Away MAVE

The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Block 4 Phenomenology as Method

	Intoduction to Phenomenology as method
	The Method
	Goethean Observation as a form of Phenomenology

With regard to the Introduction to Phenomenology by Sokolowski ,I hope you have covered chapters 5-10 by this time. The discussion of intersubjectivity might help with choosing a phenomenon to practice on.

Introduction to phenomenology as a method of investigation

To give an account of phenomenology as method is always going to be contentious, there are many interpretations of what a phenomenological method might be and certainly it is not possible to give an uncontentious set of procedures. That is what I am going to try to do, but first …

Read the chapter by Erazim Kohak

Although there are obvious dangers in thinking that phenomenology can be simply a technique that one can employ in an unproblematic way, the intention is that there is a method - a way of seeing - that can be adopted.

The Method

One of the most systematic presentations of what that method is, drawn from the presentations of phenomenology in many of the classic texts is by Herbert Spiegelberg in The Phenomenological Movement Vol. 2. p.659. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). Spiegelberg, drawing on other phenomenologists as well as Husserl, places less emphasis on the reduction(s) than other commentators, but his analysis is clear and it is set out as an activity which one might try out. The seven steps he delineates are:

1. Investigating particular phenomena;
2. investigating general essences;
3. apprehending essential relationships among essences;
4. watching modes of appearing;
5. watching the constitution of phenomena in consciousness;
6. suspending belief in the existence of phenomena;
7. interpreting the meaning of phenomena.

I shall give an account of the method as set out under these steps to serve as a way into phenomenology as a method.

1. Investigating particular phenomena:

This first step in the procedure is advanced primarily by phenomenological description. However, the dictum "phenomenology begins in silence" suggests that we cannot begin describing before we have looked. The initial part of describing could be "looking and listening", or 'opening oneself to' the phenomenon.
But what is a phenomenon, what counts as one? It is perhaps necessary to remember that phenomena as understood by phenomenology are not 'things out there' but things as they appear to consciousness. David Bell describes the Husserlian term 'object' as "the broadest, least specific ontological category there is" (1991:93) or as he quotes Husserl's own words "an anything-whatsoever" So a phenomenon, a thing, can be something I perceive, something I feel, something I synthesise in my understanding. It could be a table, a response to criticism or a concept such as justice. The instruction to just look in order to intuit the phenomenon makes the process sound easy, but as Spiegelberg points out:

This may be so in theory but it is certainly not so in practice. It is one of the most demanding operations, which requires utter concentration on the object intuited without becoming absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically. (1978:659)

Descriptions are not the things they describe so the act of description is one of guiding. When the phenomenon was something previously unknown for which we have no distinct name the situation is a particularly revealing one for understanding the process of phenomenological description. In these cases it is clear that one is left with negations, with similarities and with metaphor - Its not at all like x, it shares something with y etc. Thus the relationship of resemblance rather than identity between the spoken/written description and the experience itself is underlined. An important aspect of this process of describing is that it becomes a means to enrich the experience of the thing. The thing as an experience deepens through a simple process of noticing and recording. If my phenomenon was clouds I could say that yesterday it was cloudy for most of the day with a few breaks in the cloud in the early afternoon. That would be a pretty poor description, close observation even for a few minutes could produce a much more complete picture including colours, forms, positions, shifts and changes in those factors, effects on the appearance of the landscape, effects on my mood, changes in animal behaviour. What becomes apparent through phenomenological description is the impossibility of its ending, we could go on describing in ever finer detail and as circumstances change we would have to change the description. Thus even in the first step we already begin discriminating between those features we see as important to a thing and those which do not require pursuing with description. But for phenomenology the decision has to be imposed from the phenomenon and not from prior categorisation of what should count as relevant.

Rodin's thinker Exercise
Have a go at a phenomenological description to the point where you are starting to narrow down your description to what is relevant. Then investigate your decisions of relevance to see whether you think it is possible to discriminate between imposing something on the thing and perceiving an aspect of the description to be relevant to the thing.

N.B. to really get at what is being attempted here you are going to have to do the exercises. The term exercise is a really useful here and if it brings to mind the idea of going to the gym and working out GOOD. Imagine if you wanted to develop more strength and agility so you buy a book of exercises and then just read the book and expect the act of reading to develop your muscle tone. If you want to be able to do close observation and description then you have to practice.

