Abstract

My dissertation analyzes an important but neglected aspect of modernism. If Goethe's Theory of Colours started the subjective revolution in vision that characterized late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernism, it was Goethe's On Morphology that exerted a powerful hold on the thought of the succeeding period. Between the two World Wars, numerous major works in the humanities, including those of Oswald Spengler, Marcel Mauss, Vladimir Propp, and Alfred North Whitehead, made methodological use of the idea of morphology. A word coined by Goethe to denote the study of organic shapes and their transformations, not just of idealized, static forms, "morphology" became the figure of a cognitive enterprise that could account for structure and history. Morphology seemed to hold out the hope not simply of a mathesis universalis--the traditional aim of geometry--but of a mathesis matheseos, a metascience. ;My dissertation has two objectives: first, to define the scope of this historical problematic; second, to show that in its Goethean manifestations morphology privileged visualization over vision, and implied the development of an intuitive capacity capable of grasping relation and transformation. My focus on Spengler and Mauss allows me to relate these issues to concerns of recent critical theory. In my conclusion, I consider the ways in which the morphological question, which was in part repressed by the linguistic idealism of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, has resurfaced in cultural and intellectual currents associated with the development of the computer