What Is an End?
Goethe and the Phenomenology of Form
Dear readers,
Things have been quiet here at The Base Camp for this first quarter of the year, as my writing time has been dedicated to completing the essay collection I’m calling Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures (cover below).
I’m happy to report that this project is now all but complete, as I’ve just received my second round of paperback proof copies. The final adjustments I need to make are minor, and I should have an official publication announcement within the next week or so.
The book will be available in ebook (pdf), Kindle, and paperback editions for a volume that includes 14 chapters and a comprehensive introduction, coming in at around 65,000 words total. I hope you’ll consider buying a copy at launch. Check back here for updates soon.
In the meantime, this week I have a new essay up about Goethe’s contemplative phenomenology of nature, with a special emphasis on formal and final causes, all stemming from two recent events I participated in—one as a host and one as a guest.
If you’ve ever wanted to read about the difference between spatial and modal distance, now is your chance. More below.
Sincerely,
Adam
What Is an End?
I recently had the good fortune of hosting Dr. Ryan Shea for our event series we’re calling The Theōros Lectures, and then the even better fortune of attending a day-long colloquium that he hosted a few days later.
At both events, Ryan’s emphasis was on Goethe’s contemplative phenomenology of nature, especially on the role of form (or formal cause) in living systems. The colloquium built on these ideas by adding to them an Aristotelian context, where we also discussed how it is we should think about telos (or final cause) in living systems.
Now, I’m not foreign to these ideas, but I tend to think more often in terms of philosophical practices more than I do formal metaphysical systems, even as quite a bit of my work touches on the relation between practice and reality, the latter being the key focus of metaphysical description. What I took from these discussions was a renewed sense for how to think about forms and ends in the worlds of living beings.
In both cases, I think, we can proffer good and bad ways of thinking about teleology and formal casual structures.
Indeed, we sometimes inherit ways of thinking — rudimentary ones, I would say — that divide the world into false opposites: ideal vs. real, essence vs. appearance, purpose vs. process, and so on. But ever since these sessions, I’ve been exploring how this kind of dualism especially shapes these two major philosophical concepts — form and telos — and how both have been commonly misunderstood.
In the case of telos, we tend in the rudimentary reading to treat it as a kind of fixed endpoint, something at the conclusion of development. And in the case of form, especially in readings of Plato, we tend to imagine it as something that exists in another world altogether — distant, static, and abstract.
Both interpretations lead us to picture life as a kind of inadequate striving toward something fundamentally outside of it. But what if the opposite is true? What if form and telos are not only present throughout life, but the very means by which it unfolds?
Following from these events, this is what I understood in a fresh way, and I think it’s worth exploring what a fuller and more integrative sense of these terms could mean.
Let’s start with teleology.
The standard view treats a telos as the goal or endpoint of a process, as a destination located in the future. We picture an organism as moving toward completion, toward some ideal state of maturity it does not yet have. But this image is too flat, and too linear. And in Aristotle’s account, telos is not merely a final stop; it’s an immanent principle, present from the beginning, guiding the unfolding of a being’s development from within.
This understanding of ends upends the utilitarian calculus that treats ends as detached goals to be achieved by whatever means prove efficient. Here, ends are not external outcomes but the very logic of the being itself in its unfolding, a standard of value that is already at work in its development, not something imposed from outside. To act in accord with such a telos is not to maximize results, but to participate in the fulfillment of what a thing already, in some sense, is.
Take the canonical example of the acorn.
Its telos, we often hear, is to become an oak tree; but the oak tree itself exists, in turn, to become more acorns. The process doesn’t end in a fixed state; it renews itself. The acorn doesn’t merely aim at becoming a tree, but at fulfilling a pattern, at actualizing the form of oak-ness in a way that continues and deepens over time.
This circular movement demonstrates that while the telos of the acorn may be the oak tree, the telos of the oak tree is again the acorn. This recursive structure shows that telos is not a terminal point but a generative process, as both a draw forward and a return, or perhaps an ongoing returning. The telos is not a goal waiting at the end of a line, but a structure present throughout the line, shaping each stage as it unfolds.
Telos, then, is not simply deferred to the future. It is simultaneously present at every moment — in germination, in growth, in fruiting. It unfolds in time, yes, but is not confined to the endpoint. It is active not just in what the organism becomes, but in how it becomes: the inner coherence of the process, not just its result. Each stage is both an end and a beginning, a local fulfillment that participates in a larger pattern.
