For those who are sceptical of a reductionistic view of evolution where blind forces and accidental mergings are purported to account for the observed diversity of life, here is an alternative theory. This approach begins from a standpoint that assumes mind and consciousness to be primal as opposed to the above view which treats lifeless physical substance and forces and nothing more as the originator of life.
The primal mind and consciousness I will call spiritual, the physical substance and forces I will call material.
In my opinion the material is condensed out of the spiritual. So I am just giving an explanation of evolution to be considered and not trying to pass anything I say below as fact.
From this aspect the sun that we see in the sky is just the physical manifestation of the spiritual sun which covers a much more inclusive area. All of the surrounding sphere of influence of the sun is encompassed by the spiritual sun. And so our earth and all the planets are included in this sun. When we look up at the night sky all that we see, all of the visible objects are manifestations of the spiritual. All that we don’t see, the darkness, the vacuum of space, this belongs to the spiritual from which the physical is condensing. And through physics we are starting to realise that empty space is anything but empty. It is only empty from the point of view of human physical senses.
Now there are distinct levels of condensation. If we look at the solar system, the gas giants have condensed less than the earth and inner planets.
Moving on to earthly life, the single celled organisms we see around us are descended from those forms which condensed the earliest and by so doing have become less plastic and unable to develop further. There forms are not suitable for the descent of consciousness into the physical forms. But this remaining behind was an absolute necessity in order to form a base from which ever higher forms of life could emerge. And at every stage of life’s development certain forms remain behind and develop their consciousness no further. Organisms such as fish have descended more slowly and have thus been able to evolve further than the earlier forms. But they have progressed no further than their current stage. And this is how evolution continues. Humans have taken the longest time to condense down to the physical and thus have developed a physical form in which consciousness, which is spiritual, is able to become manifest in the individual organism.
And this is why we see a nested hierarchy of life from its early beginnings up to the present. Life is an evolution of consciousness which can also be described as a condensation of individual consciousnesses out of a cosmic consciousness. Prokaryotes share in the cosmic consciousness but have very little in the way of any noticeable individual consciousness. Humans are at a level where they do manifestly display a certain amount of individual consciousness.
This development of life can be seen mirrored in the development of each one of us from conception to adult. See the diagram below:
Images of human development compared to the evolution of sentient life:
A & K – Single cellular beginnings
B & L – Cells multiplying
C & M – Differentiation of forms
D & N – Distinct forms appearing
E & O – Developing locomotory systems
F & P – Early stages of central nervous system and senses
G & Q – Transition to a terrestrial existence
H & R – Limbs have developed to a point where they can support the body
I & S – Bipedalism gives the upper limbs more freedom from the gravitational forces
J & T – Organisms have moved from being just creatures to being creators
And this series is not meant to be taken as a simple progression one following on the one preceding it. There are overlapping forms between and within each level. I’m sure everyone understands that life is vastly more complex than depicted by this simple diagram.
Thinkers such as Lorenz Oken and those ancient astronomers who interpreted the heavens in the form of the zodiac, the circle of animals, pictured the animal kingdom as a spreading out of the human form, a series of individual forms each displaying a one sided aspect of that which is seen as complete in the human form. The human is the culmination of all that was prepared in preceding life. And that is what I have tried to show with this diagram. What is spread throughout the animal kingdom is condensed in the individual human being.
From a Goethean perspective the blue effect is observed when light is in front of darkness, we are looking at darkness through the light. The same effect can be achieved by looking through a glass of cloudy liquid. With a dark background the liquid will have a blue tinge, with a light background it will have a yellow tinge. And of course the sun appears yellow because of the atmosphere which is darker.
How can ANYONE claim to be an authority on thought experiments?
You don’t see the absurdness of your declarations?
It would be like saying- Dreams are objects. Memories of dreams are illusions. Stories about dreams are false conceptualizations of objects. Memories of stories about dreams are illusions of false conceptualizations of objects that are themselves distortions of illusions.
True story.
Aha. So when “light” is in front of “darkness” we see a “blue tinge”. I guess the next logical question would be why we see this during sunset (did you see that coming?).
As I say, I was introduced to the theory by someone on an internet discussion group who spent some time trying to convince others Goethe was on to something. It was a fair while ago. It might have been EvC forum. I’ve had a quick look and did indeed have some discussion with Martin Cadra back in 2007 but I can’t find the thread on Goethe.
I suspect I got my information from Cadra and Google but I see Goethe’s book is available via Gutenberg.
