Goethe and qualitative knowledge: A response to Arnheim

Abstract

Professor Arnheim is concerned with a major problem of the modern.world, the split between knowledge on the one hand and meaning, value, and purpose on the other. It is a central problem because in the modern world the dominant modes of knowing (determined largely by modern science) have focused almost exclusively on the quantitative, the mechanical, and the purely instrumental. This means, however, that other dimensions of human experience have no standing as belonging to our knowable reality. Meaning, values, purpose (other than instrumental purposes), and qualities-above all, those qualities we cluster under the headings of consciousness, life, and personal and spiritual reality-are regarded as having little or nothing to do with knowledge, and are frequently even disparaged as sources of illusion and irrationality. In short, our dominant conceptions of knowledge have little or no place for the dimensions of human experience that make it distinctively human. (Even though the so-called new science no longer deals with the objective quantities of 19th century naive realism, but only with the purely formal quantities of number, force, and motion, it is no less entirely quantitative, having no place for qualities other than as data for instrumental purposes.) The problem is that what is taken to be knowledge will in the long run determine the world of our experience. If knowable reality is thought to be exclusively mechanical and quantitative, we will gradually find ourselves in a mechanistic, meaningless world. Little wonder that there have been constant attempts during the past centuries to overcome this central dualism of the modern world (modern here meaning at least since the beginning of the scientific revolution). As Arnheim points out, many of these attempts have been various versions of what, in the late middle ages, was dubbed “the double doctrine of truth,” which maintained, on the one hand, the truth of knowledge (as given to us now in the modern world mainly by science) and, on the other hand, the truths of belief, or faith, or values, or meaning, and so forth. The problem for the adherent of such a two-realm theory of truth is either that the knowledge realm is constantly undercutting and eroding the belief and value realm, or that the two realms have to be held in stark and ultimately untenable contradiction. Can the dualism be overcome? More specifically, how successful is Arnheim’s solution to the doctrine of the