Rupik Gregory
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2021 Mar 3;43(1):32. doi: 10.1007/s40656-021-00387-6.
It was commonly accepted in Goethe's time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God's beneficent and providential design. Goethe's identification of sexual propagation as the "summit of nature" in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff's science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe's plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity-not merely a passive product-freed Goethe of the need to tie plants' forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology.
在歌德的时代，人们普遍认为，由于上帝仁慈且深谋远虑的设计，植物既具备自我繁殖的能力，又能在自然生态中发挥特定作用。歌德在《植物的变形》（1790年）中将有性繁殖视为“自然的巅峰”，这或许表明他也深受这一神学 - 形而上学传统的影响，该传统孕育了克里斯蒂安·沃尔夫的目的论科学。然而，歌德所描绘的自然具有内在的能动性和繁殖力，它通过多种方式自行向未来演进，没有外在预先设定的目标或固定的终点。歌德的植物学思想植根于他的朋友兼导师赫尔德的自然哲学，在《植物的变形》中，这些植物展现出自身受历史和环境制约的驱动力与方向性。在本文中，我认为将自然视为积极的生产力——而非仅仅是被动的产物——使歌德无需将植物的形态和功能与神圣的目的系统相联系，并且让他能够思考超越目的论范畴的植物以及自然的种种可能性。