2. Investigating general essences

Termed by Husserl 'eidetic intuition' this step in the method moves beyond the particular instances of phenomena to the general essences. It could be called a 'seeing through to' or 'uncovering' the essence of the phenomenon. Again this step involves a seeing, an analysing and a describing. But we are no longer describing, for example, this apple but what it is about it that allows us to see it as an apple.

There are two uses of the human imagination in phenomenology.

Imagination 1.

The first aspect of imagination to be used in the phenomenological process occurs without the conscious application of imagination as a tool. To explore the experiencing of something Husserl refers to the noematic structure of the experience of something. The noematic structure reveals that when we, for example, perceive something we perceive not just the single appearance of the thing but what is 'meant along with it'. For example we see the thing not from just the angle available to us but also via the imagination from all the other possible angles, or at least, those to which we have in the past had access to or can imagine. The predicted texture or temperature of a thing can also be provided by imagination. It is only when later experience shows that these imaginatively provided predictions sometimes get it wrong -that snakes are not slimy etc.- that we notice the action of imagination in providing the noematic structure. (This is discussed more under modes of appearing).

Rodin's thinker Think

can you give your own example of this experience of being 'caught out' providing a 'mistaken' noematic structure that then gets 'corrected' by a new one coming along hot on its heels.

Imagination 2.

in the process of eidetic description the second and explicit use of imagination comes in with the technique called free imaginative variation. In order to see the essence of a phenomenon the original phenomenon, i.e. that which is experienced, is imaginatively varied. The example that Husserl gives of the experience of perception uses a 'table-perception'. We can imagine the table-perception differently. As he suggests:

Perhaps we begin by fictively changing the shape or the colour of the object quite arbitrarily, keeping identical only its perceptual appearing. Cartesian Meditations p. 70.

What is gained by this process is not only a range of what are possible perceptions, but also the identity of what it was not possible to imagine of perceptions. From the identification of the principle which guides our intuition about what it is and what it is not possible to imagine as perceptions we see what is essential to perception. That is: what an experience must have and what it must not have in order to be a perception.

Free imaginative variation can also be used on the table itself to reach the essence of tableness. We can imagine the wooden table of our present experience as an iron table or as green instead of brown, but it cannot be imagined as made of water (in its fluid state). Thus from the use of imagination we can reach an understanding of something which is essential not just to all tables existent but of all possible tables. This essential something is the eidos of table.

Thus in phenomenology the eidos of the thing is reached via the imaginative variation of certain aspects. Phenomenology as a science of essences has been much criticised but usually on mistaken beliefs about what it is. Husserl's idea of essences has been accused of both reintroducing Platonic hypostatisation (believing that ideal forms exist in another realm of which the things in the world are poor reflections - 2nd rate copies) and being 'nothing but' linguistic analysis of general types I would maintain that he is doing neither of these, but that's probably more detail than you need at present.

Back to the practical approach of this block
One way of reaching that essence of something would be to describe how far, e.g., an apple can be from this apple before it would be a pear or anything which we could no longer recognise it as, or even coherently imagine it as, an apple. Thus we can define where the boundaries lie, not linguistically but, by examination of the essence of the phenomenon.

Rodin's thinker OK, off you go with testing out imaginative variation.

Try with a physical object or with a concept, one student tried friendship last year

3. Apprehending essential relationships:

Spiegelberg separates two forms of essential relationships which this step explores. One is the relationship between parts of a single thing and the other is the relationship between separate but connected things. Exploring the former he uses the example of a triangle. With the triangle it is easy to see that we might vary some aspects of a particular triangle, e.g., its size, without "exploding" its essence. Whereas its number of sides cannot be varied without destroying its triangleness. The example given of related phenomena is that of colour and extension. So that you can experience a particular essential relationship and verify or refute its essential nature I would like you to try this one out. Make sure you do it as you read and don't read ahead.

Exercise
What I would like you to do is imagine the colour yellow, perhaps we should agree to make it a lightish yellow, now could you deepen it a little.

Perhaps you could deepen it even more, add some red and mix it in to make a warm orange.

