Formative Powers of the Living

Paths to a realistic natural science

Wolfgang Peter 1998

Article Source: https://www.anthroposophie.net/peter/bildekraefte.htm

Foreword

This small text is aimed at everyone who turns to nature with an open heart and wants to understand its origins in the abundance of shapes that spread out before our senses. The natural research of the last decades and centuries has enriched our knowledge of the sensory world with almost immeasurable details and revealed much of the beauty of nature, which can be seen deep in the microscopic dimensions of the tiniest living creatures as well as in the distant heights of the universe our modern telescopes advance ever further. Natural laws, which have emerged from the struggling thinking of many generations of researchers through the observed phenomena, are supposed to regulate all natural events and have general application for all kingdoms of nature, whether they are stones, plants, animals or even people.

There should be no doubt about all that has been brought to light with so much effort, but can even the living form of the simplest living being, or even just a crystal, be derived from the generally valid laws of nature? Do these laws help us to understand why the lily family has three-rayed flowers while the rose family has five-rayed flowers? Can you explain to us why an apple tree grows apples and not pear-shaped fruits? When it comes to the shape of a living being, reference is often made to the genetic code, and today it is part of general education to know that the “blueprint” of a living being is written down in its genes. But can the apparent shape of a rose or a frog actually be rationally derived from the genetic code? As many scientists admit, many questions remain completely unanswered.

This work is particularly dedicated to the living form, the changing shape and the “forces” that form it. It is clear that only brief suggestions can be given in so few pages. Only small hints can be given that draw attention to the fact that one must look at nature with different eyes than usual if one wants to approach the creative power that reigns within it. And not only looking, but also thinking itself must become different, more lively. Current scientific thinking, which is exemplary in its internal consistency, has often become so rigid and abstract that it can only understand dead things. It is therefore ideally suited to our modern, high-tech world, but life itself remains alien to it.

Goethe and other thinkers, but especially Rudolf Steiner, have shown that a different view of nature is also possible, to which living things can open up in a consistent way, without insulting modern reason. Technology is putting more and more dead things into the world, and people are proving themselves more and more as masters of the earth – this should not be blamed; But it is all the more necessary that what is alive in nature must be brought to bear. Only in this way can future development be beneficial. Being master of the earth also means wanting to be its intelligent caretaker!

Nature – the thoroughly living thing

Nature spreads out before our senses in many different ways: as a mineral kingdom, as a plant, animal and finally also as a human kingdom. One will readily admit that plants, animals and people are living beings, but the apparently dead mineral kingdom is also included in the circle of living creative forces. An object is only truly dead if it is largely removed from living interaction with the environment. A single mineral, a single crystal, may come close to this state; In fact, it is also embedded in the great cycle of shaping forces that maintain and at the same time reshape the earth. On its own, the mineral as we find it in nature remains incomprehensible. Not the individual mineral is alive, but the mineral world taken as a whole is constantly being transformed in a living manner. If this were not the case, we would only find more degradation processes in mineral nature, only more erosion. However, these are still countered by constructive, mineral and ultimately mountain-building processes, although it must be admitted that the earth was much more alive in geologically older times than it is today. James Lovelock (1) , one of the few contemporary scientists who steadfastly views the Earth as a living being, compares the contemporary Earth to a sequoia tree; Although it consists of almost 97% dead woody matter, it is undoubtedly still alive – the situation on Earth is similar.

In fact, in earlier times, nature was always understood this way. The Latin word “ natura ” already points us to living creation, to being born. Nature is “ that which has become and grown without any outside intervention ” (2) .

Life is the central principle of nature .

Even if life is the central shaping principle of nature, it is not the only one at work in nature. Downward, the dead emancipates itself from the living natural cycle, which already points us to a subnatural realm . As will be shown later, the human spirit reaches upwards into a supernatural realm . And already in the instincts and feelings of the animals something emerges that is no longer mere life. Experiencing is more than just living. Although these are phenomena that are peculiar to individual kingdoms of nature, it remains clear that life is the principle in which all kingdoms of nature participate to a greater or lesser degree. If we want to understand nature, we must first of all understand life. So what we need is an exact knowledge of living nature, or, in short, a natural science that is suitable for life .

We lack a realistic natural science!

It is often claimed that today we live in a scientific age . When you look at it, that’s not true at all; Natural scientific disciplines such as physics, chemistry, molecular biology and the like determine our modern life and are also fundamental to the prevailing worldview, but are we really dealing with a knowledge of nature ? Is the central design principle of nature, life, actually understood here? According to many leading scientists, this is precisely not the case. Although we know an abundance of details that are characteristic of living beings, all of this doesn’t quite fit together into an overall picture of life. Life , as science had to realize, cannot be defined by scientific terms:

” As scientists, we are still unable to give a definition of a living system or organism. We are only able to assign certain properties to living systems. However, many properties of living organisms have not yet been sufficiently researched and cannot be specified precisely. ” ( 3)

However, this is not a temporary problem, but rather a fundamental problem in the “scientific” way of thinking applied to life. As will be explained in more detail, it is in the nature of living things that they cannot be thought of in a limited way, that is, they cannot be defined. It is the method of current “natural science” itself that prevents it from grasping life and thus nature. With the research methods currently in use, it is only possible to grasp, in a truly unparalleled manner, that which is dead, which appears most purely in the machine world that has been created by humans in a way that has never existed before. So, if you want to speak precisely, it is not a natural science that shapes our age, but rather almost exclusively a technical science developed on a large scale .

Today we do not have a natural science that understands life, but rather a technical science that manipulates the dead.

Only those who view a living being as nothing more than an extremely complex technical apparatus can come to a definition of life, as can be found, significantly, in a standard biology textbook:

” Living beings are those natural bodies that possess nucleic acids and proteins and are able to synthesize such molecules themselves. ” (4)

The materialistic concept of modern life sciences

Paradoxically, it is precisely the life sciences, such as biology itself, but especially human and veterinary medicine, that are particularly stubbornly clinging to the basic materialistic ideas that have shaped the last century, which are now actually already outdated. And this trend is not currently subsiding, but rather is progressing more and more. For example, the “intuitive” diagnostic ability of the good family doctor is increasingly taking a back seat to the highly developed and correspondingly expensive analytical equipment that only specialists can handle. The patient, taken as a whole person, disappears somewhere in the endless columns of numbers on the computer printouts. Likewise, the perceived shape that appears in nature, morphology, only plays a subordinate role in today’s biology and is increasingly being replaced by molecular biology . The distinction between individual animal and plant species, which was originally revealed through direct, albeit scientifically systematic, visual inspection, is currently being revised based on molecular biological and genetic studies.

Molecular biology is increasingly becoming the central basis of the life sciences !

