Review: Taking Appearance Seriously

Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought

Review by Keith Francis

By Henri Bortoft; Floris Books, 2012, 235 pp.

I never had the good fortune to meet the late Henri Bortoft, and everything I have read and heard about him suggests that this was a considerable loss on my part. After working for several months with his last book, 'Taking Appearance Seriously', I wish I could sit down with him over a glass of something convivial, congratulate him on his cogent account of the path to a dynamic, vivid, and fully realized way of experiencing the world of nature and humanity, and raise some questions about his views on physicists, the history of science, and the nature of language and meaning. The discussion might have gone on for a long time, but it is my opinion that most of the points over which I differ with Bortoft are peripheral to the mainstream of his thinking; of course, he might well have disagreed about that.

The back cover of 'Taking Appearance Seriously' gives a very good idea of the scope and intentions of the book: “The history of western metaphysics from Plato onwards is dominated by the dualism of being and appearance. What something really is (its true being) is believed to be hidden behind the ‘mere appearances’ through which it manifests. Twentieth-century European thinkers radically overturned this way of thinking... Henri Bortoft guides us through a dynamic way of seeing, exploring issues including how we distinguish things, how we find meaning and the relationship between thought and words.”

After completing his education at the University of Hull, England, Bortoft worked in the early 1960s with the highly respected physicist David Bohm on the concept of wholeness in the quantum theory. This led to an encounter with the hologram, at that time a recent innovation, and the realization that the idea of a picture that is completely present at each point while each point is part of the whole picture would be helpful in understanding the wholeness of human organizations.

While these ideas were on his mind, Bortoft was introduced to hermeneutics, a branch of philosophy dealing with the theory of understanding, viewed as a circular process wherein the whole can be understood only in terms of the parts and the parts only in terms of the whole. It was then a short step from hermeneutics to phenomenology, which Bortoft considers to be “the most important and influential movement in European philosophy in the twentieth century.” “Phenomenology,” in this context, refers specifically to the philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl about 1905, rather than to the term’s general definition, the “study of appearances in human experience without regard to the question of objectivity and subjectivity.”

As Bortoft remarks, getting into phenomenology isn’t easy. “It is a philosophy which has the effect of seeming strange and yet familiar at the same time. Phenomenology seems to take the ground away from under our feet, whilst at the same time giving us the sense of being where we have always been—only now recognizing it as if for the first time. It’s hard to catch hold of because it’s like trying to catch something as it’s happening and which is over before we can do so. It can perhaps be described most simply as ‘stepping back’ into where we are already. This means shifting the focus of attention within experience away from what is experienced into the experiencing of it. So if we consider seeing, for example, this means that we have to ‘step back’ from what is seen into the seeing of what is seen.”

If the exposition seems labored and repetitive at times, it is largely because Bortoft feels that the distinction between “what is experienced” and “the experiencing of it”—or, as he expresses the matter at other points, between the appearance and the appearing of what appears (sometimes referred to as the appearance)—may be difficult to grasp, and that, since it is the idea at the root of the whole book, it must be grasped.

His most succinct explanation arose from the experience of standing on a bridge and looking first downstream and then upstream. Realizing that he habitually grasped the appearance after the process of appearing had taken place—in other words, downstream—he subsequently told a group of students, “Our problem is that where we begin is already downstream, and in our attempt to understand where we are, we only go further downstream. What we have to do instead is to learn to go back upstream and learn to flow down to where we are already, so that we can recognize this not as the beginning but as the end. That’s phenomenology.”

“This was a good start,” the author says, “a doorway into the movement of thinking in phenomenology…. Phenomenology liberates us from the dualism of metaphysics…. There is nothing behind the appearances, but this doesn’t mean that there is no more than the appearances. There is a dynamic depth behind the appearance that is the appearance. Because it is the appearance, it is the thing itself (not the thing-in-itself) manifesting.”

The “thing itself” is a process, not an object. For Bortoft, embracing phenomenology was the first step in the cultivation of a dynamic way of thinking that he found at the heart of Goethe’s scientific work. So far, so good, but in an effort to place Goethean science in a historical context, he makes the evolution of science from Aristotle to the nineteenth century sound far more smooth and linear than the bumpy, ramifying, and frustrating journey that it really was, and ignores the fact that the main impulse of scientists throughout the ages has usually been to get on with the job without worrying too much about any philosophical principles that may be lurking behind it. In asserting that before the twelfth-century science was entirely empirical, and lining up Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Newton with an Aristotelian approach dating from the thirteenth century, he carries over-simplification almost to the point of misrepresentation. It is true that the linked activities of observation and thinking have been the basis of scientific striving ever since the time of the early Greek philosophers, and are also, in Rudolf Steiner’s words, “the two points of departure for all human spiritual striving”; (1) but the character of the result varies enormously with the styles of observation and thinking, as one can easily see by comparing the endeavors of Galileo and Francis Bacon, who were born within a few years of each other.

The foregoing merely gives an indication of a tendency present throughout the book, which goes along with an excessive dependence on authorities, many of whom will be unknown to most readers. My advice to the reader who is not well versed in the history and philosophy of science is to proceed with caution and keep the salt shaker handy. Fortunately, the author’s profound discussions of Goethe’s work are largely independent of his view of scientific history.

