Around the time of the 17th century, the world as we knew it died. Prior to this, it was seen as a living intelligence.
When Descartes, Galileo, and Newton arrived on the scene, they turned it into a giant mechanical clockwork.
René Descartes was the main culprit because he drew a line between mind and matter.
On one side was the thinking self and on the other everything else: inert, mechanical, available for measurement and use.
In some respects, it was an enormously useful story, powerful and transformative for the culture, and it birthed science, medicine, and technology.
It also gave us a world made of dead objects.
And since then, that lens has shaped how we all view the living world.
Craig Holdrege, the Goethean scientist, tells us that the cost of this way of looking causes the loss of living thinking.
By that, he meant not just thinking about life but actually thinking of it as alive, thinking that is responsive, thinking that is relational, and thinking that is shaped by what it encounters.
The mechanistic mind of Descartes dissects, while the living mind participates.
Goethe understood this and he insisted that perception isn’t passive, that to truly see a plant you have to let it work on you.
This is achieved by bringing sustained attention. Over time, the plant reveals itself. There is an encounter.
No longer observer and observed but subject and subject, a meeting point.
This isn’t mysticism; it’s what happens when you stop seeing the world as dead objects. Instead, you start to engage with it as a community of living beings, each with its own coherence and complexity.
The world, the living world, hasn’t changed since Descartes separated us from it. It’s always been there, and so has your relationship to it.
As the transformative experience of Domei points towards, it’s not a rejection of analysis but a widening of it.
It’s not an end to thinking but the beginning of a kind of thinking that can hold a living thing whole.
You don’t arrive at this point through argument. You arrive through sustained attention to one plant until the boundary between you and the plants softens.