The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine

2 The Metamorphosis of Plants

Kant never took any notice of me, although independently I was following a course similar to his. I wrote my Metamorphosis of Plants before I knew anything of Kant, and yet it is entirely in the spirit of his ideas. —Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann [A]t the exact moment when Kant’s work was completed and a map through the bare woods of reality was sketched, the Goethean quest for the seeds of eternal growth began. —Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” When something has acquired a form it metamorphoses immediately to a new one. If we wish to arrive at some living perception of nature we ourselves must remain as quick and flexible as nature and follow the example she gives. —Goethe, “The Purpose Set Forth” (from On Morphology) Up to this point we have concentrated on the importance of form in Kant’s technic of nature. Reflective judgment must proceed, when examining organisms, on the assumption that basic organizational frameworks inherited or constructed by natural scientists, such as system, purpose, 2 GOETHE The Metamorphosis of Plants 45 and order, correspond to empirical reality, although this unity cannot be known or proven. The feeling that results when the unity one has assumed seems to correspond to what one finds empirically is one of pleasure, the same feeling one has when one makes an aesthetic judgment of beauty. In aesthetic judgments, whether of beauty, sublimity, or purposiveness , reflection attempts to create a unity out of that which cannot be subsumed under a concept. Kant calls the assumption of unity “an occupation of the understanding conducted with regard to a necessary purpose of its own,” which is then taken up by judgment and ascribed to nature (KU 187). Kant’s aim, as we have seen, was to avoid confirming the existence of final causes in nature while allowing them as inevitable procedural assumptions (as contingent, yet as also indispensable) for the purpose of doing natural science. However, Kant also expresses sympathy with the desire to find Ur-phenomena and even the Ur-mother (KU§80): “We would still prefer to hear others offer hope that if we had deeper insight into nature, or could compare the nature [we know] more broadly with the parts of it we do not yet know, then we would find nature ever simpler as our experience progressed and ever more accordant despite the seeming heterogeneity in its empirical laws” (KU 188). If, on the other hand “we are told that a deeper or broadened knowledge of nature based on observation must ultimately meet with a diversity of laws that no human understanding can reduce to a single principle,” Kant writes, “then we will be content with that too” (KU 188). Thus, although the reality behind the form remains open-ended (since unknown), Kant has already traced the trajectory of philosophy, which must proceed according to the assumption of a progressive order, according to a scheme of organized individuation similar to the organization that the pre-critical understanding projects onto nature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writing at the same time as Kant, also eschews the anthropocentric notion of the purposiveness of nature, yet continues to look for the origin Kant declares we will never know exists, although “origin” will have a specific meaning that may initially seem counterintuitive . This is because Goethe reinterprets the very meaning of “origin ,” from a “what” or a “where” to a “how,” from a location to a process. This shift marks a significant change in the ideology governing the search for a source: while Kant would prefer to ultimately find a single , unifying, simple origin, Goethe admits from the outset that the quest for a simple in the sense of singular origin is a fruitless one, since the principle underlying all of natural development is a multiple and self-transformative one: thus, the Ur-plant or originary principle of life in any form for Goethe, though sought after, will never be found in a unique and irreducible form. Goethe recognizes many of his own ideals in Kant’s work, but shifts the focus of the inquiry from the form that both inquiry and 46 The Vegetative Soul judgment take to the question of form itself. Though Kant questions the correspondence of the technic of nature to a noumenal realm, the structure of the technic itself is a priori for reflective judgment. Whether noumenal nature corresponds to nature as we perceive...