For current scientific understanding, all phenomena of life rest more and more on a strictly atomistic-mechanistic basis, which, as many believe, moves life into the area where it can be technically manipulated and can be controlled as a supposed blessing for humans. Initial successes seem to have proven this mindset right. Just think of the discovery of penicillin and the antibiotics that are so widely used today. They are seen as the key to the fact that many life-threatening infectious diseases have been suppressed in our century. Doesn’t this prove that it was right, firstly, to assume that tiny, microscopically identifiable germs were the pathogenic source of infectious diseases, and secondly, to use purely material means, with the oft-quoted ” chemical club “.”? Wasn’t it an even greater success when viruses could be identified as even smaller pathogens using refined electron microscopic techniques, thus placing the vaccination therapy that had become common practice since Pasteur on a rational basis? Don’t the initial successes of rapid growth promise? developing genetic engineering will have unimagined possibilities in the future to adapt the living environment to human needs in a completely new way? The initial euphoria of the first pioneers of this then completely new medical-biological way of thinking can still be understood; today it has long since given way to the pragmatic insight that with such high-tech pharmaceuticals and… Diagnostics can simply do brilliant business. In addition, responsible researchers are starting to feel a sense of frustration here and there. It is becoming more and more clear that many of the supposed triumphs of scientifically oriented medicine were mere Pyrrhic victories and are already beginning to turn into their opposite. More and more pathogens that were already thought to be defeated are now proving to be more or less resistant to all known antibiotics. Chemotherapy for infections is increasingly becoming a neck-and-neck race between global pharmaceutical companies and the rapidly changing bacteria. Life, in this case bacteria, escapes the chemical cudgel. It is currently unclear how this development could be stopped. There are already some doctors today who are no longer willing to worship the sacred cow of modern medicine, vaccination therapy. They are of the opinion that vaccination not only generally does not provide protection, but also definitely makes many people sick! With entirely factual arguments, they prove that the serious and major epidemics of the past centuries had already declined significantly long before vaccinations were introduced, that the risk of damage caused by vaccinations is now usually greater than the probability of permanent damage to health caused by the disease in question, and that, finally, children in particular suffer severely and often with many side effects from prophylactic vaccinations (5) . The future will show how much of what modern genetic engineering promises will come true.

The refutation of classical materialism by modern physics

Classical materialism, as it grew in the 19th century and as it shapes the life sciences particularly intensively today, roughly speaking, reduces the entire world of sensory phenomena, and therefore also all of nature, to tiny, objectively conceived basic units Atoms, back. Their mutual situation and the strictly causal effect that they exert on each other should, at least in principle, make the entire macroscopically appearing world explainable. After the revolutionary results of modern physics, no serious molecular biologist of our time will probably fully support this picture, but in his daily research practice he follows it almost exclusively, pointing out that the microphysical phenomena discovered in physics are largely relevant to the molecular area in which he is interested are irrelevant.

In the meantime, however, there is increasing evidence that many of the phenomena observed in the subatomic regions can also be noticeable macroscopically – which, by the way, is actually self-evident, because otherwise they could not be detected with a measuring instrument that necessarily has macroscopic dimensions! In any case, such phenomena seem to play a much greater role in the sensually experienced world than was previously assumed.

So what does this new sub-sensory world look like that has opened up to physicists since the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries? As Einstein already showed at the beginning of our century, there is no absolute space that exists in itself and no absolute time, as Newton had postulated and as they have become the basis of classical physics. Space and time are directly and inseparably tied to the objects that appear in them. The concept of empty space, of absolute vacuum, has become unthinkable for the modern physicist. This supposedly empty frame in which the objectively imagined atoms are supposed to fly around, guided by strictly mechanistic laws, presents itself to him as a field of tension saturated with fluctuating, appearing and disappearing energies. The atoms rise out of this sea of ​​seething becoming and becoming better the elementary particles constituting them emerge as relatively stable islands. Since Einstein it has been clear that indestructible, eternal matter does not exist. Matter can be dissolved into pure energy, just as energy can temporarily condense into a material phenomenon. But what is “matter” anyway? How can you even imagine it? At least not objectively! This is perhaps the most important result of modern physics! From our everyday experiences we know that where one body is, there cannot be another body at the same time. Not so in the atomic world! Under certain conditions, hundreds, even thousands of atoms can be in one and the same place at the same time (so-called Bose-Einstein condensate). It is only thanks to an exclusion principle (Pauli principle) that is valid for the atoms with electrons that build up that atoms can appear spatially at all and can therefore be perceived as relatively separated objects and thus form the structure of a molecule that is recognizable to the chemist (a molecule is generally understood as a spatial arrangement of interconnected atoms). In fact, there are already chemists who doubt that molecules must always appear as a spatial shape (6) . That atoms in any case are not ordinary spatial ” things” is shown by something else: spatial objects, we are convinced, cannot appear in two different places at the same time. Atoms do exactly that in a certain way. If you irradiate atoms with light of a suitable color, you can transform them into a so-called . ” excited state “. They then absorbed light energy and thus became more energetic, so to speak. The original unexcited state of one and the same atom should have disappeared at least temporarily. In fact, it has already been experimentally possible to distinguish the excited and unexcited state of the same atom Atoms appear in different places at the same time. Atoms do not have any reality at all in the conventional sense if they are understood as things, that is, spatially objective, which is what the expression ” reality ” actually suggests (reality is derived from the Latin res = thing and is closely related to resistant , i.e. offering resistance, which is typical for solid spatial bodies). They are nevertheless sub-sensory realities that extend their physically perfectly verifiable effects into the spatial world – and, as just shown, occasionally in different places at the same time! What modern physics can teach us is that there can be realities that are not contained in spatial existence. The old particle concept, which describes atoms as spatially delimitable objects, has had its day:

” The particle concept of modern physics, which is nothing other than a variant of the substance concept of traditional metaphysics, thus turns out to be a concept that is ultimately unsuitable for explaining the experimental findings of particle physics. ” (7)

Herbert Pietschmann, full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, consistently speaks of “the departure into new realities ” (8) . However, and this is again a typical feature of modern physics, these effects do not occur in a causal manner, i.e. they cannot be understood according to the principle of “ cause and effect ”. It is almost characteristic of atomic and subatomic phenomena that they often occur spontaneously, that is, that spatial effects occur without spatially detectable causes. The best-known example of this is the spontaneous radioactive decay of atomic nuclei, which cannot be influenced by any external causes. In addition, in the subatomic world, and this is perhaps the most astonishing result of recent physical research, we never have to deal with local, that is, spatially strictly limited, effects. If you influence an atom or elementary particle (although the term ” particle ” should be treated with caution after the above explanations!) in any way, this has an immediate and completely timeless effect on all elementary particles in the entire universe . Of course, this cannot be verified experimentally in this totality, but individual examples of such non-causal long-distance effects are already part of modern physics.

Let’s summarize it in the words of Hans-Peter Dürr, physicist and long-time managing director of the Max Plank Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich:

” The break in our understanding of reality that the new physics demands is radical. This physics suggests that actual reality, whatever we understand by it, is fundamentally not a reality in the sense of a material reality…

The <uncertainty> (ie the non-causal nature of atomic phenomena; the author) is an expression of a holistic, a holistic structure of reality …

According to the new perspective, what is separated (for example through the idea of ​​isolated atoms) is not at the beginning of reality, but rather approximate separation is a possible result of a structure formation , namely: creation of disconnection through extinction in the intermediate area (Dürr 1992). The relationships between parts of a whole do not arise secondarily as an interaction between what was originally isolated, but are an expression of a primary identity of everything . A relationship structure is created not only through communication , a mutual exchange of signals, reinforced by resonance, but also, so to speak, through communion , through identification…

The holistic features of reality, as expressed in the new fundamental structure of matter, provide the decisive prerequisite for ensuring that the characteristics of life that are essential to us are not mutilated into mechanistic functions . ” (9) – but that is exactly what is currently happening in molecular biology and genetics!

Modern physics, which has penetrated far into the sub-sensory realm, has provided us with a bewildering wealth of completely unfamiliar phenomena. Life itself, which we are tracking down, will probably not be directly explained by this. But at least current physics provides a picture of matter that is fundamentally different from outdated materialistic views. The strictly causal determinism of the mechanical world view has been thoroughly swept away and this perhaps paves the way for recognizing how the actual creative forces of living things take hold of and shape matter that has become plastic in this way, and how ultimately the entire cosmos, the individuals, are involved in it earthly natural phenomenon!

The living and the dead – how do they fundamentally differ?