Yes, I’d say that anyone who say’s that they understand light is deluding themselves
Because we are looking at the sun and sunlit atmosphere (light) through the intervening atmosphere (dark) thus at sunrise or sunset we quite often get yellow, red effects. At midday, away from the sun, we are looking at the darkness of space through a sunlit atmosphere which is light by comparison, thus the blue effect.
It’s got to be emphasized that CharlieM is talking about phenomenology — how we experience the world — and not about what our best empirical science tells us what about is really going on. Not even apples and oranges — more like apples and potatoes.
Then why aren’t we talking about photoreceptors or the working of the visual cortex? And why does phenomenology require an elaborate alternative branch of Goethean physics?
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I thought that’s what others in this conversation besides CharlieM wanted to talk about.
I don’t think it does, but then again, my dealing with phenomenology comes strictly out of 20th-century German and French philosophy: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. I find phenomenology really quite fascinating and I use it in my scholarship.
I think there’s probably something to the idea that the divide between Goethe and Newton is one between phenomenological physics and experimental physics — are we interested in describing our experience of the world or are we interested in describing the fundamental, objective properties of the world by, as it were, “subtracting’ our experience of the world from our explanations of it?
(Also at stake here, in the question about proper scientific method, is the question of the relation between science and art. If science is itself phenomenological, as Goethe seems to have thought, one will not be too impressed by the difference between science and art.)
Heh. Let’s rephrase: Does Charly know he is talking about phenomenology?
Yes, I saw a similar sentiment expressed in the webpage Charlie linked to. It sounded reasonable to me.
Not sure I follow that. Is the purpose of art to describe how we experience the world?
But at midday, the “sunlit atmosphere” immediately surrounding the sun should be red right? Just like at sunset. Yet it is not.
Incidentally. if I were to tell you that I get the distinct impression that you are making things up as you go along, would you understand why?
Below is an article which I haven’t read but the abstract gives a good summary of the Goethean method.
Goethe’s phenomenology of nature: a juvenilization of science.
Skaftnesmo T1.
Normal science is becoming a fragmentary undertaking where the experts are becoming specialists in their own field which nobody else can understand. The Goethean method can be applied by anyone with an interest in nature, and you don’t need to be a specialist to participate.
These are fascinating subjects which need to be understood if we are to figure out the mechanics of vision. But it does not tell us how we consciously understand what is in front of us. It will not tell us about the nature and behaviour of clouds or rainbows or the atmosphere.
It doesn’t. It requires us to, say, pick up a prism look through it at various contrasting patterns and to notice what we are seeing. Or to look at a plant or animal, not just once, but in all its stages of development, and in its wider environment, and to look at the same species of plant or animal in a variety of environments. In other words to get to the nature and behaviour of the being in front of us.
This does not require any elaborate physics. Paying attention is all that is required.
Newton was trying to be objective so he manipulated a light beam to pass through a prism. He then observed the image on a wall. Goethe did away with the middle step and just looked directly through the prism. In the end they both had to use their sense of sight to interpret what they saw. They were both doing experimental physics. Only Goethe did not see why the experimenter should be excluded. Newton tried to exclude himself as experimenter, but that is something that he could not accomplish. If you want to understand colour then the eye must be taken into account.
Science gives results of how we interpret the world through thinking and as such it should be universal, equally valid for anybody. Art is an expression of feeling, it is an expression of how one individual interprets the world. And even ‘though it can be appreciated by anyone it is a personal statement.
Both are different but valid means of expression.
Both the light and the dark spectra have two poles. The warm red/yellow pole and the cold blue/violet pole. In your photo the colour of the sun belongs to the warm pole, the blue sky belongs to the cold pole. If you look at a low sun through an atmosphere which has been darkened by, say volcanic ash, it will appear red. It all depends on the relative contrast. What we do see in you picture is yellow rays radiating out from the disc of the sun and that is an atmospheric effect.
Of course, when it comes to making up shit, any idiot can participate. Really convenient. But you know what? Fuck the goethian method, I’ll just make up my own method. If I’m going to pretend to understand everything from biology to light and subatomic physics or neuroscience etc., I might as well take all the credit.
Good luck in your endeavours 🙂
Ah, I see. Goethean colour physics is so hard to learn. And it seems there are more rules everytime I present a new example, did you notice that?
