The Contemporary Legacy of Goethean Morphology: From Anschauende Urteilskraft to Algorithmic Pattern Recognition, Generation, and Exploration

Summary

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of Goethean morphology that reads it not so much as an anti- or premodern methodology than as a late modern one. Indeed, based on the analysis of the specificity of the visual and computational techniques that ground Goethe's approach to natural phenomena, the paper suggests looking at Goethean morphology as an original practice of reduction. The latter does not simplify complexity, as is usually the case in modern natural sciences, but rather aims at intuiting the ways in which nature's technique generates complexity itself. Consequently, the article understands the work of Goethe qua naturalist as an innovative answer to Kant's antinomy of teleological judgment, namely as an attempt to comprehend the logic of nature from within, instead of merely trying to represent or mimic it. In this context, the article presents the Urtyp, the key feature of Goethean morphology, as a proto-algorithmic matrix capable of identifying and/or visually generating and exploring the structures of both actual and virtual morphologies. Finally, the article indicates how this very gesture paved the way to contemporary techniques of pattern recognition, generation, and exploration via natural computing, developmental algorithms, fuzzy logic, and computer graphics.

Keywords: Goethean morphology, structuralism, generative algorithm, pattern recognition, fuzzy prototype, artificial life, computational arts.

THOUGH THERE HAVE been numerous studies on Goethean morphology, most employ a history of philosophy approach rather than address the topic at the conceptual level—and thus tend to overlook the remarkable contemporaneity of the methodological innovations advanced in the corpus of Goethe's scientific writings. Indeed, the manner in which Goethe formulates the main problem faced by naturalists—how best to uncover the invisible laws driving the morphogenesis of natural products—is strikingly close to how contemporary computational crafters and artists explore the virtual potentialities of the materials with which they work. In his “Vorarbeiten zu einer Physiologie der Pflanzen” (“Excerpt from Studies for a Physiology of Plants”), for instance, Goethe notes: “Wenn ich eine entstandne Sache vor mir sehe, nach der Entstehung frage und den Gang zurück messe, so weit ich ihn verfolgen kann, so werde ich eine Reihe Stufen gewahr, die ich zwar nicht neben einander sehen kann, sondern mir in der Erinnerung zu einem gewissen idealen Ganzen vergegenwärtigen” (If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps.