It is the free yet harmonious play of our cognitive faculties in aesthetic judgment that is the source of the feeling of pleasure that we associate with beauty.
Immanuel Kant
Beauty, the harmony with nature, something so abstract and so difficult to achieve, yet can be easily distinguished at the blink of an eye.
Everything that occurs in nature, exists in its most intricate form. These are sculptures of art that have been crafted through millions of years of natural selection.
The complexity of nature’s beauty is so difficult to reproduce, in order to create the finest imitation, precision of the highest order is paramount in every step of the process.
Nature and Aesthetics
A tooth can be considered as an organism, as it emerges slowly through cellular growth.
Charles Bonnet (1720-1793),was a Genevan naturalist and philosophical writer. In his botanical studies of 1754, Bonnet observed the emission of gas bubbles by a submerged illuminated leaf and concluded there are five basic forms of leaves that are most efficient in carrying out photosynthesis.
Not long after, a 37-year-old German poet and philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, while travelling from Weimar to Italy, furthered his personal botanical studies based on Bonnet’s discovery, and in 1790 published Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, known in English as Metamorphosis of Plants. It is in this book that the word Morphology was first documented. (According to his personal diary, the first usage of the word morphology occurs in 1796).
Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features. It recognises that these structures change with time.
This concept did not align with Carl Linnaeus’ binomial nomenclature at the time but slowly became the core of German Idealism, with significant contribution towards its metaphysical pursuit over aesthetics.
Goethe proposed that it was possible that all plants morphed from a single source or species. This controversial proposal revolutionised modern science and gave rise to Darwin’s evolution theory.
