|
Introduction
In 1924 Rudolf Steiner delivered a series of lectures on Agriculture. The audience consisted of members of the Anthroposophical society who were involved in related professions: farmers, gardeners, scientists. As members of the Anthroposophical society these people were familiar with Steiner’s thought, his worldview, his cosmology. Even so, in agreeing to give the lectures, Steiner advised all interested parties to read or revise upon his works beforehand in order to establish a context with which to understand the lectures.
It is to be expected that we will seek to understand our subject according to our capacity, our times, the science of the day. However, science is constantly evolving and we need to assess, in the context of Steiner’s lectures, whether the science of the day is adequate to the comprehension of the lectures - rather than reduce the lectures to the comprehension of current science. Equally well, if our capacity for understanding does not meet the demands of our subject, we have the choice: to reduce our subject to our capacity for understanding, or to develop our capacity to meet the subject.
To be educated in a modern educational institution is to be indoctrinated in the philosophy of scientific materialism, dominated today by philosophies such as economic rationalism and neodarwinism. While the traditional world view had emphasized the goal of human intellectual and spiritual activity as the essential unification of man with the cosmos and divine intelligence, the purpose of knowledge for modern man is to better align the world with man's will. Knowledge of the universe is now primarily a matter for sober, impersonal scientific investigation, and when successful, results not so much in an experience of ontological integration or spiritual liberation (as with Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus), but in intellectual mastery and material improvement.
A fundamental sense of separation is structured into the legitimate interpretive principles of the modern mind. Modern consciousness has been governed and defined by a fundamental subject-object dichotomy. Rudolf Steiner, advancing the traditional worldview, challenged the principles of the modern mind, the basic a priori categories and premises of modern science, with its assumption of an external world, that must be investigated by an autonomous human reason, with its insistence on impersonal mechanistic explanation.
To encounter a discipline such as Bio-dynamics armed only with a conventional education may be a somewhat disconcerting experience. Disconcerting, for the reason that the restrictions of modern empiricism are, quite simply, not recognized. Rather, what is encountered is a whole hearted embrace of the traditional ontological basis for science which has continued to flourish despite, what may be termed, the Aristotlean divergence and subsequent development of a radically dualistic empiricism which has been institutionalised as the orthodoxy of today.
A successful encounter with the traditional ontology manifesting as Bio-dynamics may best be facilitated by first recognizing the need for context. One is stepping outside the box and in doing so, abandoning the familiar reference points of modern convention’s radical empiricism.
CONTEXT
A good introduction:
McDermott, Robert A. (1996) The Essential Steiner. Floris Books, Edinburgh
Available from the State Library.
Methodology
Rudolf Steiner follows in the footsteps of such figures as Goethe, Plotinus and Plato in advocating a first person methodology. Traditionally, method based on direct perception is regarded as a more exact science than the conjecture and hypothesis of scientific materialism. It is the difference between direct contact with the subject and observation of secondary manifestations. The ancient Greeks, for example, recorded their understanding of the archetypes and the method required for the apprehension of the archetypes. Plato offers analysis of the archetypes and the conditions of mind required to give clarity to the apprehension of the archetypes (The Republic, vii; 5, 6, 7; viii; 3). Plato informs us that the realm of archetypes is apprehended by direct intuitive knowledge. This is made explicit in the analogy of The Line.
Plato informs us that the realm of the senses has a lower status ontologically than the realm of archetypes. The difference between the two realms is marked by a difference in mode of apprehension.
Rudolf Steiner has articulated a fundamental conviction that the relation of the human mind to the world is ultimately participatory. Steiner has also detailed the methodology for realizing this relationship. As Steiner has articulated, the human mind has the potential to be an organ of the world’s own self revelation.
Our world view is that the core of the world flows into our thinking, that we do not think about the essential being of the world, but rather, that thinking is a merging with the essential being of reality. For us, intuition is a direct being within (Steiner).
The exponents of our contemporary empiricism tend to reject first person methodologies on the basis of an assumed subjectivity, while asserting modern empiricism’s objectivity. First person methodology, as described by Steiner is rigorously objective. It is the rigour involved in developing this methodology however, which has made empiricism seem more attractive, in that it is not so demanding of personal commitment.
Rhythm of Life
The particular is only of value to us in natural science as a transitional point. It would be contrary to the spirit of science if, with respect to nature, one stopped short at the direct experience of the particular.
