The scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) represents a style of learning and understanding which is largely ignored today. The approach of modern science is largely detached, intellectual and analytical, and it is increasingly recognized that many of our contemporary problems stem from the resulting divorce from nature. By contrast, Goethe's way of science pursued understanding through the experience of the 'authentic wholeness' of what was observed. Working with the intuitive mode of consciousness, Goethe aimed at an encounter with the whole phenomenon in its relationship with the observer. In his way of seeing, rather than dividing merely in order to categorize, we should investigate the parts of an object in order to reveal the true nature of the whole. In this invaluable study, Henri Bortoft examines the phenomenological and cultural roots of Goethe's ways of science. He argues that Goethe's insights, far from belonging to the past, represent the foundation for a future science. This new science of nature, involving other human faculties besides the analytical mind, can provide understanding and explanation in a way which our present scientific attitudes, and the culture they serve, desperately lack.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Henri Bortoft has taught physics and the philosophy of science for most of his career. His postgraduate research was on the problem of wholeness in the quantum theory under David Bohm and Basil Hiley at Birkbeck College, London. He now lectures and gives seminars on Goethean science as well as the development of modern scientific consciousness.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Goethe's way of science,
By Erland.Lagerroth (Lund, Sweden) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wholeness of Nature (Paperback)
Henri Bortoft's powerful book The Wholeness of Nature. Goethes Way of Science from 1996 is pregnant with ideas:1. Goethe hoped to be remembered more as a scientist than as a poet (in the year 1987 there had, as a matter of fact, been published 10.000 works about him as researcher). 2. Goethes"way of science", his way to see and think, is an alternative, an intentional counterproject, to Galilei's, Descartes' and Newton's science. 3. Goethe does not force nature to answer reason's questions; instead he enters deeply into the sensuous impressions of its motions and life. He is not judge but participant. 4. He does this, not by examining phenomena as they exist "ready-made", but instead by contemplating how they come into existence and are further developed. 5. In this way he can approach for example the growing plant's "authentic whole", which is not the sum of its parts but, on the contrary, its"diversity in unity". Thanks to this diversity in unity, the plant by its own force is able to blossom out in stem, blades, flower, and fruit. He can not observe all this in one and the same moment but he is able to see it for his "inner eye". In this way he can apprehend the plant's whole project, and for that reason he rejects any idea that there should be another world hidden behind the material world. What he sees is another dimension of the same phenomenon, its dimension as a whole. The whole is not an abstraction only (nominalism/empirism), but neither an independent, separate reality (Platonism). 6. In this way Goethe is more empiric than most people, but at the same time he realizes that all observations contain something that exceeds the testimonies from the senses, namely the phenomenon's unit. This is what he reaches in his "sensuous imagination" (internal contemplation). In the history of science Bortoft calls this "the organizing idea", and he is convinced that such ideas, often derived from cultural history, has been more important for the development of science than concrete experiments.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A bit too fluffy for my taste,
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This review is from: Wholeness of Nature (Paperback)
I had high hopes for this book. I hoped to find good arguments for a coherent whole in Nature, as the title implies, and a good explanation of Goethe's thought on it. But I found it simply too fluffy, too imprecise in its argument, to make much of a difference to my own thinking. In other words, I found it hard to understand. Now, some time after I read it, I would be hard pressed to explain what the author said, or even, why he said it.
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