For many of the readers of being human, Goethean science, especially as brought into full incarnation by Rudolf Steiner, is a palpable presence. We have learnt to recognize the primal phenomenon and the processes of metamorphosis as fundamental to the course of nature, and we accept the basic principle enunciated by Steiner in his struggle with nineteenth-century versions of one of the ancient problems of knowledge, that if our sense impressions are determined by atomic motions they must be valueless as a source of truth. “It is these reflections that compelled me to reject as impossible every theory of nature which, in principle, extends beyond the domain of the perceived world, and to seek in the sense-world the sole object of consideration for natural science.” (2)

Steiner found that this attitude of mind was fundamental to Goethe’s contemplative relationship to the natural world. Bortoft, who mentions Steiner only once in the main body of the book, sees Goethe’s way as a glorious demonstration of the power of dynamic thinking. The initial point of contact is the removal of the “thingin-itself” as an object of inquiry.

One of the great virtues of 'Taking Appearance Seriously' is the author’s ability to convey the distinctive ethos of Goethean science and to give clear explanations of the operations of metamorphosis and the primal phenomenon, while dealing carefully with certain misconceptions that have cropped up from time to time. There is a particularly acute discussion of the tendency to see the archetypal plant as an idea in the Platonic sense, rather than a grand, organic expression of multiplicity generated from and embraced in unity, of which the hologram is a pale, technological image. “What Goethe meant by the urpflanze is the dynamic unity of the coming-into-being of all plants as the self-differencing of One plant.”

I mentioned that Rudolf Steiner appears only once in the main text, but there is a very revealing endnote to the following remark: “It is very difficult to indicate the dynamical quality of Goethe’s organic thinking, and only too easy to describe it instead in a downstream way.” “The striking exception to this is the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. His writings on Goethe are saturated with the dynamic approach, so much so that, although by no means always easy to read, anyone who takes the trouble to become familiar with them can scarcely avoid beginning to pick up the experience by osmosis.”

This is very encouraging, but the next sentence may be harder for the committed anthroposophist to swallow: “This aspect of Steiner’s work is much less widely known than his later work with what he called ‘Anthroposophy,’ a more esoteric enterprise which, important as it is to his followers, has had the effect of taking attention away from other aspects of his work, especially his luminous contribution to understanding Goethe….”

Anthroposophy evidently appeared to Bortoft to have been a sideshow for a limited audience, while the real action was elsewhere. Anthroposophy, however, is inclusive rather than exclusive, and there are moments in Taking Appearance Seriously at which a reference to Steiner would have been very much to the point. His succinct statement of the reciprocal relationship between the whole and the part gives a vital human dimension to the discussion of multiplicity in unity: “A healthy social life is found only when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.”

The latter part of the book brings the lessons of the earlier chapters to an extended consideration of the nature and problems of language and meaning. Of particular interest is the insightful discussion of the relationship between what the author puts into a book or a play and what the reader or playgoer gets out of it. In spite of the very frequent occurrence of the pronoun “we,” it seems advisable to take it that Bortoft is speaking out of his own experience of the change in perception brought about by the dynamic approach; but readers who feel that their modes of experience have developed in different ways will still find much that is of value here. Finally, there is a recapitulation of some of the initial thinking in the light of subsequent discussions, including a passage that invites serious consideration of the relationship between Bortoft’s and Steiner’s views of perception.

Those of us who have worked with Steiner’s 'Study of Man' will probably remember puzzling over chapter 9, in which Steiner speaks of what Bortoft might have called an upstream/downstream dichotomy—in this case, one that embraces the whole of one’s life:

We did not begin living when we entered the menagerie and turned our attention to the lion. This action is linked to our life up to this point, which plays into it too, and what we take out with us when we leave the menagerie will again be carried over into the rest of life. If now we consider the whole process, what is the lion first of all? He is first of all a conclusion. That is absolutely true: the lion is a conclusion. A little later, the lion is a judgment. And a little later still, the lion is a concept.

-According to Bortoft, in the shift “upstream” from appearance to appearance, we leave behind the subject-object separation and enter into a “condition in which what manifests is what it is, without any mediation by intervening entities of any kind (images, representations) in consciousness” (italics mine).

My suggestion that the juxtaposition of these statements might be a fruitful subject for contemplation is really a microcosm of my response to the main thrust of 'Taking Appearance Seriously', which is the presentation and development of the concept and art of dynamic seeing. How does Husserl’s phenomenology relate to Goethe’s and Steiner’s, and how widely does the quality of perception vary from one person to another? It is possible that to some people the sight of a dandelion registers merely as a piece of information, while others, who may never have heard of the dynamic approach, experience the inner life of the plant shining out of its glowing petals—a manifestation of its etheric energy. This corresponds to the experience of the young lady studying nettles who gives us the final word of Henri Bortoft’s book. I wouldn’t quarrel with anyone who suggested that this has something to do with the earliest stage of the path of knowledge described in Rudolf Steiner’s 'Knowledge of Higher Worlds'.

1 Rudolf Steiner, 'Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path' (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1995) 29.

2 Rudolf Steiner, 'Goethe the Scientist' (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950) 205.