Rediscovering Goethe’s Phenomenology - Pt. I
Rediscovering Goethe’s Phenomenology - Pt. I
A first step toward a spiritual science (without science woo...)
The following is an extract from my book “Spirit calls Nature”. A long read in several parts, of course. But a necessary one, if one wonders if and how a future science could look like.
“Man discovers the law tablet of the universe by a
‘flash of memory’ falling into the dark."
Wolfgang von Goethe
a. Seeing Differently
The question at this point is: How can humankind go further than where we are? If the ordinary materialist analytic and reductionist science can lead us only up to a certain point but not further than that, then what can? As a first step, two things must be kept in mind if we want to proceed from where we are.
First, we must recognize the limits of an exclusively physicalist and reductionist science and become aware that the reality we perceive with our senses and the reality that science describes are illusions. The material appearance of the physicality of life should not be ignored or neglected. Nurturing the material aspects of our lives and trying to explain it in terms of mechanical and physical processes isn’t wrong. However, it becomes incorrect once it is embraced as the unique and only possible worldview. Otherwise, we fall into a one-sidedness that sees only an outward appearance, takes it as the whole of reality, and misinterprets a superficial momentary wave for the ocean as a whole. Even if we aren’t, at this stage, able to directly see the whole and can only intuitively receive intimations of it or feel its vastness, the fact that we become intellectually aware of the limitations of the materialistic science, as it is actually conceived, leads us in the right direction. Being aware of not being aware is the first step towards a fuller awareness.
Secondly, and equally important, is to realize the evolutionary context in which science manifested in human history. Science is a cognitive activity of a specific species, the Homo sapiens, and because there is no reason to believe that humans are the last and ultimate lifeform appearing in the earthly evolutionary process, there is, therefore, also no reason to believe that science, as it is actually practiced, is the ultimate tool to unveil the truth of things. The human being, with its cognitive faculties, is a transitional being. Reason, rationality, and all the powerful cognitive skills that distinguish humans from animals are also only transitional, limited, and incomplete faculties for investigating the world and reality. Materialism isn’t wrong as such but is only one possible way of seeing—a way that developed from an evolutionary process. It would be quite an anthropocentric attitude (and a negation of evolution itself) to believe that science is the only and final tool of knowledge leading us to the ultimate truth of things. Science is a ‘species-specific’ form of cognition.
Nowadays, many speak of the necessity of inventing a new science that should unite conventional science with spirituality and look for a post-materialistic change in paradigm. The word ‘paradigm’ comes from the Greek word parádeigma (παράδειγμα), which stands for ‘model’ or ‘example’. The philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, introduced the notion of the ‘scientific paradigm’ to designate an intellectual breakthrough that bases our old worldview on a new and different model. The typical example is the shift from a Ptolemaic Universe, with the Earth in its center, towards a heliocentric Copernican conception.
In this sense, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics also determined a new scientific paradigm. But the revolution occurring about four centuries ago that brought us from an Aristotelian science towards the empiric one of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton was more than a change of paradigm. It was also a methodological change: the process and the procedure through which knowledge is acquired had changed. The underlying idea of how Nature should be investigated experienced a complete overthrow. Philosophic or religious reasoning was considered no longer an essential ingredient or point of reference, and the practice of exact quantitative measurements of the phenomena has taken its place as the ultimate arbiter of the ‘truth’. This determined much more than a change of paradigm; it not only gave birth to a different cosmology or confirmed a theory, it also determined the way we look at the physical realm, switching from a ‘way of seeing’ of the natural philosopher to the quantitative method of the modern empiricist.
Therefore, we could ask ourselves if there could also be other ‘ways of seeing’ that do not contradict and not even replace science but eventually complement and enrich it. Present science is intrinsically limited by the material sense-mind perception that instinctively reduces, particularizes, atomizes, and separates. Again, there is nothing wrong with an intellectual and rational activity that analyzes the whole by a bottom-up process beginning from reduction, polarization, differentiation, and separation. However, the question is whether we can equally develop a ‘complementary sense’ that sees things differently, namely, by a top-down vision of the whole first where particulars are not the parts of this Oneness but, rather, manifestations of it at a different level. Can we develop another ‘sense of seeing’ leading to another ‘understanding’ of the world, which transcends the mind and reason without abolishing it?
Who writes firmly believes that the answer is affirmative. Even though the ordinary human consciousness still has a long way to go before being capable of fully realizing such an alternative way of seeing and a new science based on it, we can already find intimations of this approach.
