en 
de Sean Howard and Lee-Anne Broadhead
October 2024
As settlers living and working on the unceded territory of Una’maki (Cape Breton), part of the vast homeland of the Mi’kmaw people, we have had the privilege of witnessing and participating in a bold experiment in cross-cultural dialogue known as ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’. First articulated, two decades ago, by Mi’kmaw elders Murdena and Albert Marshall, the two ‘eyes’ in question are those of Western and Indigenous Science, a sometimes jarring juxtaposition of two radically distinct sets of approaches – reductionist/instrumentalist v. wholistic, quantitative v. qualitative – to nature and knowledge.
So distinct, indeed, are these approaches that western reductionism has traditionally arrogated to itself the status of ‘science proper,’ consigning to its periphery alternative modes and methods of inquiry, whether within or beyond the mainstream laboratory and academy: classifying, for example, Indigenous modes and methods as traditional knowledge rather than modern science, a set of ‘pre-scientific’ (even pseudo-scientific) beliefs and practices at best capable of producing results and data that ‘science itself’ can properly (reductively) study and explain.
The core moral and intellectual motivation of ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’ is to counter this bitter legacy of colonial condescension, to break the false Eurocentric equation of reductionism with science. The problem with Eurocentrism, of course, lies not with the ‘Euro’ but the ‘centrism,’ the denigration and sometimes extermination of ways of knowing other than those associated with and materially assisting imperial Europe’s rise to global power. Indeed, Eurocentrism has often acted to marginalize alternative ways of knowing in Europe itself, and so successful has this process been that another false equation has largely taken hold, that of ‘western science’ with and as the relentless advance of mechanistic reductionism.
In the conviction that dispelling this notion holds the key to a new depth of both inter- and intra-cultural dialogue about science and society, our forthcoming book from Peter Lang – Cultivating Perception, Countering Faust: The Radical Resonance of Goethean and Indigenous Science – seeks to compare Indigenous science not to reductionism but rather to ‘Goethean Science,’ shorthand for the wholistic, qualitative, phenomenological approach pioneered by one of the most influential and misunderstood figures of European Enlightenment, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
In his methodological dedication to what he called “delicate empiricism” – his corresponding rejection, as an unscientific “pathology”, of the “grim torture chamber of [indelicate] empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism” from which “the phenomena must be freed once and for all” – Goethe vested his hopes for authentic, relational human knowledge of nature on the cultivation of a poetic perceptiveness of the lifeways of the world, convinced as he was from experience that “every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.” In this reverential fidelity to clear-eyed seeing of creation, Goethe’s science, and that of his distinguished inheritors, bears a striking resemblance in key features – as well as cultural distinctiveness in others – to the ethos and methods of Indigenous Science as practiced across vast swathes of time and space.
Drawing on the landmark contributions of Indigenous scientists and thinkers such as Gregory Cajete (Tewa), Leroy Little Bear (Haudenosaunee), Sákéj Henderson (Chicksaw), Oscar Kawagley (Yupiaq), and contemporary research by Mi’kmaq ecologists at the Una’maki Institute of Natural Resources – into, for example, the extraordinary, now-endangered lifeways of the Kataq, the ‘Eel People’ of the Bras d’Or Lakes – we approach Indigenous Science as a “subtle seeking” (to quote Cajete) “establishing an ongoing and dynamic relationship based on traditions of holistic participation,” an immersion in the structure and agency, rhythms and reasons of phenomena understood as the innumerable, ever-evolving forms of being assumed by the ‘Great Spirit’ or ‘sacred energy’ at work and play in Creation. Because, as Cajete says, the “Americas are an ensouled and enchanted geography” Indigenous Science, as a practice of attunement of people to place, logically develops and rigorously deploys a “spiritual ecology,” again understanding ‘spirit’ as ‘energy’ and phenomena as, in our words, units of spiritual in-formation.
Central, then, to both Goethean and Indigenous Science is the cultivation of what Goethe calls an “exact sensorial imagination”, and Kawagley an “ecopsychology” of inquiry, commensurate with the poetic, qualitative challenge of practising a truly natural science of reality. Remarkably, this electrifying resonance has drawn little attention in the literature of either tradition, and it is one aim of our detailed comparative analysis to enable these ‘two eyes’ to see each other more clearly, hopefully opening new currents of dialogue and cooperation. This work – the heart of the book – relates to the first part of our title, ‘cultivating perception’. But what does that have to do with the second part, ‘countering Faust’?
To prepare our survey of Goethean and Indigenous Science, we consider Goethe’s unparalleled depiction in his sprawling mock-epic Faust drama of the rise and fall of a figure disastrously dedicated to the conquest and engineered harnessing of the elemental forces of natural reality through violently-reductionist science and technology, the methodical dismemberment of reality, from the atom up, long perverting and now existentially threatening reality itself. Tellingly, as we consider in detail, Faust’s flight from reality begins with his attempt to conjure the ‘Earth Spirit’ as his supposed equal, consort in his attempt to rule over the Earth and break her spirit! Incapable of grasping this paradox, or of accepting his rejection, Faust turns on the world – the definition, perhaps, of selling one’s soul? – and sets the vast Mechanism of the very modern, absurd drama in motion.
Our main focus in these sections is on what has aptly been dubbed, including by some of those involved, as the ‘Faustian Bargain’ at the core of the Manhattan Project producing the ultimate perversity and threat of nuclear weapons. But in his brutal rejection of co-existence with all those who reject or obstruct his increasingly frantic hyper-development of the planet – up to and including taming the ocean tide – Goethe’s Faust, in addition to personifying the antithesis of the Goethean scientist – embodies many aspects of the era of explosive Eurocentrism: ecologically insupportable industrialism, enabling and requiring the ‘extractivist’ plunder of the Earth; the mechanization of mass-murder (a.k.a. war) featuring bioweapons and foreshadowing the Bomb; constant surveillance of the increasingly powerless many by the overpowerful few; etc.
Not even Goethe could quite anticipate the degree of uncanny surveillance and pre-programmed, algorithmic dehumanization characterizing the digital Technosphere, though Mephistopheles does constitute his artificial intelligence, a co-pilot of the doomed plane. Neither, we suspect, could he have anticipated the failure of his astounding, unclassifiable play to dislodge Faust from the ironically deified ‘culture hero’ of modernity.
Had such an overthrow occurred, we suspect that Goethe would be taken far more seriously as a scientist today, and that western culture would value Indigenous Science far more highly. Conversely, though, our hope in writing our book was to invite a Goethean-Indigenous dialogue capable of forging a new, counter-Faustian alliance: common cause based on common ground, the endangered Earth herself.