So you have experience of a colour and you have also experienced moving it in your imaginations changing the colour, now I'm just guessing here but is your yellow spread out in some sense, is it a surface or perhaps a gaseous form?

don't read on till you have that held in your imagination

Now try to experience the colour with no extension, so it must not spread out at all and of course even a very small surface is still a surface.

It becomes apparent in this operation that no occurrence of the colour can be imagined without it being extended. Thus we have apprehended an essential relationship between colour and extension.
That's an easy one, what about your phenomenon - the one you described before can you discover some essential relationships with that one. Any interesting observations to the discussion site please.

4. Watching modes of appearing:

To examine the phenomenon we must examine how it is appearing to us. One aspect that arose from this systematic exploration as carried out by Husserl can be seen in his discussion of 'horizons'.

photo of dice In this instance the given object is an object in the world -a die- but the phenomenon -die- as explored by Husserl clearly contains more than what we might term the 'perceptually given' as it might be interpreted naively. Examination of the modes of appearing reveal to us that we bring to the die more than what is immediately present to the senses. Our conceptual horizons are not limited to what is seen because we also conceptualize the meaning-along-with-it. Thus if the die open to our visual field has the side with one spot we know that there will be a hidden side with six spots. The die appearing to our consciousness has not only this appearance but other possible appearances as well.

Moreover, the die open to our conception will not only contain all that is meant-along-with-it but also the consciousness of its having a single appearance which includes never being able to see the six and the one at the same time. The appearance that is the sum of all its possible states is its fixed essential type (Seine feste Wesenstypik). It is in this manner that we can see the essence beneath the flux of appearances: not the re-consolidation of this particular instance or position of the die but the combination of appearances plus meaning.

Another aspect of observing modes of appearing, which is perhaps the opposite of the foregoing recognition that we 'see' more than we see, is the recognition of degrees of distinctness. In this aspect the mode of appearing is studied to see where the lack of clarity or haziness resides. Merleau-Ponty explores this aspect of perception in some detail to highlight that, for example, haziness is not a failing of perception it is an experience of haziness.

Rodin's thinker Check

Don't move on until you have thought of your own example of a horizon or 'meant along with it'.

5. Exploring the constitution of phenomena in consciousness:

Beyond watching the modes of appearing it is also possible to observe the way in which a phenomenon is constituted in our consciousness. One way of explaining the difference is to say that constitution is not just the full appearing but also the taking shape and "crystallisation" of the phenomenon. In this example the constituting is particularly drawn out to demonstrate what the phenomenologist would do when faced with an object to 'unpack' how it has come to appear to them in the way it has.

Someone tells me they have a cat, their cat is now for me a phenomenon. However, it is empty in detail, all I know is that it is a cat and so would expect it to be a domestic cat within certain boundaries of ordinary catness. I might add detail imaginatively and I might learn further details from the owner and thus over time the phenomenon is being continually constituted in my consciousness. The owner always wears stripes and so I might speculate that she would chose a tabby cat, I later learn that it is overweight and so the phenomenon becomes a fat tabby cat. That some details have more weight than others (excuse the pun) is also a part of the phenomenon. For example, when I eventually meet the cat I would be much more surprised if it were thin than if it were black.

Exploration of the constitution of the phenomenon reveals not only aspects of consciousness but also aspects of the phenomenon. Even if I met the cat before being told of its existence I would not know it all at once. It might be a fat black cat but is it friendly? Friendliness in cats is an aspect of the phenomenon that can only be determined over time and in certain situations. Thus by exploring the constitution of the phenomenon it is revealed that it has certain hidden aspects. Nevertheless the phenomenon is in one sense always fully known because its unknown aspects or empty features are constituted as presently empty but open to further constitution.

Although the examination of constitution reveals it to be a very active process it is not, and should not be mistaken for, construction. If by constituting the world we constructed it then the cat above would remain tabby. The blackness of the cat we accept as being seen naively or constituted phenomenologically from the hyletic data, either way it is a black cat.

Only thus can we understand Husserl's constant contention that the constitution of the world is not the creation of the world; it is taking the world which is already there and consciously "immanentizing" it in order to remove from it all possibility of doubt.

Rodin's thinker

Now! take whatever is in front of you, pencil, cup, plant, role of cellotape - anything and examine how it is constituted in consciousnes - how did it come to be for you the thing it is?

