The Perennial Alternative by Frederick Amrine, review by Frederick Dennehy

Frederick Amrine, The Perennial Alternative: Episodes in the Reception of Goethe’s Scientific Work; Adonis Press, 2021, 279 pages.

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 backgrounds 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 biography of that time, Amrine demonstrates the initiatory genesis of Goethe’s mature science. Here in the South, Goethe will descend into the realm of the Mothers, to experience, through his own “stirb und werde” [Eng.: “die and become”] transformation, the transformative processes of nature.

“Goethean Intuitions” explores Goethe’s philosophical development. While it has been said that Goethe had little interest in philosophy, that lack of interest extended only to the prevailing Enlightenment philosophies of his own time. Amrine shows that Goethe was strongly influenced by Spinoza, not only as a philosopher of ideas, but as an intuitive practitioner and exponent of self-transformation as a mode of cognition. Spinoza before Goethe, and Steiner after him, each understood that for knowledge to ascend from inference to actual seeing, the knower must first attain to the moral disinterestedness and pure transparency of geometry. It was Spinoza, too, who led Goethe to realize that in order to comprehend nature as dynamically alive, as natura naturans, 2 he must undertake the dogged work of mentally reenacting the gradual genesis of the organism.

2 “Nature naturing”—nature being or doing what nature does, as opposed to natura naturata—“nature having been or done nature”—the product or effect that remains after the living activity itself has finished.

In “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” Amrine invokes Thomas Kuhn 3 to argue that real progress in science comes not within paradigms but between them. If this is the case, change will happen not from data accumulation or the reduction of one way of seeing to another, but in the rigorous and controlled development of new ways of seeing. This is certainly true of Goethe’s phenomenological method. If the Urphanomen 4 is not an abstraction but an activity, then it can be realized—it can occur—only through exploration and practice. The intuitive knowledge indispensable to an understanding of organisms may be assisted through systematic training in openness and sensuous awareness of the scientists themselves, so that they can open new organs of perception.

3 Philosopher of science (d. 1996); his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) popularized the idea of “paradigm shift.” 4 “Primal or fundamental phenomena.” 5 An experimentum crucis is a decisive test of a theory.

“Methodological Issues Regarding the Experimentum Crucis”5 considers the prism experiments of Newton, impossible to replicate, which he nonetheless invoked as proofs of his color theory. It appears that Newton was secretive about any “narration” of his experiments, preferring “idealized descriptions,” and disclosing only the vaguest criteria for the positioning of the equipment he used. Goethe, on the other hand, who believed that all observation is implicated in theory, and that the observer “grows into and together with” the phenomena, saw Newton’s posturing as an artifact of dogmatism, and opposed it unreservedly. His own experiments were open for anyone to see and repeat.

Readers may hope that chapter 6, “Goethe and Steiner as Pioneers of Emergence,” will someday ripen into a book. Emergence, as Amrine presents it, is a science in search of an epistemology. Goethe radically insisted that theory must appear within experience. But it was Steiner who understood emergence as a direct function of consciousness, what ultimately makes phenomena real. What is self-organizing, and seems to emerge mysteriously from below, is in fact the result of thinking, the irreducible power that frees living things from the determined status of the inorganic. Given the intense interest today in the phenomenon of emergence in philosophy, science, and systems theory, as well as in art and the humanities, it may be that a new interest in Rudolf Steiner will also be emerging. But this of course has been said before.

In “Seeing Ideas: Goethe’s Science and Modernist Aesthetics,” the argument is not that Goethe’s influence has been responsible for modernist architecture or post-impressionist movements in painting, but that these schools may be better understood in light of Goethe. His call on us to overcome the single perspective of naïve realism, and to increase our perceptual agility, provides us a lens for viewing modern art. For Goethe, archetypal phenomena are revealing because they are not products of perception but represent the very process of perceptual activity. So, for instance, the seeming distortions in Cezanne’s later paintings may be seen as attempts to paint the process of perceiving along with the product. Similarly, cubism should never be confused with a formalistic dissolution into intersecting planes. Nor is it about the structure of the object itself. Rather, it is about the constructing of a kind of “intimate seeing” of the object.

“The Music of the Organism” is Amrine’s discussion of the four “modern” Goethean figures—Uexkull, Merleau-Ponty, Zuckerkandl, and Deleuze—referred to earlier. Zuckerkandl, the only musicologist among the four, gives us the ruling metaphor. Music, like any archetypal phenomenon, is an outgrowth of nature, both alive and ideal. It gives direct experience of what Rudolf Steiner calls formative forces, life itself.

These four thinkers, in their highest flights of thinking, at times may appear almost to “escape from the body,” at least from the lower self. In the new causality of emergence, in which consequents are “fundamentally and qualitatively different” from their antecedents, creative thoughts come forth that “build up their own bodies.”

In “Readings in the Text of Nature: Three Contemporary Goetheans,” we see the “gentle empiricism” of Goethe at work in the research of three contemporary scientists: Jochen Bockemuhl in botany, Wolfgang Schad in zoology, and Theodor Schwenk in the phenomenology of fluid media. Goethe, far from being hostile to science generally, saw the limitations of Galileo’s mathematical reading of nature, and devised an alternative, a method that recognizes the intentional workings of the mind in structuring experience, and allows the phenomena themselves to guide that activity. The rigorous, painstaking work of these scientists is confirmation that Goethe was every bit as much a scientist as Galileo or Newton, but a scientist of qualities rather than quantities.

“Goethe’s Epistemology of the South: A Response to Papers by Arthur Zajonc, Jeffrey Swinkin, and Ferdinand Bubacz” looks to the future of Goetheanism in other enterprises through the lens of legal theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. “The South” is Santos’s name for every possible connection to nature and other human beings that is not already finished and interred by a monoculture that paralyzes whatever it touches. It is also the physical and epistemological journey that Goethe himself took, which awakened him from his scientific slumber. To enter sympathetically into the phenomena means to be willing to approach all phenomena passionately, with surprise and wonder, realizing that “only when we start thinking with love, thinking like a rose, will our thinking begin grow, to proliferate.”

In keeping with his first two volumes, Amrine includes here a bibliographic essay that examines some of the important works that have appeared about Goethe’s scientific studies over the last thirty years, both in German and in English. His summaries can be blunt, which is all to the good; he is not one to suffer fools. And it is especially good to see reviews of anthroposophical studies that stand with distinction next to conventionally academic ones.

Of all the essays, “Goethean Method in the Work of Jochen Bockemuhl” may be the most valuable. Anthroposophical texts often tend to bridge, to reach out to the student or the open minded layperson to find points of affinity, in order to remove obstacles to the contemporary appreciation of Rudolf Steiner. The disadvantage to this approach is its tendency to domesticate the wondrous and the arcane. Not here. Amrine invites the reader to practice, using a text from Bockemuhl, “a little Goethean morphology,” with himself as guide. This is a splendid exercise, neither in interpretation nor in explication, but simply in seeing.

It is in the course of such exercises that the ‘living tradition’ of Goethean thought comes alive for the reader. The concept of the ideal manifesting itself in and through empirical phenomena may be the key to Goethean science, but experiencing it is the reward. We have to do the work.

Frederick Dennehy is associate editor of being human, a retired lawyer and active thespian, and a class holder of the School for Spiritual Science.