Steps to a Science of Organism
* Essay: Goethe and Whitehead. Steps to a Science of Organism. Matthew David Segall. In Dialogue: Journal for Holistic Science Volume 2 | October 2022
Description
"The aim of the present essay is to save Goethe’s poetic view of Nature from such dismissals by comparing his method and its findings to those of a more congenial Cambridge mathematician: Alfred North Whitehead. I make the case in what follows that Whitehead’s later philosophical work in the other Cambridge (the location of Harvard University, where he taught from 1924 to 1937) provides cosmological context and metaphysical justification for the Goethean approach, thus strengthening its position in the debate over who is authorized to speak for—or, perhaps, as Nature. Whitehead’s protest against scientific materialism’s “bifurcation of Nature” into subjective experience and objective cause, and his reconstruction of mechanistic science on more experientially adequate organic grounds, provides the occasion for a reconsideration of Goethe’s poetic vision of the cosmos.
First, I briefly review the literature on the resonances between Goethe and Whitehead. Then I attempt to clarify Goethe’s relation to the mathematical methods of natural science, an important issue for this comparison given the mathematical inspirations guiding Whitehead’s adventure in cosmology. Finally, I trace the striking parallels in their respective attempts to think Nature, with special attention paid to the way Whitehead’s process-relational “organic realism” and theory of perception further clarify the metaphysical implications of Goethe’s way of seeing. "