Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a poet, but first he was a natural philosopher, a follower of the school of Naturphilosophie that was started by Friedrich Schelling alongside Romanticism to counteract the mathematisation of nature and the universe that occurred during the Scientific Revolution as Europe moved toward modernity. This movement was one of the first blows against Newtonianism and the determinism that it entailed. Goethe was at the forefront of the assault, both in developing ideas from Naturphilosophie and contributing his own. Through analogies and the notion of the archetype, Goethe underscored the Romantic idea of the fundamental unity of all things; the emphasis he placed on teleology and on pantheism sealed his argument against determinism and against the mechanisation of nature.

I. The Origins of Romanticism and Naturphilosophie

The Romantic movement itself -- both as a philosophy and as an approach to the natural sciences -- arose largely as a response to the increasing mechanisation of the universe under the laws of Newtonian physics, which were corroborated by empirical evidence gathered through experimentation and individuated examples. Newton's legacy reached its epitome with the work of Pierre Laplace, who sought the complete mathematisation of nature: his postulation was that all things were governed by relatively simple laws of attraction and repulsion. The crucial difference between Newton and Laplace was each thinker's place for origins: Newton left room for a first mover, the origin of all things, in God, while Laplace famously eliminated God from the equation entirely by asserting that the universe came to be through a series of historical events, belittling God to a hypothesis and an unnecessary one at that.

The essence of this mathematical sort of modern science was perhaps captured most succinctly by Robert Boyle, who asserted that "the phenomena of the world are physically produced by the mechanical properties of the parts of matter, and [...] they operate upon one another according to mechanical laws" (Eichner, 10). The consequences of this approach are clear: it is deterministic, it means that if all of the forces acting on a body at a given time are known, its movements and behaviour (both past and yet to come) can be known with absolute certainty. As Laplace noted, an omniscient being could thus see the past and the future with equal clarity. This principle came to be known as "Laplace's demon", and it also came to represent some of determinism's most serious flaws.

Such a doggedly deterministic and pan-Newtonian approach created some serious problems for thinkers like Leibniz and Schelling. Of particular note is that, as Leibniz points out, a purely mechanistic viewpoint leads inexorably toward the notion of "a static universe" with no possible hope for improvement (10). This idea relies on the existence of a God who created the universe, as per Newton, who in his supreme good created "the best of all possible worlds", functioning like an automaton, some sort of "cosmic engine ... held in God's hand"; the difficulty lies in that "if a better world were possible, God would have created it in the first place" (11). This is of course perfectly in line with Boyle's mechanistic theory of the universe in motion; and indeed the universe as a great cosmic engine is in motion, there can be no disputing that, "but engines neither grow nor develop" (11) and thus any progress is rendered impossible.

A second flaw in determinism is the limitation that it imposes on free will. If all actions are pre-determined by antecedent causes -- for Newton, stretching all the way back to God, and for Laplace, through a series of historical occurrences -- then there cannot be any freedom of choice. Determinism extends even down to the molecular level, where the same maxim holds true: "since the laws of nature totally control the parts of matter that make up the body, there can be no freedom of the will" (12).

The dissatisfaction of Schelling and others with the Newtonian deterministic, static universe and all of its implications led to the formation of a new school of thought: Romanticism and its offshoot, Naturphilosophie, both of which sought to explain the world in a radically different way.

II. The Poetics and Organicism of Nature

Romanticism and Naturphilosophie redefined the static universe: under this school of thought the world itself was alive, never the same from one moment to the next, always evolving. Accordingly, the mechanical view of natural phenomena was scrapped and superseded by a "sweeping organicism", an all-pervasive life force that inundated everything -- here, nature is thought of teleologically, as an "unconscious, visible spirit striving toward consciousness" (Eichner, 15). The naturphilosopher, in attempting to understand the processes of nature, tended toward "comprehending organic products by conceiving them as results or at any rate as stages, of a process which has the form of an evolution" (Royce, 575). The telos toward which the world proceeded was none other than its own perfection: "the perfect supreme being is not its creator but its telos", and thus there is room for improvement and for hope (Eichner, 15).

