Goethe: Scientific research full of "poetry and truth"

Yang Jing

Goethe (1749-1832)

To the average person, poetry and science always seem to be difficult to combine, and some subjects of daily life are "too scientific" for poetry and "too poetic" for science. However, as a poet and a scientist, Goethe was always able to turn decay into magic, fusing the two into one furnace – obviously, in Goethe's body, he combined the romance of the poet, the aesthetics of art and the rigor of scientists. Although by current standards, "Goetheistic scientific research" can only be attributed to the romantic imagination, and even classified as "alternative", in the eyes of historians of science, this alternative research has indisputable value and significance.

The great German poet Goethe (1749-1832) was a famous novelist, dramatist, literary theorist and statesman, an outstanding representative of the Weimar classical style, and one of the most outstanding and brilliant figures in the field of world literature. In fact, in addition to literature and art, Goethe also maintained a lifelong interest in science, he did in-depth research on osteology, botany, optics and colorology, and wrote a large number of scientific research papers. In more than 80 years of long life, with strong energy and diligence, he left a total of 129 volumes of works to posterity, including 13 volumes of scientific works, with a total of more than 6,000 pages, including many famous articles such as "Plant Deformation", "Optics", "Colorology" and so on. Inexplicably, only a small fraction of them were officially published—Goethe had several plans to publish his research during his lifetime, but this wish was not realized until 1816, due to rejection by publishers and scientific authorities: he founded his own journal, Introduction to the Natural Sciences, Especially Morphology (1817-1824). He published his research papers, experimental reports, memorandums, excerpts, schematics, research outlines and illustrations, as well as correspondence, diaries and talks on natural studies in various fields of the natural sciences and his new understanding of science.

In addition, Goethe is also a well-deserved historian of science: the "History Volume" of "ColorOlogy" is dedicated to describing the color views and personality characteristics of famous figures in the past, which is actually Goethe's description of the history of color research and spiritual history, thus far beyond the inherent narrow scope of the color field, fully demonstrating Goethe's profound intellectual attainment and ability to control the history of science. Until shortly before his death, Goethe wrote to his friends discussing the natural sciences. The above proves that Goethe is very familiar with the professional scientific literature of his time, even comparable to that of professionals.

In his masterpiece Travels in Italy, in addition to exploring poetry, it is also full of detailed descriptions of geology, climate, rocks and vegetation, which is breathtaking. To the average person, poetry and science always seem to be difficult to combine, and some subjects of daily life are "too scientific" for poetry and "too poetic" for science. However, as a poet and a scientist, Goethe was always able to turn decay into magic, fusing the two into one furnace – obviously, in Goethe's body, he combined the romance of the poet, the aesthetics of art and the rigor of scientists. Although by current standards, "Goetheistic scientific research" can only be attributed to the romantic imagination, and even classified as "alternative", in the eyes of historians of science, this alternative research has indisputable value and significance.

Anti-Linnaeus naturalism

Goethe's true study of nature began in 1780. Nevertheless, the "physiognomy" research he tried under rawat in his early years (1774-1775) under the direction of Rawat laid the foundation for his future natural research activities. He initially studied comparative anatomy, with a focus on osteology. In this field, from 1780 to 1784, after careful research, he finally discovered the interpalatal bone (or "Goethe bone") of humans. Because this discovery was rejected by biologists, Goethe was so devastated that he interrupted osteologic research and turned to botany.

Goethe's residence in Weimar was accompanied by a large garden (thanks to the Duke of Weimar), which later became his natural laboratory for the study of plants. In addition to studying the primitive form and metamorphosis of plants, Goethe preferred to grow his favorite vegetables, asparagus and artichokes, as well as various herbs and spices. It is said that When Goethe went out to visit his girlfriend, he would bring an asparagus he had planted himself. Goethe complained more than once, "For more than half a century, both at home and abroad, people have known me as a poet and treated me as a poet at best." Most people do not know and take it seriously about my tireless observation and study of the natural world and the enthusiasm and effort devoted to botany for so many years. The reason for this is that his method of research is very different from that of the famous Swedish botanist Linnaeus (1707-1778) in his plant classification.

Goethe lived in an era that can be called the "post-Linnaean era". Because of Linnaeus' prestige and influence, European men, women and children were avid for plants, and botany became a new religion—the French Romantic philosopher Rousseau was its adherent. According to the Confessions, in 1765 Rousseau and his companion came to the island of Saint-Pierre in the middle of Lake Mainne to see the plants, "and regarded the whole island as my botanical garden." Similarly, Goethe lamented in his diary: "I wish God would make me a gardener or an experimenter, so that I would be so happy." Despite their love of nature, the excitement of the two is very different. As Rousseau says in The Bulletin of Botany, his interest was in flowers, and Goethe's interest in leaves—palm leaves in the Botanical Garden of Padua and fennel leaves in Sicily, all fascinated the great poet.

