Cultivating Perception, Countering Faust

Preface

Over the course of two decades, we have written a series of articles subjecting mainstream Western science to critical scrutiny, exploring the devastating consequences of the reductionist addiction to dominating, controlling, re-engineering, and repurposing—for unsustainable human ends—the natural world.

The painting by Christine Gwynn reproduced on the cover of this book, entitled The Chimney and the Cloud, terrifyingly attests to the ultimate price we may have to pay for the accumulated follies of this “Faustian science”: extinction. Two paths now lie open to the collapse of the biosphere: irreversible climate breakdown from global warming caused by industrial pollution (symbolized by the factory chimney) and massive global cooling caused by nuclear war (symbolized by the mushroom cloud). To anticipate our consideration of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust drama, Gwynn’s painting conjures the immolation of the Earth Spirit.

Can that doomsday be avoided? In this book, after setting these existential threats firmly in the critical cultural context of the Faust myth, we explore the radical resonance between two alternative scientific worldviews we believe can assist in the struggle for survival: Goethe’s own anti-reductionist, counter-Faustian scientific writings and research, and the marginal but vibrant tradition of Goethean science he inspired; and the far more formidable heritage and sophistication—conceptual and experimental—of Indigenous science in many parts of the world, including Unama’ki (Cape Breton), that part of the vast unceded territory of the L’nu, the people of the Mi’kmaq homeland, Mi’kma’ki, where we live and work.

Though we are neither Indigenous nor scientists, we see this project as a small contribution to the epic task of countering Eurocentric assumptions that undergird and continue to shape the prevailing common sense worldview at the explosive core of modern science and society. As a rule with few exceptions, this worldview persists in presenting Western science as science, reducing all other traditions and approaches to, at best, useful add-ons to the real task at hand, and, at worst, to “prescientific” knowledge systems incapable of either truly understanding or systematically transforming the world. This cognitive imperialism is constantly at work, including, as we explore, in the science classroom, the place where our “sense” of science is supposed to become “common” to all, in adherence to the orthodoxy.

For all their important differences, Goethean and Indigenous science share a commitment to the cultivation of participatory, creative perception of natural reality, and the re-establishment of good and decent human relations with the world. In juxtaposing one Western scientific path not taken to innumerable non-Western paths maligned and marginalized by colonialism, our aim is to loosen from a new angle the vicious Eurocentric grip on our education, our imagination, and our minds.

We would like to thank the Indigenous writers, historians, philosophers, thinkers, political theorists, and scientists who have immeasurably enriched our outlook and inspired our efforts, particularly Mi’kmaw elders Albert Marshall and the late Murdena Marshall, and scholars Marie Battiste and Sákéj Henderson. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to scholar Dr. Cheryl Bartlett, a Western-trained biologist who worked with Albert and Murdena Marshall and others to establish a pathbreaking Integrative Science (Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn) programme at Cape Breton University, and who invited one of us (Sean Howard) to facilitate an interdisciplinary staff-student seminar group on “Integrative Science and Philosophy.” To Janice Pariat—whose generous encouragement is appreciated more than she can know—we send our heartfelt thanks across the miles. We encourage anyone interested in the themes we engage with in this book to read her brilliant novel, Everything the Light Touches, for a lyrical, thought-provoking treatment of Goethe’s scientific journey situated within a tapestry of stories (past and present) that serve to illuminate the terrible consequences of a reductionist and colonial worldview.

Thanks are also due to Christine Gwynn for her aesthetic sensibility and generous permission to use her painting; to Philip Dunshea at Peter Lang for his encouragement and patience; to Marta Podvolotskaya and her colleagues at Peter Lang for their careful attention to detail in the preparation of our book; and to the reviewers of the manuscript whose thoughtful comments greatly assisted us in sharpening our argument.

OVERTURE Simply Seeking?

