*Henri Bortoft* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## 0 - Preface > My interest in Goethe arose as a result of working as a postgraduate research student under David Bohm on the problem of wholeness in the quantum theory, back in the 1960s. To those of us who had the privilege to participate in his daily discussions, Bohm communicated a sense of the way that wholeness is very different from how we have become accustomed to thinking of it in modern science. When I first came across Goethe's scientific ideas, I immediately recognized in them the same kind of understanding of wholeness that I had encountered with Bohm. > We realize now that nature can manifest in more than one way, without needing to argue that one way is more fundamental than another. So there is the possibility that there could be a different science of nature, not contradictory but complementary to mainstream science. Both can be true, not because truth is relative, but because they reveal nature in different ways. Thus, whereas mainstream science enables us to discover the causal order in nature, Goethe's way of science enables us to discover the wholeness. ## 1 - Authentic and Counterfeit Wholes This essay was originally published in this book: [Seamon 1985 - Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World](zotero://select/items/1_VAULI75Y) The following has some resonance with McGilchrist's left and right hemispheres. > Through the manipulation of physical bodies, and especially solid bodies, we develop the ability to focus the attention and perceive boundaries—i.e., to discriminate, analyze, and divide the world up into objects. The internalization of this experience of manipulating physical bodies gives us the object-based logic which Henri Bergson called "the logic of solids." This process has been described in detail by psychologists from Helmholtz down to Piaget. The result is an analytical mode of consciousness attuned to our experience with solid bodies. This kind of consciousness is institutionalized by the structure of our language, which favors the active mode of organization. > The alternative mode of organization, the receptive mode, is one which allows events to happen—for example, the play above. Instead of being verbal, analytical, sequential, and logical, this mode of consciousness is nonverbal, holistic, nonlinear, and intuitive. It emphasizes the sensory and perceptual instead of the rational categories of the action mode. It is based on taking in, rather than manipulating, the environment. > It seems clear from his way of working that Goethe could be described correctly as a phenomenologist of nature, since his approach to knowledge was to let the phenomenon become fully visible without imposing subjective mental constructs. He was especially scathing towards the kind of theory which attempted to explain the phenomenon by some kind of hidden mechanism. > It is the authentic whole which is reached by going into the parts, whereas a generalization is the counterfeit whole that is obtained by standing back from the parts to get an overview. # Quotes # References