As is so often the case when we forget about our roots and the achievements of the past, it might sound paradoxical that the most interesting example hinting towards a new science comes not from a vanguard research or sci-fi vision but, on the contrary, from a distant past—that is, from the phenomenological approach of the German poet, writer, and natural philosopher of the 18th century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is well known for his literature but somewhat less for his attempts to found a new science that was supposed to, in his view, supplant the Newtonian conception of the world. Though he considered himself a staunch adversary of the already predominant Galilean, Newtonian, and Cartesian science, in hindsight, one can interpret Goethe’s science not as something in opposition but, rather, as a complementary cognitive activity to the ordinary reductionist worldview.
In fact, readers unfamiliar with Goethe’s phenomenology will probably wonder why someone should reconsider and eventually try to resurrect an over two-centuries-old approach to natural phenomena that most modern scientists consider as no more than a historical curiosity, if not a fancy imagination of a talented writer and poet who, however, is regarded as a failed scientist. Goethe’s science may appear as an appendix to the history of natural philosophy or as something we should set aside in scientific considerations, as one does with alchemy, astrology, and mysticism, or that is belittled, comparing it to a geocentric or flat Earth doctrine. But a less superficial and more informed knowledge reveals how these sorts of comparisons completely miss the point. For example, nowadays, we can prove, with observations, experiments, and crisp, clear reasoning, that the Earth isn’t flat and isn’t even the center of the universe. Geocentrism and flat-Earth theories are simply wrong. Meanwhile, Goethe’s science is not a theory about the world; rather, it is a different way of seeing it, and his description of the plant kingdom or his color theory of light has never been proven to be wrong. It remains, until today, contradiction-free.
It is just another way to observe the same phenomenon of Nature, which could go hand in hand with Newtonian science. The present way of doing science is based on dissecting, atomizing, and reducing Nature to elementary components through which, with a bottom-up approach, it explains reality as a whole. Goethe’s phenomenological approach, instead, first ‘senses’ the whole and regards the elementary components becoming visible by a top-down approach, not as summing up into the observed reality but, rather, still as the manifestation of that very same whole. While Newton's science looks for the fundamental laws of Nature that govern the manifestation from a microscopic to the macroscopic level of existence, Goethe looked for the ‘primal phenomenon’ (the ‘Urphänomen’) from which all other phenomena can be derived. Newtonian science looks at the quantitative aspect of the world with the sense-mind, which by mental, intellectual, rational, and analytic cognitive acts, reduces everything to elements and laws that can be described by the ‘mother-science’ of quantity: mathematics. Goethe looked at the qualitative aspect of the world with a more intuitive and comprehensive sight of things representing the whole by describing it in terms of primal phenomena. Therefore, the two approaches are not competing for the representation of truth; rather, they resort to two different compenetrating forms of cognition.
One might also question why, then, Goethe’s approach received so little attention? There are several reasons, which we will discuss at the end of this section, once we have, hopefully, conveyed a better picture of it, though we can’t do justice to it and can only furnish a superficial overview inviting the reader to resort to the specialized literature (such as [1]1 and [2]2). Nevertheless, to furnish the reader with at least an intuitive understanding of what this alternative way of seeing is about, let us briefly outline the main principles of Goethe’s approach, especially how he applied it in biology to plants and in physics to light and color.
b. Life From the Perspective of the Unity of Knowledge
As humans, we simultaneously possess sensory and imaginative seeing. Seeing imaginatively does not act as a substitute for seeing sensorially; rather, it exists beside it, meaning that we can alternate between the two ways of seeing or that we are even able to see simultaneously in a ‘dual manner’. Contrasted with a regular dual vision that switches between the sensorial and imaginative seeing of the exact same object, this particular ‘dual vision’, which incorporates sensorial and imaginative seeing at once, allows us to view things in a complementary manner, in which our sensory vision enables us to view the separateness of distinct parts while our imaginative way of seeing allows us to view the relation and wholeness of these distinct parts. This twin way of seeing is an irreducible one. It is polar and yet integral.
The advancement of such dual vision is Goethe’s manner of viewing, which enables us to establish direct relationships of a different type than that of the mechanical, material connections which the ordinary scientific single-minded vision introduces at an exclusively sensory level. Goethean science enables us to experience the wholeness of the phenomenon that adds a novel and additional element to the appearance.
As humans, we have always been aware of the twofold to some degree; it is something applied daily, yet usually, we are not aware of it. We use this dual way of seeing in our everyday communication as we speak, listen, read, or write. In fact, just like the abstract concepts we regularly deal with, we already pointed out how the objects of our conscious awareness of the world are bound together into a single and indivisible whole. This cognitive binding skill is what led to the binding problem and the emergence of meaning in the philosophy of mind we discussed in Pt.I-II.3. Our cognitive system has already a natural and innate tendency to see in universals instead of particulars.