6. Suspending belief in existence:

That which is represented here as a sixth step is variously called the reduction or bracketing or holding in abeyance or Epoché. Spiegelberg's demotion of the phenomenological reduction from its usual primary position is contentious. The reasons he gives for this move are:

a) that the reduction is not "common ground" for all phenomenologists,
b) that Husserl did not introduce the technique until after some of his most accomplished phenomenological analyses in the Logische Untersuchungen which suggests that it is not as crucial as was later claimed, and
c) there is in Husserl's work no clear and definitive statement giving the meaning and function of the phenomenological reduction.

The procedure is perhaps most usefully termed bracketing, the metaphor being derived by Husserl from the mathematical operation of putting in brackets any part of a larger mathematical problem which one is not dealing with at present. But what is gained by this? The claim is that by bracketing an aspect of our natural attitude -the assumption of existence- we are free to explore all aspects of a phenomenon, even those which the natural attitude or a theoretical preconception would not normally allow us to entertain. As Spiegelberg puts it:

What is all-important in phenomenology is that we consider all the data, real or unreal, or doubtful, as having equal rights, and investigate them without fear or favour. The reduction will help us to do justice to all of them, especially to those which are under the handicap of initial suspicion as to their existential claims. p.692

Some commentators have set out the method as a process of ever more radical reductions. For an example see Quinten Lauer in The Triumph of Subjectivity ch. 3 where the reductions are outlined as "the psychological reduction", "the eidetic reduction", "the phenomenological reduction or transcendental reduction" and so on. I am not sure how helpful that is as an approach, so perhaps the key thing to take from the reduction idea is that it is a way to avoid any categorising or theory driven means to understand something even to the extent of not seeing it as a thing that necessarily exists beyond my consciousness.

Rodin's thinker Exercise

I want you to have two goes at bracketing. First just have a try at taking a phenomenon you know well and attempt to set aside something you know about it. For example, the name of a plant or (and this will hint at a potentially powerful aspect of this technique) a particular character trait of a person.

Then secondly, have a go at bracketing whether something exists. You could try this with something you are sceptical about and with something you can see right in front of you.

7. Interpreting concealed meanings:

The seventh stage goes beyond the work of Husserl, whom Spiegelberg has adhered to most closely until this point. By moving onto interpretation he cites himself within a hermeneutic phenomenology closer to Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty. The describing that has taken place in the previous steps, of course, carries an appreciation of meaning. However, the aim in this step is to uncover the meanings which are not "manifest to our intuiting, analyzing and describing."p. 695. The results of such an interpretative action could be construed as explanatory hypotheses which the foregoing steps had tried to avoid. But the phenomenologists making this further move into interpretation would claim to be drawing the hidden meanings from "clues" in the manifest meanings. The hidden interpretation once drawn out is presumably then 'visible' or manifest in the phenomena in a similar way to the meanings which are open to intuition through the operation of the previous steps.

You can guess what I am going to suggest now, I am sure.

Rodin's thinker Exercise
Take a single phenomenon, perhaps the one you tried out with the describing exercise, or something else if that didn't work well or keep your attention. Remember this could be an anything whatsoever, but make it something that interests you. Now try all 7 steps and see what emerges.

Results or problems to the discussion site please

A word of warning
It is clear from Husserl's representation of the difficult progress of phenomenology that repeating the phenomenological procedures of bracketing and eidetic description etc. are not automatically accessible abilities, hence my note at the beginning about practice.

As Quinten Lauer put it:

this kind of knowing, this kind of apodicitically evident ideal entity, cannot spring fully panoplied from the untutored mind, like Minerva from the head of Jove. The mind in which philosophy's ideal objects are constituted must be a mind which develops, a mind which becomes better and better equipped to know, a mind which has been trained to employ consciously the phenomenological method, not of finding evidence but of making evident. (Lauer, Q. the Triumph of Subjectivity p xxi

I believe it is very useful to return to these fundamental aspects of technique and practice them again and again as well as question them. There are many uses of phenomenology in other disciplines and we will be looking at some examples in the next block. The next reading is an example of phenomenology used within social science, although it is one that sticks unusually close to a Husserlian interpretation. The chapter you have will give a different, though not confusingly so, take on the 7 steps above. You will have observed from your own practical application that the steps merge into one another and here Moustakas is working through four procedures.