The dead

Sharply defined, rigid, solid objects most closely correspond to the idea of ​​a dead body. They neither change their shape on their own nor do they move on their own; they always require an external cause that has a causal effect on them (the principle of inertia known from classical physics). Dead bodies can be assembled into more complex structures whose rigid components can move relative to one another. But they can only be moved from a power center that keeps the otherwise dead parts moving. The mechanical clock with its gear train and the wound spring as a power center or the steam engine are typical examples of such machines . So all solidly defined bodies are largely dead, as is everything that can be constructed from them by putting them together. The form in which this happens is not immanent to the solid components, but rather it must be imposed on them from outside, primarily by humans. Gears do not automatically form from a certain amount of sheet brass, nor do they automatically assemble into a clock.

The shape of a dead object cannot be derived from its components or its material composition; it must be impressed on it from outside.

This seems to contradict the fact that salts, when they crystallize from a solution, give themselves their own form. Common salt, for example, which separates from a supersaturated aqueous solution, always takes on the unmistakable cube shape of its own accord. Iron pyrite (pyrite), the well-known golden yellow ” fool’s gold “, forms cubes, octahedrons or distorted pentagon dodecahedrons. Even though this mineral has a wide variety of shapes, certain distinctive shapes always emerge as if by themselves. And don’t crystals, bounded by very clear geometric surfaces, most closely correspond to our idea of ​​a dead object? But it is precisely here that appearances are most deceiving: if the crystal does not have to be shaped from the outside in order to take on its characteristic shape, then this is precisely a sign that it cannot be completely dead, at least in the process of its creation, but from a creative force that is alive to a certain extent, but which does not have a causal effect from outside, as when a sculptor carves a statue. On the other hand, and this will come as a surprise to many, the crystal shape cannot be derived from the material composition of the mineral. The fact that pyrite, for example, chemically consists of iron sulfide, does not explain why the ” fool’s gold” .” Crystallizes in cubes, octahedrons or pentagon dodecahedra. The macroscopic crystal shape that can be perceived by the eye cannot be deduced from the chemical formula obtained through analysis! The external conditions under which pyrite crystallizes, such as climate, soil conditions, temperature, etc., influence whether it is more like cubes or octahedrons, etc. arise, i.e. they modify the appearance of the crystal, but they cannot explain its distinctive characteristics either. Tell a chemist a certain chemical formula, as well as the conditions under which the associated substance should crystallize, and ask him to use it to explain it to rationally derive the crystal form that is forming – he will not be able to do this. He will perhaps be able to make certain statements about the short-range order that is formed, which arises through causal interaction of the material components – the so-called crystal lattice can be understood in this way in simple cases – the external shape , but the crystal habitus of the entire crystal is not! In fact, it is in crystallization that we see the process of dying, through which the living changes into the dead, in its purest form. As long as the crystal is still developing and growing, it is permeated by creative life forces, and the more this process progresses, the more the living dies into the solidified, dead form and thereby retains, as it were, the traces of the active life. How closely these formative forces that form the crystal are related to those that shape the plant world becomes clear when, for example, salt crystals separate from a thin layer of highly diluted solution, or when water vapor solidifies into ice on a cold disk. In the latter case, the well-known ice flowers are created, which clearly reflect vegetative growth forces. Isolated finished crystals can be said to be dead objects, but they still bear the traces of their becoming alive. Only glass-like, amorphous bodies no longer show these traces, although they too emerged from a living, flowing process. The dead is sufficiently characterized by its material nature. The external form it has has nothing to do with its inner being; it is impressed on it from outside. For living things, the material composition is of little importance (significantly, the basic biochemical makeup of all earthly living beings is almost identical), but their own form is crucial. A rose is not much different than a tulip, but they differ significantly in their lively, unfolding form. In order for living things to appear sensually, they must be permeated with material things, but this has nothing to do with their actual essence.

For the dead , the substance is fundamental; for the life , the developing form is essential.

If the shape of a crystal cannot be derived from its material basis, this is even more true for living beings such as plants, animals or even people. The external appearance of a living being cannot be derived from its genetic makeup, as some popular representations suggest. The genetic code is often referred to as the “ blueprint ” of the living being. But give a molecular biologist the entire genetic code of a particular creature; He will not even be able to deduce its external shape from this. The information stored in DNA is little more than a list of the proteins required by a living being:

” Hardly anyone disputes that even complete knowledge of an organism’s genetic makeup would be far from sufficient to predict its characteristics, ” says zoologist Ellen Baake (10) .

And JT Fraser specifies in his book “Time – Familiar and Strange” which is worth reading:

” Contrary to the assumption that certain physical characteristics are anchored in the genes, these wonderful dancing things do not convey the stature from the father, the happy nature from the mother. Nowhere was anything said about it in the course or copying of the original melody, how a cell is built, let alone the body. The original song, with many changes, is used only as a roadmap showing the ribosomes how and in what order they can teach amino acids to extract components from an existing environment so that they make proteins can. ” (11)

The fact that information about the proteins essential to a living being is stored in the molecules of DNA and can be accessed when needed is an indisputable, scientifically well-researched fact. Just as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or a rock concert can be recorded on a tape, a wide variety of proteins can also be encoded in the DNA. However, knowledge of this storage mechanism says nothing about the actual content of the stored information, just as no matter how well you know the function of a tape recorder, you cannot say anything about the music stored with it. Beethoven’s Ninth can never be derived from the construction plans of the tape recorder. That’s why Bernd-Olaf Küppers says quite rightly:

” Therefore, only the “existence” of biological structures can be explained in terms of natural law, but not their “suchness.” The “suchness” reflects the historical uniqueness of living systems and in principle evades a description according to natural law. This means: The The origin of biological information can be explained as a general phenomenon, but the concrete content of biological information cannot be derived from the laws of physics and chemistry. ” (12)

But it is precisely this concrete content that we must grasp if we want to understand how life manifests itself in its individual physical appearances. To stick with the metaphor, we are less concerned with the tape than with the music that is recorded on it. Modern biologists are more like tape designers than musicians, that is, they understand to some extent the physical and biochemical mechanisms used by life embodied on earth, but not life itself. This is in no way intended to diminish the importance of this research, but we must remain aware that what they can and cannot deliver to us!

The living thing

It was previously emphasized that the substance is decisive for the dead, but the dynamically developing form is decisive for the living. However, even the deadest substance is never completely without form, even though this is not intrinsic to it, but merely accidental, just as, on the other hand, the living form never appears to us sensually without substance. Nevertheless, we want to raise the bold question of whether a pure form force can exist completely apart from the material. We would then have to do with pure life itself. Of course, it cannot be perceived sensually, because the form only appears sensually on the material (but by no means from the material, as we have just seen). Is life, to put it in philosophical terms, substantial ? However, by substance one should not just understand something material, as is usually the case today, but one must refer to the more original concept of substance, which was still common in the late Middle Ages.

