Goethean Science | A Method for Integral Knowledge
In our complex and interconnected world, the need for integral knowledge has grown paramount - integral knowledge being a knowledge system which is coherent and correspondent with the emergent reality of the present. The Club of Rome's assertion that meta-problems "are system-wide, interdependent, interactive and intersensitive; that they transcend national frontiers, or even regional boundaries; and that they are seemingly immune to linear or sequential resolution" (The Predicament of Mankind, 16), encapsulates the type of emergent reality which integral knowledge is capable of remedying.
In the early modern era, as the foundations of modern mainstream science were being developed, an exceptional polymath by the name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fostered an approach for a holistic scientific method which provides a very helpful explication of the limitations of the reductive and partial methods which have grown mainstream.
In the following article, we discuss who Goethe was, the general contours of the Goethean Science, and a summary about how it contributes to the development of integral knowledge.
Goethe's Life and Contributions
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German writer, poet, philosopher, scientist, and statesman. His contributions spanned various disciplines, making him what is called a universal person (Uomo Universal). But not only was he a so-called ‘jack of all trades’, Goethe was such a talented poet that his literary works put him on par with the likes of Shakespeare, Dante, and Cervantes, but for the German speaking world.
While his primary renown was gained via literature and philosophy, he dedicated much of his life to science, particularly botany, color theory, anatomy, geology and meteorology. Notably, he discovered of the human intermaxillary bone, and interestingly, his was the owner of the largest mineral collection in Europe of the time. His approach to science was so unique that today it’s known as Goethean Science (also “delicate empiricism”).
His general works profoundly inspired multitudes, particularly, the natural philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the abstract artwork of Wassily Kandinsky, and the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin.
Yellow-Red-Blue, 1925 by Wassily Kandinsky
In addition to being an extraordinary artist and scientist, Goethe was a public figure serving as a statesman in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach where he held various governmental positions. He sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena.
What was the key?
The notion of Uomo Universal, embraced by Renaissance philosophers, envisioned a future where individuals would possess broad knowledge, skills, and virtues. While the key to this was about creating human potency with individuals who could think artistically & scientifically, one of the major goals of this was to create well-rounded individuals with expertise in various disciplines who could positively impact the state.
Our age is defined as one of hyper-specialization and relatively little transdisciplinarity which is a leading cause of cultural fragmentation and a decrease in social cohesion. Embodying a transdisciplinary approach (see our article Quantum Mechanics & Transdisciplinarity), Goethe was skilled at working through the arts, sciences, philosophy, praxis, fundamentally transcending disciplinary boundaries. His multidimensional approach allowed him to bridge the realms of knowledge and explore the interconnectedness of different disciplines.
To our day, Goethe’s approach to the sciences, in particular, and the idea of what is ‘rational’ stand as bold pillars of an alternate pathway towards cultural cohesion and enhanced ecological integration. In not accepting the crude and dehumanizing method of reductive empiricism as a complete knowledge, he foresaw many of the issues we would grapple with down the line.
a Holistic Method
Goethe's holistic view of knowledge offers a stark contrast to reductionism, which is according to eminent biologist E. O. Wilson “the leading edge of scientific research” (Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge, 1998). For Goethe, any phenomenon under observation must be experienced in its totality and cannot be understood in isolation. This complete experience must include both the subject and object of experience, along with all of the relations between and around them. This is why Goethe wrote, “In living nature nothing happens that is not in connection with a whole. When experiences appear to us in isolation or when we look at experiments as presenting only isolated facts, that is not to say that the facts are indeed isolated. The question is: how do we find the connections between phenomena or within a given situation?” (The experiment as mediator between subject and object, 1772)
The type of knowledge which emerges from this interpretation of nature is very different from that of the traditional science popular in the modern age. This distinction was best seen in Goethe and Newton’s head-to-head exchange on color theory at the beginning of the 18th century. By employing their respective methods, entirely different forms of knowledge were created. Whereas Newton studied light to create a mathematically based theorem to define a universal objective entity of light, Goethe studied light directly, in a vast array of contexts and environments, imbued with a poetic vision of its meaning.
