Session Introduction
This is the sixth of seven planned sessions (currently scheduled every two weeks, till mid-June) encompassing a collective reading of Bortoft’s book. This session’s reading encompasses roughly the third quarter of Part III “Understanding Goethe’s Way of Science”. The focus of this third essay thus far has been what Bortoft calls “the organizing idea” as a determiner of perception. In this reading, the emphasis is on Goethe’s approach to color and the dynamical unity of the plant.
Whereas Newton was primarily interested in color in order to improve optical instruments, Goethe’s interest was in the phenomenality of color. “He wanted to understand the necessary conditions for color to arise” (p. 213), and his means of doing so was by focusing on attention. It was through concrete attention to the phenomenon that he came to understand it, not just explain it in terms external to color itself. He carried out a strictly organized series of experiments, if you will, to demonstrate and simultaneously experience how it is that color comes-into-being, through the interaction of light and darkness. In this way, he was able to experience light in its pure, or primal, form, as Urphänomen.
Goethe applied this approach, of course, in his other scientific investigations, into his study of both plants and animals. He was not interested in finding the commonalities among plants, thereby reducing their differences into a kind of uniformity. This the approach taken by the analytical mind. Instead, Goethe recognized that there is such a thing as distinction without separation, that is, that many variations we experience, in plants for example, are not different things, but rather variations of a fundamental theme, so to speak, which are different but still intimately related to one another. Goethe came to understand that a plant is the result of a “conversation” of sorts between its own self-determining entelechy and the environment.
Reading / Watching / Listening
-
Bortoft, Henri (1996) The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature. (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press), III. Understanding Goethe’s Way of Science, the last section of Chapter 4 and the first section and a half of Chapter 5 (pp. 212-275).
-
(Alternately: Bortoft, Henri (1996) The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 6th printing 2018.)
-
Bortoft Reading Schedule_The Wholeness of Nature, v22.pdf (82.6 KB)
Seed Questions
-
Goethe took a very different approach to investigating the phenomenon of color than did Newton. What do you think of his approach? Which of the two investigators do you think took the more rigorous, “scientific” approach to his investigations?
-
Have you been able to obtain a prism and replicate any of Goethe’s experiments (and Newton’s for that matter)? If so, what was your experience in conducting them? How has the experience changed your own understanding of the phenomenon of color?
-
The notions of “difference”, “distinction”, and “separation” play an important role in Goethe’s approach and in Bortoft’s presentation. How do you understand these notions? Has Bortoft’s presentation helped (or hindered) your understanding?