Substance is ” that which is through and in itself, not through another or on or in another. ” (13)

So can there be pure living form apart from and independent of material? What may initially seem paradoxical and downright abstruse to contemporary people can very easily be confirmed by an almost everyday phenomenon, which, however, receives far too little attention in terms of its meaningfulness. Let us take the light that radiates from luminous bodies, such as the sun or a light bulb, and illuminates the physical world. Through light, the world appears to us in countless sensually perceptible colors. But has anyone with sensual eyes seen the light itself, independent of all material bodies? You can recognize luminous and illuminated bodies with your senses, but you cannot see the light that spreads between them with your eyes! (14) The entire cosmos is filled with the radiant light of thousands of stars, and yet to us it appears deep black as absolute darkness. We notice the shining stars, but not the abundance of light that they pour into space! So we don’t see the light itself, but only its effects on the material. And these effects are the colors present to our senses. “The colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering. ” (15) , says Goethe. Anyone who might object that light can only be produced and emitted by material bodies will be taught otherwise by modern physics. At present, light mostly arises from material, luminous bodies, but there was once a time when the world consisted, so to speak, only of light, now taken in the broadest sense. And only gradually did the light, the light energy, ie the active light, partially condense into material phenomena, and matter can be dissolved back into light at any time. This is already contained in Einstein’s famous formula E = mc 2 , which states in a very abstract way that matter and energy can be mutually transformed into one another. Light is a primary reality, matter a secondary one. Light therefore by no means needs a material basis in order to exist. It is a reality, albeit a supersensible one, which is “through and in itself, not through another or on or in another “, that is, the light is substantial! Rudolf Steiner called the light ether this immaterial substancecalled, but it should not be confused with the light ether, as classical physics accepted it until the beginning of our century. Physically, this ether was thought of as an extremely fine, but ultimately spatial, material substance – and this idea ultimately turned out to be incompatible with the physical facts. However, the light ether that Rudolf Steiner speaks of is not a spatial and material substance, no matter how fine it may be, but a supersensory and supraspatial reality, which sends its sensually visible effects into the spatial world in the form of colors. If light can, indeed must, be viewed as a supersensible etheric substance, it still seems so unthinkable that something similar could also apply to life, to living formative power. We do not see life itself with our senses, but we become aware of its effects in the living nature! The living forms that appear to us sensually in nature are the deeds and sufferings of life, one could say, following Goethe.

In addition to the light ether, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly refers to such a life ether , and between the two there is the so-called sound ether . You can get a pretty good idea of ​​this sound ether through the phenomenon of “ Chladnian sound figures ” . Take a thin metal plate, sprinkle it evenly with fine dust and touch it with a violin bow so that it begins to sound and vibrate. Then the fine dust on the surface immediately begins to arrange itself into very characteristic, highly symmetrical patterns that depend on the excited pitch and the specific dimensions of the record. The higher the pitch, the more complex the resulting patterns become, in which the dynamic vibration patterns of the metal plate are reflected. Of course, the pattern also depends on whether you are painting a square, circular, or some other shaped panel. The pure sound itself is of a non-material, ethereal nature, but where it touches the material it appears in harmoniously spatially ordered vibrations. One can clearly see that the transition to an etheric form-forming principle opens up here. Sound forms are always highly symmetrical, just as crystal forms are in nature. In fact, minerals are primarily shaped by sound etheric forces. Plants, animals and people often show symmetrical shapes in their shapes, but what is even more typical for them is that this symmetry is often radically broken, resulting in even more complex, living shapes. The flower, taken by itself, is strictly symmetrical; At the lower pole of the plant, however, it is confronted by the root, which is designed completely differently. In between, the diverse leaves unfold, each of which has many elements of symmetry, but cannot be directly aligned with either the roots or the flowers. A thoroughly asymmetrical design feature is inherent in the living world, which affects the material components of living beings. For example, only the so-called left-handed amino acids form living proteins, while the mirror-image right-handed amino acids play practically no role in life.

In order for a spatially extended form to appear sensual, the etheric formative forces must take hold of the material world.

The etheric form-forming forces are not of a spatial but rather a temporal nature.

The musical sounds let us see this clearly. A melody has no spatial shape, it unfolds over time, it is a temporal shape . And only when the sound touches the material and causes it to vibrate do spatial figures emerge. By learning to understand the etheric forces in this way, we also come closer to the nature of time, and the following may also be interesting: from Einstein’s admittedly highly abstract theory of relativity it follows that the entire universe, from the perspective of light rushing through space at the speed of light, becomes one point without expansion shrinks, so that space becomes, as it were, spaceless. At the same time, time stands still. The beginning and end of the universe are given simultaneously for light. Heat , on the other hand, which is also not of material but of etheric origin, is, according to physics (second law of heat theory = entropy law), related to the arrow of time that we are used to, that is, with the fact that for us time flows from the past into the future. But if one passes into the area of ​​the sound ether and the life ether, then the usual direction of time is even reversed; Time now flows towards us from the future, and this is extremely important for everything living (the ” tachyions “, which were hypothetically accepted in physics, came to light in a distorted form; these are “particles” that are faster than light and move thereby moving backwards in time). What will only appear as a sensual phenomenon in the future is, in a certain sense, already ethereally effective in the present. For example, the form principle that will later make the flower appear is already intrinsically involved in the formation of the roots. In every living being, two time streams meet each other, one that comes from the past and one that counteracts it from the future. And as they flow into each other, they build up into the living temporal form that characterizes every living being.

In the spirit of Rudolf Steiner, and in accordance with the phenomena that can be observed in nature, we can initially distinguish three etheric substances :

Life ether , time flows from the future towards the past

Sound ether

Light ether , time stands still

Heat ether time flows from the past into the future

In this context, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake , who has now become quite popular in wider circles but is still little recognized in specialist circles, may also be mentioned. In a series of books he has developed his idea of ​​so-called “morphic fields” , which he sees as immaterial form-creating forces. Even if this hypothesis has not yet matured in detail to complete scientific clarity, it still has some remarkable features. Sheldrake sees these morphic fields not only as form-forming causes, but also as a kind of memory of nature. The more often certain forms manifest themselves in nature, the more intense the morphic field assigned to them becomes and the easier it is form will be realized in the future. As the experience of chemists often shows, completely new substances synthesized in the laboratory are very difficult to convert into crystalline form. The more often such crystallization succeeds, the more effortlessly it can be brought about in the future. Sheldrake proposes a series of experiments (16) to confirm this. In this context, Sheldrake speaks of a “ habit formation ” in nature.

” The novelty of the hypothesis of the causes of form formation lies in the idea that the structure of these fields is not determined by transcendent ideas or timeless mathematical formulas, but results from the actual forms of similar organisms of the past . For example, the morphogenetic fields of foxglove plants are characterized by Influences that emanate from earlier foxglove plants; they form a kind of collective memory of this species. Each specimen of the species is shaped by species fields, but also shapes these species fields and thus influences future specimens of its species. ” (17)

Sheldrake calls this phenomenon “morphic resonance”: the more similar an organism is to previous organisms, the stronger the morphic resonance, and the more such similar organisms there have been in the past, the stronger their cumulative influence; the morphic field is thereby stabilized. This is an effectiveness that spans space and time. According to Sheldrake, morphic resonance not only plays a role in the actual formation of shape, but also helps to consolidate certain forms of behavior. The more often and the more individuals of a species have practiced a certain behavior pattern in the past, the easier it will be for future specimens to learn it. Sheldrake’s hypothesis also sheds clarifying light on the so-called “prophetic forms” known from evolutionary research but little understood , i.e. on the fact that certain organic forms and functions occur several times in the course of phylogenetic development and completely independently of each other, i.e. without genetic continuity.

” This phenomenon puts the conventional view of evolution in the greatest embarrassment. The most famous and yet still insufficiently thought-through example are the mysterious precursors of mammals, which appeared very early – in the Permian – and disappeared again in the Triassic, i.e. long before the actual mammals (in the Cretaceous) unfold. ” (18)

The fact that certain formative forces are guaranteed for the future not through genetic inheritance, but through the immaterial morphic fields that are independent of a continuous physical manifestation does not seem implausible in view of the fact that, as we have already had to emphasize, there is no rationally comprehensible path from the Hereditary characteristics, the genes, lead to the finished form of a living being.