For example, we pointed out how numerous letters come together to form a word, and in the same way, numerous words, all of which are unique, come together to form a sentence, from which emerges a unified and unique meaning. However, this hierarchical process of knowledge continues: These sentences form paragraphs; paragraphs then form sections and chapters, and ultimately, chapters form books. At each stage, we reach a new level and a ‘unity of knowledge’ that sees comprehensively. At each stage, the unique aspects are all viewed at once, leading to a new and broader emergent meaning that differs from these distinct aspects when viewed singularly and can’t be explained as the sum of it. Even if we are mostly unaware of this process, we always view things collectively, using a ‘dual vision’ that relates the parts into an object of cognition that can’t be reduced to the parts themselves. Recall how, also, Fichte recognized a similar cognitive instantiation when we perceive our body as a whole, not as a bundle of parts.
Goethe’s scientific method is based on this ‘twofoldness’ and applied to natural sciences, which enables us to view it by ‘reading the phenomena in the book of Nature’, as Galileo used to say. But, while Galileo saw this book written in mathematical terms, Goethe opposed the conventional numerical science that analyzes its constitutive components. The word ‘reading’ refers to addressing Nature’s sense-perceptual elements in a manner similar to that in which we read letters that make up words and the words that build up sentences constituting texts. Once we have read, we have a meaningful representation in our minds of the message that was supposed to be conveyed but then forget about the single words and letters. Similarly, we should look at Nature like an open book, not by analyzing the single letters it contains but by silencing our minds and allowing it to capture the significance of the phenomena it conveyed. In contrast, modern science employs an approach that tends to examine the particularities individually and reads the book of Nature by examining the ink or the thickness of the paper while missing its content. The meaning of the sentences and words is ignored, and thereby, the chance is missed to gain a more comprehensive understanding.
An example of particular interest is Goethe’s way of seeing living organisms from a perspective whose central theme is the multiplicity in unity. The way of understanding unity isn’t an aspect of sense-perception. Unity arises by how things are associated with our cognitive act. For instance, we may display an image of a specific plant, yet we are unable to display the plant’s unity. While the conventional manner of viewing unity eradicates discrepancies and encourages similarities, Goethe’s biological unity identifies discrepancies and incorporates them, preventing multiplicity from being flattened into a dry uniformity. It avoids a disintegration of reality into mere multiplicity and enables the individuality of the specific subject to be visible inside the light of the unity of the whole. We face something intrinsic in the creature when this happens. Multiplicity is viewed in the light of unity, as opposed to attempting to obtain unity from multiplicity. It is from the multiplicity of disparities that unity is seized (not obtained), which is the opposite of uniformity.
Goethe extensively studied the plant kingdom and specifically showed how his way of seeing could be applied. For example, adopting the standard way of seeing characteristic of natural sciences, when we look at the leaf of a plant, the awareness of it captures the abstract notion of leaf in an instant, eventually analyzing the particulars of the sensory experience, such as focusing on the differences between the parts of the leaf or what distinguishes it from other leaves. Then an inner, almost automatic perception arises that leads to the concept of a universal that we call ‘leaf’. This cognitive process becomes an active one and looks for the commonalities in the particularities (something reminiscent of Husserl’s eidetic reduction.) We look not just at one leaf but many and recognize some underlying commonality or invariance that is, more or less implicitly, contained in all of them. One proceeds from the many to the one. Once we have realized this ‘one over many’, we can go into deeper levels of abstraction with this active process of seeing, which looks for commonalities and the one feature (physical or abstract) binding them all together. An example is recognizing several leaves as all being parts of a particular tree, such as the leaf of the‘silver linden’ or ‘silver lime’ (Tilia tomentosa). Then, in turn, the trees are part of a particular living organism, and all the organisms taken together are the expression of something we call ‘life’. By looking at Nature in this way, we reveal the multiplicity in unity. It is about seeing the phenomena and the properties they express, looking for the multiplicity in unity not only by embracing commonalities but, to the contrary, by seeing all the differences as an expression of the diversity of the very same underlying unity.
An analogy that could clarify this is the example of the hologram. A hologram displays a 3D image from a 2D photographic plate (illumined by laser light), which can retain the 3D features of an object even if we look at it from different viewpoints (see the picture below).
If we cut the hologram into two pieces, we won’t be left with half the image, as we would expect with conventional photography; we will still be able to see the whole image, though with less resolution. Cutting the hologram again into pieces, we will always see, in each piece, the whole image but with a decreasing resolution until it becomes unrecognizable because only a few pixels composing the whole image are left.