Goethe, while affirming the importance of Linnaeus' taxonomy, pointed out that Linnaeus' method had a fatal weakness, that is, classification could never exhaust the diversity of plant organs—from the different leaves of one plant to different plants of the same species. Thus, Goethe argued that taxonomy, like the myth of Sisyphus, was futile in exploring the continuing nature of plant life, a historical limitation of Linnaeus and his contemporaries. Instead, Goethe argued that only by resorting to a dynamic "archetypal" theory could a rational explanation be given to the complex variety of plant forms that followed certain common mechanisms. From this, Goethe proposed his own most famous theory of plant morphology archetypals (or "leaf theory"). This theory holds that plants evolved from the simplest leaves, which gradually diversified, diminished, increased, and over the course of their evolution, they always tended to become thinner, lighter, and more perfect. Thus Goethe began to realize that all changing organs might be considered potential leaves.

In 1787, during Goethe's travels in Naples, Italy, he suddenly had an "epiphany". He wrote in his travelogue: "I feel that in that organ, which we usually call the leaf, is hidden the real old man of the sea, Proteus... Plants, no matter what, are always leaves, and the buds of the future are inseparably bound together with it. From this time on, Goethe's idea of deformation had clearly taken shape. In 1790, Goethe published the "Metamorphosis of Plants", which systematically expounded his views, and coined the term "morphology" to refer to "the study of the systematic study of biological structures", a term that has been used to this day.

Goethe proposed in the "Plant Metamorphosis" that contradicts Linnaeus's "homologous theory" of plant organs, which contains important ideas about the development and variation of plant individual morphology. The famous Russian botanist Tachtakir (1910-2009) spoke highly of this: "Goethe's historical role in plant morphology is that he laid the foundation for the morphology of plants, that is, developmental morphology. This biological theory, later known as the "Goethe hypothesis," is both the result of scientific observation and the imagination of artistic genius, and is the product of the perfect combination of "poetry and truth."

A year before his death (1831), Goethe published a paper entitled "The Spiral Tendency of Plants", which showed his passion for the study of plant morphology until his death. However, due to various reasons, Goethe was unable to fulfill his wish - to complete a more comprehensive and in-depth botanical work, leaving a lifelong regret. Although his ideas of plant metamorphism are not without "mystery" compared with orthodoxy, they have had a great impact on the history of science. The famous German physicist Helmholtz (1821-1894) even asserted that Goethe's ideas "shaped" 19th-century biology and paved the way for Darwin's theory of evolution – and Darwin did not talk about Goethe's theory more than once, even in his Origin of Species.

Anti-Newtonian optics

Compared with Linnaeus in the field of botany, Newton's position in the field of physics far exceeded it, and Goethe's attack on Newton's (and his disciples) theories of optics and color has become a famous "public case" in the history of science, and has even been cited as a joke. Goethe began to study optics and color theory in 1790: from 1791 to 1795 he wrote "On Optics", and from 1795 to 1801 he wrote and published "Color Science". Until his death in 1832, however, Goethe struggled to see his theories recognized by the "scientific community", for in the eyes of orthodoxy, Goethe's attack on the master of science, Newton, as an "amateur"—who replaced Newton's optical instruments and scientific experiments by emphasizing the subjective experience of human eye observation—was undoubtedly a "subversion" of ulterior motives.

Through tireless observation and analysis, Goethe refuted Newton's idea that "different colors are decomposed by white light." In his view, white and black are the most primitive optical phenomena, because "light is indissoluble", and the original light alternates with each other to produce various colors. In the study of color, Goethe also found that the colors themselves were not "finished, but colors that were still being formed and changing"; on the contrary, Newton "saw the dispersed images of light as the completed, unchangeable colors of the work", so Goethe asserted: "All forms ... Never remains static, never static or terminating; precisely, everything oscillates in eternal motion. This is also the difference between Goethe and the orthodox scientists of his contemporaries, who looked at nature more abstractly and in isolation from a mechanistic point of view, hoping to find universal laws from it, while Goethe insisted on looking at man and nature as a whole, arguing that it was not enough to draw any "scientific" conclusions.

According to research, from about 1796 onwards, Goethe incorporated the concept of "deformation" into his holistic scientific framework. Goethe defines that everything that has form, "from the basic material and chemical elements to the appearance of the most spiritual person", has morphology at work, and from the morphological point of view, all creation takes on the form of the type to which it belongs: in the process of movement, change and disappearance, everything is presented to our naked and spiritual eyes. At the same time, all things and I are in a larger biological system. The relationship is intricate, mutually restrictive and interdependent, and once it is divided, it will inevitably cause both sides to lose. At this time, science not only does not bring the gospel, but on the contrary, it can cause disaster.

The sublimation and fusion of "poetry and truth"

In short, Goethe's scientific approach is the empiricist (rather than abstract inference) approach of the Bacon and Locke schools. However, unlike empiricism in positivism, it does not treat man as an external observer, but as an object within or even subordinate to the object of observation. Unlike the mechanistic science that prevailed at the time, which regarded nature as the object of study by the subject "I", Goethe's scientific research objects and methods were highly related to his natural philosophical and aesthetic views, that is, emphasizing the overall unity of subject and object. In his conversation with Ekman in 1827, he summed it up: "I have always tended to pay attention only to some of the things in the geographical environment around me that can be touched by the senses, so I have never engaged in astronomy, because the senses alone are not enough in astronomy, and I have to resort to instruments, calculations, and mechanics, which require a lifetime of energy, not my share." Thus, Goethe never isolated his scientific research from human intuition.

