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inIsisThe Field Centre Research Journal Volume 2, No. 2 - ISSN 2055-5156 (Online)

inIsis - The Field Centre Research Journal Vol.2 No.2 - 2015

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inIsis - The Field Centre Research Journal Vol.2 No.2 2015Editor: Aksel Hugo: [email protected]: www.thefieldcentre.org.ukDesign: Will Mercer at Ruskin Mill Trust: www.rmt.org

Welcome to this third edition of inIsis

This edition collates presentations of research that were offered through the Field Centre to both MSc students and the public during the last academic year. THe articles invite the reader to explore at leisure the intricacies and insights of the research. It is hoped that the sequential unfolding of the three articles illuminates the thread which connects them.

Dr Troy Vine’s review of morphological thinking in the work of Goethe, Hegel and Wittgenstein provides the historical and philosophical context for both Alasdair Gordon’s investigations into the development of a morphological curriculum, and for Judyth Sassoon’s search for the processes that manifest as form.

judyth ends her article with suggestions for further research, a call taken up in our fourth and final article. Here, Aksel Hugo describes the collaborative research programme taking shape through the close co-operation of the Field Centre with the Science Section in both the UK and Dornach, in collaboration with Dr. Johannes Kühl.

Taking these three articles together, what we see developing is a path of inquiry that goes far beyond the field of special needs education.

Aonghus Gordon, Founder and Chair of Ruskin Mill Trust

The philosophical legacy of Goethe’s morphology 4Developing a morphological curriculum 14

In league with Poseidon 22Evolving morphological science 26

Previous editions of InIsis are available at the Field Centre website www.thefieldcentre.org.uk

Vol. 1, No. 1: Catching fishness/Goethe: An eye for colour/When plants become our teachers/Thinking textiles as a community of practice/Benefits of craft for impulse control-related disorders/Beholding a question: Re-imagining thinking

Vol. 2, No. 1: Community breath/To think the enlightenment anew/MA in special education/Bee culture in evolution/Learning from bees/Inviting fire/Transformative spaces

The Field Centre also produces regular bulletins summarising current research. To subscribe, please contact Simon Reakes [email protected].

inIsisThe Field Centre Research Journal Volume 2, No. 1 - 2015ISSN 2055-5148 (Print)

Front Cover: Cherry stem and fallen blossom by Simon Reakes (May 2015). Back cover: Rose Gold, The Field Centre by Patricia Russell.

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Welcome

In 1810 Goethe published his famous study on colour (Farbenlehre). This was to become long forgotten, until in the last decade it has fully entered the academic discourse both in philosophy of science and in science education. A similar recognition is yet to be seen for Goethe’s pioneering work on the ’metamorphosis of plants’ (1790) - where he develops the idea of the archetypal plant (Urpflanze). The perceptual potential he points to is that of connecting all the parts as an inner dynamic whole and of seeing seamlessly. Goethe’s main contribution to a future science is hidden in a reorientation of the scientist; where the practice of science becomes a path of self education. In his own words: ”Animals are educated by their organs, human beings educate theirs and master them” (Prose in Verse).

In his article on the legacy of Goethe’s idea of the archetypal plant, Troy Vine traces the resonance and development of this idea through Kant and on to Hegel and Wittgenstein. From this historical and philosophical perspective, the second article brings Goethe’s method to current life within an educational context. Alasdair Gordon shares his action research into the conditions of evolving a curriculum where a seamless kind of knowing is generated. Following this educational perspective, the third article portrays one particular case story. Judyth Sassoon here offers the reader an insight into her process of an embodied questioning and understanding within a specialized field of palaeontology.

In a final short article a research programme in morphological science is presented where these questions and perspectives on evolving Goethe’s scientific impulse are taken to an operational level and a research programme with the Science Section in Dornach is launched.

With a warm welcome to a stimulating read,

Aksel Hugo, Editor

Wall painting of Isis depicted with outstretched wings c 1360 BCE



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The philosophical legacy of Goethe’s morphologyBy Dr Troy Vine

To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

IntroductionHow can Goethe’s thought be relevant in the 21st century? This is the main question I attempt to address in this essay. However, I have decided not to address it head on, so to speak, by analyzing our current situation and seeing whether this or that insight of Goethe’s can be of service in solving this or that problem. Instead, I have decided to take a single idea from Goethe’s extensive corpus and trace its historical development down to the present day under various thinkers to see if a logical next stage arises naturally out of such an historical presentation, a next stage that could represent, if you like, the continuation of the inner necessity of its historical movement.

The idea I have chosen for this short historical study is Goethe’s Urpflanze - his archetypal plant - and the story I sketch is the development of this idea in the philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein. This philosophical unfolding of the Urpflanze has five parts: After a brief characterization of Goethe’s germinal idea of the Urpflanze I present the conceptual apparatus developed by Kant, which provides the conceptual soil out of which an understanding for the Urpflanze can grow. I then look at its development under Hegel and explore the conceptual difficulties with which we are presented with if we are to take the Urpflanze seriously as the single unified principle of all plants. As a further step, I turn to Wittgenstein to explore the idea of the Urpflanze as a principle that is grasped in our perceptual capacity; i.e. that which enables us to recognize all plants as belonging to a single unity. Lastly I consider the direction in which we should look to develop further the conception of the Urpflanze.


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This short story is in many ways a summary of relevant aspects uncovered in recent research concerning Goethe and his influence on the history of philosophy and I am particularly indebted to Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, in which he describes Wittgenstein’s “life and work in the one narrative” (Monk, p. xviii), and Eckart Förster’s The 25 years of Philosophy, where he offers a systematic reconstruction of the historical period that starts with the publication of Kant’s Critic of Pure Reason and ends with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

The Goethean seed of the UrpflanzeDespite having studied plants for many years, the first serious conception of the Urpflanze came to Goethe on his Italian journey in 1787. When in Italy he writes that:

Seeing such a variety of new and renewed forms [of plants], my old fancy suddenly came back to mind: Among this multitude might I not discover the Urpflanze? There certainly must be one. Otherwise, how could I recognize that this or that form was a plant if all were not built upon the same basic model? (Goethe, 1970, p. 259)

A month later he wrote to Herder saying that:

The Urpflanze is going to be the strangest creature in the world, which nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could. (Goethe, 1970, p. 310)

However, Goethe soon realized that the question of how different plants relate to each other was related to another question, namely, how different stages of the same plant relate to each other. It was to this second question that Goethe then turned his attention, and in 1790 he published his Metamorphosis of Plants.

The germination of the Urpflanze in Kantian soil Shortly after the publication of Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants Kant published his third and final critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Kant devotes a large portion of this critique to developing a philosophy of living organisms. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that on receiving a copy, Goethe reports that a “wonderful period arrived in my life” (Goethe, 1995, p. 29). He was inspired to begin work on a second edition of the

Metamorphosis of Plants, which, however, he never finishes and instead devotes himself to his chromatic studies. To understand how fruitful Kant’s third Critique was, not only for Goethe’s botanical endeavors but also for subsequent philosophical development, we will turn to a short survey of some key concepts of Kant’s philosophy.

Kant based his critical philosophy on the central idea that knowledge results from the interplay of two heterogeneous sources, namely thinking and observation i.e. spontaneity and intuition in Kant’s language. (It must be here borne in mind that ‘intuition’ in the original German (Anschauung) is from the verb ‘anschauen’ which means ‘to look at’. This very common German word is often translated in the Goethe literature as ‘beholding’, which, though closer to the German, has the disadvantage of obscuring Goethe’s connection to Kant). However, despite differentiating these two faculties, and their separate sources, Kant noted that our observation of the world always contains aspects of both these faculties. As Kant famously stated: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75).

Kant further restricted objective knowledge of the world to the interplay of a particular kind of thinking, namely discursive understanding, and a particular kind of intuition, namely sensible intuition i.e. observations made with the use of the senses. This ‘sensibility’ or ‘receptivity’ is to restrict the spontaneity of thinking, which can grasp many different possibilities, of which, however, only one, the one given by the senses, is real. In order to define these two technical terms ex negativo, Kant developed the medieval philosophical idea of a divine intelligence to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of a non-discursive understanding (i.e. an intuitive understanding) and a non-sensible intuition (i.e. an intellectual intuition).

The idea of non-discursive knowledge is as old as philosophy itself, and is discussed under the rubric of intuitio (the Latin noun of action for intueri, which means to look upon, consider, contemplate) (OED). In scholastic philosophy intuition was regarded as the faculty for spiritual perception and immediate knowledge possessed by angelic beings, and Spinoza developed the idea of a scientia intuitiva in relation to mathematics.

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Kant, however, breaking with the medieval tradition, characterizes human understanding as purely discursive, which means that the general concept of something we observe can only be arrived at by abstracting all the common aspects from different concrete specimens of things we see in the world. The general concept ‘plant’, for example, is arrived at by abstracting that which is common to all plants we have seen, and discarding all that is specific to a particular plant, or species. Thus we might define a plant as something that has roots, stem, leaves and flowers. Such a general concept of plant is what Kant calls an analytic universal. The analytic universal is always poorer in content than any given specimen we might see, as we have had to discard all that is specific to a given species. An analytic universal is therefore highly abstract.

