The Music of the Organism: Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty, Zuckerkandl, and Deleuze as Goethean Ecologists in Search of a New Paradigm

Ecology is an eminently practical discipline, but the practical dilemmas of the ecological movement—and arguably of the environmental crisis itself—are the consequences of our failure to comprehend the complexity and unity of nature theoretically. The ecological crisis is first and foremost an epistemological crisis.¹ As Thomas Kuhn has taught us, such crises are potentially revolutionary episodes out of which new paradigms can emerge.² We have also learned from Kuhn that paradigm shifts are rarely sudden events; usually they unfold over decades or even centuries. So it has been with the search for a new paradigm that was inaugurated by Goethe’s scientific work.³ As a practicing scientist and as a philosopher of science, Goethe both foresaw the crisis of mechanistic explanation and laid foundations for a new paradigm that might replace it.⁴ In doing so, he also laid foundations for a future, alternative science of ecology. Although the term “ecology” did not exist until Ernst Haeckel coined it in 1866, Goethe was a profound ecologist in principle and practice if not yet in name.⁵ This essay on four major “Goethean ecologists” seeks to add a brief chapter to the history of the reception of Goethe’s scientific work⁶ and also to Donald Worster’s now standard history of ecology,⁷ which barely mentions Goethe in passing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mechanists seemed to have triumphed over both Naturphilosophie and the separate, more narrowly Kantian school described by Timothy Lenoir, which sought in vain to keep alive a sophisticated mode of teleological explanation.⁸ The unsophisticated teleology invoked by Darwin’s critics was easily routed, and various modes of vitalism were pushed to the margins by the many patent successes of the mechanistic model. Materialism was pursued with religious fervor and supreme confidence: major biologists actually swore mutual oaths to the true faith,⁹ and talented students were counseled to avoid physics, because soon no unsolved problems would remain.¹⁰ But the great revolutions in early twentieth-century physics that the mechanists never saw coming doomed the project: nineteenth-century materialism was toppled because relativity and quantum mechanics undermined its deepest foundations. Within biology, a new debate ensued between scientists who still believed that biological processes could be fully explained by reducing them to the physical and chemical interactions of the inorganic world and “organicists,” who were persuaded that nature is hierarchical and that the higher-order biological phenomena of the life-world are explicable only in terms of “emergent” laws that do not obtain at lower levels of complexity.¹¹ Even though our understanding of matter had changed radically, and has come to resemble nineteenth-century vitalism in many ways with its fields of forces and action-at-a-distance, the former group kept practicing “normal science” (Kuhn’s term) within the older mechanistic paradigm, while the latter group, the organicists, openly sought a new paradigm.

In her important study Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology, Donna Haraway provides an incisive account of the search for a new paradigm in the life sciences undertaken by figures such as Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss, among many others, who proceeded by exploring systematically the cognitive metaphors described in her title.¹² Even though she gives Goethe the first and last words in her volume¹³ and refers repeatedly to a study by Philip C. Ritterbush that also traces the genealogy of the organicist paradigm back to Goethe,¹⁴ she neglects to explore a “Goethean” metaphor that was pursued systematically by a series of highly significant thinkers. In that sense, the present essay is also a modest attempt to add a chapter to Haraway’s splendid account by exploring the cognitive metaphor of music in conjunction with Goethe’s scientific work. Music might seem remote from ecology, but I shall argue that it has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the organic world, for there is an unbroken stream of ecological thinkers in...