The upper picture shows how, by cutting out a piece of the hologram (two times, from left to right), the picture that remains still illustrates the whole visual field but with decreasing resolution and, therefore, decreasing sharpness until it becomes almost unintelligible. The whole is still present in its own parts but with a lesser degree of information content.
The hologram can be taken as an example that clarifies the difference between the multiplicity in unity vs. the unity in multiplicity. The former way of seeing always realizes an inherent unity within the multiplicity that does not break the unity, and that can express itself in the multiplicity but isn’t dependent on it—that is, the whole is not the sum of its parts (each part of the surface of a hologram already contains the whole). The latter comes into being by the analytic and separative way of seeing, which binds the multiplicities and particularities into a unity—that is, the sum of the parts makes the whole (for example, the image arising due to the combination of the pixels from the surface of a conventional photographic plate).
The common scientific understanding of Nature by a bottom-up approach proceeds by an ‘extensive way of seeing’ things—that is, it is a process of summation of the parts. We could, however, adopt a top-down approach that proceeds by an ‘intensive way of seeing’ —that is, it recognizes the inherent unity in things that is independent of the level of distinction and fragmentation. It corresponds to a quite different logic with which the reductionist mind works. It can even lead to non-sensorial suspension of the divisive and fragmenting sense-mind activity altogether. At the bottom, this is the psychological reason why so many scientists are suspicious, if not even afraid, of adopting this cognitive act of seeing, as it apparently invites us to quiet the rational activity. But it is not about shutting down our intellectual skills. On the contrary, the silent way of seeing the wholeness at once without indulging in its parts is a cognitive state that complements and even empowers the rational and analytic mind. Recognizing the intensive dimension of the One is a powerful form of cognition that goes beyond the mind but does not abolish it.
Goethe applied this to the plant world. While he didn’t know anything about holograms, he nevertheless recognized the same principle being already present in Nature. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that if we cut from a plant, say, a branch or a stem or a twig, we can grow an entirely new plant out of it. As in the hologram, the whole is already contained in each part. It is only a matter of time before the plant will regrow itself from one of its parts. There is something that contains a wholeness, and that manifests in our conscious experience, participating in it in the form of a unity of knowledge. There is something that reproduces an ‘original plant’, though it never reproduces exactly the same. All plants belong to the same One in the many at the same time—that is, to the multiplicity in unity.
In doing so, we don’t use the empirical and quantitative divisive sense-mind but, rather, some other form of cognition that knows by seizing the indivisible unity behind the form and number. It is an effortless, intuitive way of seeing that waits for the intimate substance and meaning of the object or organism to be recognized. It is not the One made of the many that we realized; rather, it is the many as the display of the very same One.
Also, the process of reproduction can be seen in this light. When a plant flowers from another plant, it is the same One plant that forms as many plants.
Seen from this perspective, even humans could be considered as the One being reproducing itself in the multitude of humans. However, we feel as though we are separate beings, individual subjects, sometimes also very different and, not seldomly, at war with each other. Where is the unity? Again, we will argue that it is the mind that brings into the play separation, division, and numerical differentiation. Hidden in our subliminal depth, we know to be one family and, at the bottom, the One without a second. Something I described here also.
At this stage, it is critical to become aware of the fact that there are also other ways of seeing and looking upon reality. The ordinary scientific sense-mind consciousness begins with the spatio-temporal material multiplicity of life and its processes and, eventually, builds some unity by a bottom-up approach, while Goethe’s way of seeing begins from the One and, eventually, recognizes its identities in the form of bodies inside a spatio-temporal conceptual structure.
For example, we already pointed out in Pt.I-IV.3, how trees use a network of soil fungi, the mycorrhizal fungi, to communicate with each other. We can’t see the underground network of the tree’s roots, but we can imagine it. Can we consider it as the unity of one species, where each tree is the expression of the same unity in its manifoldness? Or, to rephrase the question, is all this just allegorical, a metaphor, just poetry, or does this way of seeing perceive a more fundamental truth that we didn’t notice with the ordinary sense-mind way of seeing? Conceiving, or even literally ‘seeing’ the whole present within its parts, may sound like a play on words. After all, we are told how all this is supposed to come into being: The sameness of the organism and its variations can be explained away by genetic inheritance. There is this belief that our DNA contains all the information encoded for assembling all the proteins necessary to build a fully-fledged organism.[1] But shifting our seeing from a macroscopical to microscopical observation of the process does not abolish the phenomenological way of seeing; it only presents it under a different perspective. The molecular processes themselves could be seen as the expression of an idea, the Idea, which is at work behind the superficial appearances of a purely material process. Looking at microscopic processes doesn’t mean that we have to adopt a reductionist perspective; we are still allowed to see the dimension of the One expressing itself in a microscopic multiplicity of the many. If the reductionist mind perceives the holistic approach as a philosophical abstraction of no scientific value, the holistic mind perceives the reductionist approach (as, unfortunately, Goethe did) as a meaningless abstraction because it fails to seize the One. Instead, the correct attitude should be that of embracing both ways of seeing, not that of taking one approach against the other. Both ways of seeing are mutually complementary powers of cognition that, eventually, might lead us to a third yet unknown form of knowledge. Seeing comprehensively is not opposed to seeing selectively, but they are two possible forms of cognition that are not mutually exclusive.
