Anthroposophy reveals what is conveniently overlooked: that modern science, descended from “natural science,” is a discipline specialized to focus only on measurable physical substance and mechanical forms. So its fantastic success leads us to misunderstand ourselves, since it cannot fully grasp the living, the conscious, or the individual—life, soul and spirit.
Out of this science is born a technology which produces abundance, and also, used without understanding its limitations, creates wastelands in the realms of life and consciousness. Learning how we can connect to the worlds of life and of higher consciousness and their beings is where anthroposophy can help humanity meet a most urgent and immediate challenge.
Perennial Alternative Frederick Amrine, The Perennial Alternative: Episodes in the Reception of Goethe’s Scientific Work; Adonis Press, 2021, 279 pages.
review by Frederick Dennehy The first two volumes of Frederick Amrine’s scholarly trilogy were comprehensive bibliographies of the primary and secondary literature in Goethean science, as well as the practical studies that have been undertaken in Goethe’s spirit. This third volume is described by the author as “a collection of essays written at various times about the history of the reception of Goethe’s science,” but it is a great deal more. Prof. Amrine shows first, that Goethe’s science is unarguably the perennial alternative to orthodox science and scientism, that is, the invariable place to go, then and now, for those who are dissatisfied with conventional scientific methods; second, that Goethe’s science is a living tradition of thought, as vital and fluid today as it was two hundred years ago; and third, that although they have arisen outside of the mainstream, the anthroposophical works being produced on Goethe’s science today belong with anything coming out of the academy. Amrine chronicles the reluctance with which the scientific community has received Goethe’s method as a candidate for a new scientific paradigm, replete with its glib dismissals and inept misreadings. But after reading this remarkable collection, it is difficult not to feel optimistic. For not only gifted anthroposophists, but many original thinkers and practitioners of widely diverse back-
grounds and interests, are actively pursuing Goethe’s “perennial alternative.” Some acknowledge his influence directly, while others are working in “nomad sciences” that no longer recognize the original source. The time, one senses, may be at hand. The revival of the ancient Greek thinking with the etheric body, which Rudolf Steiner repeatedly called for, is on the horizon. It becomes clear that the fruits of Goethe’s scientific method are not limited to botany or color theory. The imaginative faculty of ‘seeing,’ which Goethe’s genius transformed into a rigorous science of qualities, has the capacity to interpret anything that lives. The vigorous analogue of the musical organism, elucidated in the music theory of Victor Zuckerkandl, illumines Jakob von Uexkull’s pioneering work in the science of ecological emergence, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of wholeness, and Gilles Deleuze’s foundational philosophy of concept creation. In the unfolding of a musical composition, as in the germination of an organism, we find a direct imaginative experience of the etheric world. As Ronald Brady phrased it, Goethe’s methodology teaches us to hear the living organism as the melody that moves between the notes. As noted, this third volume of The Perennial Alternative consists of a series of independently written essays. The first, “Goethe’s Italian Discoveries as a Natural Scientist (The Scientist in the Underworld),” follows Goethe to the beginnings of his Italian journey in Padua, where his contemplations before a date palm in the botanical gardens beget what in time would become The Metamorphosis of Plants. Using a matrix of images from Goethe’s biograsummer-fall issue 2021 • 45