To explain the same natural phenomena that determinism had explained with mechanical forces, naturphilosophers turned to analogies between the world and living organisms, attributing change and movement to "freedom, [and] conscious or unconscious mental processes" (Eichner, 15). Another Romantic, Schlegel, qualified this notion by saying that "every motion is individual and dynamic. Every motion is instinct"; this even extends to "dead matter", things the movement of which empirical, Newtonian scientists would attribute to antecedent causes (16). Everything was animate, and Romanticism's fundamental natural unity made certain that none of it was inscrutable to reason: for "man's reason demands that man's experience shall be viewed as a connected whole.... [and therefore naturphilosophers] did not view the world as anything foreign to the human reason" (Royce, 574).

III. Reconciling the Analogous with the Empirical

Goethe, following in the footsteps of Schelling, was an exemplary naturphilosopher, both as a thinker in the sciences and as a poet after the Romantic literary tradition. His viewpoints not only reflected those of Naturphilosophie, but also in some cases expanded upon them; Goethe's meditations on nature expressed as microcosm and macrocosm and on the concept of archetypes are of particular interest because of the ways in which they helped to pose challenges to and solve the problems caused by deterministic principles.

Seeking out microcosms of phenomena in nature too large to be easily observed and applying lessons learned from the former to the latter might be criticised as being hopelessly idealistic -- and it is; though no less idealistic than later instances of the same from atomic physicists, like Bohr's model of the atom with its electrons orbiting about the nucleus as planets orbit about the Sun -- but as a conceptual tool, it is certainly useful. Says Goethe, "It is not easy for us to grasp the vast, the supercolossal, in nature; we have lenses to magnify tiny objects but none to make things smaller" (Goethe, 304). This is very true, and a difficult obstacle to surmount if one's prerogative is exactly that: to observe the largest elements of the universe. Goethe's solution to the problem is simple. By applying the Romantic principle of the essential unity of all things to observation, he is able to draw analogies between the unimaginably enormous and the miniscule:

However, since nature is always the same, whether found in the vast or the small, and every piece of turbid glass produces the same blue as the whole of the atmosphere covering the globe, I think it right to seek out prototypal examples and assemble them before me. Here, then, the enormous is not reduced; it is present within the small, and remains as far beyond our grasp as it was when it dwelt in the infinite. (304)

That principle of analogous microcosms and macrocosms can be construed as a blow against determinism, and indeed any science based on empirical evidence and specific instantiations of principles. It allows for a natural philosopher to draw conclusions about an object (or a system of objects) not by observing the object itself, but by observing another, completely different body and applying the knowledge gleaned from it to the first. An empiricist might take offence at this assumption -- that is, the Romantic philosophical notion that all of nature is fundamentally the same, following the same underlying principles, and therefore one needn't observe a specific instance of a phenomenon in order to know its intricacies by proxy -- but the caveat that Goethe adds serves as a warning against hubris: even something enormous reduced to a size that allows for examination might still remain unknowable.

This is not to say that Goethe himself had no use for empirical data. His forays into biology placed great importance on a posteriori knowledge and thought, though often the conclusions he reached came back to Romantic metaphysics. Exemplary of this is Goethe's conception of the "type" -- that is, "the generic and specific form toward which each individual existence strives, and which it more or less fulfills" (Will, 56). Proper determination of different types of creatures could only come about through careful empirical observation, and so it did. About this process, Goethe says that

... type should be established, as far as possible, according to physiological considerations. It follows from the general idea of the type that no single animal can be established as such a canon for comparison; no single thing can be a sample of the whole.... Experience must first show us the parts which all animals have in common, and in which respects these parts vary. The idea must prevail over the whole and abstract the picture in a genetic way. (Haas, 38)

It must be noted, however, that Goethe's types "cannot by any means be conceived as ancestral types in a phylogenetic sense" -- instead they function as a sort of "idealistic morphology", with each type serving as "an abstraction of the actual form variety within a group of organisms of the same structural plan" (Haas, 38). They then make no pretensions of deterministically understanding the purpose and behaviour of every creature; rather, the types are another conceptual tool by which the astute natural philosopher might better understand the fundamental unity of nature, allowing one to see that observing the individual cannot possibly give one a clear picture of the whole.