Goethe went further with this form of seeing comprehensively by also investigating the wholeness of the mammals—that is, rodents, bats, ungulates, cetaceans, primates, and carnivores. In this scheme, diversity appears to be the ‘self-difference’ of the single organism. One can, again, resort to the duck/rabbit metaphor but thought in its many-sidedness instead of only two appearances. There exists only one rodent, bat, ungulate, cetacean, primate, and carnivore and, finally, only one mammal of which these organic orders are all a one-sided manifestation.
An intuitive sight of life reminiscent of Plato’s universals: this identification is, however, contested. Plato conceived of two separate worlds–the world of sensible phenomena and a mental world of forms and universals beyond the sensory experience—while, from the Goethean perspective, there is no such distinction. On the other side, we could also combine both and see a third possibility in which the One is transcendent and also immanent, a dynamic Essence in latency in the manifestation and in all that there is. This would unite the Goethean with the Platonic way of seeing.
This new form of seeing ‘sees’ differences and relations in a wholistic and instant manner, it is non-spatial, and it realizes the One in a single cognitive act that does not arise due to a logical inference or a combination of elements but because of a simultaneous all-comprehensive view. It is in this wholistic manner that we should read the book of Nature. We may start from the details and seize the One but should not consider the details limiting it. Again, it is like reading a text. We see the single letters, bind them into words, and read several words forming a sentence. Its combination leads to one meaning and only a single perception of the significance that the sentence contains. But the letters, words, and sentences do not limit the semantic object. In fact, the same significance can be expressed by different words in different languages and characters. In contrast, the exact same sentence can convey different meanings, as we have shown, in Pt.I-II.3, discussing binding and the emergence of meaning.
On the other side, this does not imply that the single elements (here, for example, the letters and words) do not exist. There is no contradiction or antagonism between the two cognitive phases, that of realizing the letters and words separately first and the awareness of the meaning they convey simultaneously. The problem arises if we get stuck in the first phase: Analyzing the single letters and their relationship would cut us off from the possibility of understanding the meaning that the whole is trying to convey by it, and we will forever wonder how and why all those symbols are arranged in the sequences as they are. The comprehensive reading is not a bottom-up act of cognition; it arises due to a top-down apprehension of the meaning of the sentence, which is not contained in the combination of the letters and the words they build. The perception of the meaning of a sentence is a form of ‘higher’ cognition than counting the single letters or making a statistical analysis of the frequency with which the words appear or that of finding links and connections between the single elements.[2] It is ‘higher’ in the sense that it is a comprehensive top-down insight that the bottom-up analysis will never be able to convey and yet allows for the bottom-up cognition as well—the same fits for Goethe’s imaginative non-sensorial way of seeing Nature and its phenomena. The reductionist approach isn’t wrong or inadequate, but it is only one possible way of seeing.
However, seeing comprehensively is not just a sensorial act. The comprehensive seeing is realized by sensorially perceiving the multiplicity in unity that stands behind and is immanently present in the unfoldment of the phenomenon itself in a subtle non-sensorial manner. This realization can’t rest on the materiality of things. It arises due to something ‘pre-material’ contained in the phenomenon and of which the phenomenon itself is only a symbol, a figure presenting itself in our awareness due to a mental transcription. It is not even an imagination, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. Imagination still requires an effort that takes the elements of an object of cognition and links them into a concept, image, or meaning. If we use the word ‘imagination’ in the context of Goethe’s science, we mean an intuitive act of seeing that grasps the multiplicity in the unity of the observed phenomena or object in a simultaneous act at once. We don’t construct the whole by an analytic and intellectual operation that links things; rather, we comprehensively see the Idea that stands behind the phenomenon or the symbol that the material objects represent.