What Sheldrake’s thesis in no way explains, however, is how the first original form of an animal or plant species, or even just a crystal, comes into being. He describes how formative forces can be preserved and even intensified for the future; their origin and their inner lawful content remain completely open. This does not bring us any closer to life itself, that is, to the concrete meaning of the diverse formative forces. After all, and we should not lose sight of this, it is not insignificant for life how often certain etheric forms express themselves physically. If one wants to follow Sheldrake, one can therefore not only speak of a form-forming effect of the etheric forces on the physical material, but one must also assume an essential reaction of what is physically produced on the etheric world . She gains something by realizing herself physically.

Central forces and universal forces

The prefabricated rigid components of a dead mechanism are moved by a central power source . So it is controlled by central forces . At the same time, as we have seen, a dead object is a spatially limited body that is largely closed off from its environment and can, at least in principle, be perceived directly and completely by the senses.

In real life it looks completely different. A seemingly paradoxical question can make sense of this:

Can a living being be completely sensed?

To be more precise, can a rose or a tulip be perceived entirely with the senses. Of course, some people will answer hastily, I have seen many roses and tulips myself, both outside in the garden and as a fragrant bouquet in the vase. It will be easy to see that the rose cut from the rose bush is no longer really alive, but rather resembles a dead object. But what about the rose that unfolds on the rose bush itself? Don’t I immediately see the rich red of its flowers, don’t I smell its scent? But a completely different picture emerges when I step into the garden in winter; only bare, woody branches see my eye. It’s different again in spring, when the first reddish-green buds appear, and later, when the long shoots with their green leaves unfold more and more. And finally in autumn, when the last flowers have faded, the same picture does not appear again. Which of them is the “rose”, and which is it whole? First of all, the living rose is only possible in connection with the whole rose bush, so I cannot consider it in isolation from this if I want to grasp it as a living being. To see the rose, I have to look at the rose bush. However, over the course of the year this develops into very different phenomena, all of which are related to one another in accordance with the law. And not for a single moment can I say that this is the whole rose. Then I would have just torn out a single, completely incomprehensible image from a living, developing time organism. But I can only perceive directly with my senses here and now. Today I see with my eyes this phase of development of the rose bush, tomorrow another one, and none of them is the whole rose, but it lives together in all of them. It is not the rigid momentary form, but the livingly changing form that makes life! Our sensual gaze extinguishes the life of the rose and makes it appear to us as a dead object. Nevertheless, we are sure that the rose is alive, but only because we not only see it today, but also looked at it yesterday and the day before, etc. and remember it and notice how it has changed automatically. Although memory has past sensual things as its content, this is not the caseimmediately present. I remember not by looking sensually at the world, but by looking within myself. In addition to external sensory perception, there must be an internal mental perception if we want to understand living things. How Goethe, who dealt particularly intensively and fruitfully with the phenomena of life, cultivated this ability will be examined in more detail.

Another reason why living things cannot be completely sensed like a dead object is the following: the vital activity of every living being extends far beyond its physical limits. In order to thrive, a plant needs water and salts from the soil; it needs the carbon dioxide that it takes from the atmosphere and into which it exudes the oxygen it produces, thereby having a lasting influence. But it also needs sunlight for its photosynthesis, which in turn changes according to the rhythm of the seasons, which in turn is linked to the changing relationship between the earth and the sun. Not only the entire earth with its water cycle and its air envelope, but also the cosmic conditions are involved in the living development of the plant. And it’s not much different with animals. Although life can temporarily be maintained in relatively small, closed ecosystems, it is of course isolated from the diverse influences that have shaped life over millions of years of earthly development.

A living being can therefore never be viewed as a complete object, nor is it animated by a central source of power. What is characteristic of every living being is that it maintains a constant exchange of materials and energy with its environment, which affects even the smallest fibers. A machine also needs fuel and emits exhaust gases, but the actual structure of the machine does not take part in this. For every living being, constant interaction with ultimately the entire cosmos is essential; it is, so to speak, sustained by the entire world. The organism’s inner power development does not come from a center, but from the periphery, from the individual cells. It is not the heart that pumps the blood through the organism, as the mechanistic view holds, but rather the lively flowing blood gradually creates a center in the heart. The embryological development shows this very clearly: the blood circulation comes first, then the heart – and the same for all other organs. Life is not dominated by central forces but by universal forces , that is, forces acting from the periphery. It is not analysis, the breakdown of a living being into its parts, that can explain its living existence to us, but only a look at the entire nature that surrounds it. That doesn’t mean that anatomical or similar studies are therefore unnecessary, but they only show what has already fallen out of the life process and continues to exist as a dead inclusion in the organism, often for the benefit of the living being. One thinks, for example, of the largely dead skeleton of the human body animals and humans. Goethe had this comprehensive view through which alone one can approach life. Schiller once characterized this trait of Goethe as follows:

” You are looking for what is necessary in nature, but you are looking for it in the most difficult way, from which every weaker force will be careful. You take the whole of nature together in order to get light about the individual , they look for it in the totality of its manifestations Explanatory reason for the individual. From the simple organization you rise, step by step, to the more complex ones, in order to finally build the most complex of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By giving him to nature “Recreated, so to speak , you try to penetrate its hidden technology. ” (19)

Life itself can only be understood if one looks around and recognizes how the entire surrounding cosmos is reflected in individual living beings in a specific way. In this sense , the creative powers of living things can be understood as image-creating powers. However, these are not spatial images of the cosmos, but, as much has already become clear from the time character of the formative forces already discussed, they are the spatial imprint of purely temporal natural rhythms – this will still have to be followed in detail. The physical material, controlled by central forces, represents the plasticizable raw material through which the temporal shape of the creative forces can reveal itself in a lively, changing sequence of spatial forms. Pure substantial life itself is a completely spaceless time being; but by realizing itself physically, it appears to the senses in the spatial world. Therefore the physical form of the individual being can only be understood from the confluence of the etheric universal forces with the physical central forces. This creates forms in the physical world that the material world could never produce on its own, but the etheric world is also enriched, as we have discussed following Sheldrake.

The living, the dead

Perimeter forces central forces

Goethe’s method of capturing life

Visual judgment

The conventional scientific method is based on separating out a few data that can be ascertained as quantitatively as possible from the abundance of sensory phenomena presented to the eye and seeing whether they can be placed in a context that can be described in an abstract way. The non-quantifiable sensory qualities themselves are largely ignored; thinking itself is imageless. Wherever possible, an exact mathematical formulation of the laws of nature is sought. In this way, nature is first reduced to an abstract structure, which one then thinks about in isolation without again seeking connection to the full nature of nature. There is no other way to do this if you want to capture nature quantitatively, otherwise you would drown in an endless flood of data. Accordingly, one’s investigations always concentrate on a narrowly defined area, which one assumes is approximately independent of the rest of the world and can be understood on its own.

