All of Henri Bortoft’s Recorded Lectures in One Location

5 min readFeb 21, 2021

“Taking Appearance Seriously is a rare philosophical work of both outstanding quality and immense practicality, written to guide the reader into really experiencing what Henri Bortoft calls the dynamic way of seeing: a radically aware way of thinking and comprehending our complex world which is as applicable in the creative arts and business world as it is in science.”

Simon Robinson

Henri Bortoft (1938–2012) was a physicist and philosopher who studied the problem of wholeness in quantum physics as a postgraduate student under David Bohm. He then went on to work with the philosopher J.G. Bennett where he would extend his studies of wholeness into the areas of phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Henri would then take a deep interest in the scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, resulting in the publication of his 1986 monograph Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness. This work was expanded into what is now regarded as one of the greatest articulations of Goethe’s approach to science in The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science published in 1996 by Floris Books. Henri would then spend the next years working on his final book Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought published in 2012, also by Floris Books.

Henri Bortoft at Schumacher College, October 2009

As one of the masters degree students in Holistic Science in the 2009 I had the privilege of spending this particular week with Henri, a week which provoked an extremely profound shift in my thinking. Following my studies, I would then become the cofounder of Holonomics, a business consultancy based in São Paulo, Brazil developing business methodologies based on Henri’s dynamic conception of wholeness.

Simon Robinson lecturing at Sustentare Business School

These are described in the book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter, co-authored with Maria Moraes Robinson. In Holonomics we introduce readers to Henri’s philosophy of wholeness, and show how it can be understood in relation to systems thinking and complexity science, the development of new business models, and also how it relates to changes in our mental models, leadership and the transformation of consciousness in organisations.

Our second book, Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design, extends these insights from Henri’s work, notably the dynamic way of seeing, into the area of customer experience design. In this book we introduce our tool, the Holonomic Circle, which articulates the meaning of soul in a design, business and branding context. This framework takes its inspiration from the hermeneutic circle, an approach to understanding meaning in texts and works of art which Henri explored extensively.

One example of a practice that Maria Moraes Robinson and I have developed that forms part of our Holonomic Approach is a methodology which integrates Goethe’s theory of colour into our strategy, customer experience, leadership and organisational design workshops to help executives develop a more dynamic form of thinking, expand their level of consciousness and take then into an artistic appreciation of the world. We believe we are the only business consultancy in the world to integrate Goethe’s colour experiments into a corporate context, and are the first to publish photographs in order to help explain to people how this could be achieved.

Goethe’s colour experiments being carried out with business leaders — Credit: Holonomics

While Henri had taught at Schumacher College for many years, being one of the creators of Holistic Science, his lectures only started to be recorded in 2009, the year when I was at the college. Because his teachings involve entering into an expanded form of seeing, it can be difficult to truly grasp the essence of his teachings just by reading. For this reason I began to save his recordings, something which allowed me to return to them time and again to absorb more of more depth and understanding.

Over time the master copies of the recordings became lost. However, I took it upon myself to save, curate and make available all recordings available so that those which wished to commit themselves to studying the dynamic conception of wholeness would be able to have access to these precious lectures. In order to make it easy to share, I therefore thought that I would create this single page with all of the recordings I have curated, and one or two further ones which are also available to listen to.

In addition to the recordings, I have also provided links to my lectures notes which I have written to accompany each of Henri’s lectures at Schumacher College from 2009–2011.