, including monkeys, all had a bone in their jaws called an intermaxilla—all, that is, except for humans. Prevailing wisdom took this to be a distinguishing mark, a dividing line that separated us from the beasts, but Goethe wasn’t convinced. In the spirit of the teachings of towering Kant, there had to be a unity, a graspable plan underlying all variations. Locating the intermaxillary bone tucked away in the upper jaw of humans with cleft palates, in whom it was more conspicuous, he was vindicated: Clearly this was a sign of our connection to all life.
Goethe’s Italian journal is filled with observations on the geology of the southern regions. He writes of minerals and rocks taken from riverbeds and mountaintops. He even climbs, treacherously, to the summit of Mount Vesuvius, cataloging the various lava flows while doing his best not to turn into cinder. But Goethe’s true passion lays in what he calls the Urpflanze. Just like in animals, in the plant world there had to be an underlying unity. “Among this multitude,” he writes of Italy’s bursting flora, “might I not discover the Primal Plant? There certainly must be one. Otherwise, how could I recognize that this or that form was a plant if all were not built upon the same basic model?” But what is the basic model, the Urpflanze that gave rise to untold varieties? This is what he wants to know.
Upon return from the land of forms to “formless” Germany, exchanging a bright sky for a dark one, Goethe writes that his spirit “sought to escape injury through intense rebellion.” In Rome he had met the painter Johann Tischbein, who rendered him reclining among ancient ruins, contemplative and serene. It is by far the most famous portrait in Germany, recognizable to schoolchildren. But Goethe returns from his Italian journey unnerved. He had glimpsed an insight in the leaves of a palm tree at the botanical gardens in Padua that had made his heart thump, and had experienced at Palermo an intense inner feeling of connection to the Proteusii of all plants. “The archetypal plant as I see it will be the most wonderful creation in the whole world, and nature herself will envy me for it,” he’d written from Italy to the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder back home, sounding more like a twenty-first-century genetic engineer than an eighteenth-century poet. “With this model and the key to it, one will be able to invent plants… which, even if they do not actually exist, nevertheless might exist and which are not merely picturesque or poetic visions and illusions, but have inner truth and logic.” Now he sets out to put it all on paper: his philosophy of change married to his philosophy of science.
There is an inner unity to life, and a spirit pushing it forward. Forces at work that bring about all the diverse forms, compelling them to blossom and bloom. The Englishman Isaac Newton had placed calculation above all else. The Swede Linnaeus had imposed an artificial taxonomy on nature, grouping animals and plants according to things he could measure: number, size, proportion, form. But nature would not be so anatomized nor entirely quantified; she was a dynamic process, not a final product, as much beholden to history as to transcendental purpose. Crucially, what was true for hyacinths was also true for humans: By becoming one with flowers, Goethe hopes to find his inner way of being, he writes, “to reveal as it were myself.”
He will accomplish this by breaking out of “the grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism and dogmatism,” to “live into” the natural world. The Age of Reason had produced a static view of human nature, a mechanical understanding of the universe, a linear model of the advancement of knowledge. This might have been good for Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, studying natura naturata, or the inert world of objects. But when it came to natura naturans, vital nature in constant flux and flow and transformation, a strictly physical-mechanical philosophy could only impoverish man’s understanding. Descartes, turning inward to the mind, likewise offered a philosophy that was sterile, for how could one learn anything without first looking about? Neither empiricism nor rationalism could bridge the gap between the objective world and the subjective mind learning it. Kant had already defined the problem: What we perceive is only a mental representation of the world, not the world itself. So are we eternally damned never to know reality?
To penetrate the real, living, shimmering world, Goethe will need to embark on an “adventure of reason,” one in which “the labor of experimentation,” he writes, is intimately connected to human values and development. Cartesian-Newtonian science separated observer from observed, but Goethe comes to see that far from a requisite, the separation is a barrier. In an interactive experience not only the object of observation changes but also the observing subject. A true science of vital nature has to be vital itself, dynamic and ever-changing; it is meant as much to bring about a metamorphosis in the scientist as to inform his view of the world.
One day they’ll call it Goethean, or Romantic Science, but he is toiling now on its method. Using what he renders an “exact sensorial imagination,” he calls upon his inward artistic side to sense the fluid processes of growth and transformation. Rather than through cold external analysis, he is guided by reciprocity, wonderment, and gratitude. He respects but suspects quantification, complementing it with creative thinking to penetrate a reality beyond the senses. That’s how he discovers in himself nature’s multitudinous reflection. And begins to gain a new way of knowing the world.
