Goethe's History of Science (review)

264 Book Reviews intertextuality" (199), it is not for those who look for a discussion of meaning in the essays of Goethe the poet, scientist, and critic. University of Chicago Astrida Orle Tantillo Fink, Karl J., Goethe's History of Science. Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1991· xii + 242 pp. This study would serve well as a concise introduction to Goethe's major scientific endeavors: geology, anatomy, botany, and optics. However, the focus of Fink's investigation is Goethe's construction of the history of scientific speculation, thought, and experimentation. It involves the history of his personal involvement as well as the description of the psychological and sociological aspects of scientific developments in general. In the beginning, the author discusses the principal concepts underlying Goethe's literary essay on granite as the primeval rock, and the discovery of the intermaxillary bone as a link which signals connectedness rather than difference of organic forms. Three basic and familiar principles of Goethe's view of nature emerge: the notion of an archetypical form, the notion of a metamorphosis of this form into all other existing varieties, and the notion of an organic unity of all nature. These are, indeed, the basic constituents of Goethe's romantic science. It is not clear to me why Fink then decided to call Goethe 's work in botany and optics (or rather sight) classical science, unless by this he means the forms of presentation rather than the working concepts. The idea of a primeval plant and the notion of a leaf as the basic organ from which all other forms of plants develop through metamorphoses are essentially the same as the notion of a primeval rock as prototype of all geological formation. And the case of Goethe's theory of color is too complex to fit into the romantic-classical framework. However, as far as the texts of the Morphological Notebooks and the Materials on the History of Color Theory are concerned, there is a sense in which they might be called classical. When Goethe republished his "Metamorphosis of Plants" of 1790 as the first section of the Morphological Notebooks, it was framed by two essays entitled "History of my Botanical Studies," and "Fate of the Printed Text" respectively . As Fink clearly shows, here Goethe establishes the basic pattern of his historical writing: the scientific text, the personal involvement with the subject matter, and something like a sociology of the text. Both a subjective and an objective frame of reference are established and fused, and the narration of the history becomes part and parcel of the scientific insight itself. In later sections of his study, Fink discusses the narrative strategies of Goethe's scientific writings at length, the logocentrism of scientific movements in general (and that of the Newtonians in particular), and finally the rhetoric of the scientific guild. Reading the history of science as the history Goethe Yearbook 265 of certain texts with a language and especially a reservoir of metaphors uniquely characteristic of certain historical periods and schools emerges as one of Goethe's main contributions to the historiography of science. The other, surprisingly modern sounding, perspectives are Goethe's views on the psychology and sociology of scientific knowledge. Newtonian optics, as Fink describes very well, bears the features of Newton, the individual, of Newton in relation to British society of his time, of England and her position in the world. Goethe also clearly saw that scientific authority, scientific dogma, scientific paradigm, but also popularizers like Voltaire, played a key role in shaping the history of Newtonian science. This history—as the members of the guild would have it and the unsophisticated public had accepted it—did not, as it were, write itself as a logical progression of discoveries devoid of psychological and sociological aspects. It is Goethe, as Fink convincingly shows, who appears to be the first historian of science to have depicted scientific developments in the context of subjective-psychological, objective-sociological, and linguistic fields of forces. Therefore, it may be that while Goethe's contributions to science are usually regarded as marginal , his contributions to the historiography of science are of central importance . Fink's concise...