Books and other publications

Fugitive

by 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— 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.

“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 participant in, and responsible for.”