Now read Clark Moustakas' chapter on Epoche, Phenomenological Reduction, Imaginative variation and Synthesis.

In the next chapter he applies these ideas to conducting research in the human sciences by what he calls the Stevick - Colaizzi - Keen method and is constructed from his modification to methods of analysis used by the three authors.

The steps for this are given as follows:

1. Using a phenomenological approach, obtain a full description of your own experience of the phenomenon.
2. From the verbatim transcript of your experience complete the following steps:
a) Consider each statement with respect to significance for description of the experience.
b) Record all relevant statements.
c) List each nonrepetative, nonoverlapping statement. These are the invarient horizons or meaning units of the experience.
d) Relate and cluster the invariant meaning units into themes.
e) synthesise the invarient meaning units and themes into a description of the textures of the experience. Include verbatim examples.
f) Reflect on your own textural description. Through imaginative variation, construct a description of the structures of your experience.
g) Construct a textural-structural description of the meanings and essences of your experience.
3. From the verbatim transcript of the experience of each of the co-researchers complete the above steps a to g.
4. From the individual textural-structural descriptions of all co-researchers' experiences, construct a composite textural-structural description of the meanings and essences of the experience, integrating all individual textural-structural descriptions into a universal description of the experience representing the group as a whole.

You will see from this how crucial the idea of intersubjectivity is both as a finding of phenomenological research and as a means to the application of phenomenological ideas to social science - or practically any - research question.

Goethean Observation as a form of Phenomenology

In this final section on phenomenological method I want to present the way I developed an interest in phenomenology. This was through an encounter with the ideas of Goethean science. I was looking into this because it seemed to offer an alternative approach to science is claimed to be more holistic.

Whether Goethe's own work is a kind of proto phenomenology is debatable, but certainly in the work I did with people developing something derived from his suggestions, it presents us with a method of approaching the world that shares many resonances with the kind of approaches we have been looking at here.

I will give some historical detail, but focus mainly on the method as it is practised today.

Some historical detail

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, although better known for his poetry and plays, spent the years from 1777 until his death in 1832 engaged in scientific exploration. His work on science includes investigations in the areas of: geology, meteorology, osteology, botany and the study of colour. He was also an early exponent of the study of the history (and even a proto sociology) of science itself. Significant aspects of Goethe’s scientific work that have been influential or at least confirmed by later scientific work are his discovery of the intermaxilliary bone in humans, his work on plant metamorphosis and his study of ‘what he called’ the psychological colours. Each of these reveal something of his radical approach and the underlying theme of morphology – a word which Goethe introduced.

The intermaxilliary bone is evident in other mammals, but was thought to be absent in humans, this absence was part of the evidence that set humans apart from the animal world according to Goethe’s contemporaries. Goethe showed that it was present in humans, although by birth it was usually fused with the other bones of the skull. His intuition that nature is one and does not have sudden inexplicable jumps coupled with extremely good observational skills and a certain flexibility in thinking meant that the bone was evident to him regardless of the weight of opinion.

Goethe’s study of plants was unusual at the time, because he did not use dead herbarium samples, but studied the plants in their environments. This gave him particular insights into how the plant adapts to its environment and from there to an appreciation of the plant as an adapting organism. In opposition to theories that saw the plant as unfolding from a seed and just carrying though the process of unravelling by the germinal parts growing into their full size, Goethe saw the plant as an active organism that begins as a simple structure that then metamophoses it’s simple parts (leaves) into the more complex forms such as petals and stamen etc. as the need arises.

The last of Goethe’s studies is now seen as his most mature work, although it was the least respected at the time. Goethe’s colour theory includes a polemical attack on the Newtonian approach to colour and an explicit critique on the way science was developing. He begins his study of colour as it is in the world with a detailed account of the colours that were considered illusory even though they were understood as a non-pathological feature of vision – after images. Taking the phenomenon as experienced rather than attempting to absent the human experiencer from the picture was an underlying theme of Goethe’s approach. What he then attempted was to show how the experiencer had to guard against those qualities of mind that would prevent clear observation such as an over reliance on theory.

Rodin's thinker Think

Does any of this sound familiar to the approach we have seen in the reading and material above on method?

