Recording of a lecture delivered on September 15, 2023, by Daniel Carranze as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

The lecture conducts a close reading of Goethe's poem on the "Metamorphosis of Plants" by situating it within Goethe's larger scientific endeavor to understand what it means for a being to be a specifically living being, in particular what the kind of wholeness exhibited by the organism, whether plant, animal, or human, looks like. Particular attention will be paid to the philosophical resources upon which Goethe draws in his scientific investigation of nature, in particular Aristotle's four causes, the fourth, formal one of which is decisive for Goethe's morphology or study of living forms, and Spinoza's conatus, which Goethe understood as the organism's own endeavor to persevere in and more fully realize its own being.

Professor Carranza is an assistant professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University.