Great post sns thanks...
It is the reason why the book about Goethe method the greatest unrecognized natural scientist is so important..
When we live through this method of "seeing" and realize that we never has seen any animal in our life but only LABELLED with a name coming from habit a living object, we fall off our chair the older we are...
I was fortunate enough to read Wolfgang Schad first book (300 pages) 35 years ago and falling from my chair i did not broke my back... 😊
I just bought for 120 bucks few weeks ago the new edition completed after his long life work , 1300 pages +1500 illustrations...
A testimony to the vision and "rigorous "exact imagination" method designed by Goethe whose intelligence when assessed humble us all...Only Aristote and Archimedes compared... Think about a man with the genius of Shakespeare in his own language and his scientific vision and experience and discoveries in morphology and evolution on par with Darwin, and a view about colors that open research about light and physiology of colors experience out of the Newton box...
Nature is the only altar where God speak his words like in the first days of creation : all, minerals, vegetals, animals, and humans appear coming directly from the 7 first day... Only in cities million of years hide us from the explicit metamorphosed beginning of wild nature taking with it his implicit mysteries for us to "see" with the right gaze...
Children under 7 years old see without labels... They are the only masters...
Each animals in his personal environment is a book whose chapters are parts of his morphology and main three systems: the polarity of nerve-sense and metabolic-limb systems and the mediating circulatory-respiratory system ...
"Seeing" this dynamical polarities playing at all scales of the relation between the animals and his environment is loosing the "scales" veiling our gaze...
Goethe wrote with the same method the most beautiful book ever written about plants..." the metamorphosis of plant"...
Discusasing one day with his best friend Schiller, himself a thinker of the highest order, he answer to Schiller gazing his drawing of the archetypical dynamic of the original plant and making to Goethe the remark that this drawing reprent no existing plant but only an "idea"; my dear friend i must say to you then that i am very happy to see ideas with my concrete eyes.... Think about that deep observation....
The word genius about Goethe is well deserved...
Why Goethe is not so much well known as scientist: Because it is not the amount or importance of his discoveries that reveal his genius or a unique idea like the darwinian paradigm but it is a deep method or inquiring without looking ONLY in the parts but perceiving by "exact imagination" the whole itself all around us... Stupendous ... This is the yoga of zoology and botany.... This explain the complete reverence from many geniuses for Goethe and the huge influence of Goethe on all people, the more intelligent they are the more deep... I cannot insist enough on that... Test by yourself... But reading Goethe is not like reading a philosopher by arguments and reason... It is a transformative artistic and scientific experience OVER any LOGIC and ANY words and way over language itself...
This great poet who describe in the Faust all the contemporary hubris, and scientist was also the more spiritual man in front of the sacred nature... His devotion all his life shatter all our distraction and sleepwalking...
The list of those who place Goethe at the center of their life is very long... Those who put Goethe aside paid the price... For example Goethe is the geatest phenomenologist in German language over Hegel and over Husserl...The "cul de sac" where the mathematician Husserl put himself with his phenomenology inclined to a formal never ending chain of abstractions is completely unknown in the concrete phenomenology of Goethe where the phenomena spoke by themselves WITHOUT any theory to replace them or hide them...Husserl himself so wise it is is a children who speak too much compared to Goethe...
The only known man who is goethean before Goethe is Leonardo Da Vinci whose method is almost the same...The two men are artist and scientist devoted to "exact imagination" contemplation and understanding and perceiving of living forms...They are exact twin separated by centuries...
Verify by yourself...
http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php