Goethean Science an Approach for the Future

This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Science, Art and the Sacred, in Pari from August 29 to September 4, 2019.

with Isis Brook

Goethe’s scientific method presents us with a way to really engage with phenomena in the world, outside of our everyday preconceptions and usual theoretical frameworks. In some senses Goethe’s path was the one not taken by 19^th – 20^th century science and yet it is a path that we have found our way back to through phenomenology and the desire for a more heartfelt and embodied engagement of ourselves and the world.

Isis’ talk and workshop will give the participants the opportunity to feel their way into Goethean science through the realm of the plant. Using the plants found in the Pari environment, the group will try to connect to their being and discover what Goethe meant by science as “delicate empiricism”. In discussion participants could see if this is an approach that could help with the challenges of our current century.

Isis Brook undertook a training in Goethean science, with Margaret Colquhoun, during the time that she was studying for a PhD. Her doctoral work was on Goethe’s methodology, as currently practiced, and a comparison with Husserlian phenomenology. Isis lectured in philosophy at Lancaster University and for the Open University then University of Central Lancashire and is now Research Fellow at Crossfields Institute International. Isis’ research centres on questions to do with the human being’s relationship to nature and to the world. She has published in journals such as: The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Ethics and the Environment, Landscape Research, and Ethics, Place, and Environment and has a joint book: Between Culture and Nature: the aesthetics of modified environments. She served for ten years as editor of the international journal Environmental Values. Her current research is on the human/plant relationship.