Goethean Morphology, Hegelian Science: Affinities and Transformations

I

Goethe’s conception of morphology had a major impact on Hegel’s philosophical methodology at a point in time when Hegel was beginning to distance himself from Schelling and to confront dead-ends in his own previous conception. In 1803, Schelling left Jena to accept a chair in Würzburg, thus effectively ending the symphilosophical partnership that formed the element of Hegel’s first years at the university.¹ At about this time, Hegel must have begun to question the viability of Schellingian “intellectual intuition” as a mode of philosophical cognition, and to have doubts whether his own conception of a “skeptical” logic was sufficient to justify it via negationis. Up to this point, Hegel had proposed that a methodical construction of self-contradictions (antinomies) in the concepts of the finite understanding was enough to demonstrate that the absolute standpoint of intellectual intuition was the only positive alternative; but now he presumably recognized the inherent limitations of the skeptical method as originally conceived.² At what therefore appears to have been a moment of incipient reorientation, Hegel was introduced to Goethe’s methods of botanical and optical inquiry, both through Goethe himself and through Franz Joseph Schelver, newly arrived in Jena to fill the vacated chair of botany and to manage the botanical garden under Goethe’s direct supervision.³ The channels through which Hegel gained familiarity with Goethean science and the extent of his knowledge have been reconstructed by Eckart Förster from the historical evidence.⁴ Förster has also pointed out the ways in which Goethe’s “method of intuitive understanding” was able to be made fruitful for what eventually became the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Förster has clearly seen a key influence here which, remarkably, previous scholars failed to recognize, and I find his reconstruction both of Goethe’s methods and of his influence on Hegel persuasive and fruitful. However, I also see a number of difficulties confronting Förster’s thesis, and they are not merely problems of detail. Rather, they concern the very possibility of adapting Goethe’s methods to the philosophical project Hegel was specifically pursuing. Although I do think the difficulties can be overcome, doing so entails the introduction of metaphysical assumptions that weigh against Hegel’s claim to be working out a scientific philosophy without presuppositions.⁵ So what I want to do in the following is first, in the second section, to review Förster’s reconstruction of Goethe’s “method of intuitive understanding” and its applicability to Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology and elsewhere. On the basis of this reconstruction, I will then, in the third section, point out the fundamental difficulties it must successfully confront if it is to become fully convincing. In the fourth section, I will draw on Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s analysis of the relational structure of the Hegelian “concept” (der Begriff) in order to suggest how the aforementioned difficulties can be resolved. The fifth section offers a thumbnail sketch of the sequence of development of the first four chapters of the Phenomenology, illustrating how Hegel’s relational ontology of the “concept” grounds his morphological procedures. The brief concluding section discusses the significance of my findings for judging the independent plausibility of Hegel’s philosophy.

Before I turn to the main business of this paper, however, an important clarification is in order. It is necessary to adapt Goethe’s methods (and to some extent their underlying methodology) in order to make them applicable to the kinds of philosophical objects Hegel is concerned with. The necessity of such adaptation ought not to be misunderstood as indicative of any imperfection in Goethe’s methods; nor ought it to suggest that the Goethean methods undergo any refinement in the hands of the philosopher Hegel. The claim to be argued for in this paper is not that Hegel somehow outdid Goethe by giving an improved philosophical version of Goethe’s methods. Hegel’s adaptation is necessitated wholly by the nature of the objects whose morphogenesis they are intended to make visible. In exactly similar fashion, Goethe himself clearly was forced to adapt the methods he...