Goethe’s own scientific work is fascinating, but I would like to focus on the current attempt to use and develop some of his ideas, particularly about the method to use when trying to get to know a phenomenon. For this purpose I will use the section that outlines the method as it has been developed from a paper I wrote about trying to apply this approach to the study of landscapes. (Brook 1998)

The method

Any live and developing tradition will be in a constant flux and Goethean science is no exception, but certain key aspects appear to be constants within that flux. They appear in Goethe's own discussion of science and are reiterated by Goethean scientists working today. These distinctive features include:

observing with patience and rigor;
deepening a sense of wonder to the world;
using sensual and emotional awareness to experience phenomena as fully as possible;
attending to connections between phenomena;
acknowledging an ethical dimension to the practice of science.

Goethe points to all of these qualities when he speaks of seeing phenomena with "a certain purity of mind."(Eckermann 1935:36) One should not make the mistake of assuming that Goethe recommended a naive or pre-critical view.(1988:159) Goethe accepted the essential role of the mind’s activity in rendering experience meaningful. What he disagreed with was Kant’s contention that what is revealed by the mind is not the things as they are in themselves but only their appearance to the human intellect(1781). Although Goethe recognised the many failings of our usual means to know the world he did believe that a knowledge utterly in tune with the nature of things in the world was possible. It was this knowledge toward which his science strove. The means toward that end is an approach to phenomena that can be said to involve four stages or modes of perception.

To clarify these stages, I first draw on the way this approach to science is taught on courses organised by the School of Life Science. In the teaching, the perceptual modes are more sharply distinguished than when used by its experienced practitioners. Beginning to separate these different perceptual modes and to experience their qualities is a large part of what is distinctive about the Goethean approach. Once the observer can consciously experience these processes, they can again flow into one another in a less truncated way. The four stages are as follows:

1. Exact sense perception;
2. Exact sensorial fantasy;
3. Seeing in beholding;
4. Being one with the object.

Before the first stage of Goethean observation there is a preparatory stage. In the preparatory stage there is a place for who we usually are: our everyday likes and dislikes; our personal history and this aspect of our ordinary encounter with things is acknowledged and recorded. Care is taken to note the first impression that a thing creates in ourselves as observers. This effort allows what is often a very apposite observation some status. Recording and sharing first impressions also acknowledges the observer as coming to the thing with a history of other perceptions and memories. Placing the personal emphasis only in the preparatory stage could be seen as a form of bracketing. Although the focus for much phenomenological geography is an analysis of the lifeworld, this method shares with transcendental phenomenology an idea of a purified subjectivity as the instrument of investigation. Thus the individual subjectivity is distinguished from a form of universal Subjectivity which is used in the stages which follow.
Another aspect of this ‘first meeting’ with the phenomenon is also used, by the observer, to chose what to study. It is when one is struck by something —positively, negatively or with curiosity— that the beginning of a penetrating observation can come. This is spoken of as being drawn to or being spoken to by the thing; something about it engages us and we want to know it better. This process is seen as circumventing the possible arbitrariness of just being allocated an object of study. Being able to find the thing that it would be fruitful for one to study is not only a matter of waiting to be “spoken to”: it requires a degree of patience and a child-like receptivity. Participants report that it is often when they have stopped thinking about what they should study - what would be pleasant or convenient etc. that they are suddenly struck by something. The experience of being called to by a phenomenon is also used in more mainstream phenomenological research techniques.(Moustakas 1994: 74)

1. Exact Sense Perception

The first stage begins when we stand back from the personal encounter that recording and valuing first impressions allows. Now the observer attempts to approach the object from a clearer, more objective standpoint. This stage was called by Goethe exact sense perception and is characterised by a detailed observation of all the ‘bare facts’ of the phenomenon that are available to our ordinary senses. It is an attempt to see what is present with as little personal judgement and evaluation as possible. All our theories and feelings about a thing must be held back in order to “let the facts speak for themselves.”
The question of there being ‘facts’, even before considering whether they may be able to speak, is deeply problematic for us, but it was not entirely a naive foolhardiness on the part of Goethe. His own history of the Royal Society could be seen as a proto-sociology of science and his writings on scientific method are always around the question of the possibility of theory free observation. His own studies move from what he termed his “stiff-necked realism” to the idea that science should move towards what he termed “a delicate empiricism”.

