Abstract
What is wholeness? To answer this question, it is helpful to present a specific setting. Imagine someone not yet recognizing it asking, “what is roundness?” We might try to answer him by giving a number of instances, such as “the moon is round,” “the plate is round,” “the coin is round,” and so on. Of course “round” is none of these things, but by adducing a number of such instances we may hope to provoke in him the recognition of roundness. This happens when his perception of the specific instances is reorganised, so that they now become like mirrors in which roundness is seen reflected. In spite of what many people might think, this process does not involve empirical generalization — i. e., abstracting what is common from a number of cases. The belief that concepts are derived directly from sensory experiences is like believing that conjurors really do produce rabbits out of hats. Just as the conjuror puts the rabbit into the hat beforehand, so the attempt to deduce the concept by abstraction in the empiricist manner presupposes the very concept it pretends to produce.
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Notes
T. Leith and H. Upatnieks, “Photography by Laser,” Scientific American 212 (1965): 24–35.
David Böhm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 ), p. 149.
C.W. Kilmister, The Environment in Modern Physics ( London: English University Press, 1965 ), p. 36.
Jayant Narlikar, The Structure of the Universe ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 ), p. 250.
Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics ( London: Wildwood House, 1975 ), p. 313.
Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), chap. 7.
P.H. Bortoft, “A Non-reductionist Perspective for the Quantum Theory,” M. Phil, thesis, Department of Theoretical Physics, Birkbeck College, London University, 1982, chap. 5.
The difficulty with talking about part and whole is that a distinction is made which is extensive, and this leads to dualism. The difficulty disappears with the recognition that there can be an intensive distinction; see Bortoft, “Non-reductionist Perspective.”
See the notion of unfolding (explicatio) and enfolding (implicatio) in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, discussed in Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, vol. 2 (London: Rupert Hart- Daris, 1966), p. 129; also, see David Böhm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, chap. 7.
The terminology of presence and presencing is adopted from Heidegger as an attempt to escape dualism. See G.J. Seidel, Martin Heideggerand the Pre-Socratics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), chap. 3.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962 ), p. 206.
Arthur J. Deikman, “Bimodal Consciousness”, in The Nature of Human Consciousness, Robert E. Ornstein, ed. ( San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973 ).
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. ix; also, see Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics (Holland: Reidel, 1971), pp. 56, 69, 72–74.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. ( London: Macmillan, 1964 ), p. 20.
E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 ), p. 83.
Michael Roberts and E.R. Thomas, Newton and the Origin of Colours (London: Bell, 1934), pp. 60, 110.
Idries Shah, The Sufis (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. xvi.
Aron Gurwitsch, “Galilean Physics in the Light of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, in Phenomenology and Sociology, Thomas Luckmann, ed. ( Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978 ).
Ernst Lehrs, Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the basis of Goethe’s Method of Training, Observation and Thought, second edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1958 ), p. 290.
H.B. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition ( University of London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1972 ), p. 39.
Ernst Lehrs, Man or Matter, p. 293.
H.B. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition, p. 36, n. 149.
Agnes Arber, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (London: Cambridge University Press, 1950) p. 209, italics in the original.
Quoted in A.G.F. Gode von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism ( New York: Columbia University German Studies, 1941 ), p. 74.
H.B. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition, p. 54; Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1947 ), p. 33.
Ernst Lehrs, Man or Matter, pp. 99, 112.
The difference between these two kinds of scientific thinking illustrates, and is illustrated by, the distinction which Heidegger makes between “belonging together” and “belonging together” (Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, [New York: Harper and Row, 1969], p. 29). In the first case, belonging is determined by together, so that “to belong” means to have a place in the order of a “together” — i. e. in the unity of a framework. But in the case of belonging together, the “together” is determined by the belonging, so that there is “the possibility of no longer representing belonging in terms of the unity of the together, but rather of experiencing this together in terms of belonging” (ibid.). Thus, we could say that Goethe experienced the belonging together of the yellow sun and the blue sky, and that he did not try to make them belong together. This experience of belonging together is reached by dwelling in the phenomenon instead of replacing it with conceptual representatives.
Ernst Lehrs, Man or Matter, p. 125.
Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974 ), p. 146.
Goethe followed the same approach in studying living things in nature. With flowering plants, for example, he proposed that “All is leaf” and that “this simplicity makes possible the greatest diversity” (Rudolf Magnus, Goethe as a Scientist, [New York: Collier Books, 1961], p. 45). Goethe perceived the stem leaf as the primal or archetypal organ of the flowering plant because he saw it as containing all within itself. He did not mean by this that all the further organs of the flowering plant — i. e., sepals, petals, and stamens — grew out of the stem leaves in a material sequence. Rather, he saw the plant holistically, thus seeing the intensive dimension of wholeness. His perception that all is leaf is another instance of the intuitive perception whereby the particular is seen as a living manifestation of the universal and hence in the moment of seeing is symbolic of the universal. See J.W. Goethe, Goethe’s Botanical Writings, Bertha Mueller, trans. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1952); and Lehrs, Man or Matter.
R.G. Stansfield, “The New Theology? The Case of the Dripping Tap,” paper presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September, 1975.
Gay Hendricks and James Fadiman, Transpersonal Education (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976 ).
Ibid.
See David Seamon, “Goethe’s Approach to the Natural World: Implications for Environmental Theory and Education,” in D. Ley and M. Samuels, eds., Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems ( Chicago: Maaroufa, 1978 ), pp. 238–250.
Wolfgang Schad, Man and Mammals ( New York: Waldorf Press, 1977 ).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ( New York: Harper and Row, 1962 ), p. 58.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method ( London: Sheed and Ward, 1979 ), p. 432.
See Henri Bortoft, Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness (London: Institute for Cultural Research Monograph, Octagon Press, 1986 ).
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Bortoft, H. (1985). Counterfeit and authentic wholes: Finding a means for dwelling in nature. In: Seamon, D., Mugerauer, R. (eds) Dwelling, Place and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_17
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