Goethean science as second-person epistemics
to know a person as a friend, one must be friends with that person
“As a man is, so he sees.”
—William Blake
I have recently been contemplating the principle behind Blake’s statement in connection with Goethean science (which was a primary subject of my doctoral work). The concept of theoria entails a correlation between subject and object, or percipient and perception.1 That with which we can establish no relation must remain imperceptible to us. Moreover, the perceptual affordances available to me will be different than those afforded to a stone, or an angel, or even to me at different stages in my life, or times of day, or moods and attitudes in the same time of day. Knowledge is a relationship between beings: to know a person as a friend, one must be friends with that person. In other words, I must also be a friend. In other words, real knowledge is not something extrinsic. If knowledge seems extrinsic, it is the result of inadequate interpretation of experience; an inadequate hermeneutic of the percept. In the perception of extrinsicality, I learn something about my cognitive posture and not something about the being towards which I am assuming that posture. It’s incorrect to think that I learn something directly about the object. Put another way, the extrinsicality is a reflection of my own mode of perceiving as imaged in the object. Hence, knowledge is never merely a question of knowledge. Instead, it is also a question of being. Parker Palmer encapsulates this connection very concisely when he observes that “every way of knowing becomes a way of living, every epistemology becomes an ethic.”2 I cannot see a friend without being a friend.
I don’t regard the above as a hypothesis or theory so much as an observation that will be self-evident to any person who is willing to attend, with any degree of conscientiousness, to his cognitive and perceptual activity.
Goethean science is often construed as a “holistic” or “intuitive” method and set in contradistinction to the “analytic,” “quantitative,” or “abstract” method that characterizes the majority of conventional scientific disciplines. Another way to understand the difference between the conventional scientific method and the Goethean method is in terms of “relationality.” I will try to explain what I mean in light of the above. Think about the grammatic persons, as indicated by the pronouns I, you, and he/she/it. These pronouns are employed to designate first, second, and third person relations, respectively. Conventional science’s emphasis on models, measurements, and quantification takes place within the context of what may be described as a “third-person epistemology.” In other words, phenomena are regarded as “hes” or “shes” and mostly “its.” In Goethean science, by contrast, the emphasis on observation, experience, and quality transpires within a more fundamental matrix, which could be described at “second-person epistemology.” In other words, phenomena are regarded as “yous.” Hence, scientific research takes its departure from fundamentally different relational postures according to whether it is being conducted in the Baconian-Galilean-Newtonian mode or the Goethean one. The relational posture can be seen as a paradigmatic difference. This is important because observations disclose evidence and significance only in light of the specific paradigm or theory in which those observations are made. This is, of course, a refrain of this site. There is no way to see the sunset as evidence for the Earth’s orbit from within the geocentric paradigm of the solar system. Returning to a point raised above: if I wish to know someone as a friend, I must be friends with that person. In other words, it is impossible to get at that kind of knowledge through third-person epistemology. This should give us pause and invite a reflection of the relative completeness of the scientific ontology relative to all being.
Plato describes the Idea of the Good as that which imparts [508e] “truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower”
He continues:
you must say is the idea of Ἀγαθόν, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and the cause of truth in so far as they become known…
But as for knowledge and truth, even as in our illustration [509a] it is right to deem light and vision as being sun like, but never to think that they are the sun, so here, it is right to consider these two (knowledge and truth) as being like Ἀγαθόν but to think that either of them is Ἀγαθόν, is not right.”
As light and vision are energies of the sun but not the sun itself, and as knowledge and truth are energies of the Good without being the Good itself, so the Good is an energy of God. Hence, it is God who is, in principle, accountable for the correlation of subject and object. Hence, to understand the architectonics of theoria is already theosis, but that is perhaps a theme to take up on a separate occasion.
“Toward a Spirituality of Higher Education”