To arrive at the general concept, the analytic universal, we have had to reject what Aristotle called the differentia. The differentia is an aspect that is unique to a given species, and that which differentiates it from another species belonging to the same genus. A particular species of plants will have flowers of a particular colour, whereas the general concept ‘plant’ cannot have flowers of any particular colour because different species have flowers of different colours. As a result, this Aristotelian way of categorizing organisms, which forms the basis of the Linnaean system we still use today, can never come to an understanding of the unity that underlies the multiplicity we see in the world around us. As Kant remarks, the individual must always seem arbitrary from the perspective of the analytic universal: “Our understanding thus has this peculiarity for the power of judgment, that in cognition by means of it the particular is not determined by the universal, and the latter therefore cannot be derived from the former alone” (Kant, 2000, p. 276). As the genus is always poorer in content than the species that come under it one can never derive the species from a genus, as the species are always richer in content.

This result, however, shouldn’t be surprising because it follows directly from the characterization of the human understanding as discursive; we arrive at the analytic universal only by discarding the particular, the differentia, and retaining only what is common. Thus the greater the number of species whose relation to each other we want to understand, the poorer and less

capable of explanation is the analytic universal. Such a general concept arrived at via abstraction is what Bortoft calls a ‘counterfeit whole (Bortoft, p. 4). It is a ‘counterfeit whole’ because we can never derive the parts from the whole, nor understand their relation and connectedness to the whole.

Kant nevertheless does offer a theoretically possible alternative. The divine faculty of intuitive understanding can conceive of the parts united with the whole in one act:

Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts. (Kant, 2000, p. 276)

Such an intuitive understanding, therefore, does not need to proceed from the parts to the whole discursively, i.e. analytically, to come to the analytic universal, but rather arrives at the particular in its full specificity by ‘limiting’ an intuitive conception of the whole. Such an “authentic whole”, as Bortoft calls it, does not start from multiplicity but from original unity, and thus the universal is synthetic and therefore includes all its parts within it, i.e. it is a synthetic universal. It is the a unity which “includes difference without fragmenting the unity” (Bortoft, p. 75). Once the synthetic universal had been grasped it is possible to derive all species from it and so it is richer in content than its species. In a lecture Kant once described the analytic universal as the “unity within many” and the synthetic universal as the “many within unity” (Sparby, 2014, p. 42).

Regardless of the possibility of such an intuitive understanding, we are not divine but human and so, concludes Kant, we do not possess such a faculty and must rest content with our discursive understanding. The result is that nature seems purposive to us, but the idea of organisms having purpose is something we impose on organisms because we cannot grasp them in their wholeness, or, as Kant expressed it, the teleology of nature is a regulative principle and not constitutive of nature.

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While Kant was developing this conception of organism and restricting the human capacity to knowledge of an analytic universal, Goethe was on his Italian journey developing a method that did lead to an intuitive understanding of plants. As we saw above, Goethe states that it is possible to derive all possible species from the Urpflanze, whether they exist yet or not, according to an “inner truth and necessity”. Thus the model, the Urpflanze, is the synthetic universal of all plants and its key is the intuitive understanding, which, via limitation, is able to derive all possible as well as actual species from the Urpflanze. The unity of the plant kingdom can thus be understood as an authentic whole. This deep congruity of Kant’s philosophical work with Goethe’s botanical studies brought, as we have seen, great joy to Goethe, as well as the impulse to research further.

Goethe states the importance of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement in his short essay Anschauende Urteilskraft [intuitive power of judgement], and quotes the section quoted above, where Kant describes the intuitive understanding. Goethe then comments that:

Impelled from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly towards primal image [Urbildliche] and prototype, and had even succeeded in building up a method of representing it, which conformed to nature. Thus there was nothing further to prevent me from bodily embarking on this “adventure of reason” (as the sage of Königsburg himself called it). (Goethe, 1995, p. 32)

With ‘Urbildliche’ (archetypal) Goethe is explicitly referring to the intuitive understanding albeit with another term Kant also uses for the same. (Again, the translation obfuscates the Kantian context of Goethe’s thought.) However, this point is often overlooked.

The most famous misunderstanding of Goethe’s Urpflanze resulted in his well-known disagreement with Schiller. When, after a detailed description from Goethe, Schiller exclaimed that the Urpflanze was not an experience but rather an idea, Goethe sarcastically retorts that “I am very glad that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes”. Cassirer, who did so much to bring Goethe into the philosophical debate, says of the Urpflanze that it has “no independent, isolated ontological existence; it is a regulative principle that is necessary for the

use of experience itself, completing it and giving it a systematic unity” (Cassirer, p. 544). However, regardless of the truth of the first part, the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles is a distinction valid only for discursive understanding - as Kant often emphasizes - and is purely subjective and thus is not part of the essence of nature itself, which can only be grasped by intuitive understanding. As Jost Schieren shows, Goethe is not objecting to Schiller’s Kantianism as someone unversed in Kant’s philosophical distinctions, but rather is alluding to the fact that the Urpflanze is an example of a synthetic universal (Schieren, p. 72).

The Hegelian stem of the UrpflanzeEven when it is acknowledged that Goethe’s Urpflanze is an example of a synthetic universal, the implications are often insufficiently explored. As a result, a deeply problematic aspect of its logical structure, which was first noticed by Hegel, is generally overlooked. We will now address this problem in the context of Hegel’s philosophy.

Like Goethe, Hegel was faced with the problem of how different entities are related to each other and how each one can be given a place within the same unity without contradicting the others. Hegel’s problem did not concern plants, however, but philosophical systems. After coming to lecture at Jena on Goethe’s invitation in 1805, he wanted a system within which the history of philosophy could be understood within the context of the evolution of consciousness. This resulted in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where we find in the introduction:

It [conventional opinion] does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears into the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly when the fruit appears the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as a truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is a necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.(Hegel, 1977, p. 2)

While Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants is not named, this analogy of the temporal development of different philosophical systems to the stages of a plant makes clear the deep influence of Goethe’s plant studies. As Hegel wrote in a letter to Goethe looking back at that time: “When I survey the course of my spiritual development, I see you in it everywhere intertwined and I regard myself as one of your sons; you have nurtured in me a tenacious inner strength against abstraction” (Hoffmeister, 1952, p. 83). One of the original contributions of Förster’s study is to demonstrate the effect of Goethe’s thought on the development of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The question that now arises is how Hegel’s thought develops our understanding of the Urpflanze further. To answer this question we need to ask why the idea of a synthetic universal might be rejected. Förster claims that Kant nowhere proves its impossibility, but rather assumes it (Förster, p. 253). However, there is good reason why one would want to reject such an idea, and it is the same reason that Hegel’s philosophy was rejected by Bertrand Russell and others at the beginning of the last century: The synthetic universal contains, or at least appears to contain, a contradiction.

To my knowledge, the only paper in the literature that addresses this problem in relation to Goethe’s Urpflanze is Terje Sparby’s The Problem of Higher Knowledge in Hegel’s Philosophy, which is a response to Förster’s research. As we saw above, for the discursive understanding the genus is always poorer in content than the species, or technically expressed, the species are under the genus. Since Aristotle, the differentiae have been regarded as not belonging to the genus, but to the species. The reason for this is to avoid the genus containing a contradiction. If the genus of all flowering plants were to contain the colour of the flowers, we should say of the genus that it has both red and non-red flowers, which is a contradiction. Just as an individual leaf cannot be simultaneously green all over and not green all over, so can the genus not contain the predicate ‘red flowers’ and ‘non-red flowers’.

Hegel saw this problem in full clarity, but instead of abandoning the whole project as necessarily doomed he developed a new kind of logic that is based on the idea that a contradiction is a fundamental principle of reality, and we must therefore find a way to cope with it philosophically. Hegel develops such a method in his

Science of Logic. In the introduction he argues that logic has not progressed since Aristotle and is therefore in need of a full revision. One of the main problems with logic is that it separates form from content. This means that the different rules for combining premises such that if the premises are true then the conclusion is also true are developed in isolation from what the premises actually state, i.e. their content. Thus formal logic gives the licit ways of connecting concepts without reference to the content of the concept. It is, therefore, a purely analytic process that is not concerned with truth itself, but rather with the structure of truth preserving inferences. In such a logical system a contradiction ‘breaks’ the truth preserving structure, and nothing is left over, so to speak.

The outcome of this kind of discursive understanding is that thinking and its objects are separate. Hegel notes that in ancient metaphysics there is a concept of thinking in which “thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content” (Hegel, 2010, p. 25). However, to develop a new logic based on this type of thinking a new philosophical method is required that animates “the dead bones of logic” by revealing the inner movement of the content of a concept. By rejecting the content and considering only the form, traditional logic is not able to overcome contradiction and reach the “living, concrete unity”. Only living thinking has “the power to fill the abstract groundwork of logic previously acquired through study with the content of every truth, and to bestow upon this content the value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but embraces them all in its grasp and is their essence, the absolutely true” (Hegel, 2010, p. 37).

