Goethe S Botany

A reprint of the U. of Hawaii Press edition, 1952. No index has been added. Cloth edition (unseen), $42. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Goethe's influential text, newly illustrated with stunning color photographs. The Metamorphosis of Plants, published in 1790, was Goethe's first major attempt to describe what he called in a letter to a friend “the truth about the how of the organism.” Inspired by the diversity of flora he found on a journey to Italy, Goethe sought a unity of form in diverse structures. He came to see in the leaf the germ of a plant's metamorphosis—“the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms”—from the root and stem leaves to the calyx and corolla, to pistil and stamens. With this short book—123 numbered paragraphs, in the manner of the great botanist Linnaeus—Goethe aimed to tell the story of botanical forms in process, to present, in effect, a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants. This MIT Press edition of The Metamorphosis of Plants illustrates Goethe's text (in an English translation by Douglas Miller) with a series of stunning and starkly beautiful color photographs as well as numerous line drawings. It is the most completely and colorfully illustrated edition of Goethe's book ever published. It demonstrates vividly Goethe's ideas of transformation and interdependence, as well as the systematic use of imagination in scientific research—which influenced thinkers ranging from Darwin to Thoreau and has much to teach us today about our relationship with nature.

Better known as a poet and dramatist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was also a learned philosopher and natural scientist. Astrida Orle Tantillo offers the first comprehensive analysis of his natural philosophy, which she contends is rooted in creativity. Tantillo analyzes Goethe's main scientific texts, including his work on physics, botany, comparative anatomy, and metereology. She critically examines his attempts to challenge the basic tenets of Newtonian and Cartesian science and to found a new natural philosophy. In individual chapters devoted to different key principles, she reveals how this natural philosophy—which questions rationalism, the quantitative approach to scientific inquiry, strict gender categories, and the possibility of scientific objectivity—illuminates Goethe's standing as both a precursor and critic of modernity. Tantillo does not presuppose prior knowledge of Goethe or science, and carefully avoids an overreliance on specialized jargon. This makes The Will to Create accessible to a wide audience, including philosophers, historians of science, and literary theorists, as well as general readers.

Much has been written about the golden youth and the Olympian old age of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, poet; less has been written, however, about Goethe the scientist, who, pursuing independent research in many fields, opposed the professional men of his day with brilliant theories of his own. The educated world, familiar with Faust, Werther, and Wilhelm Meister, is not so generally aware of the scientific achievements of the man who had a genus of plants (Goethea) and a mineral (goethite) named for him who coined and first used the word morphology; who contributed to the understanding of the physiology of color; who rediscovered and described the intermaxillary bone in man, propounded the vertebral theory of the skull, formulated a concept in botanical morphology that persists to this day; who discovered the volcanic origin of a mountain; who established the first system of weather stations; who made the first systematic classification of minerals and was among the first to use the comparative method in biology; and who came unwittingly close to achieving the greatest concept in biology—some say the greatest concept in the thinking of man—the theory of organic evolution and the descent of man. Even in those few cases where subsequent research has proved Goethe’s theories to be wrong, his supporting accumulation of facts has proved extremely valuable to science. Goethe was born at the beginning of a great scientific era. But he was a creative thinker; his was not the analytic mind that emphasized fine differences but the synthetic mind that sensed the unity behind the differences. He was also an ardent lover of nature, possessed of unlimited curiosity. Consequently, as a contemporary observed, "Whatever Goeth looked upon in nature immediately acquired the character of a living experience for him." Most of the material translated in this volume is taken from notes and essays which Goethe published from 1817 to 1824 in journal form. Occupying a central position is the most famous and lasting of his scientific writings, the essay on the metamorphosis of plants—an essay which is today considered "one of the minor classics of botany." One of the most important episodes in Goethe's life was his flight to Italy, where he was delighted by the climate and the luxuriance of the plant life. A fan palm in particular attracted his attention because its leaves seemed to exhibit a complete series of transitions from the simple lance-shaped first leaves to the most complex fan type. "At my request," Goethe wrote in his diary, "the gardener cut off an entire sequence of modifications for me, and I burdened myself with several pasteboard containers in which to carry these treasures around." From this beginning Goethe started to evolve his theory of plant metamorphosis, and he returned to Weimar convinced that he had found the secret. The literary student will find much to interest him in this translation—the poet's own account of his grief and suffering at the hands of misunderstanding friends, and his victory over a threatening neurosis. Such essays as "The History of My Botanical Studies" and "The Fate of My Manuscript" throw much light on the crucial middle period of Goethe's life. During Goethe's lifetime and after, there was a tendency to ignore his scientific accomplishments in the face of his literary works. Many felt that they were almost a crime against his poetry. A few, however, contended that in science lay the center and focal point of Goethe's mental life. Goethe, himself, toward the end of his life wrote, "For more than a half century I have been known as a poet, in my own country and undoubtedly also abroad; or at any rate I have been permitted to pass for one. But the fact that I have busily occupied myself with Nature in all her general physical and organic phenomena, constantly and passionately pursuing seriously formulated studies—this is not so generally known; still less has it been accorded any attention." "Minds like Goethe's," Thomas Carlyle said, "are the common property of all nations; and, for many reasons, all should have correct impressions of them." This translation will enable those not familiar with the German language to gain a direct impression of Goethe's mind as expressed in his botanical writings.