i
430
Form is mobile, emerging, passing. The study of form is the study of morphology. The study
of metamorphosis is the key to all signs of nature.
— J. W. Goethe (174 9 – 18 32)^1[F] rom first principles, systematics can be characterized as a dividing discipline, whereas
plant morphology is a unifying discipline.
— D. R. Kaplan (19 3 8 – 2 0 0 7 )^216
Idealism and Asexualism in the Age of Goethe
While strolling in the Grand- ducal Botanical Garden at the University of Jena,
Franz Joseph Schelver, the newly appointed Curator of the garden, confided to his senior
colleague, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, that he had long doubted the “theory ascribing two
sexes to plants” and that he was now convinced that it was no longer tenable. The year
was 1804. Goethe— poet, dramatist, and accomplished amateur botanist whose treatise
on The Metamorphosis of Plants, published fourteen years earlier, had laid the foundation
for the field of plant morphology— had used his influence to hire Schelver and to transfer
his appointment from the Medical School to the Philosophy Department. His motiva-
tion was twofold. First, he hoped to establish botany as a discipline in its own right apart
from medicine. Second, Jena was then the center of Naturphilosophie, a new philosophi-
cal movement in Germany that had arisen as a reaction against the Cartesian mechanical
model of the universe. Taking a page from Plato, the “nature philosophers” granted equal
weight to reason and the senses on the one hand, and to the subjective imagination on
the other. Goethe believed that if scientists could only learn to use their imaginations as
poets do, they could leapfrog over much dreary data- collecting and accelerate the process
of scientific discovery. Goethe, then fifty- five years old, felt that Schelver’s ideas were in
harmony with his own.
As they wandered through the garden, Schelver asserted that the sexual theory was
incompatible with the very nature of vegetative life and that the production of fruits and
seeds was strictly a vegetative process. Contrary to the claims of Camerarius and Koelreuter,
the pistil did not require any external agents, such as pollen, to form seeds. Schelver based
his new asexual theory on Goethe’s own theory of metamorphosis, an argument Goethe
found difficult to resist.^3
We’ll defer our discussion of Goethe’s theory of plant metamorphosis until later in the
chapter. For now it’s sufficient to note that Goethe’s conversation with Schelver in the