It is clear that Hegel is developing a conceptual understanding of the synthetic universal, or the “concrete universal” as he also calls it. What, then, is the key idea we can take from Hegel’s logic that can enrich our understanding of the Urpflanze? Hegel investigates the logical nature of the synthetic universal by starting from some concrete particular and observing its ‘inner movement’, and thereby reveals the inner dialectical structure of the synthetic universal: What is first posited transforms itself into its opposite which then enters into conflict and a contradiction results. However, such a self-contradiction “does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness” (Hegel,

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2010, p. 33). Rather, because one has not abstracted the content before starting, the contradiction is able to result in something positive:

Because the result, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has a content. It is a new concept but one higher and richer than the preceding – richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite. (Hegel, 2010, p. 33)

Here we have a description of a dialectical movement that allows us to arrive at a universal that contains the particulars in it instead of under it. Because the two contradicting aspects are included in the unification, the concept that results is a richer concept than the previous concepts. Thus, in Hegel’s dialectic, the genus contains its species in it, and is therefore richer. However, due to the contradiction contained within it, it is not a static concept, but a living, or “fluid” concept.

Hegel’s determinate negation is therefore a further development of Kant’s intuitive understanding (Sparby, 2014, p. 274). With Hegel’s logic, then, we have the principle with which we can understand the conceptual structure of Goethe’s Urpflanze, though it does mean radically changing our idea of a contradiction. Whether Hegel has committed a cardinal logical sin, as Russell believed, or discovered a new “living” thinking in contrast to the dead abstract thinking of formal logic is a contentious issue in philosophy. However, if we are to take Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze, as described in his letter to Herder, seriously, then we must also take the idea of a synthetic universal seriously, together with Hegel’s concomitant idea of determinate negation.

The Wittgensteinian leaves of the UrpflanzeWe have, however, still not gained any clarity on what Goethe meant when he said he could see the Urpflanze with his eyes. To do so we turn to Wittgenstein’s theory of perception, which in turn gives us a further insight into clearing up the dispute between Goethe and Schiller.

Wittgenstein, whose main interest was to understand language, also began to consider the problem of how parts relate to the whole, in this case how the different meanings and usages of the same word relate to each other. Specifically, he was challenging the Platonic

picture that everything described by the same word must have something in common i.e. all be contained in the same analytic universal. (Whether this really was Plato’s view we will leave aside for now, but suffice to say Bortoft believes that Plato was also developing a philosophy of the synthetic universal.) The problem with such a picture is that one could not define what that thing common to all instances was without running into a contradiction. When faced with a similar problem to Hegel, Wittgenstein also turned to Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants for inspiration and guidance.

In The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, which was originally a collaboration between Friedrich Waismann and Wittgenstein to explain Wittgenstein’s thought to the Vienna Circle, we find the following description. It is worth quoting it in toto not only because it is one of the few explicit expressions of Wittgenstein philosophical intention and method, but also because it demonstrates explicitly the direct influence of Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze.

Our thought here marches with certain views of Goethe’s which he expressed in the Metamorphosis of Plants. We are in the habit, whenever we perceive similarities, of seeking some common origin for them. The urge to follow such phenomena back to their origin in the past expresses itself in a certain style of thinking. This recognizes, so to speak, only a single schema for such similarities, namely the arrangement of a series in time. (And presumably bound up with the uniqueness of the causal schema). But Goethe’s view shows that this is not the only possible form of conception. His conception of the Urpflanze implies no hypothesis about the temporal development of the vegetable kingdom such as that of Darwin. What then is the problem solved by this idea? It is the problem of the surveyable presentation. Goethe’s aphorism ‘All the organs of the plant are leaves transformed’ offers us a plan in which we may group the organs of plants according to their similarities as if around a natural centre. We see the original form of the leaf changing into similar and cognate forms, into the leaves of the calyx, the leaves of the petal, into organs that are half petal, half stamens, and so on. We follow this sensous transformation of the type by linking up the leaf through intermediate forms with other organs of the plant.

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This is precisely what we are doing here. We are collating one form of language with its environment, or transforming it in imagination so as to gain a view of the whole space in which the structure of our language has its being. (Waismann, p. 80)

What is here clearly expressed is not only the adoption of a particular idea from Goethe, but also an adoption of his whole way of thinking, his whole Vorstellungsart. Such an approach rejects an explanation of phenomena that links them in terms of unseen causal and hypothetical mechanisms, and instead seeks to understand them by arranging them in a ‘surveyable presentation’ grouped around a ‘natural centre’. But how does this apply to language? Wittgenstein develops this idea in his Philosophical Investigations, where he asks us to:

Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games and so on. What is common to them all? - Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them, you won’t see something common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think but look! (PI, §66)

Wittgenstein goes on to call the similarities that we can see “family resemblances”, and that all games form a family.

Now it is important to stress that what makes them a family is not something they all have in common, but instead overlapping resemblances that we can see and order into criss-crossing series. This capacity to ‘see connections’ allows us to form a surveyable presentation, which in turn gives us understanding (PI, §122). But it is important to note that this idea of ‘seeing connections’ isn’t metaphorical but a key idea Wittgenstein generalized from his theory of perception, which, as Stephen Mulhall shows, is central to his philosophical thought as a whole. It is perhaps unsurprising that Wittgenstein developed the idea of seeing connections in the context of Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology, in which we find a development of Goethe’s concept of Gestalt.

Köhler uses many different figures to show that we perceive the world as an organized whole. Such figures include so-called ambiguous figures, which can be seen as depicting one of two possible objects. However, the object seen can suddenly switch into the other possible object. The most famous ambiguous figure is the “duck-rabbit”, which Wittgenstein reproduces as a sketch in his Philosophical Investigations (below).

One of the conclusions of the possible switch of the Gestalt from duck to rabbit or vice versa is that there are two kinds of seeing. Wittgenstein begins his discussion of this topic with:

Two uses of the word “see”.The one: “What do you see there?” - “I see this “(and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness in these two faces” [...]What is important is the categorical difference between the two ‘objects’ of sight. (PI, p. 203)

However, while these two uses of the word see are categorically different, Kohler classes these two different kinds of seeing as pertaining to two different ‘visual realities’, namely the sensations of colours and shapes on the one hand and their organziation on the other. What changes in a Gestalt-switch is that the same sensations are organized in a different way. This Kantian ‘two part’ theory of ‘the ‘given’ and its interpretation (‘material’ and ‘form’ in Kant) is what Wittgenstein rejects. Such a theory implies that what we perceive is a kind of ‘inner object’ that is a representation of an ‘outer’ object to which we have no direct access but instead a mediated access via sensations. What Wittgenstein wants to show is that what is given in perception is the world itself, and not a representation of it. Thus when we suddenly see the duck-rabbit picture as a rabbit, he calls it ‘noticing’ an aspect. However, this does not mean it wasn’t there before, rather we just hadn’t noticed it. Thus we are not adding something to what was already given, but rather our perception is of a continuous whole, though comprising different kinds of aspects (I follow here Mulhall’s interpretation of Wittgenstein).


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What Wittgenstein, like Hegel, rejects is the Kantian superstition of a thing-in-itself “behind the phenomena” which causes us, via our receptivity, to have certain sensations, which are then ‘organized’ into a representation by our spontaneity (thinking). The Kantian insight that our knowledge of the world comes about via restriction (receptivity) of our thinking (spontaneity) all to easily leads to the Kantian thought that this restriction is extra-conceptual, which Hegel and Wittgenstein reject.

Our language and reality have the same intrinsic structure, and when our language represents something that is the case in the world, there is not some mysterious fit between language and some extra-linguistic reality. As Wittgenstein puts it, “when we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, then, with what we mean we do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but mean: such-and-such is” (PI, §95). McDowell, who used the insights from Hegel and Wittgenstein to develop Kant’s original insight further, paraphrases it, “there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world” (McDowell, p. 27).

How should we, then, conceive the Kantian notion of two sources of knowledge? As McDowell points out:

The fact that experience is passive, a matter of receptivity in operation, should assure us that we have all the external constraint we can reasonably want. The constraint comes from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable. (McDowell, p. 28)

By applying this idea to the dispute between Goethe and Schiller Monk claims we can clear up the disagreement:

On Wittgenstein’s view, both Goethe and Schiller could be said to be right: Schiller is right to insist that the Urpflanze belongs to the same category as ideas (rather than that of physical objects), and Goethe is right to insist that, in some sense, he sees it with his own eyes. The philosophical task is to explain how this can be so - to describe the phenomena as seeing-as in such a way that is does not appear paradoxical that a Gestalt (an ‘aspect’, an ‘organized whole’) is at one and the same time an idea and an ‘object’ of vision. (Monk, p. 512)

What Wittgenstein shows is that in both kinds of seeing we are seeing aspects, and that aspects are conceptual in nature, but also constitutive of reality. In learning to see the Urpflanze, Goethe learnt to see a new aspect of reality. Thus, when Goethe talks of developing a ‘new organ of perception’, he means he is developing a faculty to see something that he could not see before. As Wittgenstein remarks about noticing an aspect:

It is as if one had brought a concept to what one sees, and one now sees the concept along with the thing. It is itself hardly visible, and yet it spreads an ordering veil over the objects. (RPP, §961)

Similarly, Goethe noticed a new aspect of reality, which someone who is ‘aspect-blind’ as Wittgenstein calls it, cannot see. However, once seen, the idea of the Urpflanze “spreads its veil” over all plants and allows us to see them in a new way. By ‘organ’ he is of course not referring to the vehicle of sight, the eye, but to the faculty of sight itself in which thinking participates. Thus can Wittgenstein say that noticing an aspect seems “half visual experience, half thought” (PI, p.207).