It is worth noting that in Goethe's study of nature, "polarity" and "sublimation" are of great significance to the concept. Goethe used them to refer to the self-active development and differentiation of all natural things, calling them "the two great driving wheels of nature." Goethe defined polarity as "the firm unity of two or more factors" and further pointed out that one of the most significant concretizations of the concept of polarity is the physical attraction and repulsion, such as the gravitational and centrifugal forces that determine the relationship between the earth and the universe, so that matter is in a state of "continuous attraction and repulsion". In his view, the forces that drive the constant changes in form in the world and its parts stem from the principle of polarity. In his Treatise on Optics in 1791, Goethe first expressed his idea of polarity—the study of optics led him to discover that the opposition and combination of light and darkness produce color phenomena. In this regard, he wrote with great delight in poetic language, "We and the object, light and darkness, body and soul, two minds, spirit and matter, God and the world, thought and expansion, ideal and reality, sensibility and reason, imagination and reason, existence and desire; the two halves of the body, left and right, breathing, physical experience: magnets"... All of the above are concrete manifestations of polarity acting on the world.

Since then, Goethe has learned the principle of sublimation through the study of comparative anatomy, and has greatly expanded his concept of polarity. In his later scientific writings, Goethe not only used the concept of polarity to describe the tendency of natural differentiation, but also used the concept of sublimation to express the tendency of biological species and even nature as a whole to develop. All life is sublimating itself through growth, so every combination of the two poles also means a sublimation. On this basis, just as Huxley (who described himself as the "watchdog of evolution") attempted to extend Darwin's theory of natural selection into the field of sociology, Goethe declared that "the rules of sublimation can also be applied to aesthetic and moral aspects". From this, his theory touches on the relationship between natural science (research) and aesthetics and literature and art. In this regard, he at first "transitioned from poetry to plastic arts, from plastic arts to the study of nature", and then, in due course, "discovered the path back to art through physiological colors, through all the moral and aesthetic effects induced by physiological colors". This process clearly proves that Goethe's aesthetics, literary arts, and natural thought, unlike the "specialized" scientists of the time, were acquired primarily by logical deduction based on conceptual settings, but always derived from his own experience.

Professor Wolf Lepez, former director of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, argues in his book What is a European Intellectual that in the context of the modern Enlightenment, science, which claims to be free from political, religious and ideological constraints, has attained supremacy. Scientism has become an essential element of the composition of European "self-consciousness" since the Renaissance, just as Linnaeus defined "Europeans" epitomize the best qualities of human beings - intelligence, courtesy and creativity, which is also the image of mainstream intellectuals (and scientists) in the eyes of the public. Yet few people realize that there is another class of sentimental or alternative scientists, full of skepticism and criticism, "at odds" with orthodoxy—such as Goethe, who insisted on a holistic view of science and emphasized that naked-eye observations were better than scientific instruments.

For a long time before his death, Goethe's scientific research was almost reduced to the laughing stock of professionals, especially his rebuttal of Newton, which was often ridiculed as "self-imposed", but Goethe did not give up. As he said in his autobiography Poetry and Truth, "The meaning of a man is not in what he has left behind, but in the fact that he has done and enjoyed, and has enabled others to do and enjoy", and he himself ("an old man who is over a year old" has been able to consistently practice a "great value concept" with the greatest effort and sincerity throughout his life, because he has always firmly believed that "the history of the world must be rewritten from time to time, which is nothing to doubt today." Such a necessity arises not because of the discovery of many events later, but because of some new perspective, because members of an era that is advancing are led to such a foothold from which the past is observed and judged in new ways. The same is true in science. Similarly, Goethe, in His Book of Proverbs and Introspection, advocated "the simultaneous development of art and science." He defined "poetry" as a technique for reproducing "reality" because, in his view, reality is not real but just a shadow of reality. In this sense, poetry is an effort to bring reality closer to reality, to unearth the distorted and obscured truth, to create something more valuable, and to resurrect all life—poetry and science go hand in hand in the quest to discover truth/truth.

Goethe asserted at the beginning of the second volume of Poetry and Truth: "What a man desires when he is young will be abundant in old age." Like Faustus, who tirelessly explored and continued to die, he devoted himself to scientific writing until his death, and his scientific theories such as biology, optics, and color science blossomed in his later years and had a major impact on future generations, because he advocated that science and poetry were two different ways of exploring truth, and that the mutual integration of the two rather than mutual exclusion could promote the progress of human civilization. As the famous British literary theorist and Oxford University professor John Carey said in the Book of Science of Faber, Goethe's ideal has not yet been realized, but it is a good start - it will make us realize that science, like art, is rooted in human culture, and the fusion of the two will bring more creativity and miracles of life. This is also the hope of human civilization.