While still widespread, the pernicious belief that modern Western science is synonymous with science proper has been increasingly called into question in recent decades. The culturally engrained conviction that the reductionist method central to Western science constitutes an incomparably effective means of interrogating natural reality is central to Eurocentric thought. The challenge to it stems in part from evidence that the view of the natural world as “inert and material” is “at the root of our current environmental problems.”1 As the desecration of nature continues apace, awareness of the holistic and relational methods central to other scientific traditions—especially, but not exclusively, those maintained by Indigenous peoples—has grown despite their long systematic dismissal since the first onslaughts of European colonialism, as myth and superstition, quintessentially inferior, pre-scientific modes of inquiry. Herman notes that societies sustain themselves by developing an understanding of the way the world works. Why, he wonders, do we not accept these other ways of knowing as “science”? The answer, he argues, is clear: it stems from “the legacy of colonialism” in which “worldviews and understandings are still seen as backwards and irrational, if not heathen. This is a powerful discursive force that still colors the dominant worldview and acceptance of what is knowledge and what is not.”2

This book offers a critique of that dominant worldview through a comparative analysis of two radical alternatives: Indigenous science and Goethean science. To be clear from the outset, we are not equating the two, or assigning them equal value. On the contrary, the living legacy of Indigenous science—its findings accumulated, and its methods honed, over vast stretches of time and space—is of incomparably greater worth. Goethean science, in stark contrast, continues to revolve around the output and insight of one individual, albeit a remarkable one, waging a lonely, counter-cultural crusade against the grain of mechanism and reductionism, with no knowledge of Indigenous theory or practice.

Nonetheless, as Goethe’s science became Goethean science in the two centuries since Goethe’s death, the resonance between Goethean and Indigenous approaches to both nature and knowledge becomes, on close examination, ever more apparent and suggestive. The problem is that such a close examination has not hitherto been conducted, by either Goethean or Indigenous scientists and thinkers—a frankly baffling omission blocking the path, we will argue, to fruitful cross-cultural dialogue on some of the mightiest themes and dilemmas of our hideously imperilled and ailing Age.

That Age can perhaps best be denominated as Faustian, conjuring the legendary character and his infamous bargain, obsessing Goethe through six decades of creative writing. The original stimulus for this book was a captivating 2005 article by Ingrid H. Shafer, Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Science and Arts at Oklahoma, “The Faust Challenge: Science as Diabolic or Divine.”3 Professor Shafer’s main aim was to refuse what she called the “Faust Challenge” of seeing modern science as either “diabolic or divine” on the basis of the frustrated Doctor who sold his soul to buy unprecedentedly powerful, world-shaking knowledge. The paper opens with a personal reflection encapsulating a profound cultural struggle:

My fascination with Faust began as a 9-year old, some 57 years ago in my native Austria, when I saw the puppet play and could not understand why our Father in heaven did not find a way to keep from grabbing Faust in the end. Of course, at the time I was already quite annoyed with the way the Lord was depicted in religion class. I had a hard time believing that the Father kicked Adam and Eve out of paradise simply because they were curious and had broken a patently arbitrary rule. I could not imagine a better reason for breaking a rule than wanting to learn and know.4

In her teens Schafer read the Faust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and was “much happier” with the play’s redemptive—though, as we will see, intensely controversial—conclusion. Before long she “became fascinated with Faust as the paradigmatic theologian-philosopher-scientist whose bold yearning for knowledge and happiness can be depicted negatively as selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a chance of pursuing his goal.” Faust as bold captain of the modern enterprise? Faust as traitor to nature and God? For over 400 years, the legend in its proliferating versions has demanded to know which side we’re on: so are we, in Shafer’s formulation of the choice, “among … those who denounce Faust” for “brazenly continuing to eat off the forbidden tree, thus re-enacting the primal Fall,” or do we stand with those “who admire Faust” for “continuing to strive toward ever higher levels of understanding, thus realizing his human potential as one formed in the image of God”?5 Do we demonize or deify?

But why, Shafer asks, not contextualize? Modern methods of inquiry into nature have endowed us with actually staggering, seemingly magical powers to change the world and ourselves. But to ask whether such magic is inherently black or white, practiced for good or evil, Shafer maintains, is nonsensical: “It is not the quest for ever more knowledge that constitutes an evil but the irresponsible, hasty, arrogant application of that knowledge.” To seek knowledge of nature is natural to humans, but it is also human nature to sometimes abuse our species’ prodigious talent for transformation. “By themselves,” Shafer insists, “science and technology are neither demonic nor divine. They simply are. They become destructive if they are pursued irresponsibly, without concern for potential negative consequences for humanity and the biosphere.”6

If, Shafer argues, we can “reinterpret the traditional Faustian enterprise as the legitimate human yearning for exploring whatever lies beyond the farthest horizons,” then we may finally come to our cultural senses and dismiss the warring factions still fighting for Faust’s soul, determined to reduce Faustian science to a single category, diabolic or divine. Shafer is also adamantly opposed to another false dichotomy, the pernicious antithesis between science and religion, and she concludes as she began, on a moving personal note:

To limit God to any official scripture or space is idolatry, and to automatically damn Faust simply for seeking is to damn humanity for one of the two features that make us most like the One we call God: our minds. The other, of course, is love.7

Initially we envisaged responding to Shafer in a short paper taking respectful exception both to the view that science “simply is” and that what it “is” is “simply seeking.” We soon realized that the best person we could find to counter this rather immaculate conception of science was Goethe himself, with his strikingly postmodern insistence that “the history of science is science itself.”8 To introduce our star witness, however, would necessarily complicate our efforts, as Goethe, while canonized as a literary figure, remains largely forgotten—and, if remembered, generally dismissed—as a scientist. Goethean science simply isn’t on our cultural radar, and a major consequence of this neglect is our cultural failure to acknowledge as scientific the methods of inquiry into natural reality developed by other cultures.

Our own work on Indigenous science in North America alerted us to its resonance—practical, theoretical, philosophical—with Goethe’s approach. We have argued in a number of papers that open-minded engagement with Indigenous science—an engagement requiring “an end to the demand that all knowledge must be validated by Western scientific method if it is to be taken seriously”9—would greatly assist the search for a less destructive, violent, and grandiose (in a word, a less Faustian) Western scientific enterprise. We did not, however, propose the rehabilitation of Goethean science as a potential bridge between Western and Indigenous worldviews, or draw attention to the lack of awareness in Goethean science scholarship to the existence, let alone relevance, of Indigenous science. The physicist and philosopher of science Henri Bortoft, for example, writes of the need for nothing less than a “transformation of the scientist” along Goethean lines. “The result of such a transformation,” he believes

would be a radical change in our awareness of the relationship between nature and ourselves. Instead of mastery over nature, the scientist’s knowledge would become the synergy of humanity and nature. The historical value of Goethe’s work, in the wider sense, may be that he provides us with an instance of how this can be done. If this should turn out to be the historical significance of Goethe, then our present science will be only a phase in the development of science. Goethe will then be seen as a precursor of a whole new way of science […]10

Heady stuff; but in fact, this “whole new way” is only one example, admittedly extremely rare in the modern West, of a mode of creative, holistic inquiry typical of many sciences in many times and places.

Among the handful of Western scientists prepared to take Indigenous science seriously, the relevance of Goethean perspectives has indeed been tentatively raised. In “Turning the Circle,” the conclusion to his courageous 2002 book Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe, British physicist F. David Peat notes that “the biologist Brian Goodwin has called for a ‘reanimation of nature,’ while his colleague Mae-wan Ho echoes Wolfgang Goethe’s critique of the artificiality and ultimate distortions implied in the scientific experimentation of nature.” Precisely because, Peat stresses, “it is their contention that the ‘new biology’ should remain strictly scientific, in that it seeks to use reason and observation in order to come to an understanding of nature,” they and similarly minded scientists are prepared to “call into question the reductive and mechanistic approaches that are currently being employed in biology and, indeed, the whole way in which science approaches the phenomenon of life.”11 And he immediately follows his reference to Mae-wan Ho’s echoing of Goethe’s critique with an appeal to take Indigenous science seriously for the rather compelling reason that:

For thousands of years The People have supported ways of living in harmony with nature and avoiding serious ecological disharmony. Their science of biology is rich, relying upon painstaking observations that are not exclusively objective but are the result of entering into relationship with each living thing. Indigenous biology also makes use of the knowledge and teachings of birds, animals, and insects. A dialogue between biology and Indigenous science could give Western scientists a new insight into gently noninvasive observation, relationship, respect, and harmony with all of life.12

As we will explore, the radical nature of the Goethean critique is often missed, reduced to a defanged complement to mainstream reductionism in some contemporary appeals to broaden science curricula. This view holds that Goethean science has its place but its place is not to challenge the orthodoxy. In the same way, as we will also consider, Indigenous science is often treated as a complement to, not a challenger of, the mechanistic status quo even though such a manoeuvre inflicts considerable conceptual damage on the radical counter-reductionism of almost all Indigenous theory and practice. As a final irony, champions of Goethean science can sometimes invoke Indigenous science in somewhat cursory fashion, treating it as a body of knowledge and ethos of inquiry on a par with the Great Man’s vision. Instead, weighing millennia of achievement against the course and consequences of a life’s solo flight, we believe the two traditions should be seen as both resonant and radically dissimilar in depth and breadth.