{"id":37042,"date":"2024-10-24T17:27:41","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T16:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peterlang.com\/?post_type=article&p=37042"},"modified":"2024-10-24T17:27:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T16:27:43","slug":"the-art-and-science-of-true-eyed-seeing-the-common-ground-and-cause-of-goethean-and-indigenous-science","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.peterlang.com\/fr\/article\/the-art-and-science-of-true-eyed-seeing-the-common-ground-and-cause-of-goethean-and-indigenous-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art and Science of True-eyed Seeing: The Common Ground and Cause of Goethean and Indigenous Science"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sean Howard and Lee-Anne Broadhead<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

October 2024<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As settlers living and working on the unceded territory of Una\u2019maki (Cape Breton), part of the vast homeland of the Mi\u2019kmaw people, we have had the privilege of witnessing and participating in a bold experiment in cross-cultural dialogue known as \u2018Two-Eyed Seeing\u2019. First articulated, two decades ago, by Mi\u2019kmaw elders Murdena and Albert Marshall, the two \u2018eyes\u2019 in question are those of Western and Indigenous Science, a sometimes jarring juxtaposition of two radically distinct sets of approaches \u2013 reductionist\/instrumentalist v. wholistic, quantitative v. qualitative \u2013 to nature and knowledge.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So distinct, indeed, are these approaches that western reductionism has traditionally arrogated to itself the status of \u2018science proper,\u2019 consigning to its periphery alternative modes and methods of inquiry, whether within or beyond the mainstream laboratory and academy: classifying, for example, Indigenous modes and methods as traditional knowledge<\/em> rather than modern science<\/em>, a set of \u2018pre-scientific\u2019 (even pseudo-scientific) beliefs and practices at best capable of producing results and data that \u2018science itself\u2019 can properly (reductively) study and explain.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The core moral and intellectual motivation of \u2018Two-Eyed Seeing\u2019 is to counter this bitter legacy of colonial condescension, to break the false Eurocentric equation of reductionism with science. The problem with Eurocentrism, of course, lies not with the \u2018Euro\u2019 but the \u2018centrism,\u2019 the denigration and sometimes extermination of ways of knowing other than those associated with and materially assisting imperial Europe\u2019s rise to global power. Indeed, Eurocentrism<\/em> has often acted to marginalize alternative ways of knowing in Europe itself, and so successful has this process been that another false equation has largely taken hold, that of \u2018western science\u2019 with and as<\/em> the relentless advance of mechanistic reductionism.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the conviction that dispelling this notion holds the key to a new depth of both inter- and intra-cultural dialogue about science and society, our forthcoming book from Peter Lang \u2013 Cultivating Perception, Countering Faust: The Radical Resonance of Goethean and Indigenous Science<\/em> \u2013 seeks to compare Indigenous science not to reductionism but rather to \u2018Goethean Science,\u2019 shorthand for the wholistic, qualitative, phenomenological approach pioneered by one of the most influential and misunderstood figures of European Enlightenment, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his methodological dedication to what he called \u201cdelicate empiricism\u201d \u2013 his corresponding rejection, as an unscientific \u201cpathology\u201d, of the \u201cgrim torture chamber of [indelicate] empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism\u201d from which \u201cthe phenomena must be freed once and for all\u201d \u2013 Goethe vested his hopes for authentic, relational human knowledge of nature on the cultivation of a poetic perceptiveness of the lifeways of the world, convinced as he was from experience that \u201cevery new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.\u201d In this reverential fidelity to clear-eyed seeing of creation, Goethe\u2019s science, and that of his distinguished inheritors, bears a striking resemblance in key features \u2013 as well as cultural distinctiveness in others \u2013 to the ethos and methods of Indigenous Science as practiced across vast swathes of time and space.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on the landmark contributions of Indigenous scientists and thinkers such as Gregory Cajete (Tewa), Leroy Little Bear (Haudenosaunee), S\u00e1k\u00e9j Henderson (Chicksaw), Oscar Kawagley (Yupiaq), and contemporary research by Mi\u2019kmaq ecologists at the Una\u2019maki Institute of Natural Resources \u2013 into, for example, the extraordinary, now-endangered lifeways of the Kataq<\/em>, the \u2018Eel People\u2019 of the Bras d\u2019Or Lakes \u2013 we approach Indigenous Science as a \u201csubtle seeking\u201d (to quote Cajete) \u201cestablishing an ongoing and dynamic relationship based on traditions of holistic participation,\u201d an immersion in the structure and agency, rhythms and reasons of phenomena understood as the innumerable, ever-evolving forms of being assumed by the \u2018Great Spirit\u2019 or \u2018sacred energy\u2019 at work and play in Creation. Because, as Cajete says, the \u201cAmericas are an ensouled and enchanted geography\u201d Indigenous Science, as a practice of attunement of people to place, logically develops and rigorously deploys a \u201cspiritual ecology,\u201d again understanding \u2018spirit\u2019 as \u2018energy\u2019 and phenomena as, in our words, units of spiritual in-formation<\/em>.