Man or Matter |  | Author: Ernst Lehrs
Publisher: BLTC Press
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 311766
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
ASIN: B00126A4Y8
Publication Date: December 26, 2007
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Product Description
Man or Matter presents a sweeping survey of the development of man's present consciousness and it's reflection in his scientific world view. Lehrs shows a pathway through the development of man's scientific understanding -- bought at the price of estrangement from a participatory connection with the spiritual side of nature -- which recovers at each step the true meaning of man's scientific awakening and leads the reader to a liberating poise of insight and acceptance of science while at the same time, a realization of the spiritual possiblility alive in the seeming "material" world around us, revealed at every turn as the expression of spiritual nature lying behind the countenance of the world. Based on the principals of Goethe as expressed in his Metamorphosis of Plants and Theory of Color.
With an introduction to the BLTC Press edition.
Like all BLTC Press editions, this volume has been meticulously prepared and formatted for Kindle and is NOT a '"cut and paste" of public domain raw text.
R#2
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| Customer Reviews:
Good, but could have been much better October 19, 2000
Frank Bierbrauer (Cardiff, Wales, UK)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
`Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation, almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints...As facts and knowledge accumulate, the claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain sense diminshes'. So starts this very interesting work by Ernst Lehrs a long time student of Rudolf Steiner. This quotation is taken from a lecture Heisenberg gave in 1932 before the Saxon Academy of Science on the eve of Goethe's death, he continues : `The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as unimportant...'. That one of the great physicists of all time should say such things in a period of great advances in physics sounds strange to the ears of people brought up on the views of popular science as expounded by many scientists of today even when they themselves have nowhere near the kind of devotion to the normal reductionistic, mechanistic cause which is the only one the public is really aware of. The shift in the focus away from a purely mechanistic paradigm is a symptom of the diffusion of the "new" view now being taken even in scientific circles. Here Heisenberg really states two important consequences of normal science, one : the need for a careful investigation of the basis of science itself, what has now come to be known as the philosophy of science, and second : the need for another approach which avoids the strong feeling scientists get of separation between the phenomenon as it is actually experienced and the theory used to explain it. Here Goethe enters the fray as a poet and playwrite of exceptional ability who attempted to do just that, ie approach the phenomenon from another perspective.During his life Goethe avidly studied many aspects of science such as optics, botany and geology. Lehrs in his book takes the ideas of Goethe and Steiner as a starting point with the text separated into several sections. In the first few chapters he outlines his idea of the onlooker consciousness which most people live in todays world. Lehrs supports his views with those of Eddington, Heisenberg and others. As such this concept is valid and well developed throughout. He intersperses this with interesting asides which are of value in themselves. He further attpemts through a sort of conglomeration of psychological concepts and humanistic ideas a description of the emergence of this view. He discusses Goethe's ideas (at least at the beginning) in a manner not alien to Goethe himself or anyone who is familiar with his philosophical standpoint which is akin to phenomenology. This section ends in the potential hope of further fascinating ideas. He goes on to discuss Kant and Hume in their critiques of man's ability to encompass the universe in his knowledge. Then unfortunately the wheels seem to fall off and I can simply agree with another reviewer when discussing Steiner who notes that much of what is said in the literature on Goetheanistic science is first full of truly remarkable and mind shattering ideas which are full of worth and potential but then the researchers themselves start to follow the same path as others before them eg they become obssessed and refuse to look at other views or even facts which stand before them, instead they diverge off into flights of fancy astonishingly free of evidence and full of fantasy and old traditional forms of thought which are taken out of context and used in superficial ways eg the four states water, fire, air, earth. One obtains a kind of higgildy piggildy mixture of good ideas and fantasy with no firm base. Its too bad since so much could have been forthcoming. Having made this critique nonetheless the book is full of amazing concepts which deserve attention such as the way to look at Keplers formulae and the structure of the solar system, or the non-local aspects of projective geometry. In this vein the book must be read and completed to ensure none of these interspersed gems are missed and the fantasies ruled out or read over. I'm not implying here that these ideas are completely vacuous, but they are alien to Goethe's own philosophy and the scientific spirit which it engenders, or even the one present today. A book well worth reading for the good bits.
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