ABSTRACT
When investigating the origins of biology as a distinct discipline, historians rarely pay attention to either Goethe's or Alexander von Humboldt's contributions to its development. This is surprising, given that Goethe gave us the notion of morphology, and Humboldt influenced generations of biologists after him. While one reason for their exclusion might be that they were both interested in (and practioners of) the arts, this – I argue – does not fully explain their exclusion. Rather, as I will show, their exclusion has to do with the fact that, in contrast to their contemporaries, Goethe and Humboldt resist drawing a hard-and-fast distinction between life and non-life. Instead, they argue that life-like processes underpin all of nature, and that the hard-and-fast distinction between life and non-life can result in misunderstanding not only non-living beings, but also living beings. Their resistance to the distinction between living and non-living might seem – at least at first sight – problematic or even reductive. As I argue, however, their rejection was well-grounded and deserves renewed attention. In the first instance, I will show that their rejection was founded on their methodology and on their distinctive focus on plants. In contrast to their contemporaries who were largely occupied with questions concerning animal generation and morphology, Goethe and Humboldt focused on plant form, plant distribution, and plant development. Their focus on plants provided them with an important clue about the nature of living beings and their relation to their environment—a clue that challenged them to think differently about life and non-life, and that ought to challenge us as well.
