Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

Like other commentators, Tantillo starts with Goethe’s
objections to reducing nature to its quantifiable aspects,
maintaining instead that nature is best understood not
through controlled experiments, but through a multiplicity
of perspectives. She emphasizes Goethe’s distrust of mathematics
and his insistence that scientists need continually to
assess their own possible prejudices in relation to their object
of study. To understand nature truly and study it effectively,
the scientist should fashion a method out of nature’s own
procedures and learn to be “as quick and mobile” as nature
itself.
Each of the four principles she investigates describes “nature’s
will to create, evolve, struggle, transform, and metamorphose.”
Her goal is to show how Goethe uses his
scientific principles not to reduce nature to fixed laws but,
rather, to describe from multiple points of view how nature
not only creates laws for itself, but also oversteps those laws
to form new ones. An underlying theme of Tantillo’s study
is the degree to which Goethe’s observations can be seen as
evolutionary in character, and she sustains a running dialogue
with other writers on Goethe who have either argued for or
against his being a forerunner of Darwin. She articulates one
of the great strengths of the Goethean perspective, and why
one might look to him for help with present issues in science:
“While scholars have discussed whether and to what extent
Goethe believed in descent, the more central question for
Goethe’s science may well not be how the process of evolution
occurs, but why it occurs” (110). Her rich and full account
of his thought gives weight to his answer: that
evolution results from nature’s own creativity and striving.
One of the chief distinguishing features of Goethe’s science
is his refusal to eliminate aesthetic and moral dimensions
from the world and to make them aspects only of the human
mind, which then imposes them arbitrarily upon nature according
to custom. According to Goethe, beauty, for example,
is not merely a matter of taste, but one of nature’s goals.
Tantillo’s study of compensation is particularly helpful in this
regard. This area of Goethe’s thought has received relatively
less attention from mainstream commentators, and her work
is therefore even more valuable. She explores Goethe’s use of
budgetary language to understand the “dynamic economic
trade-offs” that go into the formation of an animal’s
anatomy: “Goethe suggests that animals must balance each
of their features against others. For example, animals with
tusks have expended so much material on this feature that
they do not have enough material left over for horns on top
of their heads.” She says that while the theory seems at first
to emphasize limits, its great strength lies in its ability to show
how animals create the most varied forms for themselves out
of the obstacles and within the scope of the very limits they
face (116-117).
For Goethe, organic change emerges out of the complex
interactions among an animal’s will to create, the circumscribing
limits of its given “budget,” and environmental influences.
Conventional notions of survival of the fittest would
be for Goethe an “inadequate measure of an animal’s existence
and natural selection a too mechanical explanation that
does not really explain the root cause of change. Nature, not
only concerned with a struggle for existence, seeks also to
flourish” (128). With energy or material not consumed by
that struggle, animals tend to create beautiful forms that cannot
be explained entirely by the purpose those forms might
serve. For example, the curve and curl of horns might make
them less effective as weapons, but more beautiful (129).
Tantillo’s discussion of the “type” is particularly illuminating.
Despite Goethe’s somewhat confusing use of Platonic terminology,
she argues, “the purpose of the type is not to discover
an underlying similarity but to enable the study of fluid
forms.” “Although Goethe’s type seems to endorse a kind of
fixed standard with which to measure and understand nature,
he is adamant that this standard must be flexible…Establishing
a type was intended as a means to trace particular aspects
of individual animals and species and not to fix or idealize
the forms themselves” (111).
Goethe’s meteorology becomes emblematic of his general
method; even in his treatment of inanimate nature,
Goethe emphasizes a will to create and a dynamic urge to
reconcile opposites. Tantillo says “where the Cartesian world
of dead matter operates according to set rules, Goethean
matter comes to life,” and this can be seen particularly in
his discussions of clouds. In addition, Goethe’s discussion
of clouds illustrates how crucial language is for him in making
visible the living dimension of phenomena. Goethe
praises the British scientist Luke Howard’s nomenclature for
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