Goethe, Nature and Phenomenology

phenomenology is the exploration and description of phenomena, where phenomena are the things or experiences as human beings experience them.

Goethe's way of science is one early example of a phenomenology of the natural world. He sought a way to open himself to the things of nature, to listen to what they said, and to identify their core aspects and qualities.

It is a calamity that the use of experiment has severed nature from man, so that he is content to understand nature merely through what artificial instruments reveal and by so doing even restricts her achievements...Microscopes and telescopes, in actual fact, confuse man's innate clarity of mind.⁷

Rather than remove himself from the thing, Goethe sought to encounter it intimately through the educable powers of human perception: "The human being himself, to the extent that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist."

Goethe emphasized that perhaps the greatest danger in the transition from seeing to interpreting is the tendency of the mind to impose an intellectual structure that is not really present in the thing itself: "How difficult it is...to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word."¹¹ The student must proceed carefully when making the transition from experience and seeing to judgement and interpretation, guarding against such dangers as "impatience, precipitancy, self-satisfaction, rigidity, narrow thoughts, presumption, indolence, indiscretion, instability, and whatever else the entire retinue might be called."¹²

Because accurate looking and seeing are crucial in Goethe's way of study, he stresses the importance of training and education. He believed that observers are not all equal in their ability to see. Each person must develop his or her perceptual powers through effort, practice, and perseverance. "Nature speaks upward to the known senses of man," he wrote, "downward to unknown senses of his."¹³ If we cannot understand a particular phenomenon, we must learn to make fuller use of our senses and "to bring our intellect into line with what they tell."¹⁴
He maintained that, as a person's abilities to see outwardly improve, so do his or her inner recognitions and perceptions become more sensitive: "Each phenomenon in nature, rightly observed, wakens in us a new organ of inner understanding."¹⁵ As one learns to see more clearly, he or she also learns to see more deeply. One becomes more "at home" with the phenomenon, understanding it with greater empathy, concern and respect.

the ur-phenomenon may be thought of as the "deep-down phenomenon," the essential core of a thing that makes it what it is and what it becomes.