Seeing comprehensively offers a complementary way of understanding evolution. Evolution is not only a process that proceeds from one species to another, building up onto the past by natural selection, random mutations, and other mechanism such as recombination, hybridization, lateral gene transfer, etc., but is also the emergence of the One organism in time and space. Speciation can be seen in Goethe's way—that is, metamorphically from the perspective of the multiplicity in unity. In Henri Bortoft’s words: “This means that the sequence is One organism and not a sequence of different organisms connected in an external way. They are different manifestations or actualizations of the same organism, not different organisms that have evolved from a common ancestor as in the standard theory of evolution. Once again, we have to turn our way of seeing inside-out. As one leaf does not transform into another one in the growth of the plant, so one kind of animal does not turn into another kind. They are not descended from one another, either directly or from a common ancestor, by procreative connection. As with the plant, what we see here is the development of One organism out of itself, which has the dynamic unity of self-difference. So the sequence is really the progressive expression of the whole itself and not one stage turning into another one. This is an evolution in the perspective of the intensive dimension of One.” [20]
The diverse species are not a fragmentation from a previously isolated entity; they are the expression of a single unity that is dynamic. This dynamism manifests in the expression of the diversity that is still a manifestation of the very same unity. The bodily entities of each organism exist; they might even be profoundly diverse and separated in space and time, and yet all represent the expression of the One that ultimately defines its dynamism. As in the hologram, the whole is in the parts, and at the same time, each part is one expression of the whole. We might say that the different plants can be seen as the modifications of a unique plant, not as separate bodily entities that were related in the past. This connection still exists; our fragmentary mental way of seeing cannot see behind the external appearances and realize the plant that lives in all plants. It is like our inability to see how a forest might well be only one huge single organism that, however, we don’t realize because our superficial sight isn’t able to capture the complex network of the interconnected roots below the surface and that, if we could imagine comprehensively, would reveal to us the single and undivided organism of which the single tree is a local manifestation.
The difference, however, is that by adopting the phenomenological approach, we don’t just see material connections, like those of the underground network of roots of a forest. Rather, we also realize an indwelling unity that transcends materiality. We ‘see’ the Oneness in things even though the external appearances might suggest a separation and material fragmentation. The one plant is an Idea that we can apprehend intuitively and that has a concrete reality in itself. This ‘plant-type’ or ‘archetypal plant’ —or, as Goethe called it, the ‘primal plant’ (‘Urpflanze’) —manifests and reveals itself to us in the many plants. Just as an object reflected in multiple ways by a system of mirrors remains unaffected and the same, so are the different plants a phenomenal expression of the same plant type that remains unaffected and the same. Nevertheless, if this immanent and inherent archetypal plant is immutable, its expression on the material plane is dynamic and observable in a variety arising from the multiplicity in unity in the manifestation.
This way of seeing is not limited to the plant world. The reality of which it makes us aware is inherent in each living and also non-living manifestation, phenomenon, and process. Ultimately, it is Nature as a whole that reveals us by a dynamic unfolding of the One. If we enlarge our way of seeing even further, we realize how the archetypal plant is itself, again, the expression of an ‘archetypal life’ inherent and dynamic in Nature, of which, however, we see only a cross-section in space and time due to the limitedness of the intellectual and analytic sense-mind.
This way of seeing should not be confused with a conjecture, speculation, or mental abstraction. It isn’t something like, for instance, a mathematical abstraction or complicated conceptual structure. Goethe’s ‘seeing’ is more affine to our notion of intuition, sight, or foreknowledge that captures, in a single and almost instantaneous act of cognition, a qualitative aspect of the phenomenon and that can’t be expressed by a quantitative formula, a set of symbols, or whatever complicated description. It requires the contemplation of the phenomena and things, not an analytic dissection that formalizes, compares substructures, and links them together by concepts, logical inferences, or definitions. It is a sudden, effortless, and unmistakable awareness that is quite the opposite of the intense thinking of the ordinary mind.
But it isn’t even the intuition we associate with the word ‘instinct’. Fear, anxiety, fright, and anger are psychological instincts, and hunger, thirst, sexual drive, or uncontrollable nervous reactions of pain and pleasure are bodily instincts. The intuitive way of seeing about which we are speaking here has nothing to do with our inherited animal instincts. It is a much subtler higher-mental awareness of an inherent truth in things and life that does not arise due to an automatic and mechanical bodily or psychological instinct. Rather, it transcends these and the ordinary mechanisms of the intellectual reason. What we realize by an inspiration, vision, and insight coming from a contemplative seeing is the opposite of what we can reach by an instinctual nervous reaction. For this reason, we will never associate the word ‘intuition’ with the word ‘instinct’.
The archetypal plant is not a poetic or artistic conception, either (although poets, artists, and even scientists may well resort to poetry or arts to express the ‘impalpable’). It is the realization of a reality standing behind the superficial material appearances that manifest it. It is an ontological fact immanent and inherent in reality that manifests in its materiality to our sense-mind but presides beyond it.
