Especially in subjective topics, equally rational arguments could be made for widely divergent propositions or conceptions.
[3][additional citation(s) needed] As one observer summarizes, there were two 'games' being played in philosophy at the time – one rational and one empirical, both of which led to total skepticism and an epistemological crisis.
Kant's writings had an immediate and major impact on Western philosophy and triggered a philosophical movement known as German idealism (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling), which sought to overcome and transcend the chasm Kant had formalized between the sense-based and the super-sensible worlds, in his attempt to 'save the appearances' (Owen Barfield), that is, to preserve the validity of scientific or rational knowledge as well as that of faith.
This summing of external sensory impressions of many individual wolves and hyenas into kinds and species is already taken unconsciously for granted.
(Richard Feynman) II) Causation: The second thing modern scientists do, is that by means of experiment, they try to arrive at what are called the 'causes' of phenomena.
It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most outstanding men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of Newtonian optics."
Goethe intuited the practice of rational science promoted a narrowing and contracting interplay between humanity and nature.
For Goethe, any form of science based only upon physical-material characteristics and then only selected external traits, led to epistemic impoverishment and a reduction of human knowledge.
[9] For Goethe, the collection of new knowledge is inseparable from a Geschichte des Denkens und Begreifens, a history of thinking and conceptualization.
While arranging material phenomena in logical linear sequence is a valid scientific method, it had to be carried out under a correct and humanistic organizing idea (Bacon's lumen siccum), itself grounded in nature, or natural law, often boundaried by multiple, lawful pairs of polarity.
Goethe considered this an 'artificial experience' which 'tears' individual manifestations out of the meaningful context of the whole (e.g., Newton's color hypothesis).
While often invisible, this lawfulness is clearly objective, not subjective, and not invented by the experimenter (see Goethe's description of a dandelion, or Steiner's copied version).
[8] This consideration is a special type of thinking (noetic ideation or denken) carried out with a different organ of cognizance to that of the brain (mentation or sinnen), one that involves an act of creative imagination, what Goethe terms "the living imaginal beholding of Nature" (das lebendige Anschauen der Natur).
In his 1792 essay "The experiment as mediator between subject and object", Goethe developed an original philosophy of science, which he used in his research.
The key for this is a living, direct, interactive experience (Erlebnis) involving the mind, but also higher faculties more participatory and Imaginative (Gemüt), not dissociative and separative (Sinn).
In support of Goethe, Feyerabend wrote: "Newton... did not give the explanation [of light] but simply re-described what he saw...[and] introduced the machinery of the very same theory he wanted to prove.
"[4] For Goethe, the ultimate aim of science was two-fold, both increase to the database of human knowledge; second, as a method for the metamorphosis of the experimenter.
Ideally as the experimenter's observed knowledge grows from his study of natural phenomena, so does his capacity for inner awareness, insight, Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration.
Goethe's method of science as art, of experiment as mediator between experimenter and Nature, can be applied to studies of every kind.
Where Cartesian-Newtonian science defines and values the expansion of knowledge as a logical and linear march towards accumulating facts,[citation needed] Goethean Science defines and values the expansion of knowledge as:[citation needed] 1) Observing organic transformation in natural phenomena over time (historical progression); and 2) Organic transformation of the inner life of the experimenter.
For Goethe understanding vital nature (natura naturans) is very much a function of taking impressions and activating thereby responses via the Gemüt (empathy, perhaps also compassion) so that one 'becomes what one perceives'.
[14]Andrew Dickson White also writes with respect to evolutionary thought, in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896): About the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most divergent quarters.
Especially remarkable were those from Erasmus Darwin in England, Maupertuis in France, Oken in Switzerland, and Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Germany.
Goethe's vision of holistic science inspired biologist and paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake.He went to an Anglican boarding school and then took biology at Cambridge, studying "life" by killing animals and then grinding them up to extract their DNA.
American philosopher Walter Kaufmann argued that Freud's psychoanalysis was a "poetic science" in Goethe's sense.