# Loving Nature’s Monsters: Carranza on Goethe December 02, 2024 [ Nicholas Low ](/people/nicholas-low) Edited by [Russell Powell]() In the 1982 Les Blanc film *The Burden of Dreams*, German actor Werner Herzog, posing somewhat comically in the Peruvian jungle, describes nature as chaotic, even murderous. “Taking a close look at - at what's around us - there is some sort of a harmony,” Herzog reflects. “It is the harmony of … overwhelming and collective murder … We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it.” Herzog suggests that nature is ultimately harmonious, but in a way that confounds human notions of harmony. Looking at the whole of nature, Herzog sees a harmony permeated by wanton violence, a harmony of “[overwhelming and collective murder.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0) The universe that we call home has an order, but that order is in no way redemptive. Herzog offers us a sort of inverted Hegelianism: *Geist* progresses not toward the unity of self-recognition and absolute knowing but rather toward a cosmic orgy of death. Despite this, “I love it against my better judgment,” Herzog concludes. In a [recent talk ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dHbvVkoN9k)at the Center for the Study of World Religions, “Goethe’s Botanical Misfits: The Fetishistic Palm, Monstrous Rose, and Competitive Barnacle,” [Daniel Carranza](https://german.fas.harvard.edu/people/daniel-carranza), Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, offered us a way of pondering the violence implicit in nature’s harmony that mollifies Herzog’s wicked cosmodicy. Carranza’s presentation was both wide-ranging and subtle, covering an impressive breadth of questions in the history of science and philosophy. He argued that Goethe looks back into pre-modern naturalism while also anticipating some of the suppositions guiding modern natural science. Goethe’s work on specific plant specimens, Carranza claimed, reveals the shift in meaning that concepts like “monstrosity” underwent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, as well as the afterlives of those pre-modern concepts in Goethe’s own work. It was Carranza’s treatment of the principle of transgression in Goethe’s naturalism that got me thinking about Herzog and the question of whether we can only love the monstrous in nature against our better judgment. Through his engagements with three Goethean examples—the palm frond, the proliferating rose, and the goose barnacle—Carranza argued that, for Goethe, nature tends to create beautiful and lawful forms but also achieves even higher beauty by *transgressing* those forms. In the case of the rose, the bud produces the beautiful and complete form of the flower but then continues to proliferate. The rose, Goethe believed, destroys the original perfection of the flower-form but ultimately achieves a “different perfection,” one that increases the rose’s beauty. A greater harmony emerges through the dialectical interplay between form and its tendency to self-destruct. The goose barnacle—*lepas polliceps*—exemplifies this transgressive drive toward higher harmony even more perfectly. This “irregular” and “aberrant” barnacle fascinated Goethe because it develops through a process of “ruthless internal competition.” While most organisms, including mammals, are mereologically organized—the logic of the “whole” subordinates the function of the various “parts.” *Lepas polliceps* is a “whole” made up of many smaller “wholes,” each striving to realize itself at the expense of the other “parts.” Carranza explains: > Anything but one world unto itself, these aberrant barnacles are made up of many worlds, the “whole” thereby constituted paradoxically achieving stability and unity only through an inner *agon*, in which each of its parts strives to become a “world,” a kind of whole, of its own at the expense of other parts. A “balance” is reached only insofar as the shells’ individual strivings cancel each other out, as it were. The goose barnacle is arranged according to an inner agonistic principle and, as such, represents a harmonious whole that maintains balance precisely through violence. For Goethe, these “monstrous” examples were not significant simply because of their aberrance but because they help the observer intuit something of nature’s grandest order. Carranza calls the constancy of nature an “article of Goethean faith,” or as Goethe says, “Always the same in the largest as in the smallest ”— as above, so below. This article of faith permits Goethe to extrapolate from these tiny specimens to the vastness of the cosmos. Goethe’s methodology “toggles between different scales of observation \[that\] take place within a sort of vertical continuum,” according to Carranza. ![A species of goose barnacle from a fish market in Donostia (San Sebastian), Spain](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2024-12/Picture2.jpg) A species of goose barnacle (Credit: Hans Hillewaert)The goose barnacle is the exception that proves the rule of nature’s lawfulness and represents in microcosm the essential role of the monstrous in nature’s cosmic harmony. According to Goethe, the highest levels of order must account not only for form but also for nature’s capacity for self-transgression that permits one form to give way to another. Like the barnacle, the universe is an organized whole that relies on a ruthless drive to compete and exclude. Order, form, and beauty depend on destruction. Goethe, therefore, finds in *lepas polliceps* a uniquely beautiful, though undeniably monstrous, phenomenon. He describes the burgeoning shell—the moment at which one whole, one world, realizes itself at the expense of the others—as a “marvelous spectacle,” a *herrlichsten Schauspiele.* Carranza quotes Goethe: > If one were lucky enough to observe these creatures microscopically at the moment when the end of the tube expands and the shell begins to form, you would be treated to one of the most marvelous spectacles \[*eins der herrlichsten Schauspiele*\] a friend of nature could wish for. (Cf. *FA* I 24, 612.) This aestheticization of nature’s monstrousness might well give us reason to worry. Does Goethe lead us to the same conclusions as Herzog, that we can only love nature against our better judgment? That the harmony of nature is ultimately a grand spectacle of murder, an inherently violent sublimity? Goethe’s aberrant examples recall *Ophiocordyceps*, the mind-controlling zombie fungus represented in such astonishing vibrancy in [*Planet Earth*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8), which was written about more recently by Merlin Sheldrake in the best-selling *Entangled Life*. Cordyceps is inherently horrifying: the fungus instills “summit disease” in insects, driving them to climb to a high place where they clamp onto a leaf, die, and then sprout spectacular fruiting bodies out of their heads. But the organism itself is magnificent to behold. While violent transgressing the form of the “whole” insect, the fungus achieves a higher unity, merging its own mycelial form with the insect’s hollow carapace. The result, though murderous, is eerily gorgeous—a higher beauty emerges through the fatal transgression of the insect form. Embed There is in cordyceps an undeniable beauty and even a kind of harmony that reflects the violence of nature, but one that our moral and humane sensibilities warn us against. Yet I take it that Carranza, following Goethe, hopes to teach us something more than a purely aesthetic love for harrowing nature. Goethe’s naturalism, Carranza helps us see, suggests a method for loving nature without either domesticating it or simply submitting to the harmonizing rationale of an “overwhelming and collective murder.” Rather, Goethe’s is a vision of lovingly attending to nature’s “smallest and most commonplace details,” and finding in their mutability a model for thinking about how we might, in our own lives, create harmonious wholes that include transgression and destruction as essential moments in the production of ever new and ever more beautiful forms. What Goethe’s examples teach, alongside the cordyceps fungus, is that we must also remember that those higher forms sometimes come at the expense of our sense of agency and even self-identity: we may not remain the same “wholes” that we thought we were, and we often aren’t in control of the forces that, perhaps monstrously, transform us. We can, in other words, love nature precisely in its monstrousness. But that love must recognize that not all form and not all beauty serve our individual human ends. ## Suggested Further Reading Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. *The Phenomenology of Spirit*. Cambridge Hegel Translations. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Lee, Charlotte, ed. *Goethe in Context*. Literature in Context. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Seamon, David, and Arthur Zajonc, eds. *Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature*. Suny Series in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998. Sheldrake, Merlin. *Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures*. New York: Random House, 2021. See also:- [ TWPF Blog Page ](/programming-threads/twpf-blog-page)