©2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Contents

Introduction
Ancient Wisdom Traditions
Goethe’s Color Theory
The 12 Branches
1/12 Science and Divination

Introduction

Holistic science is nothing new. It is truly the oldest of science traditions, was traditionally called Hermetic Science, thousands of years ago, and today is called Perennial Science in deliberate parallel to Aldous Huxley’s excellent research on Perennial Philosophy.

— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1970).

If this is a strange idea to the reader, which wouldn’t astonish me as this knowledge is still today hermetic, I recommend reading The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928/2003) by Manly P. Hall, which is about the best that was ever written on the subject. In addition, this precious and well-written book contains a wealth of references for further research.

I will demonstrate in this article that there is no functional difference between Huxley’s definition of perennial philosophy and the concept of perennial science as this difference came up because of a purely terminological confusion. To be true, in ancient times, philos sophia, the love of wisdom, to translate it literally, was considered the Queen of Sciences, something like an overarching or header science, while at that time, according to the prevailing holistic paradigm, was called philosophy.

Behold, that term was not defined in the sense it is used today, and done today, and was done already in the last three centuries, that is, as a system of intellectual speculation!

To repeat it, initially philosophy was a science, that followed rigorous research principles, and had nothing to do with speculation.

This was so until Aristotle, who actually was the first philosopher who relied almost exclusively on intuition to formulate his concepts, which is why I consider him as the first philosopher according to the modern definition; he was perhaps the first brilliant speculative thinker in human philosophical history. By the same token, I say Aristotle was not a scientist, not only in the modern definition, but also not when we apply the concept of perennial science. Aristotle was not pragmatic in developing his concepts, he was speculative as today science fiction authors are. That is why I refuse to call him a scientist, while Heraclites, his contemporary, was well an original scientist.

I would like to elucidate some of the elements that both perennial philosophy and postmodern science share, as ingredients of a soup that today we came to call holistic science.

As Fritjof Capra has shown in his bestseller The Turning Point (1987) and also in his books The Web of Life (1997) and The Hidden Connections (2002), we are in the midst of a complete paradigm change in science which will eventually declare wrong and obsolete four hundred years of scientific error in the form of so-called ‘exact,’ the former Cartesian, reductionist science.

My desire is to show that there are basically twelve, and probably more, ingredients and characteristics of holistic science that are presently more and more embraced, as we mature into new science which is of course just a modern vintage of perennial science.

Ancient Wisdom Traditions

Ancient traditional cultures and their scientific traditions, and what we today call perennial philosophy were holistic; they embraced flow principles, they looked at life as a Gestalt, and derived conclusions from the observation of the living and moving, not from the dead. Here are some of the most important of these traditions:

• Ancient Sumer
• Ancient Babylon
• Ancient Egypt
• Ancient Persia
• Ancient Greece
• Ancient Rome
• Ancient India
• Ancient China
• Ancient Japan
• Ancient Ottoman Empire (Ancient Turkey)

Goethe’s Color Theory

There was one genius in human science history, most of the time overlooked by our arrogant scientific pulpits, who was the real precursor of holistic science, at a time when everybody got Newtonian reductionism thrown over the head like a Cartesian mass-medicine. No, it was not Reich, while I always thought it was Reich, but just as a matter of timeline, there was one before him. It was the German lawyer, poet, philosopher and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).

Goethe, besides other scientific novelties, developed a color theory that was in flagrant contradiction with Newton’s reductionist paradigm, and that is why Goethe was shunned by the mainstream science hierarchy not for decades, but for centuries.

And Goethe knew why he had to oppose Newton!

Though the merits of Goethe’s color science, as advanced in his text Zur Farbenlehre, have often been acknowledged, it has been almost unanimously proclaimed invalid as physics.

How could Goethe have been so mistaken?

Dennis L. Sepper shows that the condemnation of Goethe’s attacks on Newton have been based on erroneous assumptions about the history of Newton’s theory and the methods and goals of Goethe’s color science.

By illuminating the historical background and the experimental, methodological, and philosophical aspects of Goethe’s work, Sepper shows that Goethe’s color theory is in an important sense genuinely physical, and that, simultaneously as poet, scientist, historian, and philosopher, Goethe managed to anticipate important twentieth-century research not only in the history and philosophy of science, but even in color science itself.

— See Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton (1988), and Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton (1986).

The 12 Branches

• Science and Divination
• Science and Energy
• Science and Flow
• Science and Gestalt
• Science and Intent
• Science and Intuition
• Science and Knowledge
• Science and Pattern
• Science and Perception
• Science and Philosophy
• Science and Truth
• Science and Vibration