Craig Holdrege on Living Thinking

I want to show that it is possible to move beyond object thinking and develop what I will call living thinking. Living thinking is a participatory way of knowing that transcends the dichotomies of man-nature, subject-object, or mind-matter, which are so ingrained in the Western mind and form the bedrock of object thinking. One of my main guides in developing a participatory, transformative, and living way of relating to the world has been the work of the scientist and poet J. W. von Goethe.

―Craig Holdrege, Thinking Like a Plant: A Living Science for Life

Craig Holdrege described Goethe’s approach to living thinking in a talk at Schumacher College:¹

Now, what I’d like to do is to bring together the significance of Goethe’s approach, these different facets. So, one the on hand, he was able to see things in relationships and in a dynamism. … How does this relates to that? How does an organism transform? An organism, a living being, lives through transformation. Can I see how it transforms, and yet remain an integrated whole? So, this very dynamic way of looking. When I say looking at the world, it’s really wrong, because the world is not an act. He is participating in the phenomenon of relationship and dynamism in nature. He is participating in that.

So, his approach is a participatory, or … dialogic, approach. … He is giving himself over, you could say, to the the phenomena with a perceiving that’s very delicate, gentle – what he calls gentle empiricism. So, really going with the phenomena, but the thinking goes with that, is in that. The thinking isn’t abstracted at a distance, but participating in, and realizes what’s happening. This is where is says, “My perceiving is a thinking, and my thinking is a perceiving“. … It’s objective, not by distancing, but by connecting, and becoming intimate with the object. The object looses its object character, and it becomes a partner in a dialogue.

So, this approach is different from what we normally think of a science today, even though I think many scientists kind of do this in their own ways, but it doesn’t become part of scientific discipline. Because what this means is that the scientist needs to develop.

I’d like to let Goethe speak again: “If we want to behold nature in a living way, we must follow her example and becomes mobile and malleable as Nature herself. She has something to teach us. We have to follow her example and change ourselves.”

It’s not about us coming with a particular paradigm, or theory, and impressing that upon Nature, but trying to enter into the phenomena to see what they have to tell us, and to try to adapt our sensibilities to the phenomena themselves. … You have to adapt your sensibilities … to see what’s showing itself here in the natural world.

So, he has this sense of the greatness of the world: “An organic being is externally so many-sided and internally so manifolded inexhaustible that we can not choose enough points of view to behold it”. We need to go at it from different sides. Look at the plant in different development stages, in different contexts. Look at the animal in its relations to its environments. … So this gets into this weaving from different points of view, to be able to begin to fathom this manifolded inexhaustible nature of organic life.

He continues: “We cannot develop enough organs in ourselves in order to examine it―the organic being―without killing it.” … Now, he doesn’t mean a new eye, or a new ear, he means what he would call…mental organs, in English perhaps. Whatever phrase you want to use, it’s the sensibility, the way of thinking, that we can begin to learn by following the example of nature. And then, that forms an organ of perception in us, that we begin to see more the living qualities of the world. And that’s what it’s about! … I’m speaking from the biological sciences.

So, there is a delicate empiricism: “It makes itself utterly identical with its object, thereby becoming true theory”, meaning understanding. And then he continues, “but this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age“. He was clear, this is not easy, these are the intellectual analytical capacities we have today in his time, and not today.

This, you could say, morphodynamic way of thinking, contextual seeing, that’s what he saw we needed to develop. He had a gift, but it was work for Goethe. And it’s certainly work for most of us who are trying to practice this approach, that you come up against your own limits, and you try to overcome them through continually going back to the phenomena, immersing yourself in the processes, and trying to listen to what the phenomena are telling you. That’s the dialogue part. The plant doesn’t speak with words. The animal doesn’t speak with words. It speaks with its processes, with its forms. The questions is: Can we hear that? Can we understand it?

So, this element, what one author [Frederick ?] called the metamorphosis of the scientist, is that science is a process of development of human capacities, and not just using the capacities we already have to interrogate nature. And I would call it a nature-world-friendly approach, where one is trying to participate in that which nature has to show, and then to develop one’s ideas, and then, of course, one’s actions in relation to that. That seems to me to be very important!

Today, where the tendency of fragmentation, what we do in nature is to bring fragmentation. The way we think about the world is often fragmented. We have all sorts of different opinions and theories, and the question of actual conversation, of actually trying to hear what the other are saying―it can be a plant, another human being, a landscape―that we integrate ourselves consciously into the organic nature of life. I really think that is what Goethe’s approach is about.

It’s not about having to follow exactly what Goethe did, of course. There was no ‘one’ method. I think that’s sometimes misunderstood, but there is an intentionality of the way to turn towards the world in a new way that, I think,…has lots of potency.

So, I’d like to close by letting Goethe speak. He writes, “As human beings we know ourselves only insofar as we know the world. We perceive the world only in ourselves, and ourselves only in the world. Every new object clearly seen opens up a new organ of perception in us.”

Thank you! I’m done.

Notes:
1. Goethe and the Evolution of Science with Craig Holdrege, YouTube, https://youtu.be/AmzXTuoqjMU?t=2810, YouTube. Accessed: 2022-11-04. Published: 2021-03-16.

Update 2023-03-28: Talk edited to improve the clarity.