Goethean science / holistic science

"Goethean science" is a holistic approach to science (as opposed to analytical and reductionist), named such because of the method associated with Goethe and described in his science writings. The Goethean approach to the total process overlaps with the dialectical approach, of seeing processes not as a collection of parts, but as relationships and interconnections.

Here is a quote from Henri Bortoft's book, The Wholeness of Nature (subtitled "Goethe's way toward a science of conscious participation in Nature"), Lindisfarne Books, 1996.

"[A] relationship cannot be experienced as such in the analytical mode of consciousness. Since in this mode it is the elements which are related that stand out in experience, the relationship itself can only seem to be a shadowy abstraction to the intellectual mind. The perception of a relationship as such would require a simultaneous perception of the whole, and hence the restructuring of consciousness into the holistic mode... The perception of a necessary connection is the perception of a relationship as a real factor in the phenomenon, instead of being only a mental abstraction added on to what is experienced by the senses. The reality of a relationship, the necessity of a connection, is not experienced as such either by the senses alone or by the intellectual mind. Hence any attempt to understand this reality in terms of these faculties is bound to find that it vanishes from the phenomenon itself and appears to be only a subjective belief." (99)

[Note: My criticism of at least this part of Bortoft's book is that he does not say how or why there is a necessary connection in the phenomenon he cites as examples, like certain structures in mammals, only that there is such a thing.]

The Goethean approach is seen as a way around Hume's assertion that, because there is no sense impression from which necessary connection can be derived, "necessary connections" do not exist. For Hume, two events appeared "conjoined" (or in "constant conjunction") and that was it -- nothing "necessary" or necessarily "connected" about them, only something "habitually" seen, "contingent correlations".

I don’t see what Hume's problems was -- an experimentally repeatable phenomenon given the same conditions or field of operation, seems enough to perceive or know the necessary connection. As Engels wrote (in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy):

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable "thing-in-itself". The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such "things-in-themselves" until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the "thing-in-itself" became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.

Setting aside Engels' sense of "things for us" and "making it serve our purposes", and the sort of objectification and alienation from nature that it implies, there are two methods here of apprehending "necessary connection". On the one hand, a Goethean, method arising out of non-analytic mental activity -- holistic, right-brain, intuited apprehension. On the other, a method arising from interacting with matter (call it "practice", "labor" or "production"; or "fiddling", "experimenting", or "hacking").

My interest in "necessary connection" has to do with "laws" as "necessary connections", and the bundle of laws present in a phenomenon (or network) is the law system. And the law system determines the behaviors, the nature of the network.

Although "network" sounds so schematic and technical.

jd