Goethe and Steiner as Pioneers of Emergence

Although short, this essay provides some significant insights into the evolution of the concept of emergence, grounding it in a qualitative holistic understanding. Like Andrew Lohrey, Amrine also uses Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos as a point of departure, noting that the book created a storm of controversy but no persuasive rebuttals or indeed adequate recommendations from Nagel himself. Amrine proposes that he could have found what he was looking for in the epistemology of Schelling, Goethe and Steiner as well as the work of von Uexkull as a forerunner of biosemiotics - organisms responding to signs in their environment.

Goethe pointed out that new faculties in the human mind (a cognitive metamorphosis) were required to understand emergent processes since 'all emergent phenomena are realisations of living potentialities' within the Urphaenomenon - in modern terms this would be a supervenient downward causal power enabling an immanent generative order (natura naturans) - also a qualitative understanding of the whole and its dynamic life process. For Steiner, time itself is emergent, time itself becomes. Amrine then explains in more detail some central features of Steiner's 1886 book on Goethe's theory of knowledge where it is consciousness that ultimately makes phenomena real. Here, strikingly, 'epistemological emergence is ontological emergence, because it is intensified thinking that occasions the emergence of the new phenomena of the organic world.' The author concludes that 'already in 1886, Steiner delivered the epistemology of emergence for which today's theorists are still searching in vain.' This is quite a claim, but I believe a valid one that deserves wide circulation.