Goethe turned to nature with a completely different mindset. He devoted his full attention to the immediate sensory impressions; his thinking never strayed far from immediate perception, just as his viewing was never thoughtless. Goethe calls this the visual judgment. He writes about this in his essay “ Significant support through a single clever word ” (20) :

” Dr. Heinroth in his anthropology … speaks favorably of my nature and work, indeed he describes my way of proceeding as a peculiar one: namely, that my ability to think is objectively active, by which he wants to say that my thinking is not different from objects “that the elements of the objects, the intuitions enter into it and are penetrated by it in the most intimate way, that my viewing itself is a thinking, my thinking is a viewing , which process the friend mentioned does not want to withhold his approval. “

In contrast to the abstract thinking that characterizes contemporary natural science, one can speak of sensual-concrete thinking in Goethe’s work . Only in this way can nature be experienced in its reality. Perception and thinking each provide only one half of reality; it is only fully understood when thinking and perception interpenetrate. It is the fundamental error of modern science that it sees in what is externally perceptible, be it directly through the senses or indirectly through the most diverse measuring instruments, a reality of which it seeks to create a mental image. The external world appears objective and exists for itself; the thoughts that people form about it are viewed as subjective. In fact, subject and object are mere appearances, both of which are encompassed by actual reality. “ That side of reality is accessible to thinking , ” says Rudolf Steiner, “ about which a mere sensory being would never experience anything. It is not there to regurgitate the sensuality, but to penetrate what is hidden from it. The perception of the senses only delivers one side of reality. The other side is the thinking comprehension of the world. ” (21) The human cognitive faculty is designed in such a way that reality is initially revealed to him separately from two different sides, and therefore remains a mere appearance until he sees it united through its active intellectual activity and thus breaks through to reality itself, which, as we have already seen, encompasses more than mere material reality. How deeply man is able to penetrate the reality of the natural world will depend on how attentively he is able to perceive its sensual side and how much he is able to mentally respond to what he perceives so sensually through his more or less richly developed inner life. More and more aspects of reality can open up to people the more they train their powers of observation and the more they enrich their inner life. Goethe says quite rightly:

” If I know my relationship to myself and to the
outside world, then I call it truth. And so
everyone can have their own truth, and it is
always the same. ” (22)

Nature cannot be experienced in its reality through passive perception alone; it needs to be actively grasped through inner activity. And to do this, the human being must internally stimulate the same creative forces that have a physical creative effect in nature.

” The task of knowledge is not: to repeat something that already exists elsewhere in a conceptual form, but rather: to create a completely new area , which, together with the sensibly given world, only results in complete reality. This is the highest activity of man, being intellectual creation, organically integrated into general world events. ” (23)

Immanuel Kant postulated that the human mind is merely discursive . ” Discursive (from the Latin discurrere, “to diverge”) or successive is the name given to thinking that progresses logically from one particular idea to another and builds up the entire thought structure from its parts. In a broader sense, thinking is called discursive, insofar as it is conceptual, in contrast to intuitive knowledge through observation. ” (24) In this way, dead mechanisms can be explained through the causal interaction of their individual parts, and generally valid natural laws can also be established, but these general laws can never be used to individual special natural phenomenon must therefore appear to our understanding as accidental , as merely determined by the history of development. The general form of motion of a body orbiting the sun can be derived from Newton’s law of gravitation, but how many planets accompany the sun and at what distance cannot be determined from this. Although nature must necessarily conform to the general laws of nature, it must not understand its specific manifestations. This way of thinking still, and even increasingly, determines modern life sciences. The biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod gave eloquent testimony to this in his now classic work “ Chance and Necessity ” (25) .

After all, Kant also considered another type of understanding to be conceivable, even if it was fundamentally unattainable to humans:

” Now we can also imagine an understanding that, because it is not discursive like ours but rather intuitive , goes from the synthetic-general (the view of a whole as such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts; the So and whose idea of ​​the whole does not contain the contingency of the connection of the parts in order to make a certain form of the whole possible, which our understanding needs, which has to move on from the parts as general reasons to various possible forms that can be subsumed under them as consequences “According to the nature of our understanding, however, a real whole of nature can only be seen as the effect of the competing moving forces of the parts. ” (26)

Kant also calls such an intuitive cognitive ability “intellectus archetypus” , that is, an archetypal understanding. Goethe was aware that he had precisely such a sensual-supersensible, archetypal ability to see that Kant believed he had to fundamentally deny to humans. In his essay “ Inspective Judgment ” he responds to Kant’s quoted passage:

” It is true that the author seems to be pointing to a divine mind here, but if in the moral world we are supposed to rise to an upper region through faith in God, virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then the same is likely to be the case in the intellectual world It may be that by looking at an ever-creating nature, we made ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its production. After all, I had first unconsciously and out of inner drive restlessly pushed for that archetypal, typical thing, and I had even succeeded in constructing a representation that was in keeping with nature, so Nothing could now prevent me from courageously completing the adventure of reason , as the old man from Königsberg himself calls it. ” (27)

How Goethe made himself ready for this spiritual participation in the productive forces of nature will interest us in what follows. The archetypal character of his research method will occupy us later and take us far beyond what Goethe was able to achieve.

Exact sensual fantasy

As we have seen, it is in the nature of living things that they cannot be grasped purely sensually as a finished, complete form. What appears to the sensual gaze is only a tiny section of an unfolding temporal shape. In order to make the entire plant, which changes in life through various forms, present to me, I have to rely on my ability to remembersupport. Only by mentally reproducing the complete development of the plant within myself can its complete temporal shape be revealed to me. Goethe particularly cultivated this power of memory, which is more than just momentary sensual observation. And that is necessary, because how pale and abstract our everyday memory is, how lacking in detail. What we can become mentally conscious of past events is usually only a weak imitation of the original, immediate sensory experience, and what’s more, is usually quite distorted; Our memory is all too quickly taken over by the powers of imagination, which reshape what we once experienced in many ways, and the more fragmented the memory is, the more likely it is. Unconsciously we tend to bridge the gaps in our memory in highly imaginative ways, but this obscures our view of what really was. If one wants to grasp living things in a truly accurate way, then the memory must be educated and strengthened. Above all, the abstract, imageless, merely conceptually oriented memory must become a truly fully saturated, detailed, inner pictorial perception, which is as little inferior as possible to the intensity and fidelity of the immediate sensory perception. The prerequisite for this to be successful is that we become much more attentive and awake in our sensory perception than we are in everyday life. Modern people’s gaze is often so fleeting that they only really consciously see a little of what is spread out before their eyes. Rather than we suspect, we walk through the world as half-blind people. In order to really see something, you not only need healthy senses, but also active mental strength to grasp what is presented to your senses. Learning to see (and seeing is seen here as an example for all other sensory perceptions, of which the sense of sight is only the most prominent for us) must therefore be the first virtue that needs to be acquired. This is quite a contrast to the common scientific method, in which attentive perception is replaced as much as possible by an abstract measurement process. Especially those sub-disciplines of biology in which this sensible looking was still cultivated, such as morphology, are becoming increasingly insignificant compared to the molecular biological approach!So the modern “natural scientist” is often not faced with the richness of the natural world right from the start, but only with a highly abstract section of it. And the formation of scientific theories necessarily develops far away from direct sensory perception. The “Visual judgment is not developed in this way. Only a few modern natural scientists went in a similar direction, such as the well-known behavioral scientist Konrad Lorenz , who, however, can be judged very ambivalent overall, insofar as his research was based on such a ” gestalt perception ” (28). , they brought to light great facts, which he often completely misinterpreted on the basis of the philosophy of Kant, at whose place of work in Königsberg Lorenz also worked for a long time and whose thinking he was deeply concerned with; a significant deficiency that still exists in behavioral research today still clinging to it overall and has brought them unnecessarily into a materialistic channel that is usually not even openly acknowledged. And so terrible books like Franz Wuketit’s ” Damned to Immorality? “, which, on the one hand, is full of wonderful observations about how basic animal behavior continues to have an effect in human life without Wuketits realizing that, by being grasped by the human mind, they can become something completely different. Whoever the animal is on good terms with the human being In a Darwinian way, he does not understand at all the morality that humans can develop, but which animals neither have nor need, and it is no longer surprising that he ultimately equates the question raised in the title of his book with one must answer decisive calls. He sums up:

” We humans are monkeys and behave like that. The few millennia of our civilization have not been able to change much about that… So I consider the hope that the development of the human race will progress to ever better things to be “better” to be buried. ” ( 29)

Here, where morality is at stake, the limits of current natural research become apparent in two ways. If it is not able to grasp nature in terms of its living essence, it is even less able to recognize the spiritual core of man, which takes hold of his natural existence, transforms it and raises it above the animal level.