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Central, then, to both Goethean and Indigenous Science is the cultivation of what Goethe calls an \u201cexact sensorial imagination\u201d, and Kawagley an \u201cecopsychology\u201d of inquiry, commensurate with the poetic, qualitative challenge of practising a truly natural science of reality. Remarkably, this electrifying resonance has drawn little attention in the literature of either tradition, and it is one aim of our detailed comparative analysis to enable these \u2018two eyes\u2019 to see each other<\/em> more clearly, hopefully opening new currents of dialogue and cooperation. This work \u2013 the heart of the book \u2013 relates to the first part of our title, \u2018cultivating perception\u2019. But what does that have to do with the second part, \u2018countering Faust\u2019? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To prepare our survey of Goethean and Indigenous Science, we consider Goethe\u2019s unparalleled depiction in his sprawling mock-epic Faust<\/em> drama of the rise and fall of a figure disastrously dedicated to the conquest and engineered harnessing of the elemental forces of natural reality through violently-reductionist science and technology, the methodical dismemberment of reality, from the atom up, long perverting and now existentially threatening reality itself. Tellingly, as we consider in detail, Faust\u2019s flight from reality begins with his attempt to conjure the \u2018Earth Spirit\u2019 as his supposed equal, consort in his attempt to rule over<\/em> the Earth and break her spirit! Incapable of grasping this paradox, or of accepting his rejection, Faust turns on the world \u2013 the definition, perhaps, of selling one\u2019s soul? \u2013 and sets the vast Mechanism of the very modern, absurd drama in motion.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our main focus in these sections is on what has aptly been dubbed, including by some of those involved, as the \u2018Faustian Bargain\u2019 at the core of the Manhattan Project producing the ultimate perversity and threat of nuclear weapons. But in his brutal rejection of co-existence with all those who reject or obstruct his increasingly frantic hyper-development of the planet \u2013 up to and including taming the ocean tide \u2013 Goethe\u2019s Faust, in addition to personifying the antithesis of the Goethean scientist \u2013 embodies many aspects of the era of explosive Eurocentrism: ecologically insupportable industrialism, enabling and requiring the \u2018extractivist\u2019 plunder of the Earth; the mechanization of mass-murder (a.k.a. war) featuring bioweapons and foreshadowing the Bomb; constant surveillance of the increasingly powerless many by the overpowerful few; etc.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not even Goethe could quite anticipate the degree of uncanny surveillance and pre-programmed, algorithmic dehumanization characterizing the digital Technosphere, though Mephistopheles does constitute his artificial intelligence, a co-pilot of the doomed plane. Neither, we suspect, could he have anticipated the failure of his astounding, unclassifiable play to dislodge Faust from the ironically deified \u2018culture hero\u2019 of modernity.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had such an overthrow occurred, we suspect that Goethe would be taken far more seriously as a scientist today, and that western culture would value Indigenous Science far more highly. Conversely, though, our hope in writing our book was to invite a Goethean-Indigenous dialogue capable of forging a new, counter-Faustian alliance: common cause based on common ground, the endangered Earth herself. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"category":[136],"topic":[203],"language":[],"class_list":["post-37042","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diversite-equite-et-inclusion","topic-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-fr"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Art and Science of True-eyed Seeing: The Common Ground and Cause of Goethean and Indigenous Science - Peter Lang<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.peterlang.com\/fr\/article\/the-art-and-science-of-true-eyed-seeing-the-common-ground-and-cause-of-goethean-and-indigenous-science\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Art and Science of True-eyed Seeing: The Common Ground and Cause of Goethean and Indigenous Science\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sean Howard and Lee-Anne Broadhead  October 2024  As settlers living and working on the unceded territory of Una\u2019maki (Cape Breton), part of the vast homeland of the Mi\u2019kmaw people, we have had the privilege of witnessing and participating in a bold experiment in cross-cultural dialogue known as \u2018Two-Eyed Seeing\u2019. 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