Fugitive

Fugitive: Three Covid Pieces: A Goethean Appreciation

“Following Goethe, I do not seek explanation, and I do not write about anything that is separate from me. My own development through these years, and the developments threading these three years themselves, are one. I try…to portray the character of the emergent social predicament that we are all participants in and responsible for.” — Allan Kaplan

Emerging from a unique Goethean approach to human experience—developed over a lifetime, applied here to life during the first three years of the Covid era, from a mountain in South Africa—Allan Kaplan’s Fugitive is both a poetic record and a contemplative, scientific roadmap.

In striving to make himself a vessel for sensing the dynamics of our time—the struggle for meaning, the will toward freedom, the experience of powerlessness and surrender, and the urge to defend and secure the capacity for human thinking and discernment—Kaplan allows the profound questions of our time to arise and be explored in thought that is free of the compulsion to arrive at fixed conclusions.

In pondering the elements of nature and the laws governing them, we find the active forces of life and health; we glimpse wisdom at work and, often, beauty. One might be reminded: we, too, are a part of nature, and this wisdom of nature, encountered competently, may serve as a guide in facing the tasks of recognizing, embodying, and preserving the essence of our humanity in these darkening times.

Here is a little book—an example in practice—to help strengthen our humanity.

C O N T E N T S:

Prelude

Metamorphosis: The Sense for Truth
Engaging Darkness: The Challenge of Mani
Fugitive

Endnotes

About the Author

Allan Kaplan works in the sphere of social renewal as a facilitator, teacher and writer. He focuses primarily on developing Goethe’s organic, holistic approach to pedagogy for social sensibility.  His work attempts to realize the full consequences of true participation. He works internationally through The Proteus Initiative, established as a vehicle for developing the Goethean approach to fully fledged social art. He is a cofounder of a mountain refuge, Towerland Wilderness in South Africa, which provides space for contemplation and life through communion with nature. Allan Kaplan is the author of The Development Practitioner’s Handbook (1996) and Development Practitioners and Social Process: Artists of the Invisible (2002) and coauthor with Sue Davidoff of A Delicate Activism: A Phenomenological Approach to Change (2014). He lives on the mountain with his partner Sue Davidoff.