From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 9 No 3 (June 2015)

It is almost impossible for modern man to understand how he can be ‘blind’. We see what is in front of our noses, and we could not see more even if we opened our eyes as far as they will go.

But there is another kind of blindness, which American philosopher and psychologist William James describes in his essay ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’. James recounts how he was being driven, in a buggy, through the mountains of North Carolina, and looking with revulsion at the newly-cultivated patches of land (called coves) and reflecting how ugly they were. He asked the driver what kind of people lived here, and the driver replied cheerfully: “We ain’t happy unless we’re getting one of these coves under cultivation.” And James suddenly woke up to the fact that these homesteaders regarded each cove as a personal victory, and saw it as beautiful.

We become blind to things by imposing our concepts on them and looking at them with a kind of indifference, which arises from our conviction that we know what they are already. James was quite sure that the coves were ugly, without seeing that the ugliness lay in his own eyes.

But even when we know this, it is still very difficult for us to grasp just how the ancient Egyptians – or our Cro-Magnon ancestors – somehow saw the world quite differently, and might consequently have developed their own ‘high levels of science’. The following example should make it clearer.

One of the few men to whom this ‘ancient seeing’ came quite naturally was the German poet [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe. And Goethe’s vision of science can enable us to grasp what it is all about.

It would simplify what follows if I explain how I happened to stumble on Goethe’s vision of science.

I had been an admirer of his work ever since my teens, when I first read Faust in the old Everyman edition. His vision of a scholar rendered miserable by his sense of the meaninglessness of life struck a deep chord with me at the age of sixteen. Good English translations of his work are rare, but over the years, I went on to collect every volume I could lay my hands on.