“thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.” Rudolf Steiner (1883), Goethean Science, GA1.
The Goethe-Steiner multi-layered worldview, known as “Goethean science,” has been spiralling back for some time; in Australia since the popularity of John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World (Penguin Press, 2007). That book was published almost two decades ago, and it is only in recent years that that the philosophical worldview is being revaluated by technical academic philosophers who, only recently, dismissed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as out-of-date thinkers.
There were cultural and historical reasons why Goethe and Steiner were dismissed a hundred years ago, circa 1924, but in 2024 “the dismissal” is stupidity. A hundred years ago Steiner, who died in 1925, reinterpreted the Goethean science with unfortunate parts of Christian Gnosticism, which is effected (there is no affection) by pseudohistory, BUT, indeed, is the same for Orthodox Christianity, as much effected (there is no affection) by pseudohistory. From Goethean science, Steiner developed what he called, “spiritual science”. On the sound philosophical basis, and the most basic of terms, it is merely the clarity of thinking from characteristic Western philosophy to spiritual questions. What is “spiritual” is determined differently by the different ‘article statements’ of the philosophy. Steiner’s esotericism, such as clairvoyance, and neognosticism are historically encrusted on a philosophy which rejects the esoteric-claimed, historical, ‘reality’. Had Steiner been more aware of his own present history, he would have seen his own ‘colours’ of perception were not real.
Whatever technical differences exist among the article statements, there is a consensus worldview, which is pitched by it antithesis (“arch enemy”) hard materialism – ‘the will’ which will not entertain any idea of something beyond human experience and comprehension, for the slavish belief in social atomism. The antithesis can be read as pure ideology, as the thesis of Goethean science-Spiritual science can also be as pure ideology. It is not necessarily so, and the synthesis proposed are many. The point for our times, and it has had a century coming, is that hard materialism has several unnecessary and negative sociologies; more in particular, in the economic perspective, inflationary consumption or consumerism: “more material is the good life.”
Goethean science is how we basically understand natural philosophy today. Natural philosophy is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe. Goethe created an alternative to the rationalist scientific method, which still plagues us in the early 21st century as pure ideological rationalism. There had been up until Goethe:
- Bacon’s natura naturata, based on inert nature, but meant the ignorance on vital nature (natura naturans);
- Descartes’ rational-empirical model based on the predominance of mentative thinking (sinnen) via the intellect (Sinn);
- Hume’s sense-based model where perception is only a mental representation of what is real; which led to…
- Kant’s more helpful distinctions between theory of appearance (Schein) and the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich).
Goethe developed a phenomenological approach to natural history, an alternative to Enlightenment natural science. For Kant, we cannot know the thing-in-itself (Das Ding an Sich) beyond our mental representation of it, BUT there is a power (productive imagination – produktive Einbildungskraft) that produces a unity (“transcendental unity of apperception”). So, we cannot know or experience it in itself; we can only see its manifestations and create representations about it in our mind.
Steiner describes three ways in which Goethe’s approach to Science differs from analytic modern science:
- Goethe avoids classification, rather explores how general ideas of classification are epistemologically related to the single data. He points out that the cognitive process is an artificial compartmentalization.
- Like Hume, Goethe upturns the principle of Causation. Goethe’s Theory of Colours was a big movement forward in the science of perception, and which had produced, in the mid-century, the influential work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989). It was Goethe who first asked, “Is it really justified when we perceive a phenomenon of light or colour, to say that what we subjectively describe as the quality of colour is the effect on us of an objective process taking place as a wave-movement?” This produced the worldview layering in the science, to distinguish between the ‘subjective’ event and the ‘objective’ — the latter being the wave-movement, or the interaction thereof with processes in ponderable matter. The conclusion is what Niels Bohr stated, “Everything we call real is made of things we cannot call real.” It is a rejection of hard materialism via the strong critique of naïve realism (or direct realism or perceptual realism).
- Goethean outlook of ‘Nature’ are the very opposite in the three respects to hard materialist thinking, outdated in misunderstanding: 3) the double concept of the Law of Nature – Kepler’s Law of elliptical orbits, and Newton’s Law of Gravitation, as opposed to the ‘relative’ positioning of the 20th century; 2) the essential difference between Goethe’s theory of colour and the theory which has prevailed in pop science; and 3) Goethean Science stands apart from Cartesian-Newtonian Classification Science in its alternative value system.
Through Hegel’s original phenomenology – which is seeded in the idea of world consciousness – Goethe comes to the conception of vital nature. Steiner applied Goethe’s methodology of a living approach to ‘original’ nature to the human sciences (mainly the performing and fine arts) which produced an Anthroposophic vision, to discern the human inner nature (natura naturans).
From Steiner’s Goethe, and of Oswald Spengler, there is Goethe’s ‘organic’ logic’ – which demands life-experience (rather than the scientific experience associated with inorganic logic). The former consists of ‘letting the impressions of the world just work upon your senses, enabling you to absorb those impressions as a whole.’ Steiner’s branch of Goethean Science was extended by Oskar Schmiedel (1891-1980) and Wilhelm Pelikan (1893-1981), who did research using Steiner’s interpretations.
From such Hegelian-Goethean phenomenology came the social psychology of Carl Jung. Goethe set-out a geheime Verwandschaft (hidden relationship) of parts that explains how one form can transform into another form while being part of an underlying archetypal form (Ur-phänomen). Goethe provided a new way of thinking (denken) which was a parallel order of science, as a more distinct, separate, and more holistic paradigm. It was useful for getting past the heavy cognitive curtain erected by Kant, where only utilitarian ideas and science are valued.
Goethean Science had defined and evaluated the expansion of knowledge as 1) observing organic transformation in natural phenomena over time (historical progression); and 2) organic transformation of the inner life of the experimenter (the major source for the “underdetermination of theory by data”). The Goethean Science is a much more human and humane outlook: understanding vital nature (natura naturans) is very much a function of taking impressions and activating thereby responses via the Gemüt (empathy, perhaps also compassion) so that one ‘becomes what one perceives’. Strangely, it parallels the same conclusion in Aristotle’s empiricism, millennia ago.
This is why, anyone with intelligence can never entertain hard materialism, and why persons like Donald Trump are not intelligent.
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Neville Buch
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