*Henri Bortoft* # Progressive Summary The book starts getting quite repetitive and I'm not sure if it has contributed that much to my understanding of Goethe. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## 1 - Into the Dynamic Way of Thinking Bortoft considers systems thinking as falling within the Cartesian paradigm, because it tries to build a model of the whole. It is the right brain hemisphere's representation of the whole. Phenomenology gives us a way to access the left brain hemisphere's experience of the whole. It does so by taking us upstream from our experience. Descartes dreamed of a unified science. He had merged algebra and geometry, two formerly separate fields of mathematics. He wanted to go further and unify all of science. In the 1920s, the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap, believed they could achieve Descartes' dream. They wanted to reduce all of the sciences to physics. But Ludwig von Bertanlanfy, who was also part of the Vienna circle, went in a different direction. He came up with General Systems Theory, which sought to find patterns common to all of the sciences. --- Differentiation is always a relation. In phenomenology, we become aware of when something appears. That moment of appearance is a moment of differentiation. But before that happens, there is an organic unity, a relation. This is what happened when Luke Howard published an article in 1803 called On The Modification of Clouds, in which he came up with the now familiar categorisation of clouds into cumulus, cirrus, stratus. Goethe read a translation of this. That was much scientific excitement, as this appeared to be a breakthrough which enabled the science of meteorology. ## 2 - Goethe and Modern Science This chapter retraces the path that modern science took. Before the 12th century, science was completely empirical. It could not go beyond the rule-of-thumb methods of the practical crafts to become a theoretical science offering rational explanations. It was a "cookbook" science, not an "explanatory" science. In the 12th century, logicians started making use of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Aristotle had made a distinction between induction and deduction. He had built upon the teachings of Plato. It was Plato, through his theory of Forms and mathematics, who opened up the possibility of deductive proof. Euclid's Elements of Geometry, which emerged two generations after Aristotle, became a foundation of western thinking after it was introduced by the Arabs in the Middle Ages. This work provided the model for the deductive movement from theory to experience. The Arabs balanced mathematics with other pursuits such as music and poetry. But in Europe, the emphasis on mathematics became more one-sided. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon said in his *Opus Maius* that mathematics was the "door and key ... of the sciences and things of this world", and concluded "wherefore it is evident that if, in the other sciences, we want to come to certitude without doubt and to truth without error, we must place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics." This sentiment came to dominate science for the next 800 years and was not challenged by Goethe. Modern science began with Grosseteste in Oxford, and Albertus Magnus in Paris. They followed Aristotle in holding that the purpose of scientific inquiry was to discover the true premises for observations. Many people have mistakenly believed that Galileo supplanted Aristotelian science by replacing deduction with experimentation. But Galileo only disagreed with Aristotle's results. He did not disagree with his methodology, which combined both induction and deduction. There is a deep continuity between Aristotle and, much later, Galileo, Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Newton. Galileo not only said that the higher reality was mathematical, he also divided the world into primary and secondary qualities. Descartes admired Galileo and attempted to build a foundation of mathematical certainty. He believed "that when the human mind is occupied with mathematical physics, it is doing a very thing for which it was created by God. It would be difficult to imagine a better warrant for mathematical physics than this!" Descartes never used the word 'consciousness'; this was later introduced by Locke. Descartes wanted to supplant Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity. He also wanted to defeat the other challenger to Aristotelianism - hermetic and gnostic philosophy. Descartes succeeded in isolating the mind from the body, and this has infiltrated science ever since. He even went to enormous contortions to explain why we feel pain. He said this was an illusion created by God to protect us. Newton completed the mathematisation of Nature in his treatise The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). This is the first introduction of mathematical physics. Boyle had recognised only two principles of nature, which are matter and motion. Newton added the third – force. Many of his contemporaries thought this was not mechanical philosophy and was a return to hermetic science. Newton's discovery was that gravity could be described mathematically without even understanding what it was. Physics as a term wasn't used until the 19th century. > The ascendancy of the mathematical was accompanied by the downgrading of the sensory. It wasn't until phenomenology that the body got rehabilitated. First with Husserl's *Ideas* Volume 2. Then by Merleau Ponty in *Phenomenology of Perception*. ### Goethe Goethe returns attention to the senses and withdraws it from the verbal-intellectual mind. He promotes a concrete way of paying attention to phenomena. It's about moving upstream from apparent diversity to discover the unity which has creatively producing that diversity. It is the way the right hemisphere experiences the world. > This may well be Goethe's greatest discovery: how to encounter what is active and living in nature by means of the senses and their enhancement, instead of remaining in contact only with what is already finished by relying on the intellectual mind. What we can now add to this is the discovery of the neuropsychological correlation between Goethe's way of science and the difference between the modes of functioning of the two hemispheres of the brain. Perhaps such a contemporary approach could provide a doorway through which Goethe's sensuos-intuitive way of science can be introduced into the world today. ## 3 - Goethe and the Dynamic Unity of Nature. Goethe published *The Metamorphosis of Plants* in 1790. > Whenever Goethe is mentioned in connection with science, it is usually in the context of his work on colour, and especially his disagreement with Newton. Consequently his approach to science is presented from the outset as being controversial. But this tendency to focus on Goethe's more controversial work has the unfortunate consequence of drawing attention away from his other, equally important work on metamorphosis in plants. > What Goethe said about metamorphosis is confirmed today by developmental genetics. The puzzling thing is, as one professor of genetics put it to me, how Goethe could have got it so right over 200 years ago without the resources of modern genetics. The answer is that he did it by learning 'to think like a plant lives' through the practice of active seeing and exact sensorial imagination. > Reading what Goethe says, it is difficult not to get the sense that he's doing the very opposite of searching for what all the different organs have in common. He is talking about the creation of difference within unity, not arriving at unity by the exclusion of difference. The direction of his thinking is the other way round. I wonder if this directional quality of life is what Stuart Kauffman is talking about when he says that life is historical - [[A World Beyond Physics#^ef8979]] Kauffman writes: > The biosphere literally constructs itself and does so into a biosphere of increasing diversity. Again, How and why is this? Remarkably, the answer may be “Because the living world can become more diverse and complex and in an ongoing way creates its own potential to do so.” Schelling was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Jena in 1798. # Quotes # References