From his work for the grand duke planning the botanical park of Weimar, Goethe is familiar with plants whose stamens can turn into petals, creating flowers with many rings of petals but no sexual parts. An example is roses, which humans had cultivated to create attractive garden varieties. But there are other flowers whose petals turn into stamens, leaving their sexual parts unprotected. Like looking at humans with cleft palates to discover the intermaxillary bone, it takes looking at these “abnormal” cases to appreciate the way things are when all goes well. If stamens and petals are interchangeable, flowers and leaves are, in fact, the same thing. To understand how this could be, all one needs to do is look at a plant’s development: It begins in the ground, where out of a seed come two cotyledons, or tiny embryonic leaves. The cotyledons are separated, but their ultimate fortune is to be united. For in the course of the development of the axis, the shoot will begin to climb upward toward its climax. Lateral appendages will appear, periodically, as if by preordained fiat. And just like a succession of limbs in a millipede paired along an axis, or the sequence of vertebrae in a human leading up to a head, serially repeating structures will begin to produce slight transformations. All the while, the plant will be purifying its sap as it climbs higher and higher. “Everything material, more paltry and vulgar is gradually left behind,” Goethe writes in one of the one hundred twenty-three short, aphoristic paragraphs that make up The Metamorphosis of Plants, “while that which is higher, more spiritual and superior is allowed to display itself with greater freedom.”
It happens like an accelerating drumroll, announcing an impending drama. The first appendages up the axis are foliage leaves, spaced incrementally above each other. But after a few series of these, the rhythm heightens, and suddenly something new appears. It’s a slightly transformed leaf, growing on the stem, one we call a sepal. And within an inner whorl directly above it, as if impatient to appear, the corolla of colorful petals now blossoms into existence. Next are the stamens and carpels, all clustered within. The female and male cotyledons have finally been united. The plant is at its zenith, ready to bring about new life; producing a seed, it has come as close as it can ever come to transcending time itself. Whether it happens to be a lily or gardenia, a periwinkle or rose, all its sundry parts have emanated from the very same motif. There is a rhythm and a logic to everything, a beginning and an end with a grand apotheosis. The plant has sprouted, expanded, and finally contracted. Graduating from imperfect potential to perfect realization, it has followed its spiritual path, just as a human should.
“Everything is leaf,” Goethe writes, undoubtedly contemplating his own origin. Life begins with an abstract generating power, an ur-plan, and then forges untold variations. “There is in nature an eternal life, becoming, and movement,” he writes, “she alters herself eternally and is never still. She has no conception of stasis and can only curse it.”
Goethe is fascinated by the similarities that transcend taxonomy—by how much all life-forms have in common. Just as leaves are for plants, the spines of vertebrate animals are elemental structures; skeletons and skulls of lizards, wolves, and humans are merely different versions of the elemental unit metamorphosed. He shares the inevitable conclusion in private with his good friend Alexander von Humboldt. In public, almost three decades before Darwin’s Origin of Species, he writes, in Story of My Botanical Studies:
The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form they have been given… a felicitous mobility and plasticity allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.
He dies just a short year later, on the brink of mysteries untold. “Mehr Licht!” he is said to have asked just before his heart failed.
More light. Please, just a little more light.
Footnotes
i In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seven lectures, “Representative Men,” published in 1850.
ii Envisioning the act of creative expression welling up from the depth of the ocean, Romantic poets often invoked Proteus, a Greek god of the sea capable of assuming an infinite variety of forms.
4.
PROGRESS
Historians claim that the idea of progress was born in the time between Christopher Columbus and Isaac Newton.i Hierarchy, on the other hand, is as old as the wind. In ancient Greece, for example, Aristotle held that there was a pecking order in nature: sensible and motile animals existing above sensible but stationary plants; animals that give birth to live young above those that lay eggs above those that produce larvae; warm-blooded creatures above the cold-blooded, themselves above the invertebrates, altogether “bloodless.”
Aristotelian zoology was a secular zoology, but it was taken up in the Middle Ages by philosophers who rechristened it the “Great Chain of Being.” Climbing up a ladder from the basest rocks and minerals through the plants and fish and insects and lizards and birds and mammals to humans to kings and queens, the rungs brought one closer and closer to the heavens, where the angels and God resided. But this continuum was a fixed order, unmovable and preordained. Alchemists might theorize that all matter was made of the same elemental stuff, such that a base metal, treated the right way, might be transformed into precious gold. But no one questioned the rigid structure of the cosmos, or that it was all ordained by God.
