From the conversation with Henri Bortoft
London, England
July 14^th, 1999
Claus Otto Scharmer

Henri Bortoft is the author of The Wholeness of Nature (1996), the definitive monograph on Goethe's scientific method. Bortoft did his postgraduate research on the problem of wholeness in quantum physics with physicist David Bohm. When I met him in London, we began our conversation by talking about his views on quantum physics.

Henri Bortoft: There is a problem with the interpretation of quantum physics. I would call this problem the two-level theory… I think that the two-level theory is misleading. Goethe made the distinction between the kind of thinking which begins with the finished product, the object, and the dynamical thinking, which looks, instead at the coming-into-being of that object. The point of quantum physics is not to differentiate into two levels but to look at the coming-into-being of entities…

In 1972 I came to know Goethe’s work just by accident… Goethe’s point was to develop a different kind of seeing, a seeing that strives from the whole to the parts. That was very close to Bohm’s hologram…

Goethe really enhanced his capacity for this kind of seeing. We don’t have the idea of doing this anymore… You have to slow down. You see and you follow every detail in imagination. It is an exact sensorial imagination. You create the image of what you see in your mind and you do that as precisely as possible. … [for example when doing that with a plant] you do this with one leaf, with another leaf and so on. Suddenly there is a movement, a dynamic movement, as you begin to see not the individual leaf but the dynamic movement. The plant is the dynamical movement. That is the reality…

Then, this imagination becomes an organ of perception. You can develop it. I get the sense that when you do it you are moving in another space, an imaginal realm. It is a movement. And it seems more real than the outer world. I think it is more real because you are doing it. You are active. Goethe had an enormous ability in that regard. The same is true for Picasso. The way he painted. When you look at his pictures you see the metamorphoses…

This transformation from an analytical to a holistic mode of consciousness brings with it a reversal between the container and the content. In the case of positivism, the theory is considered to be only the container for the facts. Now, if the theory, in Goethe’s sense, is the real content of the phenomenon, then it can be said that in the moment of intuitive insight we are seeing inside the phenomenon…

Archetypes are different modes of unity, of a dynamical unity. The idea of self-difference is something that is very important. Self-difference means that something becomes different from itself. … self-difference means that you look at what differences emerge from the unity… The Greek god Proteus appeared in different forms. It is like the hologram. It is a unity, and yet it is different...

Look at hermeneutics: You read a text or watch a play or listen to music or look at a painting. It always appears differently, and yet it is not. It is the same and it is different. Gadamer calls the "same and different" self-manifestation…

Gadamer’s first and last insight is that all being is self-manifestation and understanding is an event. It is an event of self-manifestation. That is exactly what Goethe is talking about…

Archetypes are dynamic forms. That is what an archetype is. An archetype is a movement which is here and yet becomes different — at the same time…

We cannot know the whole in the way in which we know things because we cannot recognize the whole as a thing. … The whole would be outside its parts in the same way that each part is outside all the other parts. But the whole comes into presence within its parts, and we cannot encounter the whole in the same way that we encounter the parts. We should not think of the whole as if it were a thing."