In Conclusion: Goethe’s Dream

Abstract

Kant deemed a theory of life impossible, while Goethe believed that to understand life we should consider it as a whole. The history of Biology is replete with theoretical confrontations, which—dialectically speaking—are usually resolved by their integration in explanatory theories of greater scope. The major confrontation in Biology is between analytic and synthetic conceptions . Kant and Goethe would probably be astounded to see how the analytical conception has helped provide so many details of the cellular world, sufficient to approach the cell as a whole in the way required by the synthetic tradition. I call this “the realisation of Goethe’s dream”.