Now consider form.
Here, too, we often fall into a dualistic picture. In many modern interpretations of Plato, forms are treated as eternal, unchanging ideas existing in a separate realm. The world we experience is then a copy, one derivative, flawed, and at best a shadow of reality. This reading can make the forms seem not only distant, but inaccessible: they lie “somewhere else,” while we are stuck in a world of change and illusion.
But this interpretation is far from the only one, and, increasingly, is far from the most persuasive. We didn’t mention them by name in our discussion, but Plato scholars like Lloyd Gerson and Eric Perl have argued for a different reading of Plato, one in which the forms are not remote ideals, but present in the world, active in it, structuring it from within. On this view, the forms are not absent templates to be imitated, but the very intelligibility of things — the reason why a thing is what it is.
Gerson, for example, rejects the standard “two-world” model altogether. He sees Plato as offering a unified metaphysics, where the intelligible and the sensible are not two separate realms but two aspects of one ordered reality. The forms, for Gerson, are what make the world intelligible and good; they are not elsewhere but suffuse Being with structure and value. Instead of a rejection of the world, Plato’s philosophy (on this view) is a way of showing how the world participates in intelligibility itself.
Perl also offers a precise philosophical account of this intelligibility. He argues that the form is not simply “in” the particular, nor “outside” of it, but that the form is both immanent and transcendent in a single act. A form is present as cause and essence, and yet it transcends any particular instantiation; the particular shows the form — not as a distant ideal, but as the very meaning of the thing in context, in particularity.
What unites these views is the rejection of a metaphysics that separates essence from existence, ideal from actual. Just as with telos, we are invited to see form not as something outside the world, but as what gives the world its shape and coherence. The form of a living being is not something added on from above. It is what the being is, and what it becomes, and what it moves toward, all at once.
This picture of form as both immanent and transcendent helps us avoid two familiar but limited metaphysical options. On one side, pure immanence collapses form into material appearance, reducing all structure and meaning to what is immediately present, and losing any account of why things are as they are. On the other side, the classical two-world dualism splits form off entirely from the world, leaving it distant and inert, a perfect but uninhabitable realm.
As Gerson and Perl each show in their own way, these are not our only choices.
Take again the example of the oak tree. Its form — oak-ness — is immanent in the tree as the principle that organizes its growth, gives it its structure, and makes it intelligibly an oak. But that form cannot be exhausted by this oak or any particular oak; it must also exceed any instance in order to account for the shared identity across oaks, for what it means to be malformed or flourishing, and for the possibility of recognizing oak-ness at all.
Such judgments — of healthy being, of fulfillment or distortion — are not merely observational, but evaluative, and they depend on a kind of caring attention. To recognize the unfolding of a form is also to ask whether it is doing so well, whether it is becoming what it is in a full and coherent way. This requires more than empirical classification; it calls for presence, patience, and a sensitivity to what is latent and becoming. In this sense, care is not just a moral posture toward beings, but a condition for discerning form and telos at all. Ethical appraisal, then, emerges not from standing outside the process but from dwelling within it — from attending to how a being expresses its own possibilities, and how its life unfolds toward its own proper fullness. Description and prescription are closely knit, here.
To understand why this kind of care is meaningful, we need to look more closely at what it is we are caring for, and how it exists.
Care in this sense is not only a condition for recognition. It is also a response to the contingency of form. Not all beings succeed in realizing what they are. Not all oaks become strong; not all lives unfold freely. The presence of telos does not guarantee its fulfillment. This is not a flaw in the metaphysics, but a condition of ethical life itself. For where fulfillment is not automatic, we are called to attend, to nourish, to defend what might otherwise remain latent or be lost. In this sense, ethics emerges precisely where form is real but fragile and where what should be is not yet, or not assured.
Telos for this reason does not override contingency; it gives it meaning in and through its finitude and ever-present possibility of failure, damage, or death.
In this sense, the form is transcendent — not in terms of spatial distance, but in terms of modal difference, meaning it exists not as another object in the world but in a different mode of being altogether. A form is not material, finite, or perceptible in itself, but it is what gives structure, identity, and intelligibility to material things. The form is not one more thing among things, but the very principle that makes things intelligible as what they are. This immanent-transcendent view holds that form is neither an abstract ideal nor a mere appearance, but the active intelligibility within things. Form is present in every expression and yet exceeding each, the very condition of the world’s order, knowability, and meaning.