IV. In Search of the Archetype

Another idea brought to perfection by Goethe was the archetype, which follows naturally from the notion of morphological types. Archetypes are like the "idealistic morphology" writ large, no longer limited to biology; they are a demonstration of the fundamental underlying unity of all of nature. It is the archetype which enables the drawing of effective analogies that are true on all levels, not merely as conceptual aids: the archetype says that all the world truly can be found in a grain of sand, just as turbid glass can hold all of the atmosphere inside of it (Goethe, 304).

Of the archetype, Goethe says that it is "ideal, real, symbolic, [and] identical" all at the same time:

ideal as the ultimate we can know,
real as what we know,
symbolic, because it includes all instances,
identical with all instances. (303)

That the archetype can be both actualised and idealised, both general and instantiated, is somewhat paradoxical -- but it becomes perfectly clear when set in the context of an example. The archetype of the vertebrate is perhaps the best-known, and also the best-suited to show what Goethe meant. It is knowable as an ideal: if a given organism has a spine then it is a vertebrate, and if it doesn't it isn't, and more specific details than this are superfluous. It is also knowable in its actualised form, for precisely the same reason: regardless of its individual characteristics, an organism with a backbone fits into the archetype. The vertebrate archetype is symbolic, because it can represent all vertebrates; and lastly, it also applies to every instance of a vertebrate organism.

Goethe concedes that archetypes are not well-suited for "direct experience" -- they "create a kind of anxiety in us, for we feel inadequate" (303). Instead, the archetypes must be filtered through what we can gather empirically, and then intuited therefrom by natural philosophers: this effectively reconciles the Romantic archetype with the empirical need for observation and instantiation, and thus is a philosophical victory of sorts for Goethe and for Naturphilosophie over pure empiricism.

V. Free Will, and Finally a Place for God

The place of free will in nature (even whether or not it exists) is one of the last remaining deterministic problems; Goethe's answer for this derives from his morphology. To know "the essence in man", one must first know "the purposes and qualities of nature", including the telos (or final cause, in Aristotelian terms) of each organism within it (Will, 56). Each creature -- including man -- is driven by a sort of "physical will to self-formation" or self-actualisation -- and in doing so, and in seeking "a harmonious balance of its faculties" a creature "must [...] freely will to be what nature requires it to be" (56). It is a free will of sorts, but not the kind that determinism made impossible: instead, it is "freedom of necessity" (56).

Perhaps another criticism that might be levelled against Goethe is his seeming deification of nature -- like the Laplacian determinists, his nature seems to function perfectly well without any intervention on the part of a God. But unlike the Laplacian view, the universe for the naturphilosophers did not unfold and come to actualise itself within time: "genesis and decay, creation and destruction, birth and death, joy and pain, all are interwoven with equal effect and weight", and as they can be and often are concurrent with each other, "any or all may occur at the same moment" (Goethe, 304) -- not just as a Laplacian procession of historical events, though that certainly is also a possibility. Therefore, in allowing eternity to remain a possibility, Goethe leaves room for divinity and even states that it is present: "Whoever wishes to deny nature as an organ of the divine must begin by denying all revelation" (303). Nature has not replaced God so much as God is everywhere in nature -- this pantheistic approach is what cements Goethe's differences from both Newton and Laplace. "'Nature conceals God!' But not from everyone!" he admonishes (303); and in fact it is in intuiting archetypes and uncovering for oneself the unity of nature that one can be most certain of finding God.

Eichner, Hans. "The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism". PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), 8-30.
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. D. Miller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Haas, Otto. "Goethe and Evolution". Osiris, vol. 10 (1952), 35-42.
Royce, Josiah. "Some Relations between Philosophy and Science in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century in Germany". Science, New Series, Vol. 38, No. 982 (Oct. 24, 1913), 567-584.
Will, Frederic. "Goethes [sic] Aesthetics: The Work of Art and the Work of Nature". The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 22 (Jan., 1956), 53-65.