The normal-natural guardrails for technology, First and third Order Science
From: Goethean Holistic Science; Everyday We Use Three Simple Orders of Sciences
Available in digital HERE. Paper coming.
Goethean Holistic Science (GHS) is an expanded science paradigm first published in 2014. GHS contrasts pointedly with old, one-sided conventional science. Conventional science one-sidedly emphasizes technology; more specifically, technologies of physical survival, entertainment and creature comfort.
In contrast, GHS proposes Three Orders of Science. Technology is only the middle third. In GHS technology is bound on both top and bottom by healthy “guard rails.” Why does technology need guard rails? Without robust guard rails technology will gleefully continue churning our Frankenstein monsters of ever greater self-destructiveness.
Three Orders of Science are capable of replacing the limited, worn-out, male obsession on only one-sided, rational-materialistic survival and money making technology.
What are the Three Orders of Science? They are also Three Orders of Objectivity:
First Order Objectivity acknowledges the value, validity and benefits of subjective perception and experience. The three highest-frequency intelligences are Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration. These three intelligences are primarily active in the domain of single individuals, one person at a time.
This includes the realm of individual choice, “Is X true, beneficial and valuable for me now?” Or, Is X NOT true, nor beneficial, for me now?” First Order Science is the primary province of for all neurology and Psychology.
Second Order Objectivity is: 2 + 2 = 4. Here, facts must be true for everyone, at all times; and, at all places, regardless of individual opinion, race, religion or circumstance. This is the science of practical survival. This is the domain of existing rational-materialistic science. This is the science of commerce, profit and technology. This is the familiar domain of Natural and Hard science. Second Order Science includes symbolic thinking, language and math.
Some of its high-frequency intelligences are:
- linear, sequential logic,
- inductive and deductive problem solving, and
- thinking outside the five-sensory box.
Third Order Objectivity is the dimension of healthy ethics, morals and values. “What is safe, possible, permitted and allowed now, for the highest good of all concerned?” Another way to ask this is, “For the next seven generations, have the needs of all stakeholders been considered?”
Values, morals and ethics exist objectively in the consensus of a specific group of people, at a specific time and place. Third Order Science is highly relevant to healthy group process between two or more persons living or working together. This is the domain most neglected, dismissed, suppressed, repressed by the atheism of corporate-consumerism.
Natural boundaries-guardrails for technology
In this way, two additional Orders of Science provide boundaries and guardrails to keep Second Order technology going forward aligned with subjective reality; and, the reality of human ethics, morals and values.
In the language of Best Practices in Healthy Group Process, Third Order Science provides a “container of values-morals-ethics” needed to moderate and modulate the excesses of First Order Science (foolishness, fooling yourself) and Second Order Science (Heinz 57 varieties of Frankenstein monsters crashing SpaceShip Earth).
The validity of Three Orders of Science has been field-tested since 1919 in two large fields:
- Waldorf-methods K-12 education; and
- holistic methods of healthcare.
These two fields were already practicing GHS — we simply did not recognize this. Prior to 2014, these two activities topics suffered from the joke, “It works in practice; it simply doesn’t work in theory.” More precisely, since the 1970s, one-sided hard scientists challenged holistic healthcare practitioners with a relevant and profound critique:
Humanistic Psychology, holistic healthcare and Energy Medicine all lacked:
- a comprehensive holistic theory; and
- a general holistic experimental method.
The above scheme of Three Orders, uncovered in 2014, had been available for over 200 years. It was simply un-explored and un-acknowledged. We can reach back 250 years, to the German playwright, poet and scientist, Johann Goethe (GER-tah) (1749–1832). Briefly, in modern terms, Goethe was our first modern public intellectual using both sides of his brain.
GHS is for those looking to incorporate more truly human values for the 99% into mainstream culture.
In his science experiments, Goethe balanced the experimenter (himself) with the experiment (the observed subject). He was able to keep BOTH in mind, both his feelings and intuition; AND, his hard-edge, objective, left-brain analysis and interest in numerical values, useful for comparison. These two together can work as partners, as teammates. This is the goal. This is whole-brainedness (better names for this invited).
In Western science Galileo most significantly started the pendulum of science swinging towards extreme one-sided, spectator, non-participatory science. Galileo, the experimentalist: science minus all feeling and subjectivity. “Just the facts, mam.”
The pendulum swing back towards more balance between right and left-brain, head and gut-brain science — whole-brained science — was begun by Goethe, furthered by Rudolf Steiner, then Ernst Lehrs (Man and Matter) and now GHS. In this scheme, it appear Goethe was our first modern holistic (whole-brained) experimentalist.
Future generations will eventually be taught like this:
- Science is the art of asking questions, using each new experiment to refine your question; so, you can ask better questions.
- What questions interest you? Does any question fascinate you sufficiently to live with and explore? A question about a Nature phenomena? A question about bodily health? About other people? About the electrical nature of astronomical phenomena?
- Immerse yourself in observing-learning your subject or topic. What patterns of observable facts are present?
- Prior to your coming, what patterns have others uncovered here? What new patterns may exist which you may be first to perceive?
How are your study and observations changing you?
- Goethe says, perform only two-sided experiments, experiments honoring what Inspires you, what you think, feel, Intuit, Imagine. How are your study and observations changing you? Only two-sided experiments honor how souls, as “citizens of eternity” (Dostoevsky), grow in the human experience.
If we LEAVE the experimenter OUT, we promote one-sided science, thinking separated from feeling, separated from imagination, intuition, and from biology. Goethe’s two-sided experimental method is one of few insurances again becoming an isolated, mad scientist; or, a paid enabler of corporate-military Team Machine agendas.
Goethe examples HOW to approach science so you don’t lose your soul. When science is placed before school children without this balance of inner and outer, the children are being shaped into little Dr. Frankensteins, encouraged to create one-sidedly without consideration of either how they feel; nor, the moral and ethical consequences of their experiments. Creating little STEM Dr. Frankensteins creates profit for corporation — yet — is destructive for the rest the 99% of people, Nature and ecology. GHS is the end of evil dream of all mad male scientists, “One ring to rule them all!”
Expanding our science paradigm from one Order, Second Order, into Three Orders, explains more science phenomena, a better way to conceive of objectivity and science. GHS makes more of the human psyche coherent than old one-order-science ever could. Three Sciences make a safe place for both “hard science” skeptics and soft-science professionals. Three Orders of Science is the end of war between Soft and Hard sciences. Expanding to Three Sciences, “hard science” falls naturally into place as Second Order Science, one third of a more whole science paradigm.
Goethean Holistic Science and the Three Sciences We Use Everyday for Holistic Practitioners and Self-Healers: Chapters 19–20 from Balance on All Levels-PACME+Soul Plus Related Essays
