CHAPTER V – The Adventure of Reason
Goethe immediately recognized the Tightness of this thought, and set about the task of relating the pollination process to the picture of the plant which his investigations had already yielded. His way of reporting the result shows how fully conscious he was of its revolutionary nature. Nor was he in any doubt as to the kind of reception it would be given by official biology.
In observing the growth of the plant, Goethe had perceived that this proceeds simultaneously according to two different principles. On the one hand the plant grows in an axial direction and thereby produces its main and side stems. To this growth principle Goethe gave the name ‘vertical tendency’. Were the plant to follow this principle only, its lateral shoots would all stand vertically one above the other. But observation shows that the different plant species obey very different laws in this respect, as may be seen if one links up all the leaf buds along any plant stem; they form a line which winds spiral fashion around it. Each plant family is distinguishable by its own characteristic spiral, which can be represented either geometrically by a diagram, or arithmetically by a fraction. If, for example, the leaves are so arranged in a plant that every fifth leaf recurs on the same side of the stem, while the spiral connecting the five successive leaf-buds winds twice round the stem, this is expressed in botany by the fraction 2 / 5. To distinguish this principle of plant growth from the vertical tendency, Goethe used the term ‘spiral tendency’.
To help towards a clear understanding of both tendencies, Goethe describes an exercise which is characteristic of his way of schooling himself in what he called exact sensorial fantasy. He first looks out for a phenomenon in which the ‘secret’ of the spiral tendency is made ‘open’. This he finds in such a plant as the convolvulus; in this kind of plant the vertical tendency is lacking, and the spiral principle comes obviously into outer view. Accordingly, the convolvulus requires an external support, around which it can wind itself. Goethe now suggests that after looking at a convolvulus as it grows upwards around its support, one should first make this clearly present to one’s inner eye, and then again picture the plant’s growth without the vertical support, allowing instead the upward-growing plant inwardly to produce a vertical support for itself. By way of inward re-creation (which the reader should not fail to carry out himself) Goethe attained a clear experience of how, in all those plants which in growing upwards produce their leaves spiral-wise around the stem, the vertical and spiral tendencies work together.
In following the two growth-principles, Goethe saw that the vertical comes to a halt in the blossom; the straight line here shrinks together, so to say, into a point, surviving only in the ovary and pistil as continuations of the plant’s stalk. The spiral tendency, on the other hand, is to be found in the circle of the stamens arranged around these; the process which in the leaves strove outwards in spiral succession around a straight line is now telescoped on to a single plane. In other words, the vertical-spiral growth of the plant here separates into its two components. And when a pollen grain lands on a pistil and joins with the ovule prepared in the ovary, the two components are united again. Out of the now complete seed a new and complete plant can arise.
Goethe understood that he would be taught a correct conception of this process only by the plant itself. Accordingly, he asked himself where else in the growing plant something like separation and reunion could be seen. This he found in the branching and reuniting of the veins in the leaves, known as anastomosis.
In the dividing of the two growth-principles in the plant through the formation of carpel and pistil, on the one hand, and the pollen-bearing stamens on the other, and in their reunion through the coming together of the pollen with the seed, Goethe recognized a metamorphosis of the process of anastomosis at a higher level. His vision of it caused him to term it ‘spiritual anastomosis’.
Goethe held a lofty and comprehensive view of the significance of the male and female principles as spiritual opposites in the cosmos. Among the various manifestations of this polarity in earthly nature he found one, but one only, in the duality of the sexes as characteristic of man and animal. Nothing compelled him, therefore, to ascribe it in the same form to the plant. This enabled him to discover how the plant bore the same polarity in plant fashion.
In the neighbourhood of Weimar, Goethe often watched a vine slinging its foliaged stem about the trunk and branches of an elm tree. In this impressive sight nature offered him a picture of ‘the female and male, the one that needs and the one that gives, side by side in the vertical and spiral directions’. Thus his artist’s eye clearly detected in the upward striving of the plant a decisively masculine principle, and in its spiral winding an equally definite feminine principle. Since in the normal plant both principles are inwardly connected, ‘we can represent vegetation as a whole as being in a secret androgynous union from the root up. From this union, through the changes of growth, both systems break away into open polarity and so stand in decisive opposition to each other, only to unite again in a higher sense.’
Thus Goethe found himself led to ideas regarding the male and female principles in the plant, which were the exact opposite of those one obtains if, in trying to explain the process of pollination, one does not keep to the plant itself but imports an analogy from another kingdom of nature. For in continuance of the vertical principle of the plant, the pistil and carpel represent the male aspect in the process of spiritual anastomosis, and the mobile, wind- or insect-borne pollen, in continuing the spiral principle, represents the female part.