The flowering of the UrpflanzeKant’s sharp distinction between thinking (spontaneity) and observation (intuition) allows us to characterize Hegel’s philosophy as the fruition of the Kantian insight that “thoughts without content are empty.” Similarly, we can see in Wittgenstein the fruition of the related Kantian insight that “intuitions without concepts are blind”. It is thus tempting to see the next step as the synthesis of these two approaches. However, such an attempt initially appears to have a bleak outlook. Wittgenstein once commented that: “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in shewing that things which look the same are really different” (Rhees, p. 171).

However, Wittgenstein did concede on another occasion that “the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work” (Lee, p. 74). Also, both thinkers adopt a fundamental insight from Goethe, namely that the essence is to be found within the appearance. Kant divorces reality from appearance, and then restricts our knowledge to the latter, thus rendering the former an inaccessible ‘thing-in-itself ’. Following Goethe, Hegel and Wittgenstein reject this separation as absolute: In Hegel, we find the

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rejection of the separation between form and content in logic and in Wittgenstein the rejection of the logical positivists’ attempt to reduce language to logic. They both then adopt Goethe’s morphology as a method to include the appearances, i.e. the content, in the search for the essence. Thus both thinkers strive to develop a philosophy that does not succumb to the “abstraction that we fear” (Goethe, 1995, p. 159).

Based on this common ground, how should we then proceed in synthesizing these two philosophers? We can take our starting point from Bortoft’s monograph Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness. Here, with exemplary clarity, Bortoft develops the Kantian distinction between the analytic and synthetic universal (though the connection to Kant remains implicit) by developing Wittgenstein’s theory of perception, especially the idea that we perceive aspects, or “meaning” (Bortoft, p. 53):

With the distinction between “unity in multiplicity” and “multiplicity in unity” is it now possible for us to look at a statement such as “All is leaf” and understand it as the expression of a perception of the universal shining in the particular (Bortoft, p. 88).

Bortoft describes learning to see new aspects to which we were previously blind as ‘deepening’ our perception in the same sense that the three-dimensional aspect of a two-dimensional figure can suddenly dawn on us thus giving the figure depth. “But this depth is peculiar inasmuch as it is entirely within the phenomena and not behind it [...] It is in fact the depth of the phenomenon itself” (Bortoft, p. 68). Wittgenstein is describing something similar when he says: “I meet someone whom I have not seen for years; I see him clearly, but fail to recognize him. Suddenly I recognize him. I see his former face in the altered one” (PI, p. 208).

Similarly, I can see a particular plant as just that particular plant, but I can also recognize the Urpflanze in that plant. I can see not only the plant as it currently is before me, but its resemblance to previous stages as well as to other plants, which differ in various ways. Wittgenstein calls the many different ways in which objects denoted by the same word resemble each other ‘family resemblances’. Thus we could say that when we see the Urpflanze in the plant before us we are also seeing the family resemblances between it and all other

plants, both actual and possible. But what has changed when we see the Urpflanze in the plant we are looking at? What is this added ‘depth’? As Bortoft remarks, a “transition is made from seeing the individual organs to seeing the formative movement that is the plant” (Bortoft, p. 292). That is, we see the plant in its actuality as well as in its potentiality.

In an early conception of the determinate negation Hegel pictures the form of the earth as being the negation of the movement of the cosmos. Although he later abandoned this picture, the idea that form is the determinate negation of movement, or “the reduction of the total movement to rest”, can be a fruitful metaphor (Sparby, 2015, p. 110). Just as when we see something moving, we see not only its form but also that it has come from somewhere, and is going somewhere, so with the plant we can see the ‘movement’ of its coming into being and passing away as well as the actual form, in which this ‘movement’ has come to rest. We see each particular plant as a ‘limitation’ of the Urpflanze, which we also see.

However, if we can see that actual plant as well as the potential plant, the plant appears both as that which it is and also as that which it is not. This has the same air of contradiction about it as the synthetic universal. I believe that in taking the idea of the Urpflanze and exploring the connection between Hegel’s idea of determinate negation of being and not-being, which results in becoming, with Wittgenstein’s ideas relating to the surveyable presentation we can begin to find a synthesis of Wittgenstein and Hegel’s thought, and thus further develop our understanding of Goethe’s Urpflanze. We can begin such an undertaking by exploring the question of whether the ‘understanding’ that is gained from a surveyable presentation is a shift from seeing the aspect as an analytic universal to a synthetic.

Taking this thought further, there is another aspect where Hegel and Wittgenstein’s thought can provide us with a potentially fruitful synthesis. Now, the shift in perception from seeing just the particular plant to seeing it within the Urpflanze is what Bortoft characterizes as a shift from an analytical to an holistic mode of consciousness (Bortoft, p. 86). An analytic way of seeing needs to construct an abstract theory to explain what is being seen, but a synthetic way of seeing has no need to because an understanding of


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the thing observed is already contained within the seeing. In this latter kind of seeing there is clearly a different relation between subject and object, or between perceiver and world. This shift in seeing thus a shift in consciousness; that which we previously had to add to reality in order to understand it, i.e. abstract thoughts, we now find in reality itself i.e. as synthetic or living thought. The distinction between the actual plant given in sensibility and the possible plants given to the understanding has collapsed. The next question to explore is whether we can locate this shift of consciousness in the evolutionary framework given in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This would give us a framework within which Wittgenstein’s theory of perception, coupled with the idea of a shift from analytic to holistic consciousness, can be placed. Thus the evolutionary aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought, which remained relatively undeveloped, can be placed within a Hegelian framework.

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Bibliography

Bortoft, H., The Wholeness of Nature, Gt. Barrington, 1996.

Cassirer, E., Gesammelte Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Vol. 24, Hamburg, 2007.

Förster, E., The 25 Years of Philosophy, Cambridge, 2012.

Goethe, J. W. von, Scientific Studies, Vol. 12, New Jersey, 1995.

Goethe, J. W. von, Italian Journey, London, 1970.

Hoffmeister, J. (ed.), Briefe von und an Hegel, Vol. 3, Hamburg, 1952.

Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, 1977.

Hegel, G. W. F., The Science of Logic, Cambridge, 2010.

Kant, E., Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge, 1998, (=A/B).

Kant, E., Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge, 2000.

Lee, D. (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1939-1932, Oxford, 1980.

McDowell, J., Mind and World, Cambridge, 1994.

Monk, R., Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York, 1991.

Mulhall, S., On Being in the World, London, 1990.

Rhees, R. (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein, Oxford, 1981.

Schieren, J., Anschauende Urteilskraft, Düsseldorf/Bonn, 1998.

Sparby, T., The Problem of Higher Knowledge in Hegel’s Philosophy, in: Hegel Bulletin, Vol 35, Issue 01, 2014, pp. 33 - 55.

Sparby, T., Hegel’s Conception of the Determinate Negation, Leiden, 2015.

Waismann, F., The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, New York, 1965.

Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 2009, (=PI).

Wittgenstein, L., Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, Oxford, 1983, (=RPP).

ConclusionBy planting the seed of Goethe’s Urpflanze in the philosophical soil prepared by Kant we see it flourish in the philosophies of Hegel and Wittgenstein. While much excellent research has been done in the last century to develop and apply Goethe’s scientific method to many diverse topics, the development of a philosophical understanding of his method had been neglected. By embracing and developing the philosophical legacy of two of the most influential philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively, Goethe’s morphology can be given a contemporary philosophical basis and the seed of the Urpflanze first planted by Goethe in the 18th century can bloom in the 21st.

Developing a morphological curriculumby Alasdair Gordon, MSc

This project identifies key principles for developing a curriculum using Goethe’s morphological method, and provides guidelines and examples for any teacher or practitioner wishing to develop a morphological approach. These principles are developed through action research into my teaching practice, where I develop a morphological curriculum through teaching the topic of the camera obscura. By reflecting on this fieldwork I characterize my teaching method, which informs the development of the curriculum, as morphological. I then develop a methodology for my teaching method based on Goethe’s morphology, and thereby explore the notions of ‘embodied questioning’ and ‘embodied understanding’.

Action research context I use the action research method for developing a morphological curriculum. Although there are many different definitions of action research, a fundamental idea common to all is that action research is performed by practitioners active within a particular field, such as education, in order to better understand and improve their practice through a collaborative practice. By placing the development of a practice within a research context a higher degree of objectivity can be obtained, which then positively impacts the development of the practice. This takes place within a collaborative environment, further facilitating the attainment of objectivity. As a peripatetic teacher, the collaborative aspect of my practice is primarily with the students I teach.

The data for my action research was drawn from 6 research investigations in which a curriculum was developed and taught for a morphological investigation of the camera obscura. Through an initial reflection on the fieldwork as a whole I identify and delineate key aspects of my teaching method and identify two guiding principles:


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1) Transformation: Learning can be transformative for the student in the sense that their cognitive, emotional and practical abilities can be given the opportunity to develop, whereby normally unconscious habits can be gradually revealed and made conscious.

2) Embodied Questioning: By creating relevance, interdisciplinary learning in a practical environment can be a social, creative process that develops in a student an embodied question and interest for the world.