We could speak of the archetypal plant or any archetypal life form and object as the intrinsic ‘mode of being’ that visibly manifests in the domain of our five senses. The evolutionary process seen from this perspective becomes a dynamic metamorphosis of the One that is expressing something of itself in a diversity of forms. The One, however, is in itself indeterminate and cannot be fully understood in determinates like color, shape, or other sensorial features but can, nevertheless, express itself by these determinates (sort of like Kastrup’s ‘qualia redux’, which we discussed in Pt.II-II.3g). The indeterminate One is a self-determining entity that determines itself in a determinate plane of existence out of itself. From this, Goethe concluded that the living cannot emerge from the non-living; rather, the living determines its state of being in and through the non-living.
In other words, we may say that there is more to seeing than meets the eye. There is a non-physical dimension that works behind the scenes and goes beyond the mere sense perception and mental experience. After all, subliminally, we know that all too well. For example, we know that it’s one thing to see a natural landscape through an artificial medium, however perfected and technologically advanced it might be, and another thing entirely to have a direct experience of the landscape on site. A video conference—however broadband and high-resolution it might be, with hi-fi sound—still lacks something that makes us aware of how meeting and knowing each other physically brings us to a psychological dimension that even the most advanced medium can’t deliver. The materialist might brush aside this as an irrational and emotional aspect of our human nature that still clings to socialization (because, you know, socializing has no meaning and purpose other than being a Darwinian process with an evolutionary advantage supposed to reproduce and spread the selfish gene, right?). We contend that there is more than that and that one can become directly aware of this cognitive extra-dimension if one becomes conscious of what is seen and how one is seeing.
Investigating the physical world from a phenomenological approach is not restricted to the spatial wholeness of the phenomena; it also includes its manifestation in the temporal dimension. In fact, Goethe extended his new way of seeing to the ‘movement of metamorphosis’ of the phenomena unfolding in time. It is about not only what the form represents but also what its dynamism manifests. Also, a movement, a modification in time, a change in form eventually occurring beyond the human lifetime reveal something about the nature of things. It is this process of metamorphosis that, in its temporal development, expresses a multiplicity that underlies a single unity. The archetype emerges in our awareness when we see the unity that the movement expresses through the whole series of appearances.
To understand the plant world from the phenomenological standpoint, we must shift from our reductionist and material way of seeing forms to its perception based on an intuitive temporal non-sensorial, such as a spatial holistic dynamic way of seeing. The temporal process reveals what Goethe used to call the shift from the ‘Gestalt’ (the static form, shape, or organization of the object or living body) to the ‘Bildung’ (the development, forming, or reorganization of the perceived object or living body). This process of transformation, change, and movement shouldn’t be treated as secondary. It is part of the temporal expression of the archetype, no more and no less than its spatial manifestation in form and structure. The never-ending spatial movement or temporal modification of forms is inherently the expression of a change in itself, which transcends the material domain that expresses it only in a special and temporal universe. It is a concept of metamorphosis reminiscent of the Heraclitan statement ‘everything flows’ or the Buddhist notion of impermanence. For example, in the case of the plant, we should not just look at its morphological details but also participate in its metamorphosis in time (something that nowadays is nicely revealed to our senses by time-lapse videos of plant growth) and as a whole (for example, including the observation of the growth of its roots, as depicted in the following picture).
But Goethe’s subtle perception of change isn’t something that can be reduced to its change of forms. It is the realization of a change that transcends the physical transformation of which it is only a subsequent and not even necessary expression and of which we can become aware by a conscious participatory way of seeing the metamorphic process. It is a comprehension that participates with the dynamical change of the plant, but that doesn’t arise by looking only at its material dimension or by thought alone; rather, it arises by participating in the plant’s action in form and time from within. We can say that, in a certain sense, we try to identify and become the plant. It is neither a sensory experience nor an intellectual inspection but a subtler cognitive perception that works subliminally and must be brought to the conscious surface awareness. It is a different type of knowledge that goes beyond the observation that our senses and organizing scientific mind can give us. It is the science that Goethe called the ‘Wholeness of Nature’ and that H. Bortoft has marvelously reframed in modern terms [20].
