I am actually most interested in Goethe’s scientific work/philosophy around patterns in the cosmos and especially plant intelligence.
The following is an excerpt from a longer excerpt from Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. And this book is one I personally would love to discuss eventually. As I’ve said, I cannot afford to buy the books I would love to read, but I happen to already have this one and it’s one of my favorites.
"The deep intelligence possessed by plants has been explored, and discussed, by many people of note over the past several centuries, including Goethe, Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, Masanobu Fukuoka, Jagadis Bose, and the Nobel Prize-winner Barbara McClintock. Nevertheless, their research and findings have usually been dismissed, irrespective of its competence. As Brenner et al. comment about Bose (and the concept of plant intelligence in general) . . .
Boses overall conclusion that plants have an electromechanical pulse, a nervous system, a form of intelligence, and are capable of remembering and learning was not well received in its time. A hundred years later, concepts of plant intelligence, learning, and long-distance electrical signaling in plants have entered the mainstream literature. . . . Nevertheless, the concept of plant intelligence [still] generates a considerable amount of controversy. [1]
The discomfort among reductionists has been so extreme that, as Baluska et al. (2005) note, for a very long time, the reports of a sophisticated plant nervous system was labeled as pseudoscience and doomed for oblivion. [2] Research indicating intelligence in plants, whenever it appeared, irrespective of the source, was consistently attacked by mainstream researchers as mystical, a romanticization of the natural world, or as anthropocentrism.
But really, when you think of it,
we have a lot more in common with a plant than a car.
Mechanomorphismthe projection onto Nature of a mechanical natureis a lot more ridiculous than the idea of plant intelligence ever could be
As Anthony Trewavas once put it, The use of the term vegetable to describe unthinking or brain-dead human beings perhaps indicates the general attitude [toward plants]. [3] In consequence, most of the work by Goethe and the others has been ignored, and in many cases forgotten. Even Barbara McClintock, whose work on corn transposons eventually earned her the Nobel Prize, was ostracized for over a decade, because of the discomfort her work caused. And while her work was eventually recognized, her methodology, like that of Goethe et al., has been dismissed. As one of her colleagues once put it . . .
I respect McClintocks work; I just dont like her mysticism
Despite this, plants, it turns out, really are highly intelligent and yes, they do have a brain. Its just that no one ever looked in the right place. Oh, wait! There was someone, a long time ago, who did look in the right place.
His name was Charles Darwin.
(Oops!)
Darwin commented in one of his last works, The Power of Movement in Plants, that
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed [with sensitivity] and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs and directing the several movements. [4]
This book of Darwins, his second to last, has been long ignored. It contains some of the most powerful insights about plants since Goethe’s work nearly a century before. (Jagadis Bose, during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would take it considerably further.) Darwin had two genuinely deep insights that are paradigm altering: 1) that the root of the plant is in fact its brain; and 2) that the plant is using sensitive, and intelligent, analysis of its surroundings to navigate through the soil.
But Darwins insight was just the beginning; depth analysis of plants since the turn of the (new) millennium is finding that their brain capacity is much larger than Darwin supposed, that their neural systems are highly developed in many instances as much as that of humans, and that they make and utilize neurotransmitters identical to our own. It is beginning to seem that they are highly intelligent perhaps as much or even more so than humans in some instances. (They can even perform sophisticated mathematical computations and make future plans based on extrapolations of current conditions. The mayapple, for instance, plans its growth two years in advance based on weather patterns.)
But, that cant be true. They just sit there when we kill them
(yeah? and no matter how fast a human runs, the lion still finds him tasty.)
Increasing numbers of researchers, in a multiplicity of fields, are beginning to acknowledge that intelligence is an inevitable aspect of all self-organized systems that sophisticated neural networks are a hallmark of life. Some researchers are becoming quite vocal in attacking what they call the brain chauvinism of the old-school (male) scientists who are still clasping firmly to their bosom (26A) the shreds of twentieth-century scientific certitudes. Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist, observes succinctly that, Comparisons (in intelligence) are usually made between characteristics that humans consider important; such a stance is of course biased and subjective in terms of the groups for whom it is being used. [5] In other words, rationalists, who have long attacked the concept of intelligence and awareness in Nature as antirational Romantic projection, have been themselves been merely looking at and for their own reflection in the world around them and, of course, finding the world wanting."