What is clear from these two guiding principles, however, is that the primary objectives of the learning process need to be brought about by the students themselves. They have to become responsible for their learning process and be given the autonomy and freedom to explore. As Zajonc notes, “most conventional methods of instruction are too weak and fragmented to affect a significant shift in perspective, epistemology, or moral level.” (Palmer and Zajonc, 2010, p.105). However, the intention behind my teaching method is to facilitate just this shift in perspective, epistemology and moral level. The key aspects of my method that facilitate what I have called transformation and embodied questioning can be further analysed as:

1) Embodied: By ‘embodied’ I mean an engagement on a cognitive, emotional and practical level. For example, with the task of building a pinhole camera students have to think very clearly about how they are going to do it, be interested in making it i.e. they have to feel that it relates to them, and they have to be skilful and accurate in its construction.

2) Collaborative: The embodied learning process is situated in a social environment, in which I facilitate the students in the tasks they are engaged in, and they also support and help each other.

3) Interdisciplinary: By having an interdisciplinary content, the curriculum appeals to a much broader group of students. Each student is able to find a specific activity that he or she can relate to, and which interests him or her. By having an interdisciplinary content that is interrelated, an interest in one specific area can easily spread to encompass the whole curriculum.

4) Explorative: The type of instruction given encourages the explorative and autonomous nature of open-ended investigation as a learning process. The students receive concrete tasks, without first

going into the associated theory, and then given the space to become creative. Thus they make a pinhole camera without knowing the theoretical principles of photography, and instead, by using the pinhole camera, discover these principles for themselves, which they then understand in an embodied way. This gives them a sense of ownership of what they have learnt.

5) Reflective: By reflecting on their activity, both alone and in a group, the conceptual content of what the students learn becomes conscious. The conceptual content i.e. knowing how a camera works therefore appears at the last stage of an experiential learning process. Another important aspect of this reflective process is to provide a space for contemplation, which helps the development of relevance and an embodied question.

The above enumeration gives the key aspects of my teaching method, and so the next step is to look at how the curriculum is developed. There are two aspects that need to be considered:

1) How is the content developed? In other words, what considerations go into determining the content of the curriculum?

2) How is the content investigated? In other words, how do the students then learn the content of the curriculum?

Normally, these aspects are separated and the content of a curriculum is determined by extrinsic considerations, i.e. what a group of external experts consider the student should know. Although the teacher is then left a degree of freedom as to how these set learning outcomes are achieved, the curriculum is nevertheless determined prior and extrinsically to the learning process itself. As such it cannot be a truly explorative, open-ended investigation and therefore tends to disempower students. Consequently it is unsuited to my teaching method. Rather, content needs to be developed through open-ended exploration in a collaborative environment. The content is thus self-generative within a given topic, which leads to its interdisciplinary nature, and the need for a corresponding mode of investigation.

As we have seen, the mode of investigation must be embodied and reflective, in a collaborative environment. Thereby, the students develop an

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embodied question which leads to a deeper way of seeing that is a bit like the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.

In summary, the content of the curriculum is self-generated via its mode of investigation. This mode of investigation is one that seeks the relatedness of phenomena through an embodied, collaborative, interdisciplinary, explorative, reflective investigation. Therefore, the mode of investigation is crucial and intrinsic to my teaching method.

Goethe’s morphological methodThe word morphology is derived from the Greek word morphe, meaning “form”, with the suffix ‘ology,’ which means ‘the science of’. Goethe originally introduced this term into science to delineate the scientific discipline concerned with the form of plants and animals. Of particular interest to Goethe was not the static form of a given plant or animal at a specific stage of its development but rather how the form came into being, its genesis, and how it develops further. Thus his morphological study of plants, first published in 1790, is entitled The Metamorphosis of Plants. This shows Goethe’s emphasis on the developmental aspect of form i.e. transformation (‘metamorphosis’ means ‘transformation’).

Although Goethe developed his morphological method in the field of biology, specifically botany, he soon went on to apply it to inorganic nature as well in his studies on colour (chromatics) as well as geology and meteorology. His morphological method has since been used in diverse fields including history in Oswald Spengler’s influential Decline of the West, which in the original German has the subtitle Outlines

of a Morphology of World History 1, and philosophy in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

Goethe first published his Metamorphosis of Plants and his contribution to optics without giving an explanation of the method underlying these works, as he believed the presentation alone should speak for itself. As this led to his work being misunderstood, he later published a short essay describing his scientific methodology. This essay The Experiment as Mediator Between Subject and Object, written in 1792 and published in 1823, contains a clear description of Goethe’s scientific method. It is thus well suited as a source for identifying some of the main principles of Goethe’s morphological method2.

Goethe’s morphological method is a mode of enquiry that is:

1) Scientific: “knowledge… [of] Nature’s objects in their own right and in relation to one another” (Goethe, 1995, p11).

2) Transformational: “This yardstick of pleasure and displeasure, attraction and repulsion, help and harm, we must now renounce absolutely; as a neutral, seemingly godlike being we must seek out and examine what is, not what pleases”.

3) Empirical: With use of our cognitive faculties the “evidence is grasped, collected, ordered and developed”. (Goethe, 1995, p12).

4) Collaborative: We cannot “appreciate fully enough our need for communication, assistance, admonition, and contradiction to hold us to the right path and help us along it”. (Goethe, 1995, p13). Indeed, Goethe would even go so far as to say discoveries are attributable to


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The students at this stage are very much questioning how their pinhole cameras can really work. I heard a student say “where does the memory card go?”

This ‘holding’ and trusting and living with the question is an intriguing and creative time for them.

the collaborative culture within which the scientists are situated rather than the individual scientists themselves.

“The greatest discoveries are made not so much by individuals but by the age; important advances are often made by two or more skilled thinkers at the same time”. (Goethe, 1995, p13).

These aspects are more or less shared with the natural sciences as they are practiced today. The fourth point regarding the social and historical aspect of scientific practice has been receiving much attention since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s essay, The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Indeed, as Frederick Amrine notes, “Goethe can be shown to have anticipated many of the most important tenets of contemporary philosophy of science” (Amrine, 1998, p33).

In addition to having the features enumerated above in common with natural science, it has unique features that set it apart from normal scientific enquiry:

1) A single phenomenon on its own is insufficient to understand what is being observed, and instead a series of related phenomena should be found i.e. diversification of the phenomenon: “As worthwhile as each individual experiment may be, it receives its real value only when united or combined with other experiments”. (Goethe, 1995, p13).

2) Once two related phenomena are found we should refrain from forming hypothesis and instead search for intermediate phenomena 3. “One experiment could seem to follow from another, when in fact between the two, a long series of experiments is required to bring them into a natural connection. Thus we can never be too careful in our efforts to avoid drawing hasty conclusions from

experiments or using them directly as proof to bear out some theory”. 4 (Goethe, 1995, p13-14).

What Goethe is claiming is that instead of forming hypothesis to explain an observed phenomenon, we should seek out further related phenomena instead.

What do we do, however, once we have a series of related phenomena? We can see the relation between our different experiences, but this is not what we would usually call knowledge. Yet Goethe exhorts us to refrain from theory building or hypothesising in so far as these are not merely employed as a means to finding new phenomena to include in our ‘surveyable representation’ of the phenomena under investigation. Goethe addresses this question at the end of his aforementioned essay: in connection to his Contribution to Optics, which was published the year before (1791 and 1792) Goethe states that:

Studied thoroughly and understood as a whole, these experiments [phenomena] could even be thought of as representing a single experiment [phenomenon], a single piece of empirical evidence [phenomenon] explored in its most manifold variations. Such a piece of empirical evidence [phenomenon], composed of many others, is clearly of a higher sort.5 (Goethe, 1995, p16).

Thus we must reflect on our experiences, and find new related phenomena until we come to see the “manifold variations” in their “wholeness”, that is, as if it were a single phenomenon ‘of a higher sort’. Goethe referred to this as an Urphanomen or archetypal phenomenon. Thus the end-point of the morphological method is not an abstract explanation of the phenomena but rather seeing the separate phenomena as belonging together and in their wholeness.

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Finding cooperative ways to keep still such as having a wall to rest against increases the chance of gaining clear portraits. A partner is able to collaborate with exposure and stopwatch timings.

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However, a phenomenon of ‘a higher sort’ is still a phenomenon like all others, but in this case we see it differently than we had before. Instead of seeing it in its isolation, as an isolated observation, we see it in its relation to other, related phenomena we have observed. Thus any phenomenon can become an archetypal phenomenon. What counts is our ability to see it in its relation. Thus this kind of seeing is also a kind of understanding, which I would like to name embodied understanding. This kind of understanding is different from what we could call abstract understanding, which connects phenomena via abstract theories. This clearly demonstrates the way in which a morphological approach to learning is radically different to how certain subjects, especially science, are often taught. The conceptual content is the end result of an explorative, embodied learning process, and ‘symbolises’ so to speak what the students have leant for themselves. In his later works, Goethe often speaks of the archetypal phenomenon as being a symbol. (Cassirer, E. 2007). In this way, an embodied mode of understanding can satisfy our urge for explanation.

Henri Bortoft characterises Goethe’s morphology as developing the capacity to see the ‘multiplicity in unity’ whereas the normal analytical approach strives to find the ‘unity in multiplicity’ via hypotheses and theories (Bortoft, 2007, p85). This shift from seeing many different but related phenomena to being able to see that in fact they are all aspects of a single phenomenon is a skill or capacity that develops over time.