But back to what Goethe calls “ exact sensual fantasy .” The more and the more intensively the inner mental image of a plant that appears to the senses becomes present to us, and the more we succeed in doing this for the most diverse stages of development, the closer we come to its actual essence. This will be revealed to us if we now succeed in inner spiritual activity in lawfully transforming the individual stages of development of this plant into one another. We then let the plant grow within us again as an inner image. Only now we don’t look at it from the outside, but we ourselves actively participate in its development. In this way, we internally and spiritually appropriate the form-forming forces that exist within it and which form the physically appearing plant outside, and we connect with them. And when we finally look internally at the entire development of this plant, such as a rose or lily, as in a single moment, then its actual life, which is of a supernatural nature, is mentally present to us. What we see as a type of rose also acts as a formative force in all other roses that we encounter in the sensory world. The ” intellectus archetypus ” that Kant spoke of but denied to humans comes to life in us. What is internally perceived as a type of rose or lily, etc., cannot possibly be thought of as a rigid, immobile figure. It is a thoroughly living, moving principle that is effective as a unified principle in all parts of the plant that appears to the senses. Only because Goethe made this archetypal mind active within himself was he able to understand plant life in the way he recorded it in his theory of metamorphosis.

The metamorphosis of plants

In his theory of metamorphosis, Goethe dealt specifically with annual flowering plants because it seemed to him that the plant-forming principle was most clearly revealed in them. Goethe recognized that they are all built according to a uniform law. Behind the individual types such as roses, tulips, violets, etc. there is a common archetype that encompasses them all and which Goethe calls the original plant . There must be such a thing, he thinks, because otherwise how could we even recognize that they are all plants. In fact, in each of us, when we recognize a plant as a plant, this primal plant is alive within us. But normally we don’t really become aware of them, but only of the finished judgment: “That’s a plant.” We oversleep the actual living thought process that produces this judgment. But this is nothing other than the exact spiritual image of the primal plant itself that reigns in nature.

This is the first law that Goethe established in his theory of metamorphosis, that all plants are similar to one another because the original plant has a creative effect in all of them. And so every annual flowering plant develops from the seed in such a way that the shoot or stem is formed, from which the cotyledons or cotyledons immediately emerge, which are still largely unformed and appear as if stuffed with raw materials. Here material nature still strongly dominates the formative power. The leaves that emerge from the nodes on the shoot appear more differentiated, and they initially appear more richly developed the higher they are, i.e. the later they unfold on the shoot, only to simplify and become smaller again shortly before they bloom. Now the green sepals are formed, which are often similar to the leaves, but no longer form one after the other but at the same time and nestle closely to the shoot. The petals or petals themselves are similarly densely packed together. The type of plant is revealed most clearly in the flower. The petals are very delicately built and the green leaf color gives way to a wide variety of flower colors. Here, the formative power has largely triumphed over the material or refined it. This is followed by the stamens or anthers and styles, pistils or pistils. Finally, the ovary swells into a fruit, which contains the often very hard, almost crystalline seed inside, in which the essence of the plant is almost completely hidden.

The second law , which arose from Goethe’s view, states that although the same primordial plant is active in all plants, none of them are alike. Each obeys the common law, but each carries it out in an individual way. In such a way that all parts of the plant are changed equally in a characteristic way. If the shape of the leaves changes, the flowers must also look different, and so do the fruits, etc. A chestnut tree with its characteristic leaves can only bear chestnuts as fruit and not any that are shaped differently in any way. It is a good exercise for your inner perception to see how the shape of the fruit must change if you change the shape of the leaf step by step. Such knowledge is completely inaccessible to the current scientific method, for which it is ultimately a genetic coincidence due to the history of development that apples and not pears grow on an apple tree. The genetic engineers, because they do not know or accept these connections at all, believe that they can “construct” such chimeras that ultimately contradict the laws of life.

The third law that Goethe found is of central importance:

” It had occurred to me that the true Proteus, which can hide and reveal itself in all forms, lies hidden in the organ that we usually refer to as a leaf. Backwards and forwards the plant is always just a leaf … ” (30 )

The leaf is the basic form of the plant, with which nature only plays, so to speak, in order to produce its various individual organs. This relationship is immediately clear in the leaves, calyx and flower, but the stamens, styles, fruit and seeds are nothing more than modified leaves. But one should not assume that a physically real leaf will later transform into a sepal and then into a petal, but rather the design principle that determines the leaf is found in the calyx, flower, stamen, etc., lawfully transformed. It is an ideal process that is not normally directly observable with the senses. Only in some In a few cases, but very helpful for knowledge, what is otherwise only able to be grasped by living thought is shown directly to the eye. Goethe studied such cases particularly diligently. Ideally, the whole plant is always present in each of its parts, but only reveals itself on one side. This fact also illustrates the plants’ great ability to regenerate. In this context, Goethe was particularly interested in the plant Bryophyllum , which is able to sprout complete small daughter plants with roots and leaves on the edges of its leaves, and which has since been known as the ” Goethe plant “.

 

 

The fourth law , which results from Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis, is that of polarity and increase. From node to node, from leaf to leaf, the plant spreads in a rhythmic sequence and then contracts again. But it is not a question of a constant recurrence of the same thing; rather, the vegetal law that forms the plant appears more and more sensually in order to finally develop into a colorful and fragrant flower. It narrows again in the ovary and style. In a certain sense, the stamens show both tendencies at the same time: the individual stamen is a leaf narrowed down to a thin thread, but at the same time the stamens as a whole point towards the periphery. A final expansion occurs in the swelling fruit until the plant finally narrows completely into the often tiny seed. Area, line and point are the geometric elements that determine plant growth. The seed is almost point-shaped, then the linear shoot stretches out. The petiole extends out of the point-like node and finally widens into a broad surface in the leaf. There are no extensive spatial organs on the plant, with the exception of the fruit. This essentially distinguishes plants from animals, for which the spatially extended, closed shape is typical. But animals can also develop an inner mental life that plants lack. During fruit formation, the plant touches the area that becomes the main determining factor for the animal world.

The spiral tendency – the cosmic archetype of plants

Spiral and linear tendency: female and male principles

In the last years of his life, Goethe wrote a treatise “ On the spiral tendency of vegetation ”. The linear tendency with which the shoot unfolds is opposed to the spiral tendency with which the leaves attach to the side of the shoot. This creates the ascending spiral of leaves with their strictly mathematically ordered number of leaf positions, which is typical for each plant. In simple monocotyledonous plants, the ½ position is often found, ie two leaves are formed on one revolution, which are therefore offset from each other by 180°. The 1/3 position also often shows up. In the more complicated dicotyledonous plants there are more complicated position numbers, often around the 2/5 position, ie five leaves are regularly distributed over two full revolutions. In the flower, the spiral compresses into a circle, and here the number of petals is also strictly mathematically ordered. Monocotyledonous plants such as the lily family usually have three or six petals, dicotyledonous plants often have five, such as the rose family.

The spiral and vertical tendencies depend on and complement each other. Goethe sees the linear tendency as a male principle and the spiral tendency as a female principle. In fact, there is a fortunate example, the Vallisneria , in which the vertical tendency is unique to the male individual and the spiral tendency to the female individual. Goethe finally concludes:

” Let us now return to the most general and remember what we stated right at the beginning: the vertical and spiral systems are most intimately connected in the living plant; we now see that one turns out to be decidedly male, this one proves to be decidedly female: So we can imagine the entire vegetation from the root androgynously secretly connected; whereupon, in the course of the changes of growth, the two systems separate themselves in obvious opposition and decisively oppose each other in order to unite again in a higher sense. ” ( 31)

This also sheds significant light on the law of polarity and increase discussed!

