Dear Marion,

As I reread what I wrote yesterday, I note an
important omission. I suggested:

You should not be offended if nonetheless I interpret 
the assertions of the biochemists not as fact but as
theory. I remember many months ago citing Goethe's
dictum: Das Hoechste waere zu begreifen dass alles
Faktische schon Theorie ist. "Das Faktische" to which
Goethe was referring was not the wild conjecturing of
medieval alchemists and astrologers, but the physics of
Newton and the chemistry of Lavoisier, the optimistic
rationalism of the 18th Century whose prophet Alexander
Pope wrote:
Nature and nature's laws were hid in night,
God said, let Newton be, and all was light.

Goethe was not persuaded.
He was addressing the laboratory of Lavoisier
when he wrote:

Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,
Mit Rad und Kaemmen, Walz und Buegel:
Ich stand am Tor, ihr solltet Schluessel sein;
Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt ihr nicht die Riegel.

(You instruments don't taunt me, please,
with wheel and bracket, roll and ratch:
I at the door, you were to be the keys;
Although your prongs are curled, you cannot lift the latch.)

And in direct reply to Alexander Pope regarding Newton,
Goethe wrote:

Geheimnisvoll am lichten Tag
Laesst sich Natur des Schleiers nicht berauben
Und was sie deinem Geist nicht offenbaren mag,
Das zwingst du ihr nicht ab mit Hebeln und mit Schrauben.

(Secretive in the light of day,
Nature will of its veil not be bereft.
And what she chooses to conceal,
Levers and screws will not reveal.)

In his exhaustive scientific, biological studies, Goethe
was implicitly confronting the question: What is knowledge?
At the same time, when he spurned theorizing about thought,
(He boasted: Ich habe nie ueber das Denken gedacht.)
I would say, he threw away the keys - if it's permissible
for me to persist in his own metaphor.

Jochen