From In Context #52 (Fall, 2024)
“It is true here as in other human endeavors that only the interest of many focused on a single point will generate something excellent.” - Goethe
There is a paradox at the center of The Nature Institute and the practice of Goethean phenomenology of nature. On the one hand, it is focused on the individual person and their own immediate experience. Only this person, right here and now, can be outside carefully sketching the leaf from this birch tree. No one can have that encounter for them. We always work against abstractions, generalities, mere summaries, and a subject-denying objectivity. On the other hand, our practice is of its essence communal. In “The Experiment as Mediator Between Subject and Object”, Goethe writes that “As soon as phenomena catch the attention of individuals with keen minds, they are inclined to observe and are also astute in making observations. . . When their attention was stimulated, they noticed phenomena that I either did not know or had overlooked.” And he continues by saying, “If naturally attentive individuals can be of such help to us, how much greater the gain when those with training mutually aid each other.” Much of our daily research at The Nature Institute is collaborative, involving several people working on the same project or all of us speaking together about one another’s work. Attending to appearances is best done with others.
Out of a desire to extend the research work to others, we have been experimenting with new forms of working together. Over the past several years, we have hosted several colloquia, where a small group of people engage intensively with the same set of phenomena. These phenomena have ranged from warmth, to meaning in nature, to sympoiesis, to climate change. This July, we tried yet another mode, which we called a “collaborative practice and research course.” For five days, from nine to five, ten people (five Nature Institute staff and five invited participants) focused on local plants with an eye towards coming to know plant families. The collaborative course was by invitation and only extended to those who had completed the Foundation Course or who had a significant training and practice in Goethean research. In our invitation, we described the purpose of the gathering as an open-ended venture that will allow us to work together, enter more deeply into the life of plants, and provide an opportunity to delve into important questions of method and approach. Our guiding question was: Can we move through careful observation to an apprehension of transformation, metamorphosis, and context-relatedness that opens a pathway to intuiting the quality or gestural expression of one or more plant families?
The structure of the five days was itself open and co-developed by the participants, shaped both by their own immediate interests and also by the invitations from the plants themselves. We started by simply going outside and gathering different flowering plants. After an hour, the ten of us had amassed an overwhelming bounty. The most immediately striking fact was profusion and diversity. At that point in July, we had dozens of different kinds of wild plants flowering around The Nature Institute. They were placed randomly into vases with water to keep them fresh.
We were then led by a simple question: Which of these plants belong together? Here emerged the importance of collaboration. Different people wanted to sort the plants differently. They noticed different commonalities or ignored differences that seemed important to another. A dialogue started between the participants as they worked to become attentive to the phenomenon of plant families, to the ways in which plants come to appearance as belonging together. Amazingly, at first, much of this “dialogue” was not verbal, but gestural. Going along in this way, one started to feel that the plants were beginning to sort themselves through the group working together. After a long time, the majority of our randomly collected flowering plants arranged themselves into three main groups of belonging: the peas (Fabaceae), the mints (Lamiaceae), and the asters (Asteraceae). We later added a fourth group, the parsleys (Apiaceae). Many of our specimens did not go with any of these groups and were left in their vases as a reminder of the boundless diversity of plant life. We took up the taxonomic work of Linnaeus but did it in a Goethean spirit. We did not seek to find stable markers in order to get everything to fit into tight boxes. Rather, we were striving to work together towards participating in the gestures of different plant families.
All this was the first morning. We then spent nearly two days with our four groups of co-belonging plants by splitting ourselves into three human groups. Each of our groups worked with one plant family at a time, getting to know it, comparing the different morphologies of the flowers, stems, and leaves. Our goal was not a static conception of “family characteristics of x,” but something more subtle. For example, as a group we kept coming to the realization that there is a tendency to move from simplicity to complexity in the flowering part of the plants. The flowers gather together to form an overall blossom appearance consisting of many individual flowers. This is a central characteristic of the aster family and the other plant families have species that go in this direction, yet each in its own way.
We also spent a lot of time in the Healing Plant Garden at Camphill Copake. After we had come into a mood of looking for plant families, we explored this beautiful, well-tended garden with its many kinds of flowering plants. We also moved into another realm of plant interaction at Camphill by spending an entire morning harvesting and preparing many pounds of calendula flowers. No longer staying with careful looking, we picked, we cut, we ground, we steeped. What resulted in the end was an aqueous extract that is the basis for a variety of herbal remedies containing calendula. By becoming active participants in the transformation of the plants we became aware of how plants can be prepared to maintain and enhance their healing capacity.
As a group, we spent time each afternoon working through Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants. All the participants had ample experience with Goethean methodology as researchers and most of them as teachers as well. With Goethe, we reflected on our methodology, on the way we are working to come to know the world more intimately. What stuck out, again, was how essential the collaborative group approach is to tend to appearances and cultivate careful reflective attention. We came together to share Goethe’s conviction: “I have been too satisfied with this method of working together with others to consider proceeding in any other way.”