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Wholeness of Nature

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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.

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.