Here we have the sun photographed from space. So the sun belongs to the “warm red/yellow pole” and it is observed against the darkness of space. Let me see, “light” is in front of “darkness” so there should be a blue tinge. The sun should be red or yellow because it belongs to the warm pole and intervening space is dark.
Yet the sun is white and space is black. Most peculiar. Where did I go wrong?
No rules, just observations. Two spectra, light spectrum – red/yellow (warm) merges with blue/violet (cold) – green produced, dark spectrum – yellow (warm) merges with cyan (cold), magenta produced. light over darkness blue hue, darkness over light red/yellow hue. And as I have already said light is affected by matter. Do you need any more clarification? The best thing to do would be to get hold of a prism and play with it.
The image of the bright sun is not displaced over the darkness of space so there will not be a blue edge. There needs to be something to interfere with the light and there is not enough matter between the sun and the camera to affect the light so it remains white. I have magnified part of your photo (see below), and you will notice the blue between the rays. Both the rays and the blue effect are probably caused by the light passing through and being displaced by a window and/or the camera lens. And in your original photo the earth’s atmosphere can be seen clearly to be blue because it is brighter than the darkness of space behind.
First, thanks for answering my relentless stream of pesky questions 🙂
I know what a prism can do, but the question is whether your interpretation of the resulting observations holds up with other observed phenomena.
White? I thought pure light was invisible. Hence the sun is not a source of pure light, I guess? Then where does pure light come from?
Of course, I agree that a medium like air can scatter light, and at the interface of two media there will be refraction, sure. But that’s borrowed from Newtonian optical physics. In your Goethean model, darkness was reified in that it could influence light, and pure light was invisible until it was weakened by matter and colour was instilled on it. Yet in your current explanation, you are edging closer to classical optics.
Also both caused by refraction at the interface of the glass. I don’t need Goethe to explain that. I need Goethe to explain why the sun looks white in space and yellow on earth without resorting to differences in refraction between various wave lengths.
Is air invisible, or does it have lightness and/or hue? These statements cannot be simultaneously true. You said the sky was blue because the light atmosphere was in front of the darkness of space. This does not jibe well with your previous statement that air is invisible (thus cannot be “light” or “bright”).
If a question forces me to think about things then it isn’t pesky 🙂
Yes, that is a good question.
I never said that the light from the sun is white, I said that the sun appears white from space. The image of the sun which we observe in the photo appears white. The more our view of the sun is obstructed by the atmosphere the deeper the grade of yellow it becomes eventually red if there is enough obscuring matter. White is the closest visible image to light and black is the closest visible image to darkness. We cannot see pure light and we cannot see pure darkness but we can definitely see black and white. Have you ever had the experience of being in a thick forest on a dark moonless night? I have, and believe me, in the darkness I could see absolutely nothing.
We don’t see light, we see the effects of light. We see the sun as a visible object but we don’t see its pure light.
I haven’t borrowed refraction from Newton. I observe it and I observed it long before I knew anything about Newton. Anytime that we poke the bottom of a pond with a stick we observe that the image of the stick is distorted on entering the water. That is refraction.
If there was only pure light then we would see nothing, if there was only pure darkness then we would see nothing. We see because of the contrast. Even if we were completely blind to colour we would still see objects in various shades of grey. Edge spectra would appear as gradients over a white edge from black to white and gradients over a dark edge from white to black. With our normal colour vision we see gradients over a white edge from black through red and yellow to white and gradients over a dark edge from white through cyan and violet to black. The colours intrude over the black surface or the white surface as the case may be..
Wavelengths are something that we don’t see, they are extraneous to what we see. Goethe wanted to remain within what was observed and not to speculate about what if anything lay behind the phenomena.
The air is not blue. The blue that we see is the effect of looking at the darkness of space through a light filled atmosphere. Mountains are not usually blue but if we look at mountains in the distance they appear blue because their darkness is interrupted by the light filled atmosphere between us and them. It is the same effect.
We don’t experience ourselves as seeing wavelengths, but so what?
I just found this article that seems germane to the conversation about the reality of colors:
Color is a dance between your brain and the world
Not to repeat myself or anything, but neuroscientist, Iain McGilchrist has (IMHO) some interesting stuff to say about perception.
Thank you for sharing that. At the end of the short video Mazviita Chirimuuta says, “There is no one to one correlation between wavelength of light and the colour we perceive.”
