Scientific consciousness

The science developed by the intuitive mind and the holistic mode of consciousness reveals aspects of nature which are necessarily invisible to the verbal-intellectual mind and the analytical mode of consciousness. The ability to work with this intuitive approach, to see what it reveals, not only requires a transformation of scientific method but of the scientist himself. The result of such a transformation is a radical change in awareness of the relationship between man and nature. Knowledge of a phenomenon is intimately related to the phenomenon itself since the state of "being known" is understood as a further stage of the phenomenon itself, namely the stage which the phenomenon reaches in human consciousness. The knower is thus not an onlooker but a participant in nature's processes, which now act in consciousness to produce the phenomenon consciously as they act externally to produce it materially. In Goethe's words: "through the contemplation of an ever creating nature, we should make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in her production". When consciousness is properly prepared it becomes the medium in which the phenomenon itself comes into presence. The act of knowing is an evolutionary development of the phenomenon and not just a subjective activity of man. The scientist himself becomes the apparatus in which the phenomenon appears. The difficulty in in comprehending this comes from the fact that a way of seeing cannot be grasped like an object, to appear as a content of perception. What is encountered in the way of seeing is the organization or unity of the world. It can only be understood through participation. This is not however purely subjective. When it is recognized that what is experienced as a way of seeing is the unity of the phenomenon, then it is an original event of participation in which people can learn to participate, instead of repeating something which once happened and now has gone. A way of seeing thus has the temporal quality of belonging to the present instead of the past.

Goethe elaborated a scientific way of seeing that focused on qualitative dimensions in contrast to the quantitative focus of mainstream science. It offers a new way of doing science and of seeing nature whole. This is to be understood as complementary to normal analytical modes of science.