Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1193/en

Thinking in polarities is a key to understanding evolution. It constitutes, in the most literal sense, the character of Goethe's way of observing nature; he unfolds it exemplarily in his Metamorphosis of Plants. As a man of the eye, Goethe in his research connected with what is visible of the plant as its above-ground form; its subterranean part, the root, remained out of sight. When this too is included — one must, through an act of abstraction, make the invisible visible by freeing the root from the soil — the polarity of root and blossom becomes perceptible. The primal unity of the plant is, in the earthly realm, divided into two poles. What connects them mercurially is the leaf sequence carried upward along the stem. The leaf makes sense-perceptible the middle between the poles. In an enhancement of this threefoldness, the form of the plant appears as a wholeness that in the blossom becomes most purely an image of its being.