Nowhere did this static attitude manifest more clearly than in humankind’s collective dreaming. Think of the word utopia, Greek for “no place,” or “nowhere.” Or of the Golden Ages of the ancient world, of the Garden of Eden, and arcadias, the Isles of the Blest. These were places where humans and animals are united, birth is painless, and there exists no death. But such places are gifted, they are never achieved. They take place at the End of Days, or back at the Origin, not anytime or anywhere in anyone’s lifetime, or even death. History is excluded as a medium for collective striving. Politics can be better or worse, and the moral sphere, too. But fate is not something humans control.
Fate, however, may be repeated. The Greek historian Polybius asserted in his Histories that, like the life cycle of birth, childhood, youth, maturity, old age, and death characteristic of individuals, there was a rhythm to human societies, from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy and back again. Due to the special weaknesses of each form of government, it trapped humans in an endless cycle of tyranny, oligarchy, and rule of the mob. For some it might sound better than a preordained plunge from a Golden Age, or Fall from the Garden of Eden—though many held out for redemption at the End of Days. Whatever the sensibility, misery and folly were givens. Little room was left for humanity to bring about true change.ii
Science and technology began to convince people that things could be otherwise, that if we put our minds to it, we could better our station, here, in this world. After all, Ptolemy had no telescope, Pliny no microscope, and Archimedes no barometer. To begin to take the future seriously, we would therefore need to do one better than the Renaissance, which had set itself the limited goal of recapturing ancient wisdoms from the past. We would need to climb over Plato, for whom this world offered only feeble imitations, like shadows on a cave wall. We would need men, in other words, like Christopher Columbus and Isaac Newton. Men who went out to the world to unlock its secrets, using their God-given intelligence and the scientific method. Then, as Francis Bacon promised in his 1626 book New Atlantis, we might go about forging a brave new world.
All this, inevitably, would lead to the replacement of theology by history. Theology treated time as a series of events wrought upon us from above; God’s will, not the will of humans, was what determined the ebbs and flows of fate. History would conceive of time as a chain of occurrences brought about by humans. It would be studied so that such humans, endowed with free will, could actually learn from it. The replacement of theology by history would take time and would never be entirely completed, but by the eighteenth century the process had already gotten underway. What would be the road to progress? Gradually, in the West, three traditions presented themselves. The French called for the adoption of the ideals of their Revolution—liberté, egalité, fraternité, guided by reason. Swept by industry and invention, the British touted the “Invisible Hand” of free markets, which, as Adam Smith put it, would by serendipitous logic “advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of species.” The Germans, for their part, offered a nature philosophy that took progress to be the result of purposeful laws of the universe. Out of the tension of opposites, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued, would come a synthesis of something new, something higher, more evolved.
The French were revolutionaries, the English pragmatic, the Germans idealists.iii Between them, the Judeo-Christian view of history as static until deliverance, and the Greco-Roman view of history as cyclically preordained, had given way to the modern ideal of progress. The ancients had inquired after man’s place in the cosmos; now moderns, as Bacon had instructed, could “conquer nature in action.” A change had come about in the understanding of change itself.
Perhaps it isn’t all that surprising, then, that there began to appear chinks in the “Great Chain of Being”; Aristotle’s Christianized scala naturae now seeming to some less sacrosanct than previously supposed. A man as sophisticated as Thomas Jefferson could still state unequivocally in 1770 that not a single species had been lost since Creation. But the world’s leading naturalist around the mid-eighteenth century, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, assailed Linnaeus’s definition of species as too static.iv What most people thought of species were actually varieties modified from an original form; Buffon was adamant that they could “improve” or “degenerate,” depending on their environment. Before the century was out, Leclerc’s countryman, the zoologist Georges Cuvier, published findings comparing living elephants to fossils of mastodons, ending the argument about whether or not creatures could go extinct. They could, and they had, and in the future other creatures would, too. The conservative Cuvier didn’t believe in evolution, but in cycles of creation and destruction. Catastrophism, as he called it, meant that whatever the Bible said, there had been many more than just one flood. Over in Scotland, the geologist James Hutton agreed: Earth was far more ancient than Adam and Eve.v