Real science only arises when you begin to understand the working forces. But the living plants and animals- even the parasites in the plants - can never be understood by themselves. The whole earth must be included in our explanation...When we come to the living plants , we must not merely look at the plant or animal or human world ; we must summon all the universe into our counsels ! Life always proceeds from the entire Universe - not only out of what the earth provides. Nature is a great totality; forces are working from everywhere” (Steiner).
All life is rhythm and matter is temporarily arrested rhythm. The formative forces sculpt our visible world. They are whirling galaxies, indicated in the spiral placement of leaf and bud around the stem and seed placement patterns, as in the sunflower. Plants, as living creatures, express the working of the life force which takes up and utilises the elements in the plants construction. This life force is characterised by vitality, symmetry and levity. In the agricultural course Rudolf Steiner gave indications on how to assist the formative forces, thus intensifying natural processes in order to assist nature where she has been unbalanced .
The “blueprint’ of an organism does not result from chemistry of the various components of protein ,etc. The organism images an extra -spatial order that gives form. The enzymes, hormones , etc, that move about in organisms are not shaping causes; rather they are mere indications of the relationships in the form- field at a particular point. Interference with the flow of the geometry- creating, rhythmic impulses of the formative forces leads to imbalance and physical dissolution.
If the word ‘body’ denotes that which gives shape or form to a being of any kind, we can recognize through the forms of the plant a visible spatial body (physical body). In the interplay of the formative movements, which are visible to developed cognition, we can discover what is otherwise an invisible temporal body or ‘body of formative forces’, which regulates the development of the physical body. The sphere which corresponds to our experience of the plant is the environment in which it develops. The surroundings of a plant constitute a totality in which it develops as a totality. The living plant develops the form and colouration typical of its species in attunement with the momentary interplay of cosmic and earthly activities.
The plant reveals itself as a being which connects the forces of light with the earth; and as it grows out of the earth toward the sun, formative forces enter into earthly manifestation. The plant is fully woven into relation to the earth and to the cosmos. Through the root it assumes relation to the earth and to gravity. When there is light the seedling no longer merely opposes gravity, but opens actively into the light filled space. In growing toward the light the spreading plant becomes green and begins to build up substances. It then spreads out and makes visible what has previously been at work in it as a shaping activity.
Green plants play a vital role in the flow through all ecological cycles. Their roots take in water and mineral salts from the earth, and the resulting juices rise up to the leaves, where they combine with carbon dioxide from the air to form sugars and other organic compounds. In this process, known as photosynthesis, solar energy is converted into chemical energy and bound in organic substances, while oxygen is released into the air to be taken up again by other organisms, in the process of respiration.
By blending water and minerals from below with sunlight and carbon dioxide from above, green plants link the earth with the sky. We tend to believe that plants grow out of the soil, but in fact most of their substance comes from the air. The bulk of the cellulose and other organic compounds produced through photosynthesis consist of heavy carbon and oxygen atoms, which plants take directly from the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Thus the weight of a wooden log comes almost entirely from the air.
The entities occurring in Nature (minerals, plants, animals) are frequently studied as though they stood there all alone... Nowadays, one generally considers a single plant by itself. Then from the single plant, one proceeds to consider a plant-species by itself; and other plant-species beside it. So it is all prettily pigeon-holed into species and genera, and all the rest that we are then supposed to know. Yet in Nature it is not so at all. In Nature- and, indeed, throughout the universal being all things are in mutual interaction; the one is always influencing the other.
|
|
Contextual Considerations
Agreeing to give the lectures in 1924, Steiner advised all interested parties to read or revise upon his works beforehand in order to establish a context with which to understand the lectures.
If we are to follow Rudolf Steiner’s advice and read his work, in order to establish an appropriate context with which to understand the lectures, we will notice that Steiner did not participate in the modern worldview. He had not succumbed to the modern cosmology. And what becomes obvious is the modern worldview is not an adequate paradigm for the understanding of Steiner’s work. Steiner’s is a traditional view, more akin to Plato and Plotinus. The modern worldview actually leaves us quite bereft of a context in which to adequately interpret such a view. In fact, what becomes obvious upon reading Steiner’s work is that, at the most fundamental level, our very experience of self, the modern ontology, is inadequate.
