Goethe said that, although a „natural system is a contradictory expression”, provided that the distinction (in this system) is really substantial, its items will compare themselves.
Does anybody here know a science, a theory or a classification where this vision Goethe’s has been fulfilled ?
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Further details (in answer to the query below by Dennis):
In “Allgemeine Pflanzenkunde und Recensionen”; “Problem und Erwiderung” (General Botanics and Recensions; Problem and Response), he says: “Natural system, a contradictory expression. // Nature has no system (…)” He speaks about Linné. Quelle: Goethes Werke (Sophienausgabe) Weimar, 1893, Abt. II, Bd 11, Theil 1, Zur Naturwissenschaft, p. 75, p. 79 (Linné). It seems to be a Mr. Meyer who wrote these quotes from Goethe down, but how this occurred, is not really explained. – When looking up Google, I found the following online-text, which has the same content as the cited book. Accidentally it is anthroposophic (but the Sophienausgabe was anyway edited by Rudolf Steiner): https://anthrowiki.at/Bibliothek:Goethe/Naturwissenschaft/Problem_und_Erwiderung
But in the Leopoldina-Ausgabe, erste Abteilung, Bd 11: Aufsätze, Fragment, Studien zur Naturwissenschaft im allg., Weimar, 1970, p. 27 (Naturlehre), Goethe writes: “Discernment is more difficult, more tedious, than to find similarities, and if one has discerned fairly good, the objects will thereupon compare themselves (…).”
By “class members” I just mean that some trunk (as highest class) has branches, twigs and leafs. All these are somehow members of this highest class (and of course of all the ajacend higher classes), as depicted here.
I used the tag structuralism, though I do not think like structuralists (Stegmüller, Essler, Suppes, Moulines, Sneeds). I feel that their thought of an algebraic/logic modelling of the world, which is, for instance, also the view of the physical explanation of the world by algebraic quantum mechanics (for instance this), somehow ridicule. But the nativity of these structuralists is simultaneously somehow touching, because it is easier to see in their approach, that the merely imitating approach of today’s science is inappropriate, which is comparatively not so easy to articulate if the method is completely abstract.
I ask this question not because I am a scholar philosopher, but because I am an “amateur researcher” quite in the sense of Ivor Benson, p. 70, who wrote about historians, but it may be extended to philosophers etc.: “… there is some need for such “amateur historians”, willing to undertake the dangerous and thankless task of establishing new bridgeheads (…) which the professionals can later occupy with safety”.
I am sorry if the tag "structuralism" mislead you. If so, feel free to suggest an edit to delete it. The term structure means to me, in an entirely naive way, this systematizing/system mentioned in the title, which should institute an intrinsic analogy that includes, and puts in a coherence, all the classes and elements/members of the system; hence all members of the system would amazingly compare themselves.
I suppose that it must be a system, which uses concepts that are not circular (what I mean by this, has been explained here, eventually supplemented by this explanation, which you will, perhaps, reject in advance). – From these two examples you see that, strangely, I came to the conclusion that this natural system must necessarily be based on acid-base-salt theory. – But perhaps there exist alternative solutions to achieve such a system?
I think that every of these self-comparing elements of the system would be pars pro toto the pure phenomen or "Urphänomen". These self-comparing elements would, by their mere presence, speak the language of nature, or the language of appearances. But physicists and philosphers think that the language of nature is mathematics ..., "(...) and so it remains usually only an attempt to bring many objects in a certain conceivable relation, which they, properly speaking, do not have between each other." (Objekt und Subjekt, p. 29 of the Sophienausgabe mentioned quite above.)