In talking about morphology in this way we are confronted by a particular use of language. We are using ‘seeing’ sometimes in the sense of ‘seeing a particular phenomenon’, and sometimes in the sense of ‘seeing the connection’ between phenomena and ‘seeing the unity’ in the different phenomena. We might be inclined to call the first sense literal and the second metaphorical. But this is based on the assumption that perception and cognition are separate capacities. The assumption is that when we observe, what we observe is simply given in a finished form, which we then go on to interpret in an additional act. But as Wittgenstein demonstrates, there really are two ways of seeing, without one being just a metaphor:

I observe a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’. (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 203e).

Furthermore, when we talk about perception and cognition, it is important not to picture them as two separate activities but rather two poles of a single, homogenous activity. I shall use ‘perception’ in a broad sense to also cover the cognitive aspect of observation including the concepts we have about what we are looking at. Thus when I talk about a transformation of perception, this includes a transformation of our cognitive capacities and even our beliefs about the world. This transformation of perception enables us to see previously unnoticed aspects, particularly the interrelations of phenomena, which we had not previously seen.

Goethe is addressing the congruity of perception and cognition when he says:

The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. The blue of the sky shows us the basic law of chromatics. Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena – they themselves are the theory. (Goethe, 1995, p. 307).

Goethe is here using the word ‘theory’ in a sense that goes back to the Greek root meaning, ‘to see’, as reflected in the English word ‘theatre’. By reclaiming the original sense of ‘theory’ as something that is seen in the phenomena, and not thought of as being ‘behind’ them, Goethe is delineating his scientific method from that of Newton and others, whose ultimate goal is a mathematical theory, which is the final result of abstracting only that from the phenomena, which can be mathematised, and then relating it via hypotheses. In this Newtonian mode of science the unity of the phenomena is not sought within the phenomena themselves, as a perceptual experience, but rather in abstract, mathematical principles. Embodied understanding on the other hand, seeks for the unity of the phenomena in the phenomena themselves in the form of an archetypal phenomenon.

Embodied questioning and understanding We are now in a position to understand the importance of an embodied question: Understanding is always in the context of a question, so embodied understanding must be in the context of an embodied question. Wittgenstein states, “our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to regard the facts as ‘archetypal phenomena’.” 6 (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 175e).

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Wittgenstein is here referring to an important distinction in Goethe’s morphology, namely the distinction between ‘explanation’ and ‘description’. At the beginning of his Observation on Morphology in General, Goethe states the intention of morphology is to “describe rather than explain”. (Goethe, 1995, p. 57).This corresponds to the difference between asking ‘why’ and asking ‘what’. Whilst the former seeks an explanation, the latter seeks out more phenomena to describe. Thus whereas an abstract question leads to explanation, an embodied question leads ultimately to embodied understanding through seeking out related phenomena. This distinction provided me with an insight into what I now see as an essential aspect of morphology: How to develop a question that takes over our being and spurs us on to investigate. An embodied question forms the golden thread that runs through all the diverse investigations, and keeps our interest alive and thus our love for continued observing, whilst at the same time not ending the investigation prematurely with abstract answers.

As Zajonc notes:

By lovingly holding the questions themselves, contemplating them well, we gradually, without noticing, develop faculties of insight (“organs” Goethe might say) that allows us to see and live the answers. (Palmer and Zajonc. 2010, p. 105).

In Newtonian science, seeking explanation has led to the development of a mathematical science, which abstracts aspects of the phenomena that can be quantified, and then links them conceptually via mathematics. In seeking description instead of explanation, Goethe rejects this metaphysical leap from the phenomena to something ‘behind the phenomena’. However, Goethe, doesn’t disapprove of, or reject mathematics per se. On the contrary, he states that:

From the mathematician we must learn the meticulous care required to connect things in unbroken succession….Even where we do not venture to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had to satisfy the strictest of geometrician. (Goethe, 1995, p. 16).

Thus Goethe’s aim is to develop a methodology for a qualitative science that has all the rigour of a mathematical science. One could say that Goethe is developing the mathematical method into a perceptual

capacity. As Goethe put it: “Every new object well contemplated opens up a new organ of perception in us.” (Goethe, 1995, p. 39). Alternatively, using the language developed in this section, we could say that an embodied question develops a new organ within us, namely, the capacity for embodied understanding.Thus, through this methodological reflection using Goethe’s morphology, the full import of developing an embodied question becomes clear, and thus sheds light on the first of the two guiding principles of my method. I will now turn to the second guiding principle.

By engaging in a morphological enquiry we transform our own capacities. As Frederick Amrine states,

Goethe’s scientific ideal is to allow oneself to be transformed in following the transformations of the phenomena. Thus for Goethe, the ultimate aim of science is nothing other than the metamorphosis of the scientist. (Amrine, 1998, p. 37).

This brings to the fore the central importance of a reflective process. As well as observing the phenomena we must continuously observe ourselves and through a process of self-reflection bring to awareness previously unconscious habits of thought, habits of perception and of action. Goethe’s morphological method can thus be seen as the result of his own action research, and thus sits very nicely in context to my action research project. By engaging in a morphological investigation we transform our cognitive and perceptual capacities and deepen our perception of the world. Amrine takes this idea further when he states, that the “transformed self, co-creative, constructs enhanced phenomena in turn” (Amrine, 1998, p. 45).

By discarding habitual ways of thinking, and learning to “enter into the phenomena”, we develop an “inner mobility” that is able to follow the “outer mobility” of nature. Goethe is drawing our attention to the transformative aspect of morphology when he emphasizes that:

If we wish to arrive at some living perception of nature we ourselves must remain as quick and flexible as nature and follow the example she gives. (Goethe, 1995, p. 64).

An important part of this is the social aspect of a morphological investigation. This becomes clear when we look at how Wittgenstein develops Goethe’s

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morphology into a philosophical study of language and it’s relation to the world:

“A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links. The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us” (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 54e).

In this passage, Wittgenstein claims that our lack of understanding is rooted in the fact that we do not have a clear picture of how we use language. By applying a Goethean morphology to the language we use i.e. through gaining an overview by finding or inventing intermediate links, we can gain understanding. Thus Wittgenstein substitutes the normal idea that understanding results from an explanation of a phenomenon to the idea that understanding results from a surveyable description of the phenomena i.e. a surveyable representation.

Thus an important part of gaining understanding using a morphological process is a reflection on our use of words. This facilitates finding and overcoming errors in understanding that stem from our habitual and unexamined language. In this way we can gradually free ourselves of metaphysical assumptions that often underlie such language. How we use language becomes particularly clear when we reflect in a group on how we describe phenomena. By observing and comparing how we see phenomena with others, can we first see and then resist the lure of our own unconscious habitual ways of thinking and speaking, and hence observing.

Developing a morphological curriculumIn this project I develop a morphological curriculum that provides a surveyable representation of the topic of the camera obscura. However, the focus of this research project is not the details of the finished curriculum itself, but rather the process of developing the curriculum, and the key ideas and concepts involved. I will now give a summary of the process of how I developing a morphological curriculum:

The first step is to choose a topic. This is determined by biographical factors such as the skills one has,

the equipment one has access to etc. It is clear to me now that any starting-point is as good as any other as a morphological enquiry necessarily connects phenomena with other related phenomena and forms a whole, so the individual and extrinsic nature of a starting-point becomes increasingly inconsequential to the form of the representation as the investigation proceeds.

The second step is to diversify the phenomena by finding and exploring related phenomena. This results from an initial open-ended investigation and leads to its interdisciplinary nature. This stage of the investigation is in a large part directed by the historical development of the topic, although this does not necessarily need to always be so. For Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants this stage was looking at the historical development of a plant, whereas for his Theory of Colour it comprised collating all known colour phenomena.

The third step is to find the intermediate phenomena, and identify the connections between them. This becomes the heart of the morphological method. Only by repeated observation did I see how different phenomena related to each other, and also where gaps were present. As new gaps were identified, I introduced new phenomena that bridged these gaps, and linked related phenomena. Here we have to be inwardly mobile and allow a fluidity to how phenomena are related. It is in this way that a surveyable representation is formed. However, it is not a “building out” over time from a central phenomenon, but rather a fluid process where specific areas can radically realign themselves in a new constellation with the discovery of a new phenomenon or connection. Over time, I gained an overview of the phenomena that allowed me to increasingly see them as belonging to a whole.

To summarise, the following principles inform the development of a morphological curriculum:

1) Choose the primary phenomenon.2) Diversify the phenomena.3) Connect the phenomena.

However, this is not a linear process, but iterative: it must be repeated many times. A particular investigation begins with the given initial phenomena, which are either the original starting phenomenon or the outcome of a previous morphological investigation.

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Then new related phenomena are sought, or the conditions for their occurrence are varied from the previous investigation, and the connections between the phenomena are seen anew. This is then repeated in the next course. What has also become clear is that a morphological investigation requires us to be radically creative as well as practically engaged. As such, we could call this practice one of embodied creativity.

In developing a morphological curriculum we connect phenomena until they form a surveyable representation. However, once this is achieved to a certain degree, this overview then leads to further diversification, and other related phenomena that were not originally included because connections were not apparent are explored. Including the construction of a surveyable representation as part of the students’ final reflection at the end of the week facilitates the process of forming an overview of the whole process. Just as Wittgenstein composed his Philosophical Investigations by cutting out paragraphs he had written and continuously rearranging them over a number of years, adding paragraphs and taking others away, until he could see them in their wholeness and relation to others (Monk, 1991, p. 319), so can the students cut out pieces of paper describing the different phenomena experienced and arrange them based on their ability to see connections. The final step would then be to see where gaps are present and develop the curriculum for future students by “finding and inventing intermediate links”. The process then starts all over again for the next set of students. A morphological curriculum develops in this way through many iterations teaching the curriculum.

