Retrospective 2020-31

This is a summary of my reading during the week.

Books

I have read Wholeness in Science by Guus van der Bie. The author attempts to develop Goethe’s method in his interest in a humanization of medicine. Similarly, I think it’s possible to develop Goethe’s method in the interest of humanizing work. Traditional management, which treats the organization as a machine and people as machine parts, fails to see and understand the complex situations of an organization consisting of people who are alive.

Keeping what we see strictly apart from associated concepts was a key requirement for Goethe. Goethe was acutely aware of the necessity to practice emphatic see-ing. Goethe’s method provides the basis for developing an understanding of living processes.

When empathy is deliberately extended, it can work to broaden our insight.
—Guus van der Bie, Wholeness in Science

The role of the mind in Goethe’s methodology is to find the coherence of the organization. Preliminary judgments are actively held back. The attention is on perception and observation.

Organic organization is invisible.

All parts of an organization have a relation to the whole and to each other. Organizational changes can be understood as metamorphoses. Every fact or detail must be understood in its context. This is necessary to do justice to the organic coherence of the organization. Isolated facts must be understood in the whole picture. Otherwise, there will be adverse effects.

I have also read Spiritual Ecology by Andy Shaw. The onlooker consciousness is useful for certain purposes, yet fails to provide a comprehensive context for our existence in the world—and, I would add, in our work.

There is an immense qualitative discrepancy between life and non-life.
…a living being…is animated by an inner directing principle of some sort…
—Andy Shaw, Spiritual Ecology

Wherever management is concerned with measurement, the particular aspect of work has first to be prepared quantitatively. This is an intellectual rearrangement of work that reduces it to the purely quantitative. The measurement system is in no way intrinsic to work, but is a reduction of work so that management can manipulate it for its own ends.

Management can control work according to its own will, but the price for this is that workers withdraw from work. The work begins to seem lifeless and empty. The organizing need to be allowed to emerge from the living encounter between worker and work, rather than being imposed from without according to management’s preconceptions. The thinking itself must be brought into the realm of work.

We exist in a living world, and only a deep sense of life will enable us to heal its very real wounds.
—Andy Shaw, Spiritual Ecology

Articles

I have read Doing Goethean Science by Craig Holdrege. Practicing Goethean science involves heightened sensitivity and awareness to the way we engage in the phenomenal world. We need to overcome our habit of viewing the world in terms of objects and leave behind the propensity to explain via reductive models.

Craig Holdrege describes science as a conversation with nature and presents the Goethean approach via a practical example. The metaphor of conversation brings to accentuates an inner attitude that lies at the heart of doing Gothean science. Here are some of the elements of science-as-conversation:

1. Give the conversation an initial focus. Something has sparked my interest, my attention has been caught.
2. The conversation itself is paramount. We can’t have a conversation if the focus is too narrow or too rigid.
3. Taking the conversation seriously means that it is open-ended, that there is an atmosphere of openness.
4. Infusing the conversation with respect, giving it dignity, makes me more sensitive in what I think and do.
5. Receptive attentiveness allows me to see and hear with fresh eyes and ears. I am actively giving form to the conversation through my observations.
6. In conversation we get to know the other and ourselves better. Any time we interact, we change.
7. Conversations is all about participation. I can’t distance myself from the process and its results.

The idea of science-as-conversation grows out of the doing. And once we become conscious of it, it becomes a kind of inner guide. Am I aware enough? It is a back-and forth? Am I listening or pushing an agenda?

You prepare the ground, but the moment of seeing always involves an act of grace. Or maybe we could just say: we have to wait till the world speaks.
—Craig Holdrege, Doing Goethean Science

I have also read Emma Kidd’s dissertation Re-Cognition: The Re-Cognition of our Connection to Nature Through Goethe’s Way of Seeing, and her guest articles A Pathway to Living Knowledge Course Review – Part One & Part Two. They are all available via Simon Robinson’s blog Transition Consciousness: Making the transition to a better world. I will come back to Emma Kidd’s dissertation in a future post.

In re-cognizing the wholeness of nature, we are re-cognizing the nature of wholeness and what it truly means to be whole, and part of a whole, on this earth.
—Emma Kidd, Re-Cognition: The Re-Cognition of our Connection to Nature Through Goethe’s Way of Seeing

A living inquiry tries to understand wholeness as an expression of the language of life.
—Emma Kidd, A Pathway to Living Knowledge Course Review – Part One

Life, and knowledge, become livelier when my ways of knowing become as dynamic as the part of life itself that I am getting to know.
—Emma Kidd, A Pathway to Living Knowledge Course Review – Part Two

Finally, I would like to mention Simon Robinson’s Book Review: First Steps to Seeing: A Path to Living Attentively by Emma Kidd. Emma Kidd’s book First Steps to Seeing is excellent!