Progressive Foliation

Pretty sweet thing I learned in class today I thought I might share.

Basically, Goethe, the famous German poet, was actually more interested in science than he was in literature. In fact, he even said something that basically meant he thought that it was his scientific work he’d be remembered for, not his poetry. Interesting, right?

Well, his most famous scientific paper was called, “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” In it, he describes how plants, especially flowers, go through a process of expansion and contraction in order to grow.

If you look at a flower (pretty much any flower will do, I think), notice how the leaves look at the bottom of the stem, the middle of the stem, and at the top of the stem. Normally what you see are these large leaves near the roots, and then smaller and smaller leaves as you near the corona of the flower. The smallest “leaves” are right underneath the corona, and are called the sepals. This is an example of a contraction. As you move up from the sepal and reach the corona, there is clearly a large expansion. However, as you move into the center of the flower, and see the pistils and stamens, you’ll notice that the petals of the flower are smaller. This is a contraction. After that, if the flower becomes fertilized, it will grow into a kind of fruit, which is, of course, an expansion. Finally, the fruit is eaten or thrown to the ground, decays, and all this is left is a seed, and this is the final contraction of our flower.

Goethe used this whole process to suggest that each part of the flower, from the leaves to the sepals to the corona to the pistils and stamen to the fruit to the seed, are all generated from each other. He called it “genetics,” but he meant it in the most literal way, as in, from the original Greek, “genesthai,” “to be born.” What Goethe was saying is that each part of a flower is actually a birth of one part from another part, endlessly birthing parts in a constant cycle of birthing.

Of course, this led to something of a problem: what started the birthing? And why do things birth themselves in basically the same way (ie, why do we have species, etc.?). Goethe suggested that all the parts of the flower resemble or contain within them an aspect of something he called the urorgan, which has been translated as “the first organ,” “the primordial organ,” or, “the archetypal organ.”

It’s a very different view than what we are used to. Normally, when we study the anatomy of a flower, we study the parts separately. Leaves provide this for the plant, the corona does that, the stamen and pistil are for something else, and so on. It seems as if we want to treat the flower as a giant machine with a bunch of different parts, as opposed to a unified organism that is living, organic, and changing.

Goethe basically presented the alternative to the kind of science we’re used to, and while it may not be a substitute, I think it’s interesting to think if Goethe’s system couldn’t become somewhat meaningful, if not to the scientific community, than at least to people in their everyday lives.

Bryson Nitta