Morphology Matters
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The fallen granite blocks of the Luisenburg in the Fichtelgebirge, 1820, pen and brown ink, gray wash, on greyish paper, 110 x 171 mm, private ownership
Since the dawn of Morphology as a scientific discipline around 1800, trailblazed by the pioneering work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, its authoritative categories for explaining processes of evolution in nature and artifacts were those of form (gestalt) and structure. Morphology as the »study of the gestalt of the formation and transformation« (Goethe) understands both the form of an entity and its structural organisation - be it fluid or invisible – as marking the conditions and constraints of its existence and metamorphosis. At their core, however, morphological processes are defined by activities that do not stem from an external movens, but from intrinsic properties of potentiality. This connects them to Charles Darwin's principles of Evolution, which the latter was able to explore and describe in their »inner workings«.
Having over many decades been overshadowed by the success of Darwin’s theory, the study of Morphology has most recently drawn renewed attention as both a historic discipline and theoretical framework (e.g. in the Glossary of Morphology, ed. by Federico Vercellone and Salvatore Tedesco, 2020 as well as in an edition of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Morphologie als Paradigma in den Wissenschaften“ 2022).
The sub-project »Morphology matters« seeks to systematically apply a morphological framework to metamorphotic and developmental phenomena in nature and culture – from language to robotics and plants. Opposing essentialist notions of purity, stasis, and passivity within systems of order, the focus is on trying to operate with what has been called a relativistic morphological approach.
