298 Ecological Restoration and Design
might be derived from different assumptions and something akin to sympathy and
a ‘feeling for the organism’ (Keller, 1983).
Among the dissidents to the directions of modern science, Goethe, best known
as the author of Faust, stands out among the first theorists and practitioners of the
science of wholeness. In contrast to a purely intellectual empiricism, what physicist
and philosopher Henri Bortoft calls the ‘onlooker consciousness’, Goethe stressed
the importance of relying on observation beginning with intuition that allowed
the object being investigated to speak to the observer. Descartes, in contrast,
reportedly began his days in bed by withdrawing his attention from the contami-
nating influence of his own body and the cares of the world, to engage in deep
thinking. He aimed, thereby, to establish the methodology for a science of quan-
tity established by pure thought. Goethe, on the other hand, practised an applied
science of wholeness in which ‘the organizing idea in cognition comes from the
phenomenon itself, instead of from the self-assertive thinking of the investigating
scientist’ (Bortoft, 1966, p240).
Instead of the intellectual inquisition proposed by Bacon and practised subse-
quently, Goethe proposed something like a dialogue with nature by which scien-
tists ‘offer their thinking to nature so that nature can think in them and the
phenomenon disclose itself as idea’ (1952, p242). Facilitation of that dialogue
required ‘training new cognitive capacities’ so that Goethean scientists ‘far from being
onlookers, detached from the phenomenon, or at most manipulating it externally ...
are engaged with it in a way which entails their own development’ (1952, p244). In
Bortoft’s words, ‘the Goethean scientist does not project their thoughts onto nature,
but offers their thinking to nature so that nature can think in them and the phenom-
enon disclose itself as idea’, (1955, p242) which requires overcoming a deeply
ingrained habit of seeing things as only isolated parts not in their wholeness. The
mental leap, as Bortoft notes, is similar to that made by Helen Keller who, blind and
deaf, was nonetheless able to wake to what she called the ‘light of the world’ without
any preconceptions or prior metaphoric structure whatsoever. Goethe did not pro-
pose to dispense with conventional science, but rather to find another, and comple-
mentary, doorway to the realm of knowledge in the belief that Truth is plural, not the
monopoly of one method, one approach, one time or one culture.
Implicit in Goethe’s mode of science is the old view, still current among some
native peoples, that the Earth and its creatures are kin and in some fashion sen-
tient, able to communicate to us, that life comes to us as a gift, and that a spirit of
trust, not fear, is essential to knowing anything worth knowing. That message, in
Calvin Martin’s words ‘is riveting ... offering a civilization strangled by fear, meas-
uring everything in fear, the chance to love everything’ and to rise above ‘the
armored chauvinism’ inherent in a kind of insane quantification (Martin, 1999,
pp107, 113). It is, I think, what Albert Einstein meant in saying that:
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and
space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from
the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of