Goethean Science
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749-1832) is renowned equally for his science as he is for great literature and poetry. Living at the same time as Newton he developed an alternative mode of cognition that has been sidelined in the reductionist focus that Newtonian science has brought to modern scientific development of the past two centuries.
Known as the founder of the science of morphology and living nature, Goethe developed a unique method of coming to knowledge; a method that involves an exploration that actively invites all aspects of the human being as well as all aspects of the 'object' being observed.
in Goethes own words:
" everything which man undertakes to perform, whether it is accomplished by words or deeds or otherwise, must spring from all his united powers"
We live in a time where we are educated to distrust our own experience.
In the methods of observation developed through Goethean science we are not only restoring our trust in our faculties but also in ourselves.
The exploration is one that transforms us as we travel with the process.
Through this wholehearted approach we become participating observers of the natural world.
"Nature's law is perceived as a compulsion only so long as man looks upon it as an alien power. If he penetrates its true being, it is experienced as a force which he himself uses in his inner being;he feels himself to be an element co-opperating productively in the 'being and becomming' of things."
(Rudolf Steiner in Goethe's Conception of the World, p69, London 1928) quoted in Readings in Goethean Science complied by L.S Jolly and H.H Koepf 1978.