An example of trying to let the facts speak for themselves from Goethe’s own work is his extraordinarily detailed observations of colour phenomena. Rather than draw hypotheses or work from a theory his investigations involve colour as experienced by himself, as used by artists, as created by dyers as used symbolically, as seen in animals and plants, and so on.

For the student attempting to carry out this stage with their own phenomenon, drawing can be a useful drawing of plant tool, because in drawing our attention is brought to previously unnoticed detail or patterns. For example, if our aim is to ‘see’ a particular rose, these techniques help to circumvent our usual ‘seeing roses’ mode of perception. The categorised artefact created by our usual mode perception must be ignored to let us see the rose as if we had not seen one before. Drawing from memory is also used extensively. One may think that one knows everything about the appearance of a thing only to have that assumed knowledge disappear the moment the object is hidden from view and one is asked to draw it.

Another tool used is to ignore some knowledge, for example, the names of things, such that they can be seen and described outside of some of our learned classifications. This restriction on nomenclature is used throughout the shared observation sessions. Attempting to find another word to describe the part you are indicating to someone else often leads to a looking again, an effort to find a similarity with something else. Bracketing out prior knowledge is not forgetting it, but trying to put it aside for a few minutes. An example of this was a participant describing a plant and including in the description of a leaf stalk the caterpillar that was walking along it, as if part of the plant (bracketing her obvious awareness that this was not the case). Just attempting to see it that way can lead to insights about the relationship between the caterpillar and the leaf and other boundary relationships. The intention is to free up the habitual categories and possibly see new elements in the relationships between things.

In comparison to a more orthodox scientific investigation the attempts to step outside of prior knowledge, theory driven observation and hypothesis testing are striking, but some of the procedures carried out may appear orthodox, e.g., measuring and recording quantities. Another possible departure from orthodox methods in this first stage is that all the senses are used. For example, with plants, the sense of smell will be helpful and touch can be very important. The use of the non-visual senses is common in phenomenological studies as sound and smell etc. they are said to bring a greater engagement with the phenomenon.

It is impossible to continue in exact sense perception forever. To register all the great amount of variety and detail would be, as Goethe said “like trying to drink the sea dry.” Just amassing facts about the phenomenon as a static object at the moment at which we are looking will not allow us to really see what the thing is or come to any firm idea of it. Exact sense perception is only the foundation on which the following stages rest and to which they return when necessary to verify conclusions reached by other means.

2. Exact Sensorial Fantasy

The second stage of looking at the phenomenon is what Goethe called “exact sensorial fantasy” (Exakte sinnliche Phantasie). An aspect of this activity is to perceive the time-life of the phenomenon, i.e., to see it as a phenomenon in time. This means no longer seeing the thing in an objective frozen present as prompted by the first stage, but as a thing with a history. That history can be drawn from the phenomenon with the use of an imaginative faculty that cultivates temporal and physical relationships. For example, those between the skeletons of one animal and another.
One way to gain practice with exact sensorial fantasy is to produce, imaginatively, a leaf which fills a developmental gap between those that are evident in a plant.

leaf sequence You can do this easily by taking a plant, groundsel is useful for this as it has a very clear metamorphosis and is often pulled up as a weed, and studying it carefully. You can also remove each leaf from the main stem and set out the sequence as shown.
This exercise helps to shed light on the process of discontinuous metamorphosis in the plant as opposed to recording only its form. The leaf sequence can be experienced as if one is living in the changing forms of the leaf rather than seeing the individual static representations.
Such examples can attune one to seeing movement and thus seeing things in transition.

The difference between this type of observation and, for example, viewing separate slides of a micro-organism to build up a picture of how it has developed, is that the former seems to be happening in the thing whereas the latter is more consciously reasoned out. The shift between the two modes of seeing is a small one, but the world does look very different when seen in a state of flux.

The difficult part of this way of seeing is to bring to awareness these flowing processes in, for example, the plant without freezing them with the solid nature of the exact sense perception. The aim is not to use the static recognitions of the first stage, but rather, to take those solid objective qualities into the new realm of movement and allow them to flow into one another.