The human being of the materialistic age really feels himself, as it were, abandoned and lonely in the midst of the universe. You see, if we cut off a finger, or a hand, or if we amputate a leg of a human being, or if we take away from him something which is connected with his physical, bodily being, he will feel that the single part belongs to the whole body. In earlier times of human evolution, the human beings had different kinds of feelings. Not only did they feel that the hand, the arm or the leg formed part of their being, but they also felt that they themselves formed part of a whole. In regard to these earlier times, one could speak of a group-ego in an entirely different way than we do now; the families and tribes felt, throughout many generations, that they were a unity, a whole. We have often explained these things. But in these earlier times of human evolution still other feelings existed in regard to external physical life: the human beings felt, as it were, that they were standing within the whole universe, that they had been formed from out the whole universe. In short, the universe was experienced as a great organism and the human beings felt that they formed part of it, just as the finger now feels that it forms part of the body. The fact that this feeling and sensation has more or less been lost, is connected to a great extent with the gradual rise of materialism.1
Today, in the face of our environmental predicament and our social and cosmological alienation many people are coming to understand the need to take a more integrated approach in their various disciplines and in life in general. Many of us are beginning to understand the need for a more wholistic perspective. In studying the work of Rudolf Steiner we may gain a glimpse of just how vast, how broad, and how deep a truly wholistic perspective may be.
In regard to bio-dynamics, it is our culture and consciousness that provide the context for the practice of bio-dynamics but it is the wholistic worldview that may provide the context for the understanding of bio-dynamics.
HISTORY
If we enquire into the early history of agriculture we may gain some interesting insights into our development, our current situation and the possibilities available to a more wholistic perspective. In the march of humanity’s cultural development from the ancient agrarian theocracies to the modern Western industrial state we may gain some perspective, both, on the consciousness underlying our culture and the need to establish a more appropriate context through which to understand ourselves and our world.
The term Neolithic is applied to the period of early agricultural development. The profound differences in human interactions and subsistence methods associated with the early onset of agricultural practices in the Neolithic have been called the Neolithic Revolution, a term first coined by the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe in the 1920s. The Neolithic Revolution occurred for different civilizations at different times, and for some people, such as the Australian aboriginal people, it never occurred at all. The term "Neolithic" thus does not refer to a specific chronological period, but rather to a suite of behavioural and cultural characteristics including the use of (both wild and domestic) crops and the use of domesticated animals. Some archaeologists have long advocated replacing "Neolithic" with a more descriptive term, such as Early Village Communities, although this has not gained wide acceptance .
The first agricultural revolution spurred major social change. It offered the possibility of high population density, the organization of an hierarchical society, the specialization in non-agricultural crafts, barter and trade, and the expansion of man's "control" over nature.
How were cereals domesticated? The origins of agriculture are hidden in legend and myth. How did wheat evolve out of wild grasses? How did man learn to plow? Viewing the conventional literature one encounters typical neodarwinian type speculation such as the following:
the turning point to the spread of agriculture in the Middle East was the occurrence of two forms of wheat with a large, full head of seeds. Before 8000 B.C. wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today; it was merely one of many wild grasses spread throughout the Middle East. By some genetic accident, the wild plant crossed with a natural goat grass and formed a fertile hybrid.2
Genetically, this fortuitous event combined the fourteen chromosomes of goat grass with the fourteen chromosomes of wild wheat to produce Emmer, a plant with twenty eight chromosomes. Then another very unusual thing happened. The Emmer, already under cultivation, again crossed with a natural goat grass of fourteen chromozomes to produce a bread wheat of forty-two chromosomes.
Hybrids are usually infertile but neodarwinian speculation would have it that a specific mutation of one chromosome made the new bread wheat fertile. Next, a symbiotic relationship had to arise between man and wheat. Wheat had to be harvested and replanted. This in turn called for new technology: a sickle with a serrated edge to cut the wheat so the ears would not fall down, and a plow to move the earth, which also required draught animals.
Thus agriculture had its beginnings in accident and coincidence, a mere fluke, a matter of chance. Perhaps such explanations are more of a reflection on the cosmological estrangement of the modern mind rather than any historical occurrence.The modern universe is a spiritually empty vastness, governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning. Therefore theory is proposed in which groups of nomads just happen to find a fertile hybrid which produces another fertile hybrid, throw in a mutation and have someone accidentally meld the principle of the wedge for cutting the soil to the lever for turning it, thereby inventing the plough and so on.
EVOLUTION
On the basis of adaptation and selection, evolution can only be a result, whereas Rudolf Steiner embraced the traditional view of evolution as being intrinsic, fundamentally inherent in our life, our world. Consequently, Rudolf Steiner presented a somewhat different picture of agriculture’s birth, one that views evolution as an inherent process, one that accords more fully with myth and legend, and one that seems to fit with the centralized, theocratic character of the later historical societies of Sumer, Babylon and Egypt.
