Goethe and the Problem of the Plant-Image

In this essay, I argue that, in addition to J. W. Goethe’s morphological thinking necessitating the reinvention of a host of theoretical concepts, its attention to temporal series entailed new practices of image-making. In other words, Goethe not only contested in a general or theoretical fashion the indifference to time that determined eighteenth-century botany, he also when it came to techniques of botanical image-production. Goethe’s advocation of “eine naturgemäße Darstellung” is a provocation to the classical tradition of botanical illustrations through its emphasis on metamorphic time and movement—and, not only does Goethe’s claim that plants can only be accurately represented on the move anticipate later developments in motion-capture, time-lapse and video technologies, but Goethe tries to draw plants himself in this fashion. That is, his interest in the problem of the plant-image was not just theoretical, but also practical.