Finding the Thresholds

Thresholds: Ten Anthroposophical Studies, by Frederick Amrine (Keryx 2017, Ann Arbor)

Review by Frederick Dennehy

In “Before the Law,” the parable recounted in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, “a man from the country” stands before the open door to “the Law,” asking for admittance. He is confronted by a doorkeeper, a threshold guardian who denies him admittance, at least for the present. There the man from the country sits waiting for days and years. He remains at the threshold for his entire life, wearying the doorkeeper with his importunities, seeking to persuade even the fleas on the doorkeeper’s fur collar to intervene for him and gain him admittance. As he is about to die, he asks the one question that he has kept to himself for all this time: Since everyone hopes to reach the Law, why has no other person come to the door seeking admittance? The man from the country has become feeble and hard of hearing, so the doorkeeper has to bend down low to him and shout in his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was meant for you alone. I am now going to shut it.”

What follows is a review of Thresholds: Ten Anthroposophical Studies.

Frederick Amrine, the author of this remarkable collection of essays, tells us that what they have in common is that they represent thresholds—those “places where we can begin the arduous journey of self-transformation.” Robert McDermott, asked to identify “the core practice” of anthroposophy, chose “transformation,” and I know of no other focus of attention more crucial for today’s anthroposophist. What Professor Amrine shows us in these essays is that we don’t have to share the shrunken destiny of Kafka’s man from the country. We don’t have to wait for sudden attainment to be thrust upon us after years of study. Transformation is attainable to us now, if we only have the will to look to the thresholds in thinking and feeling that are everywhere at hand and do the work that Rudolf Steiner told us in a hundred different ways and times that we are capable of doing.

What imprisons us in parables of paralysis and relegates us to parts in tales that never get told is what Coleridge called “the lethargy of custom”—what Steiner called “dead thinking.” It’s the arrogance of behaving as though the hard sharp light of ordinary consciousness were the only light, and that the only way to move through what St. John contemned as “this world” is eyes down and meek hearted.

There is no lethargy in what drives the studies in this collection. Nothing is taken for granted. Everything is up for grabs. Philosophy, the arts, science—these are not seen as ‘disciplines,’ but as defiant questionings. We are not here merely to apply concepts, but to make new ones. Artists are not performers but explorers. Audiences are not spectators and listeners but haunters of deep chasms of the heart, mad for the crossing. These essays range from the challenging to the daunting to the vertiginous, but their cumulative effect is one of bracing possibility, of optimism—which may well be an alternative name for anthroposophy’s core. If there is a message here it is this one: All things can be made new.

To make the new we have to clear away the old, and clearings are made here everywhere. Owen Barfield is called upon to disabuse us of the pretentious canard that what fundamentalists of all stripes call the ‘literal’ always was and always will be of the tired level of practiced pundits and casual gossipers, and to show us that the world cannot be caught and dissected, because it is always changing form and slipping away, always evolving along with our consciousness. There is a succinct appreciation of Thomas Kuhn, who should be “treasured” by anthroposophists, not only for dismantling the fiction that science moves scrupulously in a studied path of logic, but for his a confirmation of Steiner’s understanding of the place of intuition in the best science. Prof. Amrine includes his tribute to Thomas Nagel’s courageous Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False—courageous because Nagel, still a card-carrying atheist and anti-supernaturalist, in skewering the reflex reductionism of Big Scientism, knew that he would have to endure the petty ripostes of wounded true believers. But Nagel is intellectually honest, and shares Prof. Amrine’s aversion for narrow, sclerotic and doggedly centripetal thought. And there is Deleuze. Gilles Deleuze is a notoriously difficult, at times seemingly opaque writer, but for Prof. Amrine the challenges of his language reflect his achievement of body-free thinking, of etheric apprehensions for which we do not yet have names, and his cognitive artistry in the creation of concepts.

The best art is a gateway to the etheric, to cognitive feeling, and we are introduced (or re-introduced) to two of the twentieth century’s more revolutionary artists, the anthroposophical visual artist Joseph Beuys, and the movement artist Loie Fuller, not an anthroposophist but still a spiritual scientist, and perhaps a proto-eurythmist. And through immersing ourselves in “Music as a Threshold Experience,” which draws on the insights not only of Rudolf Steiner but the theorist Victor Zuckerkandl, we can begin to understand music as living metamorphosis and an experience of the etheric, if only we can reach that rare place where the mind is able to turn. That is to say, if we can wake up.

The last two essays in this collection display the author at his imaginative best. “Traumarbeit and Umstulpung: Two Kinds of Metamorphosis in Faust” is far more than a study of trope and meaning in Goethe’s masterpiece; it is an exploration of two fundamental kinds of transformation. As to Traumarbeit, there is dream, “myth writ small,” and myth, the dreams of nature’s unconscious writ large. Umstulpung is a kind of ‘topological’ transformation “where the outside becomes inside and vice versa.” ‘Topological’ is not used here only metaphorically.

If it has not become obvious already in this review, Prof. Amrine is a polymath, and we are afforded a summary excursus into the mathematics of topology, with consideration, inter alia, of the mobius strip and the Klein bottle. Topology, he finds, is another name for ‘metamorphosis,’ and provokes a provisional solution to the epistemological riddle of duality: We “overcome duality by rising up into a previously unmanifest dimension.”

The final selection is “The Beauty of Anthroposophy, or: What’s Spiritual About Spiritual Science?” This essay shows anthroposophy, or spiritual science, to be more scientific than conventional scientific practice, which is in the process of being strangled in the coils of the reductionist paradigm, and has ceased to do its jobs of (1) rendering phenomena meaningful; and (2) providing a methodology of discovery, a gateway to the moment of insight. The author proposes three additional scientific conceptual categories: sublimity, beauty and elegance (not the jejune elegance of reductionism that privileges control over intelligibility, but the basic good of simplicity). It is refreshing to see diagrams of planetary pathways over the years, i.e., the ‘Rose of Venus’ and the “Shield of Mars,” treated as scientific allies specifically on account of their beauty, which is “integral” to their “intelligibility” and hence their meaning. “The Beauty of Anthroposophy” is itself a threshold to the transformation of our own understanding of the very reality of science.

And if you are looking for an introductory piece about Rudolf Steiner to show a friend, or an answer to the comeback, “Okay, if Steiner was such an overwhelming genius, why hasn’t anybody heard of him, there is no better place to go than the direct and comprehensive, “Discovering a Genius: Rudolf Steiner at 150.”

This book is available only on Amazon, and there are other titles of interest there under the same imprint. Don’t miss it.