The different outputs were extreme. Newton’s theory of color was directly applied to technological and scientific advancements such as lens design, telescope improvements, color photography, and chemical analysis (spectroscopy). On the other hand, Goethe’s work developed our spiritual, human, and cultural understanding of color stimulating innovations in color psychology, art education, the phenomenology of perception, aesthetic theory, cultural studies, and the therapeutic uses of color.
The Unity of Phenomena
As we mentioned in the previous section, Goethe's holistic science challenged the prevailing fragmentation of phenomena inherent to reductionism. The modern paradigm exhibits a very difficult time understanding wholes and interrelations, and this has led to profound issues in specialization, fragmentation, and complexity. A good example of this is the way in which scientific knowledge may see a landscape from a biological, geographical, historical, or geological disciplinary perspective, but not as a whole entity. Beyond just this natural aspect, modern mainstream science definitely does not also connect the landscape to the social, cultural, and spiritual dimension of landscape relations. This fragmentary mode produces a remarkably incoherent worldview, and it is recognizable that this approach is increasingly struggling to resolve planetary meta-problems (for more on this subject, review complexity scientist Edgar Morin’s Homeland Earth or physicist Basarab Nicolescu’s Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity).
For Goethe, the only way to approach phenomena is through a process of experience, intuition and phenomenology which integrates a singular thing from a myriad of different contexts and viewpoints. In the Goethean Science, the only way to enact good science is to accumulate a myriad of personal experience with the object of matter, and then to allow that multiplicity of object awareness to synthesize into a “higher knowledge”. As he writes:
“When we attain an overview of all of [the experiences] we see that they constitute, as it were, one single experiment, one experience presented from manifold perspectives. Such an experience consisting of a multitude of others is an experience of a higher order.” (ibid)
Recognizing the underlying unity that exists within the natural world, he fundamentally questioned the reductionist approach that dissects and isolates elements. It’s in this way that by questioning fragmentation and embracing the unity of phenomena, Goethe's holistic science encourages an organic perception, inviting us to understand the integral nature of the world.
Experimental Proofs are Illusory
It may seem from the above sections that Goethe was a thinker fundamentally antithetical to modern science, and totally romantic in his ideals. But this is simply not the case. He dedicated a large portion of his life to science and admired its meaning and process. His primary concern with the trajectory of early modern science was that he felt it was theory-driven and had the effect of producing incomplete knowledge disassociated from reality.
One of the ways in which he saw the mainstream trajectory of early modern science to be error-prone was its fascination with single facts being proven and verified by experimentation. As he writes, “let me say something that may seem paradoxical. I dare to claim that one experiment, and even several of them, does not prove anything and that nothing is more dangerous than wanting to prove a thesis directly by means of an experiment (ibid).”
But how could he write this and still consider himself to be a scientist?
Obtaining a multiplicity of experiences of a single thing was extremely important for Goethe. This goes back to our earlier idea, “In living nature nothing happens that is not in connection with a whole.” What he is stating here, is that because everything is connected in nature, an experiment proving a fact no matter how many times it is repeated, isn’t a truth because it doesn’t account for the interrelated operations of the whole. This is why he wrote, “Once we have carried out an experiment, we cannot be careful enough to examine other bordering phenomena and what follows next. This is more important than looking at the experiment in itself.”
Why is Goethe’s Holistic Science Important?
Goethe’s approach to science was never adopted in the mainstream scientific community, even though it had a profound effect in art, philosophy, and education. The mainstream model of science has moved forward using the “reductive leading edge”, substantiated by a well developed system of disciplinary empirical compounding. Facts are proven by experimentation, and these facts compound to form a solid foundation of knowledge.
This knowledge system however, while it has compounded to produce incredible human creations, has done so with an extraordinarily limited awareness of its embeddedness in a network of interrelations.
It seems that today, the cracks in the foundation of modern science are growing. For 400 years, we have been using the isolated findings of mainstream science to create the anthropocenic world. Civilization is entering a state of potentially irremediable metacrisis due to our effects upon the Earth System. Small things we thought weren’t a problem in isolation, such as an economic logic of infinite extraction, non-circular waste-systems, and the rapid invention and use of new chemicals, have potentially pushed the Earth System into planetary destabilization.
Our knowledge systems need to evolve in order to be able to adequately adapt to the planetary meta-dynamics of our time, and Goethe offers us helpful advice along the way.
