For some, Goethean Science has become (perhaps it always been) a practise steeped in love, for others it’s just an outmoded ontological approach to world, but the acknowledgment, for me at least, remains the same, that of living world, anima mundi, and of soul-making.
Wendell Berry says that if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, that feels a little monotheistic to me, but we’ll briefly follow, looking for herms along the way. What interests me about Goethe’s approach is coming to senses in a multiple sense, going about world where every way of knowing can become a way of living, every epistemology, an ethic.
This entails taking in phenomena rather than always interpreting them before we take them in, giving them a home whilst being given a home.
Cosmos in human form and human in cosmos form.
This can entail a kind’ve going within, a descent, sloughing off paradigmatic products of thought, those beings inside of us who seek to replace, to subsume imaginal and phenomenological experience of colours, sounds (and more) with wavelengths (who are assumed to be ‘primary’ reality).
In such a paradigm, everyone we experience (red, intonation of voice…) become secondary qualities. This way of thinking then creates a so-called ‘illusory’ world, with a ‘real’ world (of wavelenghts) behind them. This is essentially the paradigm of the 19th century, and is still very much with us.
Goethe was one among many who wished to instil a shift away from this to a world filled with qualities, where feelings have a place, where ethics have standing in relation, where qualities have their own spiritual realities.
We are participants in a conversation, where interlocutor (living world) has much to say. This is fostered in part by slowing down, Goethe would often recommend just taking five minutes, to study the underside of a leaf, taking them in, meeting them with depth, with love.
Colour arises from such boundary conditions (reminding me of William James, to see sky is to be sky). So where Isaac Newton was predominantly reductive in his colour experiments, Goethe was holistic. Newton broke light apart and found the most basic physical explanation, Goethe walked through flower gardens and studied paintings, wherein redness is not only a Newtonian bandwidth of light, but a chaotic universe, boundaries of whom are not so easy to describe.
This is a means of oscillation, of myriad alchemical little faces spinning among fleck, fluidity, multiplicity, and polysemy.
Experience then, is given through relationships, as opposed to an objective world without relation, unto ‘it’self, a world outside of us, independent. There is no such creature as absolute space and time, both are always changing, switching in sacred deviations of ancient sympathy and antipathy, love and strife, they are change.
If we replace lived experience with a model that we assume has produced this lived experience, we create an image in our mind, a model as lived experience. Then we cathect with this model, we put ‘it’ into world and call ‘it’ ‘real’, we invest care, emotion, and time, and then everyone becomes explained and understood in terms of this model and subsequent system of models, abstracted out of lived experience, and they become reality.
These models are very useful, of course, but when we forget they are creations there is an underlying forgetfulness regarding the reality they are meant to point to... as Goethe said, it’s very difficult to keep the being before one, not to replace them with word, symbol, abstraction.
This is the paradigm game as outlined by Thomas Kuhn, wherein we have a habit of forgetting and mistaking belief and assumption, for truth.
There’s nothing wrong with models, but we need remember that they can be used by one to put an other to sleep.
Time is alive, not a human invention, but a human, and in Wade Davis’s book, The Wanderers, he writes of the dreaming (neither a myth, nor memory) as who will happen for all eternity, not just now, not just at point of origin. He writes that in Aboriginal universe there is neither past, present, nor future, they merge into one, a parallel universe, there is no linear progression, no goal of improvement, no idealisation of the possibility of change. As Deborah Bird Rose says, we can flip, from being an actor in time, to a heartbeat of time, emanating as actors, as heartbeats, collapsing, decohering, co-habiting with these experiences of reality wherein everyone who has happened is still happening.
We can collapse, and we can decohere… Goethe wanted to live in the all, one field watching over the solitude of others, part watching over whole watching over part. He said that every creature is a tone, a shade of a harmony who we need study as a whole for fear of every particular becoming a dead letter whose voices we can no longer hear, by which he means, anatomical detail isolated, violently abstracted from organism.
Past isn’t complete, whole is always changing shape, emanating from themselves like plasma clouds of radial pattern language, patterns who feel and are alive with meaning and communication, a transpersonal language of co-creation, dirt work.