What distinguishes this phenomenological and trans-phenomenological approach from the analytical and reductionist one is not so much conceptual but, rather, characterized by the meeting point of our consciousness with the object of investigation. While the reasoning and divisive mind analyzes the particulars of the determination of the archetypal, the phenomenological sight directly catches the indeterminate archetype itself. It is a method of cognition that doesn’t stop at the materiality of things but identifies the primal phenomenon standing behind the outer material phenomenon. It isn’t even an exclusively first-person perspective; rather, it is an integration of the third-person with the first-person perspective. Insisting on the third-person perspective, which only apparently abstracts from our consciousness, may make inter-subjective communication easier but automatically loses the deeper meaning and ontology of the phenomenon and the archetypal nature it represents. This is precisely the reason why the material universe appears, to the scientific mind, to be so meaningless and devoid of purpose, not because it is, but because we chose a priori to stick to a form of cognition that expunges the archetypal—that is, any meaning and dynamic significance—from the outset.
However, having said that, a living organism like a plant or an animal is not only a spatio-temporal expression of something but is also determined by the surrounding environment. This is the difference and commonality between Goethe’s and Darwin’s understanding of Nature’s workings. Both share the view that life is determined by the environment (the climate, natural resources, the soil’s fertility, Earth’s geological activity, etc.), but until recently, Darwinian evolution dispensed with any hypothesis admitting that the organism plays a role in the evolutionary process as well. For Darwin, the organism was a passive subject molded by the environment, natural selection, and genetic determinations. Goethe, instead, saw this interaction occurring in space and time in both directions: from the outside to the inside and also from the inside to the outside of every living being. Modern scientific evolutionary theories still maintain only the former interaction as the primary force standing behind the evolutionary process, with the latter having no role or, at best, playing a very marginal role. It is, however, becoming increasingly clear on a completely different scale how the human species is a vivid example contradicting this belief: Humankind is destroying the environment, decreasing its biodiversity, and even changing the climate. This is a clear (tendentially self-destructive) action of the species on the environment. Moreover, as we will discuss in Pt.III-II.5g, modern findings are now beginning to confirm Goethe’s insight.
At any rate, there is no doubt that the environment plays an important role. It is here where the infamous random mutations, the laws of statistics, and coincidental environmental events could profoundly shape the environment itself and, with it, all the living organisms it contains. For example, sudden catastrophic events determined by natural climate changes, volcanic eruptions, or cosmic ‘coincidences’ like the impact of asteroids or comets, in some cases, wiped out almost all living forms on Earth. These facts were still unknown at the time of Goethe, but he was well aware, already before Darwin, of how his insights also imply that the archetype cannot manifest itself fully and must come to terms with the physical environment through which it wants to manifest. The archetype, immanent in the plant or animal or even in an inanimate material object, ‘struggles’ to appear in its purest form, which the outer conditions prevent it from fully manifesting. It is only through a different form of cognition that we can ‘see’ or sometimes only ‘glimpse’ its phenomenal expression in the manifestation. The external material appearance of this process will later be called ‘evolution’.
This ‘delicate empiricism’ resorts to a series of experiments and experiences of phenomena that sees by a ‘binding act’ of particularities, parts, and relations how the organism no longer appears as something conditioned only from the outside environment but realizes how it is also driven by an internal creative soul-power. This internal ‘primal-force’ (‘Urkraft’) determines its form as well. This primal force of Nature is a reflection of the wisdom of a thinking Being, of the power of a Creator. Every organism exists not only to be but also to become.
Also, what already is must come to expression through a never-ending metamorphosis that tries to express the unity of the whole and that we can become aware of if we ‘ask’ Nature to adopt a participatory cognitive move inside of us. By this move, we become able to recall and see in front of us the ‘ideal unity’ that Nature is trying to express. This metamorphosis must be seen as the development of an organization by a progression, transformation, development, a series of transitory steps of Nature. What is seen, then, is not the phenomenon or the structure but the phenomenon of the organic structure as a whole—an epigenesis of forms in an evolutionary process that reveals a wholeness both visible and invisible at the same time.
The decisive factor that allows for this seeing is, guess what, again, consciousness. Only through this subtler form of conscious cognition can we apprehend and become aware of something that the reasoning and differentiating mind alone cannot. It is a higher form of cognition that does not abolish reasoning but, on the contrary, empowers it further. Goethe openly spoke of this form of knowing as something that “belongs to a highly evolved age”.
In the next part, you can find out about Goethe’s color theory in terms of light and darkness as primal phenomena.
[1] We will see, in section Pt.III-II-5g, that, contrary to common belief, modern science showed that this isn’t correct; it is a misconception that survives in the collective imagination.
[2] An aspect of our own cognition that modern AI research still struggles to become aware of, leading to the insurmountable complications with machine language recognition and translation that we described in Pt.I II-4.
H. Bortoft, The Woleness of Nature, Lindisfarne Press.
H. O. Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color: Goethe Versus Newton, Steiner Books, Inc, 1986.