The imagination in this phase can be used as a tool to vary what is seen and attempt to imagine it otherwise. The obvious link to phenomenology here is with the use of free imaginative variation. First suggested by Husserl, this is a means of deriving the essence of a phenomenon by pushing the eidos of the thing beyond what can be imagined. The second stage could be seen as a training of the imaginative faculty in two directions. Firstly to free up the imagination and then to constrain it within the realms of what is possible for the phenomenon being studied.

3. Seeing in Beholding

The first two stages of the Goethean method could both be characterised as an engagement with the phenomena, first by objectively seeing its outer static appearance and then by experiencing something of its inner processes. In the third stage one attempts to still active perception to allow the thing to express itself through the observer. We attempt to step outside of what has gone before and make a space for the thing to be articulate in its own way. The previous stages are supposed to form the ground from which one enters this third mode of perception. The detailed information is somehow transcended, but just as exact sensorial fantasy requires exact sense perception to anchor its dream like activity, seeing in beholding needs the content and the preparation of the other two stages if the researcher is to articulate the thing. Goethe terms the changes that are necessary to our everyday consciousness as the development of “new organs of perception”. An analogous process would be exercising to develop the muscles necessary to dance and the dancing itself.

What is striking about the experience of the third stage is that insights which come can counter one’s usual thoughts. It is exhilarating, as what comes can seem so foreign to oneself that it feels given and as if from nowhere. This stage is expressed in emotional language although it is paradoxically said to be the furthest from the subjective of those stages that I have described. What is expressed is the being of the phenomenon, something of its essential nature. This “seeing in beholding” or “heart-felt getting to know” can be expressed in many ways, but its inspirational nature is usually reflected in the use of poetry, painting or other art forms.

To experience the being of a phenomenon requires a human gesture of “self-dissipation”. This effort is a holding back of our own activity —a form of receptive attentiveness that offers the phenomenon a chance to express its own gesture. The result of this effort may be an inspirational flash or Aha! Participants use such expressions as “it was so obvious”, “it was there all the time" and “why had I never seen the connection before”.

4. Being One with the Object

The first three stages of the Goethean method involve different activities and ways of thinking, and these could be characterised as first using perception to see the form, second, using imagination to perceive its mutability, and, third, inviting inspiration to reveal the gesture. The fourth stage uses intuition to both combine and go beyond the previous stages. In terms of a Goethean methodology each of the stages is dependent upon those which precede it. Therefore it is not surprising that each stage is more difficult to explain outside of the context of having experienced the previous stages.

Being One With the Object in this fourth stage allows the human ability to conceptualise to serve the thing: we lend it this human capacity. When the phenomenon being explored does not have the ability to think it is the most participatory part of Goethean observation. This reveals the importance of a thorough knowledge of the phenomenon drawn from the previous stages. Our ability to think creatively and to initiate future action is the faculty being used here and thus the dangers of abstract creation not tied to a phenomenon are great.

What becomes possible at this stage of perception is, in the inorganic realm, the appreciation of laws and, in the organic realm, the appreciation of type. Type is, for Goethe, more than a descriptive plan shared by plants or animals and thus requires more than an exploration of the outer form and its constituent parts. Being one with the object allows an appreciation of the content or meaning of the form as well as the form itself. This content is only available to thinking as only in the process of thinking can the outer appearance of the thing and its inner content be combined by conceptualisation. At this stage of the process of Goethean observation it is acknowledged that the phenomenon is at its least independent of human reason.

With some forms of study the process does not end with the fourth stage. For example, if with the study of a landscape the process is to involve future developments and buildings then a further 3 stages are necessary. These three stages mirror the 3rd, 2nd and 1st as described above. For example, the 6th stage would mirror the second by trying out in imagination and with different models and plans the various design options to see which could “grow” in a particular place. In this situation the 4th stage is a switching point from what the place is saying to what can be developed there. The moral implication of being empowered to act by having an intimate knowledge of another being is often experienced by participants as an awesome responsibility.

Rodin's thinker
Exercise

It’s obvious really, but why not have a go at the first two stages. Choose a particular phenomenon, the colour of the sky, the pattern on your cat’s fur!, whatever suggests itself to you, and see if you can experience something of the change in perceptual depth that is suggested here.

Warning: it takes time.