A language of place is a language of magic, like seeking like, living and dead, as we are all alive, we are also dead, and invited to die.
We always go at least two ways, and two ways from those two ways, and so on… human dendrites, humuskind, germkind, mulchkind, phosphoruskind, thripkind, larvaekind, cosmoskind, living past listens when we listen.
Wholeness, in this composition of theory (wherein theory is practised, felt, thought as both coming to knowing and coming to loving), is universal consciousness, eternal field reverberating within themselves, co-existence of all possible phase shapes, wave function, eternally rearticulating.
Anyone less than infinity (comprehension of all entanglements) holds us in a situation of sensing a local story, a local whole in will to attend, devote to an finite line, comprehensible consciousness, quiescent attention and attraction who appears to arise only to decohere.
This is not a matter of going from parts to whole in some kind of hierarchical summation, whole is neither earlier nor later than parts.
Goethe was inaugurating an holistic intention, how can we perceive wholeness? Even asking that question causes wholeness to change their behaviour. He felt we could understand an elephant through studying a lion, so context broadens and illuminates interconnected natures of parts.
We might say that whole emerges in a coming forth of their parts, they are immanent within them, nowhere to be encountered, except in their midst.
If we break a hologram plate into fractions we do not break wholeness.
With any given phenomena we needn’t stop and dwell on and view them as existing in isolation, instead we could look about whole, to find where there is someone related, someone similar.
When related elements are drawn together a whole gradually emerges and speaks for themselves in a voice we can hear. Beings explain themselves through their mutual relations.
To reduce human experience, or even biology, to particular factors, is a trend still pervading our times, scientifically, culturally, what have you, looking for particular symptoms who are supposed to makeup whole. We might look how those part-wholes (genes, electricity, connective tissue, hormones, different parts of brain, cells and spirals, etc) are integrated into wholeness, not as symptom, but as part of coherence, of whole organism.
Goethe studied Linnaean classification, but this also stifled him. He said,
I lost courage to draw a boundary line... The problem of creating genera, with any certainty, or of arranging species, seemed insoluble.
When we separate, as we classify, we are in many ways practising artificiality.
Goethe was attuned to processes of transformation, ways forms change overtime, ways green leafness shows themselves differently during life cycles of plants, a growing, developing, metamorphosing, creature.
His observations always tried to see life, constantly learning how world expresses themselves differently in different contexts. Potential to be themselves differently in the contexts with which they are changing. Bringing their relations to expression.
Relation and dynamism are ecological senses of an organism living through transformations.
Goethe was drawn to how organism does this and yet remains an integrated whole, not so much by looking at world, but participating with phenomena, with relationship and dynamism, a plurivalent approach, a delicate and gentle empiricism, fostering care, slowness and respect. Going with phenomena, thinking that participates rather than (and when needed as well as) abstracts at a distance, perceiving as thinking and thinking as perceiving, a becoming of intimacy with being, who loses their object character and becomes an interlocutor, a partner, a correspondence.
When I say, becomes an interlocutor, I’m not implying that participation breathes life into world who wasn’t previously there, they just help us perceive polarities in nondual states.
Goethe felt that if we want to behold living world in a living way we must follow their example and become as mobile and malleable as world.
This is not about arriving with a paradigm and impressing them upon nature, as weirdly intimate as that can feel, but entering into and going about phenomena to see what they have to tell us, and to try to adapt our sensibilities to the phenomena, whether with viruses, landscapes, lichens, mycelia, etc.
An organic being is externally so many sided, and internally so manifold and inexhaustible that we cannot choose enough points of view to behold them.
We cannot develop enough organs in ourselves to participate with world without changing them through the very act, so we consciously cultivate organs of perception in us, helping to experience living qualities, making ourselves similar to our interlocutor.
We come up against our own limits and try to pass through them by going back to the phenomena, immersing ourselves in the processes, dissolving and recombining.
A conscious integration of organism. Not method, as much as germinal intentionality and maturation.