It cannot be doubted that the interplay of spiral and linear tendencies plays an essential role in shaping the entire plant shape; just as little is it that this spiral movement encircling the shoot is ordered according to strict mathematical laws, which continues into the formation of flowers and fruits. So we are already very close to the forces that shape the plant, and we can initially perceive them as a trace of movement that is drawn in space by the emerging shoot and the leaf bases spiraling around it, and which, as it fills with matter, so to speak, forms it drawn in, also becomes visible to the senses. Now we have spoken of the creative powers of living things as image-creating powers, and we have established that, in principle, the entire cosmos is reflected in individual living beings in a specific way.

If we want to understand the formal forces that shape a living being , we have to look for the cosmic models that are reflected in them.

The cosmic archetype

The sun: The fact that plant growth is closely related to the cosmic conditions is clear from the fact that it develops strictly in accordance with the seasonal rhythm, which results from the respective position of the sun in relation to the earth. But the daily alternation of day and night also has a significant influence on the development of the plant, which can be seen from the outside in the fact that many flowers open at a certain time of day and close again at another. The daily change of light and darkness determines plant life in a much more profound way. In the dark the plant mainly shows elongation growth. Long, pale, rather misshapen shoots emerge, as can be seen, for example, with old potatoes that sprout in the dark. Only full sunlight leads to actual creative growth. The excessive nocturnal shoot formation is suppressed, but the sprouting plant gains significantly in shape. The watery nocturnal shoot is prevented from swelling further, is partially dried out, so to speak, and at the same time is forced into the plant’s characteristic growth form. The light-sensitive shoot tip, the vegetation cone, follows the movement of the sun, so that one can say:

The emerging central shoot of the plant is an image of the sun rising from spring to summer .

The further the sun rises, the more developed the plant appears in order to reach a certain peak in flower formation. Fruit and seed formation are linked to the sun setting again towards autumn. It is also clear that plants that bloom early in spring are much simpler than those that bloom later in the season. Just compare primroses, snowdrops and violets with a rose bush. However, plant development does not run completely synchronously with the path of the sun , otherwise there would only be a single plant species whose specimens all bloom at exactly the same time; instead, each plant represents a shifted, sometimes strongly compressed image of the seasonal movement of the sun on a time scale . Man So one must not only look at the form-forming solar forces in their direct causal effect, but one must also recognize their acausal representation function , which makes the diversity of earthly life phenomena possible. The one vitally shaping solar force refracts itself into countless facets as it takes hold of earthly matter.

The moon: Not only the sun, but also the moon in its changing positions influences plant growth. This has been known since ancient times, was only temporarily forgotten, but is now increasingly being rediscovered. Today, for example, you can once again buy Christmas trees that were cut according to the lunar calendar, specifically at the time of the rising moon. This is the time when the tree is full of sap and stays fresh for a long time and does not dry out prematurely. At the time of the waning moon, the juices from the above-ground parts of the plants withdraw more strongly; Then you will bat when you need good, dry timber. The rising and waning moon should not be confused with the waxing and waning moon. In winter, the full moon is high in the sky, while the new moon is very low. In this case, the moon actually rises higher and higher from new moon to full moon, so when it is waxing. In summer, however, these conditions are reversed: then the full moon follows the low path and the new moon follows the high path. The rising moon is then waning at the same time. As Maria Thun , who has now become known in wider circles through her sowing calendar (32) , has proven, the moon’s effect on the plant also depends on which zodiac sign it is currently in. In fact, the moon passes through the entire zodiac in about a month, and depending on where it is located, it has a beneficial effect on root, leaf, flower or fruit and seed formation. As the rising moon causes the juices in the plants to rise, it also causes greater elongation growth, and is therefore more closely related to the formless material forces, to the “Materia”. In older times, the lunar forces were always viewed as maternal (= mater -> materia ), ie female , while the form-forming solar forces were perceived as male .

SOUND WORLD

Form-forming, material-forming

Male Female

Mercury: If we have already advanced so far into the cosmic conditions, we can ask ourselves whether the other wandering stars, the planets, which move through the zodiac and thus reveal themselves in specific rhythmic phenomena , also influence plant development. The central shoot is an image of the rising sun. The leaves are grouped around the central shoot in a spirally ascending sequence. In the cosmos, Mercury is the planet orbiting closest to the sun. So is Mercury’s movement around the sun the cosmic model of the leaves unfolding on the shoot? If one wants to assess how the cosmic conditions determine life on earth, then one must look at the cosmos as it appears from the earth; So you have to start from the geocentric worldview . Mercury is difficult to observe because it is so close to the sun and is easily outshone by it. This is easiest to do when it is furthest away from the sun from an earthly perspective. It then appears alternately either in the morning sky shortly before sunrise in the east or in the evening sky in the west shortly after sunset, whereby it is only just above the horizon. Contraction and expansion determine Mercury’s appearance in the sky, exactly the same principle that also shapes plants. Mercury appears once before and once after the sun, just as in simple plants with ½ leaf position a leaf forms once on the left and once on the right!

However, other leaf position numbers can also be understood in a similar way, such as the 1/3 position typical of the lily family, which continues into the three or six-fold flowers. In one year, Mercury completes three synodic orbits (synodic orbital period = 116 days), with three upper and three lower conjunctions with the sun (in the lower conjunction, Mercury is exactly in front of the sun, in the upper conjunction, exactly behind it, i.e. at the greatest distance from Earth. Through these three upper and lower conjunctions, exactly one hexagram , or rather two unequal triangles, is inscribed in the cosmos. This is exactly what is then reflected in the position of the leaf, and, as we can see, it can do this in very different ways. Further information can be found at Ernst-Michael Kranich (33) .

Venus: Just as Mercury is primarily effective in the formation of foliage and only works up to the flowering of simpler plants, the flowering of more complicated dicotyledonous plants is determined by the rhythm of Venus. The synodic orbital period of Venus is around 583.9 days, which means it already exceeds the annual rhythm. Five synodic orbits of Venus (5 x 583.9 = 2919.5 days) correspond almost exactly to eight solar years (8 x 365.25 = 2922 days). During this time there are five upper and five lower conjunctions: the Venus pentagrams . They are reflected in the five-fold calyx and in the five-fold flower of the rose.

Similar connections between the upper sun planets and the shape of plants can be established:

Mars: works primarily in the design of the stamens. As you move from Mars to Jupiter, the asteroid belt moves in between, representing, as it were, a atomized planet. He is the cosmic model of the dusting process.

Jupiter: works primarily when the fruits form and ripen. Remarkably, Jupiter is the largest of all the planets and it is not only heated externally by the Sun, but also has a strong internal heat source, similar to how the fruits ripen due to the heat generated by the fruit’s respiration process. The ovary itself, as long as fertilization has not yet taken place, is most strongly influenced by the moon, as are the individual nodes on the emerging shoot from which the leaves arise!

Saturn: helps with seed formation.

The planets that are even further out, with their extremely slow movements, hardly play a role in plant growth, but they do

Zodiac: we have already seen how much the plant world changes over the course of the year. But this is expressed precisely in the position of the sun in the zodiac. And we have already touched on the changing influences of the moon depending on the zodiac. And this basically applies to the entire planetary world.

The world word

In ancient times people spoke of the planetary rhythms as the harmony of the spheres , the music of the cosmos. This view, although little understood, has been passed down to our time, especially through Pythagoras . While this represents the moving planetary world, music, or the sounding cosmic vowels, the stationary zodiac images correspond to cosmic consonants. Together, in their interplay, they form the cosmic word that shapes the earthly world of life.

If you want to understand the language of living nature, you have to learn the language of the cosmos!

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