The Significance of Goethe's Natural Science in our time

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This study examines the history of the reception of Goethe's natural science from the end of the 19th century to the present, in order to reconsider the present state of the natural sciences, and to illuminate their relation with the human sciences. Goethe's natural science attracted much attention at the end of the 19th century, when the authority of the natural sciences increasingly influenced the human sciences. Some scholars saw in Goethe a way to reconceive the natural sciences or to intermediate between the natural and human sciences.Ernst Haeckel, one of the earliest exponents of Darwinism, forcefully interpreted Goethe's morphology to regard Goethe and Lamarck as forerunners of Darwin's evolutionary theory. Haeckel developed a mechanistic "recapitulative" monism that postulated a common ancestor of plants and animals, matter and spirit.Opposing Haeckel's monism, Wilhelm Dilthey proposed the new idea of "human sciences, " the methodology of which, although empirical, differs fun … More damentally from that of the natural sciences. Having made this distinction, Dilthey also drew upon Goethe's morphology to aim at an "organic science" that could bridge the natural and human sciences.Also based on Goethe's morphology, Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms constructed a new science to overcome some of the limitations of material science. Cassirer elevated the discourse of morphology from biological and social to conceptual and cognitive dimensions. Cassirer clarified that human cognition involves not only the abstract thought of the hard sciences, but also the "concrete thought" found in Goethe's natural science.Claude Levi-Strauss identified forms of "concrete thought" among "primitive peoples." He reiterated that he had learned both this method of thinking as well as his structuralism from Goethe's morphology. Carlo Ginzburg also borrows from Goethian morphology, turning his attention to non-European elements in European history in order to shed light upon "another genealogy." In the latter half of the 20th century, even molecular-biologists refer to Goethe's morphology, rediscovering their ideas of DNA in the verse of Goethe's poem "Urworte, orphisch" which translates, "Stamped form, which develops vividly."Thus the present study not only traces the influences of Goethe's morphology, but opens possibilities for a more organically humanistic integration of the human and natural sciences. Less