Goethe's science: an approach to research in American Indian Studies

In The Wholeness of Nature (1996), Henri Bortoft shows how a Goethean science of qualitative wholeness complements the analytic and causal- explanatory framework that underlies most research in the natural and social sciences. Goethe's insights and methods suggest that a better understanding of Indian tribes may occur when a tribe is regarded as its own abstraction and its own explanation. In Goethe's approach to science, the human mind is an "organ of perception" and researchers are active participants in the way they see the world. Consider an Indian tribe and the goal of Goethean science is to intuitively "see" patterns of interpenetrating relationships in a dynamic process of self-organization that is the tribe. While analytic science and Goethe's science of wholeness are incommensurable, both are true, and neither is comprehensive.