As persuasive as this account might appear at first blush, there are tensions that attend any attempt to speak of form and telos as internal principles of development.
One might ask, for example, whether this model allows enough space for novelty, emergence, or deviation. If the unfolding of a being is guided from within, does that mean its life is scripted in advance? If telos and form are always active, where is there room for the truly new and creative — for modes of transformation that are not simply the maturation of what was already present?
These questions do not necessarily weaken the account, but they do press us to refine it. We might say that form is not a fixed template, but a generative structure, a pattern that organizes becoming without exhausting its possibilities. Telos, too, is better understood not as a destination, but as a direction: it orients a being’s development without dictating its course. This allows for real emergence and for the possibility that forms, while guiding, may also evolve, respond, and surprise.
Thus, in the same way that we do not want to think of telos as a fixed endpoint to which a living being merely strives, so too we should resist imagining form as something that exists in a spatially distant or unrelated elsewhere. And just as telos is not simply what lies at the end, but what gives shape and direction throughout, form is not a remote ideal hovering outside the world, but the inner structure by which a thing becomes intelligible as itself.
Indeed, both concepts suffer when we imagine them as external destinations (one in time, the other in space). But if we understand them instead as immanent principles that also transcend — not by inhabiting this “elsewhere,” but by exceeding any single moment or instance — then we begin to see how life unfolds in a continuity of meaning. Form is what makes a being what it is; telos is how it becomes what it is. Both are at work throughout the process, not as endpoints or ideals outside of it, but as the intelligible pattern of the thing itself coming into fullness.
We could say: Form is pattern in an instant. Telos is pattern unfolding over time.
Adjusting for novelty and creativity, this is now a more compelling account, but it still raises a further important question: must such forms — like oak-ness — be understood as somehow pre-existing all instances, as if awaiting instantiation? Or can we instead rest with the forms as they appear in and through the life of the world itself?
In our colloquium, we found appreciation for Goethe’s phenomenological approach, which urges us not to seek behind or beneath phenomena for primary causes, but to attend carefully to what is given, to the shaping patterns that disclose themselves in and through attention and perception, side-stepping this question altogether.
This is quite a different approach form that of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, especially in its classical formulations, which tends to treat forms as logically prior — even in some sense ontologically prior — to their instantiations. That’s where the language of “pre-existing forms” comes from: not necessarily temporally before, but as the condition of possibility for anything being what it is. That’s the “modal difference” argument we just articulated — the idea that form isn’t just another entity among entities, but the ground of intelligibility as such.
Goethe for his part — and more broadly the phenomenological tradition as whole — tends to push back against that need for metaphysical “pre-existence.” They suggest we can attend to form as something that emerges in and through perception, something disclosed in the very life of the thing itself. The form is not hidden behind or before the world. It’s given within it, as an expressive pattern we can come to know through sensitive, attentive observation.
So, rather than demanding a strong ontological thesis about the “pre-existence” of form, perhaps we can invite a more flexible approach, one that recognizes both the structuring logic that allows recognition, and the phenomenological givenness of that logic within the actual world.
Perhaps, then, the question of pre-existence gives way to something more subtle: not a matter of metaphysical origin, but of the recognition of creative order already at work in things, accessible not through abstraction alone but through sustained attention and contemplation. This question of pre-existence here remains an open inquiry, but it still invites us to think of form not only as a condition of intelligibility, but as something that calls for presence, receptivity, and care.
In the end, what I get from these re-readings is a shared metaphysical insight. Form and telos are not external aims, but internal principles of unfolding. They do not arrive prior to or at the end of a process; they are the structure of the process itself. Both are present at every stage, shaping what a thing is and how it becomes itself. This is a picture of form as layered, meaningful, and alive. Instead of a flat expanse of inert matter, we have a world saturated with structure, pattern, and purpose.
And so we move away from the model of striving toward what is absent, and into a model of becoming what is already, in some sense, present.
In summary, form is not just what a thing should be; it is what the thing is, its becoming. And telos is not a far-off destination; it is the pattern of fulfillment that shapes each stage of life. In both cases, the real is not divided between a here and a there, or a now and a later. It is a whole: unfolding, self-expressing, ordered, and intelligible — not in spite of change and difference, but through and with it.
Thank you