Such curriculum can thus fully empower students to take responsibility and ownership for their learning process, and feel as equal members of a community of enquiry.


Bibliography

Amrine, F. (1998). The Metamorphosis of the Scientist. In: eds. Seamon, D. and Zajonc, A. Goethe’s Way of Science, A Phenomenology of Nature. New York: State University of New York Press.Bortoft, H. (2007). The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science. 3rd ed. Edinburgh: Floris Books.Cassirer, E. (2007). Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy. In Rosenkranz C. ed. Gesammelte Werke Hamburger Ausgabe, Volume 24, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Goethe, J. W. von (1995). Scientific Studies, Vol. 12 (12 vols.) trans. Miller, D. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty Of Genius. London: Vintage BooksPalmer, P J., Zajonc, A., Scribner, M. (2010). The Heart of Higher Education: A call to Renewal, Transforming the Academy through Collegial Conversations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher. Sepper, D. L. (1988). Goethe contra Newton: Polemics in the project for a new science of colour. New York: Cambridge University Press.Sommer, W. (2010), Upper-School Teaching at Steiner Waldorf Schools: Cognitive Challanges for the Embodied Self, Research on Steiner Education, 1 (1), pp. 19-32 Hosted at www.rosejourn.comVerela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1993). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Massachusetts: MIT Press.Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations. trans. Anscombe, G. E.M., Hacker, P. M. S. and Schulte, J. Revised 4th ed. Hacker, P. M. S. and Schulte, J. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

References

1 Spengler, O., Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgescichte2 In this essay, Goethe uses the word ‘experiment’ interchangeably with ‘phenomenon’. As his meaning seems best captured by the lat-ter in English, I will use ‘phenomenon’ when discussing what Goethe often calls ‘experiment’. 3 This seems to be a tacit criticism of Newton’s investigation of colour, where he based his hypothesis that white light is an admixture of all the spectral colours on a single experiment namely his experimentum crucis. See Dennis Sepper, Goethe contra Newton, 2010. 4 The English translation has been edited to avoid ambiguities not present in the original German.5 The phrase ‘piece of empirical evidence’ is also used, together with ‘experience’ to translate Goethe’s single word ‘Erfahrung’.6 To preserve terminological consistency within in my thesis I have replaced ‘proto-phenomena’ with ‘archetypal phenomena’ to ren-der the German ‘Urphänomene’.

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In league with Poseidonby Dr Judyth Sassoon, in response to Aksel Hugo

Engaging in zoology with Dr. Judyth Sassoon implies meeting the specimens, and letting them strike a tone in you. And when more specimens are put beside each other, the space between them opens up to the possibility of perceiving (hearing in the seeing) a particular chord. I have experienced this in her workshops; how after engaging with sequences of specimens situated alongside each other they suddenly begin to open up my thinking to perceive an inner lawful movement - as in a melody. This is how Judyth Sassoon has been working within comparative anatomy and palaeontology. She calls it ‘morphological dynamics’. I was curious to hear more about where her work was sourced, how she perceives it - and where she thinks it may lead. This article is her reply to my question.

What is my work really?I speak of my work as spiritual-scientific research on evolutionary biology, but that does not explain what I actually do. It is quite hard to define the real theme and method of research because it is not easily pigeonholed into a single discipline. It includes aspects of the biological sciences, psychology, art and esoteric practices. In its totality, it is not science in the usual sense, in that I do not stand back from my work as an objective observer but rather involve myself in it totally. After seven years working on this project and a lifetime of preparation, I now identify with the work completely. I suppose I have become an embodiment of my work.

Using the disciplines of palaeontology and evolutionary biology, I explore the meeting point between that which manifests itself outwardly in the sense perceptible world and that which lives in my own psyche. Of course, what lives in my psyche is also connected to the universal psyche, the ‘universal unconscious’ of C.G.Jung. Therefore I am not an objective observer, but a mediator bringing to consciousness the outer manifestations of nature and the unconscious processes that run beneath them. Yes, I am working on the premise that there is a universal consciousness of which human beings are not clearly aware and is therefore better called a ‘universal unconscious’. My own (un)conscious is part of it and I believe I have accumulated enough convincing evidence of that greater consciousness for it not to be an assumption, nor a belief, but a grounded experience.

It follows that, if I acknowledge the presence of this universal (un)conscious, I must also acknowledge its activity in nature. Since my personal unconscious is also part of it, then by working with my unconscious (my inner self) and at the same time intensely studying the sense perceptible world of outer nature, I become a mediator between the two. In this way, I come to an appreciation of the metaphorical truths residing in the concrete experience of nature and begin to understand nature as the revealed thoughts of a greater consciousness, of which I too am part and manifestation.

No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery

in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.

Spoken by Captain Ahab in Moby Dick by Herman Melville

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A few words about my scientific backgroundI trained as a biochemist, and in my post-doctoral work, studied the smallest units of living material, setting up biochemical reactions and crystallising proteins to infer their structure by X-ray crystallography. I studied the structural chemistry of proteins. It was a peculiar way to study life, because in the laboratories I saw no life. Instead, I saw gels, electrophoresis equipment, separation columns and the extracted slime of living tissue on the bench.

The work was interesting and intellectually satisfying, but only up to a point. After a time, it became spiritually boring because I wanted to learn to perceive truth in biology, not abstraction, and at the same time I was living with the perpetually tantalising question of how form arises. This was actually also my original question when I decided to study biology. Protein structures only showed me the zoomed-in content. So I needed to zoom out for a more global perspective and a better idea of context.

How did I come to this path?The events leading to my current research had their inception fourteen years ago, on the hill of the White Horse, in Westbury, Wiltshire. The hill is an Iron Age Fort, overlooking a clay pit full of Jurassic Kimmeridgian clay. On the side of the hill, there is an impressive carving of a horse, dating back to the 1700s. Beneath the present day carving, invisible to the eye, lies another, more ancient, carving, no less impressive, but perhaps not as recognisable as “horse” as the one of today. This older carving could date back to 878 AD and is thought to commemorate King Alfred the Great’s victory over the Danes at Ethandun (the Battle of Eddington).

On this hill standing above these two horses, one revealed, the other hidden, I had my epiphany. Like St Paul, I fell off my psychological horse. Unlike St Paul, I did not have a direct encounter with the Christ Being, but a more veiled meeting with that same spiritual force, because I was confronted with destiny. The experience came as an irrational heightened excitement, metamorphosing into primal fear. It was not possible to explain the exact source of the feelings, but their memory never left me. I know now this was an encounter with a destiny that came to fulfilment a few years later.

In league with PoseidonSeven years after the “Epiphany at Westbury”, I arrived at Bristol University, School of Earth Sciences, looking for a research project in palaeontology. My chosen subject was ancient marine reptiles. The motivation behind the choice came from another ‘mystical encounter’, this time in Scotland. While standing on the Northern shore of the Isle of Mull, experiencing the rhythmic, tidal movements of the water, I had a moment of inspiration and turning towards the sea I asked Poseidon, god of the sea, how I could be of service. Poseidon and the oceans are archetypes of the unconscious realm, but when I asked the question, it was from the standpoint of the rational, intellectual and conscious mind. It was not a request to return to the visionary consciousness of the past, but rather I was putting my whole life, with its intensive intellectual training at the disposal of Poseidon.

Unlike Odysseus, the man of the dawning human intellect, who stood against Poseidon and blinded his one-eyed son ...the cyclops, the creature with the single spiritual eye of the pineal gland... because for the intellect to develop, the spiritual eye had to shut down. No, unlike Odysseus I was making a pact with the unconscious as a modern human being, in whom the intellect had already developed. I was putting my whole life’s training in science at the door of Poseidon’s Kingdom, so that clear intellect and the unconscious mind could work together. It is worth recalling that Poseidon was called the ‘tamer of horses’, an epithet hearkening back to my hilltop confrontation with destiny, standing on two horses, one revealed, one hidden; one conscious, the other unconscious.

I received a visionary answer to my question and understood I could best serve Poseidon by making a study of ancient sea creatures called plesiosaurs, because of their deep symbolism for the unconscious mind. The purpose would be to experience a new way of seeing, one which not only reveals sense perceptible facts, but requires additional meditative engagement with the personal and universal unconscious. As I spoke to various University colleagues about possible research material, I was eventually directed towards the collections of the Bristol Museum, where I was told, there was a large fossil that had emerged from the quarry at the foot of the White Horse Hill of Westbury. At that moment I realised I had come full circle. The fossilised creature was mine to study, a gift from Poseidon and I knew my real life’s work had begun.