I would agree with that. In the book, The Wholeness of Nature, by Henri Bortoft, he writes:
Here he was trying to explain that there can be more than one scientific undertaking. There is the quantitative science which examines mathematical relationships and there can be the science of wholeness which is carried out in the way that Goethe tried to do. Both can give us a better understanding of reality and they need not and should not be in conflict.
Looks interesting. Pity there are no pages to preview.
Both you and I find Iain McGilcrist interesting.
He talks about our two souls which are ostensibly in conflict but ultimately complementary. He likes Goethe’s idea that we find the infinite through the finite, and the general through the particular. I would say we find the whole by examining the parts.
And in this video he says that there are two ways of understanding the world, the logical and the mythical. I think that this is a good point, the one belongs to the analytical science of quantities the other the intuitive science of wholeness. And he also says that quite often scientists begin with their conclusions and work back from there while they should be beginning with the data and drawing their conclusions from these.
There is no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds.
Returning to the topic. Evolution is the story of the development of individuals developing ever higher forms of consciousness, which at present is apparent in human self-consciousness. For an individual to experience this higher self-consciousness there must be a feeling of separation between ‘I’ and the world. A major step in this separation is in the overcoming of gravity. In our ascent to self-consciousness we must have something to push against.
Fish have remained at a stage where they do not need to overcome gravity in the same way that terrestrial animals do and so will never attain self-consciousness in their present form.
Birds, on the other hand have surpassed humans in the way that they have overcome gravity. But they have overshot the mark so to speak. Their senses and limbs have developed in a one-sided way at the expense of brain development.
In humans there is a balance between the lower limbs and metabolic processes and the higher brain and thinking processes taking place in the head. Self-consciousness can only be achieved by a balanced, coordinated development of the whole organism.
Look at a fish, there is not much to distinguish the head from the rest of the body. (around the mid point in my diagram} Whereas in birds the head is far more free to move than in humans and can serve a similar purpose that arms and hands do in humans. (birds belong on the left hand side of my diagram).
Humans are the only organisms that have developed in the balanced way to allow self-conscious creativity. And some necessary steps on this path are by becoming terrestrial and having a vertical orientation given by bipedalism.
No, it isn’t.
I see you’re a graduate of the Monty Python School of Argument 🙂
Just pointing out that you were making an obvious mistake. Evolution isn’t progress. It is just change (or adaptive change).
Lets be clear, you mean accidents. You don’t think all change is evolution, just the accidental kind is.
CharlieM isn’t using the word “evolution” in the sense accepted by scientists, and I don’t think he’s even trying to make scientific claims in the typical sense. As the discussion about Goethean optics vs Newtonian optics makes clear, he is basically doing phenomenology and trying to pass it off as “alternative science.”
From Ernst-Michael Kranich:
You do not see any progression in evolution because you are committed to a philosophy that does not allow for there to be progress. Accepting progress in evolution would mean denying the reductionist/materialist assumption which must adhere to the belief that evolution is blind. From my holistic/non-materialist point of view there is progress in evolution in the same way that there is individual progress from zygote to adult. The whole reflected in the parts.
Your mistake. I am neither reductionist nor materialist.
To see evolution as a progress is to impose human values on what we see. And that imposition is what I am trying to avoid.
What is science if not making careful observations and using our thinking minds in an attempt to fit the observations into a unified, non-contradictory whole? Observing and “seeing” what is actually there, and not “seeing” what one expects to be there.
But you are trying to remove the human from your picture of evolution. IMO life has progressed to the point where individual organisms can actually begin to understand their place in the history of life. It is this conscious self-awareness that has progressed to its current level. Your only means of understanding evolution is by means of this awareness yet you consider this ability to be just an accidental by-product of evolution. You are using this ability to deny the importance of this ability for life.
I would say that human actions and abilities are very profound and important features of the current stage of the evolution of life.
No matter how objective you are trying to be, we cannot exclude ourselves from the picture.
… not even darkness. 😀
Though I am still unclear about what “pure light” is, I think I will give it a rest. Thanks for indulging me in my exploration of Goethean optics.
And thank you for confirming my faith in the fact that we can have disagreements and still find the discussion a pleasant experience.
One last thing I would like to mention about Newton v Goethe. Goethe noticed that Newton set up his experiments to get the results he wanted. There is only one narrow position where you will get the ROYGBIV spectrum projected onto the surface. If the distance between the prism and the surface is too small or too great then the green colour will not be seen. Green appears as a result of the edge spectra coming together.
Rather than setting the conditions Goethe wanted to observe light, darkness and colour under as many conditions as possible in relation to the eye of the observer.
