rudolf steiner library newsletter: reviews
Taking Appearance Seriously The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought
By Henri Bortoft; Floris Books, 2012, 235 pp. Review by Keith Francis I never had the good fortune to meet the late Henri Bortoft, and everything I have read and heard about him suggests that this was a considerable loss on my part. After working for several months with his last book, Taking Appearance Seriously, I wish I could sit down with him over a glass of something convivial, congratulate him on his cogent account of the path to a dynamic, vivid, and fully realized way of experiencing the world of nature and humanity, and raise some questions about his views on physicists, the history of science, and the nature of language and meaning. The discussion might have gone on for a long time, but it is my opinion that most of the points over which I differ with Bortoft are peripheral to the main stream of his thinking; of course, he might well have disagreed about that. The back cover of Taking Appearance Seriously gives a very good idea of the scope and intentions of the book: “The history of western metaphysics from Plato onwards is dominated by the dualism of being and appearance. What something really is (its true being) is believed to be hidden behind the ‘mere appearances’ through which it manifests. Twentieth-century European thinkers radically overturned this way of thinking... Henri Bortoft guides us through a dynamic way of seeing, exploring issues including how we distinguish things, how we find meaning and the relationship between thought and words.” After completing his education at the University of Hull, England, Bortoft worked in the early 1960s with the highly respected physicist David Bohm on the concept of wholeness in the quantum theory. This led to an encounter with the hologram, at that time a recent innovation, and the realization that the idea of a picture that is completely present at each point while each point is part of the whole picture would be helpful in understanding the wholeness of human organizations. While these ideas were on his mind, Bortoft was introduced to hermeneutics, a branch of philosophy dealing with the theory of understanding, viewed as a circular process wherein the whole can be understood only in terms of the parts and the parts only in terms of the 12 •
being human
whole. It was then a short step from hermeneutics to phenomenology, which Bortoft considers to be “the most important and influential movement in European philosophy in the twentieth century.” “Phenomenology,” in this context, refers specifically to the philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl about 1905, rather than to the term’s general definition, the “study of appearances in human experience without regard to the question of objectivity and subjectivity.” As Bortoft remarks, getting into phenomenology isn’t easy. “It is a philosophy which has the effect of seeming strange and yet familiar at the same time. Phenomenology seems to take the ground away from under our feet, whilst at the same time giving us the sense of being where we have always been—only now recognizing it as if for the first time. It’s hard to catch hold of because it’s like trying to catch something as it’s happening and which is over before we can do so. It can perhaps be described most simply as ‘stepping back’ into where we are already. This means shifting the focus of attention within experience away from what is experienced into the experiencing of it. So if we consider seeing, for example, this means that we have to ‘step back’ from what is seen into the seeing of what is seen.” If the exposition seems labored and repetitive at times, it is largely because Bortoft feels that the distinction between “what is experienced” and “the experiencing of it”—or, as he expresses the matter at other points, between the appearance and the appearing of what appears (sometimes referred to as the appearance)—may be difficult to grasp, and that, since it is the idea at the root of the whole book, it must be grasped. His most succinct explanation arose from the experience of standing on a bridge and looking first downstream and then upstream. Realizing that he habitually grasped the appearance after the process of appearing had taken place—in other words, downstream—he subsequently told a group of students, “Our problem is that where we begin is already downstream, and in our attempt to understand where we are, we only go further downstream. What we have to do instead is to learn to go back upstream and learn to flow down to where we are already, so that we can recognize this not as the beginning but as the end. That’s phenomenology.” “This was a good start,” the author says, “a doorway into the movement of thinking in phenomenology…. Phenomenology liberates us from the dualism of metaphysics…. There is nothing behind the appearances, but