Goethean Morphology: A Generative-Explorative Approach to Nature’s Technique
On the contrary to the animal, plants do not so much appear to hide an interiorized subjectivity as they compel us to imagine an ingeniously animated and animating matter that we are never able to observe in all its operations. Within this framework, plant becomes capable of unleashing speculative energies for envisioning (their specific mode of being).—A.Szabari and N. Meeker, Radical Botany
In his “Studies for a Physiology of Plants”, Goethe singles out the main problem faced by naturalists interested in phenomenon of growth and development in nature, i.e researchers trying to uncover the hidden laws driving the morphogenesis of natural products: “If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole”. The genetic processes responsible for the growth and transformation of natural products are not given as such in the empiria, or as Goethe would have it, the observer never sees “the pure phenomenon with his own eyes”. To solve this problem, Goethe finds himself compelled to turn to another mode of visualization, that he calls “anschauende Urteilskraft” [judgment through intuitive perception]. The exercise of this faculty, I argue, is conditioned by the mediation of a series of devices that enables to visualize morphological transformations linked to plant-growth phenomena.
After a careful look at Goethe’s botanical sketches, gathered in the Corpus der Goethezeichnungen V.B, it appears that those visualization techniques include the transformation of the common practice of botanical drawing, mostly playing an illustrative role in natural sciences, into a diagrammatic tool. The later allows to map and explore the variations of the virtual field of forces driving morphological processes. Indeed, out of the hundreds of botanic drawings made by Goethe in the course of his life, only twenty percent of them display fixed, determined outlines, with an insistence on singular details and colours – that is on the materiality and actuality of the featured specimen. However, the remaining eighty percent display : barely determined marks ; quick scribbled sketches made out of evasive dots, open-ended lines and spirals, alluding to nature’s exuberant and never-ending productivity, doubtlessly serving as experimenting support for thought navigation processes in the virtual realm of vegetal morphologies ; proper diagrams ; and even proto-simulations of structural morphogenetic transformations, paving the way to similar contemporary projects using computer graphics. This point seems to support an understanding of Goethean morphology as a science mainly interested in the exploration of abstract formal properties and their expressive power, “expressiveness impl{ying} tendency, inclination, propensity, disposition or proclivity”* rather than statism, preformation or definedness. I thus propose to read Goethean Morphology as an original practice of reduction, departing from the phenomenological realm to intuit nature’s self-generating processes. In this context, the main remit of reduction is not to simplify complexity, as is usually the case in modern natural sciences, but rather to let visually emerge the autonomous processes that superintend the generation of complexity itself. In short, what Goethe is trying to achieve is to comprehend the logic of nature from within, instead of merely trying to represent or mimic it.
Goethe’s morphology thus displays a fundamental transition from a (Kantian-like) representational approach to nature to a generative one, not only able to recreate nature’s technique but also to extend it. Indeed, as Goethe famously note in his Italian Journey, “With this model [the Urpflanze] and the key to it, one will be able to invent plants without limit to conform, that is to say, plants which even if they do not actually exist nevertheless might exist and which are not merely picturesque or poetic visions and illusions, but have an inner truth and logic”. In this context, the Urtype appears of the key-feature of Goethe’s morphological method, both enabling to generate existing morphologies and to explore new ones according to nature’s logic, thus extending the scope of the actual. Consequently, one can look at Urtypes as matrices capable of generating the structures of actual and virtual entities.
As a matter of fact, despite a long-lasting preconception in Goethe scholarship, insisting on Goethe’s aversion for any kind of mathematical tool, it should be noted that in the paragraph 102 of the Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe compares the Urtype with an algebraic formula. No one to my knowledge has ever uncovered the full consequences of this claim. However, I argue that emphasizing the algebraic dimension of the Goethean Urtype, as well as Goethe’s interest for a certain kind of algebra, leads us to sketch a path from Goethean Morphology to contemporary natural computing techniques of pattern generation, recognition and exploration. As my current research tries to show, it is possible to track the legacy of Goethe’s methodological gesture in the second generation of the algorithmic revolution. Indeed, contemporary pattern generation techniques use computer graphics and context-sensitive developmental algorithms to generate natural structures and their developmental processes that only exists virtually as mathematical models, while cutting-edge contemporary pattern recognition techniques develop a prototype building method exploited by algorithms to perform image processing or clustering tasks.*
Finally, a series of contemporary architects and designers are currently relying on the increasing power of contemporary technologies to process information – that is to compute – to “provide a better understanding of material behavior and characteristic, and then in turn, to inform the organization of matter and form in design”.* The recent recourse to material computing in architecture and design, learning from biological morphogenetical processes to produce intelligent and autonomous social products, suggests a novel desire to break with the still dominant hylomorphic paradigm, where the (human) creator imposes an a priori form on matter, to favor on the contrary solutions directly imported from nature’s technique. Reconnecting with Goethe’s research program, the above-mentioned emerging fields sketch a potential liberation of contemporary technologies from their anthropocentric capture, towards a reconciliation with nature’s own agentivity and speculative energy.