Scientific writings - vol.1: Morphology-Botany

Dettagli

With this volume begins the complete publication of Goethe's scientific writings, until now only partially known in Italy. JW Goethe owes his universal fame to works of literature and poetry such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, Elective Affinities, and other absolute masterpieces.

However, his activity as a natural scientist, which actually occupied him for his entire life, is not as well known; it has been calculated that almost half of his time was dedicated to observing and noting natural phenomena, to writing scientific essays and to collecting and arranging objects such as minerals, plants, bones, shells, fossils, and so on, while over a third of The library of his home in Weimar consists of texts on natural philosophy and monographs on the most disparate fields of natural science. Of the over four thousand pages that make up Goethe's scientific-natural work, only a small part has so far been translated and published in Italian, with substantially partial and episodic editions.

More than 150 years after Goethe's death, only today, with this editorial initiative, a complete edition in Italian of his scientific work has begun, organized according to large areas; thanks to this it will be possible to integrate and place all of Goethe's brilliant scientific and philosophical-natural intuitions, such as the principle of polarity in nature, the archetypal plant, the animal type, the metamorphosis of organic entities, the essence of rocks, the morphology of clouds, the circular spectrum of colors, to name a few, in the global horizon of the great Genius' conception of the world and nature. "... we can affirm that Goethe, in each of his experiments, made his 'vitalist' conception of nature vibrate together with an insistent reference to the formative process - to the Gestaltung - in nature and in art, in such a way that man and each of its organs are never considered as mechanical devices, but always in relation to the spirituality of their function."
(From the preface by Gillo Dorfles)


"Now that the contemporary science of nature and living things, of substantially positivist origin but now devoid of real philosophical support, is animated by ferments of crisis, revision and tension towards new formal-structural statutes, the lesson of Goethean morphology, involving among other things careful and patient work "on oneself" on the part of the subject of the experience, be it the common observer, the amateur or the professional of science, presents itself to us in all its unexplored actuality and fruitfulness."

(From the essay by the Editor)

Emilio Ferrario, Editor of the edition, was born in 1957 in Milan, where he works as an engineer. He is President of the Italian Goethean Scientific Association, founded in Milan in 1993, and with the aim of promoting study meetings, conferences, publications and theoretical and practical research in the natural-scientific field according to Goethe's method, with reference also to subsequent elaborations scientific and epistemological contributions brought to you by Rudolf Steiner (1861),