Frederick Amrine

Goethe and Steiner as Pioneers of Emergence Frederick Amrine

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rudolf Steiner are shown to be the great pioneers of what today is called "emergence." Parallels with the great Danish semiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer are especially striking. We see all three figures working towards a non-Darwinian biology of freedom. The essay focuses of Steiner's first published ms., CW2; Goethe's Theory of Knowledge, in which Steiner supplies the epistemology that had been missing from Goethe's alternative science. Thus Steiner views Goethe as "the Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world."