I would say that science essentially involves testing our hypotheses to find out which ones are more likely to be true, and that actively interfering with the world through carefully constructed experiments is crucial to this process. Rigorous data collection is crucial because one is not just making careful observations but recording the results of intervention.
By contrast, what you describe as “science” — trying to integrate observations into a non-contradictory whole — is really speculative metaphysics, not science at all.
(No doubt speculative metaphysics can be informed by science, and should be. But since science itself is a work-in-progress, one would need to be informed about the best contemporary science as a constraint on metaphysical speculation.)
Not excluding ourselves from the picture does not mean making ourselves the center of it. The Scala Naturae is a philosopher’s anthropocentric fiction. Goethe can be forgiven for accepting it, because he died 27 years before Origin of Species was published.
So you are saying that a rose in a vase is real, whereas a rose growing over time from a seed producing shoot, root, leaves, flower and fruit, is speculative metaphysics? For you it seems that the part is real but the whole is just speculation produced by my fantastical imagination.
Only if you are working with inadequately collimated light.
Use collimated light (y’know, like a sane person would) and you can explain all the effects of your video (and more) as being the result of good old-fashioned Newtonian optics. Easy way to get collimated light: punch a hole in a window blind to get a beautiful parallel beam of sunlight. Put THAT through a prism and you’ll get ROYGBIV at all distances.
Or, you could just look at a CD.
I think that both are real — indeed, equally real.
One of the key differences between our views is that you think that the senses just give us “snapshots,” as you like to put it, and that the imagination is brought into play — as it were assembling the snapshots into a movie.
I don’t think that that’s true.
Rather, I think that the imagination is always at work in producing image-models, and that the senses are always at work guiding the construction of those image models so they don’t veer too far from what is conducive to successful action.
Here’s a quote from Sellars that conveys what I have in mind (though I would stress the role of bodily movement far more than he does):
“Perceptual consciousness involves the constructing of sense-image-models of external objects. This construction is the work of the imagination responding to the stimulation of the retina. . . . The most significant fact is that the construction is a unified process guided by a combination of sensory input on the one hand and background beliefs, memories, and expectations on the other.”
What Sellars does not quite add (though he comes perilously close to the truth) is that perceptual consciousness is therefore heavily constrained and biased — biased both both the perspectival facts of bodily movement in space and time, and the evolutionary constraints of the sensory apparatus, and the various biases (both biological and cultural) at the level of the background beliefs, memories, and expectations.
What makes experimental science distinct is that although it uses perceptual consciousness, there is a huge amount of socio-linguistic scaffolding that systematically filters out as much bias as possible. (Note: “as much bias as possible” is not “eliminates all bias completely.” There is no view from nowhere.) This involves a great deal of technological intervention, mathematical formalism, and the iterated error-filtering of peer review.
It’s because of the various constraints involved in perceptual consciousness that science must involve systematically eliminating as much bias as we can from what is disclosed to perceptual consciousness, and that involves a community of inquirers who can criticize each other as well as the equipment necessary to disentangle the causal influence of various phenomena.
Goethe did not try to fit his views into any preconceived ladder of existence. Instead he attempted to study nature and let it tell its own story.
Steiner:
He looked at the animal realm and noticed how they developed in certain one-sided ways which showed in their whole form.
Look at an earth worm and you will see that the alimentary canal is emphasised over an other bodily component or organ. Or look at a wandering albatross or a condor and see how the wings are so well developed for soaring above the earth. All other parts are formed to assist in this activity. Reduced bone mass, sexual organs, cranial capacity and such like.
They soar with their wings at the expense of being able to soar with their minds as humans do. All you have to do is look around you to see the inventiveness and creativity that is in evidence as the result of human thinking. We have gained this capacity by not being constrained by ever narrowing niches like many other animals are.
The animals mentioned above have given up the potential to rise to this level of creativity because of their one-sided development. They may be perfectly adapted to their particular niche, but this perfection has come at the cost of further development. They must follow the lifestyle they and the rest of their species are destined to follow from birth.
If we are trying to understand natural light why would we think that altering it before we study it is a good idea? Goethe wanted to study light and colour as they are in and of themselves and not as they become when manipulated by human actions.
Or a duck’s speculum, or a butterfly’s wing, or an oil slick, or the halo around the moon on a misty night.
I recommend staring straight at the sun. Anything else alters your perception of light unnecessarily