The civilizations that arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia were very centralized societies which were administered in every detail by religious leaders in the temple. According to Steiner, these initiates did not rule merely by tradition and superstition, but: …we find, at the beginning of historical life, a universal, penetrating wisdom, according to which man directed his life. It was not an acquired wisdom, but it flowed to mankind through revelation, through a kind of inspiration.3 The evolution of civilization, Steiner repeated many times, flowed not from primordial ignorance, but from an era of primal wisdom.4
Rudolf Steiner wrote/lectured many times about the development of consciousness and how cultural change results from changes in consciousness. For Steiner, the historical evidence of civilizations ebb and flow are footprints left by the development of human consciousness.
Rather than viewing the evolution of humanity as a march of progress from ignorant to intelligent, from simple savages to wise modern scientists, Steiner cautions us to realize that there is a subtle balance at work in the evolution of consciousness. As one faculty ebbs, another one becomes dominant. As the cosmic wisdom of ancient cultures was forgotten or discredited the intellect became stronger and gradually became accepted as the sole faculty by which knowledge could be acquired. For Steiner, then, one could view history equally well in terms of a decline of a participative consciousness and the increase of discursive reasoning. Knowledge of the physical world was increasing while the ability to find meaning in it fell first to tradition and then into philosophical abstraction.
With Steiner we may observe the development of culture and ideas as indication of fundamental changes in such faculties of consciousness as perception and cognition. Rudolf Steiner considered all cultural life to be a result of human consciousness – how a person thinks and feels, how he perceives himself and his total environment. Steiner observed that humanity had gone through definite stages in the evolution of consciousness, stages which parallel the rise and decline of certain major civilizations. Yet these stages of consciousness and their cultural manifestations are not only to be abstracted from the earthly remains of past civilizations; rather they are connected equally to the workings of the universe as a whole. In a certain sense,one could understand the history of culture by looking out toward the cosmos as well as by looking within, and this reveals one of the hallmarks of Steiner’s work – his endeavour to show that man and universe are inextricably wedded into a whole, a unity.
We cannot simply derive its features at a given point from what lies a little farther upstream, but must realize that in its depths there operate all kinds of forces that may come to the surface at any point, and may throw up waves which are not determined by those that that went before. 5
Steiner concluded that the Neolithic Revolution did not occur by chance. At certain points in our history certain impulses enter human evolution which Steiner associates with humankind’s great leaders. For example, in the Middle East, in the oldest section of the Persian scripture, the Zend Avesta, called the Gathas, Zarathustra is called the man who was the first Priest, the first Warrior, the first Plougher of the ground, who was the first Prophet and the first Teacher.
The Persians had a legend in which the Sun God, Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd, which means sun aura, whom they saw standing behind the sunlight, gave great impetus to their culture by giving a golden sword to their leader Yima. Ahura Mazda told Yima, Thou blessed Yima, child of the sun, expand the earth with thy heels and thy hands, split it apart; like wise men expand the earth by tilling it. Yima and his followers, under the tutelage of Zarathustra, used the Golden Blade to cultivate the soil, and thus the archtypal plough came into use.
From Zarathustra, the Persians learned that the Sun-being, whom they perceived clairvoyantly in the sun’s aura, would one day descend to the earth and unite himself with mankind. In preparation for that time, humanity was to view the earth as their true home. Up until this time, in the previous epoch of the ancient Indian culture, people viewed life on earth as an exile from the spiritual worlds, their real home, for which they still had an immediate perception.
Rudolf Steiner observed that Zarathustra gave his followers techniques for the elevation of consciousness which amounted to an attitude of intensified service to the earth. Agriculture became a religious duty. Thus the impulse expressed through Zarathustra during the seventh millenium B.C. began a fundamental shift in human consciousness for that civilization and those it influenced.6
Study the evolution of mankind on Earth and you will see how peoples and nations arise and pass away, how they are transformed. Nations/civilizations are born and they die – just like individual human beings. But what a particular people has accomplished for the Earth must be preserved in the whole onward march of evolution. The results of the earthly labours of a people must be led out beyond them. Steiner then goes on to describe how these labours, this onward march of evolution is lived in communion with the whole solar system. 7
The Modern World
Coming to the present day, the onward march of evolution found humanity engaged in a process of increasing individuation and intensifying self consciousness. A consequence of this development in consciousness is the predominance of the analytical/discursive reasoning of the onlooker consciousness and the subsidence of the instinctive/ unconscious participative consciousness. The whole or bigger picture is no longer self-evident to the modern mind as a consequence of the fundamentally materialistic worldview that has come to permeate modern consciousness.