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The totemic plesiosaur as guiding spiritThe creature from Westbury was a pliosaur, an animal belonging to a larger grouping of creatures called plesiosaurs. The classical image of the plesiosaur is well known. It is a long necked creature with a barrel body and four fins. It was described as a “snake threaded through a turtle” in the 19th Century, but the instigator of that wonderful description is unknown. Some have attributed it to Jules Verne, others to palaeontologist William Buckland or anatomist Richard Owen. This snake/turtle creature is the totem of my research, its guiding spirit, its symbol and focus. In order to learn the methods of my work I need to focus on something and the clade Plesiosauria with its various representatives is a very appropriate focus. For example, the snake-turtle imagery itself suggests the archetypes of line and circle: The clear straight thinking of the intellect (modern science) piercing the cyclic thinking of the psyche. And here they are functioning together as one organism. It is a perfect symbol for my work.

Teaching through sensory engagementIt is through this totemic animal, the plesiosaur, that I explore the ancient world and the process of evolution. In my workshops (e.g. Dynamic Zoology, a recent workshop at the Ruskin Mill Field Centre) I encourage participants to work with specimens and gain sensory experience through direct observation and engagement. I try to steer clear of just talking about theories of evolution or theoretical mysticism. I would rather people encountered the subject matter for themselves, through their own conscious and unconscious experiences. The reason for this is clear.

Today it is too easy to work with images and information and less easy to get to grips with concrete reality. But I think it is much better to connect with an object through the full senses, so that its meaning can be as real as possible. Too much abstraction and too many levels of removal from an object (photos, film etc.) although they have their place, do not connect with the same depth of awakening and experience. So if we want to awaken the unconscious properly, then we need to awaken our sensory experience of things

Plesiosaur from the Posidonia Shale (Posidonienschiefer) of S. Germany. The geological Formation takes its name from Poseidon.

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properly first. It is only then that the level of meaning can come through and manifest itself in our mediating consciousness.

Into the futureLooking towards the future, I intend to continue and develop this work to the best of my ability. It is a lifelong task and I cannot see myself doing anything else. Even my everyday activities have become part of this vocation. It is an unexpected but perfectly harmonious consequence of the task I have chosen. I live my work.

Without implying that everyone should take on a task so “obsessively”, I nevertheless feel it should be a “human right” for other people to have the opportunity (time, funds, support of colleagues and teachers) to discover their life’s question and to pursue it as research. Sadly, our present society does not encourage or cater for that. In the normal working world, such pursuits are considered luxuries to be pursued “in your own time” but actually I feel they are essential to the health and spiritual development of future society and need to be supported. I would gladly become part of any group that gives people the opportunity to find their true inner calling.

Of course it does not need to be a scientific vocation, it can be anything at all as long as it emerges out of true longing. It is almost as if the question needs to find the individual and there is a tremendous healing power in such a pursuit. It can be a form of therapy. The Ruskin Mill Field Centre could be a sanctuary for people to come and explore their vocations, in an atmosphere of respect and colleagueship, an atmosphere that acknowledges the importance of an individual’s biographical journey and offers supportive assistance to help people discover and pursue their individual paths. And once people find their individual calling, in group work it is possible to discover not only the individual destinies but also universal “archetypes”and so work can grow as a synergy of individual and universal truths, resonating together. That kind of research would surely be part of a true spiritual science.

The future of morphological dynamics‘Morphological dynamics’ is a way of perceiving and engaging with nature. In my workshops, participants encounter specimens directly and engage fully with

sense perceptible form phenomena. But form is the end product of processes. The point is to learn how to see through the physical manifestation of form, penetrating to the level of process and gesture. At the level of gesture, form is perceived as movement and that requires an inner engagement, in which inner processes recreate and follow the movements of outer form. This is a kind of “dynamic perception” and can not be done from the standpoint of objective observer. If one learns to work with dynamic perception, one enters the realm of the supersensible, and it is there that an individual becomes the mediator between the conscious and unconscious realm. I believe there is plenty of scope for bringing together scientifically minded people to work in this way. Individuals would bring their own biographies and their own unique fields of interest. Various personal and universal perceptions arising from group work could be explored. This work could lead to a better definition and understanding of nature’s archetypes, which could help humanity decide how to engage with the natural world. It could find application in science, farming, therapy and education and could inform new scientific curricula in schools and colleges. I believe the Field Centre has the potential for being at the heart of such an important task.

Rebuilding the skeleton of the Westbury pliosaur


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Evolving morphological science Shaping a collaborative research programme

By Dr Aksel Hugo, Research Coordinator at the Field Centre

In his last book, ’Mind and nature: a necessary unity’, Gregory Bateson (1979) raises the question of the pattern that connects. What is the pattern that connects within knowing and within nature? And what is the pattern that connects the two; as in knowing nature? The main point Bateson makes in this work is that the environmental and cultural crisis we are in is sourced in a deep epistemological crisis: How we know nature dictates how we (mis)manage it. And how we ’know knowing’ dictates how we (mis)conceive nature. Thus our schools and universities have become (in John Ruskin’s terms) ‘centres of illth’.

Given that Bateson’s analysis of our cultural crisis is correct, we do have a contemporary context for raising the question of how Goethe’s scientific impulse can evolve. In a more recent publication on ‘Nature in education’, similar arguments are put forward within a current discourse on ontologies in science education (Dahlin, Hugo & Ostergaard, 2015).

Three perspectivesAny renaissance of Goethe’s impulse in the sciences is inconceivable in our time and age without an updated (21st century context) philosophical and epistemological footing. To be recognized, it needs a contemporary stance and voice. This is the first perspective. As Troy Vine demonstrates, Goethe’s scientific impulse has been a hidden undercurrent in the history of philosophy for 200 years. Under the surface, its influence can be traced consistently through these two centuries - from Hegel through to the late Wittgenstein,

Secondly, the philosophical stance needs to be applicable as method. Through examples it needs to show what it means to be performed. Alasdair Gordon’s article demonstrates by example, how a morphological curriculum may develop in and around an archetypal phenomena. There are numerous other examples developed in Goethe-inspired science. With

the development of science education in the Waldorf Schools in the 20th century, a more applied scientific undercurrent of Goethe’s scientific impulse was set in motion. In retrospect it is remarkable to see how broad this was, covering phenomena that range from physics and chemistry to biology, ecology, geography and astronomy. A second perspective consists in reviewing and distilling this work for future science educators.

The third perspective is embodiment; it is the evolving researcher herself or himself - in the process of becoming. Through our individual research biographies we unfold unique questions, and through our unique questions we become an unfolding unique biography. Judyth Sassoon’s article reveals to us what such a concept of evolving science may imply. Where a spiritual path and a scientific path merge into one, vocation becomes initiation.

In Steiner’s biography (1861-1925) we can recognize a series of initiatives related to all three perspectives. His early philosophical career (1884-1897) was largely dedicated to reviewing and commenting on Goethe’s scientific writings. His scientific courses in his later years (1919-1922) were given in a context of ‘science education’ for the Waldorf School. Finally, in his last productive year (1924) he founded the Science Section within the School of Spiritual Science at Goetheanum. Here science merges with a path of inner schooling.

A collaborative research programme (2015 – 2024)The Collaborative Research Programme initiative began as an activity of the UK Science Section and the Field Centre, in close collaboration with the Science Section in Dornach. The intention is to gather the diverse work of current researchers and bring it to fruition as a whole that is made available to the scientific community and to science teacher education. Collaborative research projects, publications, joint events and conferences are some of the means envisioned to help this in a weaving of threads.

How can Goethe’s scientific impulse evolve? The previous articles offer us three distinct perspectives to answering this question. This article takes the question one step further to an operational level, and presents a collaborative research initiative as a way forward.

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Ruskin Mill Trust in partnership with Lillehammer University College is pleased to offer a new and innovative Masters

programme

MA in Special Education:Practical Skills Transformative Learning

Enhancing practice through practice informed research

The MA in Special Education: Practical Skills Transformative Learning explores alternative pedagogic approaches to special needs education, through the medium of practical skills. The use of practical skills in learning creates the potential for transformation in young people, as learners. The 2-year programme is aimed at individuals with an interest in exploring alternative approaches to special needs education as delivered throughout Ruskin Mill Trust provision.

Based in the UK and Norway, the MA programme will combine theoretical studies and philosophical debate with reflection through practical application and experiential learning, within the context of craft, land work and biody-namic ecology.

This MA will not incur student course fees for European citizens other than a small administration fee. Applications will open in mid-March 2016.

For more information visit: www.thefieldcentre.org.uk or contact Dr Mandy Nelson on: [email protected]

Co-shaping a pilot project (2016-2019)The Field Centre has offered to host the administrative aspects of this programme for the UK Science Section for the first 3 years. It will be a pilot project for the overarching worldwide research programme which would take place over 9 years, overseen by the Science Section in Dornach. At the same time it will be a modest beginning in the context of the UK science section focusing on ongoing and future research and science education.

In November 2015 a seminar will be held at the Field Centre where this initiative will be launched and started through identifying and connecting the first fields of collaboration.

The aim of the whole project is making the centenary of the School of Spiritual Science in 2024 a moment of precipitation and gathering of all the work done over these 100 years.

References

Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature: a necessary unity. Bantam Books, New York.

Dahlin, B., Hugo, A. & Ostergaard., E. 2015. The nature of nature: Ontologies in science education. In: Nature in Education, Kemp. P. & Soeland, R. (Eds.), Philosophy of Education, Vol. 3., Insititut International de Philosophie, Copenhagen.

Further informationAnyone interested in contributing in our co-shaping the programme may contact:

Aksel Hugo, The Field Centre, Nailsworth [email protected]

Simon Charter, The UK Science Section [email protected]

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