The current epoch is a period of contraction. For us the universe is an empirical universe, restricted to the sphere of sensory experience. Described by the Copernican revolution, the modern universe is a spiritually empty vastness: impersonal, neutral, indifferent, governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning. The modern individual no longer experiences oneself as an essential expression of an intrinsically meaningful universe.
The cosmology of a civilization both reflects and influences all human activity, motivation and self-understanding. The encompassing cosmological context in which human activity takes place in the modern world has eliminated any enduring ground of transcendental values – spiritual, moral, aesthetic- and the resulting vacuum has empowered the reductive values of the market and mass media to colonize the collective human imagination and drain it of all depth.
The world is viewed entirely in terms of neutral facts, the detached rational understanding of which gives the human being an unprecedented capacity to calculate, control and manipulate that world. The dominant goal of knowledge is ever-increasing prediction and control over an external world that is seen as radically other: mechanistic, unconscious, purposeless – the object of our knowledge.
The modern world is full of objects, which the human subject confronts and acts upon from its unique position of conscious autonomy. The cosmos has metamorphosed into a soulless, mindless vacuum, within which the human being is incongruently self-aware. We have restricted all meaning and purposive intelligence to ourselves, refusing these to the great cosmos within which we have emerged. The modern human self has essentially absorbed all meaning and purpose into its own interior being, emptying the cosmos of what once constituted its essential nature. Upon reflection, what becomes obvious is that the complete voiding of the cosmos, the absolute privileging of the human, is quite an act of egocentric projection, the ultimate form of human aggrandizement. It is a symptom of our times, of our stage of development.
In the process of evolution from primal to modern consciousness there has taken place a complexly interpenetrating two sided process: on the one hand, a gradual differentiation of the self from the world, of the human being from nature, of the individual from the encompassing matrix of being; on the other hand, a gradual disenchantment of the world, producing a radical relocation of the ground of meaning and conscious intelligence from the cosmos as a whole to the human ego alone.8
CONCLUSION
An interesting point that Steiner makes is that this process of development of consciousness that has occurred through the course of history is paralleled in the development of the individual through the course of life. To the very young child the physical world appears as a surrounding world of dreams, as it did in the early Indian epoch. The individual is working out of a self which is still in direct connection with the other dimensions, the spiritual worlds. The child develops through working on itself by means of a wisdom which is not within itself. Then, as the individual progresses in years, the higher wisdom becomes obscured in the human soul, which, in exchange receives consciousness. The individual follows a process of individuation and gains ego consciousness at the expense of contact with the spiritual dimensions.
The spiritual dimensions in us lose potency as ego consciousness develops. We cannot, however, do without that ego consciousness for it is the basis of independent judgment and free will. The question arises: how we can retain independent judgment and, at the same time, establish a new connection with the spiritual dimensions? It is a question of how to consciously experience ourselves as a whole. Steiner deals with this issue in a number of his works and lectures.
Rudolf Steiner was inclined to emphasize the true path to knowledge requires that we grow beyond ourselves. We need to be more aware of what goes on in the sphere of sensory perception and realize how superficial our sensory perceptions are. Equally well, we need to be aware of the egocentric consciousness and how it restricts our experience of self and the world.9
Rudolf Steiner’s emphasis was on the urgent need to develop a macrocosmic perspective: Human observation, and also scientific observation, must return to a manner of contemplation which once more incorporates the human being with the whole universe, with the cosmos. The human being must feel once more that he is standing within the whole cosmos.
References
1. Lecture: Dornach, January 28th, 1917.
2. Typical modern textbook speculation.
3. Steiner, R. (1972) A Modern Art of Education. London p30
4. Steiner, R. (1934) Turning Points in Spiritual History. London p125
5. Steiner, R. (1963) The Tension Between East and West .London p52
6. Moore , H. (1992) History and Practice of Agricultural Education. PA. BFGA
7. Lecture: Oslo , October 3, 1913.
8. Tarnas, R. (2006) Cosmos and Psyche NY . Viking, Penguin
9. Theosophy, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, An Outline of Esoteric Science
10. Lecture: Dornach, January 28th, 1917.
|
